(6 of 9)
When, early in 1958, armed-forces officers finally turned on the egregious Pérez Jiménez and forced him to yield to a junta headed by Rear Admiral Wolfgang Larrazábal, Betancourt returned with caution, worked calmly and steadily to reorganize A.D., stumped the country as the party's candidate for President, won a free election over Larrazábal. As his wife puts it, the maturer Betancourt has not changed "in his character, but in his way of seeing things." His days of snap decision and direct orders are over; now he probes problems with the principals involved, listens long to their points of view. For the sheer drive of his younger days, he has substituted gentle diplomacy.
Outside the Economy. It will take all these new-found characteristics to solve the problems that face Venezuela. Oil production—2,770,000 bbl. a day, second only to the U.S.—brings the government $2,400,000 a day in revenue, gives Venezuela the highest per-capita income—$800 a year—in Latin America. But oil brings poverty along with riches. Attracted by the smell of wealth and the hope of jobs, rural workers flock to oilfields and cities, only to sit idle in shantytowns. By leaving fields unworked behind them, they increase the need to import food. Last year the country spent $152 million to import staples such as wheat, corn, rice and meat. Imported eggs alone cost $30,000 a day.
The oil-economy prices are among the world's highest. It costs around $16,000 a year for a family to live a middle-class life in Caracas. And the wealth is sadly out of balance: 2,000,000 Venezuelans in a total population of 6,320,000 are outside the money economy entirely. Other problems that Betancourt faces:
¶ Large landowners, 1.9% of the farming population, hold 74% of the farming land; some 350,000 peasant families have neither land nor work.
¶ About 25% of Caracas' housing, 50% of housing in other cities and 99% of rural housing must be replaced.
¶ More than half the population is illiterate.
&3182; Total population is jumping at a fast 3% a year, and the work force is growing by 60,000 a year; urban unemployment is rising.
¶ There is only one hospital bed for every 500 inhabitants.
Betancourt's first year was a time of planning, but he took a few bites out of the urgent land-reform problem just the same. Congress is still debating his agrarian reform law, but the government seized the idle, overgrown estates of the cronies of Dictator Pérez Jiménez, added some state-owned land that was not busy. By year's end, 11,000 families were at work on 315,000 acres. Welfare goals beyond land reform in the next four years: $223 million in new schools for 300,000 additional children, $99 million on hospitals.