Latin America: Dynamite on Our Doorstep

...You have persisted in taking us for granted," a foreign minister complained to me...

...He is acclaimed in some quarters for the speed and thoroughness with which he has achieved his kind of agrarian reform, built schools and homes, destroyed the ruling oligarchy, and broadened the distribution of Cuba's wealth...

...The United States had not only befriended but also decorated the brutal dictator...

...By doing this, they hope to create or magnify tensions and discontent to the explosive point where the right-wing and military forces will take over to 'maintain order and stabilize the country.' This is what they want — right-wing, military dictatorship of the Batista type in Cuba...

...I heard that refrain over and over again in my travels, often from moderates and conservatives who meant simply that the Cuban revolution had succeeded in frightening the United States into paying attention to Latin America's problems for the first time in more than a decade, and emphasizing in the United States the urgent need for social reforms to prevent, with American assistance, violent revolution—and perhaps Communist-style dictatorship...

...In clinging to right-wing concepts in left-wing countries, the American business community plays squarely into the hands of the Communists and Fidelistas, who are quick to exploit this American resistance to urgently needed reforms...

...The business administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower, and its representatives in some of our embassies in Latin America, often could not distinguish between genuine social reform under democratic controls and the total regimentation of Communism — they could not distinguish the difference between the non-Communist left and the Party line...

...We have paid a staggering price for this blindness...

...The statistics tell the story: Latin America has received less than three per cent of the total aid the United States has given around the world from July, 1945, to July, 1960...

...While Castro's following has now shriveled to a small fraction of its earlier strength, Castroism retains a great potential in Latin America...

...Senator Wayne Morse's Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Latin American affairs recently estimated that there are about 225,000 members of the Communist Party in a total Latin American population of nearly 200,000,000 — a substantial decline below the total of a decade ago...

...Lives of grinding poverty and voiceless desperation are still the norm, but outside the drab, waterless huts where millions of Latin Americans struggle to exist, and just beyond the walls of ignorance which imprison the illiterate majority, the fuses of revolution are sputtering ever more closely...

...Dudman put it well when he wrote: "This opportunity for the Communists comes, not when grinding poverty is at its worst, but as roads are built, literacy spreads, radios and newspapers reach rural villages, peasants move to the city, an occasional student has a chance to enter a university — in short, as people learn of a better life and hope to achieve it...

...A priest in one of the countries I visited — a genuine social reformer in the democratic spirit — emphasized a theme I was to hear recurring-ly on my journey...

...There are distinguished exceptions, to be sure, like Gallagher of Sears — and Thomas J. Watson, president of International Business Machines Corporation — who see the compelling need for social reform for Latin America...

...We talked with Venezuelans of all walks of life to get their opinion and reactions...

...The program is significant in reflecting a changing point of view among some American businessmen in Latin America, and the Venezuelan concept has been exported to other Latin American countries...

...Remember, and tell your friends in the States, that if rightist, military dictatorship comes to power again in Latin America, the people's hopes for democratic reform will be crushed, and they will turn, because there will be no place else to turn, to the extreme left of Communism or Castroism...

...Jose Fig-ueres, former President of Costa Rica and one of the wisest statesmen in Latin America, a warm and devoted friend of the United States, put it to me this way: "One of the great tragedies of the recent past was the way the United States turned its back on the rising tide of democracy in Latin America...

...This is the central fact of life with which I collided almost everywhere I went on a recent journey through eleven countries south of the border...

...I am positive that the Administration had no desire to tie together the two matters . . .We must ask ourselves, in all honesty, how does this coincidence look to the rest of the hemisphere...

...As a people who have nothing to lose, least of all hope, Latin Americans are not scared by terms like "Communism" or "Castroism...

...Latin America is mortally sick because of its own failures—and our neglect...

...In the dictatorships, the military establishment has little if any part to play in "stopping Communism...

...So they sabotage reform, maneuver secretly for rightist dictatorship, and hope this will pave the way for their revolution...

...It would be pleasant to be able to report that the concept is flourishing, but this would not be accurate...

...With a few exceptions, like Costa Rica and Mexico, and our commonwealth of Puerto Rico, Latin Americans can expect for the rest of this year lower production, higher inflation, declining income, more poverty and suffering—in short, almost every ingredient of the dynamite that the Communists dearly love to play with...

