Latin America and the Second World War: Volume 2: 1942–1945 9781474288248, 9781474288262, 9781474288255

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Latin America and the Second World War: Volume 2

History and Politics in the 20th Century: Bloomsbury Academic Collections

Focusing on some of the conflicts that have shaped the 20th century and how they have changed national and international politics ever since, this collection of eight facsimile editions contains titles from our imprints The Athlone Press, Pinter, Mansell and Continuum. Going beyond the mere analysis of military strategies and developments, these books address the political repercussions of war, the propaganda involved in shaping a nation’s acceptance or rejection of military actions, the attitudes minorities face during wartime and the role of religion in instigating or resolving conflicts. The collection is available both in e-book and print versions. Titles in History and Politics in the 20th Century are available in the following subsets: International Relations in the 20th Century Europe in the 20th Century Conflict in the 20th Century Postcolonialism in the 20th Century Multidisciplinary Approaches Other titles available in Conflict include: Latin America and the Second World War: Volume 1, 1939-1942 by R. A. Humphreys Minorities in Wartime: National and Racial Groupings in Europe, North America and Australia during the Two World Wars edited by Panikos Panayi Making the New Europe: European Unity and the Second World War edited by M. L. Smith and Peter M. R. Stirk The Falklands Crisis: The Rights and the Wrongs by Peter Calvert U.S. Official Propaganda During the Vietnam War, 1965-1973: The Limits of Persuasion by Caroline Page Wars in the Third World since 1945 by Guy Arnold Yugoslavian Inferno: Ethnoreligious Warfare in the Balkans by Paul Mojzes

Latin America and the Second World War: Volume 2

1942-1945

R. A. Humphreys

History and Politics in the 20th Century: Conflict BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC COLLECTIONS

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in 1982 by The Athlone Press This edition published by Bloomsbury Academic 2016 © Bloomsbury Academic 2016 R. A. Humphreys has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders of material reproduced in this volume. If any copyright holder has not been properly acknowledged, please contact the publisher who will be happy to rectify the omission in future editions. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-8824-8 ePDF: 978-1-4742-8825-5 Set: 978-1-4742-9297-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Series: Bloomsbury Academic Collections, ISSN 2051-0012

Printed and bound in Great Britain

University of London Institute of Latin American Studies 11 Latin America and the Second World War Volume Two: 1942-1945

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AMICIS ET COLLEGIS MCMXXXIX-MCMXLV UXORIQUE CARISSIMAE

LATIN AMERICA AND THE SECOND WORLD WAR Volume Two 1942-1945 by

R. A. HUMPHREYS

ATHLONE Published for the Institute of Latin American Studies University of London 1982

First published 1982 by The Athlone Press Ltd. at 90-91 Great Russell Street, London WCIB 3PY Distributor in U.S.A. and Canada Humanities Press Inc New Jersey © University of London 1982 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Humphreys, R. A. Latin America and the Second World War. Vol. 2: 1942-1945.-(University of London Institute of Latin American Studies monographs, ISSN 0776-0846; 11) 1. World War, 1939-1945— Latin America 2. Latin America—History—20th century 9807.033 F1414 ISBN 0-485-17711-0 ISSN 0776-0846

USA SBN 0-391-02671-2

Typeset by Preface Ltd., Salisbury, Wiltshire Printed in Great Britain by The University Press, Cambridge

PREFACE In the first volume of this work I recorded my obligations to my war-time colleagues, some of them, alas, now dead. It is a pleasure to repeat my gratitude here. I wish to thank also my friends and one-time associates in the Institute of Latin American Studies, in particular my former secretary, Miss Daphne Rodger, and those Research Assistants, Dr. Colin Lewis, Dr. Joseph Smith, Dr. Rose Marie Buechler and Dr. Charles Jones, to whose help between 1969 and 1974 this book owes so much. My chief debt is, as it has always been, to my wife. New Year's Day 1982

R.A.H.

