Latin American Scene Changing

George Cabot Lodge '50 told an audience of Harvard Dames last night that "what you see in these countries [Latin America] is the dissolution of the feudal system..." and that "aggressive forces on the left are rushing in to fill the vacuum."

On the right, he said, are "business, the military, landowners, and the rich," while on the left are "a small radical minority bent on overthrowing them." But the Latin Revolution needn't be of the leftist variety, he claimed; it is "something that is going on deeper--economic, social, and cultural," and Americans can help guide it.

"We are far more revolutionary than they are. And that can be proven," he said. As an example, he cited the work of the Central American Project of the Business School, where he is an administrative assistant to the director.

The project, which administers 47,000 acres of land donated by a wealthy landowner, is working at the bottom of society, teaching peasants that "their children, by golly, have to learn," and at the top, teaching managers to analyze their business problems "unemotionally, objectively, and as deeply as possible... We're trying to take the manager by the hand--to join hands with him--to teach him the inevitable..." he said.

Potential national leaders in Centro America are cut off from one another, he said. The project's job is to get the tenant farmers, the bishops, the mill-owners, the shop-owners, and the mayors "together in the same room," to solve their own problems, not to force an ideology on them.