VENEZUELA AND COLOMBIA: NEW OUTPOSTS OF DEMOCRACY
Rubin, Morris H.
VENEZUELA and COLOMBIA New Outposts of Democracy My principal purpose when I left Cuba for parts of South and Central America was to determine what other Latin American societies were doing to...
...There is a fighting chance for success here, but it will take greater effort, more sacrifice, and a measure of U. S. aid to achieve the social and economic progress on which political democracy must rest...
...At worst, it is, in effect, a negation of the basic principle of democracy, for it denies the voters, for sixteen years, the right to choose the party and the leaders to govern them...
...Some two per cent of the landowners hold seventy-five per cent of the land...
...In Venezuela, for instance, the official Church is now arrayed on the side of social progress...
...If she cannot, with all her vast resources, make the moderate, democratic turn, I would despair for all Latin America...
...As the country's principal landowner, holding seventy-five per cent of the land, this government is able to move much more rapidly than are those elsewhere in Latin America where so much of the land is held in large estates by private landowners...
...Not only do two per cent of the landowners own seventy-five per cent of the land...
...When Rojas Pinilla fell in a brief revolution, the rejoicing was unparalleled in the history of Colombia...
...The dictator's lust for power and wealth—he was reported by the New York Times to have stashed away more than a quarter of a billion dollars by the time he was driven from office—overrode every need of the Venezuelan people...
...For example, back in early 1960, the Venezuelan labor movement signed a pact of friendship and collaboration with Castro's Communist-dominated labor movement...
...But there is much more to the problem than the distribution of land to the landless...
...The integrated project calls for the production and distribution of hydroelectric power, flood control, and irrigation for more than a million acres of land...
...Lleras' government has conducted a militant police action against the roaming guerrilla forces, but it is a long way from wiping them out altogether...
...Unlike Venezuela, Colombia had prided itself on a long tradition of constitutional government...
...I was to hear this all through Latin America...
...The two years and three months of his stewardship represent the longest period of constitutional democracy in the history of his country—and he is rightly proud of this achievement...
...When the Conservatives were in power, as they were for a considerable time, they embarked on a program of violent persecution which resulted in the murder of thousands of Liberals by the Conservative police and soldiery...
...But government agents talked directly to the people...
...more than one-third of the population lives in blighted hovels...
...Housing is desperately short...
...If you would make more scholarships available, and make them available early enough so the potential recipients could learn English before they got to the States, you could do a great deal to impress the younger generation with what American-style democracy has to offer them...
...The compelling need for crop diversification—coffee now provides nearly eighty per cent of foreign exchange—is much in the mind of the government, but progress has been slow...
...Here, too, success is modified by many reverses...
...A right-wing bombing plot, said to have been inspired by the reactionary Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, nearly killed President Betancourt last June...
...Venezuela's staggering wealth in petroleum—she is the second largest producer in the world—and in other resources, notably iron ore, has produced the highest rate of economic growth and per capita income in Latin America...
...Some of the bands are composed of Communists who conduct an unceasing struggle, but most of them are just plain outlaws...
...Fortunately for Colombia, its fragile political system was reinforced somewhat by the election to the presidency of Alberto Lleras Camar-go, a leader of considerable ability, progressive vision, and hemispheric stature, who came to office in August, 1958, and will serve until August, 1962, when he will be automatically succeeded by a Conservative...
...Financing of the program has come in part from the United States, in part from the World Bank, and in part from a special tax on the wealthier landowners...
...That is more than Castro has done...
...They need to do a lot more than they are now doing to present the democratic point of view to people who are still not sure what direction is best...
...Cardinal Concha is an enlightened, forward-looking leader who has been seeking to make the Church a great force for social reform...
...And here, as everywhere else, there is a dismaying absence of adequate technical and supervisory personnel...
...Nearly half of the total working force of two-and-a-half million is enrolled in unions...
...But this has now changed, at least in part, he said...
...Throughout the country, most people have inadequate food, clothing, and shelter...
...Agrarian reform is a major concern of the Lleras government...
...Many people in Venezuela, Betancourt observed one day, are still living in huts as primitive as those that Christopher Columbus found when he discovered Venezuela on his third journey to the New World, but with the "additional burdens of microbes and diseases unknown at the time of Columbus...