CONTENTS I II

The Caribbean Danger Zone

1

The Mexican Experience

35

III

Brazil at War

59

IV

Bolivia and the West Coast

86

V

The States of the Rio de le Plata

120

VI

Argentina under Military Rule—1

146

VII

Argentina under Military Rule—2

165

From War to Peace

203

Abbreviations

230

Notes

231

Newspapers

270

VIII

Index of Authors, Editors and Short Titles 271 General Index

274

I

THE CARIBBEAN DANGER ZONE I Of the twenty-six countries which signed the Declaration of the United Nations on 1 and 2 January, 1942, thereby accepting the principles of the Atlantic Charter, agreeing to employ their full resources against the Axis powers, to co-operate with each other, and to make no separate peace or armistice, eleven—the United States of America, Canada, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama—were nations of the western hemisphere. Three other western hemisphere states, Mexico, Colombia and Venezuela, had severed relations with Germany, Italy and Japan, and, by the end of the month, every Latin American country except Argentina and Chile had also severed relations; the first American troops to cross the Atlantic beyond Iceland had landed at Londonderry (despite the protest of the Irish Republic); and the first German U-boats to operate in the western half of the North Atlantic had begun their assault on the great coastal shipping lanes stretching southwards from the St. Lawrence to the Straits of Florida. Their advent had been heralded by the sinking of the British passenger ship, Cyclops, on 12 January, some 300 miles east of Cape Cod. They closed in 'within sight of the glow that arose from Broadway';1 burning tankers could be seen from the resorts of Florida; and, for four months, from January to April, the Atlantic coast of North America became 'the most dangerous area for shipping in the whole world'.2 In February the U-boats entered what was to be 'their happiest hunting ground', the Caribbean sea.3 Once again, as at Pearl Harbour on 7 December, the American navy was taken by surprise. An early assault on American coastal shipping had been anticipated, but not its magnitude and success. As for the Caribbean, the army had expected it to be 'relatively immune' to attack.4 It had been organized into a theatre

2

THE CARIBBEAN DANGER ZONE

of operations, principally for the defence of the Panama Canal. With the consent of the Royal Netherlands Government troops had been sent early in February to replace the British garrisons protecting the oil refineries in the Dutch islands of Aruba and Curasao, as they had earlier been sent to guard the bauxite mines of Surinam.5 Some 2000 had been assigned to Trinidad and yet others to the various bases acquired from Britain under the Destroyers-for-Bases deal of September, 1940. By the end of February, 1942, about 22,000 were stationed in Puerto Rico and double that number in the Panama Canal Zone and Panama. The navy, for its part, kept a wary eye on the pro-Vichy Rear-Admiral Robert, with his ships and planes and gold at Martinique, until he surrendered his command to the French Committee of National Liberation in July, 1943. But it was from the Pacific rather than the Caribbean that the army feared an attack on the Canal. And while the ring of naval bases from Florida and Cuba to Puerto Rico and the yet uncompleted sites in the Bahamas, Jamaica, Antigua, St. Lucia and Trinidad, as well as the air facilities granted by the Central American and Caribbean republics,6 cast an air and surface shield over the Caribbean itself, the very nature of the area, with its island barriers, narrow passages and swift currents, had been thought, in what Admiral Morison called the 'age of innocence', to protect it from under-water attack.7 But the age of innocence was over. On 16 February, the day after the Rio de Janeiro Conference of American Foreign Ministers—that landmark in the history of United States relations with Latin America—had begun, and five days after American ground troops had settled themselves in at Aruba, a U-boat entered the harbour of San Nicolas. It had already sunk light-draft tankers carrying oil from Maracaibo. At Aruba it torpedoed two more and, surfacing, shelled the Lago oil refinery, which caught fire. Two days later a U-boat, which had lain hidden in the Gulf of Paria, torpedoed two American merchantmen at anchor off Port of Spain, and these bold strokes were repeated at Castries harbour in St. Lucia in March, and at Puerto Limon, the chief Caribbean port of Costa Rica, in July, when a number of stevedores and seamen

