With Rousseau in Latin America.

AS DARKNESS fell, a tropical rainstorm pelted the bulletproof van that drove me to the Casa Blanca in San Salvador to meet briefly with President Jose Napoleon Duarte last month. Pulled from one meeting to another, the president finally found 15 minutes for me. Halfway through, the guerrillas blew a light tower, and without pausing the chief of state continued to converse in total darkness, until the emergency generator kicked in.

The president (whom I greatly admire) knew that I was lecturing on "Creation Theology" in El Salvador and Guatemala, as I had in Brazil and Argentina. He expressed a touch of impatience with my emphasis on economics. My theme was that democracies must help the poor to "better their condition" or else lose legitimacy. "My priorities," he responded, "are hominization, pacification, participation, democratization, and reactivization," pronouncing the words precisely as if they should be italicized. Only under the last heading did he include the word he preferred not to use, economics. He worried more about helping the informal economy than the formal one.

Among many people I met in Latin America, ideas like growth, incentives, profits, and a climate for investment and job-creation are faintly distasteful. For generations, conservative Latin Americans, for whom liberalismo means capitalism, individualism, and material progress, have said: "Liberalismo es pecado" (liberalism is sinful).

A priest in Guatemala explained to me how some of his brother priests, followers of liberation theology, unconsciously believe that countries like El Salvador and Guatemala will always remain poor, they're hopeless, and so the only Christian thing to do is to make sure that all "participate" in the poverty and come to share it in a "humane" way. Not for them economic growth and lifting the poor out of poverty. Some seem to imagine a kind of involuntary Franciscanism imposed upon all.

When Latin Americans say "rich," some do not think of persons born poor, whose talent, imagination, and inventiveness provide new goods and services for others; they think of large landholders who have been rich for generations and have done little to make the economic system churn with change, innovation, opportunity, and upward/downward mobility. Others think of the "rich" solely as consumers of Sonys, GE refrigerators, and other First World hardware. They do not think of them as job-creators, investors, and producers of opportunity.

CARTOON ADS in newspapers, sponsored by Christian groups, mock the U.S. dollar as a false god. Such ads use Biblical texts to assert that poverty and fraternal leveling are the sole Christian way. They give not a hint that business, entrepreneurship, and economic activism might be crucial Christian vocations, of indispensable aid to the poor. Indeed, some Christians clearly confuse the pre-capitalist order they inherit, led by landholders, with the new dynamics of capitalism, of which they see so few signs. They resent both the old order and its new alternative.

A journalist in Brazil explained to me that many, influenced by liberation theology, are the children of Rousseau and the Franciscan social mystic, Joachim of Floris (1132-1202). They desire a "new age" of nostalgia and innocence, without the complexities of a modern political economy. They do not wish to deal with the abiding selfishness in individuals. They want to abolish the old order, so as to liberate the "Gentle Savage" hidden within each simple and fraternal human heart. More like Rousseau than Marx, some liberation theologians think private property damaging.

To this end, Biblical texts are endlessly quoted. The Bible is used as a plan for a new "fraternal" order, a seemingly innocent utopianism that evokes a dream of "paradise." Thence begins the ominous journey from Rousseau to Marx. For such persons, democracy and capitalism appear to be too messy, too complex, too reliant on fallible checks-and-balances, and insufficiently childlike. Alas, it is true that democracy and capitalism are ideas acquired by those no longer young, those who have watched beautiful abstractions end in murder.

In Brazil, 37 per cent of the population is under 15 years of age; elsewhere the percentage is higher. Just for children already born, some seventy million new jobs will have to be created in Latin America by 1999. These jobs are not likely to be found in traditional agriculture. By 1999, the multinationals (which seem to be withdrawing) will probably be hiring fewer workers than at present. Thus, Latin America urgently needs about twenty million new small enterprises, each hiring three to twenty workers. So far, though, there is pitifully little moral support in Latin America for entrepreneurship. Jobs are desired, but the job-creators are despised.

Latin America is desperate for realistic economic progress. Fortunately, in virtually every country there are brilliant students of the liberal society, devoted both to democracy and to economic creativity. During the past twenty years, several million youngsters have graduated from the universities. Latin America has always excelled in natural resources; it is only beginning to excel in inventiveness. Thus, as in France and Italy, the "blue [liberal] revolution" is capturing the imagination of the young. Such new liberals must fight against traditionalists and conservatives on the right and against Marxists and "Franciscans" on the left. Their strongest ally is reality.