Latin America

ON THE WORLD TODAY

THE huge offensive launched on November 7 by the AEF of World War II is designed, in President Roosevelt’s own description, “to deny to the aggressor nations a starting point from which to launch an attack against the Atlantic Coast of the Americas.” Within the other American republics, then, and especially in South America, the progress of the offensive will be taken as the measure of the power of the United States both to defend the Hemisphere and to win the war by rolling up Hitler along his Southern flank.

There are, therefore, practically no limits to the beneficial effects which the move into Africa can have if it approaches an all-out success. Even the positions of the “problem children” of interAmerican solidarity, Argentina and Chile, are bound to be rocked by a favorable turn in Allied fortunes. Triumph in Africa should cure Chile of her doubts of the final outcome; and in the Argentine render the Castillo administration’s devotion to the Axis impossible as a realistic nation’s foreign policy, whatever advantages it may have seemed to hold out previously to the land millionaires of the republic in their struggle for the control of Argentine domestic economy.

How far has it gone?

Yet these hopeful rationalizations should be tempered with recognition of the fact that the Axis during 1942 has come dangerously near to creating its own “second front” in the American Hemisphere; and down to the very moment of the African invasion was working at the job daringly and on the whole effectively.

It is from this angle that the developing crisis in our relations with Chile over Nazi espionage needs to be examined. The controversy began with an obvious reference to Chile and Argentina in a speech made by Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles on October 8 before the National Foreign Trade Convention in Boston. “I cannot believe,” Mr. Welles said, “ that these two republics will continue long to permit their brothers and neighbors of the Americas ... to be stabbed in the back by Axis emissaries.”

Undoubtedly Mr. Welles wished to bring into the open the scandal of Axis diplomatic espionage on shipping and military movements in the Americas. Manifestly nothing could be done about the Argentine with the Castillo administration still in power, but in Chile there was some chance that bringing it into the open would lead a more friendly government to end the espionage nuisance by breaking its Axis relations.

At the worst, if Chile did nothing, the rebuke was an effective way of heading off a visit from President Ríos scheduled for late October — a visit increasingly regarded as awkward in Washington.

The effects of plain speaking, however, quickly outbulked the question of motives. President Rios at once announced indefinite postponement of his visit, while his Foreign Minister, Barros Jarpa, denied the charges that spying activities were going on under Chilean jurisdiction. Swiftly, our State Department produced proof that a spy ring not only was operating under Nazi diplomatic auspices in Chile, but that it was responsible for numerous ship losses to German submarines in the Atlantic. As a result, Barros Jarpa resigned; and to give President Ríos a free hand in his foreign policy embarrassments, the Cabinet quit with Jarpa.

Chile and Argentina

Here was a chance for a complete reversal of Chilean attitudes toward the war, the United Nations, and the collaborative activities of the other American republics. But President Ríos accepted Barros Jarpa’s resignation with the honors due a diplomat caught in an inevitable embarrassment, and after a few obviously halfhearted attempts to offer the Foreign Ministry to a pro-Ally politician, appointed a colorless career diplomat, Joaquín Fernandez y Fernandez, the ambassador to Uruguay.

Nothing in the record of Fernandez suggested that he disliked the processes of appeasement. After making a faint gesture of appeasement toward the United States in a public statement at Montevideo praising President Roosevelt, he stopped at Buenos Aires on his way home to Santiago and allowed himself to be entrapped as a guest at a dinner to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the death of the Chilean patriot, Bernardo O’Higgins.

There Enrique Ruiz Guiñazú, the pro-Axis Argentine Foreign Minister, stood over him and pronounced an oration declaring that the policies of Argentina and Chile “ follow parallel courses . . . to command respect for our respective sovereign decisions.” “Good Neighborliness,” Ruiz Guiñazú added, “consists in refraining from disturbing peaceful cultivation of one’s heritage.”

Since his return to Santiago, there have been no disavowals from Fernandez either of the collaboration of the Ríos and Castillo governments in “parallel courses,” or of the right of Ruiz Guiñazú to make a declaration of general foreign policies on behalf of Chile. Until such disavowals are made, something suspiciously like a diplomatic bloc appears to be forming between the two neutrals.

Angry neutrality

Chilean reactions to the espionage controversy are by no means limited, however, to the diplomatic developments. Except for the Socialist and Communist dailies, the metropolitan press of Santiago and Valparaiso has supported their President’s position that the speech by Welles was a serious affront to the nation. Journals, hitherto strongly favoring the United Nations, have come out for prolonging the “prudent neutrality” experiment. Former President Arturo Alessandri has attacked the United States and declared the national dignity of Chile insulted. The conservative political groups and the Axis agitators have fervently revived old charges that inter-American war collaboration is simply “Yanqui imperialism” in a new form — a subtle device of Washington to bring about “rule or ruin” control of the foreign policy of the other American republics for the benefit of Washington and American big business.

Thus the Chilean neutrality issue, within a little more than a month, has been transformed from a relatively mild argument over the expediency of breaking relations with Japan into a passionate Latin-American quarrel over the old fighting question of gringo dominance in the Hemisphere. It makes little difference whether this is a sound view of the values at stake in the issue. This is the way the controversy has developed.

And developing, it plays inevitably into the Axis hands. While the quarrel rages, there is little prospect that so temporizing a leader as President Ríos has proved himself to be will seek a way out of his difficulties by a sharp break with the Axis. Without the break, the abuses which separate Chile from anti-Axis America will persist and increasingly isolate her. In her isolation, she can hardly escape being drawn closer and closer to Argentina.

There are of course certain more optimistic signs. Since the controversy arose the Chilean government has put a number of prominent Axis agents under arrest and seems, in contrast to Argentina, genuinely determined to break up the operations of the particular spy ring against which evidence has been produced. In spite of the bickering between Washington and Santiago, Chile’s physical contributions of iron, copper, and other essential materials to the United Nations war machine are increasing.

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Nevertheless, the widening rift between the governments faces us with a crucial situation. Out of it the Nazis have a chance to create a front, and they are adroitly trying to create one. In this war the Axis sooner or later is forcing all neutrals to take sides. If the neutrals of South America choose the Axis side simply to the extent of continuing to give aid and facilities to Axis propaganda and sabotage operations, a line will have been set up between the friends of the United Nations and dangerous, not to say potentially hostile, territory. It may be a front of bitter grievances and political hostilities rather than a physical battle line, but it will be a line of division within the Americas and the beginning of the admission of Old World struggles and balance of power rivalries into the New.

The Axis takes advantage

It is of inestimable advantage to the Axis to create such a division. Already it is forcing Brazil to keep large bodies of troops on guard in the southern provinces where her large German population is established just across the border from Argentina’s largest German population.

If the war of the 1940’s should end in anything less than the total destruction of the Axis, the line between friends and enemies of the Axis would have to be watched by soldiers against the coming of the war of the 1950’s or the 1960’s, as no previous frontier has been watched in the history of the American continents.

There is still, between Chile and Argentina and their neighbors, nothing more than a frontier of political divisions. But already across the borders the antagonists are rushing the railroad constructions — a line connecting the Chilean Pacific port of Antofagasta with the Argentine railway system at Salta; a line connecting Bolivia with a Brazilian Atlantic outlet at Santos. The pillboxes and the defenses in depth could come later, but the essentials are being assembled for a military frontier.

Chile’s final decision, it now is to be hoped, will be determined by victory in Africa, and by the slowly improving outlook in the South Pacific. But until she makes her final decision, the line separating the neutrals from the rest of the Americas is the line most worth watching in the whole American Hemisphere.