THE STRUGGLING MIDGETS OF CENTRAL AMERICA

...The only conclusion one can draw from the demographic pattern of the area," said one student of Central America, "is that there are just not enough people to create the resources needed by a modern state...

...We are running a clean show...

...The five Central American countries combined have a total population of fewer than eleven million— smaller than that of metropolitan New York City...

...How much would you say you have accumulated...

...We have invested carefully and expanded our holdings, but it is nonsense to assume that we have piled up a quarter of a billion dollars...

...Later I was shown public proclamations forbidding the holding of political meetings...

...Kennedy, in whom we have confidence, that it is time to stop helping these dictatorships...

...Benjamin Nunez, formerly Costa Rica's minister of labor and recently its representative to the United Nations...

...For Nicaragua, with the blessing of the United States, is a police-state tyranny that censors press and radio, arrests its opponents, maintains tight military control of all political activities, hounds even moderate critics into silence, and, more often than not, is under a state of siege...

...Echandi's triumph was partly the result of depressed economic conditions flowing from a sharp drop in the world price of coffee, Costa Rica's principal product, and a serious split in Figueres' National Liberation Party...

...The Communists exploited every opening, including the hard facts of misery, hunger, and hopelessness among the poor, and captured control of the labor and agrarian reform movements...

...The press is free...

...In 1944 a popular revolution swept out the brutal dictatorship of General Jorge Ubico...

...I can't see how you can call this a dictatorship...

...This is, in fact, what was attempted more than a century ago when the Captaincy General of Guatemala became, in 1823, the United Provinces of Central America —"free and independent of old Spain, of Mexico, and every other power...

...President Ydigoras, who can best be described as a domineering democrat who wants his people to love him even if he expects them to think he knows best, is more hopeful...

...Today there are 5,000 kilometers of gravel roads and 2,000 kilometers of paved roads...

...Under his regime Guatemala has done tolerably well, by fits and starts...

...But democracy reasserted itself when the supreme court voided the suspension of the newspaper...

...At one point in his career, near the end, the General did step aside to allow his puppet, Dr...

...They cannot survive without your help and the democratic people of my country and all Latin America know this...

...You say you believe in freedom, but you rush to the aid of this tyranny...

...The people, however, applauded his going...

...Except in the few cases where modest agrarian reform has taken hold, Central Americans live under a long-outmoded land tenure system which developed during colonial days and was expanded in more modern times by the introduction of the type of capitalist agriculture represented by the United Fruit Company...

...After a period of uncertainty and insecurity, during which there were two elections, one of which was annulled, General Ydigoras was elected President and assumed office March 2, 1958...

...The leftist forces, including Communists and non-Communists alike, succeeded in 1951 in electing Jacobo Arbenz to the presidency...

...Six months of bitter civil war followed, ending in the defeat of the Calderon-Picado forces...

...Nothing less than this will prove it to the people of my country...

...I talked with several knowledgeable Americans and Guatemalans who do not think so...

...During the past five years," he told me, "we have had martial law for four of them...

...Our progress is slow, but we are setting up pilot ^plants in the various fields to show the people they can look forward to housing, education, agrarian reform, farm-to-market roads, and progress in health...

...Of course we own some properties," he said quite amiably...

...That would be hard to say...

...A political freak, Whelan was appointed U.S...

...Calderon, by the way, had the support of Costa Rican Communists who joined forces with the oligarchy in a struggle to preserve the status quo...

...As for the highways, I was told that they were built for military maneuvers and that their construction was honeycombed with graft and corruption...

...The brothers have ruled Nicaragua with an iron fist—and have managed, on the side, to build handsomely on the nest egg Papa left them...

...The educator with whom I talked made much the same appeal—to end all assistance at once...

...It is far short of what my enemies claim...

...You have insulted us by sending such an ass to be your ambassador to our country," one Nicaraguan exploded...

...The first is a democracy, the second a dictatorship with the outward forms of democracy, and the third a democracy with some of the trappings of dictatorship...

...Luis won the Presidency virtually by default, for the opposition groups abstained from participation on the plausible assumption that the outcome was rigged...

...But nobody with whom I talked in Nicaragua thought the end would come that soon or that easily...

...They range from Guatemala's three and a half million to Costa Rica's population of little more than a million...

...I do not know what has happened in Guatemala since the ill-fated invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles this April, but I suspect, from what I have read, that there has been a renewed wave of anti-American feeling among students, left-wing elements, and even some of the moderates because of what they regard as Yankee intervention...

...A devout Catholic, this educator complained that the Church has provided no meaningful opposition to the Somoza regime...

