THE HEMISPHERE: Storm over the Americas

The First Secretary of the Chilean Embassy in Washington was giving a cocktail party. The talk was of Virginia hams and the weather. Suddenly a young reporter spilled his Scotch & water into a girl’s lap. Wailed the girl: “What a mess!” Said Host Fernando Ortuzar, who had been looking elsewhere: “Which mess, madam, London or Argentina?”

International relations were just about as touchy in the Americas as they were in Europe. They worsened last week when the U.S. State Department abruptly caused postponement of the Inter-American Conference on Peace and Security, which was to have opened in Rio on Oct. 20. The State Department explanation: the U.S. could have no dealings with the Argentine militarists whom the U.S. had welcomed back in the Hemispheric fold only seven months ago. The Latin American fear: that the Good Neighbor policy of joint action was being scrapped.

Once again essentially laudable U.S. intentions had brought the U.S. face to face with an old dilemma: how to reconcile U.S. policy with Latin American sensibilities.

The Seesaw. Sumner Welles’s doctrine of nonintervention and mutual consultation on hemispheric problems was the heart of the Good Neighbor policy. During his long reign as Under Secretary of State (1937-1943), he did very little for democracy within Latin American nations, but he did a great deal for democracy between them and the U.S.

Cordell Hull encountered the dilemma when he fired Welles, lashed out at the rising Argentine dictators, and discovered that he was hurting the feelings of most Latin Americans, Argentina’s democrats included. They were for democracy, more or less, but first of all they were for Latin independence.

Under Ed Stettinius and his Latin American deputy, Nelson Rockefeller, the State Department seesawed back to Welles’s way of doing things. At the Mexico City Conference last winter, such anti-totalitarians as Mexico’s Foreign Minister Ezequiel Padilla led the Latin demand that Argentina’s totalitarians be restored to hemispheric fellowship. At San Francisco, this process was completed by Argentina’s admission to the world family.

U.S. libertarians raged, and Latins were noticeably embarrassed, but the saving fact remained that the U.S. had followed the expressed will of the hemisphere.

About Face. The man behind last week’s simultaneous blow at Latin pride and Latin dictatorship was paunchy, punchy Spruille Braden, lately U.S. Ambassador to Argentina and now Jimmy Byrnes’s new Assistant Secretary in charge of Latin American affairs. Last May, just after he arrived in Argentina, Braden kicked the old Welles-Stettinius-Rockefeller tradition aside and announced his own policy: “We would like to see democratic governments in all parts of the world.” Times had changed in Buenos Aires.

Argentine democrats rallied, not to the colonels as they had at Hull’s prodding, but behind Braden and the U.S., and they were still going strong last week.

But, outside of Argentina, many Latin officials reacted as they usually had in the past. Braden’s recent promotion seemed to confirm their worst fears: that the U.S. State Department was committed to a policy of direct, forceful intervention in the affairs of a sovereign Latin country. Last week, after U.S. Ambassador Adolph Berle had warned President Getulio Vargas to get on with Brazil’s promised elections, a paper edited by the President’s brother roared: “This hated policy of intervention was yesterday in Argentina, today is in Brazil itself.”

Damned & Damned. In Washington, the new policy had a spectacular airing in the U.S. Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee. Neither Chairman Tom Connally nor potent Republican Arthur H. Vandenberg had been consulted on the cancellation of the Rio conference. Both had looked forward to attending, and both had taken a hand in the previous policy of Latin self-determination at any cost.

Spruille Braden, remembering all the criticism of the earlier policy and riding out the temporary storms of Senate opposition, might have concluded that the rule in hemisphere affairs was: damned if you do, damned if you don’t.