The Hemisphere: Road Trips

Latin America will get extraordinary attention from top U.S. foreign policymakers in the new year. In January, Assistant Secretary of State Edward Miller, in charge of U.S.-Latin American affairs, will preside over a meeting in Havana for U.S. ambassadors in the Caribbean area. In March, the State Department’s retiring planning chief, George Kennan, on his swing around the hemisphere, will stop off in Rio to attend a meeting of U.S. ambassadors in South American countries. And both President Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson have said that they hope to visit Latin America sometime in 1950.

The State Department said stiffly that the meetings were primarily intended to tighten up U.S. diplomatic techniques. But some thought that they might foreshadow changes in U.S. policy, especially the “recognize-and-deplore” formula, which often works against the interests of democratic forces in the Americas (TIME, Dec. 26).

Last week in Washington, the Foreign Policy Association, taking note of the big postwar crop of military coups, reported “the persisting feeling that, in practice, recent U.S. policy has redounded to the advantage of repressive regimes in Latin America.” Bogotá’s newspaper; El Liberal went much further. “Formerly,” it said, “the fundamental condition to be an ally of the U.S. was to be democratic; now it is to be anti-Russian. The old democratic friends of the U.S. are now criticized as pro-Russian.” Right or wrong, these and other Latin American views would once more be assured top-level U.S. consideration.