Revolution and Counter-Revolution: Or, Venezuela Revisited
Botsford, Keith
When I first wrote a review-article for DISSENT on Venezuela,* I advanced the idea that the Betancourt "democratic" revolution, which enjoyed enthusiastic U.S. support, was really the beginning...
...With all the dangers we know are implicit in the form...
...Exceptions: the form of indigenismo, or racial consciousness, usually by or on behalf of the Indian, elaborated by Mexico, and later rather woolily by Haya de la Torre...
...and that this means, in some form, however moderate, one-party rule...
...I took it that what the Alliance for Progress offered as an alternative to the Castro revolution was a determined effort to transform the social, economic and political structures of a nation, without passing through a violent upheaval or getting involved in the Cold War...
...I began personally and must end so...
...and that our goals in this were quite openly counterrevolutionary: designed to stop any further revolutions that we could not control or influence or that might turn against us, such as Castro's...
...What more beguiling picture for a politician in an unstable, relatively new country, than the spectacle of the National Nurses marching in starched white pinafores, the Union of Actors passing motions and perhaps doing a little Agitprop on the side, the Trade Unions, hundreds of thousands strong, marching with banners—and all these variously, subtly, intimately blended with the ruling apparatus...
...But Latin America is as old as we are, and its nations came to national consciousness not long after we did...
...Anyone who has lived in Latin America will recognize the improbability of this situation...
...Universities should be universities and trade unions, trade unions...
...To play with the building-blocks of democracy, on whatever behalf, to make them less effective instruments, if need be, against the government, and certainly, always, against the Establishment, is to vitiate the political process...
...C) That Betancourt remained in office for the constitutional period and passed on the reins to Leoni after honest elections is a triumph and an example...
...The last time, dizzy with the two vital words, I stopped at about the fifth page with this desperate note to myself: "Now not even I know what I mean by "revolution" and "counterrevolution...
...Demagogic and sentimental dictatorships such as Per6n's...
...Latin-American elites claim that what we mean by individual liberty is a luxury for them and exists in the more advanced democracies because economic and social liberty has preceded political and individual liberty...
...If the masses, Betancourt (and others) reasoned, could be brought into contact with the political process at this lowest level, that which affected their own working conditions and material well-being, they might be led, by stages, to higher spheres...
...g) understanding that the extremes are not the natural home of the modern citizen, and that the ideological passion wanes, with many still left to mourn it, as material benefits increase...
...effective action and, perhaps, visible and dramatic action...
...The editors of DISSENT said the use of the term "counter-revolution" in this context was "confusing...
...It is surely not coincidental that the counter-revolution should begin at a time when it was becoming increasingly self-evident to most elites, even the least-developed, that the great "Reformation"—in the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, and for Latin Americans, the Cuban— had its defects...
...and (i) inventing various names for all these tendencies and forms and mutations, names that will indicate purpose and planning and nothing so dull as mere democracy or a political party—the word "revolution" will do very nicely, and the "democratic" won't hurt, either...
...Establishment, headed, in respect to Latin America, by what is probably the least promising team ever assembled...
...Even then he may fail unless he lends it an imaginative fiction...
...E) To z'hat extent are the nations of Latin America nations at all...
...and anyone who has spent any time in Latin America recognizes that there are vast masses of people to whom the word "rights" means little or nothing...
...The time has come, therefore, to take a closer and slightly more critical look at the extent to which the Betancourt answers were effective in his own country and during his period of office, at the same time considering the relevance of his answers to the rest of Latin America...
...In fact, nearly every government in a less-developed country has been tempted (without, I fear, taking into account the sinister precedents offered by the Fascist or Communist states) to multiply the effectiveness of its national government by extending influence into as many spheres of collective action as possible...
...To divert organizations from their stated aims to other purposes is to invite limitations on each member's freedom of choice, to put pressures on him which he is ill-equipped to resist, and to introduce into such organizations matters that are irrelevant to their raison d'être...
...Even with our own guarantees in the United States, I find the degree of state control and my powerlessness to do much about what I disapprove of humiliating and intolerable...
...E) Even though a nationalist, Betancourt was more aware than most Latin-American political leaders of the need for joint action on hemispheric problems...
...Then, by agile footwork, he has to maintain a balance between these two...
...Problem: How to create support in the nation for consistent and effective power...
