Latin America

ON THE WORLD TODAY

FOR some time the State Department has been considering the establishment of a semi-governmental commission on inter-American affairs. The proposed commission would be an experimental body which could be made permanent if it worked out well. Several of Assistant Secretary Spruille Braden’s young men have been making some quiet soundings on the subject.

Ideas on the composition of the group have not entirely jelled yet, but in general the plan is to make the commission broadly representative and fairly elastic, and not to overload it with government men. There would be State Department representation, of course; some from other directly interested departments, possibly including the military; and, for obvious reasons, a few carefully picked Congressional members.

Otherwise, it would be chiefly a “public interest” organization. Labor and finance would naturally be represented; so would medicine, the university faculties, and some industries, including radio, motion pictures, and publishing. The numerous regional and local organizations working throughout the country to promote interest in inter-American relations would have a voice. As other economic and professional groups developed specific Hemisphere interests, they would be included.

The hope is to keep the organization small enough to hold reasonably intimate committee meetings. The body would have no policy-making functions. It would be expected to serve, however, as a catchall for information and advice on many of the interAmerican problems which trouble the policy-makers. There is no design to use the commission as an entering wedge for reviving the Office of Inter-American Affairs, which President Truman abolished by executive order.

The group would have no administrative assignments, and its paid staff would be essentially no larger than would be required to keep the records. Presumably the commission could be established by Presidential action, but if Congressional authorization were forthcoming, the standing of the group would be improved.

Realism and practicality

Such a body might help to fill up a number of serious gaps which are developing in the inter-American program. Several questions on the Hemisphere front are calling for more discussion than the State Department can give them with propriety; and the Department needs additional enlightenment.

To take a few examples: there is considerable concern over the evident inclinations of many of the Latin American republics — especially the betterheeled ones — to spend outside the Hemisphere as large a share of their war sales accumulations as possible. These assets are estimated at more than $7,000,000,000.

Policy decisions must be made as to how much, and in what form, United States assistance will be furnished for Latin American economic and industrial development. And there is considerable worry over the fact that the labor movement in most of the republics appears not only to be losing all vital contact with labor union progress in the United States, but, either under official domination by the Latin governments or under increasing Communist influences, to be taking an entirely separate path of development.

From its economic, commercial, and labor attaches and advisers, the State Department has a great deal of material in its files on all three of these questions, but much of this represents the routine of bureaucratic factual reporting. When the Department ventures into positive findings and recommendations, issues often prove too hot for it to handle. For State Department releases imply official commitment to a certain extent.

But a relatively informal commission would not operate under these conditions. Its recommendations might gain in realism and practicality when made by exporters, industrialists, and labor leaders fresh from the active fields. In any case, since no one could regard them as policy commitments of the State Department, recommendations could be informal. They would not have to be couched in weasel words. Indeed, the more forthright they were, the better.

There is no guarantee, of course, that such a commission’s labors would channel larger Latin American war savings into United States markets, provide us with an ideal partnership in Latin America’s economic future, or establish a lasting brotherhood between Yankee and Latin American labor organizations. But the idea that these are vital issues to be taken care of could be more widely spread.

Another gap to be filled concerns the public appeal of the inter-American program. The State Department is conscious that the program has “lost press" since the heyday of the Good Neighbor policy. This may, or may not, be measurable in newspaper space and radio time allowances, but the program had, from the mid-1930’s until almost the end of the war, the claim upon editorial selections of being the special baby of President Roosevelt, Secretary of State Hull, and Under Secretary Sumner Welles.

A lick and a promise

From 1940 on, too, the Office of Inter-American Affairs was a source of inter-American news, chiefly on what is known as the “constructive” side. Now this situation has changed. President Truman and Secretary of State Byrnes are largely uninformed about inter-American affairs and are immersed in world and domestic tribulations. They have had time to give the Hemisphere program only an occasional perfunctory blessing. Since the OIAA has been abolished, the publicity of the program is confined to what Mr. Braden can give it.

Mr. Braden, an engaging and forceful public personality, probably has won a larger and more favorable press for Hemisphere subjects than any runof-the-mill Assistant Secretary could. But partly because of his special connection with the policy struggle against Colonel Peron and fascism in Argentina, and partly because of essential news values, press and radio attention has been concentrated for a year on the Argentine conflict — which ended in failure to achieve our major objectives.