...Even more fundamental than the general indictment of indifference, neglect, and, sometimes, arrogance, is the more specific charge — and well documented it is — that the United States, especially under the Eisenhower Administration, either ignored or actually opposed the recent historic surge toward democracy in strategic areas of Latin America...

...Per capita income in Central America ranges from a high of $320 per year in literate, relatively prosperous Costa Rica to $186 per year in dungeon-like Nicaragua...

...It is, then, not difficult to understand that Latin America resents the lack of continental economic policy to organize production, prices, and the industrialization of our united peoples, so that those who make sacrifices may receive a corresponding share of the benefits...

...that no sustained economic development is currently in sight...

...They also complained about U. S. restrictions on the importation into the United States of their main export product — oil...

...The concepts of free enterprise and 'people's capitalism,' however attractive they may sound in the United States, have little appeal in Latin America...

...Less than two years ago Castro was doubtless the most popular public figure in Latin America...

...It looks like a callous attempt to purchase favor . . . It suggests that dollars are being dangled before Latin America in the same manner that the Russians of late have been waving rubles before Cuba...

...the American business community is convinced they go too far...

...The Communists," he said, "have developed a Latin American strategy that is simplicity itself...

...In the showdown struggle with Communism — and its current ally, Castroism — time is not on our side, except as Communism and Castroism play into our hands with self-defeating excesses...

...In the United States it is seventy...

...Latin America is dynamite—some of it already exploding—right on our doorstep...

...Then they will be ready for their longer-range goal, which is to launch a Castro-type guerrilla warfare in the mountains and the villages that would culminate in a Castro-style society closely aligned with Moscow...

...This is their immediate, goal — to keep chaos alive and hunger widespread — until they can be strong enough to maneuver for power...

...Invasion of Cuba, even if more successful than the monumental fiasco of mid-April, will do nothing to relieve Latin America's illness...

...they are effects, rather than causes, of the deep-running discontent that has invaded and enveloped those dead-end streets throughout all the hemisphere south of the United States...

...This, of course, is precisely what the Communists oppose...

...The Sears, Roebuck executive stayed on during the year of provisional government and into the first year of the democratic regime of President Betancourt...

...It is only if the next step is taken quickly enough — the adoption of meaningful agrarian reform, the passage of hope-instilling social legislation for urban workers, and the development of a middle class with a genuine stake in society — that the new order can be stabilized along democratic lines...

...They are interested in results...

...The private opinion is heard repeatedly that business was better under [Dictators] Perez Jimenez in Venezuela, Rojas Pinilla in Colombia, and Manuel Ordia in Peru...

...You were decorating the dictators with medals and awards when we were fighting for freedom, and worst of all, your people in some of the embassies and in Washington blackened the reputation of some of our best men, who were fighting for democracy and social reform, by calling them Communists when, in fact, they were just the opposite...

...These figures help to explain the deep-running resentment throughout Latin America over U. S. neglect of her southern neighbors...

...A Mexican saying sums it all up: "Eat first and be a Christian afterward...

...Much of this mood is changing now, although slowly...

...Their devotion to the cause is staggering — and enviable...

...And in the dictatorships I visited, aside from Cuba—Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua — little thought and even less money go into the building of new schools...

...Most Latin Americans are born on dead-end streets and are doomed to live there until the day they die...

...Because he seems to me to represent this moderately hopeful new development in the business community, I want to record briefly the observations and experiences of John F. Gallagher, vice president for foreign administration of Sears, Roebuck 8c Company...

...The Communists are bent on frustrating every evolutionary approach to the problem of Latin America...

...Nor do these statistics reveal that social and economic conditions are deteriorating still further even now...

...He is appointing men who know Spanish and know and understand and sympathize with the plight of Latin Americans," said a Panamanian official with deep satisfaction...

...Those who have turned against Fidel Castro because of ties with international Communism and his police state methods nonetheless often tend to sympathize with his seizure of foreign investments...

...They feel, and quite rightly, that they have been shamefully neglected since the end of World War II...

...Except when the party line changes temporarily and they become identified briefly with popular front movements, the Communists, like so many of our American business interests, oppose the agrarian and social reforms of the moderately left regimes in countries like Colombia and Venezuela...