...VII To conclude, what is the substance of this counter-revolution...
...An important question, considering that the days have not passed when Chile and Argentina can quarrel over a few acres of pasture in the Andes —the ridiculous end of the scale—and, more sublimely, Mexicans, Brazilians, and Cubans, among others, can propose to define their ideologies as "National," to the exclusion, almost of all the more difficult questions...
...Nothing could be further from the truth...
...these haven't become a Way of Life, and revolutions of one form or another remain the traditional means of access to power in at least two-thirds of Latin America: But the word has more powerful connotations: it has come to mean a change in the basic structures, a break with history, and hence a means to escape the long record of failure...
...If enough were done during his tenure, and that enough were sufficiently seen and appreciated throughout Venezuela, there was hope...
...9.00...
...Quite unlike ourselves (and when I included Jack Kennedy in that list, I only meant to indicate that he would probably have thought this is a good method for others, in underdeveloped nations, to follow) these movements are quite uninterested in the notion that it is an Opposition, loyal to be sure, that makes an effective democracy...
...For the Center is an unnatural position for a Latin American...
...Guatemala's and Honduras' bandyingabout of power between rival groups within the armed forces...
...B) Participation...
...How much easier to wipe the slate clean with a revolution and start up afresh...
...The inner contradictions of Betancourt's nationalism (never, after his youth and first attempts at politics very strong) are apparent...
...For the Latin is often unconvinced by the evidence of his eyes...
...Problem: Is "revolution" in this sense, the best means of effecting a radical transformation...
...Vargas sought to achieve the same thing in Brazil, and Goulart wished to extend the Vargas domain...
...One • On the Venezuelan Democratic Revolution: A Profile of R6mulo Betancourt, by Robert J. Alexander...
...The "far left" during Betancourt's regime could only oppose progress in housing, sanitation, economic conditions, and land reform, by referring to the classic abstractions of Marxist theory...
...Among the points in common, the most important is that they are all what I would call "democracies of the majority...
...His refusal to take the leadership of that second phase of the struggle was the first and fatal tragedy of Latin-American history...
...345 pp...
...G) To get around the record of historical failure, Betancourt thought, was a matter of applying sufficient critical energy to break the cycle...
...or do know and don't care) or venal and generally vengeful against society (which is the most common...
...Charisma is the lubricant that can make social reform work: a good president in Latin America has to persuade the privileged to give up some of their privilege and the underprivileged to demand their rights...
...B) Betancourt was undoubtedly correct in seeing that effective infrastructures, whether political (through Accion Democratica), economic (through industrial and agricultural unions), or even social and cultural, are the key to extending awareness of national problems and goals downward into the supposedly inert mass...
...And I have tried, many times...
...H) Betancourt's means of making ideology relevant was to base himself, though cautiously, on its nationalistic content...
...easy enough when the group of the politically-conscious is so small and the mass of the inert so great, when there are no fundamental "pressure-groups" sufficiently institutionalized or coherent to resist...
...Problem: To what extent does real sovereignty exist, and how much should it be restricted by common problems and needs...
...He may never actually leave his wife, but the swath he cuts in society is marked more by the mistresses he keeps...
...Particularly as "power" in Latin America has often meant simply power to exercise personal authority and for personal profit...
...and before that, god...
...The Latin American may adopt it for a while, but he is fickle and can dump it as easily as he takes it up...
...I think most Latin Americans will make this choice, now, or later...
...Sixth, while these problems are getting themselves sorted out, I am convinced that the Betancourt regime was no isolated phenomenon...
...Betancourt's pragmatic approach was right for Venezuela in every respect: right, because there was nothing else he could do, and right because I hate people who dream up paper governments and can't even tell you how many people die every year in their own cities, or what the poor actually eat, or how many on the average live in one room...
...F) Betancourt recognized limitations on individual liberty...
...In terms of revolution, I take this to mean: first, pre-empting some of the goals of a more radical revolution...
...or, if I were a Latin American, it would require me to take up my position in the machinery of government and deprive me of the greatest gift freedom ever gave us, the right to privacy...
...D) Even supposing power to be used on behalf of the nation, what guarantees exist that it will continue to be so used, once acquired...
...he held, quite rightly, that one did a bit of both, because the two were intimately linked...
...He and Frei both share an ancient dream of Bolivar's, at the time when South America was first liberated: that this liberation should lead to union...
...the second seeking to open up some "original" brand of the classic Communist society...
...D) How to create support for effective power...
...Getulio Vargas' corporate dirigisme, with its foundations in Brazil's adopted philosopher Auguste Comte and its model, at least partly, in Mussolini's Italy...
...It is possible to say that he did so reluctantly at first, then indecisively...
...I think most of it is visible in Venezuela...
...possibly mark a new step in the evolution of politics...
...He sought and ob tained the presidency in open elections...
...and Betancourt because Venezuela is, both actually and potentially, a rich nation, and so, for the present, exceptional in Latin America...
...Problem: To distinguish "power" from government...
...When I say "we," I mean, of course, the U.S...
...The masses, they claim, have bread, not liberty...
...The Establishment is those who have escaped from that morass: broadly speaking, the elites, educated, economically independent, professionally trained and both emotionally and intellectually aware of politics in the larger sense...
...Can the word be upgraded to include more than a change in the ownership of power...
...In defeating history, publicly, for all time—and nothing less is re quired in most Latin-American nations, for them to become nations, modesty is unbecoming...
...Often, if not always, the way to get around jargon and difficult definitions is to be very personal...
...I claim, and particularly for Latin America, that, once politicized, no organization (Latin-American universities are a case in point) ever escapes the essential diversion into politics of its basic functions...
...It is a perpetually exposed flank...
...A) The basic context: poverty, poorly articulated economies, backward societies, populations unabsorbed into the life of the nation, population explosions, illiteracy, malnutrition and disease, deficit budgets, faulty balances of payments, undiversified crops and industries, economic dependence on foreign capital, latifundiary or minifundiary agriculture, obsolescent cadres, overdeveloped military establishments...
...Like a sound marriage, the Center and reform come to bore him...
...An unglamorous method of defeating history...
...IV To these problems, the Betancourt regime gave these answers: A) Betancourt never resolved the question of priority between "problemsolving" or political form...
...First, to inculcate in Venezuelans a desire to fight for their "rights" which he sought to define, both legislatively and ideologically...
...11 I would start by pointing out that to the South of us political experiment has been going on at a prodigious rate...
...As far as I am concerned, Latin Americans who opt for other solutions are either ignorant (in which case they should go and learn the results at first hand, and not just in Cuba, where, as Cubans themselves say, all is just a pachanga, a great ball and a mess), irrational (because they don't know what they're getting into and still want to...
...d) a tendency to embody the power of the movement in the person of a powerful chief executive and a corresponding realization that the chief danger to its stability arises from personal ambition so that the problem is less one of succession (there is always a successor in the ranks) but of keeping the ship of state stable and making the transition from those who made the revolt to those who inherit it...
...Particularly in Latin America where the active society is small...
...And, more important, the waverers, who might have been gathered into the fold earlier, could now seek an alternative with some honor...
...They asked me to recast the piece...
...the facile verbiage of "self-determination" and "non-intervention" used to conceal basic antiAmericanism, and indigenous economic ideologies such as "state monopolies" and hybrid "nationalization...
...He retired from office with what he brought with him: practically nothing...
...Every country in Latin America, with the possible exception of Paraguay and Haiti, has had its periods of "democracy...
...Being personal also helps clarity...
...Or finally, the two "authentic" revolutions, the Mexican and the Cuban, with their totally opposed developments, the first becoming a political system in which one party detains all the power and yet resolves all conflicts (with some, if a limited, democracy) within itself...
...Should we fear, as democracies have traditionally feared, the development of one-party states...
...As a young man, he would have tried to create forms of political action to resolve national problems, but nothing changes a man like responsibility, and when Betancourt assumed office he found the problems to be so overpowering that defining the nature of his government had to wait...
...Its probable form...
...He repeatedly sought to assert: (a) the indissolubility of national sovereignty, (b) the absolute primacy of non-interference with the affairs of other states...
...The first steps were taken, and taken in Venezuela...
...c) a liberalism that is limited by permitting opposition within the structure of power, but none from without, thus recognizing that factions may split off from the monolith but that as they do, they lose real power, and hence quickly die in isolation...
...This can be done with sinister or noble aims...
...You have to get wilder and wilder (as Jango Goulart did) or lose your audience...
...and the gradual is an unnatural speed...
...Out of all the confusions and experiments, is that, at last, some semblance of order...
