VENEZUELA: Old Driver, New Road

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A new band of leaders, grimly and responsibly determined to rescue their people from disease, starvation and ignorance, is at work in Latin America. These leaders replace the medal-jingling military popinjays of old; they shun the demagogic example of Fidel Castro in Cuba; they cherish such institutions as Congress, courts, constitution. They are the hemisphere's real builders.

The nations they govern include the biggest in the hemisphere. Argentina's Arturo Frondizi, inheriting the Santa Claus economy built by Juan Perón, has fearlessly shot Santa Claus and put the nation to work. Brazil's Juscelino Kubitschek is daringly steering the fastest boom in Latin America, industrializing the country with printed money. Colombia's Alberto Lleras Camargo is bringing political peace in the wake of two dictatorships and moving toward a sound program of land reform. Chile's Jorge Alessandri is tackling one of the world's worst cases of inflation.

An Old Revolutionary. Nowhere are the challenges, the perils and the possibilities greater than in Venezuela, where President Rómulo Betancourt, 51, a classic example of the legendary conspirator-gone-respectable, inherited the mess left when Dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez ran out two years ago. Next week Betancourt ends his first year in office—the longest term of constitutional government in the dictator-ridden country's history. Perhaps his biggest success is simply surviving that long.

Yet he has done much more than survive. He has braked the Communist influence that erupted when Pérez Jiménez fell. He has kept a coalition of democratic parties working in harness. He has begun a sorely needed land reform, built scores of schools and hundreds of miles of highway, brought in a World Bank mission to plan the next four years of economic and social reforms.

Betancourt's skill in the art of practical reform grows out of 30 years of the trial-and-error education of a Latin American rebel. He is an intellectual who, for a short time during the '30s, called himself a Communist. He is an old revolutionary who on one occasion did not boggle at collaborating with an ambitious dictator-to-be to overthrow constituted authority. That venture gave him an intoxicating taste of power, but he was overthrown and wandered through years of exile, unsure whether he would ever get a second chance. Above all, he is a master politician who has learned about his country and its people by tramping dusty back-lands roads and sleeping in peasant huts. He organized peasants, industrial workers, students, businessmen and professional men into a leftist movement called Actión Democrática (A.D.), the country's major political party.

Fortnight ago, Betancourt's cops broke up a right-wing plot against him, and he used the occasion to go on TV and say a few things about where he stands now. On Communists, he warned of those who "create hostility against foreign investment capital and against the U.S." His nation's relations with the U.S. are good, he said, and in an aside obviously aimed at Cuba he added: "If other countries are not in a similar situation, we wish that good inter-American understanding could be restored."