The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Latin America

THE tough, dangerous war in Korea has had one effect in Washington which has been comparatively little publicized: our defense and diplomatic establishments began asking themselves how much and what kinds of help the United States would require from Latin America to carry on with the struggle. What were our prospects of getting it, and what were we doing, or should we do, to improve the outlook? To what extent could we count on the twenty Western Hemisphere republics to be “on our side” if and when the conflict approached an all-out stage, and where were the dangers of defections?

The same questions were being asked between Munich and Pearl Harbor ten or more years ago. Many of the same problems have reappeared — problems of organizing supply lines, production, and stockpiling; of ironing out economic rifts and political misunderstandings between the Hemisphere governments; of protecting the Panama Canal and the major security spots of the Western land mass; of coping with political infiltration and threats of sabotage.

On the surface the cooperation this time came faster. In a resolution the Organization of American States, composed of twenty Latin American governments and the United States, supported the United Nations’ action commissioning United States forces to resist Communist invasion of South Korea. By acclamation they declared their solidarity with the Washington government in the Far Eastern military emergencies.

Guatemala, where Communist penetration in domestic politics has been notably effective during the past three years, joined ihe chorus, along with Argentina, whose feuds with Washington date back to Argentina’s refusal to break relations with the Fascist Axis early in World War II. Colombia’s Conservative President-elect, Laureano Gomez, an opponent of United States influence in inter-American affairs from his early manhood, and once an apologist for the Nazi-Fascist cause, issued a public statement endorsing American operations in Korea. So did President Arnulfo Arias of Panama, who was also a Nazi sympathizer in 1941.

Tentative negotiations for the sale of strategic raw materials, largely as yet unproduced, were initiated in a number of Latin American capitals or Washington embassies. Offers of the use of old World War II air transport and military bases, hardly required for a war in remote Korea, came in sufficient numbers to be almost embarrassing.

Underneath the surface, however, it is questionable if the Hemisphere front is as solid as it seemed. Some of the offers of assistance and the fervid declarations in favor of the United States were obviously motivated by Latin American wishfulness that trouble in the Far East would restore the Good Neighbor policy in all its pristine generosity. The extent of our generosity will naturally depend on the extent of the Korean involvement.

Dictatorship looks at the Red threat

Among our more enthusiastic supporters are a number of Latin America’s toughest and most reactionary dictatorships — Nicaragua, for instance, the Dominican Republic, and Peru — which are accustomed to trenting the mildest of democratic movements in their own bailiwicks as outcroppings of Communism. At a somewhat higher level of the Hemisphere power structure, President Perón of Argentina was quoted in an interview in Buenos Aires as saying that in order to beat the Reds the Western world must give up individualism. “Liberal individualism has already failed” was the pronouncement.

In a word, quite a lot of Latin American sentiment which in a general way is in favor of checking Communism a long way off did not necessarily wish to see this result achieved through a victory in which the political principles of the United States would prevail.

Meanwhile in countries like Guatemala and Cuba, where the Communist penetrations are deepest, the party propaganda mills kept grinding out the charge that the United States was being justifiably crushed in a vicious and desperate imperialistic adventure in Asia. This, needless to say, took some of the edge off the officially correct declarations of the governments.

Except for some phases of the Communist penetrations, however, most of these flaws in Hemisphere solidarity are minor. The huge defense appropriations tackled by Congress in mid-July were bound, for instance, to step up purchases of strategic raw materials.

If things go badly

If things go from bad to worse in Korea, if we are faced with the Communist capture of Indo-China, or with a Russian thrust into Iran and Iraq, stockpiling of Western Hemisphere materials would have to be resumed on a wartime basis.

These are the commodities from Latin America that we would need: Brazilian and Cuban manganese; Bolivian tin, tungsten, and antimony; Peruvian copper and vanadium; Brazilian mica, quartz crystals, industrial diamonds, vegetable oils, raw rubber, and bauxite; sisal and abaca cordage fibers and kapok from the Caribbean republics; and medical substances and chemical supplies from all countries.

Buying these on a large scale would have three important results: —

1. It would greatly improve shaky dollar balances, and necessitate large financial assistance from the United Stales to get production organized. Such assistance would come chiefly in the form of government or public Export-Import Bank credits, which is the shape in which most of the governments want it.