...A democratic constitution was promulgated, the army was abolished as a permanent body, the banking system was nationalized, a career merit system for recruiting government employes was instituted, and new strength was given an existing program which provides for autonomous public institutions to control certain important economic activities...

...Now there are 4,000 schools and about 3,800 are public...

...When I saw Luis Somoza, a big, handsome man with considerable capacity for turning on charm when he wants to, I asked him about his family's wealth, citing the charges leveled against him by his opponents...

...They expect he will either amend the constitution before his term expires, or find himself a puppet and then step into a new post, as the Dominican Republic's Trujillo did when he made himself a generalissimo in command of all the armed forces while retaining executive control of the government...

...There have been some window-dressing reforms, but they exist largely on paper...

...Ydigoras suspended the daily for twenty days, closed a radio station that criticized his action, and generally invoked a cloak of secrecy and censorship...

...His death, unmourned by the multitude, brought his two young sons to power...

...After eight months of a junta government and four years Presidential tenure by Otilio Ulate, Figueres was elected President in 1953, receiving sixty-four per cent of the vote...

...Like its neighbors, Guatemala is an agricultural country, specializing in coffee, bananas, and cotton...

...Present developments in Costa Rica date from 1948, when the country's democratic traditions experienced great strain because of the efforts of former President Rafael Angel Cal-deron Guardia and President Teo-doro Picado to put Calderon back in power again, although he had been clearly defeated at the polls by Otilio Ulate...

...There were practically no roads when my father became President...

...Founded by a group of Latin American spokesmen for democratic progressivism, including Venezuela's President Betancourt and Costa Rica's former President Figueres, the Institute provides the teaching staff and facilities for the training of young men and women of Latin America sent there by their political parties...

...Our Point Four program has yielded mounting dividends in the form of better farming methods and diversification of crops...

...I have visted three of the five countries— Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Guatemala...

...One of the most hopeful developments I encountered in Costa Rica was the Institute of Political Education...

...I spent a day with him traveling the countryside as he dedicated schools and power installations...

...The process of breaking down the oligarchic system moves slowly...

...I could see why some of his opponents thought he was a bit touched in the the head and some of his friends thought he was crazy, all right—but crazy like a fox...

...The country is drifting without much affirmative action, hoping that something will happen soon to bring a rise in the market price of coffee and bananas...

...In his ten years in Managua, Whelan never bothered to learn Spanish or the history and culture of the country, contenting himself with serving as a backstop for the brothers Somoza and making himself, next to the brothers, the most cordially detested man in all Nicaragua...

...The ruling dynasty, which came to power nearly thirty years ago after a long period of control of the country by U.S...

...It will take time...

...This bottles up all dissent and results in the arbitrary arrest of anyone who dares criticize anything...

...It would be difficult to evaluate how much a man like Whelan— and there have been others like him elsewhere in Latin America—has done to blight America's image as a freedom-loving land and to instill a scornful attitude toward us on the part of Latin Americans who genuinely cherish democracy...

...Somoza pointed proudly to the fact that the Nicaraguan constitution, at his request, forbids him or any member of his family from seeking the Presidency when his term ends two years hence...

...He modestly disclaimed being a multimillionaire...

...All the Nicaraguans with whom I talked, with one exception, extracted a prior promise not to divulge their identity...

...Average net income in Nicaragua, for example, is $186 a year, which is much more than most Nicaraguans make because the overall figure, of course, includes the handsome earnings of the oligarchy...

...Support for the Cuban revolution ran high until the wave of Castro's excesses turned public opinion against the bearded revolutionary and his cause...

...These people live on the border of bankruptcy every day of their lives...

...Again like its neighbors, the country has what seems like a never-the-twain-shall-meet gulf between the wealthy and powerful oligarchy and the poverty-stricken and voiceless peasants...

...Castillo was assassinated in July, 1957, by a fanatic who had managed to penetrate the palace guard...

...Director of the Institute is an able, indefatigable priest, Dr...

...The lone exception was a remarkably courageous man, Pedro Joaquien Chamorro, editor of La Prensa, who has spent three-and-a half years in jail and two years in exile during the past seven years...

...The reason you know so little in the States about what is going on here is because all but one of the American correspondents here is on Somoza's payroll...

...The constitution prohibited Figueres from seeking reelection, and his party lost the Presidency in 1958 to Mario Echandi, a far more conservative figure who has emphasized more reliance on free enterprise, although he was elected, in part, through the help of the Communists...

...There I saw first-hand the process of censorship in action...

...An educator charged that Somoza's school statistics were grossly exaggerated, that there was a desperate shortage of educational facilities, and that, by United Nations count, sixty-seven per cent of the nation was illiterate...