...Last December and January it was the leftists' turn to stage a series of bloody riots and bus burnings which shook the nation and brought a suspension, still largely in effect, of several basic constitutional liberties designed to keep the terrorists in check...
...This judgment expressed the mood of many another American, Venezuelan, and United Nations official I interviewed...
...The tensions, confusion, and drop in confidence produced by these disorders have done much to slow the progress of the fledgling democracy...
...Both parties agreed to this because they felt it represented the only hope for a peaceful resolution of their bitter differences...
...New requirements are growing at the rate of 25,000 a year, or 10,000 more than are being built to meet old needs...
...Many of the Venezuelan oligarchy, and more than a few American business men, yearn for a return of the times of Perez Jimenez when they could be sure of their special concessions, tax favors, and police-state stability...
...Castroism, as elsewhere in Latin America, has followed an up-and-down course in Colombia...
...The Betancourt government is moving on two fronts in housing...
...We are not seizing the land of foreigners...
...But it drains his strength for other equally compelling tasks...
...Some indication of the kind of representation we had in Latin American embassies at that time may be gleaned from this episode: In January, 1958, when the revolution against the bloody tyrant was raging in Venezuela, our former ambassador to that country, Fletcher Warren, then in Turkey, wrote Pedro Estrada, head of the hated secret police and the dictator's number one butcher and torturer, wishing him success in putting down the people's revolt...
...Time is not on Venezuela's side...
...Fourth largest country in South America, as large as Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico combined, Colombia's climate includes extreme tropical heat and steady biting cold...
...Both countries are caught between the powerful and persistent pressures of the far right and the far left...
...The result has been delayed starts, fitful progress, and a considerable accumulation of unfinished business...
...A year or more ago the bearded Cuban and his program commanded more than ninety per cent of Colombian public opinion, but it has skidded to a small fraction of that proportion now...
...A group of civic leaders, for example, enticed some 3,000 persons from a local pro-Castro leader by showing them how the project would help them to help themselves to a better life...
...But the major struggle of the Lleras regime is being waged against .poverty, disease, and illiteracy...
...The Communist leaders opposed the plan as "capitalistic subterfuge...
...More than a decade ago, however, it succumbed to dictatorship, the last phase of which was under the brutal rule of General Gustavo Rojas Pin-ilia, a cruel, strutting, power-hungry tyrant whose regime was marked by wholesale graft and corruption and by numerous arrests and murders...
...Some 25,000 to 30,000 families are being settled on their own land each year...
...But both Liberals and Conservatives agreed it was the only way they could live together in peace under a constitutional system...
...A Colombian who understands the farm problem pleaded eloquently with me for the establishment of farm machinery centers, with U. S. funds, that would lend out equipment to farmers without charge...
...The evenly divided character of the government often prevents decisive action, and the power of the ancient oligarchy provides a constant brake on more rapid social progress...
...Many of Colombia's internal problems are quite different from Venezuela's, but they add up to the same challenge—a race against time and tyranny...
...Colombia had been torn for a century between two parties, the Conservatives and the Liberals, not in the usual sense of political conflict, but along violent, bloody lines— actual civil war...
...They are aided in their domestic efforts by a considerable flow of written materials from Soviet Russia and Communist China and by Communist short wave radio programs in Spanish beamed to Latin America from the mother countries —programs, incidentally, which are more numerous and longer-lasting than those beamed that way in Spanish by the Voice of America...
...The country was broke when Betancourt took over, and it is tottering on the edge of bankruptcy even today...
...It was the mood in which I left Venezuela for Colombia...
...It is providing free water and electricity for those who live in the shabby hill-side slums, and it has embarked on a program of building new homes —a program whose goal is 70,000 new dwellings a year, a modest enough beginning considering the rapidly growing population and the present backlog of demand for some 800,000 new units...
...In understanding Venezuela, the salient ingredient is the fact that she vaulted from ancient feudalism to modern democracy and achieved a fabulous rate of growth in a remarkably brief period...
...The government is distributing government-owned lands, idle lands, inefficiently used lands, illicitly acquired lands, and, where necessary, private holdings...
...There are many complaints over the slowness in processing government loans...
...The Church," said the petroleum technician, "has been a thoroughly reactionary force until recently...
...In addition, seats in Congress, provincial governorships, and other key posts were to be divided equally between the two parties for the...
