One for the Road

It was the classic Latin American scene. At 2 p.m. one day last week, eight tanks rumbled up to the presidential palace in Ecuador's Andean capital of Quito. Radio bulletins soon blared the news: Carlos Julio Arosemena, 44, the country's 46th President in 130 years, had gone the way of many of his predecessors--deposed by military coup. A crowd of demonstrators gathered at the palace to protest to the new rulers; and tanks opened fire. Three persons were killed, 17 wounded. In the palace, Arosemena refused to resign at first, then bowed to superior firepower and was bundled onto an air force plane bound for Panama. All this was classic, but this time there was a variation. The reason given by the military brass for its coup: that Arosemena was a drunkard who had "spotted the national honor."

"Masculine Passions." Alas, the soldiers had a point. Installed as President 20 months ago (after a coup against erratic President Jose Maria Velasco Ibarra), Arosemena came from an aristocratic family of bankers and landowners. His father was Acting President from 1947 to 1948. He himself had been elected Vice President in 1960, was known as an intelligent, reform-minded individualist. But he was also well known as a powerful man with a bottle--and in office the binges seemed to have grown more frequent. For days at a time, he failed to show up at his office in the palace. In November, he kicked up a royal fuss in a Quito nightclub; he showed up sloshed for his talk with President Kennedy on a state visit to the U.S. last July, almost fell on his face at Guayaquil's airport five months later when he went out to greet Chile's strait-laced President Jorge Alessandri.

When sober, Arosemena pushed through a much-needed austerity program, reversed the drain on foreign exchange, and managed to increase Ecuador's low standard of living a bit. Under pressure from the military, he broke diplomatic relations with Castro's Cuba. His regime seemed to satisfy most people--except for the drinking. But as his drinking got worse, the Conservative opposition in Congress twice sought to have him impeached. Lacking the votes, it asked the military leaders to intervene. At first the army refused. Arosemena denounced his critics as "Creole Calvinists." He was a human being, he said, with normal "masculine passions and vices."

Undecorous Acts." Last week at a formal dinner in Quito honoring Admiral Wilfred J. McNeil, president of Grace Line, Arosemena was full of liquid passion. Evidently upset over the squabble with U.S. tuna fishermen, he told off U.S. Ambassador Maurice Bernbaum in loud, undiplomatic language. "The Government of the United States," declared Arosemena, "exploits Latin America and exploits Ecuador." He then, said the dinner guests, committed a series of "even more undecorous acts," and vomited in front of the gathering. At an all-night meeting, officers of all three services agreed that Arosemena had to go.

Heading the four-man junta that took over is Navy Commander Ramon Castro Jijon, 48, who immediately declared that the new regime was anti-Communist and democratic. In the first 24 hours, the junta imposed martial law, established a strict curfew, outlawed the Communist Party, and pledged to go after bands of pro-Castro terrorists roaming the backhands. Next year's presidential election was canceled, but the military officers promised to call a convention to draft a new constitution "when opportune." The U.S. would probably recognize the junta. But whether sober soldiers, governing by martial law, would run the country better than a tipsy but amiable Arosemena was still to be proved.

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