VENEZUELA: Old Driver, New Road

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The Governor's Shame. The U.S. Government also backs Betancourt—a 180° change of opinion. During Pérez Jiménez' reign, the U.S. pinned the Legion of Merit on the dictator and regarded Exile Betancourt as a troublemaking embarrassment. In 1955 Governor Muñoz Marin of Puerto Rico invited President Figueres of Costa Rica to a meeting in Puerto Rico, where Betancourt, a good friend of both, was then living. The State Department's chief for Latin American Affairs, Henry Holland, hastily got Muñoz Marin on the telephone. He insisted that Muñoz send Betancourt out of Puerto Rico as long as Figueres was there to keep Venezuelan Dictator Pérez Jiménez from thinking that a plot against him was being hatched on U.S. soil. Filled with shame, Muñoz sent Betancourt on his way to the nearby Virgin Islands.

These misguided accommodations to Pérez Jiménez have been used by critics of the U.S., especially left-wing critics, to build up the impression that Washington likes dictators. Quite obviously, the U.S. favors democracy as a governing principle, does not put Latin American dictators into power, recognizes them once in power only as it recognizes any ruling government. But a policy of correctness to dictators leaves plenty of room for a policy of warmth to democratic governments, and there is more warmth in Washington these days for men in Betancourt's mold.

During the postwar period, the U.S. gave $31.5 billion in grant aid to the rest of the world, while it gave Latin America only $625 million—less than 2% of the total, less than the Philippines got. Yet even now, measured by its per-capita income of $285 a year, Latin America, with 194 million people, is a poor neighbor living next door to a rich uncle (U.S. per-capita income $2,100). The inescapable need is for more capital.

U.S. private investment, which has so far provided $25 billion to Latin America, remains the best supply, but it is shy; Betancourt is paying off Pérez Jiménez' bad debts to prove good faith to private investors, nonetheless faces a painful outflow of private capital. But half a dozen new ideas for providing Latin America with capital are afloat in the hemisphere:

¶ New York's Republican Governor Nelson Rockefeller, long interested and involved in Latin America (through family holdings in Venezuela's largest corporation, Creole Petroleum), urges the U.S. to take "steps to bring about the ultimate goal of Western Hemisphere economic union" to create "the greatest free-trading area in the world." Tariffs and quotas hamper trade throughout the Americas; eliminating or reducing them could touch off a burst of healthful commerce.

¶ Colombia President Lleras Camargo, one of the hemisphere's most sober thinkers, believes that the U.S. should swallow hard and lend money for land reform across the hemisphere. "That is where the backwardness of our countries is," he says. "In the fields."

¶ Costa Rica's ex-President Figueres presses for commodity price stabilization that will free economies and government treasuries from drastic swoops that bring "feast or famine for our people, and more famine than feast."