Word: hacienda
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...Andean peaks divide the country into three mutually suspicious regions. To add to the sense of un-togetherness, 1% of the population owns 60% of the land, and in the bleak highlands, where half of the country's 5,000,000 people live in medieval squalor and ignorance, hacienda owners pay their workers as little as 5? a day. The four-man military junta that toppled hard-drinking President Carlos Julio Arosemena three years ago promised to change all that. In a blizzard of decrees, they set out on a daring program that sought moderate landreform, modernized tax collections...
...down the forbidding, 4,000-mile chain of Andes. In some countries the call for reform and development comes through loud and clear. In others, the attitudes of centuries are hard to change. Everywhere, it will be nip and tuck to meet the suddenly rising expectations. As one hacienda owner says: "We have held our Indians in bondage and misery since the Conquest. Now our day is passing, their day is dawning. The transition could be a nightmare...
...hundreds of decrees organizing a civil service, setting up a land reform, revising the tax system. New industry (paint, textiles, detergents) is flowing into Quito and Guayaquil. In the highlands, where half of Ecuador's 4,700,000 people (80% of them Indian-descended) still live, some hacienda workers are paid only 50 a day, are often treated with medieval cruelty. "On many haciendas," says a parish priest, "there is neither...
...star of the picture, of course, it is Lana who suffers most. And at 44, Actress Turner looks precisely like a girl whose million-dollar assets have been frittered away on gaudy clothes and dime-novel escapades. So she goes out to a friend's hacienda, dolls up in traditional tienta costume, falls off her horse and gets gored by a young bull. Moments after they rush her to the hospital, her marriage is saved. Only Love is lost, but probably no one will notice...
...giving up to 32 acres to a family in rich coastal areas, up to 75 acres in the highlands. If the program is carried out successfully, the change will be dramatic. Most of the country's arable land has been concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy hacienda owners ever since colonial days; the peasants either worked as sharecroppers or scratched a bare living out of their own tiny plots, often no larger than a single furrow. Today a peasant's life expectancy is only 32 years, and his income is about $110 annually. To get maximum...