Guarded Optimism

Long after the Alianza para el Progreso was launched in 1961, many Latin American governments clung to the convenient belief that it was just an other U.S. giveaway project. "It seemed well-meaning," as one top Latino puts it, "but rather Utopian and probably futile." Now, at last, that view seems to have changed. Last week, as diplomats and economists from a score of nations gathered in the Peruvian capi tal of Lima for the third annual full-dress review of the Alianza, there was encouraging evidence that most Latin American nations now accept its goals and are working to achieve them. Said Colombia's Carlos Sanzde Santamaria, astute chairman of the Alianza's key planning committee: "We have made great strides in stating our problems and in diagnosing them--and we are making a start at solving them."

The problems are as monumental as ever. Galloping population growth threatens to wipe out the hemisphere's slim, hard-won gains in housing, education, health, and food production. In many countries, inflation seems incurable. As always, Latin economies desperately need foreign investment capital. But for all their frustrations, the Latin American nations succeeded this year for the first time in meeting the Alianza's goal of an overall 3% per capita product growth rate. Latin American export earnings rose 8%. And paced by the U.S., which has already invested $3.7 billion in the Alianza, there has been a notable increase in foreign aid to the member nations.

More important perhaps than any statistical balance sheet was what seemed to be a new awareness of what the Alianza can and should be. As Brazil's Minister of Planning Roberto Campos observed: "Neither our fate nor our salvation are in the stars. They are within us ourselves." By meeting's end, nearly everyone shared a new, if guarded sense of optimism about the Alianza's prospects. As Thomas Mann, U.S. Under Secretary for Inter-American Affairs, pointed out, "The Alliance has given us a growing awareness of the social and economic problems we all face, a better understanding of what makes the world go round."

The most straightforward summation of all came from Ecuador's Finance Minister Alberto Quevedo. Said he: "More and more, we Latins are prepared to give in to demands for social justice. A peaceful revolution like the one propounded by the Alliance means that we may lose a good share of our privileges. A violent revolution will certainly mean the total loss of all that we have and cherish."

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