Holy Gunsmoke

THE Spanish conquistadores came to America with courage, greed and fanatical faith. Their military heirs still have greed, machismo (a word conveying Latin American admiration for masculine qualities of toughness and physical courage) and belief in the holiness of their mission. On October 3rd—for the second time in eight days—this mixture was let loose on a long-suffering Caribbean country. The pattern of the military coup in Honduras, in which the army commander, Colonel Osvaldo López Arellano, threw out the elected president, Sr Ramón Villeda Morales, was strikingly similar to that which abruptly ended constitutional rule in the Dominican Republic the week before.