Painting and Politics in Central America

...There is no denying, however, that the pace of these programs is very slow, and it is doubtful whether they can be carried out with proper care to the tenuous ecology of the region...

...Efrain Recinos, Roberto Cabrera, Elmar Rojas, Arnoldo Ramirez Amayo—all young and all committed to a humanist figuration—make up a quartet the likes of which Latin America hasn't seen since Jose Cle-mente Orozco's generation in Mexico...

...Even the U.S.' $90-million stake—a small part of its total $600-million investment in Central America—amounts to a mere 7 per cent of El Salvador's industrial complex...

...It isn't fashionable yet—even for the youth...

...Today that resentment is not the major issue...

...Furthermore, while the nation's chief opposition party, the Christian Democrats, is essentially moderate, its youth contingent in the university makes common cause with the extremist factions...

...Probably both...

...and the military government survives only by exercising naked force...

...No doubt this is a reflection of the fact that his country, the most backward and least populated of Central America, is still a frontier society...

...Not only has the country lost some of its most progressive and enterprising technicians—the expelled Salvadoreans—but it has been deprived of the market for its food and forest products trfat El Salvador, quick to adjust, now buys from Guatemala...

...Then, too, it has no natural resources to tempt metal combines or oil magnates...

...were to permit (or fail to prevent) a revolution, Guatemala's slow industrialization would come to an end: The semimechanized cotton and coffee plantations that supply its badly needed foreign exchange would be broken up...

...Considering that few Cabinet members (including the last President, Oswaldo Lopez Arellano) have finished grammar school, there is a desperate need for such a program...

...Young Hondurans have heard all about the CIA, though...

...Nickel and tourism seem to be the only means of effective development remaining," he said...

...Or the revolutionary tension, living with violence or anticipating it...

...When the threat of oas sanctions forced the Salvadorean Army to withdraw from the 15-20-kilometer strip it had occupied in 1969, the U.S...

...Since it is widely believed that the government committed the crime, I was amazed by the courage of the young artist and by the tolerance of the authorities...

...In fact, this well-organized, overcrowded country the size of Massachusetts suffers less paranoia than many of our southern neighbors...

...The American embassy is also enthusiastic about a plan approved by the previous government ?a unique feat in itself," according to one official—for a $250-mil-lion contract with International Nickel to develop the immense deposits of that metal in the hills behind Lake Izabal...

...Honduras, for its part, is even more rife with charges that the war it claims to have been winning was snuffed out "by the cia" to "save" El Salvador's Unconnected millionaire coffee and cotton merchants...

...Over the oligarchs' opposition, it is spending $50 million annually to provide the Indians—who are not landless, but minifundistas, and possess some communal grazing lands—with better tools, instruction in crop rotation, improved seed, fertilizers, and credit...

...In the last Presidential election the candidate put up by Villeda Morales' Liberal party was badly beaten by Nationalist Ramon Ernesto Cruz in honest, open balloting...

...Yanqui imperialism was no legend here in the days when United Fruit shuffled governments in Tegucigalpa with the help of a platoon or two of Marines...

...Last year the medical and law faculties were forced out and a Leftist rector was installed?all to put an end to nonexistent "Yanqui penetration of education...

...Nevertheless, all kinds of innuendos were appearing in the press, including the ludicrous claim that aid, which financed the project, was bent upon substituting George Washington for Francisco Morazan as Honduras' national hero...

...In the country at large, however, the recent kidnapping and slaying of a rich industrialist, Ernesto Regalado, backfired, causing widespread revulsion with the tactics of the Far Left...

...The four-day border conflict, triggered by "patriotic" harassment of the two nations' respective soccer teams, was fueled by longstanding grievances over the migration of prosperous El Salvador's excess population into Honduras' comparatively empty and undeveloped countryside...

...And while volcanoes and lovely mountain lakes may not be major tourist attractions, political quiet anywhere in the world is becoming one...

...motives for stopping their Army from pushing on to Tegucigalpa...

...It was El Salvador that provided the impetus for the Central American Common Market...

...But barring an economic and political union that SELDEN RODMAN, a critic and specialist in Latin American affairs, is the author of South America of the Poets, The Mexico Traveler and The Caribbean...

...I attended an opening by one of them, a series of brilliant water colors devoted to the recent machine-gunning of a deputy in his home...

...This sense of Yanqui interference was intensified when the U.S.—acting through the Organization of American States (oas), which it inevitably dominates—forced an end to the so-called "Soccer War" between El Salvador and Honduras two years ago...

...After the oas intervened, the cia was by some twist of logic accused of rescuing Honduras' one-crop economy (bananas) at the expense of El Salvador's principal crop (coffee...

...The most poetic and renowned painter of Honduras, Antonio Velasquez, is a primitive who never tires of memorializing the timeless-ness of his remote, somnolent village...

...seems out of the question in the foreseeable future, these countries cannot possibly survive without continued U.S...

