Command Decisions

Crackdown followed showdown in Guatemala last week. Having weathered a stormy counterrevolt of army officers who hankered after another change (TIME, Aug. 16), Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas finally struck at Guatemalan Communism with the sort of command decisions his followers have been demanding since the June revolution.

In a series of legislative decrees replacing the 1945 constitution, the junta President 1) outlawed the Communist Party, making Guatemala the 18th Latin American republic to do so, and 2) dissolved the elaborate structure of political parties and social and economic front organizations through which the Reds had dominated the country. Castillo Armas then committed Guatemala to the U.S.-sponsored anti-Communist resolution which 17 of the American states approved but which the Arbenz regime fought bitterly at the Inter-American conference in Caracas last March.

The crackdown came none too soon. The country's leading Reds, every one of whom eluded Castillo Armas' somewhat butterfingered clutches last June, were hard at work trying to regroup their shattered forces underground. Some who first fled to asylum in embassies later slipped out to join other comrades in stirring up the peasants and the numerous unemployed. Immediately after the recent army rising, Communist leaflets quickly appeared on the streets proclaiming that "the people" had turned against the regime as "a fascist dictatorship imposed by the U.S."

To deal with such determined adversaries, the new President last week made a decision that shocked his liberal supporters. To boss the secret police, Castillo Armas picked Guatemala's toughest cop, Jose Bernabe Linares, 51. As most Guatemalans know, when Linares last ran the secret police under the late Dictator Jorge Ubico his men submerged political enemies in electric-shock baths and perfected a head-shrinking steel skull cap to pry loose secrets and crush improper political thoughts. Whatever else Linares' appointment meant, it suggested that Castillo Armas' latest command decision was not to toy with the enemy forces but to erase them.

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