So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life (19 page)

And at each stop, Sarge was the impeccable inquiring American. Courteous, deferential, asking always of what use the volunteers could be, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he, the brother-in-law of the revered JFK, was certainly the most important person who had ever visited, and ready with anecdotes about his recent visit to Pope John XXIII, he made a great impression—on his hosts and, truth to tell, on me. On our final day in Lima, we were the guests at a magnificent luncheon, hosted by President Manuel Prado and attended not only by the prime minister (Pedro Beltrán, who was also the publisher of the leading newspaper in Lima) but also by what seemed to be the ruling elite of the country, landowners seemingly rich beyond belief.

I was seated next to one of these potentates, who remarked to me, during the course of the meal, that one great deficiency of Peru was that it lacked first-rate universities. Alas, he maintained, the country lacked the budget to create a great university. I reminded him that many of the great universities in the United States were started—and maintained—by private funds. Thus, I said, when Mr. Rockefeller wanted a first-class university in Chicago, he funded it and had it built and staffed. “How much would it cost to start such a university?” this Peruvian Rockefeller (or so I imagined) asked. Sarge, who had overheard the conversation from across the table, replied that he thought fifty million dollars might at least get it started. “Fifty million,” the Peruvian repeated and then asked, “On an investment of that type, how much could I expect to earn as a return?”

Sarge thought the dialogue typical enough of the Latin American upper class to get me on Mike Wallace’s late-night NBC television program to tell that story and plug the Peace Corps. He was always alert to publicity possibilities for the Peace Corps, and that quality, plus his unbounded enthusiasm and his ability to communicate it to members of Congress, made the corps so successful in those early years, when a sizable number of congressmen were ready to scrap the whole program as the “Kiddy Corps,” or worse. He staffed those early programs with exceptional people. He took virtually no one from the foreign policy/economic development agencies or the accompanying establishment, preferring outsiders like me, successful—or at least publicizable—men and women from the professions, business, or athletics, and he imposed on the Peace Corps two Shriverisms unheard of elsewhere in the government. First, “In, Up, and Out”; no one could serve more than five years, no Peace Corps careers. Second, each hired country administrator had to take a pay cut; no one could earn more in the Peace Corps than his last salary as a “civilian.”

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Peru, which had a sizable Indian minority, who spoke Quechua (a non-written language), had long been regarded as a U.S. satrapy under the control of well-provided generals, with scant history as a democracy, and a social system that would have been called feudalism in any other century.

Over the previous twenty years or so, an opposition had built up, enjoying growing support among the Indians, within a nascent labor movement, and among some intellectuals. This was the APRA, advocates of a Latin sort of New Deal social democracy, headed by the charismatic figure of Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, a favorite of U.S. liberals. The outgoing Eisenhower State Department, true to form, had regarded the APRA as a poorly disguised form of Communism and hardly the anti-Soviet bulwark Peru’s oligarchy had built and wanted badly to keep through an upcoming election. Haya de la Torre had twice been elected Peru’s president but twice denied office, once by flagrant fraud in the election count and once by an army coup.

As the next election approached and the first groups of volunteers (about 150) were undergoing their three-month training preparatory to heading for Peru, the question arose: What will the United States do if, as appeared likely, Haya de la Torre were to win the election and the Peruvian army, under the command of President Manuel Prado and the unanimous influence of media and clergy, were once again to overthrow an elected government and install a military regime? The U.S. ambassador James Loeb (my old pal from the ADA) strongly urged a withdrawal of U.S. recognition and economic aid, and President Kennedy concurred. Jim Loeb then came over to the Peace Corps one day to seek an answer from Shriver as to what the Peace Corps would do under those circumstance, mindful that the Peace Corps was not to be considered part of U.S. foreign policy or under the control of the State Department.

