Latin America

ON THE WORLD TODAY

MONTEVIDEO is the brisk, clean capital of South America’s smallest but by no means tiny republic, Uruguay. On the outer rim of the Plata estuary, it is the top observation post in Latin America. For a year or more Montevideo has been accustomed to the occasional arrival from Buenos Aires, 125 miles across the estuary, of young men obviously in flight from their homeland, Argentina.

They came by steamer, by fast plane, and now and then by fishing boat or pleasure sailing craft. They were often swollen, bruised, limping, and sometimes still bleeding from beatings by Colonel Juan Perón’s national police — known simply and factually in the river Plata area as the Argentine Gestapo.

Suddenly in mid-October the refugee stream thickened, and the wounds were more serious. Young men came on crutches, or with their ribs smashed, or still spitting out battered tooth fragments, with their faces beaten to a pulp. Sometimes women arrived with clout marks on their heads, seeking treatment for over-all body bruises.

Some refugees were relatively unknown political workers of the anti-Perón underworld in Buenos Aires; but others, who in brighter days had villas at Punta del Este and Uruguay’s fashionable beaches, were lifelong friends of Uruguay’s oldest and wealthiest families. From top to bottom Montevideo’s well-informed, politically alert population knows the background of all this — and the dangers of the Argentine terror to themselves.

They know that Perón, former War and Labor Minister and Vice President, and now candidate of the Argentine fascist forces for the presidency, after being temporarily ousted in a two-day abortive coup in October, is back in power, determined to have no more coups and to force himself on the country as President in the elections scheduled for February 24. They know that the stepped-up violence is simply the fascist means to Perón’s two dominant ends.

Perón terrorizes the neighborhood

Montevideans are also familiar with the techniques of the Argentine terror. They know, from their own frequent business and social visits back and forth across the Plata, about the tanks in Buenos Aires streets, and the tommy guns in the hands of police platoons wherever there are crowds; about mobs — police-paid slum thugs — ranging the town day and night, brass-knuckled, toting knives and guns, picking street fights, starting disturbances wherever there is a chance to involve the opposition.

They know, too, how the police force of Buenos Aires has grown since the original military coup of June, 1943, from four thousand, a reasonable size for a metropolis of more than three million, to thirty-five thousand, now completely under Perón’s control.

They know the ugly elements which that increase has brought in: tough Army conscripts forced to join the police when their service terms ended, because of deliberate mix-ups in their discharge papers; halfIndian Gauchos lured in from Corrientes, the last “Wild West” province in Argentina; and Guaraní Indians hired straight out of the Paraguayan Army, inured to the brutalities of dictatorship and as ready to shoot into a political meeting in Buenos Aires as to massacre a file of war prisoners in the Chaco.

Through November it became increasingly difficult for Montevideo to take the Argentine terror as a passing phase. The big October coup from within the Army had failed because General Avalos lost his nerve when a Peronista organized mob jeered him for an hour as he tried to make the keynote speech explaining the change in the government.

It appeared that returned Perón was in for keeps. In November he lessened the chances of another stroke from Army and Navy.enemies by deflating the Campo de Mayo garrison to less than half the size of the police establishment of Buenos Aires. His gunmen in city provinces are unquestionably able to control the February elections in his favor.

American fascist election

If a majority vote were miraculously cast against him despite brute force, he would have still another ace in the hole. Argentine law requires the ballots to be deposited in post offices for counting. From top to bottom the Peróon machine now controls the post office. Reckoning the odds, even the refugees are becoming discouraged. They told their Uruguayan friends that an unarmed civilian majority, no matter how large, could not fight tanks, machine guns, and organized thuggery.

By mid-November, refugees, Uruguayan leaders, and the people of Montevideo were pretty well agreed that unless extraordinary outside help is given the opposition, Perón will soon be able to take on his enemies in the inter-American organization and in the democratic nations of the world with the prestige of a constitutionally elected Argentine president.

