Latin America

ON THE WORLD TODAY

THE great Argentine Revolution of June 4 has developed into one of the more unpleasant wartime political fermentations in the Western Hemisphere.

South American politics and political regimes are subject, of course, to curious fluctuations. It is entirely possible that sooner or later the Buenos Aires situation, at least in some of its surface aspects, will brighten. But the regime which tossed the Nazi-tutored General Pedro Ramirez into the presidency has been in office long enough now for us to appraise with some exactness both its initial character and its practical objectives.

Nothing in that appraisal so far justifies, in the United Nations camp, either satisfaction or cheery expectations. The Ramirez putsch has brought Argentina probably the stiffest dictatorship the republic has known since it got rid of its celebrated “Tyrant Rosas” ninety-one years ago.

The new administration has called off the constitutional presidential elections scheduled for September. It has banned all political party meetings. It has outlawed the Freemason lodges in the usual fascist fashion and has imposed an even stricter censorship on newspapers than that enforced by the previous president, Ramón Castillo. Furthermore, the new administration has collaborated closely with the fascist and Falangist organizations in the republic. The pronunciamentos of the new president — who has decreed it illegal to describe his administration as “Provisional”—have bristled with such fascist catchwords as “authority” and “discipline.” Naturally, it has suspended Congress.

It has stopped the work of the Anti-National Activities Committee in the Congress — better known as the Taborda Committee — and that of an equally valuable committee on Axis espionage. It has done everything in its power to discredit the findings of these organizations against both army and civilian pro-Axis leaders prominent in the new government. It has been tougher on pro-Allied comments in newspapers than the Castillo regime ever was — among other things, it has suspended the English-language newspaper in Buenos Aires, the Standard, for certain mild criticisms of Argentine neutrality which the Castillo administration overlooked last February.

It has closed the Junta de la Victoria — “Victory Club”—of pro-Allied society women in Buenos Aires, which functions as a relief and bandage-rolling station; and, to add insult to hostility, it ordered the police to do the padlocking job.

Axis agents persist

To be sure, the new administration suspended the right of Axis embassies to send code messages to their governments, ignoring in the meantime the excellent chance that, with the radio and transoceanic telephone services fully open, the Axis agents may possibly have plenty of deeper codes to fall back on by using the apparently innocent language of personal messages and conversations. Nothing has been done, in any case, to rid Buenos Aires of the hundreds of Nazi and Japanese embassy attachés who cannot have any conceivable business in South America except propaganda and espionage.

In a word, what we seem to have here is a poker game of inter-American coöperation. There is double talk about Pan-American solidarity, with sly intimations of some far future break with the Axis. Meanwhile the Buenos Aires “Non-provisional” Government cracks down on all genuinely liberal and proAllied movements in the republic.

Our new-found friends below the Río de la Plata are perfectly willing to break relations with the Axis — for a price. But the price is high.

The Ramirez gang’s chums and advisers from the Spanish Falange embassy in Buenos Aires and elsewhere have undoubtedly told the new government how much appeasement the Allies are willing to pay for mere neutrality. Why shouldn’t Argentina, then, ostensibly the cock of the walk in Latin America get something more than Spain received, for something better than neutrality?

What price appeasement?

For instance, why not demand a free hand for the “ Non-provisional” reactionary dictatorship to establish itself permanently, as the price of a break with the Axis? Or enough Lend-Lease supplies for Argentina and for the ruling generals’ junta to re-establish Argentina’s military superiority over Brazil and Chile, as a price of really effective collaboration with the United Nations? And finally, as the price of a declaration of war on the Axis, let’s have freedom for the republic to use its military superiority to establish, at the expense of Chile and Brazil, not to mention Bolivia and Paraguay, the long-yearned-for coast-to-coast hegemony of Argentina in South America.

It would be a slur, of course, to intimate that any of these propositions have been put concretely to Washington. So far, they are merely hanging in the air of the Potomac Valley. But there is no question that the Ramirez crew’s main interest, as concerns its foreign policy, is with what was once known in Chicago as the pay-off.

We are not interested

Consequently, it is pleasant to be able to report that our State Department has begun operations on the Ramirez front by taking insinuations about an Argentine deal in its stride. Ambassador Espil, in other words, is persona grata as a diplomat in Washington, but he has not been encouraged to function as an emissary of Buenos Aires power politics. Moreover, the idea that Euenos Aires should send a special commission to the United States to discuss basic “business matters” appears to have been diplomatically discouraged.

