Regaining a Lost Habit

Few projects have ignited Latin American imaginations more than Peruvian President Fernando Belaunde Terry's "Marginal Highway." Envisioned as the key for unlocking the vast, virginal resources of the eastern Andean foothills, the road was originally planned to run 1,500 miles across Peru.

Its aim: to open up 5,000,000 acres of the country's richest land for colonization, thus doubling the total amount of national acreage under cultivation. Then Belaunde got the idea of extending the road beyond Peru, and persuaded Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia and Paraguay to join in. "We have lost the habit of thinking on a grand scale," he said, "of conceiving works that, like the Panama Canal, change the geography of a continent. Nature is our enemy, and nature can be overcome."

Change in Cultures. Nature is already giving way. Now some 30% completed or under construction, Belaunde's Marginal Highway--so called because it skirts the edge of the Amazon rain forest--is changing the lives of thousands of Andean Indians who have lived for centuries in hopeless poverty and despair. With the road come jobs, and with the jobs come large payrolls ($1.75 to $2.50 a day for laborers) that enrich the local economy and help usher in such 20th. century conveniences as sewers, electricity and refrigeration. Once a section of the road is completed, local farmers are able to trade more easily with neighboring villages and get their products out to bigger urban markets. Eventually, Belaunde hopes to relocate almost 1,000,000 peasants from the more heavily populated western regions of Peru to the less populated road areas.

Before last year, for example, the northern town of Yurimaguas could not boast a single motor vehicle. Last week trucks and buses rattled over its freshly concreted streets, stony-faced Indian women raced about on sleek Honda motorbikes, and stores were stocked with everything from American canned tomatoes to cold German beer. On down the road at Tarapoto, the local airport now handles more freight than any other in Peru except Lima. Along with Ford and Chevrolet agencies, Tarapoto has also sprouted no-parking signs and one-way streets.

In a few remoter areas, the road is changing whole cultures. For hundreds of years, northern Peru's Aguaruna Indians lived in secluded families rather than communities, dressed in dingy loincloths and bird plumage, and let their women do most of the work while they went off to hunt or war with Ecuador's head-shrinking Jivaros. Now, the Indians--spiffed up in khaki pants and cotton sports shirts--are working on road gangs, settling into villages, and even taking up farming, cattle raising and carpentry.

A Stiff Price. The road's progress outside Peru is also impressive. Though Ecuador and Colombia have not gone beyond the planning stage, Venezuela has already opened 275 miles of its portion of the Marginal Highway, and has another 85 miles under way. Paraguay has built a 442-mile link across the Gran Chaco, cutting transportation time from the rich central farming areas to Asuncion from six or eight days to ten hours. Bolivia's President Rene Barrientos has built about one-third of a planned 1,100-mile stretch, renaming one of the small towns along it after Belaunde.

The cost of progress, however, is high. With nearly 200 miles completed, Belaunde has so far spent $200,000 a mile for his highway v. $120,000 a mile for normal coastal roads. His opposition in Congress, an odd alliance of leftists and rightists who control 86 of Congress' 140 seats, claims that the cost is just too stiff and is now threatening to block further appropriations for the road. Belaunde has resorted to massive deficit spending to pay for his $170 million highway and other Peruvian development programs. The resulting inflation (15% a month) and spiraling national debt, his critics complain, is carrying the country to the edge of bankruptcy. But Belaunde is adamant. Since 60% of the cost of Peru's part of the highway is being financed by the Export-Import Bank, the World Bank and other foreign lenders, he can coast along for many months without additional funds. By then, he hopes that his political problems will have eased sufficiently to allow him to bulldoze his way a bit farther along his dream road.

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