...business...

...If," an embassy spokesman said to me, "it goes through . . ." "The Left will really scream about a sell-out to U.S...

...THE SITUATION in Guatemala, the country I visited first on this trip and know best from a six-month sojourn in 1965, underscores the point...

...Yet even this meager gain could be achieved only if Guatemala were given the same massive subsidies and subjected to the same political controls as Cuba...

...And during my visit a campaign was being mounted to throw out a team of educators from Florida who had been requested by government officials to give Honduras a modern school system...

...The largest, richest, most populous of the five Central American nations, it is also by far the most favored in those scenic splendors, folk cultures and ancient ruins that attract tourists...

...Until a similar leader appears, one with enough charisma to flout suicidal nationalisms, U.S...

...It's not that El Salvador is more prone than other Latin American republics to seeing a North American troublemaker under every bed...

...THE ARTISTS of El Salvador, like those of Honduras, tend to be conservative...

...Is it the persistence of the great Mayan past that so stimulates Guatemala's artists...

...It's simply that here, as everywhere, dependence on U.S...

...In addition, the state is surveying its vast unused tracts of potentially arable flat lands in the Peten and Reina districts for possible colonization, as an alternative to expropriating the productive privately owned plantations...

...economic and military power will remain the only alternative to chaos...

...Many hamlets continue to be ruled by the man with the quickest draw and the shortest temper...

...This may not last, though, for internal strife is latent...

...Asked to stop these falsehoods before it was too late, the U.S...

...The U.S...

...Cruz' opponent, it is generally conceded, lacked machismo, a sine qua non in a frontier society...

...Was the official attitude genuine, or prompted by the fear that suppression of the show would be interpreted as an admission of guilt...

...embassy and usis headquarters were stoned...

...The thousands of Salvadorean nationals who were expelled from Honduras naturally resented the seizure of their farms and businesses, and failed to understand U.S...

...His history of Colombia will be published sometime this fall...

...Industry and the big plantations are owned by an oligarchy closely tied to U.S...

...If the oligarchy, the military and the U.S...

...Many Guatemalan artists have achieved mastery since 1965...

...A revolution might raise the Indians' subsistence living standard 5-10 per cent, at the cost of reducing the prosperous to the peasants' level...

...Besides injuring its national pride, the Soccer War hurt Honduras' economy...

...Yet despite the economic pinch, this historically volatile nation is enjoying uncommon political tranquility...

...favors the agricultural reform programs and contributes aid funds to them, though not nearly enough...

...Fortunately, there were two other jurors and one of them, a Mexican, saw eye to eye with me in passing over the academic nationalists and awarding the top prizes to two unknown but imaginative young artists...

...GUATEMALA, HONDURAS AND EL SALVADOR Painting and Politics in Central America BY SELDEN RODMAN WHILE visiting El Salvador last month to judge a national painting competition, I had an uneasy feeling that only circumstance saved me from being denounced as an agent of the cia...

...trade...

...This is largely attributable to a legislative device imported from Colombia that gives Honduras' two warring political parties equal representation in the Congress...

...Central America's dilemma would be comic if it weren't tragic...

...trade, aid, credit, soft drinks, motion pictures, news services, diplomatic arbitration, and arms is so inescapable that national pride seeks a scapegoat...

...The North American presence has certainly been overbearing and self-serving in the past...

...Nonetheless, for years Guatemala has been living in a state of siege, its capital at the mercy of terrorists, its vast Indian population hardly more advanced or better off than when Pedro de Alvarado sacked the region in 1526...

...indeed, it is so small and overcrowded it has to be...

...Morazan came close to uniting the ministates a century ago but failed...

...imperialism," I interjected...

...The tourism will surely be aided by the advances that have been made in the arts...

...We've escaped guerrilla warfare so far," one cynic told me, "because we're the last to hear about it...

...With Honduras now out of it, and Costa Rica periodically threatening to withdraw, this tenuous yet desperately needed assault on trade barriers is endangered...

...That is difficult to say...

...But will that matter if 30-40 thousand new jobs are created...

...But the governing party's flagrant (and unnecessary) manipulation of the 1970 elections, and its strident claim that it "saved El Salvador" in the Soccer War, have resulted in the opposition becoming disenchanted with the idea of seeking power peacefully...

...Ambassador replied—properly, but perhaps too haughtily—that if Honduras wanted to send home the team it had invited, that was its privilege...

...Each painting was carefully labelled "Fito Mirangos, Martyr," and each depicted the crippled professor in his wheel chair surrounded by uniformed hoodlums and other monsters...

...In these circumstances, it would appear wisest to continue the present course, for the government of Colonel Carlos Arafia Osorio is making some progress...

...tourist trade is virtually dead...

...Moreover, the very success of the revolutions their idealistic youth clamors for could only result in economic breakdown, greater unemployment, and less democratic governments than they now have...

...Their country is also remarkably orderly...