South America: Notes on a New Continent

Time Inc. Editor-in-Chief Hedley Donovan, accompanied by Board Chairman Andrew Heiskell, recently concluded a six-country fact-finding tour of Latin America. Donovan's report on the trip:

It is a rare moment, after years of journalistic travels, to have a whole fresh continent to see for the first time.

Mountains, jungle, savanna, pampas, desert and suddenly, amidst all the distances, a city of four million, or eight. Against the Big Sky of the Brazilian interior, the wide, windy vistas of Brasilia, with some human touches creeping in around the edges of the totalitarian master design -it will be a great capital in 1990 when it gets past 1984. From the plane, a fabulous fiery sunset over the estuary of the Rio de la Plata, lights coming on in Uruguay and Argentina on either side of the river. Another sunset, seen from sea level, the eye drawn up walls of ocher, rust and dusty rose to the snow fields on the crest of the Chilean Andes. Everywhere, people of charm, energy, talent, incorrigibly attracted to non-Anglo-Saxon forms of government.

The brevity of the visit is remarked at each stop. You point out that if you stayed the fortnight you would wish in Country A, you couldn't go on to B and C, and how long has it been, by the way, since your new Brazilian friend was in Chile, or your Peruvian lunch companion in Argentina? A long time, it usually turns out, and sometimes never. This conversation, all the way around the continent, serves as a steady reminder that South America still is more of an entity on the map than in the minds of the South Americans.

There are only three Latin American leaders with any sort of audience outside their own country: Fidel Castro, but he has somehow become slightly old-hat, either as a menace or an inspiration; Luis Echeverria of Mexico, presiding over a dynamic entrepreneurial economy while talking a medium-left, aggressively Third World line; and one South American, the impressive Carlos Andres Perez of Venezuela. Perez heads one of the only two working democracies in South America (Colombia is the other), and he has oil, 2.4 million bbl. a day. He is not self-righteous about his country's democracy (he is too well aware of Venezuela's turbulent history), and he is too smart to seem to reach for any continental "leadership" role. He has large economic plans for Venezuela and many discontented citizens who wonder when all the oil money will matter in their own lives.

There is a measure of South American unity in three attitudes toward the industrial world and, especially, the U.S.:

>> The feeling that the advanced industrial nations exploit the Third World is stronger than ever and is remarkably adaptable to shifting circumstances in the world economy. In the winter of 1973-74, when OPEC was inflicting the maximum pain on the oil-consuming world, all the South American nations except Venezuela and Ecuador were also hurt. But they were full of heady visions of "other OPECs" that could force the rich North to pay much more for copper, bauxite, coffee, etc. Then the weakening of world demand knocked down raw materials prices; copper fell from $1.50 to 500 per lb., and Peru and Chile now say the industrial world is "exporting its recession." There is still very little interest in South America in the whole subject of how the advanced world got to be advanced.

>> The subject of the Panama Canal unites South Americans. The Zone is seen as an odious relic of the imperialist age. All the governments support the Panamanians' demand for a new treaty granting them unmistakable sovereignty over the Zone, with details of canal operations and U.S. military presence to be negotiated. General Omar Torrijos Herrera, Panama's strongman, is willing to wait until after the U.S. election for the new treaty (he has heard of the "Teddy Roosevelt lobby"). But something must give in 1977. He speaks of restraining "the students" (at the University of Panama) as another general might speak of withholding his paratroopers. Secretary Kissinger has said that if the U.S. fails to renegotiate the status of the canal, "ten years from now we may face a guerrilla war in the Western Hemisphere."

>> South America would give Kissinger good marks on the canal but would accuse him of general neglect of the hemisphere, which is seen as characteristic of all U.S. Administrations as well as the U.S. press and public.

Though the South American countries can thus agree on certain common grievances against the U.S., they have deeper hostilities, between classes and interests, within their own countries. The two can sometimes merge, as in the Chilean leftist underground, where the hated Pinochet junta is seen as a creature of the Pentagon and CIA.

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President Augusto Pinochet Ugarte was wearing a heavy tweed jacket, brown slacks and loafers when we met him at Edificio Diego Portales. He is a ruddy, thickset man with the look of a prosperous Swiss dairy farmer in town for the day. One had half-expected a general's braided visor, the dark glasses and cruel lips seen on all the anti-junta posters from Sweden to Berkeley. "You can see I am not so horrible," said Pinochet, "that I don't eat babies." In an anteroom outside his office, a memorable scene: 22 generals of the Chilean army were waiting to be called in, one by one, to hear whether they would be promoted, retired, or held in place another year. Perhaps Pinochet would slip into uniform for those sessions.

