Springtime

Once more the earth had rocked gently on its spinning axis and once again spring had come to most of South America.

Now in November, from the Isthmus to the Horn, the sun slanted more kindly on 96,000,000 humans. Since four out of five of them depended directly for their lives on what the sun and soil and water gave them from their labors to eat, this was for most their hopeful season. Clockwise from the ten republics came the reports.

1. Venezuela. On the far plains, the llanos, that stretch from the Caribbean coastal Andes southward to the jungles of the Orinoco, the rains had ceased. Now, where the sparse cattle had been herded from hummock to hummock by boat, the floods would subside. Now the earth would crack and parch through six months of drought.

The crops were being gathered and they were good. On the humid shores of Lake Valencia sugar was being cut and corn harvested. The beans of coffee and cacao were stripped from highland groves in the northwest. But, as usual, the rusty soil of Venezuela had not produced enough. Given sufficient agricultural machinery from abroad, it might be five years, announced Secretary of Agriculture Eduardo Mendoza Goiticoa, before the nation could feed itself.

Meantime, Caracas boomed. Attention turned from the old pursuits of the soil to the speculations encouraged by the country's 1,000,000-barrel-a-day oil industry. Caraquenas feverishly built houses, streets, schools, soda fountains, bars, movies, hotels.

The arts prospered. Sweltering Maracaibo, the oil port, was about to get its own orchestra. A campaign against illiteracy -- with matchbooks exhorting DON'T BE ANALPHABETIC!-- was in full swing. The Government was distributing good cheap books, and it looked as though the new President of Venezuela's first representative government in generations would be Romulo Gallegos Freire, a revered old novelist. A nation, most of whose citizens believe that the way to cure a cold is to grow a beard, found itself saying : "We've always had a grand future. Now we have a chance to make the future the present."

2. Brazil. Two world wars had paid her in goods and services for everything she had sent to them, and still somehow they had left her crippled and broke.

Some living costs had risen 600%. Cities and towns rippled with unrest and uneasy protest.

In the steaming Amazon basin snakes sloughed their skins and downriver at Belem (pronounced Beleng) a two weeks' festival in honor of Our Lady of Nazareth, observed by the eating of barbecued beef, drinking rum aged in coconuts and dropping contributions into Our Lady's donkey cart, had just ended. South on the Hump, in the states of Pernambuco and Baia, the spring rains brought up tender green sprouts of sugar cane and tobacco, promising record crops.

Farther south, in the Platine states of Paran`a and Sao Paulo, the farmers were either up to their knees in water, planting rice, or up to their ankles in the locusts which had fallen on their wheatfields. The locusts, everyone said, had come again from Paraguay. Good crops or bad, the Brazilian on the land feared they would all rot in the soil. Transportation equipment, which must come from lands still hungover from war, was manga de colete, scarce as vest sleeves. It was about time something good happened for Brazil. Wasn't God supposed to be a Brazilian?

3. Uruguay. In three weeks there would be a national election: citizens would vote for a single president, and at the same time decide whether or not they would have a single president or an executive council of nine, on the order of Switzerland.

Meantime, the Uruguayan bathing resorts like Carrasco were ready to take the Argentines' vacation money. And meantime, behind the brave intellectual fac,ade of Montevideo lay the pueblos de ratas, the rat towns, the wretched, tuberculous barracks where the shepherds' and farmhands' families lived while the men worked in the fields and pastures ten months of the year.

In 1942-43 pastoral Uruguay had suffered a ruinous drought that killed off nearly two million sheep and cattle. Uruguay was paying for it now in high food prices. And there were locusts. It was said they came from Paraguay.

4. Argentina had locusts, too, in the northern part of Buenos Aires province and on up through the northeast, Entre Rios and Corrientes. You tried to keep them out of your fields of flaxseed and grains and sunflower with strips of sheet metal laid against the wire fences. If only, said the Argentines, the Paraguayans would control their locusts.

Twenty percent of Argentina, the tenderloin within a radius of 350 miles from Buenos Aires, grows most of everything that makes Argentina rich. There the humus is five, ten, 15 feet deep and, where the locusts had not come, spring found the alternate rows of deciduous fruit trees (the other rows are citrus and produce in winter) green with new fruit, the pastures of lavender-blossomed alfalfa up to the Shorthorns' bellies.

It was a hot spring. In Rosario, the great wheat port up the Parana from Buenos Aires and the nation's second city, tempers grew short. A football referee was beaten senseless by a mob of fans and almost lynched. The Argentine referees' association decreed a week-long protest strike. In B.A. the Senate okayed 1,196 laws in an hour; President Peron agreed to buy $100,000,000 worth of Spanish Government bonds to facilitate trade with Spain and cleared Ludwig Freude--an Argentine citizen of German birth who has lived in Argentina 33 years and whose son is Peron's political handyman--of all the Nazi complicity charged against him in the U.S. Blue Book.

