THE HEMISPHERE: Legend on Tour

Never before had they heard or seen such a speaker. He cracked jokes, talked fast, talked slow, beat his chest with his fists, waved his arms in circles, crouched, whirled, broke off his most telling sentences to invite applause. In the hall of Panama City’s Inter-American University, Panamanian students roared approval. Yes, they liked the man from Peru, Victor Raul Haya de la Torre.

In most Latin American countries Haya was little more than a name—but he was a name. As a student revolutionary he had passed through most of Central America as un unwelcome exile, suspected of Communism and feared for his wild talk of uniting South America’s Indians. The U.S. had once picked him off a ship at Panama, sent him to Europe to get him out of the way. For 16 years he had been the leader of the underground opposition in Peru. Twice, his followers claimed, he had been elected president of Peru, if the ballots had been counted right.

But now his furtive days were over.

Haya’s Apra (People’s Party) was out in the open and had become the majority party in Peru. Haya himself, now an outspoken foe of Communism, was all steamed up about paying back defaulted Peruvian bonds to the U.S. (so that he could get new funds for his industrial, irrigation and Indian-aid projects). With the U.S. State Department he stood in high favor. And in capitals like Santiago and Caracas, government was now in the hands of leftists, some of whom (Venezuela’s Romulo Betancourt, for one) had known Haya in exile.

Last week’s visit to Panama was one stop on a tour. Haya had already been in Colombia and Venezuela. In Panama, where the university gave him an honorary law degree, Lieut. General Willis D. Crittenberger invited him to lunch at Canal Zone headquarters. Haya would go to Costa Rica and Guatemala. To each country he had an official invitation.

What Apra Wants. In some ways he was still the old Haya. Throughout his tour he still stuck up for continental unity. “What I am fighting about,” he cried, “is that in this hemisphere there is a United States of the north and disunited states of the south. Small and big can never live together. We must make ourselves big by uniting. We Apristas are against customs barriers and want political and economic cooperation among all Latin American countries.”

He punched out his party’s home program in Apra-style slogans: “We don’t want to take riches away from those who have them; we want to create riches for those who haven’t them. In the old days democracy meant liberty without bread. Today totalitarianism means bread without liberty. Apra wants bread with liberty.”