1973-09-06

Welcome to the Latin American Press Review, a weekly selection and analysis of important news events in Latin America, as seen by leading world newspapers, with special emphasis on the Latin American press. This program is produced by the Latin American Policy Alternatives Group. 

The British news weekly, Latin America, reports that the Brazilian Army has been battling with peasant guerrillas near the Araguaia River in Northern Brazil, and recent events have shown the impotence of the Army in dealing with these jungle fighters. Two landowners have been killed by the guerrillas for collaborating with the armed forces during anti-guerrilla operations, which ended in April, and other important landowners who assisted the Army have been forced to leave their haciendas to take up residence in the comparative security of larger cities. 

The leader of the guerrillas, the now legendary Osvaldão, nailed the guerrillas' manifesto to the door of a church in a village near the Araguaia. The statement reaffirmed the 27 points of the guerrillas' program. In this document, the guerrillas, who began to settle the region in 1967 as a part of the long range strategy of the pro-Chinese faction of the Brazilian Communist Party, supported the principal demands of the local population. 

They used simple and direct language in making their points. One of the chief demands involved the posseiros, small farmers who have lived in the Araguaian River for generations without legal title to the land. Large landowners have been taking over in recent years, and the guerrillas demanded that the posseiros be given security of tenure. 

A second point of the guerrillas' manifesto involved an ancient scandal in which gatherers of Brazil nuts are forced to sell their harvest to local merchants at the officially-controlled price, which is approximately 1/13th of the price which merchants sell them for. These widespread grievances, combined with the violence and corruption of the military police, provide the guerrillas with an ideal environment, and this explains the fantastic popularity of Osvaldão and his followers among the local people. In the region, tales of the guerrillas' exploits paths from mouth-to-mouth, and apart from Osvaldão, one hears mention of others, especially the women of the group.

The decision of the Army to end active operations against the guerrillas angered local oligarchs, who recently met with the military commander and suggested a final solution to the problem. The suggestion was that they should form a death squad of hunters who knew the forest, men accustomed to kill Indians, entrusted by the landowners. This band of killers would be employed to hunt the guerrillas for a bounty of 10,000 cruzados each. The offer was refused by the Army on the grounds that it did not accord with the philosophy of the government, but local opinion was that the risks outweigh the possibility of success. The guerrillas already have local recruits with them and the hunters might well change sides, and furthermore, the conflict would inevitably run out of the control of the Army. 

The Army also claims the guerrillas forces to be now reduced to a half a dozen fugitives, but Air Force officers based in the area told a recent inquirer that of the 35 original combatants, 20 still remained active. Local civilian sources assured the same inquirer that Osvaldão commanded at least 60 men divided between two vans, which were themselves divided into yet smaller patrols. Their influence is felt along 100 kilometers of the River Araguaia. Popular support from the local population ranges from several cases of incorporation into the guerrillas, to discrete provision of information, supplies, and often, shelter. 

The present situation is complicated for the government by the fact the peasant leagues springing from the spontaneous need of country people to defend themselves and their scant livelihoods are again important for the first time since their suppression during the first years of the military government. Their demands are backed by the church, which has been taking an increasingly hard line with the government in recent months, and it is this wider movement which gives the Araguaia conflict its particular significance. This from Latin America. 

After 17 years of military rule in Argentina, the Peronist party has returned to power, and presidential elections are being held next month in which Juan Peron himself will run. Peron, who earlier this year was considered to be a revolutionary of sorts, now appears to be arranging a right centrist regime, and has thus received the blessings even of the United States State Department.

One result of Peron's new-found conservatism is that the leftist Peronista, or Peronist Youth Group, whose work among Argentine masses has given the Peronist movement much of its strength, has been virtually excluded from the new government. This has been a bitter pill for the militant Peronist youths to swallow, for during the 17 years of Peron's exile, it was they who bore the brunt of confrontations with the military dictatorship.

Recently, however, a strategy for dealing with Peron's upcoming administration is beginning to emerge. A Peronist guerrilla group, the Peronist Armed Forces, has published its own evaluation of the situation. According to them, a policy for the new phase must necessarily begin with the actual political state of the masses. The working classes entered the broad front of the classes, and is aware of the limits which this implies. The statement is speaking here of the broad populist anti-military coalition, which Peron assembled to allow him to return to power.