Uruguayan leaders are under no illusions as to what this might mean to them. They know that for months Montevideo has been slowly filling up with Perón’s bully boys — secret agents now ostensibly on good behavior, but listening, plotting, and quietly agitating sympathetic groups. They have evidence that a few bars and coffeehouses have been bought as propaganda spy centers.

They know that large funds are available from secret Perón campaign and military budgets for promoting a Uruguay coup, probably through the old pro-dictatorship party, the Herreristas. The coup is unlikely till after Perón’s position is reinforced by the election, but it is prominent among the dangers Uruguayans must be prepared for.

Uruguayan leaders have been preoccupied since October with the problem of either asking international help in ousting Perón or preparing to live permanently next door to a bad neighbor, in constant peril of an attack on Uruguay’s traditional democratic liberties. What to Washington is merely a desperate political headache has become for Uruguay an imminent threat of death by torture.

The Larreta Doctrine

Courageous, resolute Uruguay acted. On Thanksgiving Day, to the offices of twenty American foreign ministers came a formal diplomatic note from Uruguay’s foreign minister, Alberto Rodríguez Larreta. By the week-end it was being hailed by adherents and opponents alike as the Rodríguez Larreta Doctrine. The Larreta Doctrine is based on a simple philosophy adapted to a world where the perils from fascist enemies have been multiplied by modern weapons.

It proclaims not only that peace is indivisible, but that peace and democracy are indivisible. It recognizes that denial of free information and of civil liberties, and disrespect for human dignity, on the part of a government, may be a worse threat to the peace of its neighbors than actual aggression.

The Doctrine therefore proposes joint action by the American republics even in the internal affairs of an American country violating basic liberties to the point of endangering Hemisphere security and the democracy of its neighbors. Larreta’s newspaper El Pais in Montevideo regards the Doctrine as akin to the common-law right of dwellers in a city block or a rural community to take action when a disorderly neighbor renders himself a moral nuisance even though the neighborhood is still undamaged by direct aggression.

A guarantee of a republican government

His friends say that Larreta, a lifelong student of United States history, considers the Doctrine analogous to the provision in our Constitution guaranteeing the states a republican form of government. He recognizes that this provision has not been tested legally, but he believes that endorsement of the Doctrine by all republics except Argentina might by its own moral weight crush Perón and eliminate residual smalltime dictators like Trujillo in Santo Domingo, Somoza in Nicaragua, and Carías in Honduras.

His emphasis is wholly on collective intervention. Larreta is convinced that the maintenance of democracy for Uruguayan and Hemisphere security is strictly a neighborhood problem. He is understood to have taken this stand as early as August, 1943, after long study of the development of Argentine fascism.

The idea is Larreta’s own, home-grown out of Uruguay’s trans-river perils, although there are plenty of indications that the Doctrine was discussed with important resident diplomats in Montevideo before the Thanksgiving Day promulgation. The Doctrine was deliberately confined to a statement of principles. It was therefore criticized as vague. But the understanding is that the steps taken to enforce it would be (1) diplomatic breaks, (2) economic sanctions, and (3) as a last resort, military intervention in the internal affairs of a state that was menacing its neighbors’ democracy.

Sources close to Uruguay’s Vice President, former Foreign Minister Guani, propose that charges against a dangerously anti-democratic republic be sifted by an inter-American political defense committee at Montevideo, with Guani as chairman, and that final action be decided through consultations with all the republics.

Larreta insists that collective pro-democratic intervention was implicitly sanctioned by Bolivar in trying to exclude dictatorships from the inter-American conference at Panama in 1826, by the mediation of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile between the United States and Mexico in 1914, and by the seizure of Vera Cruz by the United States in 1914. It was sanctioned explicitly in resolutions of Inter-American Conferences, in 1933 at Montevideo and in 1936 at Buenos Aires. Meanwhile, old-fashioned, unilateral intervention by the United States Marines for the “good” of weak, disorderly states was condemned and abandoned.

