By the Bootstraps

Puerto Rico, say the experts, ranks third in the world after Britain and the U.S. in the way the national income is spread among all classes of people. This achievement owes much to Puerto Rico's celebrated Governor Munoz Marin; it also owes much to a tough-minded young businessman named Jose Teodoro Moscoso, who was chosen to run Munoz' Operation Bootstrap in 1942. The choice was a natural: in the ten years after he graduated from the University of Michigan, Ted Moscoso had accomplished much. He entered his family's wholesale drug business, helped build it to thriving good health. Then he joined the city of Ponce's Housing Authority, constructed thousands of homes for slum dwellers. Then, having had a hand in the blueprint for Operation Bootstrap, he was told to make it work.

The idea was to get U.S. industry to invest in Puerto Rico, an attitude far removed from the usual reformer's hostility to foreign capital. Moscoso was frankly ready to try anything. "If something doesn't work," he said, "to hell with it." Potential mainland investors got invitations to Puerto Rico, promises of a free hand for free enterprise. The government chipped in by relaxing tax rules, training the workers, sometimes even constructing the factory buildings. By 1961, 680 plants employing 50,700 Puerto Ricans were established on the island.

Last year, as a measure of his success, Moscoso, now 50, was able to move on once more. He went to Manhattan for some "belly-to-belly" selling of more blue-chip U.S. corporations on the advantages of setting up shop in Puerto Rico. A second job was an invitation to join the Kennedy task force on Latin America. He was also appointed U.S. delegate to a new U.N. Committee for Industrial Development. Last week, making his first speech at the U.N., Moscoso outlined Puerto Rico's successful principles of industrial growth: sound government, with adequate planning, budgeting and auditing; education to provide industrial brainpower; just distribution of the fruits of industrialization. Said Moscoso: "Tax reforms and land reforms would also be part of this arsenal. For if the masses do not feel that they are participating in the advance of the economy, they will not support a development program indefinitely."

On the day of Moscoso's maiden U.N. speech, President Kennedy picked him as U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela. He will be the first Puerto Rican to represent the U.S. as an ambassador abroad. Venezuela's President is Reformer Romulo Betancourt, an old friend of Moscoso's. In Puerto Rico, Governor Munoz Marin called the appointment "a very good thing for Washington, a very good thing for Caracas, but a bad thing for San Juan."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.