Latin America

ON THE WORLD TODAY

BRAZIL is flying storm warnings which may affect the whole inter-American front.

For nearly seven years the huge Brazilian Republic — occasionally described by home-grown orators as the largest Latin state since the Roman Empire — has been outstanding in its collaboration with the foreign policies of Washington. Governed by a dictatorship with not a few totalitarian trimmings of its own, Brazil nevertheless has policed a vast German minority into relative harmlessness, smashed Axis spy rings, given the Allies (chiefly the United States) invaluable air, transportation, and naval bases, and carried the ball for the United States in many a scrimmage with other South American nations. Alone among the Latin states of the Western Hemisphere, Brazil has an expeditionary force abroad, in Italy. No other Latin American republic quite matches this record.

But lately the sky has been clouded with suspicion that Brazil may break these consistent inter-American relations. The government, acting through the chief of the National Police and the Ministry of the Interior, closed the social and intellectual organization known as the Society of Friends of America — of which the American ambassador, Jefferson Caffery of Louisiana, is honorary president.

The political storm which followed the closing forced Foreign Minister Oswaldo Aranha, former ambassador to Washington and chief protagonist of Brazil’s pro-Washington policy, out of office. A widespread clique of conservative Army officers, cold and suspicious towords the United States, if not actually hostile, seemed to have gained strongly in political influence through Aranha’s ousting. Finally, there were hints that the new military top dogs were cultivating closer relations with Argentina.

No one believes there will be a halt in Brazil’s war effort. If Washington worries, it is over the broader question whether, for the peace settlement and beyond, the largest country in South America will join up with Argentina in a coalition aimed against the United States and big enough to speak for the whole continent.

Vargas: dictator or democrat?

General Getulio Vargas, the republic’s present president, has ruled ever since he snatched the office by revolution in the middle of a presidential election in 1930. Since November, 1937, when he abolished the constitution and the Congress, he has been an unquestioned dictator. The dictatorship has been noticeably genial and mild in comparison with old Latin American standards. Nevertheless, Brazil has been ruled for seven years exclusively by presidential decree.

After the fall of France, Vargas, astutely advised by Aranha and Ambassador Caffery, with possibly a little side assistance from President Roosevelt, turned down certain tempting overtures to throw in his political lot with the totalitarian dictators. Except for limited flirtations with the enemy, he has held Brazil’s foreign policy on an even keel, as an associate of the democracies.

But, during the past year, Vargas’s dictatorial security has been slipping. In spite of tight government censorships, many of the Allies’ democratic proclamations have got over to the people and to articulate groups. Brazil has had a long tradition of moderate, if not always efficient, democracy under its empire (1822 to 1889) and under the pre-Vargas republic (1889 until the 1930’s). And the Allied affirmations of the rights of the common man have begun to find a response.

Last November the tension heightened when the police shot down a number of student demonstrators for “constitutionalism” at the University of São Paulo. The outbreak is doubly embarrassing because Vargas has always publicly maintained that some kind of constitutional regime would be restored sometime. Foreign Minister Aranha, with tongue-in-cheek humor, once referred to the Vargas caliphate as “a strong regime for the preservation of democracy.”

Vargas needs the Army

Vargas has tried to soothe the 1944 unrest with vague promises of popular elections and plebiscites on constitutional issues after the war. But this summer he has been increasingly aware of a stumblingblock. Politically he has survived his fourteen years as president and dictator by getting along with the Army. He knows that without Army support no president in Rio de Janeiro can last long. But the top group of officers in the Brazilian Army, with perhaps a few exceptions, have little use for the current talk about elections, plebiscites, and constitutionalism — probably less than at any other time since Brazil broke her ties with Portugal.

Across their southern borders, in Argentina, the Brazilian Army leaders have witnessed the beguiling example of a country where Army officers, by stepping in and ending all this democratic nonsense, have won for themselves promotion and better pay — and the pleasures of running the government and conducting its economic activities, to boot. The demonstration has been highly contagious.

General Vargas, then, has drifted into a situation where it may be difficult for him to make any further gestures in the direction of democracy without risking the loss of his vital military support. This is the dilemma which forced the ejection of Foreign Minister Aranha. Aranha arrived one night in midAugust to deliver his inaugural address as honorary vice president of the Friends of America society, to find the doors shut against him — padlocked by the police. When he demanded an apology none was forthcoming, and President Vargas refused to back him up.

It would be easy to overdramatize Aranha as a democratic political martyr. The fact is that he is one of the most astute practical politicians of his generation in Latin America, who saw, at least as early as 1937, that Brazil’s interests were best served by close collaboration with the United States. He had defeated the Brazilian military clique too often in the pre-Pearl Harbor battles to break the Washington connection and draw Brazil closer to the Axis, and he knew too much about their early certainties of Axis victory, for them to spare him when Vargas was once more forced to make a play to the Army for further military support.

So out of the Aranha affair comes one insistent presumption: political changes in Brazil for the immediate future are much more likely to be in the direction of military authoritarianism — Argentinescented — than in a democratic direction.

Brazil and Argentina in the future

What are the chances of a lasting coalition between the Argentine and Brazilian militarists against the United States and the Good Neighbor relationship generally? No love is lost between these nations, whose conflicts run back to the earliest days of independence. The Argentine nickname for Brazilians is “Los Monos — the Monkeys,” a term that is not relished by a people with a large tropical forest population.

The Argentine military propagandists have spread plenty of poison about the reputed intentions of the United States, after peace, to hold on to Brazilian and other Latin American military bases as advance outposts for the conquest of a two-continent empire. They have pulled all the emotional stops about the degradation involved for Brazil in having her policies toward devoted sister republics, like Argentina, dictated from Washington.

In response to what Secretary Hull called “false rumors” of sympathy with Argentina, Brazil early in September denied any intention of recognizing the Farrell dictatorship.

The Argentine Republic’s obvious strategy is to beguile the Brazilian military with lovemaking artifices while she hatches her favorite project of establishing an “austral bloc”—sphere of influence or conquered empire — over Paraguay, Bolivia, and Chile. And this is one development which no Brazilian government, from reactionary military dictatorship to philosophical anarchist, could witness without feeling the scales slip from its eyes and screaming.

Neither could Argentine imperialism work out these “austral destinies” by trying to arrange some quid pro quo compensation to Rio de Janeiro. Buenos Aires, to be sure, might easily enough extend a free hand to Brazil’s rulers in the northern part of South America — play up the undoubted advantages of establishing a Rio de Janeiro “sphere of influence” in Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador. But this would bring an ambitious Brazilian empire smack up against the practical interests of the United States in the Caribbean and the approaches to the Panama Canal. Not even the most ardently responsive of Los Monos would welcome a kiss of death like that.