Latin America

ON THE WORLD TODAY

BY a popular majority of some 267,000 votes, and by an overwhelming majority in the Argentine electoral college. Colonel Juan Perón was elected president of Argentina. Apparently it was a true victory. No protests were filed by Perón’s opposition, the Democratic Alliance of the Radical, Socialist, and Communist parties, charging irregularities either in the election itself or in the counting of the votes.

Pre-election fascist brutalities by Peronista mobs and police may have swayed some timid voters. But the real explanation of the victory was that, by promulgating and promising wage raises, bonuses, and land divisions, Perón changed the political orientations of Argentina’s underprivileged. Fascist traits in the regimes the Colonel had stage-managed, and in the campaign he conducted, seemed to touch Argentina’s “little people” lightly, if at all. Convinced that they would be better off under Perón than under a constitutionally orthodox president like those who preceded him, they voted for him.

For Argentine liberals, the weeks of the count were agonizing. Each day they could see that a little extra organization here, a little stronger political appeal there, might have changed the 134,000 votes they needed to elect their candidate.

On one point these regrets brought Perón and Dr. José Tamborini, standard-bearer of the Democratic Alliance, into curious agreement. Both before and after the election, Perón claimed that the United States Blue Book — the State Department document issued in mid-February charging Peronista leaders and Perón himself with years of collaboration with Nazi Germany — gave him, by offending national pride, a strong “leg up” toward victory.

Early in the count period, Tamborini, in private conversations, began blaming the Blue Book for his defeat. It made no difference that for months Latin American desks in the State Department at Washington had been piled with letters from Argentine liberals pleading for exposure of the Axis connections of prominent Peronistas. In the Blue Book, Perón found an “issue” he knew how to capitalize, and Tamborini a welcome alibi.

Argentine aftermath

International developments expected as by-products of Perón’s election came about according to schedule. In Washington, the Pan American Union voted to postpone “ indefinitely ” the Rio de Janeiro Conference of American Foreign Ministers which had planned to consider drafting a military mutual-assistance treaty for the defense of the Western Hemisphere. The United States voted reluctantly with the majority for postponement, ostensibly because it did not wish to oppose the will of so many neighbors.

The resolution expressed the pious hope that the conference on the treaty still could take place before the ninth general Pan American conference in Bogotá in December. But it was not certain that even at Bogotá the treaty issue could be disposed of.

Meanwhile, the United States modified its unequivocal refusal to sign a military pact with a Perón government. Secretary Byrnes said that we are ready to participate in such a treaty, provided that Colonel Perón’s government will carry out its obligations to eliminate “Axis influences” that have threatened the security of the inter-American system. It remains to be seen how these influences will be eliminated.

The Office of American Republic Affairs must now buckle down to the task of adjusting inter-American policies to the practical certainty that for six years the American republics will have to deal with Perón and with growing fascism in Buenos Aires.

The outlook did not seem wholly unpropitious. Though there were more than the usual political tensions, most of the Latin American republics were attacking their troubles with no obvious tendency to import Argentine prescriptions.

Chile’s upset

Chile ranked as perhaps the worst danger spot. Her “war prosperity” expressed itself chiefly in huge price inflations which put even the necessities of food and clothing almost beyond the buying range of common and agricultural labor. Since V-J Day this situation has been complicated by the growing unemployment.

Early in January, Chile’s President, Juan Antonio Ríos, began a six months’ leave of absence because of a grave illness, leaving the office to a somewhat ineffective second-string congressional politician, Alfredo Duhalde. Since Chile has no vice-president and the death or removal of a chief executive calls automatically for the election of a successor, presidential booms started popping in Santiago.

At the very beginning of his administration Acting President Duhalde ran afoul of the worst kind of labor difficulties. On the eve of a general strike organized by the powerful Chilean Communist Party, the Chilean police fired on a labor mass meeting in Santiago, killing several people and precipitating one of the most serious Left-Right issues in Chilean history.

Since then, Chilean politics has labored under almost ceaseless cabinet tensions and official “investigations” of the shooting. Acting President Duhalde has been disowned by the Radical Party because of his management of the mass-meeting crisis and because of congressional political tensions.

The old “Popular Front” coalition of Radicals, Socialists, Communists, and a few minor parties, which elected Ríos in 1942 and his predecessor, Pedro Aguirre Cerda, in 1938, broke up several years ago. Eventually it was patched together again in a looser organization, known as the Democratic Alliance. Now, under Duhalde, that has fallen apart. With all the “left of center” parties going their separate ways, congressional majorities can seldom be obtained even for the most pressing legislation, except by coincidence. Under these circumstances, the Cabinet has virtually no standing with Congress.

