The "liberation era" of Carlos Castillo Armas, the rebel colonel who threw a pro-Communist regime out of power in 1954 only to die of an assassin's bullet last July, came crashing to an end in Guatemala last week. An election staged by Castillo's successors to keep the liberator's Nationalist Democratic Movement (M.D.N.) in office turned out to have been so patently rigged that not even the government tried to uphold it. Harnessing popular anger over the fraud, the opposition candidate, General Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes, 62, made a tumultuous bid to take power.
With some 500,000 Guatemalans voting, Ydigoras piled up...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
