Alliance for Progress

Just as he has stamped the phrase New Frontier on his Administration at home, President Kennedy is out to tag his Latin American policy. The new catch phrase, first used by the President in his State of the Union message: Alliance for Progress.

Last week the President defined the aim of Alianza para el Progreso in an article he wrote for LIFE EN ESPANOL. The U.S. Latin American policy goal will be achieved, said the President, "only when every form of tyranny--either despotic rule at home or domination from abroad --is driven from the hemisphere." Last week, even a Latin America preoccupied with pre-Lenten carnivals could see that the President was out to give substance to his words.

FOOD. Two teams of aid and agriculture experts moved south of the border--one led by George McGovern, 38, director of Kennedy's Food-for-Peace program, the other by Deputy Director James Symington, 33, guitar-playing, folksinger son of Missouri's Democratic Senator Stuart Symington. Symington's five-man team flew to Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador to offer grain, seed and other surplus foodstuffs as inducements to get to work on land-reform programs. Other stops: Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina. McGovern. traveling with Brain-Truster Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (along as Kennedy's personal representative), visited food-exporting Argentina to reassure it that the giveaway program is not intended to harm normal markets. "A man who's starving and not in a position to buy food isn't considered a commercial customer," said McGovern.

MEN. Another test of U.S. intentions toward Latin America is the kind of ambassadors it sends. Kennedy's choice for Costa Rica, a notable bastion of representative democracy in Latin America: El Paso Mayor Raymond Lawrence Telles Jr., 45, a Spanish-speaking fourth-generation American of Mexican ancestry. An Air Force lieutenant colonel in World War II, Telles handled aviation lend-lease supplies to Latin America, later served as an aide to both President Truman and General Eisenhower on visits to Mexico.

BACKING. The President, at his televised press conference, laid special emphasis on an announcement that "we have today recognized the government of El Salvador." Implicit in his announcement was a caution to the new junta, dominated by El Salvador's legendary "14 families," whose indifference to the nation's poor has been conspicuous even by Latin American standards. The junta, said Kennedy pointedly, "has announced its determination to bring about free and democratic elections in that country, and it seeks solutions for the economic and social difficulties . . . We hope to be able to assist El Salvador in reaching these goals."

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