Unsettled Election

Guatemalans have historically been prey to political extremes, ranging from a long line of rightist dictators to the Communists' most successful infiltration of a Western Hemisphere republic. When Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas kicked the Reds out in 1954, he began building a new middle lane in the political road. Last week, half a year after the colonel's assassination by a crackpot guard, his moderate ideas went down to defeat, jabbed by the left and steamrollered by the right in an election which all sides agreed was the freest in the country's history.

Up to Congress. None of the three major presidential candidates got a clear majority. This left it to Congress, still controlled by Castillo Armas' M.D.N. party, to choose between the two front runners. Unofficial returns gave Rightist General Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes 177,198 votes, M.D.N, Candidate Colonel Jose Luis Cruz Salazar, former Ambassador to Washington, 132,087, and the leftist Revolutionary Party candidate, Mario Mendez Montenegro, 125,796.

The defeat hit not only M.D.N. but the U.S., which has backed Castillo Armas' brand of moderation with some $80 million in aid. Though publicly neutral, the U.S. had obviously hoped that the middle-road ways would stick. Both Ydigoras Fuentes and Mendez Montenegro professed to be friendly to the U.S., but their backers yelped about U.S. "interference" in internal affairs.

The popular favorite was a strange one. An aging survivor of the reactionary 1931-44 Jorge Ubico dictatorship, General Ydigoras, 62, is a hardworking, fluent spellbinder, backed by feudal landlords. Though anticlerical in the past, he casually promised to have a famed Guatemalan priest canonized by the Roman Catholic Church. M.D.N. charged that he also dropped leaflets by airplane on election day announcing that Cruz Salazar had just withdrawn from the race.

Communist Chance. If the Congress should pass up Ydigoras for Cruz Salazar, the general would probably bring his followers out into the streets for riotous demonstrations, in which the Revolutionary Party and Communists might join in order to nullify the election.

The best hope for the present appears to be some form of Ydigoras-Cruz truce, possibly to give the general the presidency but modify his wilder tendencies and guarantee continued U.S. assistance. The best hope for the future is the precedent of a notably free and orderly election. In mulling over the recent past, Guatemalan moderates could only mourn that Castillo Armas was cut down before he succeeded in easing political restrictions, building up a strong successor and demonstrating the ultimate benefits of his economic alliance with the U.S.

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