A Statesman Comes to Call

By virtue of a life spent in high office in Colombia and as the constructive head of the Organization of American States, Alberto Lleras Camargo ranks as Latin America's most creative democratic statesman. He is also a friend and admirer of the U.S., happy that his country is "governed by institutions that have their origin in Philadelphia." In Washington last week for a state visit, President Lleras thus won a special warmth and spoke words of special weight. His subject was the "backwardness" of Latin America--Lleras is too frank to call it "underdevelopment."

A backward nation, the Colombian President told a joint session of Congress, "can follow the Communist pattern in the hope that, after three or four generations of privation and bloodshed, the survivors may at last know and acquire some of the goods, services and facilities of a higher civilization. Or it can be guided by those principles and procedures through which you yourselves have come to be one of the richest, most fair-minded and happiest of nations."

To Prevent a Rout. Said Lleras: "I want to make it quite clear that I do not consider you bound to help in the economic development of any part of the world." Nonetheless, he thought that only foreign aid could assure his coffee-growing Andean country of 14 million of "a decisive stake in the material civilization of the West," preventing "a retreat, a rout, a historical disaster." What kind of help? Latin America is asking only for loans, and guarantees "restitution to the American taxpayer." But aid lending "is fundamentally a political act that cannot be judged by traditional banking criteria." If help comes "too late or too little," the masses may "repudiate their democratic leading classes and take leap after leap in the dark."

To Live by Law. Alberto Lleras more than any other man is keeping Colombia out of the dark. Lleras began his career as a hustling journalist and at 24 was running Colombia's top newspaper, El Tiempo. Jumping into Liberal politics, he held a flurry of boy wonder Cabinet posts, came to the U.S. as ambassador in 1943, became Colombia's interim President for a year at 39. In 1947, he went to Washington to play the leading role in creating the OAS, became its first secretary-general. He wrote most of the 1947 Rio mutual defense treaty that Fidel Castro denounced a fortnight ago.

The blight of Dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla in 1955 sent Lleras back into Colombian politics. He plotted his revolution in Bogota's somber Jockey Club, where he brought the warring Liberals and Conservatives into a united front that eased Rojas out of office without a fight. Now midway through his four-year term, he has put across a belt-tightening stability program, cutting the foreign debt from $400 million to $170 million, holding the peso steady.

A fragile-looking man who nonetheless nimbly dodged an assassin's bullets while fighting Rojas, President Lleras has a personality that combines a scrupulous candor with courtly charm. Last week he chatted in the White House with Eisenhower for 45 minutes about "everything on heaven and earth," hit it off so well that Ike flew Lleras off on an unscheduled helicopter hop to Camp David and Gettysburg. And in a fond homecoming to his beloved OAS headquarters, Lleras paid solemn respect to the OAS's task "of proving that at least a part of the world knows how to live in a society of nations ruled by law and moving toward perfection."

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