Word: guatemalans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Near Guatemala's Pacific coast, 35 miles from the Mexican border, lies a new solidly paved, closely guarded airstrip. So out of place did the strip seem amid the sparsely settled cattle ranches and banana plantations that Guatemalans have been whispering about it for months. Could it be the base for a cooperative U.S.-Guatemalan-Cuban-exile airborne military operation against Fidel Castro? Fortnight ago, poking around the country. Los Angeles Mirror Aviation Editor Don Dwiggins heard about the strip and broke a story reporting that it had been built with U.S. funds in a mysterious "crash" program...
...There was no doubt about the speed of the project. Work began in mid-August, when the U.S. construction firm of Thompson-Cornwall Inc. put 450 men to work round the clock on a $1,000,000 contract to build the air strip and an airport building. Though the Guatemalan government usually looks for easy terms and already owed Thompson-Cornwall more than $1,000,000 for earlier road construction, it paid cash this time...
Within 25 days the runway and buildings were completed. When the job was finished, the U.S. delivered eight surplus B-26 light bombers to the Guatemalan government. Last week five B-26s were at the new strip, along with one C-54 four-engined transport and four C46 twin-engined Curtiss Commandos. The strip will accommodate these ships, but to say that it will handle jets was an overstatement: it is only 6,000 ft. long, marginal for jets in Guatemala's hot weather...
...Descamps tried both sneers and smears. He publicly branded her opinions "treasonable," and in official information bulletins, called her a vamp and a blackmailer. Mulet, 48, even tried to plant a story that Irma used her column to get even with him because he spurned her advances. When most Guatemalan newspapers refused to print that story, he wanted to run it as a paid ad, was again turned down...
Outraged by the beating, the Guatemalan Press Association demanded an immediate investigation, while El Impartial, a leading daily, saw it as "an attack on the freedom of expression." But last week President Ydigoras refused to comment, and by week's end the poker-faced Interior Ministry still dismissed the whole thing as just "a street incident...