...The end of a decade of suppression and terror was followed by the re-establishment of a constitutional democracy, but along curious lines...
...Except for one or two fleeting periods, Venezuela had had no exposure to constitutional traditions and no experience in the practices of democracy until the present regime of Ro-mulo Betancourt came to power in February, 1959, after a swift revolution...
...It is far from completed, but it is achieving affirmative results even now...
...They are hampered in improving their lot by ignorance of modern methods—seventy-five per cent of the rural population, for example, is illiterate...
...Still, the toll was 2,600 in 1960, including hundreds of women and children who were ambushed and slaughtered by roving gangs of hoodlums...
...Colombia was prosperous then because of the high price of coffee, far and away Colombia's most important crop, but Rojas Pinilla and his associates piled up such enormous personal fortunes that when the dictator was driven from power he left the country deeply in debt...
...Symbolic of the Lleras regime's approach to the challenge in Colombia is the development of a TVA-type of program on the Cauca River, at Cali, a city of 600,000 inhabitants, many of them living on the edge of starvation...
...The ruling junta which took charge after the collapse of the dictatorship brought both parties together to achieve an extraordinary solution: Each party would take a turn at the presidency, and both parties would share control of the legislative branch...
...Some of the more fiery spokesmen of the Liberal Party, leftists all, are chafing under the rigid arrangement and are demanding a change...
...Under the dictatorship that preceded the revolution, that of Marcos Perez Jimenez, the people of Venezuela lived in the grip of sadistic terror...
...Betancourt, once a Communist, is now a true believer in democracy and democratic reform...
...With the overthrow of the dictatorship of Rojas Pinilla, the big question was which party could rule without creating a new chaos and violence that might overthrow democracy and re-establish dictatorship...
...You are doing some things now to make this possible, but there is much more you can do by way of extending the program and making it available to those who cannot afford to pay the present fees...
...The Communists are not numerically potent—most students of the party, legalized by Lleras, estimate its strength at 5,000 to 6,000...
...It would be much easier, for example, to fire away at the un-complicatedly reactionary position of the right than to try to undermine the social democracy which is the heart of the Betancourt administration...
...VENEZUELA and COLOMBIA New Outposts of Democracy My principal purpose when I left Cuba for parts of South and Central America was to determine what other Latin American societies were doing to prevent the rise of Castroism and Communism by responding to the relentless pressure for reform rolling up from the wretched countryside and the city slums...
...Both programs are functioning fitfully...
...This same Colombian, a petroleum technician with considerable understanding of his country's mood, pleaded for a more extended program of American scholarships for Colombian students, a far more expansive program of sending American professors to Colombian universities, and a greatly enlarged American-financed program of teaching English to Colombians...
...then the Conservatives would have the presidency, and so on for sixteen years...
...As for public works, the program is limited by the lack of adequate funds, the absence of meaningful foreign aid, and by the demand of the foreign and domestic business communities for "fiscal responsibility," which means a balanced budget and lower expenditures for job-creating projects...
...Moreover, those of us who believe in reform are disturbed that there are elements in Betancourt's AD party that want to go too far toward the left—to include schemes of nationalization in their program— and this dismays us...
...More recently, however, the council of the CTV voted thirty-seven to twenty-three to put the pact in a deep freeze and leave it that way indefinitely...
...Four—It is woefully short of funds, partly as the result of the plundering of the dictatorship...
...They show their distaste for the moderate regime of Romulo Betancourt by holding back on expansion and promoting a flight of capital from Venezuela...
...The building of rural schools and medical centers is an even slower process...
...And as for scholarships, it is important to remember that much of the Castro and Communist sentiment is lodged with students...
...f Half the nation suffers from disease and malnutrition...
...But its influence is far greater than these numbers imply because of the party's massive production and distribution of Communist literature...
...f Half a million children of school age are unable to attend school because of the chronic shortage of teachers and educational -facilities...
...They would not be greatly disturbed if a right-wing army coup overthrew the democratic Betancourt regime, for this would simplify things for them...
...And yet when revolution came, the United States remained remarkably aloof, here as elsewhere in Latin America...
...The resentment in Venezuela itself boiled over in the violence which attended Vice President Richard M. Nixon's tragic visit to that country...
