Latin America

ON THE WORLD TODAY

POSSIBLY the biggest bombshell tossed on the interAmerican front during the war has been heaved from Washington. It was the series of charges made by Senator Hugh Butler of Nebraska, that the United States has spent six billion dollars in the past three years mainly on “boondoggling” projects in Latin America in order to buy the good will of the neighbor republics.

Instead of good will, according to Senator Butler, this program has aroused hatred and fear of economic imperialism among the neighbors. It has fostered political corruption in their governments and want among the people by disturbing their labor and social economies. Besides, accuses the Senator, most of the Latin American countries are not democracies but dictatorships — the kind of dictatorships we are supposed to be fighting elsewhere.

Exporting domestic politics

All this was much bigger news in Latin America than it was in the United States. Here inter-American programs are only a fraction of the war effort, and occasional extravagance in senatorial criticism of national policies is a familiar feature of partisan politics.

But in Latin America, all war activity hinges on the inter-American relationship. If Senator Butler’s attack presaged any drastic change in that relationship especially in its economic phases — a good many of the Latin republics might have to revise, not only a great many of their war activities in support of the United Nations, but their attitudes toward the whole scheme of inter-American coöperation from now on into the post-war world.

Furthermore, it has been a chronic fear in the southern republics for years that a change of administration in the United States might mean the end of the Good Neighbor policy and a return of “dollar diplomacy” with all that it once implied of military interventions and imperialistic pressures in the weaker Latin nations.

Consequently, when a Senator of the party opposed to the Administration uses all the weapons at his command to discredit and destroy the Good Neighbor policy as it is now applied, all these fears are revived and widely disseminated. Necessarily, too, all the pro-Axis and anti-Gringo elements in the various republics — and every republic has some of them in influential political spots — are encouraged by the Butler charges to attack their own governments’ policies of collaboration with the United States.

The Butler bombshell, then, was an even heavier shock to Latin America than the Argentine militarist revolution of last summer. The Argentine coup concerned only Argentina and, in varying degrees, three or four of her nearest neighbors. But the Butler charges, if they could conceivably lead to an aboutface in Washington’s inter-American politics and a withdrawal from other outstanding inter-American commitments, would concern pretty nearly everything that has been built up during the past ten years in inter-American understanding.

Senator McKellar retorts

What are the chances that Senator Butler’s charges will have any such effect? In the first place, his charges lack some of the practical impact of strict accuracy. The figure of six billion dollars he used as an overall total for our expenditures in Latin America for all agencies dealing with the southern republics was boiled down, in an initial reply made by Senator McKellar of Tennessee, to something nearer two billion dollars, of which more than one billion dollars has been paid out for essential war supplies duly purchased and received. The bulk of the remaining billion, according to Senator McKellar, has been put out either in loans or in indirect expenditures for the improvement of the facilities of the Latin republics for producing war supplies rapidly.

There were even more striking inaccuracies in Senator Butler’s accounts of the wages paid to Latin American labor on war supply and other projects at Washington’s expense. In general, wage scales somewhat higher than the previously prevailing ones have been paid, partly for the “good will” effect on the people in the producing areas and partly to adjust workers’ incomes to the general wartime rise in prices from which most Latin American countries have suffered acutely. But some of Senator Butler’s figures suggest that he actually mistook wages paid in depreciated local currencies for dollars.

A further calculation neglected in the Butler charges is the fact that a good deal of the money put out for physical improvement of production facilities has been supplied in the form of loans — many of them good loans. Some of them are so good, in fact, that they have been repaid already. Others should not be too difficult to take care of during the post-war adjustment period, if only because of the huge dollar balances which the Latin American states are piling up in the United States in the wake of their immense shipments here of vital war supplies.

In other words, the Butler suggestions of wasted billions tend to shake down in most cases to an exhibition of heavy, but not abnormally heavy, wartime spending.

False premises, colored conclusions

Most of the other concepts expressed in the Butler reports belong, basically, in the same category. The Nebraskan legislator learned, for example, of shocking cases in which Latin American workmen on United States projects, after collecting their first wage increase, declined to work the second half of the week or even after the first Monday night. Among expatriate Gringos who favor low wages, these stories are a dime a dozen. They are like the “coal in the bathtub” stories popular among upper-bracket, groups in American localities where slum clearance projects have been instituted rather suddenly.