The statement continues, the masses now hope for a breathing space after 18 years of exploitation, a phase of peace and prosperity, sufficient to allow them to recover from the blows they have received. They seek to restore and surpass the conditions they enjoyed between 1945 and 1955, when they won paid holidays, collective bargaining, full employment, job security, freedom to organize and participation in power. Today, with wages down, 1.5 million unemployed, collective agreements which are not honored, and with union organizations in the hands of a bureaucracy which is ready to sell out the workers, the masses are in a state of weakness which prevents advance.

The group statement continues, "The masses are not looking for an ideal socialism at the present time, but the prosperity and social justice which they do seek is more than the national bourgeoisie is either willing or able to concede at the present time. For this reason, the leadership of the bourgeoisie and the anti-imperialist front is challenged by the masses, and this challenge should be the concrete point of departure for any revolutionary strategy." This position is important because it provides the Peronist youths with a way out of their political isolation, and should ensure the future unity of the movement. 

Youth for Peron and their guerrilla allies are clearly confident that the inherent contradictions of the present process, in which Peron is trying to mediate between the claims of the working class, national capitalists and foreign investors, will lead to a new radicalization of the Peronist Movement as a whole. Until that time comes, the Youth for Peron is content to remain on the sidelines, with its militants busy consolidating their work of organizing the basis. According to Latin America, well-informed sources credit them with having 100,000 active militants, whose confidence of the present is buoyed up by their belief that they can mobilize the people. This previous article is from the British News Weekly, Latin America. 

In a report of historical and contemporary interest concerning US relations with Latin America, the aviation writer for the Miami Herald writes that Southern Air Transport, a charter airline with extensive service in the Caribbean and Latin America, is controlled and subsidized by the Central Intelligence Agency. Rumors of CIA involvement, which have abounded for years, have been formalized for the first time in official hearings before the Civil Aeronautics Board. Competitors have charged that Southern Air Transport has been controlled and subsidized by the CIA, and that the Civil Aeronautics Board should abolish Southern Air's operating certificate and reject a proposed sale of the firm.

The competitors claim that the past ownership changes have not been reported accurately to conceal involvement by the CIA, and they question whether Southern Air's operating certificate should be continued, since its financial base may be the result of an input of federal funds, thus making the Civil Aeronautics Board's approval of its operations a sanction for illegal acts, namely the control of a certified supplemental airline by an agency of the Federal Government, the CIA.

Commenting on the activities of Southern Air, former CIA official, Victor Marchetti, said that the sole existence of Southern Air is that the CIA is ready for the contingency that someday it will have to ferry men and material to some Latin American country to wage a clandestine war. The competitors charge that Southern Air has been controlled by the CIA at least as early as the US invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.

In 1960, under the Eisenhower Administration, when Nixon was the White House coordinator for the planning of the Bay of Pigs, Southern Air was purchased by Percival Brundage, who was director of the bureau of the budget under Eisenhower, and Perkins McGuire, who was assistant secretary of defense, and by Stanley Williams, current president of Southern Air, who is trying to buy out the other owners.

Also, Southern Air has had connections with Air America, an airline operating mainly in Southeast Asia, admittedly controlled by the CIA. For example, the airport space at the Miami International Airport is leased in the name of Agnes Technology Incorporated, whose assets are largely loans to Southern Air, and whose liabilities are largely loans from Air America. Also, in 1966, Southern Air won a hotly-contested case in which it was granted authority to operate in the Pacific over a host of competitors.

The ruling so astounded the Independent Airlines Association that it protested the ruling, but according to a former association president, they were told not to expect any help since the airline was controlled by the CIA. The competitors have said that even if the federal examiner hearing the case rules in favor of Southern Air, they may appeal their case to the Civil Aeronautics Board and even to President Nixon. That report from the Miami Herald.

In the wake of the military takeover of the Uruguayan government last June, thousands of political arrests have been made. As a result, Uruguay's prison population of politicians, workers, and urban guerrillas has overflowed into the Cilindro Sports Stadium, the prison ship, Tacoma, and numerous military garrisons. In reply to protests regarding conditions in the overcrowded jails and emergency areas of confinement, the Interior Uruguayan Ministry held a lottery on Independence Day, 25th of August, to gather funds for the improvement of the jails. 