...Kennedy wants us to be a neighbor and partner, not a poor relation," exulted a Colombian technician...

...Senator Mike Mansfield said in August, 1960: "It is no secret, after all, that we are engaged in a serious and bitter dispute with Cuba at this time...

...Their tactic at the moment," said one well-informed Venezuelan who once followed the party line, "is to function with rather small, highly organized, well-disciplined, tightly controlled units that are extremely active and mobile...

...government had decorated and praised the Dictator Perez Jimenez...

...Most of all, the present structure of society is not producing a pool of trained and educated personnel to staff the multitude of technical and administrative positions demanded in any progressive reform, however modest...

...They questioned whether many U. S. companies and individual Americans had the best interests of Venezuela at heart — and used as examples, American lack of understanding of Venezuelan history and culture, lack of Spanish language training, lack of social interchange, lack of contact with the people of Venezuela...

...Moderately left-wing democratic parties like Accion Democratica in Venezuela and the Liberal Party of Colombia are clearly our best bets against violence and extremism, but their reform programs are "socialist poison" to many American businessmen who are unable to distinguish between democratic reform and regimented Communism...

...Everywhere in Latin America, except in Cuba, there is—or at least was, until the abortive invasion of Cuba in April — deep satisfaction with President Kennedy's initial utterances on the problems south of the border and his new appointments to key diplomatic posts...

...businessmen are so short-sighted as to be unable to grasp the essential fact that democratic social reform is the swiftest and surest way to build stable, viable economies that can stand up against the promises and threats of Communism and Castroism...

...Many of them have been trained in the school of Marxist-Leninism in Moscow...

...Each year," said a Guatemalan official, "Latin America falls farther behind in meeting the need for schools and teachers...

...This central fact, when fused with another and newer reality—the revolution of rising expectations now surging through most of the underprivileged portions of the world — goes far to explain the explosive character of society throughout all Latin America...

...Castro's admirers, however, do not constitute a majority, or anything near it, now...

...Often, precisely because they are so opposed to reform, Communists are secretly invited into positions of power in the government or in the labor unions, such as they are, by the surviving tyrants of Latin America...

...My crash program of Spanish proved more of a hindrance than a help, so I relied largely on interpreters in my encounters with Latin Americans who knew no English...

...We listened, and at first we were quite resentful over what appeared to be many inaccurate views of our attitudes and beliefs — and at the apparent lack of appreciation for the contribution that most businessmen believed their companies had made to Venezuela...

...The people have the means to know of a better life, and impatient as they are and have a right to be, they are easily intoxicated by the dazzling allure of shortcuts as preached by the Communists...

...But far and away the greatest influence on the changing U. S. attitude toward Latin America is the fact of Castro's Cuba...

...Most of our children cannot even aspire to enter the first grade," a Haitian business man told me...

...business interests find themselves aligned with the detested wealthy elite who are forever maneuvering for a return of rightist-army dictatorship to "maintain order," which in their terms is best translated, "Keep the profits flowing and the people pauperized...

...It is achieving modest results in Venezuela, but I talked with both Americans and Latin Americans who felt that in too many cases the program, however well-meaning, is hemmed in by goals that are both too limited and unappealing to Latin Americans...

...When he fell, a great wave of pent-up anti-Americanism swept over Venezuela...

...Out of this creative searching by Gallagher and his associates came a deepening awareness of the need to share with Venezuelans, to get to know them better, and to help them in person-to-person activities...

...They move swiftly, and sometimes effectively — through printed propaganda, their influence in certain labor unions, and other means — to oppose effective social reforms that might give the people a feeling that they belonged and were wanted and could hope to improve their lives...

...The impoverished countries of Latin America are saddled with staggering budgets for military operations — ranging as high as fifty per cent — in large measure because of U. S. pressure to build an anti-Communist force...

...In Chile, for example, one per cent of the people control forty-three per cent of the land...

...He knows the difference between a Social Democrat and a Communist," one Venezuelan diplomat commented hopefully...

...This last ingredient of the Communist appeal, anti-Americanism, is pressed on the Latin Americans with relentless fury...

