Latin America

ON THE WORLD TODAY

THE attempt to jimmy the presidential succession in the little Central American country of El Salvador had a bloody aftermath. A revolution broke out on Palm Sunday, barely a month after President Maximiliano Hernández Martínez had had his term extended until 1950 by a hand-picked Congress. Even the elite corps of the Army split over the perpetuation of Hernández Martínez, — a dictator since 1931, — so that in the capital city of San Salvador, LendLease tanks and bombing planes staged the most modern battle yet seen in Central American history.

The Hernández Martínez forces regained the capital shortly, and, with the grim Indian discipline of Salvadoran tradition, liquidated the leaders of the revolt by the firing squad. In the actual fighting, civilian and military casualties apparently ran into the hundreds. Walkouts and the threat of a general strike followed. President-dictator Hernández Martínez tendered his resignation on May ninth “in the interests of restoring order in the republic.”

The little republics, whose coffee and banana finca owners and controlling groups generally have been living in dread of agrarian uprisings on the pattern of Mexican radicalism, are watching events closely. They don’t propose to let this war’s aftermath catch them with any leftist agitations on their hands.

Argentina rides high

Meanwhile, deeper in Latin America, the struggle to get set for the readjustments of peace involves somewhat higher political stakes. Argentine thinking and acting in terms of the post-war world go far toward explaining the Argentine revolution and its complex of domestic and foreign policies.

The Argentine leaders of the present government want to assure themselves during a world readjustment period — which they expect to be disorderly — of three things:

1. Argentina’s freedom from control by any Hemisphere organization in which a strong power like the United States might have a prevailing influence.

2. Dominance over a bloc of South American states sufficient to prevent control from being exercised by a group of Hemisphere powers or the United States.

3. Rigid control over domestic politics, so that these aggressive foreign policies can be carried out without partisan opposition or constitutional hazards, and so that the Argentine people can be insulated from social disturbances or radical social developments anywhere else in the world.

The military leaders who overthrew the conservative administration of President Ramón Castillo last June struck precisely because they did not believe that a constitutional government could carry out the stern business of preparing such defenses for the peace emergency; and they were perfectly confident that militarists could.

Since then, in spite of international quarrels over methods and personalities, the revolutionists have pursued their aims with effective consistency and certainly with enough success to give them a right to feel encouraged. They have even weathered a virtual breach in relations with the United States since General Edelmiro Farrell’s succession to the presidency in February, and have survived in spite of the scowl of our State Department.

They have partially overcome the loss of Lend-Lease armament shipments by expanding their own war production industries, and have increased the size of the Army by at least two divisions. They have practically destroyed the democratic liberties of the Argentine people without so far causing any serious threat of popular revolution.

Until the regime meets up with some counter-force which is strong enough to strike at it, we must conclude that the militarists will go on in the task of entrenching themselves against the dangers of peace.

La Prensa scandal

Their outstanding recent exploit has been the five days’ suspension, late in April, of the great Buenos Aires newspaper, La Prensa. Because of its political influence and its enormous financial resources, La Prensa had been able to maintain a fairly critical attitude toward the government, both on foreign and on domestic issues, long after most of the Argentine newspapers — La Prensa’s old rival, La Nación, excepted — had been transformed into government stooges.

The government seized on a mere routine criticism of the management of Buenos Aires municipal hospitals as cause for the suspension. La Prensa’s editors were ordered to print the official answer to the charges about the hospitals with the same display in the paper, and to agree to indulge only in “constructive” criticism in the future—or the suspension would become permanent.

For most of the five days, apparently, La Prensa’s editors wrestled with the problem: Should they go out of business for the duration of the junta’s regime, as a sign to the world and the Argentine people of the type of Fascism that is in control of things; or should they resume publication, and so force the government either to tolerate their broader criticisms or to shut them up for their dislike of generals as dictators?

La Prensa quite obviously made the second choice. It appeared on May Day, when its five days’ ordeal by silence was over, with the government’s reply to the hospital charges occupying five times the space the subject had called for originally — a tribute, no doubt, to the generals’ infatuation with rhetoric. But the editorials had the old touch of bitter distaste for the dictatorship.

Plainly, La Prensa is going to go down, if the “colonels” dare extinguish it, with its true colors flying. If La Prensa can continue to snipe from the rear and play upon popular resentments toward the dictatorship, the internal control which the colonels consider necessary to their foreign program and their domestic discipline can hardly be realized. In the field of press freedom, merely the first round is over. The knockout blow, from whichever side it comes, is still to be delivered.

Argentina calls the tune

Meanwhile, two other at least partial successes should be chalked up to the Argentine Fascisti in their foreign relations. Their collaborating government in Bolivia, after a brief strike in the tin mines late in April, managed to discover evidences of a “dangerous” revolutionary plot in the republic, which enabled it to exile a group of its favorite enemies.

Certain other Argentine methods have been spreading lately to Chile. The highly unusual step was taken this spring of suspending the important Santiago newspaper La Opinión for a series of violent criticisms of President Ríos’s administration. The high police officials entrusted with enforcing the order were not satisfied with carrying out their routine duties. The crew which they brought along with them to serve the legal papers, in the best early Nazi style and to the scandal of the Chilean press, including La Opinión’s opponents, thoroughly smashed the newspaper’s typographical equipment and its presses.

Within a month, President Ríos risked a scandal of even more exciting proportions by flouting the rigid political discipline of one of Chile’s traditional political parties. The Radicals, a vital element in the president’s election two years ago and the party to which he personally belonged, broke with Ríos over domestic issues during the winter. They eventually demanded that five of their representatives in the Cabinet resign within a given period or be expelled from the party. When the resignations were filed at the dead-line late in April, President Ríos refused to accept them, and the formal expulsions followed.

These developments have had two effects, suggestive of the trend of new troubles in the southern part of Latin America. Without the support of their former party associates, the Radical leaders can hardly expect to remain in the Cabinet. But in their places President Ríos is now expected to appoint a new set of ministers, predominantly generals. Slowly, under the pressure of its fancied needs to face the post-war world securely, Chile appears to be going the Argentine way.

What are we doing about it?

In Washington, on the other hand, few defenses seem to be contemplated against these stratagems and their successes— at least on the scale on which Argentina is building defenses against the influence of Washington and Pan-Americanism.

The resignation of Laurence Duggan, recently promoted to Director of the Office of American Republican Affairs, removes the last top man in the State Department who has made overall expertness in the Latin American picture into a professional career.

At this moment, when so many of the Latin American republics are jumping the gun on the United States in their preparations against post-war democratic adjustments, and jumping it chiefly in ways which are hardly consistent with the aims the democracies conceive themselves as fighting for, the State Department looks weaker on matters of Hemisphere policy than it has looked during the decade since the Good Neighbor policy was invented.