...Daily fatalities have now been reduced from an average of one hundred a day to seven a day...
...The two principal ingredients of Colombian land reform are parceli-zation, under which the government sells plots of land to farmers under favorable terms, and colonization of the public domain, under which farmers are given a piece of land and the credit to begin operations...
...A recent representative poll showed that sixty-six per cent of urban Colombians and seventy-four per cent of rural residents felt that Castro's was not a good example for Colombia to follow...
...Most of the keenest observers with whom I talked are convinced that Venezuela's crisis is based more on fear than fact, that it is psychological and political rather than economic...
...Do you want them, or would you prefer to listen to Communist promises...
...To do it the Venezuelan way, we shall have to forge steadily forward with a program of social progress that helps redress the grievances which our people legitimately hold against society as it functions now...
...I have made two-and-a-half million acres of land available for distribution to small farmers in two years," said President Betancourt recently...
...Much has been done under existing legislation, but a new measure designed to speed progress and provide the tools for better management was still alive in the congress, although blocked by conservative forces, when I was in Colombia this spring...
...In the field of education, the government is achieving modest progress, but nothing resembling the results of the crash program in Cuba...
...This is a politically motivated labor movement down to its shoestrings—with the unions tied tightly to political parties...
...Consider these: ^| Unemployment stands at twelve to fifteen per cent of the working populace...
...To combat this condition, the Lleras regime has embarked on a four-year plan to construct 8,600 classrooms for primary schools to serve 364,000 pupils...
...This would reduce the present classroom deficit by thirty-five per cent in four years, but would not resolve the whole problem until 1972, at the earliest...
...He must work and scheme endlessly to prevent coups from left and right —so much so that he seems sometimes not to have the time and energy he needs to build the solid social underpinnings of political democracy...
...In public housing, for example, the government is helping to build low-cost homes at the rate of about 15,000 a year, but this is not nearly fast enough...
...Most Colombian farmers today have precious little land—one to four acres—on which they raise coffee or sugar...
...The discovery of DDT and other insecticides has made it possible to control much disease in the tropics and open vast new lands to cultivation...
...There is the urgent need to provide technical assistance and extension services, to build schools and medical facilities, and to construct access roads from the farms to the main arteries of traffic...
...The declining confidence is based on the presposterous fear that Betancourt is going too far too fast, and on the more tenable concern over riots, disorders, and a lack of clear-cut direction by the government...
...I sought my answer first in the two countries that command the northern rim of South America—Venezuela and Colombia...
...Like its eastern neighbor, Venezuela, Colombia only recently, in 1958, threw out a brutal dictatorship and acquired a democratic government, but one with a unique constitutional form...
...And both must move more swiftly and resolutely to put their houses in order if they are to keep from dropping off the deep end to the dictatorships from which they only recently escaped...
...The grievances are great...
...The Lleras government is moving ahead on all these fronts, but the pace is not rapid enough...
...f Down in the valley and on hills across the city are the great mansions of the multi-millionaires...
...Dictator Jimenez squandered millions of dollars on luxury hotels and handsome boulevards to impress visitors to Caracas, blasted tunnels through the mountains for showy highways, and generally erected an expensive facade to conceal the nightmare of oppression and poverty that gripped the country...
...Plots from the right and the left have rocked the country during the past year...
...Venezuela harbors what is widely regarded as the strongest labor movement in Latin America outside Mexico—and yet it is only three years old...
...The Americans," he said, "are over-confident...
...Side by side go rural programs for road building, schools, sanitation, and housing facilities...
...sixteen-year period...
...Both countries are struggling with coalition governments because of factional strife that attended their birth as democracies...
...I heard much the same about the Rockefellers in Venezuela...
...I was told, for example, of one Communist-dominated area of violence where the government went in with its parcelization program, offering title to land and agricultural credit...
...On the far right, the dominant oligarchy of banking, commercial, industrial, and landowning interests seeks to keep a tight rein on reform...
...Moreover, we pay for it...
...Betancourt's Democratic Action Party (AD) dominates the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV), but it is constantly required to fight rearguard actions against the Communists...
...The disheartening slowness results from a variety of causes: One—The regime itself is a moderate one, committed to acting democratically, and thus slowly...
...Given the bitter, century-old division, it was clear that neither could...
