Latin American

ON THE WORLD TODAY

THUS far in 1947, most of the Latin American governments have moved steadily toward the Right. In Argentina, though arrangements for deporting eight more former Nazi agents were publicized late in May, actually the Peron government continues to strengthen its neo-fascist controls over Argentine politics and economy.

In Brazil, the Communist Party has been outlawed by congressional legislation, and, nominally at least, driven underground. In Chile, a cabinet crisis has been utilized to kick the Communists out of President Gabriel González Videla’s government, in spite of the fact that 50,000-odd Communist votes last fall furnished the marginal plurality which elected him. In Guatemala, President Arevalo revoked the freedom of the press which has functioned in Central America’s strongest republic since its liberal revolution of 1944, and restored traditionally tough Guatemalan censorship.

In Nicaragua, too, there was an apparently rightist, and certainly authoritarian, development. Twentyfive days after he was inaugurated president as the picked man of ostensibly retiring dictator Anastasio Somoza, 75-year-old Dr. Leonardo Arguello was thrown out of office by a Somoza-ordered military coup. Argiiello’s apparent error was that in his early official appointments he tried to be a real, instead of a puppet, president.

The forms were gone through in a congressional choice of a Somoza stooge, Benjamin Lacayo Sacasa, as Provisional President. Sacasa immediately appointed Somoza as Minister of War, Navy, and Aviation, and as commander of the National Guard.

Right face!

In all but a few instances, the reasons for this rightward march are in the open. One outstanding provocation is that many leftist activities in Latin America have fallen into the control of Communists, or have been infiltrated by them. This gives the conservative and reactionary opposition — the big landholding, financial, and growing industrial employer interests, and the Church — something alarming to swing at.

Also, the fact of so much Communist influence, and the exaggeration of it, give the reactionary interests their chance to swing further to the right, when they do swing, than might be possible if their opponents were merely “democratic” leftists, like Venezuela’s Betancourt.

This appears to have been the case in Brazil’s official dissolution of the Communist Party. When the conservative majority in the Brazilian congress took its swing at the Communists, it did the job with a whoop and a holler and no legalistic punches pulled. As a result, Rio de Janeiro’s dissolution statute went somewhat further than Brazil’s great and good friend, the Washington State Department, would have liked to see it go. The State Department has enough trouble with Moscow already without stirring up any more on the Western Hemisphere front.

Neither did Washington’s custodians of inter-American good-neighborliness like the idea of the Communist and fellow-traveler press throughout Latin America screaming that the wicked imperialist of the North was paying for the assassination of all true “liberalism” in Latin America.

Uncle’s help wanted

Most of the Latin American republics want and desperately need United States loans, investments, and economic favors. So it is understandable that compliance with the rich uncle’s presumed political tastes sometimes outruns what the State Department would not dream of even unofficially advising.

After all, most Latin American political leaders are addicted to sweeping gestures by tradition and temperament. Therefore, when it is a question of a policy of conciliation and appeasement toward a potential benefactor who, technically speaking, may not have asked anything, an extra sweep or two to a gesture may seem, at least to Latin American tacticians, just what is needed to make a gesture convincing.

Closely affected governments like the Brazilian and Chilean have read plenty into the signs of the slow “making-up” process between the Washington government and President Juan Domingo Perón’s in Buenos Aires. Here and there more is being read into the atmosphere of reconciliation than is contained in the signs themselves.

Following President Truman’s announcement that Washington was satisfied with the action taken by Argentina to comply with the anti-Nazi provisions of the Act of Chapultepec, Spruille Braden, who had fought long and hard against appeasement of the Peron regime, resigned. It was as clear a signal as could be given that the businessmen’s ideas of letting bygones be bygones with Peron would prevail in Washington’s official diplomatic policies.

If Peronism in Argentina was doing so well simply by sticking to its rightist and even neo-fascist, guns, after having given, since long before Pearl Harbor, considerable provocation to the United States by doing so, why should conservatives and reactionaries in other Latin American republics stint themselves in batting their liberal and leftist elements around as a means of conciliating Uncle Sam?

This type of rationalization, as its popularity spreads in Latin America, may be watched as a source of other developments besides Brazil’s law dissolving the Communist Party. The rationalization accounts in considerable part, for the stepping up of activities against, the Betancourt regime in Venezuela. It lies in the background of subtle efforts and propaganda now under way to shovel away the improvements from thirty-five years of social revolutionary experiment in Mexico, and to reconvert the late Don Porfirio Díaz’s republic as nearly as possible into a “businessman’s country.”

President Alemán’s visit to the United States this spring involved hopeful expectations of gringo credit and investments in Mexico amounting to projected totals of close to 600 million dollars. If veering to the right will help the Alemán government to get them, Mexican patriots can be trusted to cheer.

Unified defense of the Hemisphere

But some documentation of United States preference is still more direct. On May 26, in an official message to Congress, President Truman revived a 1946 project for military aid to Latin America.

The President’s message did not stop with proposing supply of military equipment to Western Hemisphere nations and United States training for their armed forces. It also left it up to the Chief Executive to accept in payment from the Latin American governments, not only cash or property, but “any other direct or indirect .benefit which the President may determine to be adequate and satisfactory.”

This arrangement, unusual for peacetime, would give Mr. Truman and his successors, certainly in the case of slightly used arms equipment, power to offer the Latin American states bargain deals on armaments, in return for practically any “indirect benefit” a Latin American ruler might think it expedient to confer upon Washington.

Chile’s red purge

Some of the Latin American rightward trends, however, are perhaps less closely tied to Washington’s new policy. In dropping the three Communist members from his cabinet in April, Chile’s President Gonzalez Videla no doubt saw certain potential economic advantages in his United States relationship. But placating Washington is unlikely to have been his main incentive.

Much more serious than the loss of gringo approval, the presence of reds in the Chilean cabinet was an invitation to a rightist revolution with plenty of help from Peron’s bully-boy allies in Chilean politics. The Santiago cabinet shuffle, then, had more to do with domestic and South American power politics than it had with getting in line with the Truman Doctrine.

Similarly, nothing much is to be made out of the course of the Paraguayan revolution as a projection of Washington’s Left-Right struggle. The Para-' guayan rebels are simply trying to replace a peculiarly offensive dictator with one they hope will prove less offensive. In spite of their unfavorable but indecisive military record, they still have a chance to do this by negotiating, provided the late spring efforts of a former Brazilian Ambassador to Paraguay to do some mediating between the forces prove effective.

Guatemala’s loss of a free press and some associated civil liberties reflects a deep-seated difficulty, more than a century old, of fairly decent. Latin American leaders like President Arevalo who try to govern constitutionally. Much of the free press becomes an irresponsible agitation press. Irresponsible agitations collect dangerous followings. El Presidente becomes a dictator in order to keep from being ousted by a worse dictator.