Back in Power

In a five-minute ceremony in Santiago's Congressional Hall of Honor last week, General Carlos Ibanez formally donned the broad red-white-&-blue presidential sash. Thus, 21 years after Chileans overthrew his dictatorship, the general returned to office as the republic's constitutional chief, chosen in a free and fair election.

In honor of the day, which was also his 75th birthday, the stern old soldier thawed a little and permitted his inflation-harried countrymen, many of whom had voted for him as an economic savior, to celebrate his return in a national fiesta. From suburbs and provinces they poured into the huge square outside La Moneda, the presidential palace, to watch open-air performances by some 1,200 actors, dancers and musicians on seven different stages. Noisily, they cheered the general in his sky-blue uniform, the parading troops, the flat-hatted cowboy who galloped up to the general and handed him a horn filled with red Chilean wine. Some of their loudest cheers were for Eleanor Roosevelt,* head of the U.S. delegation to the inauguration.

But even before the fiesta was over, the general had begun to indicate that a new austerity was in order for Chile. In a characteristically frosty radio address to the nation he said: "I assume the government of the republic in a state of near collapse . . ." By week's end, his ministers were talking of whacking the budget and freezing wages. The first job to which the general had pledged himself was to lower the cost of living; it was clear from Ibanez' opening words that deflation was already under way.

-Who recalled in her newspaper column recently that Franklin Delano Roosevelt "used to say with amusement that he thought there were more Delanos in Chile than in the U.S. . . . One of his earliest sea-captain relatives once sailed into port in Chile, found the country at war, joined their navy and stayed to become a citizen." Best known of the dozen Delanos Mrs. Roosevelt met: Caricaturist Jorge ("Coke") Delano.

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