Facts and Latin America
Carter, John
Richard Halliburton to jump into the sacred pool of Yucatan, a Blair Niles to adopt the French penal colony of Devil's Island, and we send out an annual contingent of cheap drummers,...
...Simply to state these divergencies is to summarize their cause...
...It is true that our past interventions in the Caribbean and Central American republics have aimed to restore orderly and prosperous conditions in those regions and have not led to permanent occupations or alienations of sovereignty...
...Richard Halliburton to jump into the sacred pool of Yucatan, a Blair Niles to adopt the French penal colony of Devil's Island, and we send out an annual contingent of cheap drummers, Get-Rich-Quick-Wal-lingfords and gay ladies to swell the "American colonies" south of Key West...
...The important element is not the character but the occasion for such criticism...
...We have a strong color-complex...
...In Argentina we confront a perfect market, economically speaking...
...France, which is now the premium steel exporter of the world and which aspires to the leadership of an economically united Europe...
...We buy from them about $75,-000,000 a year...
...The key to stable economic friendship with our southern neighbors lies in this delicate matter of international psychology...
...Latin-American revolutions have been generally less sanguinary but more frequent than these two upheavals...
...To begin with, when we think of them at all, we think of them as Latin Americans, not as Mexicans, Brazilians, Cubans, Argentinians and so forth...
...Nearly one-half of Brazilian and Chilean exports go to the United States, two-fifths of Ecuador's and more than a quarter of Peru's...
...South American criticism of North American policies is a growing element in our balance of trade...
...But where these purchases are the direct consequence of our prior investAmerican industry looks southward, confident that flourishing markets will be opened in even "backward" countries...
...Economically, it would appear that our position in Latin America is unassailable...
...Our economic chain to Latin America can be no stronger than its weakest link and that link is, at present, good-will (the term is used in a purely commercial sense...
...We sell to the Argentine close to $200,000,000 worth of merchandise a year...
...We share the Anglo-Saxon's curious distaste for other languages and other civilizations...
...We have shown only too little interest in the artistic and scientific achievements of races whose genius has never resided in trade or in our particular brand of self-government and we judge them by standards which are utterly alien to them and by individuals who are utterly unrepresentative of their ideals...
...If not, we shall eventually find an answer in the trade returns, which will be as comforting to our competitors as it will be disturbing to our undiscriminating statisticians...
...As it happens, these are the very factors, so soothing to our statisticians, which are so disturbing to the Latin-American recipients of our economic attentions...
...These all lie with the fates, they do not remove the underlying alienation...
...When we raise our agricultural tariff rates to help our farmers we affect the Argentine farmer...
...and Germany, now devoid of political ambitions in South America and with some of the shrewdest industrial and technical brains in the world, are alike in a position to profit commercially by the exploitation of antipathies between the Americas...
...The American republics vary in size from the diminutive Salvador to the gargantuan Brazil, in culture from primitive Haitian black to the Mexican intellectual, in political life from a Nicaragua which is just emerging from a period of civil wars to stable Argentina whose constitutional history is more orderly than our own, in commercial importance from the "banana" states to the tremendous markets of Brazil and Argentina...
...And even if the best competitive efforts of the British and the racial ambitions of a virile young nation are insufficient to hinder our economic progress in the Argentine, we could do far worse than admit that Argentina exists...
...In the following paper Mr...
...If we, as a nation, show neither sympathy for nor interest in the other Americans, we cannot expect to hold them as political associates or commercial customers except through the brute strength of heavy loans, mass-production and geographical proximity...
...When we do condescend to notice them, we send a Seabrook to extol the "spiritual beauties" of voodoo orgies in Haiti, a Richard Halliburton to jump into the sacred pool of Yucatan, a Blair Niles to adopt the French penal colony of Devil's Island, and we send out an annual contingent of cheap drummers, Get-Rich-Quick-Wal-lingfords and gay ladies to swell the "American colonies" south of Key West...
...Carter admits that "our economic position in Latin America" seems sound, but calls attention to "qualitative considerations" too frequently lost sight of...
...We must find some way to meet this criticism and the worst of refutations would be an attempt to answer it...
...Spain, which has laid the foundation for a new era of economic expansion...
...We have had only two revolutions in 150 years, the revolt against England and the Civil War...