Ríos and Duhalde together have given about half of the portfolios to military officers, and at present the only civilian party acting with the regime is the Socialist. Communists and the strong middle-of-theroad Radicals are making it a point of the party discipline to refuse cabinet posts.

In addition, the Chilean labor movement has been split into feuding Communist and Socialist wings over the general strike issue. The Socialists opposed the strike as ill-timed, and thousands of Socialist workers refused to go along with it, even when their individual unions, under Communist leadership, had voted for it.

Chile’s economic difficulties and political divisions are worse than Argentina’s were at any stage of the development of Peron fascism and certain circles of the Army and of big business in close touch with the Peronista leader in Chile are inclined to admire the Argentine “experiment.” Rumors of coming Chilean military-fascist coups are a dime a dozen in Santiago and Washington.

A presidential election crisis conceivably could produce a coup or a further labor crisis involving the Communist issue. But hope is growing that, since Chile weathered such drastic economic and political troubles at the point of nearest exposure to the Argentine temptation, she may eventually weather them through to better economic conditions.

Brazil irons out a constitution

In Brazil, too, Argentine examples and pressures carry considerable weight. But since its inauguration on January 31, the freely elected administration of General Eurico Gaspar Dutra has settled down to its job, with the emphasis mainly on domestic problems. Liberal opinion both inside and outside Brazil received a slight shock when the Congress, now functioning as a constituent assembly, voted powers to President Dutra to carry on the government by decree laws until the Constitution is finished.

But Brazil has been used to government exclusively by decree since Getulio Vargas established his dictatorship in November, 1937. A few more months of it do not necessarily mean a backward step if the net effect is that the Congress can give its undivided attention to constitution-making. So far, the Dutra decrees have been largely routine in character; and, although Vargas is a prominent member of the Senate, there have been no open indications of any efforts by his following to restore the dictatorship by a coup.

Democracy in Peru

Peru, under the first democratically elected government she has had in the twentieth century, appears to be making democratic methods work. Early in the year the Aprista Party, the strongest member of the coalition that elected President Bustamante last June, finally entered into full participation in the government — instead of plotting on the outside to control it — to the extent of taking over three cabinet posts.

Tensions have relaxed in party rivalries and in Congress. The smoothness with which the government is now being conducted, for the time being at. least, has lessened the chances, dangerously large until recently, that the democratic regime would be overthrown by a military coup of the old-fashioned type.

Actually there is more Peruvian interest just now in the National Economic Convention, which the government has called to meet late in the spring, than there is in Lima’s chronic political jugglings. The convention will take up such problems as the founding of new industries, the linking of coastal Peru by highways with the rich resources of the eastern Andes provinces, and the bringing of four million mountain Indians into closer touch with the coastal economy. The new government recognizes that these are Peru’s real problems and is increasing its popular prestige by trying to do something about them.

Colombia’s presidential handicap

Colombia faces a curiously complicated presidential election the first week in May. As the campaign entered its last month, there were three candidates: solemn, somewhat uninspiring Dr. Gabriel Turbay, a former Ambassador to Washington, the nominee of the Liberal Party, which has ruled Colombia since 1930; and Jorge Eleacer Gaitán, a mestizo lawyer, running as an independent with the support of a few labor unions which he once led before he married money in Bogota and became a prosperous corporation counsel; and Mariano Ospina Perez, candidate of the numerically strong and wealthy Colombian Conservative Party.

Consistently during the campaign, Turbay has proved his lack of political appeal, and from the point of view of a republic which usually chooses members of old families for its presidents, he has another liability. The liberal candidate is of Syrian parentage — a “Turko,” to use the Latin American street term for all Levantines.

Large and powerful liberal factions, consequently, kept calling upon the Liberal Party through the spring to revoke the Turbay candidacy and name a more authentic Colombian. Taking advantage of the dissatisfaction within the Liberal Party, the Conservatives put a candidate on the ballot for the first time in sixteen years.

In the principal Latin American countries, then, the worst potential effect of the Perón victory in Argentina — an epidemic of political Perón fascism — seems for the present not in the cards. The undoubted major diplomatic defeat which the United States suffered in Perón’s election need not involve us in any immediate head-on political clashes with other Latin American governments. By developing the Latin American economy from now on, the United States can do much toward binding the interests of the Hemisphere together, and toward weakening the temptations of Peron’s example.