With wry bitterness, Hondurans call their small Central American republic "the land of the 70s—70% illiterate, 70% rural, 70% illegitimate." And they might add 70% politically unstable. The military coup that ousted President Ramón Villeda Morales, 54, was the 136th revolution in 142 years of independence from Spain. Only two constitutionally elected chiefs of state have completed their terms.
President Villeda Morales, a pediatrician turned reform politician, almost made it; the coup came only ten days before elections to choose a new President. It undid six years of hard work to change the banana republic's image of mud-hut misery, one-crop economics and machine gun politics.
Choose Your Flag. Elected in 1957 to succeed a military junta, Villeda Morales made a start on agrarian reform, got $11.6 million in Alliance for Progress aid and used it to launch a modest development plan to educate his 1,950,000 people, build roads and attract new industry. Personally popular and staunchly antiCommunist, he kept Honduran far leftists at arm's length, helped labor clean out Red infiltrators. "I am asking you," he once told a labor rally, "to choose between Communism and democracy, between the blue and white flag of Honduras and the red flag of Russia."
What Villeda Morales could not do was pacify the country's bush-league, 5,000-man armed forces. By a quirk in Honduras' constitution, the army rates as a semiautonomous agency, dependent on the Congress for funds, but taking orders only from itself. Villeda Morales first alarmed the soldiers by creating a new civil guard that eventually became a 2,500-man personal army responsible only to the President. The gripes grew louder and finally reached the flash point over the government party's choice of an almost certain successor in the Oct. 13 elections. He was Modesto Rodas Alvarado, 43, the hardheaded president of Congress who was determined to put the army in its place; he actually campaigned with a promise to curtail the military's power.
Formula As Before. As rumor of the impending coup spread, U.S. Ambassador Charles R. Burrows did his best to talk the brass out of it. Last week the Pentagon even rushed in Major General Theodore F. Bogart, of the U.S. Army Forces Southern Command, for secret talks to be sure everyone got the message. But all threats and pleas were useless. Early one morning last week, four air force fighters swooped low over the tile-roofed capital of Tegucigalpa, as troops cut off access to the presidential palace. Villeda Morales' loyal civil guardsmen put up a vain resistance, and gunfire rattled through the cobblestoned streets. Honduras' President made a last desperate phone call to Ambassador Burrows for U.S. help. But Washington could not act that fast—if indeed it knew what to do. Over the radio came the classic announcement: "The patriotic armed forces" had overthrown the President "to end flagrant violations of the constitution and obvious Communist infiltration."