GUATEMALA: Commie Upswing

The people of the sunny Guatemalan town of Escuintla (pop. 31,000) last week chose as their mayor a candidate who was in faraway Moscow on election day. The absentee mayor-elect, Gabriel Carney, had not bothered to campaign for votes—that would have cut into his trip behind the Iron Curtain with Guatemala's Communist Boss Jose Manuel Fortuny. But he headed the local Labor (Communist) Party ticket, and the tightly organized slaughterhouse workers of Escuintla voted him into office.

Elsewhere, municipal elections also registered rising popular strength for the Reds. Until recently, Guatemala had only 536 people as card-carrying Communists; the Reds were content to win their political victories by infiltrating other parties of the government coalition, which is consistently proCommunist. For last week's elections, the Red party offered candidates in four towns, thus opposing various combinations of other coalition parties, and the anti-Communist opponents of the government as well. Running under their own colors, the Reds won three towns.