Through pattering rain, ten armed soldiers and three officers marched up the driveway of the San Salvador mansion of President Jose Maria Lemus at 10'clock one morning last week. The group's leader drew his pearl-handled Luger pistol, rapped discreetly at the door, waited. The door opened, and there stood Lemus— barefoot, wearing blue pajamas. "What's up?'' he asked. "You are no longer President, my colonel," said the officer. "In fact, you are under arrest.''
Still in pajamas, the ex-President was whisked to a downtown fort for 24 hours' safekeeping before flying off to Costa Rica, where his wife Coralia has relatives. In a bloodless power shift, El Salvador's middle and upper classes had acted to remedy a situation that had the makings of a bloody, Castro-style revolution.
Lemus downfall lay in his steelhanded concept of duty. By long-established custom the wealthy families who control the tiny, crowded (305 persons per sq. mi.) coffee country allow the military brass to run the government so long as they keep order. Lemus tackled the problem of order keeping, aggravated both by agents of Fidel Castro and by one of the Americas' broadest gulfs between haves and have-nots (average daily agricultural wage: 60¢). He outlawed unruly opposition parties, saw to it that persuasive opponents of the regime were jailed. Eight weeks ago Lemus got too tough even for El Salvador. When parading students protested a ban on public meetings, his police responded with clubs, fire hoses and point-blank rifle fire; boys were beaten and several girls were raped. Horrified by such excess and fearful of total, bloody revolt, the nation's respectable moderates organized a preventive coup.
To replace Lemus the moderates chose a six-man junta: three army officers, three civilians. Colonel Miguel Angel Castillo, at 44 the oldest junta member, was customs-guard chief under Lemus; Colonel César Yáñez Urias. 40, was a key officer at San Carlos Fort, where the country's ammunition is kept; Major Rubén Alonso Rosales, 35, shared in command of El Zapote Fort overlooking the presidential palace, where the army stored most of its weapons. The civilians—Dr. Fabio Castillo, 42, and Lawyers René Fortin Magaña, 29, and Ricardo Falla Cáceres, 30 —are all connected with the university and are considered moderately liberal.
The junta promised free presidential elections on schedule in 1962, freed political prisoners, dissolved Congress and promised to elect a new one soon. To answer the inevitable question, the junta chose as its spokesman Lawyer Fortin Magana. It "definitely will not be of the Cuban type,'' he said. To a crowd outside the palace he called: "Because we believe that you deserve more than a crumb of bread and justice is precisely why we are here." How much more than a crumb it would take to keep El Salvador pacified remained to be seen.