PERU: Poor Man's Conservative

"I am the most hated man in Peru," says Premier Pedro Beltrán, 63, and perhaps he is right. In an Andean country where the bulk of the people are impoverished Indians, Beltrán is a rich capitalist, a conquistador-descended aristocrat.

He is also a conservative newspaper publisher, a budget balancer, and the most orthodox of economists; his idol is West Germany's Ludwig Erhard. Yet he is running, in economic policy at least, a government whose dominant political base is a mass leftist party called APRA. Their dislike is mutual.

Beltrán got his job through a strange chain of circumstances that began with the election of President Manuel Prado in 1956. Like Beltrán, Prado belongs to the aristocracy of 30 or 40 interlocking families that dominate Peru, yet he was elected by APRA on his promise, which he kept, of restoring the outlawed party's legality. APRA's advice to Prado was to develop Peru's backward land by deficit financing. Against his own preferences Prado acquiesced, and government presses cranked out endless paper sols to pay for the expansion. He was soon in deep economic trouble and under fire from Publisher Beltrán. Prado's answer was direct and logical: in a phone conversation that began, "Look here, Pedro," he turned his troubles over to Beltrán.

APRA was not pleased at the prospect, but it went along because Beltrán has a well-calculated economic plan. Hoping for U.S. development loans and well aware that the U.S. requires prior approval of the conservative International Monetary Fund, Beltrán (who knows and admires the U.S., is married to an American) imposed an iron austerity on Peru. When he gets Peru's economy in orthodox order, which will please him as much as Washington, Beltrán plans to ask the U.S. for $100 million, figures that the U.S. can then hardly refuse.

Put Up or Shut Up. Beltrán learned the rules of conservative economics at the London School of Economics in 1915-18 —long before that institution went for Keynes and Laski. With a somewhat jaundiced eye a contemporary remembers him there at 20 as "a student of economic sciences, a member of an exclusive club of whisky drinkers, a dancer of the tango, a playboy, a reader of Adam Smith, and a wearer of the arrogant colored vests introduced by Wilde and Disraeli." When he got home, he turned the family hacienda into a lucrative model of science and mechanization, went back to economics as a director of Peru's Reserve Bank, making it into a modern central bank. He dabbled in journalism as holder of controlling interest in a struggling little newspaper called La Prensa. World War II took him to the U.S.: Washington (as ambassador), Bretton Woods (to help organize the World Bank), San Francisco (to help set up the U.N.). Returning to Peru, he built La Prensa along U.S. newspaper lines into the most influential daily in Lima. He at first supported the army dictatorship headed by Manuel Odria, then helped persuade Odria to eliminate himself by holding the free election that Prado won.