...It cannot endure, as Senator Mike Mansfield, one of the Senate's foremost authorities on Latin America, has pointed out, for the simple reason that it does not deliver enough education, enough food, shelter, and clothing, enough medical care, enough of the conveniences of life, and, most important of all, "it does not provide for a sufficient number of people that intangible but essential element of prideful participation in the present and hope for the future which are the keystones of political stability...

...Millions of our poor people have worked hard and suffered greatly for decades to contribute to the economic expansion of the United States...

...The Communists seem rather well financed, especially considering how few sources they can tap for money here in Latin America...

...If the moderate left is not allowed to press forward with its reform program...

...The first stage of emancipation from feudalism is a delicate and dangerous one...

...Merely because they stood for agrarian reform, social security, and the like, you called them Communists, and thereby made their task more difficult, and incidentally, helped the Communists by identifying them with the reform so many demand so urgently...

...But several Latin American officials warned me against assuming that this meant a significant decline in Communist strength...

...Ironically, the appeals of Communism make greater headway among those for whom life has grown somewhat better in recent years, for they now have the means and the media through which to listen and observe...

...Latin American population doubled from 1920 to 1956 and is increasing now at the rate of 2.5 per cent a year — highest in the world...

...Communism and Castroism are not to blame...

...For example, leaders of democratic left parties met recently in Lima and resolved that Cuba's "revolutionary process, justified at the beginning, has been deflated by its present agents, converting a brother country into an instrument of the cold war, separating it, with suicidal premeditation, from the community of interests of the Latin American people...

...Latin America, whose 200,000,000 people occupy a rich land mass more than two-and-a-half times that of the United States, is plagued by one-crop economies, crippled by dependence on exports, riddled by illiteracy, hunger, and disease, afflicted with shockingly low per capita incomes, harried by mounting inflation and falling world prices, rampant with tax evasion, and most of all torn asunder between the few enormously rich who usually control the country and the once silent but now stirring poor...

...Our thinking was clarified one day when one of the Americans who had lived in Venezuela for many years said: 'Perhaps we should look at this situation through their eyes...

...He is admired among those who have grievances against the United States, some of them legitimate, for the aggressive manner in which he talks back to the giant of the north...

...Louis Post-Dispatch, had greater opportunities to observe the program than I did, and he came up with just about the same conclusion...

...Richard Dudman, who has recently roamed nearly all of Latin America for the St...

...and that its rapid growth is becoming unmanageable...

...We have had a genuine democratic revolution in major areas of the hemisphere, but the United States was cold and indifferent when it was not in fact opposing the rise of free government to replace tyranny...

...There was a time when the revolutionist and what he stood for commanded the support of some ninety per cent of the people of Latin America...

...Ezequiel Padilla, the distinguished Mexican statesman and diplomat who has served his country in the cabinet and as ambassador, expressed it this way: "In the development of the wealth and industrial progress of the United States there is incorporated the work, the life, the contribution of entire generations of Latin American laborers to produce in agricultural fields and from the bottom of the mines the raw materials indispensable to North American industry...

...What is urgently needed in Latin America is a new social structure, for in most of the countries south of the border the prevailing structure is hopelessly out of date and seems little more than an economic treadmill...

...they did not create them...

...I talked with hundreds of individuals on every side of every major problem, and out of it all I have distilled the report which begins on this page and runs through most of this issue of The Progressive...

...business interests and diplomats on "free enterprise" leaves them absolutely cold...

...it is used to keep the people in check...

...And then,' he asked, 'do you suppose that we hypothetical natives of Texas would have been considerate and courteous to those Venezuelans as they have been to us over the years that we have lived and worked in their country?' "As we studied the situation further, we found that <here was much that we could do...

...Illiteracy is appallingly high, averaging more than fifty per cent for all Latin Americans of reading age, and reaching eighty-nine per cent in the dictatorship of Haiti and seventy per cent in Bolivia, Guatemala, and Honduras...

...Despite its emphasis on good works and cultural exchanges," he reported, "the program's real motive seems to be to protect private property against expropriation and against additional taxation and labor legislation...

...Gallagher was there when Vice President and Mrs...

...The young democracies are still too weak to enforce their enlightened will on the powerful elite of wealthy landowners and urban entrepreneurs...

