Latin America

ON THE WORLD TODAY

THROUGHOUT Latin America today, Communist leadership is laboring as hard and as skillfully to destroy the influence and prestige of the United States in the Western Hemisphere as the Fascist Axis ever worked in the 1930’s. The Axis operated through the industrialists and the ruling class. The Communists are working in a field where it will be more difficult for us to recover any ground we may lose — namely, with the masses. Most Latin American countries are desperately impoverished and their agrarian economies are still on the border line of serfdom.

It would be to Russia’s advantage if the Western Hemisphere states were made unwilling partners in the encirclement by the “capitalist democracies,” or were sufficiently alienated from the United States so that in the event of a World War III their services as allies would have to be expensively coerced.

Besides destroying United States leadership, the Communists have two other Latin American objectives: control of the labor unions and all related social and economic movements: and elimination of United States economic holdings through expropriation and nationalization.

Efforts to establish control on the labor fronts are carried on largely through “boring from within” tactics in the activities and practical politics of the Latin American unions. Since the spring of 1945 the Communists have been operating in the labor unions with several distinct advantages. Labor discontent has been greater than usual in most of the republics because of the increased cost of living. The Communists have been shrewd and energetic in capitalizing on this factor.

To weather their post-war economic difficulties, the unions have required strong discipline, and the Communists have gone a considerable way toward providing it. Their leadership has inspired a confidence previously abused by many of the old-time Latin American leaders, who employed the unions as steppingstones to political success, or as bases for racketeering operations against employers.

Owing to these circumstances, Communist control over labor union organization has been strikingly extended — especially in Cuba and Costa Rica. In Brazil, in spite of tight government control over union elections and activities, the Communists strengthened their influence in labor policies through a sharp increase in the number of “fellow traveler” officers in numerous locals.

Ch«!e: Communist proving ground

Politically the Chilean Communist Party is the strongest in Latin America. The party is numerically stronger in Brazil and has had both political and economic influence in Mexico for a full generation. But in Chile its outstanding asset is the party’s strategic position in national politics.

President Juan Antonio Ríos of Chile died in early July. Under the Chilean constitution, an election to choose his successor had to be held within two months. On September 4, the ballots for four candidates were counted. Of the total vote, 11,999 went to Bernardo Ibáñez, the Socialist; 129,092 to the Liberal, Fernando Alessandri; 141,134 to Eduardo Cruz Coke, Conservative; and 191,351 to Gabriel Gonzalez Videla, candidate of a coalition of the Radical and Communist parties.

Officially it was not the final election. Under Chile’s cumbersome constitution, since no candidate had a clear majority, Congress had still to choose, by October 24, between the two men with the highest votes — Cruz Coke and González Videla. Forty thousand of González’s 191,000 votes were contributed directly by Communists, and tens of thousands more by labor union members whose votes were secured by Communist leaders. González has made his career as a fairly consistent left-wing leader of the Radical Party, roughly equivalent to an orthodox New Dealer in the United States.

Chile is bound to be a good place to watch for signs of what the Communists are up to in the Western Hemisphere. If the Communists show their hand in Santiago, we shall have a more realistic idea of the forces and motives involved in the struggle between Communism and the United States in the Americas, and of the way in which the United States can use its undoubtedly superior advantages to win.

Temporary setbacks

The Communists have lost face in Venezuela by fighting on the wrong side of the October, 1945, revolution, and in Colombia by forcing the government’s hand in a crucial strike of the Magdalena River transport workers in December, 1945.

They have made little headway in Mexico against the entrenched politicos in charge of the labor movement. Their influence in Argentina has been obliterated for the time being in President Juan D. Perón’s fascist-patterned government unions.

But there is a temporary quality about most of these setbacks. The Communists will be sitting in a handsome “we told you so” position in Argentina and Venezuela if the Perón and Betancourt governments do not redeem their promises of improved economic conditions for labor. In Mexico, the Communists are preparing to answer a call for strongarm labor leadership if the incoming Alemán administration fails to relieve the still rising cost of living.

The Communists not only have used their post-war openings to strengthen themselves in Latin America but have put themselves in a strategic position to make further gains. Already they have made it far more difficult than it was in 1941 to swing the labor elements of a number of the stronger republics to the side of the United States in any common cause involving Hemisphere interests.