THE CARIBBEAN DANGER ZONE

3

perished with the United States freighter, San Pablo? Sinkings in the Caribbean area, south of a line from Cape Sable, Florida, to Vera Cruz, rose from twenty-four in February to sixty-six in June, a major part in the waters round Trinidad, the approaches to the Panama Canal, the Yucatan Channel and the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti. Altogether 336 ships with a tonnage of over one and a half million were destroyed in 1942, the heaviest losses occurring in the five months from May to September, but mounting again in November; and these figures exclude the losses in the Gulf region around New Orleans and the passes of the Mississippi.9 The worst was over by the early months of 1943. Though the Battle of the Caribbean flared up from time to time, only thirty-five ships were sunk south of the Cape Sable-Vera Cruz line in 1943 and only three between January and July, 1944. The oil tanker routes from Maracaibo and Trinidad, the bauxite lanes from the Guianas, and the approaches to the Panama Canal were not again in serious danger after January, 1943.10 Convoy systems had been organized, air cover provided, anti-submarine warfare improved, and, more especially after the Allied landings in North Africa in November, 1942, the U-boats had been diverted elsewhere. But the effects in 1942 on oil supplies from Venezuela, on crop movements and on food supplies in the Caribbean had been serious, and the challenge to the United States in her own backyard, as one member of the State Department put it,11 combined, as it was, with Japanese advance in the Pacific (checked but not ended by the Battle of Midway Island on 4 June) and British reverses in Africa, did not inspire confidence in Latin America. But Germany, after the Rio de Janeiro Conference, had scant regard for those states which had severed relations with her. The sinking of the Mexican tanker, Potrero de Llano, though brilliantly lighted, off the coast of Florida, the contemptuous rejection of the Mexican protest, and the torpedoing of yet another tanker, brought Mexico into the war on 1 June (though the declaration of war was made retrospective to 22 May), and the torpedoing of five Brazilian passenger and cargo ships, including a troop ship, off the coasts of Sergipe

4

THE CARIBBEAN DANGER ZONE

and Bahia, with serious loss of life, led to a declaration of a state of war between Brazil and Germany and Italy, though not J a p a n . II Rumours abounded in the early months of 1942 that the U-boats refuelled off the desolate coasts of Central America and among the Caribbean islands. None seems to have been authenticated. T h e U-boats possessed so great a cruising range that, normally, refuelling was unnecessary. But there was always a possibility that supplies and provisions might have been obtained here and there; rumours had to be investigated; and, inevitably, the task of seeking out landing or hiding places fell upon the United States navy. 12 So did the burden of Caribbean defence in general. C u b a had sufficient small gunboats and other craft to patrol her own coasts, at least between the mainland and the outlying keys and reefs, and to assist in the escort of sea-trains from H a v a n a to Port Everglades. 13 But the naval resources of the Dominican Republic and still more of Haiti were diminutive and the Central American states had neither naval vessels nor craft capable even of inshore patrol. W h a t the island and isthmian republics could and, in the main, did do, was to give the United States the freedom of their air space, ports and territorial waters, to permit the use of existing airfields, some of which were enlarged, 14 and the construction of others, 15 and to allow American personnel and operational units to be stationed at strategic sites, such as new air bases at San Jose in Guatemala and near Guatemala City itself and at newlyconstructed fields at San Julian and San Antonio de los Bahos in Cuba, and to co-operate generally in the suppression of Axis financial and 'fifth-column' activities. Axis assets were frozen or confiscated in Cuba; a Custodian of Enemy Property, endowed with extensive powers, was appointed; and, after some delay, Axis nationals were either shipped off to the Isle of Pines or interned in a concentration camp near Havana. 1 6 A special commission to control the funds of enemy countries and nationals was appointed in the Dominican Republic. Enemy property was sequestrated in Haiti and

