A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  Quadros greeted us cordially—we were the first foreign delegation he had received since his inauguration—and showed a lively interest in the new administration in Washington. We had decided not to raise the question of Cuba because Adolf Berle was due to see him in a few days. About Brazil, Quadros said that the financial situation was desperate and that he planned to set forth the facts as bluntly as possible in order to prepare the nation for drastic remedies. He talked well, but with a certain elusiveness. I cannot claim to have detected the instability which would later produce his dramatic resignation; he struck me rather as one of the new school of delphic statesmen in the manner of de Gaulle. He had some of de Gaulle’s gift for sibylline utterance—that is, for the gnomic statement which seems fresh and clarifying but at the same time leaves policy sufficiently ambiguous to keep hope alive among all interested parties. “The next months,” I later wrote in my report to Kennedy, “will show whether there is more to him than ingenious mystification.”

  From Brasilia we flew to Recife in Brazil’s desolate northeast. Here we met Celso Furtado, a young economist who had worked with Kaldor and Kahn at Cambridge and was now head of SUDENE, the federal commission for the development of the northeast. We drove with him through the humid area along the coast, devoted largely to sugar cultivation. Then we headed toward the semi-arid land in the interior. I had never seen such an area of despair—one bleak, stagnant village after another, dark mud huts, children with spindle legs and swollen bellies, practically no old people (Furtado noted that life expectancy, for those who survived their first year, was twenty-nine years). In one hut a baby, lying helplessly in his mother’s arms, was dying of measles. The rest of the family of seven was sitting on the dirt floor eating a hopeless meal of beans and farina. When McGovern and I entered, they looked up apathetically, except for a naked baby, perhaps eighteen months old, who rushed cheerily toward us, holding out his arms to be taken up. He was covered with scabs and pockmarks, and we were reluctant to touch him. A cameraman, who had come along in order to record evidence of need sufficient to convince Congressmen, kept flashing pictures of this terrible scene.

  Furtado was realistic in his assessment of possibilities. Seeing no present hope of doing anything in the semi-arid zone, he was concentrating on the sugar lands. An emergency food program, he said, would do no good; it might even disturb the existing dietary balance which kept the people marginally alive. “Real development,” he said, “means giving man the possibility of being happy in his work. These people hate their work. They are too weak anyway to work very long. If you give them food and do nothing to change their way of life, they will only work less.” As we drove through the desperate countryside, Furtado discussed women as the index of the state of development. “In the poor areas they no longer have the grace or form of a woman; they become beasts of burden.” After nine hours in the hinterland, we returned, tired and depressed, to Recife. As we got out of the car, an enameled Brazilian girl came out of the hotel in high heels and a chic Paris dress. Furtado said drily, “We are obviously back in a developed country.”

  Furtado himself came from a ranch in the interior. During the fifties the American Embassy regarded him with mistrust as a Marxist, even possibly a communist. But in 1961 Furtado seemed to see the problem of the northeast as a personal race between himself and the agitator Francisco Juliao, who was organizing the peasants in Ligas Camponeses and urging them to seize the land. McGovern and I were both appalled by the magnitude of the problem and impressed by the initiatives which Brazil had already taken. We carried the cause of northeast Brazil with us back to Washington.

  4. HEMISPHERE RECONNAISSANCE: II

  McGovern now returned to the United States, while I went on to Peru to complete my presidential mission in the company of a Food for Peace technical group bound for Bolivia. It was headed by James Symington and Stephen Raushenbush.

  The process of revolution in Bolivia, which had begun haltingly with the MNR uprising of 1943, had reached its climax when the MNR returned to power in 1952 and, during the presidency of Victor Paz Estenssoro, carried through one of the few genuine social transformations in Latin America’s long history of political upheaval. Despite the nationalization of the tin mines and other offenses against free enterprise, the Eisenhower administration exempted Bolivia from its Latin American canons and actually gave it more grant aid than any other country in the hemisphere—about $150 million. This aid, however, had produced little in the way of economic stimulus or other visible result. Much of it had gone for direct budgetary support; the rest for technical assistance. The Bolivian budget had been about $35 million annually (less than that, say, of the University of California), and of this the United States had been paying about one-third. But, as a condition for this subsidy, Washington had insisted that everything else should be sacrificed to the stabilization of prices. In 1960 the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs actually told the House Foreign Affairs Committee with regard to a projected development program, “We had to tell the Bolivian Government that they couldn’t put their money into it and we weren’t going to put ours into it.” This decision to pursue stabilization at the expense of development, along with the decline in tin prices, condemned the country to economic stagnation. As President Hernán Siles, who had faithfully carried out the stabilization program in 1956–60, put it, “The United States has given me just enough rope to hang myself.” Paz Estenssoro, whose second term as president had recently begun, was now struggling to get his poor and isolated nation moving again.