...They oppose as too weasel-ing and conservative the same reform laws resisted by the wealthy oligarchy as too radical and confiscatory...
...The lofty Andes enter Colombia in the southwest part of the country and fan out in three mountain ranges—a fact which colors the political life of the country...
...There is an incredible hunger to know English," he said...
...This is a demanding commitment in terms of his time and energy because the foundations of Venezuelan freedom are so fragile...
...To combat unemployment, the government is seeking to attract new industries to Venezuela and to develop a program of public works...
...He told me how widely and favorably the Rockefellers are known for their experimental work in Colombian agriculture...
...I want to report on Venezuela first...
...But change, if it is to come constitutionally, cannot come until after 1962, not until after a Conservative president is elected and a new congress convened, because a constitutional amendment requires the affirmative vote of two successive sessions of the congress...
...In every community the Church owned much of the best land, and the priests in some cases were the richest men in town...
...Another problem, which deserves separate treatment, arises from President Betancourt's passionate commitment to maintaining a constitutional democracy...
...Meanwhile, American businessmen in Venezuela, as they piled up staggering fortunes in the artificial boom, praised the "accomplishments" of the dictator's rule...
...It worked closely with the Conservative Party, often condoning liquidation of liberals by violence...
...One of the significant advances of the past few years has been a sharp reduction in "the violence"—a sort of unceasing guerrilla warfare that rages through the mountain passes in certain areas of Colombia...
...When people learn English, they learn the ways of democracy...
...The landless peasants broke away from their Communist leadership, accepted the titles, and today till their own land with great satisfaction...
...In the all-important field of agrarian reform, the government is making diligent if desultory progress...
...They held out the papers and said, "Here are the titles to the land...
...In the elections which sent Betancourt to the presidency and his AD party to coalition power in congress, the Communists polled three per cent of the vote for president and six per cent for congressional seats...
...My overriding impression, as I left both countries, was the same: While Venezuela and Colombia are moving in a hopeful direction, the pace of reform is far too slow, perhaps even fatally so—especially when compared with the push-button speed with which Castro's Cuba is demolishing the old order and bridging the gulf between the very rich and the very poor...
...The pressures are enormous...
...At best, of course, this peculiar arrangement makes for a precarious balance that requires a great deal of tact and tolerance on both sides...
...Few developments in Latin America have cost us so dearly as our friendship for and decoration of Perez Jimenez, who is now living in luxury in Florida...
...There are still many reactionary priests, but those at the top of the hierarchy are working hard to achieve countrywide improvement...
...Some of my most trusted informants, both among Americans and Venezuelans, reported to me that the Venezuelan program, while fine in concept and fair in operation, was not meeting the challenge as forcefully as it might...
...For a century violence and dictatorship—the former as frequent and the latter as brutal as in any country in the world—dominated the Venezuelan scene...
...It is hampered by lack of funds but the agency is now hopeful the United States will make a loan available to meet this pressing need...
...He almost seems to count each day that constitutional government survives as a miracle...
...The tax revenues from Venezuela's immense oil production might have made the country a model of healthy, promising development, but Betancourt inherited a society in which explosive tensions were as deep and the gulf between the fabulously wealthy and the desperately poor was as great as in any country in Latin America...
...Three—It is a coalition government that must secure its left and right flanks—in other words, compromise—before it goes into action...
...Two—When it does move forward on a reform front, it encounters crippling resistance from the still powerful oligarchy and a certain group of American business interests, and sabotaging interference from far leftist forces...
...This Colombian, and several others, all of them devout Catholics, were remarkably candid in expressing their judgments regarding the Church's role in almost completely Catholic Colombia...
...It regards Betancourt's regime as radical, but so ultra-conservative an American as Republican Senator Homer Capehart of Indiana concluded after a personal tour of inspection that "the coalition government is attempting to put into effect moderate economic and social policies which are quite necessary for the future development of the nation...
...His hands are still red and raw from the bombing, and his face bears some of its marks...
...Both countries are new democracies nursing infant reform programs...
...The present need is for at least 275,000 new homes...
...In Cuba, many of those who work on the land share only a theoretical ownership and are, in reality, workers for wages arbitrarily fixed by the state...
...The average annual income of the peasant family, on the other hand, is $240...
...The agrarian reform law is designed to get parcels of land into the hands of these campesinos now living on a barely subsistence level...