Opposition and encouragement

But aside from arguments of legal precedents, the Larreta Doctrine inevitably ran into rough sledding. After all, the Latin American republics from the Spanish-American War to the early 1930’s fought a running battle against Theodore Roosevelt’s principle of permissible unilateral armed intervention for the preservation of order, and against American rights in revolution-ridden republics.

The battle was won mainly by insistence on the rights of absolute sovereignty. Many honest Latin American political leaders are still fearful that a reactionary change in the Washington administration might transform the Larreta Doctrine into a tool for interventions of a new dollar diplomacy.

Some of the Foreign Offices showed hesitancy, reservation, and even open opposition; and Nazi-FascistFalangist centers in Latin America, and also the Soviet news agencies, have condemned the Doctrine as paving the way for the destruction of national sovereignty in Latin America and for the final triumph of Yankee imperialism. Under these pressures from the Foreign Ministries, public opinion wavered.

Secretary Byrnes within five days endorsed the Doctrine down to the last comma, while the New York Times grumbled, apparently more in tactical than basic disagreement, against the undue precipitancy of the Department of State. Declarations from Mexico and Cuba, while leaving the way open for further discussions, were practically turndowns. Foreign Minister Carlos Morales of Venezuela said his government prefers economic sanctions to direct intervention. Costa Rica and Spain’s Mexico City government-in-exile approved.

Editorial boosts came from Peru’s Aprista leader, Manuel Seoane. Foreign Minister Leão Velloso announced that Brazil’s support of the orthodox nonintervention principle has been so long established that any change requires profound study. Peronista Argentina naturally frothed. La Prensa and La Nación, while finding merit in the principles of the Doctrine, came to no conclusion. But the Peronista organ, La Epoca, demanded a diplomatic, economic, and cultural break with a degenerate, picayune democracy that was a traitor to its benevolent big neighbor, and Foreign Minister Cooke, in a radio address, repeated the threat of a break, but without specific insults.

Anti-Doctrine press campaigns broke out in rightist and some far leftist papers in most Latin American centers, including Montevideo itself. El Debate, Montevideo’s totalitarian Herrerista organ, which hopefully predicted a MacArthur dictatorship in the United States, called Larreta a United States stooge and accused him of betraying the “name and honor” of the republic. Leading rightist Senator Bulnes of Chile proclaimed that Latin American regimes established by “foreign bayonets” could not be considered democracies.

New hope for liberals

But moving toward the year’s end, Larreta and the Uruguayan liberals are not unhopeful. They understand that Velloso was in a spot in Brazil. He made a supercautious statement on the eve of the Brazilian elections, when an important undercover issue was the September 29 speech of Ambassador A. A. Berle expressing the hope that the Vargas government would go through with its free-election commitments. Pro-Vargas and Communist elements advertised the speech during the campaign as scandalous intervention, and Velloso was obviously reluctant to upset last-minute domestic political balances.

Uruguayan leaders naturally hoped that Eduardo Gomes, idealistic champion of middle-of-the-road political democracy, would be Brazil’s next president. They knew that with Gaspar Dutra, former War Minister in the Vargas government, in power, Velloso or his successor in the Foreign Office probably could not be persuaded to endorse the Larreta Doctrine.

Uruguayans are for the most part encouraged by the growing democratic atmosphere elsewhere. Venezuela, Peru, and Ecuador are now on the side of democratic order, and there is at least a fighting chance of victory for the Doctrine in free debates in Chile and Colombia. If a definitive majority should begin to roll up among the stronger powers, the Uruguayans would be reasonably sure of the approval of the Caribbean states.

Meanwhile, Uruguay is carrying on an anti-Perón crusade with great courage. She knows that Perón, by shutting off wheat, manufactured goods, and summer beach tourists, could almost wreck Uruguay’s economy.

She knows that adopting the Doctrine at the March Rio consultation meeting or earlier might step up the program for a military political coup in Montevideo. She knows from the refugees what this would mean to Uruguay’s old democratic freedom and civilization. But Larreta says, “To save this peace takes courage.” In devising and aiming a practical political weapon with which fascism can be checked, Uruguay has proved that she has courage.