Latin America

ON THE WORLD TODAY

ALONG with the fall of France and Pearl Harbor, the collapse of Mussolini was one of the three great shocks that Latin American opinion has received during the war. Furthermore, whatever may happen to Italy in the near future, the repercussions of Mussolini’s downfall are unlikely to subside for a considerable period. And some of them are likely to be unfavorable to democracy in the American continents.

The fact is that Mussolini was looked up to by very large groups of Latin American politicos, and by not a few governing circles, as an extremely simpático person. Several dictators of the middle 1930’s, and possibly later, kept personal channels of communication open with him and touchingly treasured his personal letters. All up and down the twenty republics, sheltered and pious well-to-do old ladies adored Il Duce as the savior of religion and the protector of the social order.

But — and this is why the repercussions to the fall of Mussolini should be regarded as serious — the influential reactionary groups in a number of American republics do not appear to be thinking of the collapse of Fascism in terms of a comeback of democracy. Least of all are they thinking of it in those terms in connection with their own countries.

On the contrary, there is evidence of a good deal of plotting and planning with the object of improvising various forms of authoritarian and even totalitarian governments in several Latin American countries. Furthermore, as these plots mature, the plotters and planners are likely to move fast, as they already have done in Argentina.

The essence of the reactionaries’ problem is speed. They must get their jobs done and get themselves thoroughly entrenched in power before some worldwide democratic upheaval — if one is coming — gains the momentum to sweep them out.

Ever since the short-lived Uriburu Revolution of 1930 in the Argentine, the nationalists there have stood for the corporative state institutions of Fascism and have supported more or less openly a group of local “legions” and civilian militia formed on the model of Fascist political organizations abroad.

The growth of these bodies was openly permitted during the administration of President Ramón Castillo, whom the Revolution of June 4 ousted. Under the counter-revolutionary leader, President Pedro Ramirez, further enlistments appear to have flourished.

Fascist with all the trimmings

Furthermore, certain Fascist methods of control are being slyly inserted into the Ramirez crowd’s administrative practices. By a single decree late in July, for example, labor unions were converted — Fascist style — into virtual stooges of the government. All their rights of political agitation and action were taken away from them, and in practice they were ordered to deal with employers in subsequent disputes only through the agencies of the government.

Meanwhile, the regime has found a pretty good working substitute — for the time being at least — for the discredited political appeals of Mussolini and of Fascist ideology under its own name. This is the genial notion — drummed upon every instant by the Ramirez radio and propaganda machine — that military officers are invariably bluff, hearty, non-political persons, expert at cutting the red tape of civilian bureaucracies and totally devoid of self-seeking. Thus, the inference runs, dictatorship under military auspices cannot have anything in common with the faults that developed under Mussolinian Fascism, and essentially is not Fascism at all.

The Ramirez regime has devoted an immense amount of showmanship to building up this picture of Cincinnatus leaving the sword for the cabinet desk. The officers composing the government are still serving, so far as the state payrolls are concerned, strictly for their army and navy salaries.

The government also appears to have won a little kudos even in liberal circles for the way it has gone after a few notable grafters of the Castillo regime, and for vigorously prosecuting a few price-regulation violators in its bad graces. It shows all the symptoms, in fact, of a puritanically reformist government determined to turn the rascals out. Its propaganda is doing its military best, in other words, to seduce the Argentine people into settling for the emasculation of the labor unions with a few blackmarket prosecutions.

Economic crackdown?

There are currents and counter-currents in the situation, which more or less obscure the picture. The tensions of the Fascist effort in Argentina, for instance, undoubtedly have been tightened by the fall of Mussolini. But at the same time, in spite of “appeasement” yearnings in certain quarters, the impulses which have led the United Nations to take a tougher attitude toward the Axis in the wake of Il Duce have also led certain elements in Washington to “get tougher” with the imitators of Axis techniques in Argentina.

As a partial result of this tendency, the United States government early in August took the extraordinary step of holding up export licenses granted on something like 16,000 shipments to the Argentine Republic prior to May 1. Ostensibly, and according to official explanations, no political pressure on the Ramirez regime was intended. The licenses were recalled for further examination simply to make sure that no supplies exported to Argentina will fall into the hands of blacklisted Axis firms or agents.

