Latin America

ON THE WORLD TODAY

THE news from Argentina has been steadily bad for nearly half a year — since the putsch of last June established the Ramirez administration in power.

No progress was made in the first two months of autumn toward a break in relations between-Buenos Aires and either the Nazi or the Japanese government. True, a small feeler in the way of suggestions that the break might be on the way was put out in Rio de Janeiro early in October. The hope may have been to head off a project in the State and Treasury Departments in Washington for freezing Argentine funds.

In mid-October, however, there was a cabinet crisis. Three members of President Pedro P. Ramirez’s government resigned. All of them were suspected of pro-Allied sympathies. One of them, General Elbio Anaya, the Minister of Education and Justice, appears to have been confined, immediately after his resignation, as a political prisoner.

But the full extent of the pro-Axis leanings of the Ramirez crew was disclosed a few days later when the successors of the retiring Ministers were announced. They were: Captain Ricardo Vayo of the Argentine Navy, Minister of Public Works, known as a long-time enthusiast for Nazi principles of military rule over civilian populations; César Ameghino, Minister of Finance, a long-time backer of Manuel Fresco, the outstanding anti-Semite agitator in Argentina; and, for the important propaganda post of Minister of Education and Justice, Dr. Gustavo Martínez Zuviría, who, under the pen name of Hugo Wast, has written three or four of the most violent anti-Semitic books in the Western Hemisphere. By these appointments the Ramirez crew uprooted its planted rumors of an early break with Berlin and Tokyo.

Changing Ambassadors

Even before the pro-Allied Ministers resigned, the Buenos Aires foreign office recalled Don Felipe Espil, the republic’s highly competent ambassador in Washington for the past twelve years. Don Felipe has built up through his long years in the embassy, including a secretaryship during the early 1920’s, probably as intimate acquaintance with political and social trends in the life of the United States as any Latin American living. Hence, while he always stood up for his government in its legitimate difficulties with Washington, he was also at the same time a force with all the Buenos Aires administrations since 1931 in composing differences and in persuading Argentina to go along in essential inter-American programs.

His removal was considered in Washington a definite blow to the wartime inter-American program. The appointment of Felipe Espil’s successor followed.

He is Dr. Adrián Escobar, a non-English-speaking politician who began his diplomatic career only three years ago. He showed a strongly antagonistic attitude toward coöperation with the United States and the other American republics as a delegate to the Pan American Conference at Lima in 1938. Then, after his appointment as Ambassador to Spain in 1940, he promised Dictator Francisco Franco that Latin Americans unsympathetic with Spanish Falangism would shortly change their views. Since 1942, Escobar has been Argentine ambassador to Brazil, where he has won a reputation for doing practically everything possible to increase the tension between Brazil and Argentina.

Naturally, there was no open objection to Escobar’s appointment to Washington. But the perfunctory speed with which he was given the “persona grata” rating by the White House indicates clearly how complacent the State Department feels, in the present state of affairs, about letting the Ramirez group put its worst foot forward in Washington.

Suppression and bloodshed

But not all of the Argentine bad news has to do directly with foreign policies. Within the republic in October a government decree — there have been ten thousand since the Ramirez regime assumed power — suddenly prohibited the publication of Yiddish-language newspapers. Within a day or two the decree was suspended, after a public protest from President Roosevelt, although an official statement in Buenos Aires made it clear that the White House action had no bearing on the situation.

During the same month there were bloody police bludgeonings and shootings-up of reasonably orderly student demonstrations for democracy and against the dictatorship of the regime. Since the June coup of the “colonels” there have been nearly a hundred suspensions affecting seventy-two newspapers throughout the republic — ranging from a few days to permanent closing orders. Although the administration lost its nerve when it came to shutting down the powerful liberal Buenos Aires morning dailies, La Prensa and La Nación, it nevertheless has permitted the capital’s Nazi house organ, El Pampero, to shriek its demands every day that the editors and publishers of La Prensa be shot for treason because of their criticism of the government.

In other ways the regime has betrayed the neurotic nationalism peculiar to Fascist movements. One of the ten thousand decrees of President Ramirez requires the use of Spanish Christian names in all birth registrations — making it obligatory for children of merely transient American and British parents, for instance, to go legally through life as Enrique and Caterina, instead of as Henry and Katherine. Another similar step is a broad-scaled etymological effort to “purify" Argentine Spanish.

How Ramirez got his start

Since June we have learned a good deal about the origins of the Ramirez coup. General Ramirez and his original chief associate, General Arturo Rawson — President for a day after the June revolt — apparently began their preparations by making certain arrangements with leaders of the relatively liberal party in Argentina. The ostensible understanding was that after the military leaders had taken over the government for a brief provisional period, bona fide elections would be held.

Unfortunately, to put over their uprising, Rawson and Ramirez had to go to their brother officers in the army and navy for support. They ran afoul of army and navy groups whose objective was to set up an authoritarian, Fascist government in Argentina.

As a result, from the moment that their putsch ostensibly succeeded, Ramirez and Rawson found themselves virtually prisoners of their fellow conspirators. Rawson resigned within twenty-four hours. Ramirez succeeded him, only to become a puppet in the hands of a militarist pro-Nazi junta which has dictated most of the dictator’s ten thousand decrees to the dictator.

There are certain inherent weaknesses in such a situation. The ruling clique is forced to govern through a terror-stricken puppet who is not wholly sympathetic with their purposes. How much more public resentment it will take to toss out Ramirez and his military clique remains to be seen. But both the domestic symptoms and the outside pressures are growing ominous.

The financial stability of Argentina calls for scrutiny. The general freezing of Argentine funds has no doubt been a subject for argument in our State and Treasury Departments, on the ground that other American republics might resent direct financial pressure.

But practically all the banks in Argentina are now dealing with Nazi and Japanese as well as Spanish Falangist financial interests. They can be blacklisted for this without any direct branding of all financial dealings with Argentina as undesirable. So it is extremely significant that early in November this method was adopted in respect to two powerful and largely nationally controlled Argentine banks, the Banco de la Nación and the Bank of Buenos Aires Province.

Russia vs. Japan

Other developments on the Latin American front are on the surface fairly encouraging. Most of the continent has received news of the Moscow agreements with eloquent applause. Even though Brazil has not yet recognized the Russian government, the Brazilian ambassador in Washington, Carlos Martins, hailed the Moscow policy declarations as “a victory which brings joy to all our hemisphere.”

But too much stock should not be taken in extravagantly polite Latin American expressions on the subject of an outstanding diplomatic pronouncement. Under the surface the Nazi and Japanese propagandists are busier than ever hammering on the Russian flank of the United Nations in Latin America. At one and the same time, during the past few weeks, they have been busy trying to persuade the politicos below the Rio Grande that “heretic” Washington is trying to push Catholic Hispanic nations into embracing the “atheist colossus” of Eastern Europe; and that Washington, in its fears of some eventual scheme of world Communist conquest, is trying to dissuade them from recognition.

Much less delicate was Spanish Foreign Minister Jordana’s note of congratulations to the Japanese puppet “free state” in the Philippines. Here the idea was that, after half a century of slavery to the gringo, it took the Japanese to set a people of fundamentally Hispanic culture free at last.