THE CARIBBEAN DANGER ZONE

5

Germans and Italians were placed in Fort National in Portau-Prince. 17 T h e Central American countries all took measures of varying degrees of severity for controlling enemy assets and property, and, while imposing restrictions on some Axis nationals, interned or deported others to the United States for repatriation or internment. Guatemala took over the short stretch of the German-owned Vera Paz Railway, intervened in German-owned coffee plantations and, in J u n e , 1944, expropriated them, 18 the British Minister later observing that the expropriation and deportation of German finca owners was carried out as a means of obtaining loot and with no animosity.19 El Salvador also took control of estates belonging to German and Italian settlers, though, in contrast to what happened in Guatemala, these were returned to them after the war had ended. 20 Costa Rica, deporting a number of Germans, interned others (as also did Honduras), placed Germanowned businesses under Costa Rican administration and expropriated German farms, and, after the torpedoing of the San Pablo in the harbour of Puerto Limon, rioters wrecked a number of German properties. 21 An American presence and American influence became pervasive almost everywhere in Central America. They were most marked in Guatemala, where an executive agreement regularized the stationing of American troops and where President Ubico hoped for American support for his pretensions to the British colony of Belize,22 and, among the island republics, in C u b a and Haiti. Secret military and naval agreements were concluded between the United States and Cuba. The San Julian and San Antonio de los Bahos air bases, the one at La Fe near Cape Antonio and the Yucatan Channel, the other not far from Havana, became operational and training centres for American and Royal Air Force pilots in anti-submarine warfare. T h e San Julian field was used as a sea-plane base. Naval patrol stations and emergency landing fields were established. United States air, naval and army detachments were stationed at strategic points along the C u b a n coast and a dozen or so submarine chasers given to the C u b a n navy and a number of aeroplanes to the air force.23 Under a comprehensive agreement with Haiti the United States undertook to patrol Haitian waters, provide military aircraft, coastal bat-

6

THE CARIBBEAN DANGER ZONE

teries and artillerymen, train Haitian naval cadets, airmen and mechanics, and construct a marine railway (for ship repair purposes) at Port-au-Prince, and the American naval and military attaches in Haiti found themselves elevated to positions of unwonted authority.24 The American military presence was less in evidence in the Dominican Republic, but it was certainly there. An agreement was signed in January, 1943, for the establishment of an American naval mission; three submarine chasers were sent to assist the Dominican coastguard and air force in patrol activities; and, later, a Marine Corps air mission was detailed to train Dominican pilots.25 All eight of the Central American and island republics were given modest allocations of Lend-Lease aid,26 enabling them to emerge from the war somewhat better equipped in ground, air and naval strength. None experienced direct enemy attack, apart from the submarine attack in Puerto Limon harbour. But several suffered a loss of ships under their registry, and in Cuba there were genuine fears of an attack on Havana. A black-out was imposed in April, 1942, but soon abandoned, and, in the event, the rumours of German threats, or the threats themselves, turned out to be idle. Various acts of sabotage, however, were attempted, and a great sensation was caused by the arrest in September, and the subsequent execution, of a German spy, Heinz August Luning, who had entered Cuba on a Honduran passport, had accomplices as far afield as Chile, and transmitted information on the movement of shipping to the U-boats by short-wave radio. Luning had the distinction of being the only spy to be executed in Latin America during the war.27 In August, 1942, compulsory registration for military service began—a controversial measure which led to the demand that Cuban troops should not be sent abroad without the explicit approval of Congress.28 None was sent abroad. But a few Cubans were enlisted in United States forces and many more offered to serve.29 Essentially non-belligerant (though Cuba had the gratification of sinking a German submarine) ,30 the small republics of Central America and the Caribbean did not suffer greatly from the war. In return for the military facilities which they made available to the United States and for measures to sup-

