On the Firing Line

Under its dusty pepper trees and somber eucalyptuses, the straggling town of Ucurena (altitude: 8,500 ft.), in Bolivia's Cochabamba Valley, is outwardly quaint and tranquil. Indian women in bright dresses and stovepipe hats of white straw dogtrot along its streets, with babies and water jugs lashed to their backs, just as their forebears did 100 years ago. But all Bolivia knows that Ucurena, by virtue of a turbulent role in the country's land-reform movement, is the symbol of the Indian farmer, now trying manfully to break away from centuries of serfdom and build a new way of life.

Will diligent infiltrators peddling Communism capture the sympathies of these newly aware and newly dignified men? Or will they be influenced by dedicated U.S. citizens who man the ramparts of the Point Four program? At Ucurena last week the answer was clear: on this far-off firing line in the struggle for men's minds, the West was winning easily.

Soft-Voiced Moon. Twenty years ago, Ucurena was part of a 7,000-acre estate based on a 400-year-old Spanish land grant. It was owned by a Roman Catholic convent and leased, with its 12,000 Indian families, to a powerful patron. For the right to sharecrop small plots on a fifty-fifty basis, the campesinos had to till the patron's big fields, and even submit to being rented out as labor.

In 1936 the Ucurena Indians formed a farmers' union, succeeded after many setbacks in buying part of the estate. Their leader, Jose Rojas, was an idealistic reformer much taken with the preaching of Bolivian Marxists on the need for land reform. Ucurena soon got known as a "Red" town. Its example helped lead to the sweeping expropriation and redistribution of estates in 1953 by the leftist (but nonCommunist) government of President Victor Paz Estenssoro, which rules Bolivia today.

But though they had land, the campesinos lacked even basic know-how to get them through a period of drastic change. Into this unstable situation stepped a tall Oklahoman named Thomas J. Moon, a graduate of Texas A. & M., to take over Point Four's Inter-American Agricultural Service (SAI) in the Cochabamba Valley. Left-Winger Rojas' job as boss of the union of campesinos of Cochabamba soon thrust him into gingerly contact with the soft-voiced norteamericano. The meeting was an eye-opener to Rojas. Moon was obviously neither an imperialist nor a propagandist. All Moon wanted was Rojas' cooperation in getting on with the training of likely Bolivians as county agents to instruct the newly independent farmers.

Mutual Admiration. With Rojas' help, the county-agent program grew fast. Now SAI employs 870 Bolivians, led by 36 U.S. experts. Through demonstrations, flip charts, radio talks and movies narrated in Quechua, the local Indian language, 100,000 campesinos have learned the uses of chemical fertilizers, insecticides, high-yield seed and crop loans. Per-acre profits have gone up $100 or more; some of the farmers have even bought trucks.

Ucurena is rapidly trading in its old reputation as a center of radical ferment for new fame as a high producer of wheat and potatoes. Last week, after unseasonal frosts had ruined the potato crops in the 12,000-ft. highlands, Ucurena easily supplied an extra 200 tons of top-quality seed potatoes to plant an out-of-season crop in the lower valleys. Black-haired Jose Rojas, now 43, and Moon are mutual admirers, and Rojas refuses even to comment on the bad old days when he was anti-U.S. "Instead of the vague promises of the Communists," explains Joaquin de Lemoine Quiroga, governor of Cochabamba, "Point Four gave help, seeds, fertilizer and tools. The campesino, as an independent landowner, can form his own opinion."

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