Word: accion
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Into this setting come volunteers from ACCION (Americans for Community Action in Other Countries), a sort of private Peace Corps. Their primary job is to develop a community spirit in the barrios (slums) and to stimulate the habit of self-help. What complicates their task is the numbing sense of futility bred by the sprawling poverty. In Caracas, for instance, innumerable tin and cardboard huts perch uncertainly on the scenic hillsides. They are put up overnight and house hundreds of thousands of peasants who flood the city seeking work and a better life. They find neither. Few make more than...
Volunteers (called Accionista) might help the unskilled poor build a clay pipe to bring in water or teach them basic job skills such as sewing and welding. But for the most part, ACCION is not there to give technical assistance or to dole out aid. In fact, alms-giving charities just hinder ACCION's effort to stimulate the people into initiating projects for themselves...
...organized now into state-controlled syndicates but under the shadow of the great anarchist and socialist unions of the Republic-which still operate underground, still hold the sympathies of many workers. The second sphere is the Christian Democratic Movement, a loose coalition of Catholic groups ranging from the conservative Accion Catolica, which supports the regime, to the left-leaning Catholic labor movements, which oppose it. (Members of Opus Dei can be found in all groups.) The third is the Monarchists, well organized but without mass popular support. And above them all is the army, leaning at the moment toward...
Disgusted at the ever-expanding Lima slums and impatient for swifter reforms, Belaúnde finally decided to form his own political party a few months before the 1956 presidential elections. He named it Accion Popular, a catch phrase suggesting that the best help is selfhelp. No one would help the peasants unless they awoke from their coca-chewing lethargy and helped themselves-in the same cooperative, community spirit of their Inca forefathers. Working together, they could build roads and schools and hospitals -Belaúnde would see that they got the tools. "This was the philosophical idea," he says...
Profits for Progress. At least 70% of ACCION'S current $420,000 budget comes from Venezuelan contributors, and it can count on future support from the "Voluntary Dividend for the Community," a new program whereby Venezuelan corporations agree to kick in 2% to 5% of their profits to help fight poverty (TIME, March 6). Gradually, the Americans are turning over their jobs to Venezuelan volunteers and to slum leaders themselves. Says Blatchford: "That's what we want to do-work ourselves out of jobs." They may not get the chance. Already communities in Brazil, Nicaragua, Bolivia...