PANAMA: Election Day

Revolvers banged noisily, men scuffled in the streets, gay young Negroes beat out tropical rhythms on car fenders. Someone cut the telegraph wire to the interior. It was Sunday and Voting Day; in the first of six major elections in Latin America this year, Panama was choosing a President and a congress. Some 300,000 Spanish-descended hotbloods, dusty-footed Indian women and black West Indians lined up to deposit ballots marked (to aid the illiterate) with party symbols: a bell, a horseman, an ear of corn. Then, as a double precaution against double voting, each digged his fingers in a pot...