...This will insure the flow of orders for British rails and British rolling stock...
...From the cold economic point of view we could scarcely be in a better position-they require our goods, we do not need theirs...
...While the work of Pan-American synthesis is a task for generations, we can at least make a beginning...
...If we, as a nation, show neither sympathy for nor interest in the other Americans, we cannot expect to hold them as political associates or commercial customers except through the brute strength of heavy loans, mass-production and geographical proximity...
...But where these interventions clearly involve the consideration of defending the Panama Canal, forestalling non-American encroachments or protecting our trade routes it is difficult for the South American to praise us for our altruism or to attribute divine right to the special service squadron...
...The test of our ability to remain on cordial economic terms with the southern republics exists today in Argentina, where a normal triangular trade development has been allowed to distort feeling in the united kingdom and the Argentine republic out of relation to economic facts...
...The tendency is now for such railway companies to exclude foreign (meaning American) capital from obtaining control...
...We know next to nothing of our neighbors, of their history, their literature, their exceedingly interesting political, economic and social experiments, their traditions, their problems or their tastes...
...As it happens, these are the very factors, so soothing to our statisticians, which are so disturbing to the Latin-American recipients of our economic attentions...
...It is this consideration which lends economic weight to such incidents as the Sacco-Vanzetti furore in Latin America, to the outbursts over Haiti and Nicaragua, to the recurrent denunciations of the Monroe Doctrine and Yankee imperialism and to the charges of hypocrisy, crass materialism and quintessential selfishness which come and go with the seasons...
...For us, as individuals, that beginning must be at least to recognize that other American republics exist...
...While the work of Pan-American synthesis is a task for generations, we can at least make a beginning...
...We buy 10 percent of their exports, they buy less than 4 percent of ours...
...For us, as individuals, that beginning must be at least to recognize that other American republics exist...
...We are predominantly a Protestant, Anglo-Saxon, self-governing democracy...
...All international criticism is that...
...It is not enough to say that criticism of the United States in Latin America is unfair, inept or misinformed...
...There are many who see the entire western hemisphere as our economic heritage...
...And yet we felt affronted when the British regarded us as an inferior sort of colonials...
...So too the working out of "the American experiment" will be the test of our "crass materialism" and our national "hypocrisy...
...Our economic advantage lies in our proximity to the American tropics, in our mass production, in our purchases of their products and in our close relations to the west coast of South America...
...The Argentine instance is instructive because it points the way to a possibility of capitalizing racial and cultural relationships between Latin America and Latin Europe to the detriment of our present economic position...
...Italy, with surplus labor and great economic ambitions...
...Our neighbors are more generally bilingual and their civilization is more deliberately selective...
...The trade balance is thus overwhelmingly in our favor...
...An economic mission headed by a veteran British diplomat visited the Argentine last year and secured preferential contracts and trade arrangements looking to a reciprocal trade on the "buy where you sell basis"- a basis which would be very disturbing should the British see us apply it to Chile and Brazil...
...Two-thirds of the Argentine railways are British owned...
...Our neighbors are more egalitarian and cheerfully admit of strong admixtures of Negro and Indian blood...
...Argentina is the only major South American country which purchases from us more than she sells us...
...For the balance of South America, our purchases amount to but a fourth of the total exports...
...Moreover, they produce many of the same things which we produce, and in abundance-wheat, corn, linseed, cotton, wool, hides and skins, beef, mutton, pork and petroleum...
...Q. E. D. Actually, the matter is complicated by the British...
...That is the trouble with statistics...
...We purchase over two-thirds of the exports of the countries bordering on the Caribbean, including Mexico, Colombia and Venezuela...
...Furthermore, the big American packers have a commanding position in the Argentine meat export trade, and much American capital is profitably invested in utilities and other enterprises...
...This year a British trade fair is to be staged in Buenos Aires to stimulate lagging British trade...
...They omit qualitative considerations...
...All this, it should be noted, is a very definite attempt to capitalize the cordial Anglo-Argentine political relations for the benefit of British trade and to the possible injury of American trade...
...We are scarcely conscious that the Latin-American nations exist...
...The next time we may not be so lucky.FACTS AND LATIN AMERICA By JOHN CARTER YOU can prove anything and nothing by statistics, particularly south of the Rio Grande...
