Latin America

ON THE WORLD TODAY

SUPPLYING the millions of men and women in the civilian labor armies of Latin America who are getting out materials for war is a need almost as basic as supplying the United Nations’ fighting fronts.

United States Marines on Guadalcanal and United States soldiers in North Africa must have weapons and food or they can’t fight effectively, and everyone knows it. But not everyone realizes that in order to solve the fighting forces’ supply problem completely it may be necessary to solve the supply problems of the Latin-American production fronts at least partially and even to solve some of them first.

To be sure, there was plenty of enlightening discussion of this point even before Pearl Harbor. Nevertheless, to many naval and military supply experts and to certain key personages in war production and in allocation of resources the need for supplies on the fighting fronts has seemed paramount. Authorities not directly connected with in ter-American relations have often regarded the neighbor republics as a species of WPA countries that ought to be thankful to get anything that was left over from Uncle Sam’s war effort provided anything was left over.

At the same time, a good many war production industries in Latin America have been slow to recognize that wage and purchasing-power adjustments are imperative for the workers.

The attitude of some industries has tended to be that, after all, the United States is opening up new economic opportunities and developing new resources in these countries; and because there is a war on, many more jobs are available than their workers might have expected. Why not put off drastic wage and purchasing-power adjustments?

Aid to our Latin-American allies

Standards of living and problems of supply have had some attention, of course. There have been large allotments of supplies for certain areas and for populations engaged in certain specific activities rubber gathering, for instance. Considerable shipments of machinery have been made to the Latin-American countries for industries directly connected with the war. Much help has been extended to war-working populations in sanitation and health fields, and there have been some improvements in regional transportation in localities where strategic materials are produced. There have also been a few adjustments of wages to meet rising living costs.

Seldom, though, have these changes come up to the expectations of Latin-American groups, especially groups of workers who have been told, perhaps a little fulsomely, of the benefits that were about to come to them as a result of their aid to the United Nations. Indeed, in many LatinAmerican areas, the more the strategic materials industries have expanded, the more have basic living conditions deteriorated.

As a result of these disappointments and partial disappointments, there have been a good many symptoms recently of growing Latin-American skepticism about the blessings of participation in the United Nations war effort. Most of these symptoms have come in the form of labor troubles. There have been some rather disturbing strike threats in Mexican mining and textile industries recently, for instance. Colombia has had a twoday railroad strike. In both cases, increases in living costs above wage increases appeared to be the basic trouble. So far, serious consequences have been averted in these countries by efforts toward sensible readjustments.

Paraguay and Bolivia

But in Paraguay and Bolivia, serious consequences have not been averted. In Paraguay, the labor movement is weak. Nevertheless, in a country with a living standard as low and a government as unstable as Paraguay’s, even a weak labor movement can seem dangerous. So, when there were minor strikes and threats of larger ones in Paraguay late in November, accompanied with a group of labor demands for improved living conditions, Dictator Higino Morinigo decided that the time had come to reshuffle his politics.

This decision taken, the method of reshuffling was cut out for him. Most governments in Paraguay thrive best through the help of some strong outside influence. Dictator Morinigo, since the Rio de Janeiro conference of last January, had gone through the motions, at least, of playing for this support from the United Nations. For example, he has accepted loans from Washington to improve Paraguay’s transportation facilities.

But the traditional source of moral support for Paraguayan dictators is the Argentine. Hence Dictator Morinigo, when he decided that political action was necessary, deprived his pro-United Nations advisers of effective authority in the government and juggled power into the hands of ministers recognized as trustworthy Argentine stooges. Also, he put all the leading spokesmen for the labor protest in jail — which is fairly in accordance with the way the reactionary Castillo administration in the Argentine feels that labor leaders should be dealt with.

Tin supply endangered

The Paraguayan difficulty, however, threatens for the present only the United Nations political front in the Hemisphere. The Bolivian disturbance affects the United Nations supply line for the vital strategic metal, tin, and also, though to a lesser degree, several minor strategic metals, such as tungsten and antimony.

But the Bolivian trouble, too, came about as a result of the non-solution of the problems of supply and living standards. Tin is mined in Bolivia on grim, barren plains above the 10,000foot level, where little is produced for the inhabitants but a few juiceless root vegetables. Supplies of food as well as of most articles in daily use have to be shipped in from outside. The general custom of the big mining interests, Patiño and Hochschild, is to sell supplies to the mine workers in company stores.

To this general meagerness of life in the mining regions, 1942 has added a new difficulty — one of the world’s worst struggles even in wartime: rising costs of living. A complex of shipping and Bolivian national financial difficulties and of plain scarcities helps to explain rising prices, but explanations can hardly satisfy the Bolivian miners.

Increases of 100 per cent in the cost of ordinary foodstuffs have been common, and for some things the price rise has been several times that.

A few wage increases have been granted, but most of them have been absorbed or more than absorbed immediately by the rising costs of food and necessities in the company stores.

Early in December a liberal, up-to-date collective bargaining code, in some respects resembling the Wagner Act but providing rather more direct methods than the Wagner Act for frequent adjustments of wages to living costs, was due to go into force in Bolivia. A somewhat complicated series of congressional and executive procedures was apparently required to put the code into operation, and whether all the necessary formalities were gone through with appears doubtful. In any event, when the code was not applied so soon or so concretely as the tin miners had been led to expect, a serious strike broke out in the Catavi tin region.

It seems at this distance to have been the toughest of Latin-American strikes since the republics below the Rio Grande became part of the United Nations production line. Army detachments sent out from the capital, at La Paz, to put it down forcibly appear to have lost their nerve after a few shootings. They filled up an empty train with arrested strike leaders and took them back to the national prison.

Eventually a vague and temporary compromise resulted. Many if not most — of the workers have gone back to the tin mines, attracted by company bonuses and promises of further negotiations. But most reports still suggest that the Bolivian tin region harbors the most difficult and unsettled labor situation in the Americas at this time.

Moreover, the strike has provoked a violent controversy in the United States as to whether Pierre Boal, Washington’s ambassador at La Paz, did or did not, through Bolivian President Peñaranda, advise the Bolivian government against making the new labor code operative.

Washington denies interference

The State Department has categorically denied, through Under Secretary Sumner Welles, that such advice was even hinted. On the other hand, Ernesto Galarza, labor expert of the Pan American Union, insists he has proof that Ambassador Boal took this action, and says that in due time he will produce it.

But the flare-up over Ambassador Boal’s part or non-part — in the events leading up to the tin strike is not necessarily the major issue in the Bolivian difficulty. The important point is that tin output is endangered and the Bolivian mine regions have been turned, for the time being at least, into a fertile field for Axis agitators. Agents of the Axis can be counted on not to overlook this opportunity to make trouble.

And this situation has come about chiefly because the United States has not yet fully determined whether to deal with the people at large in the other American republics, or fairly exclusively with the governments and the ruling classes; or whether to pursue the daring and original policy of maintaining good working relations with both.