Latin-American Future
REVOLUTION in Latin America is not merely a matter of Dr. Castro in Cuba, or petty up- heavals in Honduras. The whole South American sub-continent and Mexico, and the umbilical cord that joins them, along with the offshore islands, are in the course of a social, economic and inditstrial revolution. Latin America is going through Western Europe's nineteenth century, but that is a process accelerated these days by tech- nology, as the Soviet Union has shown. Many Latin-Ameri_an economists and politicians are considering one of Western Europe's twentieth- century devices as a possible means of making the historical process less painful than it has been elsewhzre, at other times. For well over a yzar now a working committee of the United Nations Commission for Latin America has been studying how a common market could he formed.
There are difficulties and dangers in the way. Any device that stimulated production in the already semi-industrialised 'ABC' countries— Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Uruguay— would tend to widen the present economic gap between them and the primary producers, mak- ing the richer brethren richer and the poorer relatively poorer still. It may be that the planners should think first in terms of regional groups, rather than in terms of a continental-sized com- mon market--that Latin America should be. like Western Europe, at Sixes and Sevens. Foreign investment will be needed on a much higher level than the present 400 to 500 million dollars a year, most of it risk capital from private American sources. Those who are invited to invest in mining, in oil, and in public services fear :expropriation, and point to British and American experience in Mexico and Argentina. But both as a producer and as a market. Latin America is of the utmost importance to the West--potentially more useful and more amiably disposed than other comparable regions. Assistance on half the scale of Marshall Aid for Western Europe could transform Latin America economically in a -mere ten years.
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