One of the most well-known prisoners is Liber Seregni, who, until his arrest in July, was a member of the Uruguayan Senate and a member of the opposition party, Frente Amplio. Seregni's wife commented recently that the aim of the government's Let's Dignify our Prisons campaign appears to be to turn Uruguay into one big jail. The campaign for the freeing of Liber Seregni has brought international response, including a letter from Angela Davis, who promises to fight for the liberty of Liber Seregni and all political prisoners.

Ironically, Liber Seregni is more dangerous to the government in jail than he was at large, because the issue goes far beyond the Frente Amplio leader. It has attracted attention to some 4,000 political prisoners, ranging from members of Congress to Tupamaros and their sympathizers, many of whom have been held for months without ever being brought to court. The unnerving part of living in Uruguay today is that numerous people who have never taken part in revolutionary activity have been arrested merely on suspicion of presumed links with sedition.

Chile Hoy of Santiago reports that former Colombian dictator, Rojas Pinilla, has surprised everyone by announcing that his daughter, Maria Eugenia Rojas Pinilla, will be the candidate of his party in the presidential elections in 1974. Pinilla's party, the National Popular Alliance, more widely known as ANAPO, lost the 1970 presidential elections by a mere 45,000 votes, and there is considerable cause for believing ANAPO's claim that the vote count was rigged against them. 

Maria Pinilla will no doubt benefit from the fact that the two major parties of Colombia, the Liberals and the Conservatives, are ideologically quite similar. ANAPO's platform of redistribution of the country's wealth has brought it massive support among Colombian prisons and workers in larger cities, and Maria Pinilla's challenge to the Liberal-Conservative coalition could make this one of the most interesting elections on the continent next year. This from the Santiago Weekly, Chile Hoy. 

The Mexico City Daily Excélsior reports that the Chilean government last week outlawed the Chilean Truck Owners Association, and called upon all patriotic Chileans to act to break the six-week-old lockout, which has thrown much of Chilean society into disarray. The Popular Unity government called on workers, peasants, students, and all Chileans, to put every vehicle that can move on the roads to help transport badly needed medical supplies and food. The Chilean interior minister announced that the Popular Unity government decided to nullify the existence of the Truck Owners Association because it is proved that its strike had the aim of provoking a coup d'etat, or civil war. This from the Mexican Daily, Excélsior. 

You are listening to the Latin American Press Review, a weekly selection and analysis of important news events in Latin America, as seen by leading world newspapers, with special emphasis on the Latin American press. This program is produced by the Latin American Policy Alternatives Group. Comments and suggestions are welcome, and may be sent to us at 2205 San Antonio Street, Austin, Texas. This program is distributed by Communication Center, the University of Texas at Austin. 

Our feature today is an article on the world food situation from the August 73 issue of Science Magazine, the American Association for Advancement of Science Publication. Last July, for almost the first time in living memory, the crop report prepared by the United States Department of Agriculture rated a spot on the CBS evening news. To consumers perplexed by rising food prices, the prediction of record crops was doubtless welcome, if maybe deceptive news. To economists concerned about the world food situation, the relief was of a different order. A poor harvest in the United States could mean disaster for some countries that depend on American food exports. 

The world food situation is more serious now than at any time since 1965 to '67, when an armada of American grain shipments saved perhaps 60 million Indians from possible starvation. The immediate cause is a bout a freakish weather that has visited droughts on some parts of the world, floods on others, and given the 1972 harvest much worse results than was expected. All countries except India have now bought enough grain, though often at ruinous prices, to cover their immediate needs, but the world's grain stocks are down to their lowest level in 20 years, and whether or not there will be enough food to go around next year depends on the success of crops now in the ground. 

The omens so far are that crops will be good around the world as long as the weather stays favorable and epidemics hold off. But the touch and go nature of events has rekindled anxieties about the world food situation. Beyond the immediate question of whether this year's crop will produce enough food to avoid major price disturbances, political instabilities and famines, there is concern that the present alarms and scarcities may reflect not just last year's bad weather, but a fundamental deterioration in the world food situation. Already, there are those who foresee a period of food scarcity in which those with food to sell will have a useful political weapon in their hands. 

