Healthy Change

"We have a revolution here every Thursday afternoon at half-past 2, and our government is run like a nightclub," cracked Don Juan Palacios, the improbable count in Ludwig Bemelmans' 1941 travel book about Ecuador, The Donkey Inside. If the count (or Bemelmans) were to visit Ecuador this week, he might have to eat those cynical words. One of South America's backward nations has been undergoing a healthy change. Since 1950, Ecuador (pop. 3,200,000) has:

P: Doubled the government budget (to $70 million a year) and balanced it.

P:Nearly doubled total exports, to $100 million a year (v. imports of $86 million).

P: Doubled production of such commodities as fabrics, trebled cement output.

P:Greatly boosted production of cacao (the leading cash export), coffee and oil.

P:Made itself the world's No. 1 exporter of bananas, at 20 million stems annually.

The powerhouse of this prosperity is the layer of productive topsoil three feet thick that covers the warm lowlands around the busy port of Guayaquil (pop. 262,000). But because picturesque Quito (pop. 212,000), some 9,000 ft. up in the Andes, is the seat of government, it happily shares the fruits of the boom. Once slurred as the city of "100 churches and one bathtub," the capital now boasts new hotels, nightclubs, theaters. Around Quito, however, in the eroded Andean valleys that are overpopulated with 60% illiterate Indians, the economy is still sluggish. The Panama-hat industry, once a mainstay of the mountain Indians, is dying.

To President Jose Maria Velasco Ibarra, the contrast between the coast and the mountains emphasizes the need for communications that would move labor to the coast and step up interregional trade. In 1953 he started a four-year. $50 million program to add new road and rail links to the main existing connection, the old Guayaquil & Quito Railway. Now 1,100 miles of new routes are reaching out to tie Ecuador together (see map).

Good prices for Ecuador's exports, government encouragement for farmers and investors, more than $15 million in U.S. aid and a stable currency have all helped to let backward Ecuador share belatedly in the fast economic development that other parts of South America have enjoyed since World War II. But back of all these factors is a democratic climate and relative political peace. Minor plots still pop up occasionally and are duly put down, but between them the administrations of Velasco Ibarra and his predecessor, Galo Plaza Lasso, add up to the longest period free of successful Thursday-afternoon revolutions since 1925.

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