Latin America

on the World Today

THE virtual collapse of the Ninth International Conference of American States at Bogota cannot he explained away by Secretary of State Marshall s rationalizations that the wreck of the Conference was planned with malice aforethought by international Communism. The Conference was in a deadly tailspin long before the murder of a leftist political lender named Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, Colombia s Huey Long,” brought on a bloody uprising.

The Bogota riots of April 9-10 did not shatter the Conference, regardless of who started or profited by them. The riots, at most, reduced the remainder of the sessions to a grim face-saving gesture. Inter-American collaboration, which the Conference was supposed to further, was moribund already because the United States has abandoned a meaningful and sincere Good Neighbor Policy.

As World War II approached, the Latin American countries, as a whole, were on the threshold of wider industrialization and greater individual economic independence. At the same time, there was prospect of much broader intra-Homisphere trade in each other’s products. Their leaders had reason to believe that many of the disadvantages of their posit ion as “semicolonial” countries — producers of raw materials only, for the more technically advanced nations — were about to be lessened.

Economic improvement was essential to the social progress of all groups in their populations, from peonized or half-peonized farm labor and the ragged, hovel-housed proletariats in the fast-growing Latin American cities to the large landowners and investors in modernized business and industry in the republics, the old and new rich. It was equally essential to political stability and to democratic development.

But economic improvement called for many things. Vast amounts of factory equipment and modernized building materials were required, to start new industries. Agriculture needed to be changed from the old system of one-, two-, or threecrop specialization in export staples, so that the growing populations of city industrial workers of each country could eat on the agricultural areas’ produce. And Latin American agriculture required vast quantities of machinery to accomplish this change and to go on producing export crops cheaply and efficiently enough to command world markets.

Tn all but a few select areas, transportation by highway, rail, air, or water connections had to be modernized and often revolutionized so that farm and factory products could flow profitably within countries and across the borders of neighboring republics.

Immense changes were taking place in national economies which had gone along much as they had in the old Spanish colonial days. Relatively stable currencies and financial underpinning were essential to see each nation through these changes. The republics needed a minimum of tariff barriers to get their products out into the world markets, across each other’s borders, and particularly into the United States. It was a large order. President Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy at least had the vision to put what was needed into words.

U. S., rich great neighbor

Help was promised to the Latin American states by the Good Neighbor Policy’s spokesmen and agencies during the process of bringing in Latin America on our side in World War II. President Roosevelt, Secretaries of State Cordell Hull and Edward St.etlimits. Under Secretary Sumner Welles, and their high diplomatic subordinates bound themselves repeatedly to a post-war program of meeting Latin America’s needs. The Office of Inter-American Affairs was set up as early as 1940, under Nelson Rockefeller’s direction, ostensibly with the assignment of helping out in Latin America’s war and post-war emergencies.

The promises lasted for five years. At the Havana Conference of American Foreign Ministers in July, 1940, an extra 500 million dollars was added to Export-Import Bank funds for credit distribution in Latin America. At the Conference of Foreign Ministers on the Problems of War and Peace in Mexico City in February, 1945, considerable assurance of economic aid to Latin America’s recovery was given — though in a set of resolutions disturbingly rich in weasel words. Throughout this period, the basic pledges were that if the Latin American countries and their people would only make the necessary sacrifices to win the war, the rich great neighbor would back their development programs with its vast resources as soon as peace came.

Then nothing happened. The Inter-American Office was taken over by the State Department within a matter of weeks after the Hiroshima bomb. No more machinery, no more transportation equipment, no more goods were appreciably available for Latin America’s cherished industrialization programs and starved markets in peace than before.

Credit dried up and most of the Latin American currencies soared off into ruinous inflation. The hundreds of millions of dollars which the Latin American governments, businessmen, and industrialists had accumulated through sales of war materials were exhausted, with a few exceptions, in meeting inflated operating and living costs well before the end of 1947.

Tariffs block trade

Old and new United States tariff barriers were raised to check such exchanges of goods as might have gone on between this country and the Good Neighbors even without sufficient credits. Nothing concrete was done by United States leaders to check the rash of tariff wars between the Latin governments, as each one strove, in the Hemisphere’s general economic confusion, for impossible individual economic self-sufficiency. Washington’s tariff and other restrictive policies gave unforgivable offense to Cuba and several other large sugarproducing republics. An alarming agitation went on in the Eightieth Congress for the scuttling of reciprocal trade policies and treaties.

Then came the final blow. Early in the post-war readjustment processes, word went out from the State Department that, political loans were out and the Latins would have to get loans from United States private finance and industry. All the inferences were that they would have to take them pretty much on the orthodox free-enterprise terms. The Latins had tried out that method earlier in the century. It had led to most of the profits of their production going out of their countries, and to “dollar diplomacy.” They did not care to risk this outcome again.

No trust in gringos

All these development s have fitted into the pattern of Latin America’s chronically distrustful thinking about the United States. Anyone who served in any government agency dealing with Hemisphere relations during the war knows how frequently his friends from south of the border mournfully prophesied: “Well, I suppose as soon as our war is over, the honeymoon will be finished too.”

Anyone who traveled in Latin America during or shortly after the war years knows that the honeymoon was full of sacrifices. A look at the empty store-shelves, at the patched clothing of even relatively prosperous middle-class crowds in the Latin American cities, made this clear. A walk past the long queues waiting for broken-down buses and trolley cars in the blistering summer heat showed that the sacrifices, though intimately personal, were shared by millions.

Things are slightly better now in a few special situations, but not enough better to make those who did the sacrificing think well of the victorious gringos as pledge-keepers. Things are not good enough to cause the masses of Latin Americans to defend the United States against accusations of broken faith by Communist agitators, or by the Argentine government’s professional gringo-baiters, or by the extreme rightist elements so powerful in a republic like Colombia. The Latin Americans are swayed by bitter memories and by embittering current experiences with the United States.

More promises

It was into this cloud of mistrust that Secretary Marshall headed at Bogota. When the United States delegation came forth with an offer of another 500 million dollars of Export-Import Bank funds for Latin American distribution, the Good Neighbor colleagues received it in stony silence. For the 500 million dollars was proffered along with pep talks for an inter-American accord, not to say military alliance, against international Communism. And it was exactly the same sum which was offered eight years ago at the Havana Conference, along with pep talks to fine up the Good Neighbors against international fascism. There were just two differences. Five hundred million was not as much money at Bogota as it was at Havana eight years ago. And the U.S. promises which went with it were less believed in.

Although a political pact was signed to bolster the inter-American system under the United Nations, the economic problems discussed at Bogota were left unsolved until an all-American economic conference later in the year, when the United States will have another chance to make good.