Governments of developing countries will find this year that the soaring prices of food grains and freight rates have driven their imported food bills up by 60%, or roughly $2 billion, and a drain on foreign reserves of this could, if it should continue, threaten to retard economic development and make the gap between rich nations and poor nations grow faster still.

Much besides the threat of famine therefore hinges upon the ability of developing countries to make crop yields grow faster than people. The salient fact about the world food situation is that for the past 20 years, food production has increased at a rate just slightly faster than population. A fact that, were it not for major inequities in resource and income distribution, could translate into a very slight improvement in per capita diet.

Yet even disregarding the uneven rates of consumption, this average diet is precariously close to subsistence, and those even slightly below it are undernourished. The present extent of malnutrition in the world is a matter of debate because of arguments about how it should be measured, but according to the Food and Agricultural Organization, the FAO of the United Nations, perhaps 20% of the population of developing countries, or 300 to 500 million people, are undernourished, in that they receive less than the recommended intake of calories, not to mention protein. Alan Berg, World Bank deputy director for nutrition, estimates that of the children born today in developing countries, roughly 75 million will die before their fifth birthdays for malnourishment or associated illnesses. 

The article continues, "Regarded from a gross overview, the world's situation over the last two decades appears tolerable, if not precisely ideal. Countries with a food deficit have been able to buy cereals at reasonable and stable prices from the grain exporting countries." In short, the remarkable feature of the world food situation in retrospect has been its general stability. Perceptions of it, however, have followed a strangely erratic course over the last decade, lurching from pessimism to optimism and now back towards gloom again. 

In the mid 1960s, doom saying was the fashion. The USDA forecast that the concessional food needed by developing countries would eventually exceed what the United States had available to give away. Strikingly enough, the date calculated for this dire event turned out to be 1984. The USDA projections formed the basis for Famine 1975, a well-written and widely-read track by brothers William and Paul Paddock. The Paddocks took the USDA's figures, but assumed a slightly faster rate of population increase, and concluded that the famine era would arrive nine years ahead of time in 1975. 

The famine talk of the mid-1960s suddenly lost credence in the face of a new phenomenon, part-agricultural and part-public relations. The Green Revolution, with its wonder wheat and miracle rice, swept the headlines like wildfire, but they swept the wheat and paddy fields of Asia at a rather slower rate. 

Developed at an agricultural research center in the Philippines and Mexico, the new strains of rice and wheat did indeed produce yields many times greater than native varieties under certain conditions. The promising performance of the new strains in India and Southeast Asia suggested that the rate of food production could be increased from 2% to 4% or 5% within a few years.

Aided by favorable weather conditions, the new Mexican wheats produced bumper crops. India announced she would become independent of all foreign grain imports by 1973, and the Philippines pinned to become a major exporter of rice. And in the general euphoria, even the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization began to talk as if the real food problem would be one of surpluses, not scarcities. But from this high point, enthusiasm about the Green Revolution has slowly subsided, dipping occasionally into positive vilification.

The basis of the criticisms lies essentially in the fact that modern agricultural technology is no quicker or less painful to apply in the developing world than it has been in the advanced nations. High-technology farming in the underdeveloped world generates massive rural unemployment, as it did in the United States. The new strains of wheat and rice, which are the spear point of Western agriculture, require fertilizer, irrigation and the learning of new skills, all of which rich farmers can acquire more easily than the poor. The scarcity of land capable of this highly-specialized farming also greatly restricts its general applicability. 

The high-yield strains are also extremely sensitive to disease, a problem that the advanced countries themselves have yet to successfully cope with. After the optimism about the Green Revolution began to appear overblown, it required only a few bad harvests to set the pendulum swinging back toward despair.

The strange events of 1972 have done just that, although bad weather and an unlikely combination of circumstances were the principal cause, the resulting havoc was quite disproportionate, demonstrating the system's possible fragility. First, the Soviet Union had another bad harvest. The Russians bought 30 million tons of grain on the world market. The amount was enough to set grain prices soaring to historic heights, and to double world freight rates.

Other countries too were in the market, Indonesia and the Philippines for rice, India for grains. Drought in the countries bordering the southern edge of the Sahara caused a bonafide famine, which has affected between one and 10 million people. The Peruvian anchovy industry failed almost completely last year, and may be permanently damaged because of overfishing. And since the anchovies were the source of much of the world's supply of fishmeal, livestock owners turned heavily to grains and soybeans to feed their animals. 

