THE AMERICAS: The Old World

Delegates from the Spanish-speaking Americas, including Catholic clergy and Spanish Falange agents, gathered at the flag-decked Cine Güemes in the pink-walled city of Salta in northern Argentina. Their goal: to spread the doctrine of European totalitarianism for the benefit of the reactionaries and Fascist-minded in Latin America. They had a name for it: Hispanidad.

Outstanding figures were Argentina’s President Ramón S. Castillo; Foreign Minister Enrique Ruiz-Guiñazú; onetime Argentine Ambassador to Spain Daniel Garcia Mansilla (the presiding dignitary); the Most Rev. Roberto José Tavella, Archbishop of Salta; and Spanish Ambassador to Argentina, Admiral Antonio Magaz y Pers, Marquis of Magaz. They convened as the first Congress of Hispano-American Culture.

The choice of Salta as the conference city recognized neutral Argentina as a meeting ground congenial to the Fascist-minded. But opposition to the conference developed from the Argentine people, the majority of whom are sympathetic to the United Nations’ cause. Neither Santiago Luis Cardinal Copello of Buenos Aires, nor the Papal Nuncio, the Most Rev. José Fietta, approved of the congress.

The motivating force of the congress was increasing awareness of the trend toward liberalism and democracy among the some 270 million people of the hemisphere. Emphasis was placed on the Fascist catch phrases of nationalism, order, discipline and authority; and the cultural and historical ties with Spain. Result: giving a new form to a front organization behind which anti-U.S., anti-democratic propaganda and ideology can be disseminated by Falangist and Fascist agents.

Said Archbishop Tavella (showing the influence of Mussolini and Franco): “It is necessary to restore Spain and Hispanidad in America. . . . We’ve fallen into a state of intoxication and impotence but thank God this is disappearing; the course of liberalism is wavering; clarity of vision and sense of the true course is returning.”