...Every fault of American diplomacy and American business enterprise — and, unhappily, there have been many — is exaggerated and exacerbated by the Communists, often with telling effect...

...His breed is not yet numerous, but he holds out genuine hope that, side by side with newly enlightened U. S. government policy, he will play a far more constructive role in the life of Latin America than has been true until now...

...But, unhappily, too many other U.S...

...The United Nations has estimated that Latin America needs 500,000 more primary teachers and as many new classrooms if it is to make primary education available for the 19,000,000 children waiting to begin their education...

...The Communists know they are not strong enough to move directly now...

...You preferred to play with the dictators, and I do not think it would be too much to say that much of what we have achieved in replacing dictatorship with democracy, we have achieved despite the United States...

...The story of how our Central Intelligence Agency financed and directed the crude attempt to destroy Castroism has been graphically presented as a new and chilling episode of "Yankee imperialism...

...Moreover, by opposing these democratic social reform movements, U.S...

...They do not spin the complicated theories of Marxist ideology to the untutored ears of peasants and workers, but rather proclaim themselves a force for radical reform, holding out hope to the impoverished masses by preaching land reform, social justice, progressive taxation, industrialization, and anti-Americanism...

...if Latin America fails soon to put its house in order...

...I was to encounter this point of view everywhere I went in Latin America among articulate, enlightened spokesmen for democratic social reform...

...We have paid a high price, too, for our wretched failure to encourage, support, and identify ourselves with the recent march of democracy in Latin America—an historic movement away from dictatorship toward free government— which is one of the most significant developments of life in the recent history of Latin America...

...Elsewhere in Latin America, children reach school age faster than schools are built and teachers are trained to accommodate those who have been waiting their turn for from one to ten years...

...The Communists in Latin America, as elsewhere, are indefatigable workers, dedicated souls—and cynical manipulators with an immense capacity for sacrificing means to ends...

...The United States has contributed little to the development of this vital sector of the social community...

...But whatever the reason, Latin America desperately seeks aid from the United States...

...Most Latin Americans go through life beyond the reach of a doctor or nurse or pharmacist...

...In several countries they complained passionately that Americans, in government and business, had little contact with anyone except the ruling clique that cracked a brutal whip over the masses of people...

...The average life expectancy is less than forty-five years...

...But the excesses of the Castro regime — its firing squads, suppression of liberties, and tight ties with the Kremlin — have taken a steady toll, especially of the moderate left...

...Let us assume that the cattle industry was owned and managed by 40,000 Venezuelans who were living in Texas in a very comfortable manner as compared with the majority of us...

...But these statistics cannot begin to tell the whole story...

...Almost everywhere I traveled I encountered an awakening consciousness of the urgent need for more schools and teachers, but the pace of progress is pitifully slow, except in Cuba, where I saw a push-button dictatorship order and get action in a hurry...

...The Communists insist these reforms do not go far enough...

...traveled in only eleven countries, among some of the islands and in Central and South America, but I believe, from my reading and my talks with more experienced students of the area, that what I have to say is, in most significant respects, representative of Latin America as a whole...

...American business interests have made fabulous profits in Latin America — usually at the expense of downtrodden native labor — but a new type of American businessman is appearing on the Latin American scene...

...Numerically, the Communists do not represent great power...

...During 1960, Latin Americans, most of them already underprivileged, increased in population five times more rapidly than they increased their total production of goods and services...

...I strove diligently to overcome these handicaps by putting in long days and nights, for seven weeks, searching for the truth in this troubled and long neglected area of the world scene...

...Thank God for Castro...

...Castro is still regarded affectionately by a fair number of Latin Americans as a bearded Robin Hood who steals from the rich to feed the poor...

...I am not an expert on Latin America...

...In Paraguay five per cent of the farm units account for ninety-four per cent of the total acreage...

...Communists, for example, have made great capital of the abortive "invas-sion" of Cuba in April...

...Communism and Castroism are exploiting the tensions and troubles of a dying order...

...The State Department approves because the establishment of such projects is viewed as potentially helpful in the struggle against Communism — although the program itself is carefully set forth as an affirmative action and not specifically anti-anything or anybody...