...In Caracas, too, are 120,000 boys under twelve years of age who have no home...
...I was to hear again and again that Betancourt's Venezuela is a major testing ground for all Latin America in the struggle between the extremism of Castroism and Communism and the middle-of-the-road course of democratic reform...
...Unlike the practice in Castro's Cuba, lands confiscated from private holders are paid for partly in cash and partly in long-term bonds...
...The problem is simply too big for the moderate program on which it is embarked...
...This, in essence, was the question I asked everywhere I went...
...There is some grumbling that the holdings are too small...
...Aside from making the land available, the government has a program designed to provide funds for farm homes on twenty-year loans at low interest rates, and to provide comparably long-term loans for feed, seed, and equipment...
...The introduction of a new breed of cattle that prospers in the lowlands has added significantly to Colombia's meat-producing capacity, as has the use of new grazing grasses that grow well in the tropics...
...Many of those with whom I talked were hopeful but few were optimistic about the outcome...
...Their ranks include a considerable number of young men who are the sons of subsistence farmers who have no place for them on their tiny farms...
...Where it is functioning effectively, the agrarian reform program does much to contain the rising pressure for a better life and check the demand for more extreme solutions...
...This warfare, a remnant of the large-scale civil war between Liberals and Conservatives for so many years, has claimed about 300,000 lives in the past thirteen years...
...Claiming only 30,000 members in a total population of 7,000,000, they are a small but tightly organized group that makes no secret of its hopes to destroy the Betancourt government...
...Five—As an infant democracy, with no reserve of trained manpower, the Betancourt government is everywhere seriously hampered by a lack of administrative, managerial, and technical personnel to staff the many number two and three spots in government and on major public projects...
...In many ways, Venezuela is widely regarded as the most important test of democracy in Latin America, but its course is impeded not only by violent pressure from left and right, but by the resistance of the business community, including a number of American investors, to the only course of social reform that would enable Venezuela to stand on its own feet as a stable democracy...
...In barber shops, restaurants, and other places where people are chair-ridden for a time, they are sandbagged with Communist and Castroist publications...
...This is vastly important because the democratic forces in both Venezuela and Colombia need every ally they can get...
...It is a race between two alternatives," said one highly placed American observer, "a race between greatly accelerated social revolution and bloody revolution...
...He spent millions on a dazzling new hotel atop the mountain that rims Caracas, a building of luxurious splendor reached by expensive cable-car, while twothirds of the population in the countryside lived on the edge of starvation...
...The present plan calls for placing some 60,000 families on their own land through parcelization and colonization, but the number of farm families urgently needing help is estimated to be six or seven times that total...
...The multitude who own nothing is unnumbered, as far as I could determine...
...Communists have been denied a role in the national government by President Betancourt, but they are represented in both houses of the legislature and, fairly widely, in municipal government...
...One Colombian told me that the Communists do a much better job than the Americans in making their propaganda available to the people of Colombia...
...They are called the abanonados...
...Are you moving fast enough, democratically, to prevent totalitarian solutions...
...We are buying it...
...We had not only supported the regime of Perez Jimenez because we thought it was fighting Communism—which it was not —but we also decorated the dictator, under the Eisenhower Administration, with the Order of Merit...
...Venezuela is enormously wealthy...
...The exact details of the peace settlement, after a false start or two, were these: No matter what the political mood of the country, the Liberals were to have the first president, for four years...
...The twenty-three votes of the minority came from the Communist unions and those which had been expelled from the AD for taking a far leftist position on a number of domestic and foreign policy issues...
...On the other hand, there is persuasive evidence that failure of the government to solve the country's pressing problems could lead to a considerable revival of Castroism...
...When the revolutionary government of Romulo Betancourt came to power in February, 1959, it took over a country that was riddled with poverty, bursting with pressures for extreme and immediate solutions, and saddled with a short-term debt of a billion-and-a-half dollars as a result of the waste, graft, and plundering by the Perez Jimenez regime...
...These are but a few of the grim statistics that may help reveal the outlines of the challenge that confronts Betancourt and his regime...
...among the small landowners, two-thirds own less than twelve and-a-half acres, and fourteen per cent own less than two-and-a-half acres...
...From all I could learn, the government agency in charge is doing an excellent job as far as it goes in helping to provide modest homes on twenty-year payment plans, but it doesn't go far enough...