THE CARIBBEAN DANGER ZONE

7

press enemy activities, they received not only Lend-Lease but financial and economic aid in an effort both to sustain and to strengthen their economies in their own interests and in that of the United States. T h e Government of the United States, Sumner Welles had declared as leader of the United States delegation to the third meeting of American Foreign Ministers at Rio de Janeiro, 'stands prepared to render financial and technical assistance, where needed, to alleviate injury to the domestic economy of any of the American republics which results from the control and curbing of alien economic activities inimical to our common defense. It is ready to enter into broad agreements for the acquisition of supplies of basic and strategic materials, and to cooperate with each of the other American republics in order to increase rapidly and efficiently their production for emergency needs'; and he cited also the resolution of the Board of Economic Warfare on 26 December, 1941, that it was the policy of the United States to 'aid in maintaining the economic stability of the other American Republics by recognizing and providing for their essential civilian needs' equally and proportionally with her own. 31 Financial and technical assistance took many forms. T h e Export-Import Bank, for example, opened a credit with the National Bank of Haiti in 1942 to ensure the stability of the local currency in the face of exchange difficulties arising from the lack of shipping facilities. Similar lines of credit were made available to Costa Rica and Nicaragua, and a $25 million loan for public works, including roads, water systems, hospitals and the like, went to Cuba. T h e Public Roads Administration gave assistance to road construction in Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. 32 T h e Office of the Co-ordinator of InterAmerican Affairs, established in 1940 with Nelson Rockefeller at its head, 33 set up a Health and Sanitary Division immediately after the Rio de Janeiro Conference, 34 to assist in dealing with problems of public health and sanitation, the eradication of malaria and other tropical diseases, the establishment of health centres and the improvement of hospitals. It operated in each of the eight republics except Cuba. T h e Food Supply Division of the Co-ordinator's Office, through its Institute of Inter-American Affairs, initiated an ambitious project in

8

THE CARIBBEAN DANGER ZONE

Costa Rica for the cultivation of fruit and vegetables for local consumption and the supply of the Canal Zone—Costa Rica's major 'contribution to the Allied cause'. 35 It also contributed to a food supply and road-building programme in Honduras. Co-operative agricultural experiment stations and demonstration farms were set up in El Salvador, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic. Technical advice on crop diversification was given to Cuba. An Inter-American Institute of Agricultural Sciences, of which Vice-President Henry Wallace laid the foundation stone in 1943 and for which the Co-ordinator's Office provided the initial finance, was established at Turrialba in Costa Rica for the training of graduate students and experiments with new types of livestock and tropical crops. 36 T h e production of quinine and hemp was encouraged in Guatemala—perhaps Guatemala's main economic contribution to the war effort.37 And to replace Far Eastern sources of supply of so basic a strategic material as rubber, agreements were made with all the Central American states for increasing the cultivation of rubber-bearing plants and for pre-emptive purchases by the United States of all exportable rubber surpluses. 38 The United Fruit Company, with its vast Central American interests, appropriated funds for a 1000 acre hevea plantation and an agricultural school in Honduras 3 9 and announced plans for the development of natural products such as hemp, quinine, palm oil and rubber elsewhere. T h e rubber programme was less successful than had been hoped, and the most ambitious scheme of all, conducted in Haiti, was an outright failure. Under an omnibus agreement concluded in April, 1942,40 the Societe Haitienne-Americaine de Developpement Agricole, or Shad a, established in 1941, 41 was given financial support to plant up to 24,000 additional acres of sisal (a substitute for Manila fibre), to be cultivated in small holdings. By an arrangement with the Rubber Reserve Company Shada was also to plant cryptostegia, a vine which yielded pure latex, though Roosevelt said that it sounded like a 'horrid disease'. T h e United States proposed to buy all the rubber produced; United States technicians were detailed to help in the operation; a research station was set up at Gonaives; and many thousands of acres were cleared for planting and some $6,200,000 were invested in the project before it was

