I turn now to a prospect of great promise:  our Hemispheric relations.  The Alliance for Progress is being rapidly transformed from proposal to program.  Last month in Latin America I saw for myself the quickening of hope, the revival of confidence, the new trust in our country—­among workers and farmers as well as diplomats.  We have pledged our help in speeding their economic, educational, and social progress.  The Latin American Republics have in turn pledged a new and strenuous effort of self-help and self-reform.

To support this historic undertaking, I am proposing—­under the authority contained in the bills of the last session of the Congress—­a special long-term Alliance for Progress fund of $3 billion.  Combined with our Food for Peace, Export-Import Bank, and other resources, this will provide more than $1 billion a year in new support for the Alliance.  In addition, we have increased twelve-fold our Spanish and Portuguese language broadcasting in Latin America, and improved Hemispheric trade and defense.  And while the blight of communism has been increasingly exposed and isolated in the Americas, liberty has scored a gain.  The people of the Dominican Republic, with our firm encouragement and help, and those of our sister Republics of this Hemisphere, are safely passing through the treacherous course from dictatorship through disorder towards democracy.

VIII.  THE NEW AND DEVELOPING NATIONS

Our efforts to help other new or developing nations, and to strengthen their stand for freedom, have also made progress.  A newly unified Agency for International Development is reorienting our foreign assistance to emphasize long-term development loans instead of grants, more economic aid instead of military, individual plans to meet the individual needs of the nations, and new standards on what they must do to marshal their own resources.

A newly conceived Peace Corps is winning friends and helping people in fourteen countries—­supplying trained and dedicated young men and women, to give these new nations a hand in building a society, and a glimpse of the best that is in our country.  If there is a problem here, it is that we cannot supply the spontaneous and mounting demand.

A newly-expanded Food for Peace Program is feeding the hungry of many lands with the abundance of our productive farms—­providing lunches for children in school, wages for economic development, relief for the victims of flood and famine, and a better diet for millions whose daily bread is their chief concern.

These programs help people; and, by helping people, they help freedom.  The views of their governments may sometimes be very different from ours—­but events in Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe teach us never to write off any nation as lost to the Communists.  That is the lesson of our time.  We support the independence of those newer or weaker states whose history, geography, economy or lack of power impels them to remain outside “entangling alliances”—­as we did for more than a century.  For the independence of nations is a bar to the Communists’ “grand design”—­it is the basis of our own.