Confronted with the question, Shriver did not hesitate. Turning to me, and earning my everlasting respect and admiration—amid some surprise—he told the ambassador, “Frank Mankiewicz here is our director in Peru; he’ll make that decision.” And I made it on the spot, because I had already decided it would seem absurd to send our volunteers, whom I saw as incipient revolutionaries, to countries with military dictators. (In my years in Peru, and later as Latin American regional director, we never sent Peace Corps volunteers to Nicaragua, Paraguay, or Argentina, all then overt dictatorships.) I made it clear the Peace Corps volunteers in training would not go to Peru, in spite of the arrangements we had made with the government, until democracy had been restored or at least a process toward a restoration of democracy had been undertaken. We also would tell the government that any coup d’état would be immediately met by a suspension of the Peace Corps’ arrival.

To no one’s surprise, Haya de la Torre won the election, and the army nullified the result and quickly installed a general as president. The United States recalled Ambassador Loeb and cut off all foreign aid, and I announced the Peace Corps would not be assisting Peru. It was a rare expression of American support for democracy and opposition to the local oligarchy, and it worked. Within a few weeks, the government and the ruling general announced new elections would be held, and the government guaranteed the military would honor the result. The winner of the new elections, by a narrow margin, was Fernando Belaúnde Terry, the candidate of the Popular Action Party. President Belaúnde took office a few days later, and, right on schedule, the first Peace Corps volunteers arrived in Peru; President Belaúnde was at the airport to greet them.

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Whatever one likes or dislikes about “the 1960s,” I think the Peace Corps can remind us just how different America was—and how different it could be again. At the time, the Peace Corps and the civil rights movement had seemed, especially to many young people, like major training grounds and battlefields on which America’s future would be shaped.

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My radicalization had been gradually developing—reading Paul Goodman, learning in a very preliminary way of “new” organizations like the Students for a Democratic Society and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—but being in the middle of Latin America, in what was then called the underdeveloped world, really moved it along (“underdeveloped,” in common usage at the time, was replaced in the 1970s by what we use today, the less judgmental and more politically correct “less developed” and “developing”). Fundamental to everything was the landownership system, in which huge tracts were owned by single owners—many of them American corporations—where the people who worked the land were conveyed along with the land. Once, I asked a campesino (a man who worked someone else’s land) who the owner was of a vast Andean cornfield stretching as far as the eye could see. “Se llama Granny Goose,” perhaps the largest potato chip manufacturer in America, was the response.

Labor relations were primitive in the 1960s. At a big U.S.-owned copper mine, Peru’s rudimentary labor laws were systematically circumvented by firing workers a few days before their probationary time ended and then rehiring them a few days later, thus avoiding entry into any “benefits” period. And all of this was done with the approval and collaboration of the U.S. embassy and, it seemed to me, the whole U.S. establishment, government, military, and private. The most ordinary objections to any of these practices, it seemed, would prompt a determination that the people who objected were “radicals” or militant leftists or, of course, Communists. Hugo Blanco, a local labor agitator, who even favored land reform, acquired some support in the Andes region, and there was no debate about him or his causes at the U.S. embassy meetings I attended; he was considered a dangerous leftist, and we should cooperate with the local military to “take him out.”

At the same time, a dispute was brewing between Standard Oil of New Jersey and the Peruvian government over a grotesquely unfair contract negotiated by a previous military government. The government was asking a slightly higher royalty from Standard (now Exxon) and was threatening to slow down production until the dispute was resolved. The response of our embassy was to seek the elimination of all aid to the country, and the end of its participation in the Alliance for Progress, unless Peru gave up the argument.

In fact, the Blanco matter even caused the temporary dismissal of our Peace Corps team from these weekly country team meetings: The head of the U.S. military mission (we had one in every Latin American country, for what purpose I found it hard to determine; war was hardly imminent) announced at a team meeting that if “that fellow Blanco gains enough support, this country will go right down the drain,” while twirling his index finger from left to right to demonstrate. My deputy, Bill Mangin, replied, “General, you forgot—this country is south of the equator; it would go down the drain counterclockwise,” twirling his finger from right to left. We were banished from the meeting for a few weeks.

