Latin America: Democracy’s Bull

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Last week the U.S. Senate turned loose a bull in the Latin American china shop. He was Spruille Braden, now confirmed as Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs, a big, jolly, working democrat whose object was to smash the Western Hemisphere’s dictatorial bric-a-brac.

Never before had the U.S. had such a man in charge of its Hemisphere relations. Seldom had it had such a man in any major diplomatic office. And never had the prideful, sensitive, yearning Latins had to deal on a Hemispheric scale with such a North American.

Already Spruille Braden was better known to the Latins than any other U.S. figure, Franklin D. Roosevelt perhaps excepted. In five months of Hemispheric fame, twelve years of quieter labors, he had made himself an idol to many, anathema to many others. Nor were all who distrusted or feared him dictators and authoritarians. Many a Latin democrat (perhaps more Latin than democratic) was numbered among his loud detractors.

For Spruille Braden, in his big person and his big ideals, embodied the great paradox confronting the U.S. in Latin America. The U.S. officially, and Braden personally, propose to uphold the U.S. idea of liberty in all the Western Hemisphere. Yet the U.S., as the greatest of western nations, and Braden as its servant, must recognize that sovereignty—especially sovereignty below the Rio Grande—is sometimes more precious than liberty.

Spruille Braden thinks that he knows the answer: in the final test, sovereignty rests not in governments but in the people, and the people love liberty. He learned that revolutionary answer where it often seems to be contradicted—in Latin America.

Man of the Mountains. The most colorful diplomat on the current U.S. scene was born 51 years ago, in the Montana mountain country. His future was shaped at birth: Spruille’s father was William Braden, an engineer and promoter who followed the mining business from Montana to Chile, got rich in the process, and in his day was famous throughout the southern continent.

William Braden made a point of taking his family wherever he went. When schools were scarce, Spruille’s mother tutored him. At 16 he entered Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School, took a year off to mine, cut timber and slush about the oilfields of the West, then graduated at 20. Yale knew “Fat” Braden as an All-America goal in water polo, and as a discriminating but notable eater. His class annual characterized him: “He hath eaten me out of house and home.” His mother later said that the English language, as perfected at Yale and spoken by Spruille Braden, was unintelligible.

Possessed of a budding paunch and a brand new engineering diploma, young Braden set to work in his father’s Chilean copper mine. He was 21 when he saw 19-year-old Maria Humeres del Solar in the box of a Santiago theater. By managing to marry her six months later he set something of a record in overcoming the restrictive protocol of Latin courtship, and the lack of a common language. (Both now speak excellent Spanish and English.) Two of Braden’s handiest assets in Latin America have been his greying senora’s charm and judgment. The Bradens have five children, three grandchildren.

Wealth & a Conscience. Moneyed by mines, electric power and oil deals, Spruille Braden was another rich man on the Hudson in the late ’20s. His menage at Riverdale, N.Y., included a stable of South American prizefighters who slept over the garage.

The 1929 crash did not exactly give Braden a social conscience; it awakened one. Dinted but by no means bankrupt, he did some heavy thinking which later led ex-Attorney General Homer Cummings to say: “Braden just couldn’t help convincing himself that he was a progressive.

It was in him all the time and had to come out.” It came out in the form of money and personal support for Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 campaign. The Roosevelt victory, the laws of politics, and Braden’s background made him a natural for Latin diplomacy. He soon completed his qualifications by selling all his Latin holdings.

The Braden Way. In dictator-ridden Buenos Aires last May, Spruille Braden stated his policy in one explosive sentence: the United States is against dictators everywhere. By the same token he is for freedom everywhere — period.

The difference between Braden and some other enunciators of the same doctrine is that he believes in practicing it, always and everywhere. The doctrine, and the methods by which he prefers to enforce it, have produced his most spectacular successes:

¶ He founded his diplomatic reputation on his settlement of the Chaco war (1932-35) between Paraguay and Bolivia. After three years of feckless negotiations, Braden took to the radio, bluntly addressed the Paraguayan and Bolivian people over the delegates’ heads. A settlement followed quickly.

¶ In 1940, when he was Ambassador to Colombia, he was alarmed by the presence of the German-operated airline Scadta so near the Panama Canal. Well aware that Pan American Airways controlled Scadta and could throw out the Germans, Braden turned the heat on Pan Am through Washington, got action, and demonstrated one of his favorite theses: that Naziism, wherever and however it infiltrated Latin America, had to be and could be eradicated.

¶ In 1944, as U.S. Ambassador to Cuba, Braden helped make possible the free elections in which President-Dictator Juan Batista’s regime was voted out. Braden forbade U.S. business interests in Cuba to pony up the usual election ante ($2,000,000 in that case) and otherwise encouraged a free vote. Even Batista praised him: “He is more a man than a diplomat.” So far, the Braden doctrine and the Braden way have failed in their most conspicuous, most important test—in Argentina. There, at the crest of his career as a Hemisphere Ambassador, Braden early this year locked horns with Dictator Juan Domingo Perón, threw every personal and official weight against him, and for a time seemed to be winning. Hundreds of thousands of Argentine students, workers, businessmen, army men, politicians rallied to Spruille Braden’s call: “We . . . must and will establish . . . the inviolable sovereignty of people.”

But the triumph was short; Perón no sooner fell than he rose again like Antaeus, seemingly stronger than ever (TIME, Oct. 29). Braden’s confirmation as Assistant Secretary was before the Senate, and his critics set upon him in full cry.

They had a case.

The Dissent. That case was partly a U.S. case, partly Latin American, and its exponents rated a hearing.