  The visitor to the Presidential Palace in La Paz must pass by the lamppost, across the street, from which the corpse of President Villaroel dangled in 1946—a chastening reminder to his successors of the uncertainty of political life (and one on which Paz Estenssoro may now muse today from his exile in Peru). Paz, an intelligent and harassed man, began by setting forth the general case for revolution with fluency and candor. The great need in Latin America, he said, was to incorporate the poor people into both the money economy and the political society. But too much of Latin America lingered in a quasi-feudal state, with the very poor, and especially the Indians, living under the domination of a landed oligarchy which thought it was ruling by divine right. The longer the oligarchs resisted change, Paz said, the more violent revolution would be when it came. Peru and Ecuador, he added, were ‘particularly near the point of social explosion.

  I responded that many North Americans agreed with this analysis, that even a Republican administration in Washington had provided the margin of financial support which had saved the Bolivian Revolution from disaster. Where revolution meant healthy social change, the Kennedy administration could be depended on to look on it with sympathy, but not so when revolution meant dictatorship, repression and the entry of alien forces into the hemisphere. The leaders of the Bolivian government surely bore a particular responsibility to maintain the integrity of their revolution.

  “There is much poverty in my country,” Paz replied. “The communists have made themselves the advocates of the just demands of the workers and peasants. That makes it hard for us to oppose them without seeming to oppose what we regard as a just social program.” But he gloomily admitted that they might try to take over Bolivia as they had taken over Cuba; ever since the Castro revolution, he added, the communists had proved especially successful in winning adherents and forcing issues.

  I seized the opportunity to put the President’s question. Paz replied without hesitation, “Castro must be eliminated.” I wondered how this might be done. He said that first the economic screws must be tightened against him; then an educational campaign must inform the hemisphere of the true character of the Castro regime; then—but at this point he muttered something about the OAS and trailed off into vagueness. His attitude could be described, I think, as composed in equal parts of a strong fear of Castro, a fervent hope that the United States would rid the hemisphere of him and a profound disinclination to identify himself, excep
t in the most marginal way, with anti-Castro action.

  When I returned to Lima, I found Victor Haya de la Torre, the leader of the APRA party, even more outspoken in his condemnation of Castro. A car took me to a hideout on the outskirts of the city to meet this oldest of Latin American radical democrats. He had just returned to Peru after a long absence in Europe; and he was still exuberant from the enthusiasm of 200,000 loyal Apristas who had welcomed him home at a great rally a few hours before. He seemed younger than his sixty-six years, jolly and secure, remarkably free from bitterness in view of his years of frustration and persecution, and touchingly sanguine about the future. As for Cuba, he regarded the Castro regime as the great threat to progressive democracy in the Americas and felt that the OAS might consider invoking the Rio Treaty of 1947 against aggression in the hemisphere.

  Haya spoke with great warmth about Kennedy and the references to an alliance for progress in his State of the Union message. The new American President, he said, had an unexampled opportunity to lift the hemisphere to new levels of unity. The Good Neighbor policy had been all right for its day, but, though benevolent, it had been unilateral. What the Latin American republics sought from the United States was a genuine coordination of hemisphere policy through consultation and especially through a willingness to create a hemisphere pool of ideas. Now that Washington had abandoned imperialism, relations between the United States and Latin America were largely a “question of style.”

  He was optimistic, too, about APRA prospects in Peru and critical of Belaunde Terry and his party for supposed collaboration with the communists. Later, however, when I spent an evening with a group of younger Peruvian intellectuals, they all dismissed APRA as old and tired, the party of a former generation. They agreed that it had little to say to youth, that it had a sense of organization but no sense of mission and that the new and vital spirits were looking to Belaunde. They ridiculed the idea that Belaunde was working with the communists.

  My last stop was Caracas. I had not met Betancourt since Havana more than a decade before. Till the end of the fifties he had continued to live the life of a political exile, pursued by the agents of Pérez Jiménez, the brutal Venezuelan dictator, and for a time harried by the United States Department of State—a fact for which he seemed to bear no malice. Returning to Venezuela after the overthrow of Pérez Jiménez, he was in due course elected to the presidency. Now he hoped to be the first president in Venezuelan history to serve out his full term. In 1960 Trujillo had done his best to thwart this hope by sending a group of assassins to kill him. They had loaded a parked automobile with dynamite and exploded it as Betancourt drove past in a parade. When the sheet of flame descended on the presidential car, Betancourt threw up his hands to protect his face. In consequence the backs of his hands were savagely burned, though he escaped unscathed otherwise. The man sitting beside him was killed.

  After we sipped fruit juices for a time on the veranda, Betancourt suggested a tour of the city. Entering his car, he kicked a couple of machine guns out of the way. Apart from this, security precautions were unobtrusive. As we drove off, Betancourt began to rub salve on the cracked scar tissue on the hands, saying in English, “This for Trujillo—eh?” and laughing genially. On our return there was an agreeable dinner with a number of Acción Democrática leaders, including Rómulo Gallegos, the novelist and former president. Late in the evening Betancourt, an ardent movie fan, had Der Blaue Engel projected on a screen in the garden. We sat pleasantly on, smoking Monte Cristo cigars and watching the young Marlene Dietrich, amidst the fragrance of the bougainvilleas and in the pale light of a full moon.