...In his younger days, Betancourt had been a close student of a Venezuelan "reality" to which he sought Venezuelan solutions...
...After this time, one could still push forward on behalf of Moscow, Peking, or Cuba...
...Third, I find no difficulty in believing that this was, during the Kennedy Administration, and at the end of Betancourt's, official United States policy...
...Rare indeed is the revolutionary in Latin America who would give up a safe job, a little influence, the comforts of home or his social standing (preferably on the heads of others...
...Yet Latin America shows a bewildering variety of political systems...
...Unless you come to power through a mass revolu tion, your support is not broad enough to run the risks involved in demagoguery...
...thugs—Somoza, Batista, and Venezuela's Perez Jimenez...
...Briefly: (a) an eclectic attitude towards older political models, adopting elements from many systems: bits of old-fashioned socialism mixed with sophisticated techniques in mixed economies...
...VI I will close by restating the argument for calling the Betancourt "democratic revolution" a "counter-revolution" as briefly as possible...
...These, fortunately, are less well understood by the masses than a new refrigerator or school...
...Its outcome is always indecisive, sometimes for more than a generation...
...The counter-revolution wishes, in each country, to be total, to include everyone, if possible, and hence to be stable...
...And note, in the years following, how it became increasingly evident that these so-called great revolutions were both degrading to individual liberty and manifestly unsuccessful economically and socially...
...G) What is the political tradition in Latin America...
...Second, when he was threatened, he had the courage to admit that Venezuela did not live, as a nation, in the best of all possible worlds, and to state that governments were sometimes forced to act in ways that might be repugnant to their leaders, but which were, ultimately, for the common weal...
...On this question of the Center and the Slow Gradual Approach to change I am fairly sure of my ground...
...and that the counter-revolution is no accident...
...New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press...
...Ecuador's quasi-technocratic officers' corps...
...might expect the leaders of the African states, with their diverse populations, small countries, rudimentary economies, and fractional elites, to shop around...
...Fourth, this all seems to me perfectly sensible, and well within the limits of what democracies can do to defend themselves against attacks of irrationality...
...They did so under special conditions...
...Tommy Mann at home and Ambassador Bennett, abroad...
...The best approach is the one that works, and 1 would rather have imperfections that let me breathe than exquisite mechanical models...
...Fifth, I'm not convinced that this counter-revolution has many chances of success if it takes up the anodyne roads to political progress that might be suggested to it by the representatives of the Great Society at home or abroad (say Mr...
...A) To the question of which comes first—pressing problems or po litical form—I beg off...
...In short, he borrowed the Mexican PRI's motto: "effective suffrage, no re-election...
...I will go farther, I think they mark a turning point in Latin-American history, and, since they have their vague counterparts elsewhere (in the "enlightened" socialisms of Yugoslavia, Algeria, Egypt, etc...
...The PRI in Mexico functions as a model: not a village, however remote, that is not in periodic or constant contact with the party or the government, which, in Mexico, are nearly synonymous...
...it was a bloody strug gle for power and for survival, a civil war that tore up the old order all right, but not for the sake of Reform...
...I would find it overwhelmingly necessary and desirable...
...And then, demagoguery feeds on dema goguery...
...It serves to weaken the freedom of precisely those groups making their first step toward political consciousness...
...C) To distinguish personal power from government, Betancourt in sisted on due constitutional process, and non-re-election...
...And if I had to live in Latin America, I would find this line of reasoning more than logical...
...Native ideology supinely reflects international ideology...
...and democracy seems a chaste, modest maiden...
...All I see in this, in Latin America, is an assertion of independence vis -a-vis the United States, which we would do just as well to declare vis-a-vis the Latin American nations...
...And, if Mexico is any example, it is to create, in the leaders of such organizations ambitions relevant first to power for themselves, and, only then, to the general good of their members...
...It is like asking me to acquiesce in the liquidation of my own will and my own capacity to act...
...His main object was to survive his term of office and to hand on power to a legally-elected successor, Leoni: which he did...
...His nationalist heart beat in close tempo with the United States, and his ambitions lay well beyond Venezuela...
...he defined it quite specifically as an alternative to the traditional Latin-American definition of "revolution...
...Yet, for all these elites and their talk of revolution, the barricades they storm are imaginary: just fantasies of leaving their wives...