...New industries, especially in the consumer field, are being established by American and other foreign enterprise, but there has been little new heavy industry in the past two years, largely because foreign capital is so skittish about the political stability of the country...
...This is doubtless true, but I do not think Betancourt would insist that his program ranges as widely or runs as deeply as the agrarian reform in Castro's Cuba...
...Colombian agriculture was revolutionized after World War II by new scientific developments...
...Both are battered relentlessly by the extreme forces of right and left...
...Both cling to democracy, each in its own way, and both are committed to reform programs...
...There is a woeful lack of coordination of government agencies in the field...
...Either the Cuban method will prevail, or we will do it the Venezuelan way—a legal, evolutionary revolution...
...They aligned themselves with the oligarchy in combating social reform and keeping the poor in their place...
...All in all, the conclusion I came away with was that the program is working tolerably well but does not move fast enough or go deeply enough to satisfy the hunger for land ownership and the pressure for reform...
...Castroism represented a powerful force in the Venezuelan labor movement a year or more ago, but its hold on the workers has dropped decisively...
...President Lleras' hands have been tied on occasion by the peculiar composition of the congress, but he has used his gifts for affirmative leadership to break through the fifty-fifty stalemate to achieve a measure of encouraging progress...
...The country as a whole is more than fifty per cent illiterate...
...they must share control equally with the Conservatives...
...The Democratic Action Party wing of the CTV still includes a fair number of relatively extreme leftists who are not Communists, but mostly Betancourt has succeeded in shaping it in his own image of democratic, moderate, middle-of-the-road reform...
...The country was a colossally corrupt police state, with total suppression of freedom, wholesale public and private immorality, police brutality, torture, an elaborate spying network, and a medieval concentration camp in the swamps of the Orinoco River...
...They are struggling on every front to relieve tension by multiplying opportunity, but the pace is painfully slow...
...While it lags behind Cuba's agarian reform in scope and depth, it does have the happy advantage of providing land, however small a parcel, for the land-hungry peasantry...
...The direction is definitely hopeful...
...That is why there is a lack of confidence and a flight of capital...
...f In Caracas alone, some three to four hundred thousand persons, half of them unemployed and hungry, live in ramshackle huts made of cardboard, mud, and tincans on hillsides that run with sewage...
...Such a plan," he argued, "would bring direct assistance to the farmers, who would know that this is an American operation and would respond accordingly...
...Venezuela's Communist spokesmen make occasional pilgrimages to the shrines in Moscow and Peking, but insist they are "absolutely independent" of both—a claim no one takes seriously...
...The U. S. government and the press charged off the affair, as usual, to Communist propaganda, but the bitterness of the Venezuelans ran much deeper and was more genuine and widespread than could be explained by a sham political show...
...But I was told officially that three-quarters of the agricultural land is in 6,700 units of 2,500 acres or more...
...Lack of adequate roads and the division of the country by towering mountain ranges have made it difficult for government troops to penetrate the last pockets of gangster violence...
...We are in the midst of a great dilemma," said President Betancourt...
...It is designed to serve only as a holding device for the eventual restoration of genuine democracy...
...Venezuela's history of violence, directed at itself, has not come to an end with the birth of democracy...
...In the critical field of housing, the Betancourt regime is making steady if slow progress—nothing that approximates the pace in Cuba...
...Betancourt and his colleagues are seeking to close the gap with a self-help housing scheme under which families are given credit to buy materials and finance supervision but do much of the work themselves...
...It would cost you so little to expand your present operation...
...The Liberals captured an impressive majority of the votes in the first election, but it does them little good...
...One forward-looking American business man put it to me this way: "Betancourt is a great man, a true democratic liberal, but he is so tied down by the coalition and so harassed by the pressures from left and right that he has not been able to produce a clear-cut program that commands confidence...
...It has signed thousands of contracts providing for wage scales and fringe benefits almost unheard of in the rest of Latin America, but many of the benefits are eaten up by the staggering cost of living...
...Illiteracy blights the lives of fifty to sixty per cent of the people...
...I confess I did not see Venezuela's program at close range, as I did Cuba's...
...I am personally optimistic about the future, but the government has a long, hard road to travel...
Vol. 25 • June 1961 • No. 6
