Word: betancourt
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Castro announced his confiscatory land-reform program for Cuba, a study commission that ranged across the political spectrum from two Communists to the Archbishop of Caracas was at work on the same problem in Venezuela-where 1.7% of the landholders own 74% of the land. Last week President Romulo Betancourt asked Congress to pass into law the commission's recommendations for a "peaceful, legal and orderly reform." No drastic social surgery, the bill's sensible goal is to force untilled land into cultivation and thereby reduce the $135 million that Venezuela now spends annually to import food...
Into the Lair. Betancourt began by wooing the military in its own lair-the marble, mahogany, and gold-crusted officers' clubs built as a form of bribery by Pérez Jiménez. He offered not bribery but calming talk: "The armed forces are indispensable for the republic." He insistently hinted that the day of the bloodless, predawn coup had ended...
...President excluded the Communists from his government but achieved a look of political unity by giving three Cabinet posts each to opposition parties, only two to his own A.D. (Seven "independents" are all trusted Betancourt friends.) With a solid majority in Congress and state governorships, A.D. is launching a fight for the labor unions, heavily infiltrated by Communists after the dictator fled...
Behind the Door. Pipe-smoking President Betancourt disappears behind his padded office door in Miraflores Palace before 8 a.m., sees some 60 visitors a day. His time is largely devoted to a nightmarish array of white elephants left behind by the dictatorship. Items: an unfinished $450 million steel works, gathering rust in the Orinoco jungle, a chain of showpiece hotels, 300 colorful apartment buildings, some of them 15 stones high, in Caracas. By official count, 90% of the apartment tenants refuse to pay rent...
...Betancourt is still firmly committed to socialism but will try to sell off or shut down the worst of the money losers. He also plans such overdue measures as building hospitals and schools (the country is 65% illiterate), which will strain even the oil-rich budget. The army still has tanks, and the Communists still could muster 80,000 well-organized rioters. But working for Romulo Betancourt are his honesty, his political savvy and his country's deep hunger for peace...