The New President

After what Panama considers a high-speed vote count--it took two weeks to tabulate 242,000 ballots as compared, for example, to three months after the 1948 election--an electoral junta last week handed the presidency to the candidate of the government's opposition.

President-elect Roberto F. ("Nino") Chiari, 55, is a birthright member of the moneyed cluster of families that have run Panama since the republic was founded in 1903. He was by no means the choice of the nationalistic mob that last November riotously invaded the U.S.-run Canal Zone to plant the Panamanian flag there. Since the other two candidates were equally patrician and soberly bent on keeping Canal Zone sovereignty out of the election, the mob did not get a choice. Chiari's win was chiefly a response to the perennial Latin American urge to upset the incumbent party.

Nino Chiari, a serious, quiet man, is the heir to a family fortune in ranching, sugar and dairy farming, which he has built up by riding his ranges in shirt-sleeves and keeping an austere eye peeled for signs of waste or obsolescence. This year conservative Chiari campaigned on muted issues of harder work, fewer government employees, more development projects and fewer showcase public works. He made only a mild plea for the right to fly the Panamanian next to the U.S. flag: "I cannot see what harm it can possibly do a country as large as the U.S. to make such an understanding gesture to a country as small as Panama."

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