Latin America

ON THE WORLD TODAY

IS the all-American front headed for an all-American crack-up? This question has been asked around Washington ever since the Stettinius regime in the State Department sponsored the admission of Argentina into the United Nations.

No longer is there a positive United States policy toward Latin America. The Hemisphere front was improvised and largely directed by President Roosevelt and the Hull-Welles State Department as an informal coalition — a working bloc of states responsive to United States leadership in world affairs. Since Mr. Roosevelt’s death no serious effort has been made in Washington to maintain the coalition.

Mr. Spruille Braden, the Assistant Secretary of State for American Republic Affairs, no doubt intended to support the Roosevelt policies when he entered office in October, 1945. But he has been too bogged down with the difficulties of his Argentine program, and with opposition in the State Department and throughout the government generally, to carry them out successfully, or to function as an official channel for United States leadership in the Hemisphere.

This autumn there has been a further decrease in firmness. Secretary of State Byrnes’s preoccupation with peacemaking indicates that for an indefinite period he will not be able to come to grips with major policy decisions in Hemisphere matters. President Truman, so far as Latin American relations are concerned, has remained an apparently willing cipher. Meantime it has been made clear in the State Department that no pronouncements on basic inter-American programs, similar to those which Mr. Welles often made, are expected from Mr. Braden until Secretary Byrnes is free to assist in their formulation.

Hence, with one exception, there have been no declarations or efforts pointing toward a new policy. The exception was a speech which Mr. Braden made in Chicago in mid-September, announcing his preference for “free enterprise investments” over “political loans” as a means of assisting Latin American economic development.

The Latin Americans know that little has been done to shore up Mr. Braden’s position. Our Ambassador in Buenos Aires, George S. Messersmith, has been permitted by the higher State Department authorities to take a practically autonomous course in his working relations with the Perón government. This course is at variance on several points with the Braden view that the Perón regime is still failing to live up to its agreements on Hemisphere security, and it is based on the assumption that Argentina is now ripe for acceptance as a full partner in Hemisphere defense.

At the same time our Ambassador to Brazil, Mr. William D. Pawley, appears to have been granted license to criticize freely the Braden program of excluding Argentina from defense agreements, and all but publicly to lobby for promotion to Mr. Braden’s post.

Mr. Byrnes temporizes

Under these circumstances, a slight tactical victory won by Mr. Braden late in October had relatively little importance. Secretary Byrnes disposed of rumors of Braden’s resignation and Pawley’s succession with the announcement that he did not know of any intention to quit on Mr. Braden’s part. Then, along with praise for Ambassador Messersmith, he added that the United States position regarding the exclusion of Argentina from Hemisphere defense arrangements is exactly what it was last April when a firm note was issued.

From Mr. Braden’s standpoint, this statement meant that there was to be no sharp or open reversal of his policy along either the Messersmith or the Pawley lines, and that his hold on his job, if he wanted it, was reasonably secure, at least until Congress convenes in January.

But to the Latin Americans, with their special sensitiveness to power balances in bureaucratic politics, it meant that Mr. Braden’s face was being saved rather than his influence on State Department decisions. It was from the angle of polite scorn that the Latin Americans interpreted Mr. Braden’s Chicago speech. If it proved anything to them, it proved that so far as developing a positive program for restoring the Good Neighbor relationship was concerned, Mr. Braden was either a prisoner of his opposition or had gone over to it.

Mañana, mañana

In the same press conference in which he saved Mr. Braden from undue humiliation, Secretary Byrnes announced that the Rio de Janeiro Conference to draft a mutual military defense treaty for the Hemisphere powers — a gathering originally called for October, 1945 — must once more he postponed. Again the excuse was legitimate — that at least until early 1947 the responsible statesmen of the American republics will be busy attending United Nations or other world conferences.

These successive postponements of the Rio meeting, now mounting toward a year and a half, have been draining away from the coalition something of the impetus to act on specific and basically simple common problems. United States leadership has suffered in prestige through the fact that the State Department has usually been the principal advocate of postponement.

Similarly, United States economic prestige has declined. With the Hemisphere still almost as dependent upon us for machinery and consumers’ goods as during the war years, little more has been done to relieve the need and in many cases the desperate shortages of the Latin republics. No concrete program has been worked out for helping them as industry in the United States lengthens its productive stride.

