On the Job

Of course I visited and saw at first hand intensively the ten countries I write about. The route my wife and I took included Venezuela, Brazil, a hop across the Andes, up the west coast, and over the Andes several times again until we reached Colombia at the top. I had the good luck in Chile of rounding Cape Horn in an American Navy DC-3, after a trip to Tierra del Fuego, a segment of the earth's surface not often seen, and we had the further good fortune of skimming the Amazon in a nautical craft like a dragonfly 2,300 miles upriver at Iquitos—and sliding over an alligator.

Of the ten presidents of the countries we visited I met and interviewed all. Altogether we took notes of conversations with 722 people, counting husband-and-wife teams as one, and sometimes we had a moment or two off from politics. We had a glimpse of a voodoo ceremony in Brazil, and inspected its marvelous golden scimitars of beach. We went to night clubs, casinos, and the lowest of boites as well as palaces, and had fabulous things to eat and drink with enlivening hosts of every category. We studied trade union statistics in Buenos Aires, and managed to see as well the grave and compelling Inca uplands of Peru.

What I have sought to do, country by country, is to describe each and tell what it is really like in a series of national profiles, as well as outline the major problems that carry across the entire continent—revolution, politics, land reform, inflation, population pressure, urbanization, industrialization, hemisphere relationships, American policy, the Communist position, and changes in the status of oligarchy, church, and army. Most of these factors are touched on three times, (a) in reference to Brazil, because Brazil is a separate world of its own; (b) in general in Chapters 7 and 8; and (c) in rela¬tion specifically to each country aside from Brazil. No one can doubt that South America is in transition—the question is to what. I do not promise easy answers, but at least we can have a look—perhaps keeping in mind John F. Kennedy's emphatic remark that Latin America is more crucial to us than any region in the world.

So we plunge now into the broad and brilliant maelstrom of Brazil, and thus begin this circumnavigation of a continent.