Latin America

ON THE WORLD TODAY

POLITICAL inconsistency has been a fine art in Latin America for generations, but a new record was hung up in January when the Argentine Republic broke diplomatic relations with the Axis. The break was almost without preliminaries.

Politicians and the financial backers of politicians, on confidential terms with the Argentine government, had helped to put the pro-Nazi politicians of Bolivia in charge of the government there, through a “palace revolution” accomplished just before Christmas. The same, or affiliated, groups have been working for similar revolts in Chile and Uruguay, and for subversion of the administration of Dictator Higinio Morínigo in Paraguay to the Axis side.

The establishment in lower South America of a bloc of states friendly to the Axis, or which would merely renege on their coöperation with the United Nations, would have been a welcome diversion to the Axis. At the same time, Axis spy rings and Axis propagandists were flourishing in Argentina, with no serious hindrance except a few wrist-slaps for the record.

Trouble, trouble

But there had been trouble over the reputed Argentine liaison with the Bolivian revolution. At the suggestion of the Inter-American Committee for the Political Defense of the Western Hemisphere, in Montevideo, the rest of the American republics agreed to sift the evidence of enemy influences in the Bolivian picture before recognizing the new Bolivian government.

During the third week in January, notices began to come in. In Washington, Secretary of State Hull, on behalf of the United States, with obviously calculated modesty, simply supported the stand of the republics which had already spoken.

Buenos Aires finally realized that these almost tender indirections packed more wallop than it had anticipated. Ramírez’s shrewder advisers realized that Argentina was being put in the doghouse.

Through the diplomatic grapevines, simultaneously, the Buenos Aires Foreign Office learned that a serious “bill of indictment” had been prepared in the State Department in Washington, citing chapter and verse on the connections of prominent Ramírez-supporting Argentines with the Nazis and with Spanish diplomats and Spanish Falange agents in South America, in promoting the Bolivian revolution; and that the “indictment” could be brought out and put to use at any future time when it might seem advantageous to embarrass the Ramirez administration.

Ominously, in London, Foreign Secretary Eden announced in Parliament that Great Britain — Argentina’s best customer—supported the United States in its refusal to recognize Bolivia. And something else the Buenos Aires Foreign Office was permitted to know was that the United States and Great Britain had seriously, if informally, discussed the prospects of breaking relations and imposing economic sanctions on Argentina.

There were, naturally, grave practical difficulties in such a project, since it involved the meat rations of the peoples of both the United States and Great Britain. Nevertheless, the Argentine leaders were hardly in a position to laugh it off. The Ramírez advisers were led to believe that economic sanctions — which could effectively have destroyed Argentina’s war boom prosperity — were in prospect.

Ship ahoy

At the height of the tensions, a small United States naval squadron, under command of Vice Admiral Jonas Ingram of the South Atlantic Force, anchored off Montevideo — Uruguay’s capital. The purposes of this voyage are still, technically, a mystery. On the surface, it was merely a courtesy visit.

But the Ramírez crew — already suffering internally from guilty conscience — had other premonitions. They realized that, although the United States was pledged to non-intervention in Latin America, that fact would not necessarily require Washington to look the other way if interventions in Uruguay’s internal affairs were being plotted.

Early in the fourth week of January in Buenos Aires, these pressures began to take effect. There was a night-long session of the cabinet, and of the junta of colonels and barracks commanders who more or less run the cabinet. The final decision — taken over the dead political bodies of various pro-Nazi dissenters — was to break with the Axis.

Spy hunt

In the decision, however, one other typically Latin American development played a part. A few days before the warships and the rumor of economic sanctions arrived in the La Plata Estuary, an Argentine consular agent, with the Teutonic name of Hellmuth, bound for a post in Barcelona, had been arrested by the British authorities in Trinidad on charges of pro-Axis espionage.

There had been similar instances in Argentine history during the past four years, which the Buenos Aires government — either the Ramírez crew or the “prudently” neutral administration of President Ramon Castillo — had taken in its stride. But Señor Hellmuth was in no sense given the benefit of any doubt. President Ramírez accepted the evidences of his guilt without question and announced that, since the Axis was attempting to debauch the Argentine foreign service, relations with the Axis must be broken.

The Nazi chargé d’affaires and the Japanese ambassador got their official notification of the effects of the Hellmuth incident in the form of passports visaed for the homelands.

The Argentine abettors of Fascism, in other words, were utilizing their last moments of grace to climb on the non-sinking ship of Allied victory. In due time, but in somewhat considered cadences, Secretary Hull and President Roosevelt piped the new collaborators aboard.

The morning after

The next few days brought more gestures but hardly a definite improvement in the Ramirez regime’s status. There was a noisily advertised roundup of alleged pro-Axis spies in the Argentine Republic in the wake of the Hellmuth scandal. But cynics in Washington and London and in the better-advised Latin American capitals speculated as to whether this might not be simply the regime’s dodge for dealing with its rich, conservative enemies.

At the same time, while Buenos Aires’s notorious Nazi propaganda newspaper, El Pampero, was suspended, other less marked publications putting forth the Axis “line” seemed to have comparatively few difficulties with the Argentine censorship. Ostensibly, communications facilities of Axis nationals with their homelands were cut off, but nothing specific was done at once about freezing Nazi and Japanese commercial and financial channels.

Ostensibly, too, the Ramírez regime ran into a certain amount of internal trouble in the wake of its fateful decision. Three or four members of the Ramírez cabinet resigned, including the violently anti-Semitic novelist, Hugo Wast, who was serving as Minister of Education. So did several of the “interventors” appointed by the Ramírez regime to control the provincial governments in place of the regular state governors who were dismissed last June.

One resignation, however, carried a more convincing note. General Arturo Rawson, leader of the June 4 revolt of “the generals” and President for a day until he was overthrown by Ramírez, and more recently Argentine ambassador to Brazil, telegraphed congratulations to the chief executive in Buenos Aires. He said that, in breaking with the Axis, the revolution had at last attained its primary objective. A curt message from Ramírez’s secretary reminded him that the sole objective of the revolution was to achieve Argentina’s ideals of nationalism. Rawson quit — the first ostensible victim to the Ramírez theory that the break with the Axis was purely the result of the Hellmuth spy conspiracy.

The real effect of the break

The Argentine somersault proved, for one thing, that even a relatively strong American state could not stand out indefinitely against the joint diplomatic policy of nineteen of the other American republics. On the other hand, not even a chronic optimist in his senses could consider the results pure gain. The matter of Bolivian recognition, for instance, was by no means solved by General Ramírez’s face-saving operation.

Neither is the question of the Lend-Lease armament supplies for which Argentina has long been clamoring likely to be solved until the Ramírez regime, or its successors, has done considerably more than post the Axis in the Buenos Aires Foreign Office for lacking certain diplomatic amenities.

So far as Argentina is concerned — unless Ambassador Rawson’s resignation is suggestive of basic political overturns on the way — the diplomatic about-face involves no diminution of the Ramírez regime’s commitments to Fascism. None of the Fascist restraints on press, schools, unions, political parties, and civil liberties was removed. Until some of these things happen, democratic observers can accept only one conclusion: the first established Fascist regime has invited itself to the victory table. On whose blood it proposes to sup remains to be seen.