The State Department, in fact, is insisting on a polite form of “unconditional surrender.” It will discuss Lend-Lease deals with the Argentine after, and not before, the Ramirez regime has taken its place in the structure of inter-American solidarity by breaking relations with the Axis.

In the first place, an Argentine break with the Axis, or even an Argentine declaration of war, would not be worth so much these days as Spain’s neutrality meant in the fairly recent period when the possibility of a thrust by Hitler through Spain might have endangered the whole United Nations campaign in North Africa.

Today Argentina’s position in the military strategy of the war has an all but negligible value. Argentina’s food supplies are immensely valuable to the United Nations, but Argentina is obliged to sell them to the Allies to avert economic collapse — and is selling them, particularly to Great Britain.

Axis espionage in the Argentine has been a serious Allied headache, and still is something of a headache. But, in proportion as the U-boat campaign is licked on the high seas and especially in the South Atlantic, it becomes of less and less practical importance to the United Nations if Axis agents in Buenos Aires are permitted to spy their heads off. Under these conditions, appeasing the Argentine by sending her vast Lend-Lease military stores isn’t worth its weight in ships and tanks and cannon.

Our Good Neighbors

Neither is it worth the ill-will which serious appeasement of Argentina would certainly arouse in rival South American republics, especially Brazil and Chile. If Argentina were suddenly treated to a Sunday-school picnic hamper full of military goodies by Washington, Brazil might be justly irritated.

Washington realizes it cannot afford to treat Argentina like Brazil, the first major South American power to become an ally and a fellow belligerent, until Argentina becomes fully as devoted an ally as Brazil, and from similarly genuine motives. Nothing in the conduct of the Ramirez regime to date has suggested that such a metamorphosis is in sight.

Meanwhile Argentina is continuing to reap the natural consequences of the government’s policy — under both Castillo and Ramirez — of mercenary isolationism. Brazil, for instance, has been walling up northern frontiers against potential Argentine pressure by drawing closer to Bolivia.

Specifically, Rio de Janeiro has endeared itself to its southwestern neighbor by granting Bolivia a free port at Santos, and by pledging materials, under a kind of lend-lease pact, toward the construction of a Santa Cruz-Corumba railroad and of rail and canal connections which will improve Bolivia’s access to the Paraguay River and the Río de la Plata estuary.

Nor are these pledges mere rhetoric. Pig iron and steel production are due to begin within a few months in the new Brazilian steel mills built with the aid of United States Government capital at Volta Redonda.

Meanwhile, some potentially perilous developments in inter-American relations have been checked, if by no means cured yet, in Southern California. The great unmentionable factor in hemisphere solidarity is the race and color discrimination practiced in certain sections of the United States against native-born citizens primarily, but at times against certain groups of “Good Neighbors.” And over huge stretches of Southwestern United States, from Texas to California, a large population of Mexican birth or extraction has been subject, almost from the beginning of American settlement in these regions, to varying degrees of segregation and discrimination.

These Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, underprivileged, desperately poor by local economic standards, and in many cases of partial Indian descent, have rarely been in a position to fight for a higher status. On the whole they have accepted their lot fatalistically, if not exactly with gratitude. But the situation has created a constant subsurface bitterness in our relations with Mexico.

“Zoot suit” riots and repercussions

This bitterness was accentuated early in June when the basic tensions in the situation flared up in the so-called “zoot suit” riots in Los Angeles. The riots followed a familiar pattern, with a few military trimmings. Certain slum gangs of young Mexicans — “zoot suit” addicts, possibly, as a social defense mechanism — have become “bad” gangs. Some of them on their prowls about town had trouble with soldiers and sailors: and some of the troubles led to stabbings, beatings, attacks on women, and other crimes that go with slum gang warfare.

So Army and Navy detachments on leave, assisted by numerous bellicose civilians and whooped on by newspapers exploiting a “crime wave,” proceeded to give the “zoot-suiters” a dose of the lower brands of American mob violence.

The Mexican authorities made strong and proper diplomatic protests to Washington, only to find that the great majority of the mob victims were — regardless of Indian pigmentation and Mexican backgrounds— technically native-born United States citizens.

Fortunately, both the diplomatic protests and the dangerous social dynamite in the situation hit home to the California authorities. The state is now trying to solve the problem on the basis of state responsibility, and appears to have made a constructive beginning.

Governor Earl Warren has put an investigation into the social and economic conditions leading to the riots into the hands of a citizens’ committee headed by Attorney General Robert W. Kenny. Mr. Kenny, a Los Angeles-born liberal who knows the social and economic dislocations of his community clinically, has a better than average capacity for knocking heads together and getting situations cleared up.