Peru
Kenneth Pike was the first SIL representative to visit Peru in late 1943. SIL signed a contract with the Peruvian Ministry of Education on June 28, 1945. In Peru and later expansions, Townsend “found mission tailor-made to the needs of U.S. policymakers…American missionaries had always accompanied American businesses abroad, but the political climate in postwar Latin America gave Townsend’s new crop of missionary translators and educators a special appeal to U.S. ambassadors who were charged with securing markets and resources for the American economy.” 1942 also marked Peru’s victory against Ecuador in a conflict concerning the two countries’ oil-rich Amazonian borderland. President Manuel Odría, Prado’s successor, supported Townsend’s aviation-based plan as a means of bringing military expertise and equipment from the U.S. As firm nationalists, both presidents strongly believed in the value of the Amazon for its natural resources and possible colonization, Stoll claims that both also agreed that the SIL would be the most important organization to introduce the indigenous population to the new realities of western expansion, all while providing a nascent infrastructure.
Read more about this topic: William Cameron Townsend
Famous quotes containing the word peru:
“The idea that nations should love one another, or that business concerns or marketing boards should love one another, or that a man in Portugal should love a man in Peru of whom he has never heard—it is absurd, unreal, dangerous.... The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)