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Meetings cannot be held without police permits; in practice, permits are not granted. Apristas (and other oppositionists) are shot, exiled or shipped off to prison on Frontón Island, near Callao, and forgotten. Imprudent editors who displease the regime are sometimes bludgeoned by prowlers in the night. Students at ancient San Marcos are restive; last week, as it often is, the university was closed down after a strike. Apra simmers explosively underground. The Indians still ive in their timeless withdrawal, despite some experiments aimed at improving their lot (TIME, May 23).
The Vital Vote. Adding up Odria's record, most Peruvians give him his due but now yearn for a change. Odria knows this; he is honest with himself. "We are Latins," he says. "People are growing a bit tired of me. That is the Latin way." The attention of Peru, and of Venezuela's Pérez Jiménez and other interested bystanders, now centers on the manner of the change, and the man whom Odria will choose to sit in the carved presidential armchair once used by Peru's Conquistador Francisco Pizarro.
Of the kind of change he proposes, Odria says: "I shall go, but the regime will go on. Whoever succeeds me must be a man willing to carry through my program for the country's good." Such talk plainly points to continued suppression of Apra, and no other party has managed to survive the politically barren years in any strength. By the present signs, therefore, Odria will stage a purely formal election vith a single, designated candidate.
A year ago the candidate would probably have been Odria's close friend, General Zenón Noriega. But last fall Noriega, impatient to be boss, hatched an ill-timed plot; he now lives obscurely in Argentine exile. The unrest that followed may have helped convince Odria that his successor should be a civilian. Half a dozen, all from the wealthy right, are vaguely available. Among them: ex-President Manuel Prado, fondly remembered for staging 1945's free elections, and Foreign Minister David Aguilar. But whoever runs, only one vote will really count. That is the vote of Manuel Odria himself, who says, glancing at the blueprints on his desk: "All this must continue. I will see to it."