Visitor from Bonn

THE AMERICAS

On his four-week good-will swing around Latin America, pink-cheeked Ludwig Erhard, West Germany's Minister of Economics, stopped off last week in Chile. As in Mexico, where he opened his tour by attending the inauguration of a $25 million German industrial fair, he was welcomed as the fiscal wizard who symbolizes West Germany's spectacular economic comeback. Santiago's press gave him the Page One treatment, university professors asked him to lecture, and Chile's much-regulated businessmen applauded till the walls of the Union Club vibrated when he told them: "There is no miracle in German recovery--individual economic liberty has been the secret."

Looking Forward. With German trade in Latin America already running at a rate of nearly $500 million a year, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil are now so far in debt to Bonn that Erhard was not interested at the moment in signing new trade agreements. The only bargain he proposed in Santiago provided for the restoration of the Bayer and Merck drug properties, seized in World War II. But Erhard had bigger matters in mind. West Germany's continued progress, he said, requires wider foreign business, and Latin America, rich in raw materials and poor in machinery and manufactured goods, is the place for German trade to grow. "We regard Latin America as the continent of the future," he said. "Here opportunity lies waiting for us around every corner . , " We have decided to build up a capital fund to help Latins buy from us on a long-term credit basis."

In Mexico Erhard discussed building a new steel mill for his hosts in Durango; newspapers reported that Alfred Krupp was on his way to the country to confer about new industrial plants. In Peru, Erhard helped inaugurate a new steel tubing mill equipped with German machinery. In Brazil, where a German steel tube plant is going up in Minas Gerais and a Volkswagen assembly plant is to be started in June, a $142 million trade treaty with Bonn provides that $50 million of German goods will be used this year in Brazilian undertakings.

Looking Backward. But one or two traditional German specialty items are missing from Dr. Erhard's export program, as Chile's crusty old (76) President Carlos Ibanez belatedly learned last week. "Tell the Minister" huffed the general to his interpreter, "that I wish we may soon exchange Chilean and German officers to work in our armies and arms factories." Without batting an eye, Erhard said: "Tell the President that there is no German army . and military plants have been forbidden for many years."

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