THE CARIBBEAN DANGER ZONE

9

suddenly cancelled in May, 1944, on the grounds that it could not be expected to produce significant quantities of rubber. Peasants had been removed from their lands, crops, such as coffee, cocoa, bread-fruit, coconuts and fruit, uprooted, to make way for the company's plantations, and the work of restoration and rehabilitation was difficult and costly.42 A similar unhappy result attended a design to fill in by a preliminary all-weather road the gaps in the Pan American highway between the Mexican border with Guatemala (where the Suchiata railway bridge was opened in 1942)43 and the Panama Canal Zone. At the end of 1941 the United States had appropriated $20,000,000 for the completion, in co-operation with the states concerned, of the highway proper. The Guatemalan section was nearly finished, though improvements were needed. But much remained to be done elsewhere, particularly in the difficult Costa Rican section. Military and strategic reasons dictated a decision in 1942 not to await the completion of the permanent highway but to provide at United States expense and with Army Corps engineers an emergency 'pioneer' road which would permit traffic at a much earlier date. But the plan was abandoned in October, 1943, after the expenditure of some $40 millions, and the war ended with neither the pioneer road nor the permanent highway completed. Nor did the work on the pioneer road and its abandonment altogether sweeten United States relations with Central America. There were complaints in Costa Rica, for example, that American engineers ignored local advice, that American truck-drivers treated Costa Ricans badly, that machinery was over-ordered and then lay idle, complaints, in short, of inefficiency and prejudice, with the army, in the end, leaving its work undone.44 Miscalculations and war-time dislocations of this kind were to be expected. So were shortages of shipping and of certain vital imports, more especially of petrol, capital goods and spare parts. There were also food shortages—wheat flour was an example—partly the result of failures of deliveries, partly of over-specialization on export crops or the diversion of resources, as in Haiti, from food production for local use to other purposes,45 partly of labour dislocations and, in some countries, such as Honduras, of the inadequacies of internal

10

THE CARIBBEAN DANGER ZONE

communications. T h e activities of the Food Supply Division of the Office of the Co-ordinator of Inter-American Affairs were designed to relieve this problem, and the Foreign Economic Administration 4 6 bought in 1943 and 1944 the entire exportable surpluses of several Dominican foodstuffs, such as corn and rice, for direct shipment to Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands. 47 T h e United States also bought in 1943 Guatemalan surpluses of rice, corn and peanut meal. There seems to have been no very acute distress in the independent republics. But one of the worst effects was inflation. Food prices in Haiti rose from 35 per cent to more than 100 per cent between 1941 and 1943.48 There were food riots in El Salvador in 194549 and shortages of sugar, beans and rice—the staple diet of the peasantry—in Costa Rica. 50 Complaints were not encouraged in the Dominican Republic, but there were, nevertheless, murmurs that badly-needed foodstuffs were being exported at highly profitable prices, and in 1946 coffee and sugar cost more in Ciudad Trujillo than in New York. 51 From Costa Rica to C u b a and from Guatemala to the Dominican Republic inflationary tendencies, with wages chasing, or not chasing, prices, characterized the region in general. Deplorable as was the lot of the poor and the peasant— as it always had been—export crops, which were the lifelines of the republics, suffered only temporary disruption. For the coffee-exporting countries—primarily El Salvador, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Nicaragua, but also Cuba, the Dominican Republic and H o n d u r a s — t h e Inter-American Coffee Agreement of November, 1940,52 ensured a reasonable and expanding share of the American market at reasonable prices to all, though, naturally enough, there were opposing views both about prices and quantities. 53 T h e increasing wartime demand for sugar benefited the sugar-producing areas—Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Haiti. C u b a had been allowed to supply less than a third of the American market before the war. It supplied a half in 1944.54 T h e United States took almost the whole surplus crops throughout the war years, though, because of shipping difficulties, she was forced to store part of the 1942 and 1943 crops in C u b a n warehouses. Again there were questions over what the size of the crops ought to be and what they should fetch. But the 1944 crop was

