Stable

At the six-month mark on a soul-trying stabilization program, Bolivia took a look around last week to see if the stern anti-inflation measure was actually working. By most of the signs, it was. But with rumblings from labor on the rise, the question now is how much longer the nation would keep taking the medicine.

Plentiful Food. Long queues, once the most characteristic street scene in La Paz, have disappeared. Instead of lining up for supplies of subsidized food and then rushing to sell them on the black market for a tenfold profit, Bolivians shop from plentiful stocks. The free price of bread and meat is about one-third the old black rate. Farm production will be up 59% by the end of the year. The boliviano has come down from its crazy peak of 13,000 to the dollar, and has been averaging 7,700.

This was gratifying news for President Hernan Siles Zuazo, who has backed the program with everything from a hunger strike to threats to resign, and for George Jackson Eder, an old Latin America hand who left International Telephone & Telegraph Corp. to supervise Bolivia's National Monetary Stabilization Council. But Juan Lechin, executive secretary of the powerful workers' confederation, was looking out for labor and labor alone. At the confederation's second congress last week, he burst into an impassioned defense of the featherbedding privileges that the workers took for their own after bringing the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (M.N.R.) to power in 1952. He demanded death for the Eder program ("He speaks the language of the English viceroy in India"), and an end to wage ceilings. In the wake of the speech the boliviano took its first serious flutter in recent months, up to 8,100.

General Strike? Grim warnings against Lechin's course were sprinkled all through a detailed report released by Stabilizer Eder last fortnight. He cautioned that the "miracles" of stabilization could be wiped out by a round of raises now. He caustically criticized the law that bars firing of surplus employees. In the last five years, said Eder, the number of workers in the government-run mines increased 20% while production dropped 50%. The report's blunt summary said that if Bolivians expect U.S. aid to continue at its present level (about one-third the government budget), so must stabilization.

In a speech at the labor confederation, President Siles Zuazo pleaded, warned and quoted statistics to prove that austerity must stay. But as the workers' congress went on, labor sentiment still favored a general wage hike, with a general strike the alternative.

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