...Eighty per cent of the people have nothing but the dreary shacks in which they huddle, often on the unpredictable suffrance of the government or the wealthy landowning class that owns them...

...The emphasis of U.S...

...They resented his being permitted to enter and live in the United States...

...More than half the people of Latin America are undernourished, more than half suffer from some infectious or dietary disease, more than half do not sleep in beds, and more than half are working—when they work— under semi-feudal conditions of land tenancy that provide no escape corridor to a better and more hopeful life...

...Their immediate goal is to prevent the passage or effective implementation of agrarian reform, labor legislation, social security, and educational expansion...

...And more recently, he has won applause for repelling the invasion financed and directed by the Goliath of the north...

...Here, in essence, is how he tells the story of that roaring period: "During those last two years, we did a great deal of soul-searching for the answer to the violent anti-Americanism that was a part of this transition from dictatorship to democracy...

...And its people are convinced they are entitled to it...

...It was a journey of exploration and discovery, for I had never before traveled south of the border...

...They cannot chronicle the despair that lives in the dingy hovels, or the enormous gulf between the ruling oligarchies that dwell in luxurious splendor and the rest of mankind in Latin America, or the bitterness with which so many contemplate the vast profits earned by foreign investors exploiting the rich natural resources of these countries, or tell of the brilliant facades of the great cities of Latin America that conceal the heartbreaking reality of the misery of the mass of people...

...Nixon were spit upon and stoned by hysterical mobs who hated the Eisenhower Administration for aiding and honoring one of the most vicious and corrupt tyrants in the long and bloody history of their country...

...The slow pace is in large measure the direct consequence of resistance by the ruling oligarchies to paying higher but more equitable taxes...

...Preference for dictatorship and distrust of democracy as applied to Latin America is a belief that runs strongly through American business communities in these countries...

...United Nations specialists recently concluded a survey showing that Latin American food production is lagging behind growing needs...

...Latin Americans know, moreover, that we recently decided to make $500,000,000 available for Western Hemisphere development only because we were alarmed by the inroads of Castroism, j And we know it, too...

...Gallagher had lived in Venezuela for three years when the hated dictatorship of Perez Jimenez was overthrown in 1958...

...They did not understand our great concern over Communism and our apparent lack of concern over their social and economic problems...

...They know that genuine social reform would bar their way to power, for the people would then not listen to them...

...Victims of conquest and colonialism for half a millenium...

...There are rumblings that are deep and persistent as millions of Latin Americans yearn to vault their way from Sixteenth Century feudalism to Twentieth Century opportunity...

...A Colombian professional man who sees the U. S. press quoted approvingly from a recent statement by Adlai Stevenson: "The Eisenhower Administration was basically concerned with making Latin America safe for American business, not for democracy...

...The whole subject of U. S. assistance is a raw sore with most articulate Latin Americans...

...They draw heavily from the restless and idealistic youth of Latin America, from older intellectuals, and from the more impatient individuals in the labor and agrarian reform movements...

...M.H.R...

...Consider some of the cold statistics: Less than two per cent of the people of Latin America own more than fifty per cent of all its wealth...

...I returned from my Latin American travels with the conviction that Fidel Castro's stock has slumped sharply in all the countries I visited, but it has not evaporated, as some wishful-thinkers would have us believe...

...We found that they were disturbed because the U.S...

...It is no secret that this dispute is to be aired with the other American Republics . . . within a matter of days...

...Said another Latin American official: "For a decade you have behaved toward us like a cold-blooded banker interested only in his profit...

...victims, too, of corrosive poverty, hunger, and disease: they are stirring restlessly, unsure of their direction, but determined to do better for themselves and for their children — by whatever name the change is known...

...Europe received 41.1 per cent, the Far East, 17.2 per cent, and the Near East, 11.3 per cent...

...American business men subscribed more than $200,000 the first year to finance two hundred projects designed to improve understanding, foster friendship, provide scholarships and recreational opportunities for Venezuelan youth, and make available affirmative materials on democracy and free enterprise to the communications media of the country...

...and if the United States continues to neglect Latin America, right-wing military dictatorship could take over again and Castroism could once more become the symbol of hope for the common man of Latin America...

...Suppose that we were natives of the state of Texas and that cattle raising was the state's main industry...