(3) Latin America

ON THE WORLD TODAY

As in our own country before Pearl Harbor, a struggle between isolationists and interventionists — with definitely pro-Axis forces deeply engaged in the infighting — is going on in Latin America. Of late the struggle has been fiercest in Brazil and the Argentine Republic.

ISOLATIONISTS IN BRAZIL

Brazilian developments are below the surface. Some significant claw-sharpening practice has been attempted by the anti-intervention and pro-Axis factions this summer. But it does not, from present indications, appear to have been successful.

Operations began in the Ministry of Justice and the National Police Department, but eventually affected the Ministry of Press and Propaganda.

The Ministry of Justice, since some time before President Vargas began governing by decree in November, 1937, has been headed by Dr. Silva Campos. He is the author of a “corporative” constitution for Brazil — proposed by the Vargas regime but never put into operation — and of a book in which he has avowed belief in many totalitarian political methods thought not to be specifically in the Axis cause.

Felinto Muller, head of the National Police (a job many times as powerful as Edgar Hoover’s), is a Brazilian largely of German descent who maintains close contact with many pro-Nazi German elements in Brazil and with relatives in the Reich. Naturally, the Ministry of Justice and the Police Department have had plenty of coöperating to do in enforcing measures against Axis subversive and espionage activities in the Republic. They have to their credit, since Brazil’s diplomatic break with the Axis last February, the capture of several potently organized spy rings. Nevertheless, suspicion has been widespread, both in Brazil and elsewhere, that the Muller-Silva Campos combination was unhealthy for the United Nations cause.

Suspicion began positively to justify itself toward midsummer when the place of Dr. Silva Campos, on a long leave of absence because of illness, was taken by a strong advocate of collaboration with the United Nations, Dr. Vasco da Cunha. Da Cunha gave Chief Muller an order to round up some new groups of pro-Axis agitators and Muller defied it. Muller was clapped under temporary “house arrest" and a definite Cabinet crisis was on.

Dr. Silva Campos came up to Rio de Janeiro to protest to President Vargas, and received so little satisfaction that he turned in his own resignation. Muller, with dismissal hanging before his eyes, also quit.

But the Vargas regime being, according to one of its own inner-circle wits, a “dictatorship of checks and balances,”the next developments, from the United Nations viewpoint, were anticlimactic. Grapevine advices went out from the Presidential Palace that a Cabinet reorganization would be welcome, and when this produced the conventional flood of resignations, those of da Cunha and of pro-Ally Propaganda Minister Lourival Fontes were accepted.

In the final outcome, Vargas cleared up the situation in the Ministry of Justice and the National Police Department by naming a pro-Ally Justice Minister and a new police head who immediately went at his job of riding herd on pro-Axis activities without reservations.

The new Chief of Propaganda began coöperating with United Nations information activities quite as ardently as Fontes had done, indicating, to experts in Brazilian political balances, that he is taking his orders from sources higher up in the government than the little clique of Brazilian top generals who want to play Brazil’s cards closer to the Axis.

Muller was given an advisory post in the War Ministry, where it is still a question how much influence he will have in policy-making. Nevertheless, his effort to make the United Nations’ “gloom summer” an occasion for relaxing the pressure on the pro-Axis elements was converted by smart government politics into a spectacular failure.

ARGENTINE THUNDERHEADS

By contrast, developments in the Argentine Republic’s relations with the United Nations seem, on the surface, almost wholly dark. Argentina during the past few weeks has casually accepted Nazi “blockade regulations” for the Western Hemisphere and rejected overtures from Washington with regard to convoying her shipping. Her Foreign Minister, Enrique Ruiz Guiñazú, according to credible reports from Uruguay, has accused the United States in the Chamber of Deputies of trying to lead the Argentines “by the nose” into interAmerican operations against the Axis, and of trying to force Argentina into the war by refusing to sell her arms.

As a climax to a difficult situation, the Buenos Aires Government ordered the expulsion of Waldo Frank, a lifelong worker for inter-American understanding, from the Republic. Next day, while still in Buenos Aires, Mr. Frank was beaten almost to death by a pro-Nazi “goon” squad.

These troubles spring, however, out of an internal political situation in the Argentine by no means so unfavorable to the United Nations as it looks. The National-Democratic administration of President Ramón S. Castillo aims to control the government in order to forestall, among other things, any challenge to the economic power of the owners of the big landed estates in the legislation of the next few years. And the opponents of Castillo, the Radicals and Socialists, happen to be, not land reformers alone, but ardent advocates of strong pro-United Nations policies in the war.

Furthermore, the Radical-Socialist coalition forms certainly a huge voting bloc, probably a popular majority. The Administration, consequently, feels it necessary to fight such a powerful enemy on all fronts — those of foreign policy as well as those of domestic issues.

THE ELECTION AND THE AXIS

It is a situation which has forced the NationalDemocrats, including the President, into a position increasingly isolationist, and, to the extent to which isolationism favors the Axis, into an increasingly pro-Axis policy. Yet from the Administration viewpoint there is no way out. It cannot reverse its war policy without giving the advantages of a humiliating retreat to the Radicals.

Most of all, it cannot win the 1943 presidential elections without two things: army support for certain “election control” methods at the polls, and votes. In a country where the top army cliques expect a substantial Axis victory and where the largest voting bloc which can be swayed by foreign issues is the Italian, the practical political answer to both needs is “prudent neutrality.”

There is, therefore, no plausible likelihood of a change in Argentine war policies until late in 1943 — and only then if the Radicals are strong enough to win next fall’s elections in the face of the Administration’s “control” measures. Yet even in the impasse there are certain consolations. In realistic Latin-American politics, you can frequently measure the strength of an opposition by a ruling government’s arbitrariness. Each further step that President Castillo takes out on the limb of isolationism is, in this sense, a tribute to Argentine mass opinion’s mobilization with the other Americas.