Latin America Must Unite

...If each of the twenty countries plans to have machine-building plants to cover its industrialization, where will markets be found to absorb this production...

...That is the great question...

...And, this being the case, it must be subject to planning...

...However, I feel that Latin American industrialization cannot be achieved without an organic plan which approaches in a fundamental fashion the relations between production and the market...

...I certainly do not share the opinion of those who believe that Latin America should retain a purely pastoral economy and confine its "industrialization" to the extraction of raw materials and the production of unfinished or semi-finished goods...

...When we talk of "industrialization," we tend to forget that there are two phases or stages to that process: that of an industry which builds machinery and that of an industry which employs machinery...

...No doubt, we will be told that, for such a currency to exist, the practical economic unity of our countries will first have to be achieved...

...The first question relating to Latin American industrialization is this: Does Latin America propose to create, an industrialism which builds machinery...

...And thus we come to what we apristas call "democratic inter-Americanism without empire...

...Twenty-five years ago, in my book Anti-Imperialism and the APRA, I wrote these words, to which I still subscribe: "So long as the capitalist system prevails in the world, the Latin American peoples, like all the economically backward peoples, must accept foreign capital and deal with it...

...LATIN AMERICA MUST UNITE By Victor Raul Haya de la Torre Mexico City My statements in the April 26 New Leader on Latin American industrialization were abridged by a New York news agency and then transmitted to the Latin American press, with the result that they provoked contradictory and distorted comments...

...This "Latin American peso" would tend to maintain a stable rate of exchange with the dollar, which is a stronger monetary unit representing an economy much more advanced than our own...

...At the present time, Latin America does not build machinery...

...If so, then we come to the second question: Which of the Latin American countries will manufacture machinery...

...But, if we are to avoid what is called "production anarchy," it is obvious that this industrialization must be coordinated continentally, that is...

...on the basis of Latin America as an economic whole...

...In other words, the Latin American countries' economic nationalism and aspirations to "self-sufficiency" are Utopian, outmoded, misleading and contrary to history...

...The aprista movement is therefore not opposed to the investment of foreign capital or to industrialization, but it believes that both must be subject to planning...

...We apristas believe that only a common Latin American currency can resist the vicissitudes of devaluation and inflation...

...I would like to reaffirm here the ideas I expressed earlier, and add some new thoughts...

...We must therefore take this principle as our point of departure: Latin American industrialization must be approached on a continental, not a national, scale...

...Victor Raul Haya de la Torre is the veteran leader of the APRA movement in Peru, recently released after a 5-year confinement in the Colombian Embassy at Lima...

...Haya's exclusive statement in The New Leader of April 26...

...It is at this point that one of the principles of aprismo emerges clearly: Economically, Latin America must be treated as a unit and not as twenty separate countries, each following its own economic road and hoping to become an industrial power...

...I am convinced that this statement will not be accepted by the "old-fashioned investor," but I am also convinced that Latin Americans have an obligation to show their neighbors to the north that sound economic coordination of the two Americas is possible only on the basis of an economically and politically unified Latin America...

...Our economic time and space indicate the position we must take and the road we must follow: So long as capitalism remains the dominant system in the most advanced countries, we will have to deal with capitalism...

...A second principle, related to the first, is that a Latin American monetary unit must be created...

...How shall we deal with it...

...it employs it...

...And planning means control...

...Foreign capital is necessary in Latin America precisely in order to help negotiate the period of industrialization...

...I have always believed that Latin American unity also serves the best economic interests of the United States...

...Since 1941, the aprista movement has advocated the establishment of such a monetary unit (the Latin American peso) backed by a Reserve Bank of all twenty Latin American countries...

...The answer is obvious: Creation of a common Latin American currency must proceed simultaneously with other measures of economic coordination designed to lay the foundations of unity...

...This article is an attempt to develop ideas first broached in Mr...