...We used to export $4,000,000 a year, now it is $70,000,000...

...This was too much for Castillo Armas, the Guatemalan anti-Communist exiled leader...

...Every measure for reform must run the fire of the wealthy elite, and often a promising measure emerges from the legislative process almost completely shorn of its hopeful passages...

...With your connivance," he said, "some sixty per cent of the budget here in Nicaragua goes to the military...

...When my father became President, there were only 250 schools, and half of them were private...

...How can such a great democracy as the United States send out as its representative a man who loves dictatorship...

...Some of Somoza's claims do not stand up on investigation...

...Is the pace of improvement fast enough...

...But this lasted only until 1838 when the five present states began life as independent nations...

...In the ten years he served as ambassador—until President Kennedy relieved him, happily, earlier this year—Whelan built up the Somozas as statesmen and defied the State Department to get tough with them...

...Guatemala, the last of the Latin American countries of which I write, is the northernmost and most populous of the Central American nations...

...There is now a growing middle class and a widening circle of lower-income families proud of their homes built with government assistance...

...Some ninety-five per cent of the budget money goes where it is supposed to go...

...A few days later the Arbenz government collapsed...

...marines, is the Somoza family...

...Somoza urged me to look at "the great achievements of my administration and my father's before me...

...Branded by our State Department as pro-Communist, Arbenz proceeded to provide his foes with ammunition by turning to the Soviet bloc for arms and ammunition—after being refused by the United States and its allies...

...Leonardo Arguello, win a "free election" without opposition, but the General wasn't satisfied with the way things were going and simply took back the Presidency...

...It is up to you of North America to help by disproving the belief that a majority of us hold, that your help is decisive in saddling us with this tyranny...

...Luis Somoza Debayle, then 34, picked up the Presidency, and his younger brother, Anastasio (Tachito) Somoza Debayle, West Point trained, became commander of the all-powerful Guardia Nacional, the best organized military force in Central America...

...But the bishops refuse to take a clear-cut stand because they fear the Somoza family will retaliate by persecuting the Church...

...Costa Rica has made greater progress toward achieving some of the goals and developing most of the methods of social democracy than any of its Central American neighbors...

...Just before he was summoned home this year, he was feted handsomely by the brothers...

...Do something before it is too late...

...Only two hours before he insisted to me there was a free press in his country, I had visited the office of La Prensa, an opposition daily which is allowed to function for window-dressing purposes...

...Ambassador to Nicaragua by former President Harry S. Truman simply because the late Senator William Langer threatened to block every appointment of a Federal judge until somebody from North Dakota got something by way of a political plum...

...How can we believe you when you say you are against Castro, as I am, because he is a dictator, and yet maintain cordial relations and hold out a helping hand to the dictatorship in Nicaragua...

...In Guatemala, only 516 of the country's 348,687 farms, or fourteen-hundredths of one per cent, include within their area more than forty per cent of the nation's farm land...

...Disease is still rampant and illiteracy stands at sixty-seven per cent...

...Some semblance of unity is sought today through the Organization of Central American States, with headquarters in San Salvador, but its efforts are not very impressive...

...Some indication of this Truman appointee's predilections in domestic politics may be gleaned from the fact that he proudly had hung on his wall the portraits of the late Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin and former Senator William E. Jenner of Indiana, both of whom symbolized Know-Nothingness at its worst in the recent history of the United States...

...Ydigoras came to power in a relatively free election in March, 1958, after a characteristically stormy period in Guatemalan history...

...That will make it clear to us and to the rest of Latin America that you mean what you say when you insist you are against dictatorships...

...he asked...

...Perhaps the principal architect of the recent and current cordiality between democratic America and dictatorial Nicaragua is a tough-talking American who used to run a grain and potato warehouse business back home in Pembina County, North Dakota...

...Worse than that, because of his presence for ten years you made it impossible for us to get word to your government on how frightful conditions are here...

...This able young editor expressed a conviction that I heard from many Nicaraguans—the bitter judgment that the United States, by aiding the Somoza regime economically and militarily, was in considerable measure responsible for the country's plight...

...A reform program, looking toward land distribution, school construction, home building, and the development of new industries has taken modest shape...

...He is used to them...

...Even if these nations separately spent all their income for roads, schools, homes, hospitals, and economic development, they would still fall short of meeting the demands of their hungry, reform-conscious people...

...The latter, however, succeeded in capturing control of the legislative Assembly...

...I asked...

...Costa Rica forged ahead under Figueres' moderate program of social reform...

...As long as there is hope in this land," he told me, "as long as we are moving forward, we can defeat Castroism and Communism...