2. It would take the edge off Latin America’s disappointment over our post-war failure to bolster its economies with public loans, while billions of Marshall Plan dollars rolled across ihe Atlantic to establish a front against Soviet power in Europe,

3. It would weaken the Communist appeal in many areas by improving employment and wage conditions, and give several troubled Latin American governments strong practical incentives to ride herd on their Communist fifth columns.

The Communists lose ground

The danger of Communist penetration has somewhat weakened in Latin America since the end of World War II. It is not nearly as formidable as ihe Nazi and Italian Fascist penetrations were on the eve of Pearl Harbor. The Communists, for instance, polled more than 600,000 votes in Brazil’s 1945 presidential election, and in the Chilean elections of 1946 gave their candidate a plurality of 50,000. In Costa Rica, next door to Panama and its Canal, party members and fellow travelers down through 1948 held high official positions as close advisers of the president. In Venezuelan politics, the party was playing a powerful lone wolf game between the factions, while in Cuba it was moving toward virtual capture of the labor movement.

Today the party has been outlawed and driven underground in Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, and Costa Rica, with consequent loss of numbers and propaganda facilities. Since 1948 it has slipped considerably in its control of the Cuban labor unions. It still has considerable conspiratorial strength in these and several other republics, and possibilities of sabotage of defense stockpiling or military operations against Soviet power are by no means negligible.

But the only place where it has gained power materially is in Guatemala. There, taking advantage of the trials of the first. would-be liberaldemocratic regime in the republic’s history, a small inner group of Moscow-trained agents moved in as early as 1946.

Foothold in Guatemala

Aided by a large colony of Communist exiles from Spain and other Latin American countries, the master strategists have infiltrated Guatemalan stooges into the government, and have organized, along with a movement for radical social and economic reforms, an old-fashioned nationalist campaign against “gringo economic imperialism.”

Assassinations and gang outrages in the streets of the principal cities have terrorized the opposition and to some extent the law enforcement authorities and the administration of President Juan Jose Arevalo himself.

One by-product of these disturbances was the ousting last spring of United States Ambassador Richard C. Patterson, Jr., at the behest of the pro-Communist elements, for protesting too bluntly on behalf of American interests under attack in the republic. And to show the picture at its darkest, the presidential candidate so far outstanding in this year’s election, Colonel Jacobo Arbenz, has cultivated closer ties with the Communist elements than even Dr. Arevalo has.

In the over-all Latin American scene, however, the Guatemalan developments represent a defection rather than a trend. The other Central American republics, disturbed by her example, have tightened their lines against Communist infiltrations.

There are some indications meanwhile that the Guatemalan defection may be moving toward its end. President Arevalo in the past few weeks has been busily dropping Communists and fellow travelers from the public payrolls. Furthermore, whatever its nuisance value to the kremlin, Guatemala in the total defense problem of the Hemisphere is not important. In a big enough emergency, if she persists in her Soviet orbit, a military cordon sanitaire could be placed around her borders to keep her intrigues and indoctrinations from spilling over.

For the rest, there quite possibly are Communist cells among Venezuelan and Colombian oil workers, Bolivian and Brazilian miners, Latin American shipping unions, capable of troublesome sabotage. But these elements would hardly be beyond the eventual control of the military and security forces of their own countries, reinforced in a sufficient emergency by the security operations of the United States.

The Fascists were stronger

In contrast, too, with the situation of the Axis powers ten years ago, no Communist agitators today conceivably could overthrow and hold any Latin American government, with the possible exception of Guatemala.

Indeed, to show the essential weakness of Communist penetrations in the Hemisphere, that contrast may be worth a moment’s examination. Ten years ago, German and Italian economic holdings were enormous in most of the republics. Germans of wealth and influence were intimate and valued advisers of presidents and their cabinets. German-trained officers held high posts in Latin American armies and participated in the power-making operations of military politics.

Huge groups of naturalized Germans and Italians swayed the political sympathies of the most powerful South American countries, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. From Franco Spain came a ceaseless flow of propaganda in praise of the Axis and of Fascist methods of government. In Brazil, Dictator Getulio Vargas was actively experimenting with those methods, as Perón and a revolutionary military junta were to do in Argentina.

Today Communism in Latin America has none of these elements of strength and influence. The ruling economic and political groups, the armies, the pervasive influence of the Roman Catholic Church, are hostile both to its operations on the domestic fronts and to the spread of its world power. Emotional sympathy with North American institutions may be lacking in some of these elements, but there is no doubt of their sense of where the common danger lies. The United States, then, enters the deeper tensions of power struggle reasonably sure of Latin American support.