0 - The Black Vault

THE BDM CORPORATION
cluster of smaller agrovilles for 120 families. The new comm,,,ities
offered the farmers many advantagas including ccmmunity Jefense, schools,
dispensaries, market centers, public gardens, and electricity. The GVN
expected warm surport from tne rural populace, but the peasants objected to
the agrovilles even more sharply than they had to previous resettlement
experiments.333,'
Under pressu-e frcm the Interior Ministry to meet ambitious
goiernment construction quotas, provincial and local officials scrambled to
get agrovilles underway. The peasants, who were supposed to c ,truct the
settlements, responded less than enthusiastically, therefore. 'courvee'
labor was reso-ted to, and thousands of Republican Youth were imported to
help.. For example, at one site -- Vi Thanh near Can Tho -- 20,000 peasants
were assembled from four districts, many more than the number whc could
expect to profit directly from the undertaking.34/
Moreover, most of those
who were selected to move into tne agoovflles which they had helped build,
did so unwillingly, for it
home,
often meant abandoning a cherished ancestral
tombs and developed garcens and fields for a stringe and desolate
place often without shade, toilet facilities cr provisions for livestock.35/
The Viet Cong put special emphasis into their anti-agroville
campaign,
issuing threats against village cadres ana assassinating some of
them. By the end of 1960, peasant resistance and insurgent attacks caused
abandonment of the program with only 22 out of 80 communities compieted. 36/
The telltale indicators of why the GVN's Land Oevelopment,
agglomeration and Agroville schemes had failed were not being read by Diem,
His government (with US aid) was unable to provide the rural population
with:
0 an effective counterinsurgency capability and,
* a viable politico-administrative framework.37/
Even as the Agroville program was winding down,
Diem and Nhu were
formulating their next attempt at pacifying the countryside--Strategic
Hamlets.
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