...Our trade with the South cannot be divorced from military, political and financial qualifications...
...In effect, they buy enough wheat and meat at Buenos Aires to enable the Argentinians to purchase our automobiles...
...The real fault in our relations with the other American nations lies with ourselves, in our provincialism, our prejudices and our indifference...
...If not, we shall eventually find an answer in the trade returns, which will be as comforting to our competitors as it will be disturbing to our undiscriminating statisticians...
...When a passing economic incident such as our revision of the tariff can create a disturbance in our economic relations with the most progressive of the South American nations, our hold upon the markets of the South must be regarded as more a matter of luck than of ability...
...ments it is easy for the South American to regard "favorable" trade balances as a meretricious method of bookkeeping...
...And where the objects of American policy have seemed to be "to shoot men into self-government" as Page phrased it, or, as in Haiti, to teach black Catholic peasants to conduct themselves politically like white Protestant Ford owners, it is doubly difficult for the South American to feel that we are not interfering with the domestic institutions of our neighbors...
...The next time we may not be so lucky...
...The heritage of the Texas frontier taints the better part of the hemisphere with the epithets of "greaser" and "gringo...
...We stand separated from them by a racial, cultural, religious, linguistic abyss, which we think we have bridged by some fat trade statistics...
...The key to stable economic friendship with our southern neighbors lies in this delicate matter of international psychology...
...Unless we can consider and answer the peculiar problems which we are confronting in the Argentine republic our economic position vis-a-vis Latin America must be regarded as decidedly unstable...
...Carter is devoting to an outline of world economic problems which have followed the war.-The Editors...
...And even if the best competitive efforts of the British and the racial ambitions of a virile young nation are insufficient to hinder our economic progress in the Argentine, we could do far worse than admit that Argentina exists...
...At the same time, we sell them lumber, cotton yarn, automobiles, trucks, agricultural machinery and petroleum products, commodities which do not perceptibly compete with their domestic producers...
...Foremost among these are the average citizen's unawareness of Latin America, and the abundant criticism of the "Yankee attitude...
...The test of our ability to remain on cordial economic terms with the southern republics exists today in Argentina, where a normal triangular trade development has been allowed to distort feeling in the united kingdom and the Argentine republic out of relation to economic facts...
...Even here, distinctions must be made...
...It is a wealthy market, representing an energetic people and a stable government...
...We have shown only too little interest in the artistic and scientific achievements of races whose genius has never resided in trade or in our particular brand of self-government and we judge them by standards which are utterly alien to them and by individuals who are utterly unrepresentative of their ideals...
...When a passing economic incident such as our revision of the tariff can create a disturbance in our economic relations with the most progressive of the South American nations, our hold upon the markets of the South must be regarded as more a matter of luck than of ability...
...The result is that with British trade still hard hit by the war and needing markets, a definite effort to capture the American share of the Argentine trade recommends itself in the united kingdom...
...It is true that we buy the bulk of the Cuban sugar crop, of the Brazilian coffee crop, of Chilean nitrates and copper, of Central American bananas, of Colombian, Mexican and Venezuelan oil...
...Just as the test of the Monroe Doctrine has been the freedom of this hemisphere from partitions such as have pegged out Africa, so the test of our Caribbean policy will be our political disinterestedness and our living up to our word...
...These fail to realize that from the northeastern tip of Brazil southward, South America is actually closer to Europe than to the United States, in terms of marine transport...
...They need capital, we have it...
...In the long run, we will be judged by our conduct rather than by our qualities, good, bad or indifferent...
...This is not so...
...The article is the third in a series which Mr...
...And in Argentina we find what we have long lacked in the western hemisphere: an economic counterpoise and a moral critic...
...Yet our exports to the Argentine amount to a quarter of their imports, while their exports to us are less than 3 percent of our total imports...
...The other American republics, with important qualifications, can be described as predominantly Catholic, Latin and authoritarian states...
...We may be as good as gold, but if we are alien in racial spirit and in civilization from our neighbors, we will simply prolong a misunderstanding...
...They buy far more from the Argentine than they sell...
...We dispose of about a fifth of Argentine's total trade, but it amounts to less than a twenty-fifth of our own trade...
Vol. 11 • February 1930 • No. 16