The proposed commission could spread more Hemisphere information than any existing agency; and could help to check undue public concentration on trouble spots.

Democracy gets two boosts

Concrete progress toward improvement in interAmerican post-war relations has moved at a slow pace. In Bolivia an apparently “liberal” junta, placed in power in late July by a long overdue revolution against the fascist-sponsored regime of President Gualberto Villarroel, has established its authority effectively.

The new government obtained diplomatic recognition from the principal American powers under the provisional presidency of Néstor Guillén. A judge of the La Paz Supreme Court, President Guillen has a reputation for political mildness. His cabinet represents labor and university groups, both faculty and student. In any case, the harsh rule of a group which enforced its authority by a series of periodic “blood purges” against its opponents was over.

But there were still two hurdles to take. The junta came out on top, in the last analysis, only through Army support. So it remains to be seen how long it will take the Army, formed by the same training which produced Villarroel and a long list of preceding dictators, to muscle in on the junta’s still predominantly civilian show.

Over the border, too, General Juan Domingo Perón’s Argentina, which helped to put Villarroel in the presidency and is now, as then, in control of Bolivia’s principal supply lines, was making trouble about food shipments. In Bolivia’s La Paz, street crowds shouting for “a lamppost for Perón” made it clear that, for the time being at least, Bolivia was immune to temptations to join Argentina in an anti-United States “austral bloc.”

Political disturbances in Asunción also put Paraguay temporarily out of the running as a bloc pledge. The coup did not go to the length of unseating Dictator Higinio Morínigo, but it forced him to grant to opposition political parties of anti-Argentine tenets so much freedom of action that Paraguay was reclaimed to the Hemisphere’s democratic front.

Why die for Washington?

These minor political successes were more than overbalanced by a strange development in Uruguay. Foreign correspondents were suddenly forbidden to send uncensored dispatches critical of the conduct of neighbor governments.

The explanation was not hard to find. Uruguay, at constant risk to herself from Perónist Argentina, consistently stuck her neck out to do favors for the United States and the Allies during the war. Last November, Foreign Minister Eduardo Rodríguez Larreta went even further. He advanced a formal diplomatic proposal to sanction collective intervention by the American states in countries, such as Argentina, where fascist or similar internal political programs might threaten the peace of the Hemisphere. Secretary of State Byrnes indorsed the “Larreta doctrine” with high-pressure enthusiasm, but in a round-robin consultation it was rejected by an overwhelming majority of the Latin foreign ministers.

In July, then, the United States reversed its stand and joined a committee of Latin governments in the Pan American Union in recommending a resolution to the next Pan American Conference, forbidding “collective” as well as individual intervention in the affairs of any American republic.

The order limiting Uruguayan press freedom came almost simultaneously. It was issued by the Interior Minister on his individual authority, and undoubtedly internal difficulties connected with impending national elections and fear of Perón had something to do with it. But none of the Cabinet’s more liberal ministers made an effort to halt the order. The United States had let a small stout ally down.

Oil on the doorstep of fascism

Meanwhile, a new difficulty arose when Chile applied for an Export-Import Bank loan to develop an oil field, discovered last winter, which is strategically located on the Straits of Magellan.

In Washington the Chilean representatives were told that no “political loans” were available, and that it would be more appropriate for such financing to come from American private oil companies. Extremists in both right and left parties — including the numerically strong Chilean Communists — promptly retorted with charges that the Good Neighbor policy was being liquidated in favor of “Yanqui imperialism” and a new Hemisphere exploitation drive by American big business.

Meanwhile in Argentina the process of deporting Nazi agents wanted by the United Nations was stymied again. The Argentine courts decided that the agents were eligible to habeas corpus rights, which, at the current rate of judicial procedure in the republic, should give them three or four more years of freedom.

At the same time Great Britain, which has made far more consistent efforts to appease Perón than Washington has, was undergoing an even more exasperating squeeze play. The Buenos Aires government was refusing to make a food sales deal, on a rising sellers’ market, with a British commercial mission, and was demanding interest on some £130,000,000 in blocked sterling owned by Argentina, with threats to expropriate British railroads in the republic if the British didn’t pay up.