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In Lima, Peru's Capital, the patriotic bond issue was $5,000,000. On the very day that Colombia's President had his wedding ring nipped off, Peru's Congress voted 15% of their month's pay to the cause.
Five-Month Windup. Like a languid baseball pitcher whose windup seems interminable, Colombia & Peru have been a long time getting ready to throw their balls. No railways and no roads firm enough for an army's advance connected Bogota, last September, with the Leticia corridor. Roads have now been built, rushed to completion at prodigious cost. Socialite maidens from the best families of Bogota are ready at Florencia, demurely garbed as Red Cross nurses. Last week at least 3,000 Colombian troops with artillery and machine guns were deployed behind the Putumayo River, facing roughly equal Peruvian forces.
At Tabatinga, five miles below Leticia on Brazilian soil, several thousand Brazilian troops maintained "armed neutrality" last week. Their first job on arrival had been to improve "sanitary conditions" at Tabatinga, which were described as "unbelievable." With the stench abating last week, smart Brazilian officers from sophisticated Rio de Janeiro 2,000 mi. away stopped holding their noses.
At Peru's Military Aviation School near Lima last week President Sanchez Cerro approvingly inspected a brand new fleet of Douglas combat planes, just arrived from Santa Monica, Calif. "Within a few days," said he, "they will be tuned up and ready."
"As One Man!" Leading Colombia's fleet up the Amazon last week was Conservative General Alfredo Vasquez Cobo who, in Colombia's last presidential election, was defeated by Liberal Dr. Enrique Olaya Herrera.
That the Liberal President should have trusted the Conservative President-reject to lead Colombia's forces is proof, boasted Colombians, that "we have sunk all party differences and stand united as one man!"
About the time General Vasquez Cobo passed Manaos he exchanged defiant messages with his prospective foe, the Peruvian commander at Iquitos, Colonel Victor Ramos, who wired: "I have taken all kinds of military measures to prevent the entrance of your expedition upon Leticia; to guarantee our security in the Peruvian Amazonic basin; and for the purpose of preventing any attempt at acts of hostility against my countrymen now legitimately occupying the Leticia zone. They are supported by advanced principles of free determination of nationality."
Replied rotund, grey-haired General Vasquez Cobo: "I comply with an obligation of courtesy to acknowledge receipt of your telegram. . . . I abstain from all comment. In any case, I take advantage of this opportunity to let you and the inhabitants of the Amazonas and Putumayo regions know that my mission is one of peace. I am trying only to restore order in territories that belong to us by [the Saloman-Lozano] Treaty."*
Steaming on up the Amazon, General Vasquez Cobo's fleet approached last week almost within shooting distance of Leticia.