At the end of this month, President Carlos Castillo Armas will make a state visit to Washington and reap some of the honor due him as the doughty little warrior who kicked a pro-Communist government out of Guatemala. Since that mid-1954 burst of glory, he has managed to survive in the face of drought, plots and a sputtering of accusations (TIME, Aug. 22). But last week, as he made plans to depart, his prestige was dipping. Main reasons: resentment over ham-handed measures by his police, and a hard-to-ignore smell of corruption.
Both problems stemmed from a food-speculation scandal, in which...