Inside South America is a series designed to describe the known political world of todaycontinent by continent. I have written about Latin America before but this new book, Inside South America, is a totally fresh work following a long,arduous, and comprehensive recent trip through the ten South American republics. It is not in any sense a revision or updating of the old book, InsideLatin America, which was published as long ago as 1941, and bears norelation to its predecessor except that it necessarily deals with ten of thesame countries. But, although this new Inside South America has beenwritten altogether from scratch, I pick up passages here and there from theolder book and paraphrase a paragraph or two. After all I still have to mentionthat Brazil is big.
The continent has changed vastly since myvisit twenty-five years ago on the eve of American participation in World WarII. In the early 1940's the principal preoccupation of hemisphere foreignpolicy was something that seems today as remote as Nebuchadnezzar—fear of Naziinvasion and Fascist overturn, actively directed by Germany. Today we have thethreat of Communist agitation and the possibility of subversion and indigenousoverturn, but Moscow is pursuing an official hands-off policy and China is faraway. In the 1940's most of South America was frozen into a kind of derelictimmobility in domestic affairs, punctuated by sporadic "revolutions"which meant little but temporary shifts in political power; today nearly theentire continent is in a state of active flux, grasping for a future, withfundamental yeasty impulses for change apparent almost everywhere. The key wordadvance.
Tempo is what counts, and the pace of SouthAmerica is both fast s slow—a difficult paradox, and one of the factors thatmakes the continent hard to write about. Contrasts are sharp as well asperplexing, and there two—or more—sides to almost everything.
These are some of the basic questions we mustface:
Is the United States finished in SouthAmerica?
How well is the Alliance for Progressworking?
Is Castro's influence on the decline? Whatabout Communism?
Why do the South Americans change governmentsso often?
What about army, church, and the populationexplosion?
Is anything being done seriously toameliorate one of the most vi and piercing of all South American problems, thatof narrowing the g between rich and poor?
Who or what runs each country, and what dothey need most?
This book, unlike its predecessor, does notdeal with Latin America large, but restricts itself to the continent of SouthAmerica, the ten ma land countries below the Panama Canal—field enough. Ido not include Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean islands, or the Guianas.But I w have to use the term "Latin America" frequently to indicatethe context within which I am writing, or by way of general reference. The name"Cuba" will appear often enough in these pages, to say nothing of"Dominican Republic," with all its unhappy connotations.
The ten countries which I deal with in fullform a remarkable constellation — Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia,Ecuador, Paraguay (a long alphabetical gap there between "E" and"P"), Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Although they form an obviouslycompact geographical unit, they differ widely from one another. The diversitywithin South America is spectacular, even if all ten republics have roughly thesame historic origin, cultural development, and religion, and nine of the tenspeak the same language. Consider Paraguay and Uruguay, which are neighboringbuffer states between Argentina and Brazil. But Paraguay is medieval backwaterrun by an anachronistic military dictator, where Uruguay, with its highlyadvanced social services and a free democrat development, resembles Switzerlandor Denmark. Or take cities. Sao in Brazil, the eighth-largest and thefastest-growing city in the world, with a population above 4,500,000 and morethan that by the time you have finished reading this page, is as different fromQuito, the remote jewel-box capital of Ecuador, as Chicago is from Marrakesh.
I have sought to give banisters to the readerby means of several maps and a chart. But statistics are not reliable in SouthAmerica, and this difficulty is compounded by tricky pitfalls as between"Latin" and "South." In prewar Japan the person of theEmperor was considered too sacrosanct to be touched, even by his tailor, whohad to estimate measurements while standing respectfully several yards away.The journalist today is often put to the same kind of comic inconvenience whenhe tries to obtain accurate figures on South America.