South America is off the beaten track, stillterra incognita. Timbuctoo is more familiar to most Americans, if only as asymbol, than thriving hemisphere cities like Medellin, Cordoba, or the newindustrial complexes Venezuela. Such a distinguished and otherwise cosmopolitanman of letters as Edmund Wilson makes a point of never having visited the continentread its literature. We have seen King Tutankhamen's tomb, but not Pizarro'sbody still visible under glass in Lima, Peru, and looking rather likeyesterday's turkey with a few bones sticking through the cracked skin.South America lies "on the margin of history." There are no more thaneight references to it in the index of the H. G. Wells Outline of History, firstpublished in 1920 and 1,288 pages long; a comparable contemporary boo TheRise of the West by William H. McNeill, similarly has exactly eight suchentries for 829 large pages. Nor do we receive South American news adequatelyon a day-to-day basis. The New York Times and Christian ScienceMonitor do their best, but it is by no means easy for a reader in the UniteStates to keep fully abreast of what is going on in the hemisphere, and viceversa. More on this later.
Visitors to the continent below us shouldbrace themselves for several shocks—and not merely because there are stillhotels in Chile that never heard of an American Express check. Among the firstoverriding and in escapable characteristics are poverty, backwardness, and lackof development. The average per capita income is only $269 a year, compared to$2,975 in the United States, and the whole area, including all ten countries,is statistically classified as being "underdeveloped"—the only continentall of which is underdeveloped even though it comprises half the westernhemisphere. What makes the impression sharper is a preposterous and shamefulinequality of means. Two percent of the people of Latin America own 70 percentof the wealth. Rich men ship out hundreds of millions of dollars a year tosecret bank accounts in Switzerland and New York, while peasants in the sterilehills or squatters in the shanty towns have to live on 40 cents a day—or less.
In Brazil I talked about plans for this bookwith a friend, and he exclaimed, "Give us a jab now and then!"I hope I am not overdoing it, but listen-In Bolivia prisoners in the publicjails are not fed; their families feed them, or they starve. In the continentas a whole 40 million people need housing; the shortage of units isbetween 12 and 14 million. Only 43 percent of the population of Montevideo,generally regarded as a progressive city, has any access to a sewage system.Only three capitals out of ten have safe drinking water, and literally millionsof citizens in all ten countries are drastically short of water. The town ofCuzco, Peru, up in the Andes, where Indians still live in the Stone Age, has a40 percent mortality rate up to the age of four, and 20 percent of all childrenin Brazil die in their first year, largely because of diseases spread by filth.Smallpox is still "entrenched" in Brazil, Peru, and Colombia. Doctorsare in short supply.
Half the farmland of Brazil is in the handsof 1.6 percent of owners, and there are only 14,000 passenger automobiles inBolivia, a huge country. Only 2 percent of the gross national product of SouthAmerica as a whole goes to education, and the over-all illiteracy rate is closeto 50 percent. Only 15 percent of adolescents of high school age attend school,as against 90 percent in the United States, and there are some 15 millionchildren of primary school age who do not go to school at all because there areno schools available.
Take communications. Paraguay, which lookslike a small blot on the map but which is the size of California, has not morethan 450 miles of paved road. Par for the course for airmail delivery betweenBuenos Aires and Santiago, Chile, is around five days, although the two citiesare only two hours apart by plane. One rail journey in Brazil between citiesonly a thousand miles apart takes a week—if the train is running. Or considerpolitical stability. Argentina had till very recently 222 different politicalparties, believe it or not, and Venezuela has had more than 100 revolutions ina century and a half. Chile, although it is the most enlightened country on thecontinent, once had 8 presidents in 18 months. Bolivia has had 179 changes ofgovernment in 126 years, and Paraguay had 39 different heads of state between1870 and 1954.
I have used the word "revolution"in the preceding paragraph and Latin America is, indeed, widely known for thebewildering frequency, variety, and raucous color of its so-called revolutions.But in plain truth most of these revolutions are not revolutions at all. Theyare no more than barracks revolts or capriciously forced substitutions inpersonnel, carrying no basic or permanent weight, and effecting none butsuperficial changes—outs replacing ins, or ins quarreling with other ins.Mexico, it is true, had a real revolution, resulting in a genuine transfer ofpower, in the years following 1911, but this is beyond the province of thisbook, as is Castro's revolution in Cuba, which was also genuine. The nearest toan authentic revolution in any republic on the South American continent itselfcame in Bolivia in the early 1950's, but it petered out.
Bloody tyrants have been cast down, and bothPeron and Vargas made seminal changes in their respective countries, Argentinaand Brazil. But most other of the innumerable changes in government that haveafflicted South America in recent years were mere Putsches or coupsd'etat. So the question that now arises—are genuine revolutions in theoffing?—has a special significance. Is South America in a truepre-revolutionary stage? We will explore.