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A small group of men carefully made their way through the steel and concrete skeletons of one of Latin America's biggest housing projects—52 apartment towers, each twelve stories high, rising over 30 acres on the outskirts of Lima to provide government housing for 10,000 people. Stepping lightly across an open trench, a well-dressed visitor fell into step beside the chief engineer and started firing intense questions. "Is it going fast enough?" he demanded. "What are your problems?" "Are you getting all the help you need?" Everything was on schedule, replied the engineer. As the two circled the project, workers on the scaffolding overhead clapped wildly and commenced the chant heard around Peru: "Belaunde! Belaunde! Be-la-un-de!"
Straightening up, the visitor cupped his hand slightly and delivered the forward chop of his arm that is his symbol. "Adelante," he said. Forward.
Forward is the course of Fernando Belaúnde Terry, 52, President of Peru and the man who in the past 19 months has captured the imagination of his people as no one before. He is an aristocrat, a member of one of Peru's older and wealthier families. Were it not for the force of circumstance, he would probably still be just a successful Lima architect. His political enemies call him an adventurer, a buccaneer, a demagogue. In his messianic public oratory, he has at times approached the emotional level of a Fidel Castro. But the revolution that Belaunde carries forward is peaceful, democratic, and made in Latin America. As far as the U.S. is concerned, he is the very model of an Alianza President.
Lighting a Path. Other Latin American Presidents get more of the world's attention. Mexico's Diaz Ordaz administers a prosperous, rapidly industrializing nation. Venezuela's Raul Leoni is pumping his country's vast oil wealth into impressive reforms; Argentina's Arturo Illia is struggling with inflationary troubles in the best-fed nation in Latin America; and Brazil's Humberto Castello Branco seems to be starting his gigantic country back toward order after toppling a ruinous leftist regime. But there is genuine excitement in Peru. What is going on there under Belaúnde lights a path ahead for the entire spiny west coast of South America from Colombia to Chile.
This is Indian South America, land of the ancient Incas and Spanish conquistadores, whose 45 million descendants have always lived in mutually exclusive societies: the white Spanish minority that owns the wealth and the hopeless, anonymous Indian and half-breed majority that exists in squalid slums or labors on Andean haciendas. "In the sweep of all its history," says Belaúnde, "our land has been the theater of endless bloody struggles. And always there remained great gulfs between the conquerors and the conquered."