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I doubt if John F. Kennedy or Sargent Shriver had anticipated the wide result when contemplating the impact of the Peace Corps on the Americans who went overseas to learn how life was lived in the developing world, but for me it was clear: The Peace Corps radicalized us. I see this clearly within myself and hear it from the hundreds, indeed thousands, of returned volunteers I have met and observed at various reunions.

Much of this occurred because of the strict Peace Corps requirement that volunteers live on the barest subsistence. Implicit was the idea that Americans abroad are generally “ugly” and live among the upper classes, display their wealth, and demand things most of the local people can’t begin to afford. It was these elements that attracted me to the Peace Corps in the first place, and I insisted upon this for the Peace Corps volunteers. If you lived—even roughly—with the “ordinary” citizens of a country and had no money to throw around or to move out, you would get a true-as-possible picture of their lives.

Listed as gospel by Shriver and others, the two foremost goals of the Peace Corps were to help other nations develop economically and to maybe impart some U.S. cultural and even political values along the way. But quickly, what came to be called the third objective of the Peace Corps emerged: to bring back to America a true picture of that Third World life. This grew out of what one of my political science professors at UCLA would refer to as an “inarticulate major premise”: that Americans weren’t really aware of how a substantial majority of people in less developed lands lived; and that, alas, the American people remained largely ignorant of how—at least in Latin America—the United States controlled the policies of other governments and inhibited and ultimately suppressed the will of the people of those countries, who almost always opposed these policies.

At the time I went to Latin America for the Peace Corps, the most conspicuous example of such a “suppressed” country had been, of course, Cuba. There, sixty years after the Spanish-American War “liberated” Cuba from Spain, we were running the country largely for the benefit of a few U.S. companies and one American institution—organized crime—and for decades we had imposed an occupation by the U.S. Marines. So strong was the opposition to this state of affairs that a small, ragtag bunch of self-styled “revolutionaries” under Fidel Castro rather quickly overcame the army of the latest U.S.-backed tyrant, Fulgencio Batista.

Peru seemed to me then a sort of pre-Castro Cuba, with most of the land owned by a few, many of them foreigners from the United States and Japan; the petroleum reserves and industry controlled by and the profits shared by a few (under a collusive contract entered into by a few wealthy local profiteers and Standard Oil); and an urban population largely consisting of poor squatters and a few hopelessly underfinanced private entrepreneurs.

The oligarchy that ran the country relied heavily on its armed forces, paid and supplied largely by the United States and commanded by a locally compliant ally of the Pentagon. Whenever a truly radical—and, of necessity, anti-U.S.—figure emerged from an election, he would be swiftly overthrown by the armed forces, always with scant or no objection from the true caudillo, the American ambassador.

In fact, my years working for the Peace Corps demonstrated to me (this was not something I’d expected or looked for) that U.S. policy, heavy-handed and with no questions asked, was to side with power and maintain that power. We opposed, and scorned, even the most basic ideas we had thoroughly accepted at home. Worker rights, a minimum wage, the value of widespread ownership of property, the dangers of a society based on class and race, the necessity of upward social mobility—all those were opposed, almost instinctively, by an army of American bureaucrats living in a style and on a scale far above what most had experienced back in the United States

The most powerful person in any Latin American country, including its own elected or self-appointed leaders, was the American ambassador. And because this was in the most heated time of the Cold War, virtually all of those who opposed the “Colossus of the North,” whether explicitly or merely through striving for some small part of the democracy we allegedly supported around the world, were labeled “leftists” or simply “Communists.” One thing I learned early: If officials call a man a Communist often enough and loudly enough, he will almost certainly become one.

It was clear from the day I arrived in Peru that the most unpopular person in the country, among ordinary people, was the American ambassador. I also saw that in country after country throughout Latin America we were doing the same thing and had been doing it for as long as anyone could remember.