The Alliance's Progress
MEYER, KARL E.
U.S. MILITARY AID UNDERMINES PROGRAM'S AIMS The Alliance's Progress By Karl E. Meyer Washington Friday, August 17, was the first birthday of the Alliance for Progress, but no one in...
...The results are sometimes operatic...
...Teodoro Moscoso, the U.S...
...He was the head of government but sounded like an aggrieved taxpayer...
...The Canberras cost about $1.4 million each...
...When I was in Peru three years ago, I heard the Prime Minister, a conservative, complain bitterly about the purchase of a light cruiser from Britain...
...The Peruvians insisted that the planes be remodified to their original extremely fast and tricky configuration," Senator Gruening noted laconically...
...Senator Gruening calls for a complete elimination of the U.S...
...When the U.S...
...Ecuador is in desperate fiscal straits—so desperate that even the municipal government of Guayaquil, the big commercial city, is asking, in its municipal capacity, for direct emergency aid to shore-up a bankrupt city hall...
...Ecuador has been receiving $21.7 million in U.S...
...In a speech early this month brimming with supporting facts, Democratic Senator Ernest Gruening of Alaska made a strong case that the program is achieving exactly the reverse of its aims...
...Funds were also found for a status-seeking naval race with Brazil...
...The citation praised his "consistent support of democratic principles...
...Undeterred, the Peruvians sought other high-powered craft, and bought a squadron of 16 British Hawker Hurricanes and eight Canberra jet bombers...
...Within days, Senator Gruening added, two planes were cracked up on the ground in Quito...
...military aid program, an idea that may send chairs swiveling in the Pentagon...
...The Canberra purchase vexed the military in neighboring Ecuador, then in the midst of a violent border dispute with Peru, and the Ecuadoran Air Force rushed to buy six Canberras from the British...
...Major General Nicolas Lopez Lindley, commander of the Army and moving force in the coup, received the Legion of Merit from Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara eight months before...
...The best example is the U.S...
...Additionally, North Americans who are trying to spur social reform in Latin America are finding that Washington's left hand is sometimes being tugged exasperatingly by its right...
...Of the $1 billion committed to the Alliance thus far, only about a quarter of the total has actually been disbursed, in part because the administrative machinery is turning slowly and in greater part because the traditional societies of Latin America are simply not geared for a real program of change...
...Yet the last vigorous exercise of the military in that country was to throw out a President...
...But Argentina is the classic case...
...military aid, the Argentine military has also been buying planes in Italy, Britain, Canada and West Germany...
...But let us not contribute to their folly from our own hardpressed Treasury, and our own mounting debt and our unfavorable balance of payments...
...The first year has mainly served to demonstrate the size of the boulder that has to be moved, and the inadequacy of the available levers to do the job...
...But the Alaska Democrat has an argument that may appeal to many North Americans who are beginning to be restive about underwriting a somnolent Alliance: "If the Latin American governments feel they must sacrifice their precious, meager resources for the maintenance of oversized and obsolete military establishments, I say —let them...
...Significantly, the three Latin republics with the smallest proportionate military budgets are Mexico, Costa Rica and Uruguay—three of the most stable, free and progressive countries in Latin America...
...In Peru, a U.S.-supplied Sherman tank rammed into the Presidential palace in the overthrow of President Manuel Prado y Ugarteche...
...Yet Argentina has had to come, hat in hand, for an emergency stabilization loan of $500 million—$200 million from the United States—in order to meet such basic obligations as the pay of government workers...
...military aid program, begun in 1951 with the objectives of strengthening Hemisphere defense, encouraging a standardization of weapons, and exposing Latin American officers to the democratic ways of such temples of freedom as the General Command and Staff School at Fort Leavenworth...
...Three of the four military commanders who led the coup in Lima received training in the U.S...
...Karl E. Meyer, a member of the editorial board of the Washington Post, is co-author (with Tad Szulc) of The Cuban Invasion, recently published by Frederick A. Praeger...
...made 12 F-86 fighters available to Peru, the planes were modified to reduce landing speed slightly...
...To use against whom...
...One real test for the Alliance is how it deals with a Praetorian guard that the U.S...
...That about sums up the present attitude to a program that was launched with effervescent oratory by President Kennedy and approved by all the Latin American republics—except Cuba—a year ago in Punta del Este...
...The halfbillion dollars spent in the past decade, he contends, has contributed to a foolish arms race involving an extravagant proliferation of obsolete weapons as rival republics shop all over the world for flashy equipment...
...In sum, countries that cannot meet the minimum public needs that might truly strengthen internal security are spending vast and unnecessary amounts on arms...
...Besides receiving U.S...
...The role of the military is not always ignoble in Latin America...
...It is true that the armed forces turned against Juan Peron in Argentina and, what was more creditable, then yielded power to the elective regime of President Arturo Frondizi...
...In the first month, sadly, three of the planes cracked up...
...administrator of the Alliance, instructed his staff that the anniversary was to be "marked" and not "celebrated...
...MILITARY AID UNDERMINES PROGRAM'S AIMS The Alliance's Progress By Karl E. Meyer Washington Friday, August 17, was the first birthday of the Alliance for Progress, but no one in Washington connected with the venture was in a very festive mood...
...helped to arm, and that usually—but not always— serves reactionary purposes...
...In most Latin American countries the privileges of the military lie outside civilian control...
...Most often, in the past few years, against their own people...
...military aid program, as Senator Gruening stressed, is the way it has made a seeming accomplice of the United States in coups against the very elective regimes that the Alliance for Progress is supposed to support...
...But praise for this restraint had scarcely died down when the Argentine military voided an election whose results they did not approve, and then ejected Frondizi...
...military aid as against $39 million in economic aid...
...The most melancholy side effect of the U.S...
...the military budget, an Imperium in imperio, was simply outside the control of civilian authority...
...The Peruvian Air Force, for example, has an exotic selection of United States, British, Canadian and French planes—many no longer operable because parts are unobtainable...
Vol. 45 • August 1962 • No. 17