The outcome of these various demands was dramatic rises in international market prices. In the short-term, it looks as if the scarcities that followed in the wake of the 1972 harvest will ease off, stocks will be rebuilt, and prices will subside to near their normal levels. The longer term prospects for the world's food situation depend on the viewer's perspective. If the optimists have the better record in the debate so far, they also have the harder case to make now. The optimist position is essentially the economic thesis that agricultural production can expand to match demand. 

But their critics respond, "Demand represents only what people can afford to buy, not what they need." On this view, the income of people in developing countries is likely to be the primary constraint on food intake for the foreseeable future, and the production will match up to whatever the market can afford. One analyst, Anthony S. Royko, says, "The United States could double or triple food production if the price was right. However, a review of the dynamics of underdevelopment in a capitalist system does not leave one massively optimistic when considering the cost to underdeveloped nations in increasing their immediate purchasing power." 

Moreover, the article continues, "US food surpluses, whether sold or given away, may help to avert shortages in particular countries, but can cover only a fraction of the expected increase in food needs of the developing countries. These nations must meet the major part of the food requirements themselves." Unfortunately, it is in predictions of likely agricultural productivity increases in the developing world that the professionals become more pessimistic. Among the reasons most commonly argued are the following. 

First, the Indicative World Plan, drawn up by the Food and Agricultural Organization, postulated that there could be slight improvement in the world's diets by 1980 if the agricultural production of developing countries met certain specified goals. So far, the progress made in meeting even the very modest goals of the FAO's plan offers little cause for enthusiasm. Between 1962, the base year of the plan, and 1975, agricultural production in developing countries was supposed to increase at a rate of 3.4% per year. In fact, the average growth rate between 1962 and 1970 has been only 2.8% per year, dropping to 2% in 1971 and to 1% last year. 

One of the few goals successfully met is that for farm machinery, which has been considerably exceeded, this since it adds to rural unemployment is a mixed blessing. Modern agricultural techniques used in the context of a developing capitalist economy not only increase the gap between rich and poor farmers, but are more likely to reduce jobs than to create them. Yet, rural areas in which the bulk of the population increase is to occur are where jobs are most needed. 

The high-yield strains of rice and wheat could cause a disaster for the populations they support because they are genetically more uniform than the native strains they replace and hence more susceptible to an epidemic. The plant breeders who devise the new strains are well aware of the problem, but are nowhere near a solution. 

Prevention and control of such epidemics is a hard enough task for the United States, and requires skilled manpower that developing countries using the new seeds may not possess. Although the trend of agricultural production in developing countries has been steadily upward, there is no guarantee that it will continue to rise. Future gains may be harder than those already made, the best land has already been put under plow, the most convenient water sources already tapped. Production of protein especially seems to be bumping up against certain constraints. 

The article continues, "This year's projections by the USDA Economic Research Service forecast that the world's capacity for production of cereals at least will increase faster than consumption, but projections explicitly assume normal weather conditions. The weather may not be so obliging." 

Whatever the real extent of malnutrition in the world and maldistribution of existing resources, there seems to be no certain prospect of substantial improvement, and the fair chance of degradation in the immediate future. Protein has become a seller's market. In recent months, there has been a clear trend of richer countries pulling protein away from the poor.

A similar dynamic exists inside the underdeveloped countries themselves, where economic elites' demands for meat may well price grain out of the poor man's mouth, given that it takes about seven pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef. The article concludes cautiously, stating that, "For the moment, the general world food situation seems stable, if a little precariously so." Most experts are agreed that 1972 was probably just a bad year, not a turning point.

In the longer term, the world's agricultural capacity is clearly not yet stretched to its limit, and any deterioration in diet on this account is likely to be gradual. However, any real immediate improvement or deterioration in the average diet is more likely to be linked to social and economic structure than to natural phenomena. 

You have been listening to the Latin American Press Review, a weekly selection and analysis of important news events in Latin America, as seen by leading world newspapers, with special emphasis on the Latin American press. This program is produced by the Latin American Policy Alternatives Group. Comments and suggestions are welcome, and may be sent to us at 2205 San Antonio Street, Austin, Texas. This program is distributed by Communications Center, the University of Texas at Austin.