...Alexander's book, which is a compendium, both partisan and polemical, of information on how Betancourt did what he did, even if it is, and necessarily so, less clear on why...
...How good was Betancourt...
...H) To what degree are the various solutions proposed relevant to their societies...
...But Betancourt belongs to what is called the democratic "left," to whom such easy solutions are taboo...
...support, was really the beginning of a genuine "counter-revolutionary" movement in Latin America...
...The use of personality in politics is not always bad...
...K.'s speech on Stalinism as its beginning...
...but it took more effort...
...b) a recognition, in all its crudity, that where the basic political material is backward or inert, politics can't survive or function without a monolithic structure of power to protect it...
...Problem: Do you attempt to solve these questions before or after devising a politics...
...Personally, then, I cannot breathe the air in such a place...
...B) Under the conditions described in A), who is involved in politics in Latin America...
...It contains, therefore, the essential ingredients of a "happening," to many, the vague hope of a beginning anew, a tabula rasa followed by an Unknown Quantity...
...Consider the true range, however...
...So your opponents get wilder and wilder...
...Then, among the military "regimes," the presentday Brazilian junta's save-the-country-for-democracy cautious, semiscrupulous custody of that nation's political institutions...
...But a "democratic" leader can't make a habit of demagoguery...
...And I would argue that no one in Latin America, after Bolivar, has come to power through a mass revolution: for Fidel Castro obtained his mass support after a revolution that succeeded on a nar row base, and Mexico—well, Mexico's revolution was not even aimed 386 at democracy, even if some leaders thought it was...
...My only qualifications, in fact, are that I have seen most of them at first-hand, and have, by a hybridism of blood, being half-Latin, a kind of empathy with life below the Rio Grande...
...and (c) the need to establish hemispheric machinery to guarantee both of these, and resolve common problems...
...Nor does this improbability depend on whether the government is strong or weak...
...Latin America, like ourselves, and perhaps every nation since Andorra and Monaco, has become a factor in the international pattern of power...
...his regime is notorious, in Latin America, for being honest...
...I was constantly forced to ask myself why a continent that started out with a far more homogeneous culture and political ideal than we did in the United States should be forced to seek so many different solutions for what are, in simplified form, the same social, political, and economic problems...
...Betancourt came to power, after the overthrow of Perez Jimenez, on a basis of mass support expressed through trade and agricultural unions...
...But I know that state to be inevitable, as the church once was...
...I) Betancourt thought of his movement and his government as "rev olutionary...
...e) the use of a certain form of primitive nationalism, more usually directed against something outside rather than for any positive national goal, as the basic cement of societies in transformation...
...To us, alas...
...This was where Betancourt felt the crunch...
...That is, he proposed to make his "democratic revolution" more than a mere change in government and to effect through it basic alterations in the nature of Venezuelan society...
...And here is one of the areas in which we least understand our neighbors...
...Obviously, a dominant one...
...Betancourt's successor Rafael Leoni, who had long connections with such movements would undoubtedly argue that, as the central government becomes stable, these building-block organizations lose their political dependence and begin to act as legitimate substructures...
...These exceptions have traces of originality, but few of relevance...
...he would often rather believe he lives in Eldorado than actually have the streets paved with gold...
...The worst nations have the most model documents...
...The moderately good ones are constantly suspended, amended, or disregarded...
...Dissent they will tolerate, as long as it does not challenge their rule...
...to be stable and hence endure...
...His enemies —the Ene my—say that what he did, and what his successors do, and what all dem ocratic leaders do in Latin America, whatever their good-will and piety, is not enough...
...that is, as governments or as movements or parties, they all seek to speak for the whole nation...
...only recently...
...that came after...
...He uses it while it seems to work, but is dismayed by the first re verse and distracted by the first alternative that comes along...
...but when he finally did, he sought to do two things...
...After all, no one knows about all the political gradations in Latin America, and I may know less than most...
...The reasons are obvious...
...Do we abet this counter-revolution and see it through to its logical end, or try, once again, to impose our own brand of democracy where, as I believe, it is, for technical and contextual reasons, largely irrelevant...
...I don't think it would be exaggeration to say that to defeat history in Latin America is to win the battle...
...Obviously, a very limited number of people, derived, in general, from the Establishments...
...In short: put down organizational roots, tie them to local situations, and local power structures will support the national structure...
