Ecuador: The Dynamite Man

In the tiny South American republic of Ecuador, Vicente Levi Castillo is the hero of the wealthy taxpayers. A political pal of Ecuadorian President Otto Arosemena, Levi Castillo, 35, is a former Deputy in the Constituent Assembly, which has just completed a new constitution for Ecuador. It was in the process of losing his status as Deputy that he was elevated to the position of hero. Today his popular title is "the Dynamite Man of Ecuador."

Levi Castillo's troubles and his brief triumph began with the Ecuadorian equivalent of the Tonight show, a radio program that reported all the sessions of the Assembly in the Congress building high on a hill overlooking the capital city of Quito. One recent evening the program became particularly diverting when shrewd parliamentary maneuvering by one of the Deputies forced a clerk to start broadcasting the names of all the delinquent taxpayers in Ecuador. The poor Indians and mestizos of the countryside, listening on their transistor radios, were delighted at the embarrassment of so many rich merchants. President Arosemena, who was also listening in, realized that the names of many of his supporters would be among those mentioned. He placed an urgent call to his friend Levi Castillo and asked him to stop the reading—by whatever means he could.

A few minutes later, Levi Castillo burst into the Assembly chamber and, as the clerk droned on through the list, laid two sticks of dynamite on his own desk. Then he took out a revolver, which he fired once into the floor to gain attention. Slowly he raised the revolver to hip level, aiming at the dynamite. "Ever since I was a boy," Levi Castillo remembers, "I've had this dream of causing a large crowd to leave a large chamber in a hurry." At last his dream was realized. The Deputies poured out the chamber's four doors like water past a broken dam. The next day the Deputies were too busy voting Levi Castillo's ouster to bother about finishing the reading of the list.

The deposed Dynamite Man was already a hero. And Ecuadorian politics being what they are, he confidently expects to be sent to Congress in the next election in June 1968. After all, he says, he never should have been thrown out of the Assembly. "That wasn't dynamite on the desk," he insists. "It was just two tubes of sand, and I have a police affidavit to prove it."