Calculated Risk

In his turbulent year in office, President Gabriel Gonzalez Videla has gambled a lot, and always won. Last week, his victories over the Communists behind him, he was ready to gamble again. Just one year after signing the $175,000,000 trade agreement with Juan Peron (TIME, Dec. 23, 1946), he sent the treaty to Congress for ratification.

As it had from the beginning, the powerful Chilean National Agricultural Society led the opposition. It was dead set against the limited trans-Andean customs union that the treaty would set up. That, it said, would lead to Argentine food-dumping and put Chilean farmers out of business. Even Chilean vineyards, it contended, could never compete with the mass-produced wines of Mendoza.

Under the agreement, Chile would ship coal, iron and copper to Argentina. But, said other critics, after the new steel plant at Concepcion is completed in 1949, Chile will have no coal to export, may even have to import coal from the U.S. to keep going. In the end, they were sure Argentina would get a stranglehold on Chile's economy.

Gonzalez was unimpressed. Now, more than ever, the country needed the $175,000,000 Argentine credit promised in the treaty for public works and industrialization. And Gonzalez was even surer, after the year's events, that a revitalized Chile could repay the money later without losing her independence. But what prompted him to send his treaty to Congress last week was his strong new political position. A year ago he ruled with Communist support. Now he had ditched the Commies, won other friends in Congress. Yet as champions of cheap food for the masses, the Communists would have to vote for his treaty. The president of the Santiago stock exchange now backed the deal, too. Gonzalez reckoned that he had votes enough to make it.

That left just one more question: would Argentina herself ratify the treaty? After all, Peron was no longer so flush with funds. Gonzalez , flashing his most confident smile, was not afraid of that either. Peron, he said, would keep his bargain.

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