So far, neither the United States government nor the American labor movement has taken any serious steps to counteract a patient, shrewd, and infinitely painstaking effort to alienate the Latin American masses from us.

The propagandists beat their drums

The other objectives of Communist activity — lessening of foreign economic control and destruction of United States leadership in the Hemisphere — are mainly problems for the propagandists. And the propagandists have distinguished themselves. They have not merely succeeded the Fascist Axis and the shouters for religious and cultural union with Franco Spain — the Hispanidad enthusiasts

— as the main source of poison-pen attacks against the United States, but in many respects they are outdoing the Axis.

Extensions of United States “reactionary capitalist" property holdings in Latin America, the Communists claim, are designed to furnish the pretext for future military interventions. They should therefore be discouraged, and whenever practicable, Yanqui holdings should be expropriated. Marine occupations, the Communists assert, and the “dollar diplomacy” in the first two decades of the century, give the key to power politics in the Hemisphere. The United States is acting now, as it did then, from strictly “imperialist” motives.

With these strings to their bows, the Communist propagandists can fit to each day’s convenience the arrows used in any immediate attack. If the United States, for instance, supports Great Britain against Russia on some Mediterranean or Near Eastern issue, the Communists regard it as a sign that Washington is paying off in advance for the support of British “imperialism” in her own “imperialistic” objectives in the Western Hemisphere. Strike trouble on the American labor front is twisted to mean that Yanqui “reactionary capitalism” will move into Latin America, when the time comes, equipped to exterminate organized labor.

In general, these are the points most labored by the Communist press of Latin America: —

1. The Good Neighbor policy was a hypocritical ruse designed to lure the Latin American states into a Yanqui capitalist empire without the cost and the risks of military conquest.

2. The post-war abandonment of Good Neighbor generosities to the republics merely proves that the ruse did not work and that the United States has reverted to the idea of military conquest as the necessary eventuality.

3. The use of Latin American military bases during World War II —however much they may have profited the Russian war effort—and all current programs for joint defense of the Hemisphere are preparations for military conquest.

4. The settled purpose of the “colossus” is to export race discrimination and persecution to Latin America.

For scores of Latin American workers the propaganda just described is almost their only source of news. Chilean miners, for example, in their remote mountain camps and thousands of organized (continued)

Cuban workers in small communities see little interpretation of the United States post-war program for Latin America except the Communist one. Even for thousands of city workers the Communist “line” comes with the peculiar authority of their union press.

Thousands of Latin Americans of all classes, whose opinions of United States intentions toward the rest of the Hemisphere were formed in the years of “dollar diplomacy” and the Marine occupations, welcome the more ferocious jibes—even though, in a strictly domestic struggle, they would cheerfully string up the local Communists to the nearest lamppost. And native fascists and residual Axis agents are happy to see Communist propaganda critical of the United States.

What can we do?

None of this means that Latin America, or any one of its individual republics, is in immediate danger of “going Communist.” The Communist antiYanqui campaign, nevertheless, is establishing itself as a barrier to understanding between the United States and the other American countries.

The only thoroughgoing cure for the situation lies in a difficult assignment for our top-level policy-makers —the reaching of an accord with Soviet Russia. As long as Washington and Moscow are determined to be “tough” with each other in Europe and Asia, the Communists can be depended upon to be “tough” with the United States in Latin America.

We have preached that orthodox American democracy has enormous benefits to confer on Latin America. But in practice Washington’s policy has insisted that the benefits can come about only through the restoration of a free field for American “free enterprise” in the republics. In Latin America’s present chaos of shortages and inflation the opportunities for “free enterprise,” as the Communists well know, have even less meaning for the Latin American masses than in the pre-war years.

The fact is that, by failing to get together with our Hemisphere neighbors on a post-war program for economic adjustment in the same way in which, between 1939 and 1942, we got together with them on a defense policy against the Axis, we have exposed ourselves to an unscrupulous, damaging Communist propaganda, and are now suffering the consequences.

Meanwhile, Washington seems inclined to try another solution — a military alliance of the American states for the defense of the Hemisphere, presumably against Soviet Russia. In a number of cases such an alliance would definitely require us to choose one form of totalitarianism or dictatorship as our ally against another. The yanqui-baiting campaign of the Communists in Latin America might then be suppressed. But, unlike the Good Neighbor policy, a military alliance would not win for us the friendship of the Latin American peoples.