...When I asked him if he were, as charged, running a tight little dictatorship, he grinned and said: "That's an old one...

...A privileged elite dominates the economic and political life of all five Central American nations...

...Some notion of the magnitude of the problem confronting these little countries can be gleaned from these representative examples: In Costa Rica, relatively the most advanced of Central American nations in other ways, one per cent of the farms encompass nearly fifty per cent of the country's total farm land...

...With the abundant help of our Central Intelligence Agency—a charge frequently made and never repudiated—Castillo raised his banner of liberation in the eastern region of Guatemala on June 18, 1954...

...They are said to own the national airline, a shipping company, ranches, coffee plantations, textile mills, radio stations, a newspaper, Florida real estate, buildings around the world, the Nicaraguan embassy in Washington, some of the schools in Nicaragua, and even the Foreign Ministry, which pays rent to the family...

...Of its population of 3,700,000, more than 2,000,000 are full-blooded Indians who speak a variety of Indian tongues but little or no Spanish...

...This is supposed to help stop Communism, but you are making Communists by cooperating in this program...

...Why don't you differentiate between democracies and dictatorships...

...He was succeeded by a new regime headed by an exiled schoolteacher, Juan Jose Arevalo, who preached reform and nationalism— and opened the door to Communist infiltration...

...Together they constitute what we know as Central America...

...Ninety per cent of the priests, those who have to work with the people and see their hopeless condition first-hand, are opposed to the Somozas...

...The editor pleaded with me to "go home and tell your Mr...

...Most of the people are terribly poor and have absolutely no hope that conditions will improve under the present system...

...President Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes, for example, became greatly agitated earlier this year when Ramon Blanco, publisher of El Impartial, mocked as comic opera the President's spending of a million dollars to put down a small army revolt that might have been suppressed with a couple of truckloads of soldiers...

...When their training is completed, the graduates return to their countries to provide effective social democratic leadership in the liberal parties which sent them to the Institute...

...Leader and hero of the democratic elements was Jose Figueres, who was to become one of the most distinguished democratic spokesmen for all Latin America...

...Castroism found a haven in Guatemala during its first year, as it did in other Latin American countries...

...Whelan has been photographed frequently embracing the Somoza brothers, one at a time, and being embraced by them...

...Eighty cents a day is still the best return most peasants can command...

...The five countries are predominantly rural, the percentage of rural population ranging from sixty-eight per cent in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Costa Rica, through seventy-two per cent in Guatemala, to seventy-seven per cent in Honduras...

...His name is Thomas E. Whelan and he dotes on dictator Somoza as a fond father would a son...

...And yet Costa Rica still has a hard road to follow in wiping out widespread inequities in social and economic life...

...Luis Somoza takes embarrassing questions in stride...

...But is there enough time, I brooded as I headed homeward...

...The result has been deadlocked government, with the Assembly passing reform legislation and the President piling up a record number of vetoes—more, in fact, than all other presidents of Costa Rica combined...

...Much of it was left us by our father, who worked hard for it before he became President...

...To the naked eye of a wholly inexperienced student of Latin America like myself it would seem that it might have been the better part of common sense to have consolidated these five midgets into a single full-grown country...

...Castillo quickly became president of the governing junta, and proceeded to govern Guatemala with lavish assistance by the United States, which was determined to show how more responsive to the needs of the people he was than Arbenz...

...An Institute of the kind that flourishes in Costa Rica would be destroyed in Nicaragua before it opened its doors, unless it were a school for the training of tyrants...

...The answer is, of course not...

...Here, clearly, is a modified form of feudalism which leaves the great majority of people in poverty, illiteracy, and despair—the ingredients that could enable the Communists or Castroists to blow the system sky-high unless something is done and done soon...

...Its literacy rate, for example, is eighty-eight per cent of the population more than ten years old—perhaps the best showing of any country in all Latin America...

...Congress is independent...

...I found him a shrewd, affable character...

...The best thing you can do is to refuse to help this regime...

...Guatemala is a democracy in form, and to a considerable extent, in practice, although it has a tendency to put its democratic principles in cold storage from time to time as crises develop...

...Critics of the regime, and this includes, as nearly as I could determine, almost everyone not a member of the family, charge that the Somoza family has accumulated a fortune of half a billion dollars—in a country of grinding poverty...

...The December, 1959, elections gave President Ydigoras his first workable majority in congress and he has since moved ahead with greater dispatch on his reform program...

...Papa," officially known during his lifetime as General Anastasio (Tacho) Somoza, captured power in 1936 and held it, unchallenged, until he was gunned down by an assassin in September, 1956...

...The courts function normally here...