Latin America

ON THE WORLD TODAY

THIS has been a stormy midsummer on the interAmerican front. The friendly, liberal government of Colombia was threatened with overthrow by military reactionaries closely linked with the Spanish Falange. The United States lost ground as a result of hasty recognition of the Fascist-controlled military regime now ruling Bolivia. In the growing impasse between Washington and the Argentine Republic, some of the bitterest words have been spoken in the whole history of Western Hemisphere diplomacy.

We score a moral victory

Secretary Hull, on July 26, in a summary of the position of the United States government, flung on the table the full indictment of Argentine official conduct. The Argentine government has “deliberately violated” its pledge to the other American republics to coöperate in the war against the Axis. It has “openly and notoriously” given “affirmative assistance” to the enemies of the United Nations.

The indictment charges specifically that the regime has tried to stamp out democratic opposition and democratic support of the Allied cause. It has not checked Axis espionage and political agitations. It has given huge contracts to Axis firms on the Allied blacklists. It has supported Axis propaganda newspapers with lavish government advertising and with big allotments of newsprint secured by Allied grants.

The facts show, the summary proceeds, that the Farrell government was put in power by “extremist proAxis elements” and is controlled by them. Consequently, there can be no recognition of Farrell by Washington until a fundamental change in Argentine policy has been conclusively demonstrated.

The summary has scored, for the time being, a moral victory. The only ambassadors left in Buenos Aires early in August were those of Spain — an active collaborating power in most of the Argentine political disturbances — and of Argentina’s virtual satellite republic, Paraguay. All the other American governments, including two which previously had recognized the Farrell regime, Chile and Bolivia, recalled their ambassadors for consultations before the summary was issued, and there are no signs of their early return.

How pure is Argentina?

In proof of Argentina’s purity, General Farrell’s Foreign Minister, General Orlando Peluffo, made a speech for home consumption, citing Argentina’s occasional favors to the Allies: the shutting off of code communications to Axis diplomats, the occasional prosecutions of Axis spies and suppressions of Axis newspapers, the internment of the crew of the Nazi battleship Graf Spee, sunk in the River Plate estuary in 1939, and so on.

Washington’s reactions to the Peluffo speech were cold. Argentina’s reaction took the form of a street mob. The mob stoned the windows of most of the democratic — or formerly democratic — newspapers of Buenos Aires, and next day President Farrell himself announced that its actions proved how completely the Argentine people were behind the government’s policy.

In short, the tongue-lashing stung but it was not followed up. Military or naval demonstrations against the Farrell regime are obviously inexpedient. But there was no threat of economic sanctions even in the harshly worded summary.

Outwardly the Farrell government has assumed the martyr’s robe. Meanwhile, it has been interestingly busy. Although a certain number of Argentine ambassadors, including Adrian Escobar, the former associate of Spanish Falange leaders, now accredited to Washington, have been called home in retaliation, Argentina still retains competent diplomatic staffs in most of the American capitals. These are carrying out covert instructions to convince their host governments that the Washington program of non-recognition is a dangerous form of political intervention in Latin American affairs.

This campaign is known to have won enough converts in several American capitals to raise the question of whether the Farrell regime can be kept in quarantine in the event of an early collapse of Nazi Germany — a subject for growing jitters. In her efforts to build up a bloc of deep southern powers, including Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia, and possibly Peru, as a counterforce against the influence of the United States in the Hemisphere, Argentina quite possibly has gained as much as she has lost by taking diplomatic isolation and a scolding from Washington without any more specific punishment.

Argentina’s economic pressure

Such propaganda is matched by more practical developments. The Buenos Aires government is rushing a railroad line through to Santa Cruz in Eastern Bolivia through the Bolivian oil fields. This should shortly give General Farrell or his successors oil with which to bargain for favors with prospective confederates — to say nothing of a tighter economic rein on Bolivia than Brazil is likely to get through a railroad of her own into the much less economically secure Bolivian rubber regions.

With Argentina’s present hold on Paraguay and with her control over Bolivia strengthened, a militarist government may have, in fairly short order, mounting quarrels to settle between Chile and Peru over Bolivia’s dwindling west coast shipping trade. If Buenos Aires totalitarianism is as ruthless as it sounds, it can settle them either by enforced bargains favorable to itself or by threats of war and conquest.

Right here, in fact, lies the menace to the peace of the Hemisphere — the most serious menace which South America has felt since the Chile-Peruvian war of the early 1880’s. Brazil, with its own growing population and hinterland interests, and with its immensely increased military power as a result of its active participation in the war on the side of the United Nations, could hardly permit a militarist Argentina to extend its authority from coast to coast, and from Lima to the Straits of Magellan, either as an empire or as a federation of satellites.

Argentina, with its present military psychology and as a possible place of asylum for refugee Nazi technicians and military leaders, is the sole power in Latin America which needs to be watched today for this poison of continental imperialism.

Already, in any case, Argentine diplomacy shows symptoms of working in these directions. Argentine influences are busy heating up Peru and Chile to new and higher temperatures in their chronic squabble over their shares in the Bolivian shipping trade. Argentine agents are whispering in the ears of various Army factions in Brazil that dispatch of a Brazilian expeditionary force — which landed in Italy in midJuly — is a serious injury to the effectiveness of Brazil as a South American military power.

If it serves no other purpose, this is at least a subtle way of stirring up dissensions in the Brazilian Army, and of sowing distrust of the United States and the United Nations.

Appeasement pays off

Less than two weeks after United States recognition of Bolivia’s military junta government in June, a national election returned an overwhelming majority for the national revolutionary movement party in the republic’s Congress. The MNR, as the “movement” is called in Bolivia, is the Fascist party, which seized control of the government last December with the aid of the Argentine totalitarians.

Now President Gualberto Villarroel, the practically assured winner in an election to be conducted by the Congress shortly, can be chosen legally as chief of the nation by the votes of a Fascist legislative body with obligations to Buenos Aires.

Thus the government with which Washington broke last December, because of its Argentine connections, is now confirmed in authority with the blessings of recognition upon it and the unction of legitimacy.

Only in the northern part of South America did the totalitarian system receive a complete rebuff. When President Alfonso López of Colombia was kidnaped by Army officers at Pasto, near the Ecuadorean border, on July 10, the bulk of the Army remained loyal and rescued him. Instead of founding a totalitarian Army government with himself as president, Colonel Diogenes Gil, the kidnaper, is now doing a ten-year stretch in a Colombian penitentiary.

The scandal had certain humorous implications. Pasto is the center of Colombia’s reactionary “deep south,” and there was a picaresque quality to the proceedings, as if Vice President Wallace had been kidnaped by the Mississippi or Texas militia.

Nevertheless, the incident shows that within, as well as between, the neighbor republics, the offensive of Fascism goes on. And that is no laughing matter.