The export license maneuver for the time being deprives the Argentine government of much needed supplies of machinery, manufactured articles, and industrial materials — just at the time when the Ramirez crew is trying to build up a reputation for being a better provider for the population than the Castillo regime was. And the mere fact that supplies for definite United Nations war industries in the Argentine are excepted, along with exports licensed since May 1 — when a much more severe supervision of destinations was instituted — does little to relieve the Argentine government of its embarrassments.

The most surprising development is that the Ramirez authorities have apparently agreed to Washington’s license policy — or at least made it clear to American diplomatic representatives in Buenos Aires that they plan no protests. But this is in keeping with the Ramirez group’s systematic policy of blowing hot and blowing cold toward the United Nations.

In any event, in Buenos Aires, there was no lack of quick counter-measures. In the same week that the body blow on export licenses was so cheerfully accepted, President Ramirez announced, in an interview with the Chilean pro-Nazi paper, Chileno, that neither democratic reform nor a break with the Axis was being planned in Argentina. And authoritative spokesmen for the government gave it out that Argentina would not break with Italy following the crash of Mussolini, because Argentine chivalry did not approve of hitting old friends when they were down.

Will Chile bite?

The worst danger from the Argentine “new order,” however, is to be looked for in the example which its apparent success so far offers to reactionary elements in other Latin American republics.

One of the countries most plagued by Argentina’s example is Chile. Chile’s economy has been out of balance most of the time since World War I, and the present war has done little to improve it. Copper and iron exports are sharply up, but agricultural exports have fallen off almost to nothing because of the world shipping situation. The workers in the copper and iron mines, however rich in money wages, cannot eat all the republic’s fruit and grain surpluses.

As a result, Chile suffers from badly depreciated foreign exchange and a desperate shortage of various imported foods and manufactured materials at the same time that her economy is bogged down with farm overproduction in several commodities.

The government, which functions through a complex of bitterly competing political parties in both Congress and the Cabinet, has not been able to straighten out these basic tangles. There have been increasing demands from Chilean rightists and reactionaries, ever since President Rios’s election early in 1942, for a “strong” regime wffiich would override constitutional limitations for the time being and solve all problems on a strong-arm basis.

Already these elements have made some significant gains. In the Cabinet shuffle last spring, President Ríos went as far as he dared in scrapping party representations of the radical-to-leftist coalition which elected him. He named as ministers more military — and ostensibly “non-political” —officers than Chile has known since she was virtually governed by a military Fascist clique in the early 1930’s.

But the pressure from the right is for a still heavier military hand in the government. And there are definite threats — if not positive dangers — of a military coup on the Argentine model. Lately, indeed, some of these pressures are coming from the Ramirez regime in Buenos Aires itself.

The Argentine government is taking advantage of Chile’s meat and other food shortages — and of Argentina’s surpluses — to urge upon Santiago new economic ties which immensely increase Argentine economic influence in Chile. It could hardly be increased to any serious degree without greatly strengthening the elements plotting for a more authoritarian and a more military government in Chile.

Worried good neighbors

Similar inspirations from the decline of Italian Fascism — which, in a way, was merely high-lighted by the collapse of Mussolini — are being felt far beyond Chile.

Thus in Peru there have been worries this summer over the possibility that an army junta will either bring about a revolution or force President Prado to renew his border war on Ecuador, as a means of putting the army in the saddle. There are reports of army pressure on President Medina of Venezuela to take a stronger rightist line or take the consequences; and of strong rightist and clerical agitation against liberal President López of Colombia.

Even in the model Latin democracy of Costa Rica, there have recently been efforts by the present administration to pass a new election law giving it control over the counting of presidential votes. The only difference was that in Costa Rica’s case revolutionary threats came from the liberal side, and were taken so seriously that the bill for the new electoral method was withdrawn from Congress.

Meanwhile the Axis propaganda is sounding a continuous keynote to whoop these rightist and military extremist plots and movements along. Its method is to repeat the constant charge that the peace riots in Italy are communist demonstrations, and that with Mussolini gone and with Fascism gone, the world will lie open to bolshevism and atheism and anarchy and all the horrors from which Mussolini and Hitler and Nazi Fascism have pretended to protect weaker nations. In every Latin American information center, the Spanish Falangists are subtly chiming in.

In any event, while such a showdown threatens, there is even less likelihood of a break between Argentina and the Axis powers than there was before. The Ramirez inheritors of Fascism in Argentina now have fatter fish to fry — or think they have — than a few Lend-Lease dickers with Washington. They see a long chance for political dominance.