"Frustrating Monologue"

To find out what is going wrong with the Alliance for Progress, the OAS last November commissioned two distinguished Latin Americans--Juscelino Kubitschek, former President of Brazil, and Alberto Lleras Camargo, who had just finished his term as President of Colombia. Their separate reports last week made disheartening reading.

Silence Preferred. In the view of Kubitschek, who ran up a huge deficit in Brazil to build his beloved back-country capital, Brasilia, the U.S. is to blame for not delivering as much aid as it seemed to have promised. "It would have been better to have had silence," said he, "than to have spread seeds of hope that will never grow and bear fruit." As presently constituted, Kubitschek went on, the Alliance is little more than a label. "I protest against using the name Alianza as a label for projects of all sorts, some of which had already been put into operation before the creation of the Alliance and which have no creative purpose."

Specifically, he objected to the Alianza's taking credit for aid under U.S. Public Law 480, which allows the sale of surplus food for soft local currency, and for the operations of the Export-Import Bank, which has in fact been less active lately. He accused the U.S. Congress of lopping 40% from what he considered a Kennedy promise of $1 billion-worth of aid in Latin America in 1962--when all that Kennedy actually requested was $600 million. And he found a "lack of coordination among U.S. organizations designed to finance the Alianza, and lack of a central U.S. organization with ample powers to make clear Alianza definitions and decisions." He made little mention of Latin America's failure to institute the substantial tax and agrarian reforms that were to be its contribution.

Urgency Disappeared. Colombia's Lleras Camargo found more fault with the southern end of the Alianza. "The feeling of urgency that dominated the Punta del Este meeting disappeared immediately after the documents were signed," he said. The governments--"all of them"--have shown a lack of interest and have abdicated the responsibility that they were expected to share. Thus, instead of a grand alliance of equals, the program has degenerated into a standard series of bilateral aid agreements between the U.S. and each individual country of Latin America.

Both ex-Presidents agree that a multilateral leadership of the Alianza is needed to end what Kubitschek calls "this frustrating monologue." They want to set up a new Inter-American Development Committee to run the Alianza. The committee would consist of six representatives of American nations, including a permanent U.S. delegate. Kubitschek's committee would be led by the executive secretary of the Inter-American Economic and Social Council, Lleras' by a president elected every five years. Says Lleras: 'He would become the figure that the Alianza is lacking so that its image may cease to be that of a U.S. political enterprise, and become a collective instrument, a multilateral machine, an authentic movement of the national forces of 20 countries."

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