WHERE DO WE STAND IN LATIN AMERICA?
BEALS, CARLETON
Where Do We Stand In Latin America? By CARLETON BEALS ONE by one the Latin American countries are breaking away from the hitching-post of American diplomacy and dollars to which they were tied...
...that all other lands must present a united front against the common enemy...
...2. Meddling by the "Yankee paratroopers," as the good-willers, economic advisers, and military missions are called...
...The new President Romulo Betancourt, who with the leading intellectuals of the country and the Lend-Lease air force, have now liquidated the remnants of the Gomez dictatorship in the country, was actually opposed in this effort by the Lombardo labor and the Communist elements...
...The situation was not improved by the irresponsible meddling of Ambassador Adolph Berle...
...Real wages have never been lower in many decades, though even before the war in many places they were below a coolie standard already...
...Lombardo claims control of 60 per eent of organized Argentine labor...
...The only strong dangerous imperialism left in the world (according to Lombardo) is that of the United States, doomed to become Fascistic and take the role of Germany in world affairs...
...It will not do to shrug this off as Communistic for the grievances are real, not fancied...
...The latest three have occurred in Argentina, Venezuela, and Brazil...
...TN Argentina the American public has been fed not the truth but the official State Department position...
...The October coup of the Army generals was not to promote free elections, but to control them...
...Ten years ago Mr...
...Above all he called for adequate wage standards in the oil industry and adequate taxation and control over the industry to prevent the wealth of the land being drawn away without proper development of Venezuelan living standards, education, and communications...
...But that he can do this is due to the general situation and to American bungling and selfishness...
...His sudden switch of policy at this juncture must be chalked up as another Soviet maneuver against the United States...
...The resultant scarcity of consumer goods, rampant inflation, and higher taxes caused real wages to be cut, according to the country, anywhere from 40 to 90 per cent...
...In short he echoed the very words of Pareto, the Italian nationalist, and the Mussolini of 25 years ago...
...The worst dictatorships of the continent emerged precisely in those countries which we had forced bloodily into the cold baptism of democracy...
...Efforts to block Latin American economic independence, like those of the American delegation at Chapultepec, must fail...
...The struggle is that of the proletarian nations against the wealthy nations...
...IT has become all too plain to the southern countries that though their voices, their resources, and their military bases were needed by the United States when the Wehrmacht was knocking on the portals of Africa and when the criminal negligence at Pearl Harbor had opened our western shores to possible Japanese attack, in contrast their councils affd cooperation are not wanted for the peace...
...Today he demands a strong alliance of 20 of the sister republics against the other—a purely Latin American federation strong enough to oppose the United States...
...It is now all too evident that in secret sessions of the Big Three the United States has increasingly lost its moral leadership and the peace...
...6. Failure of the United States to enforce any of its fine phrases regarding the rights of smaller nations...
...Our correspondents there have been official crusaders...
...It extends to all classes...
...But the new movement springs definitely from economic unrest and the anti-United States feeling...
...4. Abandonment of the Pan-American system of joint consultation in favor of unilateral coercion as in Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil...
...His stand is supported by Rafael Carrillo, head of the Mexican General Confederation of Labor, who quotes Virgil Jordan, Henry R. Luce, and Undersecretary of State Clayton to prove that the United States is definitely embarked upon political, financial, and economic imperialism, particularly in Latin America and in the Pacific...
...They have also observed that the system of inter-American consultation has broken down, that big-stick tactics are being revived, that unilateral action by us is taking the place of agreement and discussion, that American ambassadors are beginning to act and talk like a combination of bad ham actors and Roman proconsuls laying down edicts for subject inferior peoples...
...The process, we long ago discovered', was nowhere successful in Latin America...
...The labor movement of Latin America is now riding this present general wave of anti-Americanism for all it is worth...
...The discovery that the bright facade of the Good-Neighbor and inter-Americanism was being used to gain control of key resources, rich contracts, public utilities, air-rights, etc., all in the night of wartime secrecy...
...7. Failure to give Latin America any adequate voice in the peace arrangements or the peace structure...
...The secret and devious manipulations to retain control of those outposts should be squelched immediately...
...they were given vague promises at Chapultepec and an effort made to impose economic regulations which would have destroyed their industries and reduced them still more to the status of colonial agricultural and raw-product countries...
...it was worse off than before the war...
...This policy is pivoted on the theory that the UnitedStates is now the most danger-' ously imperialistic nation on the globe...
...He calls them to a nationalistic front against the United States as "a capitalist imperialist country...
...In this situation Latin American labor has laid down a new militant policy...
...Latin America has large credits in England and the United.States...
...they were used as pitiful catspaws at San Francisco...
...Thanks to coercion by the United States, the friendliness of the Argentine people for the United States, an attitude held by somewhat over half the population, has now been largely reduced to a handful of noisy political aspirants...
...It is necessary," Lombardo told his audience, "to create an alliance of the Popular Front with the anti-imperialist bourgoise [the native capitalist] in order to create the National Anti-Imperialist Front in every Latin American country...
...Lombardo does not call the clans to revolution...
...All too soon, they have become aware that the end of the war has ended large American purchases...
...True, enough Latin American labor is now led by fellow-traveler Lombardo Toledano, who has become an echo of Moscow and one of the most powerful figures in the Western Hemisphere...
...American troops should be taken off Latin American soil and bases gracefully relinquished at once...
...They had fought for democracy, at great sacrifice, and had enjoyed little of it at home...
...In eloquent tones—for he is a notable orator—he hailed the Russian victory and the weakening of capitalism throughout the world_as a result of the destruction of German and Japanese industry and the exhaustion of England and France...
...He called for the industrialization of the country and the building up of independent shipping facilities so that Venezuela would never again be placed in such a plight as it was during the war...