Essence of the Latin case was simply that the U.S. had no business interfering in Latin nations’ affairs, for or against dictatorships. For the most part this view was expressed by a very special type of Latin: professional diplomats or Government officials, many of them good democrats according to their national lights, who had been schooled to regard the U.S. as an unavoidable, sometimes kindly but always threatening colossus.

The U.S. dissent was more varied in its sources and expression. A notable dissenter was cool, bitter Sumner Welles, who used to guide U.S., policy in Latin America. He had no use for “those well-intentioned but wholly ill-advised spokesmen for foreign governments who have assumed the role of saviors of the Argentine people.” He took for a text the recent, Braden-inspired postponement of the Inter-American Conference on Peace and Security. Said Welles, dismissing the Braden argument that no conference was better than one where Argentina’s authoritarians would be received as equals: “Neither the individual interests of the United States nor the cause of Inter-American unity is served when the United States Government or its representatives take action which is regarded by the peoples of the Latin American nations as derogatory to their national sovereignty.”

Debating Braden’s confirmation, Foreign Relations Chairman Tom Connally bumbled: “We do not expect to interfere in any wise in [Latin American] domestic affairs unless it is in the interest of some American citizen or some American properties that are involved.” But Tom Connally had a better point: the Act of Chapultepec, sponsored by the U.S. State Department at the Mexico City Conference this year, had solemnly repudiated “intervention by a state in the . . . affairs of another.” Just what, asked Connally, did Mr. Braden think he was doing to that policy, to which the Argentines had subscribed by U.S. and Latin invitation?

It remained for Wisconsin’s Bob La Follette, more noted for his love of liberty than for his international thinking, to single out the big difficulty. La Follette did not quite dare to make an admission hard for any lover of liberty to express: that the dictated do not always and unanimously object to dictation. He compromised by asking: was it correct to assume that “the much-detested government of Colonel Perón” had no mass support?

What Is Intervention? Spruille Braden told his Senate critics that he was no “interventionist,” and he meant it. To his mind, he had simply put an end to the negative intervention of silent acquiescence—the kind of thing that made him boil when Sumner Welles, and later Nelson Rockefeller, were handling U.S. affairs in Latin America. Just suppose, said Braden, that he had kept his mouth shut when he went to Buenos Aires? Argentina and all the Hemisphere would have mistaken his silence for support of the Perón regime. Libertarian Americans in Buenos Aires heartily agreed, said that if the Braden policy were reversed, the U.S. would never again be trusted below the Rio Grande.

At the upshot, the Braden policy was not reversed. But, in effect, it was somewhat dampened.

Lest they be suspected of approving the Peróns of Latin America, the critical Senators joined in a unanimous vote to confirm Braden’s appointment. But they had made known that freehanded, aggressive “intervention,” even for Latin liberties, was not the policy of the U.S. Senate.

The Brass Knuckles. Spruille Braden himself was well aware that Latin sovereignty, Latin pride and—probably more often than he would like—Latin sloth were involved. Long before his critics awoke to the fact, he had realized that his No. 1 antagonist, Perón, commanded some popular support (perhaps 30% of organized Argentine labor, for instance). He understood, better than most, that the U.S. could do little more against the Argentine regime than continue to make U.S. displeasure known.

As Assistant Secretary, subject in the long run to a restraining Senate, Braden could not do everything that he might have hoped to do. But, as Spruille Braden, he could still speak to the Peróns. Last week, on Navy Day, he again denounced the Argentine “state of siege” which “permits a hoodlum with brass knuckles to strike the face of a young girl because she cries, ‘Long live democracy! ” In short, the Senate drubbing had not changed the bull. Braden had always been adept at stepping carefully, calculating just the china to be smashed. But the horns and the hooves were still there, and would be so long as he practiced what he had preached to Argentines: “The voice of freedom makes itself heard in this land, and I do not believe anyone will succeed in drowning it. I shall hear it in Washington with the same clarity with which I hear it from Buenos Aires.”

The Voices. This week the various voices of a varied Latin family came to Secretary Braden:

¶Brazil, biggest in size (3,286,170 sq. mi.) and population (44,460,000), replaced swart little Getulio Vargas, its President and dictator since 1930 (see above).

¶Venezuela, the world’s third largest oil exporter, had a new, revolutionary government. This week the new junta, headed by President Rómulo Betancourt, seemed to have the confidence of Spruille Braden.

But at home it was having reorganization troubles.

¶ In Central America, where a U.S. ambassadorial sneeze may start a revolt at any time, democracy and dictatorship contested across national borders. Costa Rica is a first-class democracy; El Salvador and Guatemala are struggling with the problem of embryo democracy. Nicaragua and Honduras are still outright dictatorships.

Sooner or later, Spruille Braden would be impelled to take a stand in that regional struggle.

Some would call it intervention ; Braden would call it the only practical form of nonintervention. As he had been saying for a decade, he said in Washington last week:

“. . . The ideal of the Inter-American system is ‘the application of democracy to international relations.’ “The Good Neighbor Policy is one of respect which begins with self-respect and then mutual respect. It is a two-way, not a one-way, street to be traveled in dignity by both parties in full realization that they [both] have rights and responsibilities.” One such prerogative, to Braden’s way of thinking, is the right of all governments to speak their minds. As Spruille Braden, and as an Assistant Secretary of State, he can be expected to go right on speaking his.

Oath & a Prayer. This week, in Washington, Supreme Court Justice Stanley Reed swore in Spruille Braden. Maria Braden, sitting quietly by, never took her dark eyes off her husband. Afterwards, when the ceremony was repeated for cameramen, Secretary of State James F. Byrnes grinned and sardonically echoed Braden: “So help you God.” Then Byrnes turned to the photographers, suggested that they caption their pictures : “Standing in need of prayer.” Spruille Braden smiled, signed the oath, and kissed his wife.