Since it overthrew the Allende regime two years ago, the junta has probably "detained" for political reasons some 90,000 people, of whom about two-thirds were held for more than 72 hours. By conservative estimate, more than 3,000 of these prisoners were executed without trial or died of torture. There are thought to be at least 5,000 political prisoners in jail today.

The regime says these figures are greatly exaggerated; a few abuses have taken place (Pinochet says twelve officers were recently jailed for mistreating prisoners). In any case, firm measures are needed to deal with the guerrilla threat: look at Argentina, where leftist terrorists are assassinating and kidnaping people every day.

Many critics of the Chilean junta have found it easy to forget what a disaster the Allende regime was. Elected as a minority candidate, Allende allowed his radical backers to mount a campaign to destroy the possibility of any effective opposition, in the press or elsewhere. The economy was in chaos. Increasingly violent demonstrations and paralyzing strikes had created a state of near anarchy.

Pinochet and his generals have been pursuing draconian deflationary measures. The rate of inflation has been halved -to an appalling 340% a year. There is hunger in the shantytowns of Santiago, and unemployment is running close to 20%.

The junta thinks the U.S. should be grateful for the replacement of Allende by an anti-Communist regime and cannot understand why U.S. Senators, journalists, et al. harp on "human rights." Said Pinochet: "We are better friends to the United States than the United States is to us."

Within Chile, the Roman Catholic Church is now the regime's weightiest opposition. It has sponsored the remarkable Committee on Cooperation for Peace, which sought information about political prisoners, gave them and their families what legal help it could, tried to find jobs for released prisoners, and arranged some departures from the country. The committee operated under the patronage and protection of Raul Cardinal Silva Henriquez, the Archbishop of Santiago, who maintains a brisk and good-humored air despite the travails of his flock and his own delicate position. It seemed something of a miracle the committee could function at all, and Pinochet has asked the cardinal to disband it, alleging that it served Communist interests. The cardinal said he would comply but warned that the closing down of the committee would create more problems for Chile than it solved.

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Americans once assumed that all the world was evolving, or should be, toward Wisconsin or New Zealand-style democracy. We now know it is not happening any time soon, certainly not in South America.

But this does not mean Latin Hitlers or Stalins. You can have freewheeling political conversations in Chile, Peru, Brazil and Argentina. The press has considerable freedom in Argentina, some in Brazil and Peru, and a bit in Chile. In Peru, there is a legally active opposition party, though it has no election to get ready for.

In Brazil, the military regime has been nursing along, although not very fast, an official opposition party, which won majorities in many of the state legislatures last year. Free municipal elections are scheduled for next year, though the opposition is a bit skeptical as to whether this will really happen -and says so out loud. The powerful Brazilian state governors are still appointed by the President. And the President is chosen in a consensus of generals and business interests. The consensus candidate will have a token opponent at the next election in 1978; the election after that might be real.

The present South American generals are not man-on-horseback types. There are none as dramatic as some of our own republican generals, e.g., MacArthur or Patton. Few have ever seen a war, of course. They have labored up through a bureaucracy whose military functions are essentially of a police character -i.e., keeping internal order -combined sometimes with managerial responsibilities in state enterprises. The generals are mainly of middle-class and lower-middle-class background, usually not sons of the oligarchy or of the dispossessed, and are assumed to have a kind of disinterestedness and loyalty to the country above class.

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General Ernesto Geisel, the President of Brazil, is probably the only Lutheran chief of state in Latin American history. He gives no interviews and keeps a low profile, though his kindly-grandfather photograph (in civilian dress) is standard decor in government offices. His last job was as president of Petrobras, the state oil monopoly. The No. 2 figure in the regime is another military technocrat, General Golbery do Couto e Silva, an astute and affable man who was once manager of Dow Chemical's Brazilian subsidiary. Beneath the generals, some brilliant economists and financial men attempt to guide the country's growth.

Brazil has had a sensational rate of capital formation, achieved at the usual price: deferred consumption. Some have deferred more than others; the contrasts between wealth and poverty in Brazil remain as glaring as any hi the world, but there has also been a real rise in middle-class and blue-collar affluence (40% of today's university students are children of manual laborers; ten years ago it was 9%). Brazil considers itself in a recession now, essentially because of the cost of imported oil; its expansion of the past decade, including the beginnings of an auto and truck economy, assumed cheap fuel forever. Now the regime is going to invite foreign oil companies back into Brazil, granting "risk contracts" for exploration. The opposition sees this as a surrender to the imperialism of the multinationals (a dirty word in most of Latin America).

