The Nazi Underground in South America

THIS book by an ardently anti-fascist Uruguayan professor is dedicated to the proposition that ‘Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking America is the theatre of an undeclared war.’ Among many other sensational charges, he accuses the Germans of conspiring to seize the valley of the river Plate and establish there an ‘Antarctic Germany,’ and of plotting to detach Patagonia from Argentina and unite it with southern Chile, the Germans who have settled in that part of Chile playing a leading part in this overturn, which would lead to German control of the Straits of Magellan. He cites Haya de la Torre, leader of the radical Aprista Party in Peru, as authority for the statement that ‘the Japanese have a perfect organization in our country, integrated by twenty thousand officers of the Japanese Imperial Army.’ There is a Latin exuberance about Señor Artucio which finds expression in his dedication of the work to Haya de la Torre, ‘whose brow shines like a high star in the moral firmament of the Americas.’ Add to this his strong feeling against the conservative groups of South America, and one may reasonably suspect that he sometimes exaggerates the scope and significance of some of the plots and tendencies which he describes. At the same time South America is a continent militarily weak and economically rich. Any or all of the danger spots to which the author calls attention might become acute in the event of further spectacular reverses for the United Nations or of loss of Anglo-American control of either the Atlantic or the Pacific.

W. H. C.