With hot weather the price of nylons fell in Buenos Aires from $10 to $4 a pair. For some reason potatoes were unobtainable, but the gladiola-like branches of the ceibo, Argentina's national flower, luxuriated and the air was sharp with the hot odor of eucalyptus.

5. Paraguay, that tight little island wilderness of river and savanna and forest, was bothered with locusts in its spring pastures. The Paraguayans said the locusts came from Argentina.

6. Chile. Looking northward, the first of the five Andean republics is Chile, where spring had come hesitantly, like a girl from the sea, wet and cool. It was bad news for vineyardists that the wine crop was badly damaged by late frosts. It was bad news for Chilenos in general. Next year the common grades of wine might have to go above 18-c- a gallon (the same price as gasoline) and that would go hard with a nation which bows not even to the U.S. in its liking for alcohol.

In Valparaiso warships of the U.S. and Argentina arrived with delegations to the inaugural of new President Gonzalez Videla. He announced admission of three Communists to his Cabinet of eleven, the first Red invasion of this sort in Chilean history. The 1947 budget was cut from $221,000,000 to $203,000,000, chiefly at the expense of the departments of education, health and sanitation. Expenditures for military purposes were not seriously affected.

But Chileans, the Austrians of the Western world, the wittiest, the best-looking people on the continent, felt pretty good as spring came again. God, they also say, is a Chilean.

7. Bolivia. On Nov. 1, All Saints' Day, the beginning of seeding time, the young men come with their guitars and swing the prettiest cholas from the boughs of tall willows. After that there is a picnic and next day, the Day of the Dead, everyone lays flowers in the cemeteries for those who swing no more.

The national flower of Bolivia is the kantuta, bell-shaped and scarlet. The Incas said the flower first blossomed from the blood dropped by a Virgin of the Sun God, beloved by a prince and slain by the trick of a jealous witch. Spring came cold and dark to lofty Bolivia, but nobody recalled more beautiful kantutas. It was, Bolivians said, as if all the blood shed this year were reappearing as flowers.

8. Peru. On the puna, the more-than-two-mile-high sierra, the saffron moss took a little spring rain and greened. The llama, alpaca and wild vicuna prospered. Beyond the Divide, where the tributaries of the Urubamba, ancient river of the Incas, flow down their slotted valleys toward the Amazon, the oxen pulled the wooden plows across the tiny fields. It was not unusual to see as many as ten teams interminably plowing a valley acre terraced with the stones of the Inca.

To the north of Lima, Peru's TVA, the Santa Valley Corp., pressed on with South America's most exciting hydroelectric development. Even with abnormally high wages (78-c- a day), it was still difficult to keep the 1,300 Indian laborers steadily on the job. Some part of each year, in spite of the deadly verruga flies and the bone-dry soil of the western Andean slopes, they had to go back to tend their meager mountain farms.

Along the montana, the eastern slope, maybe oil would be discovered. The explorer Humboldt spoke of Peru as "a beggar sitting on a golden throne."

9. Ecuador, too, might grow oil-rich. Shell was prospecting to the east of the mountains, Standard near the coast. Meantime, there was a gasoline shortage in Quito. Undisturbed, the Indians were preparing for the annual pilgrimage to the Virgin of Quinche. Below Ecuador's 30-odd snow-capped volcanoes the orange, lemon, apple and pear trees blossomed together. The farmers of the coast looked to the yellow zapote flowers to tell them how soon and how hard the rains would come, and thus how good would be the growing season.

10. Colombia had an oil workers' strike and in sympathy the bus and taxi drivers of Bogota, "The Athens of South America," also quit. The Colombian oil workers wanted more money and the same treatment received by foreign employes. Later the Government took over transportation and distribution of gasoline for the duration of the strike. The oil companies are mostly foreign. Meantime the Bogotanos ("every man a poet") engaged in a newspaper debate as to whether Liberator Simon Bolivar (1783-1830) was a genius or mad.

Below Medellin, in the state of Caldas, the "brown gold" of Colombia, coffee, was in blossom. So was the virus of malaria, which preys on the ravaged men of Caldas.

San Isidro, who was a farmer, was the man to whom most of the people of South America prayed last week, whether in Spanish or Portuguese or--for perhaps a third of the 96,000,000--in some Indian tongue. Perhaps San Isidro knew, if the rest of the world did not, that behind the deceptive urbanity of a few coastal cities the South American in general had to wring his livelihood not from a continental garden but from patches of a wasteland of mountain, desert and jungle. Just about 2% of the land of Colombia, for instance, was under cultivation. Nevertheless the South American loved his land as few men ever have. Nobody on the planet was closer to the soil. He and his wife and children--like the vast majority of his fellow citizens--slept on it every night. And now spring was here.

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