  Betancourt was far the most impressive of the Latin American leaders. Tough and good-humored, he conveyed an impression of strength, authority and inextinguishable vitality. Our talk during eight hours ranged widely. He inquired about the new administration in Washington, mentioning the hope that President Kennedy had already excited through the continent. When I brought up Castro, he repeated a remark Quadros had made to him after visiting Cuba: “Those people have no aim, no purpose, no doctrine, no ideology. It is government by epilepsy.” Betancourt himself, however, had no doubt of the Castro regime’s ideological drift. The personalism of Latin American politics, he said, was a great source of weakness. Without strong democratic parties, like Acción Democrática, the temptation to rely on the disciplined organization of the communists was hard for a man like Castro—even possibly for one like Quadros—to resist. As for a hemisphere policy toward Castro, Betancourt argued that if the OAS first took action against Trujillo it would be easier to unite the American republics against Castro. Beyond this, it was necessary to use all the resources of progressive democracy to combat poverty, illiteracy and injustice.

  VIII

  The Alliance for Progress

  IN A FAMOUS QUOTATION of 1952 German Arciniegas spoke of two Latin Americas: the visible and the invisible. The visible Latin America was the Yanqui’s Latin America of presidents, chancelleries, generals, embassies, business houses, law offices, estancias and haciendas. The other, the “mute, repressed” Latin America, was a “vast reservoir of revolution. . . . Nobody knows exactly what these 150 million silent men and women think, feel, dream or await in the depths of their being.”

  By 1961 there were a good deal more than 150 million people; they were no longer silent; and the whole hemisphere was seeming to move in response to their inchoate stirrings. When I came back to Washington in early March, it was with the conviction, more urgent now than ever, that the struggle of the invisible Latin America to join the twentieth century was confronting the United States with a crisis—one which, if ignored, might end by transforming the southern half of the hemisphere into a boiling and angry China, but which, if approached in a strong and comprehensive way, might still not be beyond our power to affect.

  1. EVOLUTION OF A POLICY

  Here was a continent of 200 million souls, at least two-fifths of whom were under fifteen years of age, nearly 50 per cent of whom were illiterate, 30 per cent of whom would die before their fortieth year—a population multiplying faster than any other in the world—where 2 per cent of the people owned 50 per cent of the wealth and 70 per cent lived in abject poverty; yet here also was a part of the west, permeated and tantalized by democratic ideals of freedom and progress, where the existence of a common ethical and political inheritance might create possibilities of partnership and action which did not exist in Asia or Africa.

  Here was a world at once fascinating and appalling in its internal contrasts, where a highly polished nineteenth century civilization coexisted with unimaginable primitivism and squalor, and where a surging passion for modernization now threatened to sweep both aside. Here were free republics with meager traditions of stability or continuity—where, indeed, ninety-three illegal changes of regime had taken place in the last thirty years—but with deep pride in their more than a century of independence. Here was half of the western hemisphere, which, if it turned against the United States, would mock our leadership before the world and create a hard and lasting threat to our national security, but which, if we could work effectively with its people, might provide the world a model in the processes of democratic development.

  The old order in Latin America was obviously breaking up. There was no longer any question of preserving the status quo. The only question now was the shape of the future. Here was Fidel Castro, the passionate leader of the Cuban Revolution, behind him the inarticulate woes of generations, and behind him too the thrust of communism from beyond the hemisphere; and here was the new young President of the United States, whose accession to power had already awakened fresh hope in the Americas, and behind him the uneven and uncoordinated energies of reasonable men and of indigenous Latin democracy. Which road into the future? My talks with Betancourt, Haya de la Torre, Paz Estenssoro and others had given me the strong impression that the democratic left in Latin America had turned decisively against Castro and that he would increasingly appear as the s
ymbol not of social revolution but of Soviet penetration. Nonetheless, if the United States were not ready to offer an affirmative program for democratic modernization, new Castros would undoubtedly rise across the continent. This was the nature of the crisis.

  President Kennedy knew all this, of course; and, when I reported to him, he proceeded, in the manner that was so characteristic, to ask a series of rapid and specific questions: which countries and social groups gave Castro most support? how capable was Castro of setting off simultaneous and prearranged violence in a number of countries? naturally we sympathized with the leaders of the democratic left, but how really effective in fact were they? what were my impressions of Frondizi, of Quadros, of Betancourt? what about our own ambassadors? how prepared were our embassies to handle a massive aid program? He had no illusions about the difficulty of maintaining the position of the United States in the midst of a social revolution in Latin America, but, as revolution seemed inevitable, he clearly believed we had no choice but to do our best, partly because the loss of Latin America would damage our own security but even more because we had a particular, almost familial, responsibility to help these peoples in their battle for democracy.

  I put my answers to these and other questions in a memorandum on the dilemmas of modernization in the hemisphere. The modernization of Latin America, I suggested, was basically a task for Latin Americans, though the United States could make a significant, and possibly decisive, contribution to its fulfillment. But no one should underrate the size of the problem. The memorandum emphasized the following points: