The Peace Corps Approach

"Mata al gringo! Mata al gringo!"

bawled the fight fans in the tiny Mexi can town. It was 1941, and the skinny, 21 -year-old American college boy calling himself "Chopper" Hood slugged away at his Mexican opponent. "After a little while," recalls the Chopper, "I realized that what they were yelling was 'Kill the Yankee!' " Thus, if somewhat inauspiciously, began Gringo Hood's longtime friendship with Latin America.

This week Jack Hood Vaughn, 44, current U.S. Ambassador to Panama, moves into the heavyweight class as Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs, succeeding Thomas C. Mann. As such, he will coordinate and direct all Alianza aid programs in Latin America, oversee the State Department's Latin American section, and generally act as President Johnson's top policymaker, adviser and troubleshooter for that area. The assignment promises to be quite a workout, but Vaughn seems in shape.

As a frail, carrot-topped youngster in Michigan, Vaughn took up boxing in self-defense, went on to win the state Golden Gloves title as a 124-lb. feather weight (and have his nose broken three times, his jaw once). Picking up his master's degree from the University of Michigan in 1947, he spent ten years in Bolivia, Costa Rica and Panama as a United States Information Service officer and as a coordinator of U.S. aid projects. In 1961 he went to Washington as director of the Peace Corps' sprawling Latin American operation. President Johnson soon tagged him as a comer, and last year, after the bloody Canal Zone riots, picked him as Ambassador to Panama.

There Vaughn pushed hard for farm-credit banks and rural roads to open up the interior. Like an oldtime circuit rider, he traveled around the country telling peasants, students and politicians that "Panama's main natural resource is not geographical--not the canal. It is the people and the land. And they must be developed."

Although Vaughn will not have Tom Mann's personal pipeline to the White House as a special assistant to Johnson, he is taking an aggressive and eager approach to his job. He may depend less on a massive infusion of dollars to solve Latin-American problems. "Man does not live by G.N.P. alone," he says. "After looking at the results of our foreign aid program around the world and seeing how few attitudes have been changed and how little it has to do with better government, self-respect and social change, I feel there are several missing ingredients." Among the ingredients Vaughn wants to increase: Peace Corps-type activities, people-to-people aid.

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