...and before god, the gods...
...And we have to approve of it in some way because if it uses its resources properly, it is a great leveller of injustice, inducing its citizens to reason and quietly muffling the voice of unreason, the primitive anarchy, the almost willfull self-destruction that still lurks in most of us...
...C) What does "politics" mean...
...and then taking firm measures to see that these goals are effectively and imaginatively implemented...
...Alexander, with obvious approval) smack of policy, not happenstance, and quite justify the term counterrevolution...
...to endure and hence to put forth, like roots descending from a tree all sorts of substructures that will nourish the state and politics itself...
...In the context of Latin America, anyway, the president who exercises his authority has at least one great virtue: he tends to eschew the abstract, and he expresses himself like the second-generation immigrant mayors of our cities used to, by building bridges, hospitals, roads and the like: good and public works that will bear his name...
...Seventh, to my mind, such concordances, pressed into action with such vigor and elaborated with such care during the Betancourt regime (and meticulously described by Mr...
...And under this (10 percent would be a rough guess) relatively small group, a diverse mass, in varying states of disaffection (which is already a beginning of political consciousness) or totally unconnected to politics at all...
...Personality helps defeat the legacy of history...
...When I first wrote a review-article for DISSENT on Venezuela,* I advanced the idea that the Betancourt "democratic" revolution, which enjoyed enthusiastic U.S...
...Their social and cultural unity is considerable and their political destinies have been a matter of concern to them since the days of the Liberation...
...III First, some questions of context...
...Second, this alternative can be described as a "counter-revolution" in the same way as one understands the Counter-Reformation to be a reaction to the Reformation: that is, as a stock-taking, a close examination of a traditional position menaced by a new and more radical one, and a decision to adopt part of what the new movement offers while preserving what are considered essential elements of the tradition...
...Or, among elected democracies, the various "formulas" to provide the one precious ingredient that democracy has always lacked in Latin America—stability—ranging from Uruguay's oligarchy to Colombia's system of alternating the executive power between the two major parties...
...Naturally enough, Betancourt had to pay lip-service to Venezuelan na tional susceptibilities...
...Central and South America is a big laboratory in modern politics...
...We" think that these various political formulae are not a "search" for a viable system of government, but simply a reflection of an innate inability to govern at all, to which there are certain notable exceptions: those, for instance, who most closely resemble us, or most readily accept our lead in hemispheric affairs...
...this meant, of course, excluding "foreign" ideologies, a step Betancourt at first hesitated to take, but eventually did, with rigor...
...Generally, it is synonymous with the person, the group, the movement that holds power at any particular moment, and hence usually irrespective of the desires or needs of the citizens...
...Only thus can a counter-revolution forestall the possibility that the more radical revolution will still take place...
...Problem: How to get the 10 percent to participate more intelligently, and the 90 percent to participate, period...
...The hypocrisy of it was what finally got me down...
...Either government by force or, in many countries, the attempt to define a constitution...
...It is always possible that a whole experiment, like Betancourt's, may fail on a matter of feeling, on a vague desire to go further...
...Munoz because of Puerto Rico's economic links with the United States...
...in short, carrying on an old Latin-Amer ican tradition—the easy play for power...
...One might expect this where, as in Africa, the formation of new states, without indigenous political traditions, encourages the search for utopia in a vacuum...
...F) If "liberty" is desirable, what does this word mean in Latin America...
...And everything he does achieve pushes his opponents into the abstract...
...In speech, religion, education, culture, manners, the similarities among them are greater than the differences, which are mostly ethnic (separating the "Indian" countries along the Western littoral and in Central America from the "white" European triangle in the South, and both from the more "Negro" Brazil and the mixed populations of the Carribean complex, including Venezuela) or economic (dividing the relatively industrialized, such as Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Mexico and Venezuela from the more backward economies...
...Or as some would say: Betancourt and Frei and the experiment in democratic revolutions came just a bit too late...
...And to defeat history, two things are necessary to a political leader: first, the necessary charisma, a sense of himself, because the place is personal...
...The only change the "revolutionary" wants is that the present government be out and he in...
...and before the gods, nature...
...1) What role does the concept of "revolution" play in Latin America...
...They wish to be, politically, the filter through which the vox populi can be heard...
...There are too many elements in common between, for a short list, and with significant differences among them, Betancourt, Munoz, Figueres, Belaunde Terry, Frei and, for that matter, Jack Kennedy...
