Word: bela
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After a year of military rule, Peru finally has constitutionally elected a President. He is Fernando Belaúnde Terry, 50, a onetime architect and aristocrat turned crowd-rousing politician. Of the three candidates, he was considered the least likely to succeed. Yet on election day, he won votes from the Christian Democrats on one hand, the far leftists on the other, and from Peruvians in the middle who regarded him as a sensible compromise between Haya de la Torre, a weary ex-revolutionary, and Manuel Odria, a tired ex-dictator. With the count nearly complete, Bela...
Escape to the Sea. Educated in France and the U.S. (University of Texas), Belaúnde was one of Lima's most successful architects when he decided to enter politics in 1944, immediately won a seat in the federal assembly, and soon set his sights on the presidency. With fiery speeches and expansive promises, he came within 110,000 votes of beating Manuel Prado in 1956, and he has been campaigning ever since. In 1957, he fought a saber duel with a Congressman who called him a "demagogue and a conscious liar" (both men were slightly wounded). Two years...
...East. In this year's campaign, Belaúnde promised Peruvians land reform based on expropriation of the big estates, worker-controlled industrial cooperatives, housing, food, jobs, easy loans. He talked of opening up the lush jungles to the east beyond the Andes-and went there himself by canoe and muleback. He opposed U.S.-owned oil companies, but denied that he was anti-Yankee and called for more foreign investment. When Peru's Communists offered their support, he said, "I am against international Communism." Yet he did not reject their votes...
...better care of the poor, but the message gets a lot of mileage. In 1961 Odría was hit in the face by a potato during his first campaign venture outside the capital of Lima and he never set foot in the provinces again. This time, bankrolled by Belaúnde's disaffected conservatives, he is stumping the length of the country. The army obviously would not object if he won and -although not obviously-both Peru's best newspaper, La Prensa, and its prominent publisher, ex-Premier Pedro Beltr...
...sensible observer ventures to predict a sure winner. Yet as election day draws near, the experts in all three parties privately agree that Odría, onetime dictator or no, is getting the biggest campaign play. One Belaúnde aide reports that his pollsters in the cities tell him "everybody's talking about Odría." Says an Odría strategist: "I can only tell you that I think it will be close...