Latin America

ON THE WORLD TODAY

FOR more than a month Washington’s top question in inter-American diplomacy has been the recognition of Bolivia. Whatever the decision, — and the outlook early in June was toward recognition, — it is a highly important step in Latin America for the United States.

In deciding whether or not to recognize the present Bolivian government, the United States necessarily will be establishing something of a precedent. It will be making up its mind that it does or does not propose to extend its friendly support to essentially Fascist governments in the Western Hemisphere.

The present Bolivian government came into power through a “palace revolution,” using the republic’s highway police as its main spearhead, late in December. Its leaders were chiefly young lawyers, army officers, and university professors on record as holding totalitarian views of what the social and political organization of the country should be. Some of them had been open sympathizers with Germany or active collaborators in the Nazi propaganda in Bolivia.

The squeeze play on Bolivia

Washington denied the new regime recognition and, with considerable difficulty, persuaded all the other American republics, except Argentina, to make nonrecognition an inter-American policy.

Bolivia’s new junta soon discovered that non-recognition carried penalties. Lend-Lease arms and other shipments stopped. When Bolivia’s antimony contract with the Allies ran out during the winter, it was not renewed. During the spring, intimations were given to La Paz that when a considerably larger wolfram contract expired on June 30, it might suffer the same fate. The Allies have continued to take tin from Bolivia, but with less pressure for heavy and quick deliveries, and with frequent hints about mounting stockpiles and the development of tin resources in other parts of the world.

Under these pressures, the La Paz junta resorted to policies of “ appeasement ” toward the unsympathetic “Northern Colossus.” They expropriated Axis properties in the republic. They fired half a dozen top members of the government who were smirched with Axis or Argentine connections. They announced the “democratization” of Bolivian society and called national presidential elections for July 2.

They went through the motions of improving wages and working conditions for Bolivian miners, especially in the tin mines, and for a brief time threw Don Mauricio Hochschild, head of the republic’s secondlargest tin syndicate, into a concentration camp. They proclaimed amnesty for the political opponents of the regime. Finally, they arrested seventy-nine known Nazi agitators and dispatched them on planes for internment in the United States.

Appeasement in reverse

Meanwhile certain inconsistencies appeared in the performance. A good deal of the Axis property expropriated seemed, for instance, to be that of small Jewish merchants of German or Austrian extraction. The notorious Axis sympathizers dropped from the cabinet and the top bureaucratic positions in the government still managed to maintain significant advisory connections with the ruling powers.

Miners’ relief, as it developed, amounted to a few wage adjustments and a much closer subjection of the miners’ unions to government control. Mauricio Hochschild spent a short time in jail, but shaking down the tin interests is routine procedure for new regimes in Bolivia.

Amnesty of political prisoners was advertised charmingly throughout the republic, but prominent prisoners like José Antonio Arze, candidate of the PIR — leftist revolutionary party — for president in 1940, were only released under a highly restrictive form of detective-shadowed house arrest. In addition, Señor Arze was prohibited from running for president in the July election by a provision requiring all candidates for office to be veterans of Bolivia’s 1932-1935 Chaco War with Paraguay.

In short, the only positive gain the United States has made from this whirligig of Bolivian appeasement gestures is the exile of the seventy-nine top Axis agents — picked by Washington agencies — to American internment camps. Since they were also top members of the German commercial and educational colonies in a country starved for both commerce and education, it was a genuine, if forced, sacrifice of local leadership, and Bolivia will miss them.

Recognition of the Bolivian junta offers certain advantages over a continued non-recognition policy. Although they went along with Washington, most of the Latin American governments are suspicious of the non-recognition technique as a potential form of intervention in their domestic politics. Moreover, near neighbors of Bolivia, like Brazil, Chile, and Peru, are concretely embarrassed by it. They are being held up on various business projects they have on foot with Bolivia, because of the breach in relations. Quiet pressure from these powers, in fact, is supposed to have had a good deal to do with Washington’s willingness to reopen the question.

Reopened it certainly is. During most of May the members of a commission headed by American Ambassador to Panama Avra M. Warren and Brigadier General Ralph Wooten were in Bolivia checking up on the situation and the junta’s virtues. On the return of the commission to Washington at the end of the month, all the indications were that recognition would be recommended.

Churchill to Franco to South America

Possibly, though, in the Bolivian business Washington considers itself gambling for even higher stakes than are involved in friendly relations with the faction controlling a lone tin republic. Whether it was so intended or not, Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s speech in the British Parliament on May 24, with its devoted and almost affectionate references to alleged services by General Francisco Franco’s Spanish Fascist government to the cause of the Allies, was received by reactionary and domestic Fascist elements all over Latin America with joy. To these antiAmerican circles, intimations that Latin Fascist regimes might be welcomed into friendships with the British Empire were naturally cheering.

It is on such rocks, whether Mr. Churchill knows it or not, that the rather tenuous regional understanding between the American republics could be split.

Under these circumstances, it is natural that certain elements in the State Department would favor avoiding any possible Churchillian seduction of certain republics from the inter-American orbit by trying to appease Latin American Fascist leaders. For this purpose these elements would be tempted to look upon recognition of a more or less phony Fascist regime in a relatively harmless country like Bolivia as a diplomatic master stroke.

“Election” in Ecuador

Ecuador was due for a presidential election the first week in June, with the principal anti-administration candidate, former President Velasco Ibarra, a political exile in Colombia. But on May 29 there was a military revolt in Guayaquil which swept the administration of President Arroyo del Río from power. Dr. V. Ibarra returned from Colombia in triumph, and another tropical republic’s election had been held in the traditional way, with bullets instead of ballots — not to mention a few Lend-Lease tanks and big guns which the revolutionists found useful.

Velasco Ibarra has a somewhat more liberal record in Ecuadorian politics than his ousted predecessor, and there are no Fascist taints in the disturbance. The only possible difficulty for Washington lies in the fact that some of the military elements joined the revolution in protest against President Arroyo del Rio’s acceptance of the settlement of a border dispute with Peru, which gave Peru a large slice of Ecuadorian territory. Our State Department was happy to draw out of the hat a statement made by Dr. Ibarra less than a week before the revolution, apparently also endorsing the border settlement. Ecuador is seemingly due for a quick passage through the recognition bottleneck unless its army chiefs sign up the new president for war threats against Peru.

Elsewhere, the inter-American front has enjoyed a relatively quiet month. The military junta ruling Argentina distinguished itself by outlawing a few more forms of pro-Allied propaganda and by arresting Federico Pinedo, former Treasury Minister and a leading financier, for pro-Allied activities.

In Mexico, there were worries about a general strike scheduled for early summer, and about the generally simmering state of national politics due to high living costs and Sinarquista agitations. But, except in Mexico, nothing has happened in the hemisphere to confront the Allied war effort with worse difficulties than it has so far survived — barring, of course, the long-term difficulties which could be created by the wrong decision about Bolivia.