...from the attempt to forge broad, popular-based "movements," such as Munoz Mann's Populares in Puerto Rico, Betancourt's Accidn Democratica in Venezuela, or Belaunde Terry's in Peru, to the extremely promising development of basically "leftist," socially-oriented Christian Democratic parties such as Frei's in Chile and its rudimentary beginnings in other countries...
...Nor do I think it can succeed in recruiting its leadership out of its own ranks, as Betancourt did, and the Mexican PRI does, in a kind of self-perpetuating sausage-roll of ever-less charismatic leaders...
...I don't think you take up the hard tasks of Reform and revolution, no matter how democratic, with a little band of wellwishers, a few loans, and a tidy middle class scared to death of change of any kind...
...not fast enough and not complete enough...
...f) the impossibility of allowing politics to run to picturesque riot when there are no well-balanced checks and pressures available to regulate the various forces at work...
...First, the attempt to create an "alternative" to classical revolutions (of which the model at hand for Betancourt was the Cuban) was explicit, a declared part of Betancourt policy...
...Even the most histrionic military junta is an assault on the problem of politics in Latin America, and what this maze of systems should teach us is that it is not the form of government that defines societies in Latin America, but the substance...
...Problem: How to get around the disillusionment of History itself, the record of failure...
...Frondizi and Kubitschek both presided over shaky governments and did very well by the use of imagination and by implicating as much of the national Establishment as they could corrupt...
...V I. think I have stated the Betancourt position clearly and fairly (following the guide-lines suggested in Mr...
...The mass accepts direction and the elites always find their niche...
...h) doing something about the various extraneous particles in the national blood stream that so far have stubbornly refused to become absorbed—the very poor, the Indians, those that lie beyond, or outside, the law...
...Alternatives seldom exist, and governments (and leaders) exert more power than they ought to simply because no one else will...
...We live in the shadow of the state because the state also protects us and regulates our prosperity...
...These, like all members of an elite, sitting, or rather lying lazily sprawled in a perpetual siesta across the recumbent, docile populations that sweep their streets, curl their hair and bring them their drinks out to the patio, see a greater possibility of loss than of gain...
...Problem: Can a government defend individual liberty where there is no desire for such liberty, no expectation of obtaining it...
...That he should have remained honest and not abused his office, or his party and his officials, or theirs, is an Astounding Adventure...
...on the one hand making stringent regulations governing our investments in Venezuela, and on the other conjuring up or discovering caches of Cuban arms on Venezuelan soil...
...In the sense in which Latin Americans mean the word all classical revolutions have been nationalist...
...A variety which we, in our perpetual desire to find an "image" for what we don't understand, have reduced to a most elementary schema: on one side, military juntas and moustachioed officers, corrupt dictators, hidden behind sun-glasses, wild revolutionaries, and on the other, the "good guys"—among which, obviously, our "democratic revolutionaries...
...And there, in a nutshell, is the problem: a matter of definition...
...The remaining problems (D to I) can be dealt with together...
...Here again, not much hope, and generally less so with each turn of the wheel...
...Betancourt was a "democratic" revolutionary, he had to act by "democratic" methods, and chose in this to follow Munoz, whose great lesson was that progress is a matter of persuasion, an inch at a time...
...To make the content of a revolution "nationalist" is to play on words...
...Problem: How to create a political and economical infra-structure sufficient to resist the abuse of "power...
...the division within the Dominican Republic between "progressives" and "diehards...
...rather like having your cake and eating it...
...Both Munoz Marin and Romulo Betancourt, who sat at his feet as an exile in Puerto Rico, achieved one great thing: they defied despair and got away with it...
...Just when it began to be seen in its true colors...
...Problem: How make ideology relevant...
...Passons...
...Shall we not mark 1957 and Mr...
...You depend on elites, the moneyed and middle classes: to last out your time and perhaps to achieve something...
...and second, the ability to make change stick and to make change visible—in short, since we are talking about "revolutions," democratic or otherwise, even if your revolution is very slim pickings compared to a real upheaval, and democracy always gives slow, and often intangible, results, to make certain that these changes bear all the appearance, the guise, the trappings of revolution with a capital "R...
...Betancourt thought it was a matter of effective action...
Vol. 13 • July 1966 • No. 4