It depends on who the investigator is, and how he investigates, whether he determines that such abuses of access to temporary prosperity are characteristic of whole societies or are simply tidbits of gossip about individual departure from normal behavior.

Senator Butler, from this point of view, seems to have been one of those wishful investigators who can generalize from practically any particular legend to support a cherished primary thesis.

Senatorial boondoggling?

The end product, however, could be permanently damaging only in proportion to the seriousness with which the Butler reports are taken in the United States. If the Senator’s charges about the uselessness of the Good Neighbor program and the spending of a minor fraction of our war funds on improving the war production capacities and the living conditions of the neighbor nations are slapped down fairly quickly by authoritative spokesmen on foreign policies in both the Republican and Democratic parties, then the chances are that Latin American leaders will quickly forget them.

If, on the other hand, the Butler reports are used as anything like the spearhead of a Republican attack on the Roosevelt administration’s Hemisphere programs, a new era of distrust of Washington’s Hemisphere statecraft could open almost any minute. The awakening of these latent feelings of distrust, moreover, would almost inevitably, and poisonously, affect the usefulness of the American nations at the peace table.

The truth is, of course, that the countries where Senator Butler says Americans are “hated” — for their “boondoggling” extravagances among other things — have given the Allies vital military bases and vast stores of essential war supplies, and have expelled or disciplined Axis fifth columnists. All but one of the twenty neighbors have broken relations with the Axis, and thirteen are now in some state of belligerency against our enemies. If it is true that we are “hated down there,” then, as the Washington Post put it editorially in answer to the Butler charges, “the emotion has been well dissembled.”

One main thing, however, is to be learned from the Butler incident, regardless of how much or how little damage it does. All that is constructive, and even much that is vitally helpful in a military sense, in the working relationship between the American nations is still perilously at the mercy of politicians and their political followers who do not understand it.

Colombia joins up

Meanwhile, to give accent to the feeling of reasonable confidence of Latin American leaders in the United States, in the very week when the Butler bombshell was being readied for discharge, another South American republic — Colombia — became a belligerent.

In mid-November there had been another U-boat sinking of a harmless Colombian schooner, the Ruby, with some loss of life. The Colombian government, having received neither apologies nor explanations for similar sinkings in 1942, decided that the dignity of the country required definite action. Accordingly, the Senate passed a somewhat unusual resolution to the effect that Germany had put herself in a state of belligerency with Colombia, and therefore Colombia must assume the same status.

Nevertheless, for all practical purposes it was a declaration of war. The government, functioning for the present under Acting President Echandia during the absence of President López in the United States, called up the reserves for army service. Stricter surveillance of German nationals and fifth column elements was ordered, and German property was seized as an indemnity for the losses sustained in the Ruby and other sinkings. Also, negotiations were initiated with Washington for Lend-Lease armament.

This last step, incidentally, may have its bearings on South America’s broader politics. For instance, Colombia has by no means asked for, or received, so great a bulk of Lend-Lease arms from the United States as most of the other South American powers have claimed. At the same time, potentially disturbing conditions toward her southwestern border have undoubtedly put Colombian leaders in a frame of mind during the past few months in which larger armaments might prove desirable.

It is common knowledge in western South America that there is still bad blood between Peru and Ecuador over the old boundary dispute which was terminated, but hardly settled, by Peru’s occupation of considerable border territory after an undeclared small war between the two countries in 1941. It is also common gossip in South America that “the war after the war” on the continent will consist of an attack by Peru on her weaker neighbor, either to take all of Ecuador up to the Guayas River, or, if the going seems to be good, to annex the whole republic.

New conquistadores?

Colombia, which has hundreds of miles of Pacific shoreline, naturally does not relish the idea of finding herself neighbor to a Peru of greatly increased population and resources. A conquest of Ecuador, too, would about double Peru’s strategic advantages in respect to Colombia, and more than double her boundaries with Colombia.

In its deeper backgrounds, though, the PeruvianEcuadorian sore spot, and the tensions between Peru and Colombia over Ecuador, are the kind of issues which an effective concert of American powers, based on the Good Neighbor policy, could settle. There is no really plausible chance that a war against Ecuador, or a war over Ecuador, could occur among the South American west coast powers if the other nations of the continent actively opposed it.

But both action and unanimity would be pretty much out of the question if confidence underlying the Good Neighbor relationship between the American republics were destroyed either by some uninformed decision of the voters, or by irresponsible attacks.