HONDURAS: By a Landslide

A truck and a jeep full of pith-helmeted cops armed with rifles and Sten guns rolled up to Tegucigalpa's central Prado Hotel on election day last week and glowered at a jeering crowd of demonstrators from the Liberal Party, main opposition to the government of Chief of State Julio Lozano. From behind, some barefoot kids stole up and pelted the policemen with banana and orange peels. Furious, the squad's commander pulled out a pistol and fired into the crowd. A woman screamed. The rest of the cops opened up, mostly firing wild. One man was killed, nine persons wounded.

Two backlands battles were even dead lier because they pitted government troops and supporters against a tough garrison commander and some soldiers still loyal to longtime (1933-48) Dictator Tiburcio ("Bucho") Carias, whose Nationalist Party also opposes Lozano. Ten were killed. Lesser violence influenced the vote in other places. Voters in one village reported that police forced them at gunpoint to chew up and swallow their Liberal ballots, then forced them to vote for the government's National Union Party (P.U.N.).

A day or two after the election, the government announced, without any accurate count of the votes, that it had won all 56 seats in the constituent assembly, to convene Nov. 1. Its first act will be to elect Dictator Lozano President of Honduras for six years, with General Abraham Williams Calderon, 62, cigar-chomping leader of the P.U.N. as First Vice President.

Lozano was blandly pleased. "It's the natural ambition of every citizen to reach the highest office his country can offer," he purred. Williams was equally content. "We won by a landslide," he said with a straight face. Better yet, the aging (71), ailing Lozano had openly hinted that he planned to step down in a year and turn over the government to Williams.