...8. Evidences of a revival of American imperialism...
...5. General abandonment of economic cooperation for the continent...
...Latin America is an area which needs capital...
...Latin American labor reaped none of the bonanzas that American labor did during the war...
...Juan Peron is stronger today than he ever has been...
...Berle helped overthrow the democratic regime of Grau San Martin in Cuba, and the Batista terrorist interlude was brought into being...
...IT is little wonder, therefore, that since the war began 13 governmental upsets have occurred in Latin America, and this is probably only a beginning...
...In this book he describes Nelson Rockefeller's visit to Venezuela, quotes his fine speech regarding the new social obligations of private wealth, and shows how within a few days after his arrival all the new labor legislation of Venezuela was repealed and how peasants were driven off lands by the army at the behest of the oil companies...
...Instead of acting aggressively toward neighboring countries, as depicted in the American press, the Colonels' regime has bent every effort toward lowering trade barriers and promoting friendship...
...The only sizable opposition party—the Radicals, comparable to the old British Liberal Party—is split three ways: Conservative, Popular Front, and pro-Peron...
...The continued presence of United States troops on continental bases not yet returned, which Latin Americans fear never will be returned...
...Recently he was using the Communists in the same way...
...In 1940 in his excellent book, Entitled Venezuelan Problems, Betancourt laid down a broad program of agricultural, financial, ahd industrial reform...
...9. The waste, graft and inefficiency as well as the favoritism displayed in many American projects carried on in war secrecy...
...In Venezuela, which supplied, next to the United States, the bulk of Western Hemisphere oil for the war effort, economic conditions have been unusually bad...
...The Lombardo labor forces have played a powerful part in a number of governmental changes—in Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Bolivia, and they have provoked a more conservative trend in Colombia...
...This has also meant the abandonment, even before war's end, of many projects looking toward long-term economic cooperation, an abandonment of all the fine Utopian promises they were given to induce them to produce for the war effort...
...The new labor policy calls for a national blockade by the Latin American countries, by the British colonies and by other colonial areas, against the United States...
...Peron controls the rest...
...These conditions are chiefly laid at the door of the United States because of its purchasing monopoly, which pegged raw material prices"at low levels, so that wages could not be raised to meet the spiralling cost of living...
...In Bolivia plantation hands deserted the fields where they received 20 or 25 cents a day to work on the American rubber project in stinking dangerous jungles for 40 to 75 cents a day, but according to the La Paz price index, the cost of living has gone up more than 1,300 per cent since the Chaco War, and at least half of this has been due to this war...
...that only by open cooperation with the less powerful nations of the earth can that leadership be recovered and the continuous betrayal of people after people by power politics, played so much more astutely by our partners than by us, be halted...
...The slogan for Latin America must be nationalism and national power against the encroachments of the United States...
...in other words revival of Big-Stickism...
...Indeed a wave of hostility toward the United States is sweeping most of the continent and a half to the south...
...The recent turn-overs in Venezuela, Argentina, and Brazil obey special circumstances...
...DURING the war, Lombardo talked of the 21 sister republics of the Western Hemisphere...
...He calls for an effort to ally the dominions of the British Commonwealth, particularly Canada, New Zealand, and Australia in this crusade...
...APPARENTLY, the Good-Neighbor policy, just as Latin Americans feared all along, was merely a little wartime map to be yanked off the wall the day after victory...
...Besides it has some real grievances...
...Vargas has merely injected more confusion into an already confused situation, and it has contributed to the growth of anti-Americanism in Brazil, already so strong that a year before the end of the war pro-American officials were being removed from all key positions...
...The causes for this shift in sentiment are varied and not too clear, but among them are: 1. Intolerable economic conditions due to work-stoppages, curtailment of wartime buying, inflation, and the dizzy drop in real wages...
...He may control SO per cent...
...Soviet and Communist propaganda...
...Goods will come in, but this will merely intensify the distress due to the shutting down of Latin American industrial establishments...
...Not enough shipping space was allotted to the country to keep the national diet even up to minimum standards of health...
...In Brazil, Dictator Vargas in 1937 used the Green Shirt Fascists to overthrow the elections and remain in power...
...They were cold-shouldered at Dumbarton Oaks...
...This condition has now been followed by wide-scale unemployment...
...it was a coup to prevent the development of a threatened wide-scale social revolution...
...As a result a wave of anti-Americanism is rising in the other Americas, worse in some respects than that which featured the period of our Marine aggressions and our imposition of loans and democracy by bayonets —a process now transferred to Japan and Germany...
...By CARLETON BEALS ONE by one the Latin American countries are breaking away from the hitching-post of American diplomacy and dollars to which they were tied during the war period...
...THE only solution for this complicated situation is a return to the more enlightened principles of the Good-Neighbor policy and an end of irresponsible sniping at governments we don't like...
...The loss of the support of the feudal meat and wheat barons has been compensated for by support from a wide sector of the new Argentine industrialist group...
...With copious quotations from Marx and Lenin and Stalin, Lombardo set forth the doctrine that revolutionary activities should be carried on only in capitalist countries, i. e. in the United States...
...Lombardo explained this new orientation in a great massmeeting in the Esperanza Theater in Mexico City, a session to hail the signing of a pact between Mexican labor and the Mexican equivalent of the Merchants and Manufacturers Association for the rapid industrialization of Mexico at whatever the cost...
...it could use $100,000,000,000 of capital tomorrow with ease...
...And labor today is still more worse off...
...3. Widespread stories of Jim Grow incidents on American projects...
...And yet this region provided nearly $6,000,000,-000 worth of goods to England and the United States for which no consumer goods were received in exchange...
...His gratuitous advice to Mr...
Vol. 9 • November 1945 • No. 46