Left turn

The Hemisphere front is likewise suffering from subtle political complications. Since 1944 more than half a dozen Latin American governments have moved — through revolutions or elections — in liberal or leftward directions. Peru, Bolivia, Guatemala, and El Salvador have got rid of hardboiled dictatorships. Paraguay has modified its government. Venezuela has come into the hands of a mildly left-of-center junta. And Brazil has exchanged the authoritarian Vargas regime for a measure of constitutionalism. Cuba moved definitely leftward by choosing Dr. Ramón Grau San Martin President in her 1944 elections.

But today many of the leaders of these governments who a few months ago might have been counted as among the best friends of the United States in Latin America have their fingers crossed. They are not opposed to maintaining a Hemisphere front, or as yet inclined to withdraw from it. But they are not disposed to make any commitments to it until they see where United States leadership — when and if it gets around to adopting a post-war Hemisphere program — proposes to lead.

Mr. Byrnes is unlikely to have time to draft a positive and concrete inter-American policy until his troubles with world settlements are over. It is unlikely that he could obtain domestic political support for a program so specific as President Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy. And it would be still more difficult to place an Under Secretary in charge of creating and administering such a program who could hold the confidence of both a jittery executive and a skeptical Congress.

With these handicaps it is doubtful if a clear decision can be reached for a considerable time to come even on the question of the basic objectives of a Hemisphere policy. Will Washington’s main efforts, for instance, be put forth to line up the Latin American states in a military alliance for a third world war, against Soviet Russia? And is the Good Neighbor policy to be scrapped as a means of direct help from one government to others, and the alternative aim adopted of utilizing our economic strength to build up a Hemisphere empire for the “free enterprise” of big business?

In the State Department and associated policymaking branches of the government, questions of this sort continue to agitate the Hemisphere program. But until world issues and domestic politics are out of the way, no one can settle which direction the key policy will take.

Latin American bloc?

One result of the decline of United States influence has been an apparent trend toward closer association among the Latin American states. The Latin delegations caucused at Flushing Meadow almost at once after the opening of the United Nations Assembly. The ostensible product of the meeting was merely an agreement to support Colombia for election to the place on the United Nations Security Council shortly to be vacated by Mexico, and there were explicit denials that any idea of forming a “Latin American bloc” was under consideration.

Nevertheless, in authentic trial balloon form a few days later, the chairman of the Cuban delegation, Dr. Guillermo Belt, suggested a possible chore for an exclusively Latin group. With their intimate approaches to the Spanish people and special understanding of Spanish problems, Dr. Belt proposed that the Latin American governments might try their hand at eliminating the Franco regime. Nothing came of the proposal immediately.

A little earlier an Argentine delegate had spoken to the Assembly in favor of avoiding political steps in Spain which might damage Latin America’s “mother” culture. But the Belt suggestion indicates that the thought of using their own weight, apart from the United States, in international affairs is running strongly in the minds of certain Latin American leaders.

There is nothing intrinsically anti-United States in such a tendency, and in certain future international developments the Latin American countries are bound, from time to time, to have an interest which the United States does not share. But Hemisphere unity is likely to be weakened still further if the Latin governments, in default of United States leadership, should develop anything like a consistent practice of making their decisions on international issues “bloc-wise,” without taking Washington into their counsels.

A few crumbs of comfort

Meanwhile, several developments have been favorable to United States interests. The Perón government in Argentina, for instance, has injured its project of founding an “austral bloc” of far southern republics by alienating the new government in Bolivia. Because of railway car “shortages,” since the Perón-sponsored Villarroel government was overthrown in La Paz in the July revolution, Argentine wheat shipments to Bolivia have shrunk to zero and meat shipments to 10 per cent of normal.

In Venezuela’s first free election, on October 27, Provisional President Betancourt’s moderately leftist Democratic Action party won an overwhelming majority over all opponents in a poll of 1,000,000 votes. This ensures that Venezuela will be given a “liberal” constitution by the new Constituent Congress.

The Chilean Congress in October underwrote the 50,000 plurality which Gabriel González Videla rolled up in the September elections by voting him into the Presidency. On November 3, with five United States warships in the harbor at Valparaiso and the White House’s top military adviser, Admiral William D. Leahy, in attendance as special Ambassador, he was inaugurated.

The big fleet was there quite obviously to impress the Argentines, and the Chilean Communists who contributed 40,000 votes to the González Videla victory. But no one supposes that the Chileans or any other Latin Americans really liked it.