ECUADOR: Exit Velasco

A copper-cheeked sentry fired one shot into the night air. Then the guard stood aside, and a delegation of army officers strode into Quito's gloomy presidential palace. Inside, brusque Colonel Carlos Mancheno, Minister of Defense, told President José Mariá Velasco Ibarra that the army had finally turned against him.

For once in his voluble life, the ex-law professor, whom Ecuadorians - call "El Loco," said nothing. He resigned his powers to Colonel Mancheno and flew off in an army trimotored Junkers to Colombia and exile. It was a time for Velasco to say: "This is where I came in;" an army coup had chucked him out of the Ecuadorian presidency in 1935, a revolution had brought him back from Colombian exile nine years later to make him President again.

Velasco took office the second time proclaiming his "profoundly leftist soul," but soon the country swung right and Velasco swung with it. This burned up the army, one of the few in Latin America with longtime leftist sympathies. In addition to its other failings, the Velasco Government had done little to combat the country's postwar inflation, which is one of the highest in the hemisphere. Last week the Sucre, which was once a worker's daily wage, stood at 13 to the dollar.

Last week's revolution was a pushover. Nobody was shot, nobody arrested. But Colonel Mancheno, appointing himself President, made it clear that there would be no conservatives in his Government.