Peru's General Manuel Odria, onetime subdirector of his country's War College, held a soldierly reunion this week in Lima with Venezuela's Colonel Marcos Pérez Jiménez, one of his best students back in the early '40s. Pérez Jiménez revisited Peru with the prestige of an old grad who made good: he is the dictatorial President of Venezuela (TIME, Feb. 28). Host Odria greeted him with easy confidence: he is the dictatorial President of Peru.
Solidarity among strongmen seemed to be the meeting's theme, but it was tinged with subtle rivalry. The gift that Pérez Jiménez brought was a replica of Simón Bolivar's sword, studded with 860 sapphires—a lavish memento, but also a neat reminder that Peru historically owes its independence to Venezuela's Bolivar. And in any economic comparison, oil-rich Venezuela could lay claim to the more spectacular boom (TIME, Feb. 28). But Peru could also make an impressive boast.
Quietly and courageously. Peru has revamped its economy and pushed ahead to a solidly based prosperity. In 1949 its government became one of the first in the world to cast off a stifling tangle of wartime and postwar controls on business and currency exchange. Since then, national production has doubled. Foreign investors have been looking toward Peru with hope, and moving their money in. And the present prosperity seems to be only the prelude to long-haul progress.
Odria feels proud of his role in this task, and partly in consequence, he has recently made an unorthodox and undictatorlike decision. He says, repeatedly, that at the end of his term, in June 1956, he intends to step out of the presidency. A promise to leave power, followed by a coy show of succumbing to duty and staying on, is standard politics in Latin America. But Odria seems firmly set on leaving. Said he recently: "The constitution clearly states that at the end of my term I must go. That is what I plan to do. Moreover, I am tired."
A Land Asunder. After seven years of governing Peru, Odria, at 57, may well be tired. The country he runs is geographically sundered into three parts by the highest mountains in the world outside the Himalayas.
¶In the Green Hell to the east is a rain-catching jungle bigger than Texas that supports a scant 13% of the people, some of them aboriginal headshrinkers.
¶West of the jungle rise the high Andes —"God Almighty with His back up." On this vast plateau the ancient Incas, seeming to thrive on the cold, thin air, built the roads and stone cities for a creative population. The 5,400,000 numb survivors cling to their ancestral languages and communal farms, to their llamas and alpacas, but they have almost no part in their country's money economy. Only the rare towns and the mines, where U.S.-owned companies dig copper, lead, zinc and silver, are in this century.