Brazil's slow movement toward parliamentary forms is called distensao, a sort of domestic detente. The regime still carries out arbitrary arrests -not on the Chilean scale -and professes to be unable to control completely the zeal of army and police interrogators. As in Chile, the Catholic Church is in the forefront of the moral opposition. Paulo Evaristo Cardinal Arns, the forthright Archbishop of Sao Paulo, tries to visit the political prisoners in his diocese. He fears that the methods of torture are becoming ever more terrible, and he knows of "highly sophisticated rooms" in Sao Paulo jails. He sees the Brazilian people turning desperate, and anarchy not far distant. "All this talk of the Brazilian economic miracle is a slap in the face" for the poor, the cardinal says. "We have no creative thinkers, only technocrats."

The turmoil in Portugal, the old motherland, is much on Brazilians' minds these days. It is not only the generals who argue that Brazil cannot move from authoritarianism to freedom overnight. Many thoughtful Brazilians feel their history and heritage are simply incompatible with full democracy.

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A different breed of generals, the leftists: President Francisco Morales Bermudez of Peru received us the day after he had tidied up a considerable turbulence in his regime. There had been two days and nights of military comings and goings at the Palacio Tupac Amaru, and at the end two influential generals were retired from the army. General Morales had either broken up a possible coup or, as one of the tame Lima newspapers put it, had simply moved "to have his own men in positions of trust and power, normal with all incoming Presidents in most parts of the world." His guys, so to speak.

General Morales himself had dislodged a slightly more leftist and much more mercurial President, General Juan Velasco Alvarado, only last August, and is understandably aware that nothing is permanent in this world. But the vast chambers and corridors of the executive palace were bare of police and soldiers the day after the latest shakeup, and the general was calm and self-assured. "My security is given me by my work," he said.

During the seven years of the leftist military regime, Peru has been seeking a "humanistic and Christian socialism," but it is not inhospitable to foreign investment. Under Plan Inca, the old semifeudal landholding system has been broken up, and a cloudy kind of mixed ownership, blended from 19th century European syndicalism, the modern Yugoslav cooperatives and perhaps some Andean mysticism, has been introduced. "We do not believe," adds General Morales, "that we are the only owners of truth."

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Argentina is the saddest place on the continent: ravaged by years of misgovernment, terrorism from the left and right, inflation that runs at 20% to 30% a month, despair and cynicism among the large and seemingly helpless bourgeoisie. How this highly favored land, with its 10 ft. of topsoil and 25 million homogeneous people of European descent, achieved such a colossal mess defies understanding. For the past six weeks the word has been that a coup could come any day, with the army taking over from the pathetic Isabel Peron, but there is only modest hope that this would make matters noticeably better.

There are touches of faded elegance still in Buenos Aires, and an occasional comic interlude: Antonio Cafiero, the strangely cheerful Minister of the Economy, is explaining to TIME how he is about to negotiate with the unions "a dynamic social compact" that should help stabilize wages and prices for some months. Unannounced, a fellow in an electric-blue gym suit bursts in from a side door and seats himself. He turns out to be the head of the C.G.T., the AFL-CIO of Argentina. A few minutes later, from a different side door, the head of the metallurgical workers union barges in. Excusing themselves, the American visitors pass through a corridor where a dozen more labor leaders are milling around, accompanied by four or five dozen bodyguards. Ten days later -so much for the dynamic social compact -Mme. Peron from her sickbed orders a 15% general wage increase.

Jorge Luis Borges, the great poet and essayist, the most eminent living Argentine, is proud to come from a patriot family. Some fought for Argentina and "some died."

"I had a country. I am ashamed of my country today." Is there any hope for Argentina? "No -oh, maybe in 200 years." Borges is almost totally blind, but he knows how shabby Buenos Aires has become, "and I still get homesick if I'm away for a few months."

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The most interesting thing to watch in South America's near future, apart from the obvious potential for economic growth, is the groping for political forms somewhere between all-out democracy and rigid authoritarianism. Peru and Brazil think they are exploring this ground, and priests and professors talk about it in Chile.

It comes near the heart of the problem that a dictator, General Torrijos of Panama, should say: "I feel ashamed when I notice that somebody sitting next to me starts trembling. I feel guilty that there are people who are still afraid."

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