South American Solutions

By HUGH O'SHAUGHNESSY A FEW months ago in Rio de Janeiro, Helder ili.Climara, auxiliary archbishop of the city and one of the foremost religious leaders in the western hemisphere, declared on television that the Church's main fight in Latin America was not against Communism, but against the selfish- ness of the rich.

It is statements like this that are helping gradually to establish the ideal of Christian Democracy as a political reality in Latin America and to provide the inhabitants with an alternative to the present impossible choice be- tween established oligarchy on the one hand and Castro-type Marxism on the other.

Slowly and painfully and with very little co- ordination, a Variety of new Christian Demo- cratic parties are emerging throughout the hemisphere, dedicated as much to sweeping away that mixture of feudalism and irresponsible capitalism that forms the established order in so many of the twenty republics as they are to showing that life can be improved without turn- ing to the Cuban type of totalitarianism.

If this year's results are anything to go by, the Christian Democrats can expect to make a great deal of progress in the next decade.

The best example of sheer electoral strength is perhaps to be found curlently in Chile. During the last few years that country has stumbled from one crisis to another under the somnolent guidance of a Conservative President who has been unwilling or unable to do much to remedy a stagnant economy and the great disparities in land tenure and wealth among Chileans. The dissatisfaction of the miners and industrial workers became so great that a year ago people were widely forecasting that Chile would become the first country in history to choose a Communist government in free elections.

Yet in the municipal elections in April this year the Christian Democrats, on the basis of a vigorous reformist platform, jumped from fourth place in the poll to first and gained the largest number of seats in local government. Their leader, Eduardo Frei, is now a strongly tipped candidate for next year's presidential election.

The same trend is being followed in fern. Last month Fernando Beladnde Terry, himself a practising Christian, was elected to the presi- dency by a small majority that he owed to, the co-operatiOn of the Christian Democratic Party.

In Venezuela, too, the Accitin Democraica Party of President Ronaulo Betancourt maintains a precarious coalition only with the good will of COPEI, the local Christian Democratic group- ing. When a new President is chosen this December he will have to take account of COPEI's aims when he comes to working out his policies.

There are the beginnings of Christian Democ- racy even in Mexico, where PRI, the left-wing government party, has been in power solidly for thirty years and where the Catholic Church as such was once proscribed and where it still suffers from legal disabilities. At the turn of the year Manuel Rodriguez Lapuente broke with the main right-wing opposition party PAN in dissatisfaction with its negative attitude of op- posing every policy of PRI simply because it was PRI policy. With more constructive ideas he hopes to build an attractive, radical alterna- tive to a government which would benefit from a period out of office.

But in spite of hopeful signs this year, the 'We have been building walls against the West for a thousand years.' movement still has a long way to go before it obtains electoral strength comparable with that of Christian Democratic parties in Germany and Italy. Being relatively new they will take a long time to gather funds and build the machinery necessary to challenge the Conservative, Com- munist and Socialist parties already in the field. Perhaps to anyone who knows European Chris- tian Democrats like Konrad Adenauer and Mario Scelba this would seem no great loss, par- ticularly if the Latin Americans were to model themselves on their counterparts on this side ' of the Atlantic. Fortunately, however, the Chileans, Peruvians and the rest have little in common with the cautious establishment atti- tudes of the German or Italian Christian Demo- cratic parties. The gap between rich and poor in their continent is so much wider than it is in. Europe that nothing less than revolutionary measures are needed to close it. Hence their policies of wholesale land redistribution, heavier and more effective taxation of the rich, strict exchange control to prevent flight of capital and a measured hostility towards US economic dominance and so on The parties can congratulate themselves that they are making an appeal to an impatient generation of young people. A British diplo- mat, used to the quiet inertia of Catholic life in England, remarked to me in Caracas recently how surprised he was at the 'extremism' of the young members of COPEI and the ease with which they slipped into Marxist terminology. Members of all parties in Venezuela agree that the only way Betancourt's government makes any appeal to the young people is through the COPEI youth movement. There is no doubt about the left-wing attitude of Latin American Christian Democracy or of its youthful appeal.

With the wisdom of hindsight one can see that such a movement had to come. No one with any pretensions to a social conscience nowadays supports the status quo in a continent where 5 per cent of the population is responsible for a third of all personal expenditure or which supports steaming, fetid slums like the ranchos in Caracas, the villas miseria of Buenos Aires or Rio's favelas, all of which stink and heave within sight of extravagantly smart garden cities or country clubs.

No self-respecting Latin American politician is proud of the fact that of so many countries, Peru or Paraguay or El Salvador, for instance, one can say that the mass of land is held by a tiny minority of the people or that the whole show is run by and for four hundred, forty or, as in the case of Nicaragua, one family.

There is no disagreement among thinking people over the fact that the present state of affairs has to be changed. Yet Castroism does not offer a satisfactory solution. The standard of living of all but the poorest in Cuba has de- clined since the revolution. One can, of course, argue about the reasons for this, whether it is due more to the US trade embargo than to the failure of the system, but the fact remains that most Cubans are eating worse and have less goods to buy, whether medicines or motor-cars, than before Castro arrived.

Added to this, Latin Americans can see that Cuba has merely swapped one master' for another. The Russian master, moreover, has cont. milted the double mistake of threatening to em- broil the whole continent in a nuclear war and then finally selling the Cubans down the river at the instance of the US, a mistake that played on both the natural fears and the natural pride of the whole of Latin America.

In view, then, of the problems and the un- satisfactory nature of the Marxist remedy, the continent has been thrown back on to its own resources in the search for an acceptable line of political advance. In Christian Socialism it may have found one that is in harmony with its own original culture and that has the advantage of being native bOrn. The majority of realistic politicians, economists and sociologists who have studied the region are of the opinion that Latin America must in the end produce its own solu- tions to its problems and not rely on either the US or Russia to work out its salvation.

Nor is it an accident that the political ideas in question have come to the fore at this ,par- ticular moment in history. The various parties have emerged at a time when there is not only widespread scepticism about a Marxist solution to the area's needs, but also an awakening of the ideals of social justice in a body where they had long lain dormant.

The pronouncements of the late Pope have provided a respectable rallying-point for non- Marxist reformers and also stirred the at times sluggish conscience of the episcopate and clergy. In the century and a half since Latin America gained its independence from France, Spain and Portugal, the Church has, on the whole, been content with the status quo and when any per- manent revolution has come about—as in the Mexico of 1910—it has been caught on the wrong side of the fence. This is, incidentally, all the more unfortunate for the Church when one realises that some of the most famous Latin American reformers and revolutionaries, Bar- tolomd de las Casas, the protector of the In- dians, or Miguel Hidalgo, the hero of Mexico's fight against Spain, for instance, were church- men.

This time thinking Catholics are determined not only that they shall not be caught on the wrong side of the fence, but also that they shall give a positive lead to reform.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the change in the official policy of the Church in Latin America in recent years towards the left and even towards the extreme left. Of all the diplo- mats I met in Cuba earlier this year, for example, the one from the Papal Nunciature was the least perturbed and most relaxed when discussing Castro. I imagine that the Russians have more outstanding problems with Fidel than the Vati- can has. And when John XXIII died the other day there was three days' mourning in Havana. As a Venezuelan Communist observed to me, `Why not?'