THE CARIBBEAN DANGER ZONE

11

one of the largest on record and fetched the highest price for years.55 The United Kingdom, in combination with the United States, took the crops of the Dominican Republic and Haiti.56 Haitian sisal went to the United States, and so did the entire surplus cotton crop from 1941 onwards, though Haiti agreed to improve its quality and limit its quantity. Cuban tobacco growers suffered a severe blow—Britain abandoned Cuban cigars for Jamaican—but by 1944 the heavy demand for Cuban leaf tobacco in the United States, and of the American forces overseas for Cuban cigars, relieved the growers' distress.57 The fruit producers in the ill-named banana republics, principally Honduras, but also Costa Rica, Guatemala and Nicaragua, were the most vulnerable. Both at the time of the German submarine campaign and later bananas had a low priority in shipping, and the ships of the United Fruit Company were diverted to other purposes.58 Even in 1945 it was reported from Costa Rica that the export of bananas had been reduced to almost nothing.59 But by that date the banana plantations were being brought back into production. By 1945 also the United States had become almost the sole market and source of supply, except for the Mexican trade, in Central America generally. Ill The original purpose behind the decision to grant Lend-Lease aid to the Central American and island republics had been to ensure their internal stability. This, as Admiral Stark had remarked in July, 1940, was 'just common sense'.60 The last thing the United States wanted was that these states should become centres of disorder such as might provoke conflict among themselves or intervention from abroad, and though most of their rulers could have felt little enthusiasm for the 'Four Freedoms' which President Roosevelt had enunciated in January, 1941, beyond this there was a happy coincidence between American views and their own. They entered the war with spontaneity, mostly but not wholly dictated by expediency. They were weak nations, and, as General Ubico of Guatemala remarked, the fate of weak nations depended upon the result of the war. What, indeed, was their alternative, as

12

THE CARIBBEAN DANGER ZONE

Ubico also remarked, to active or passive participation in the cause defended by the United States? 61 Even General Hernandez Martinez of El Salvador, whose country had been benevolently neutral during the first World War, and was no very important ally in the second, acted without hesitation. General C arias Andino of Honduras told his National Assembly that H o n d u r a n policy embraced aid to the democracies and opposition to totalitarianism. As for Nicaragua, General Somoza was reported to have said that he was ready to sacrifice his life for democracy, 62 except, no doubt, in Nicaragua. This proving unnecessary, he was able to emerge from the war with his personal wealth greatly increased and the military strength of his Guardia National, which served both as a police force and an army, sensibly enhanced. 63 But the quieter grew the sea after 1942, the more turbulent became the land. In El Salvador Hernandez Martinez, despite growing discontent with his repressive regime and actual conspiracy against him in 1943, secured from a complaisant Congress in February, 1944, an extension of his term of office to December, 1949,64 in recognition of the 'prodigious benefits' he had rendered to the mass of the people 'in a reign of true freedom and democracy 5 . 65 But a military revolt on 2 April, in which civilians were also involved and in which the rebels seized Lend-Lease tanks and aeroplanes, very nearly succeeded. 66 Badly led, it was quelled with such brutality that a second revolt broke out in May. This took the form of a general strike organized by university students in the first instance and spreading so rapidly among the urban professional and business classes that it paralysed the capital and the nation. Bowing before the storm and, it is alleged, the advice of the American Ambassador, 67 the theosophistdictator resigned, to be succeeded by the first Presidentialdesignate, General Andres Ignacio Menendez. But the revolution of liberal expectations which the dictator's resignation ushered in, and which centred round the figure of a young doctor, Arturo Romero, faltered. The Chief of Police, Colonel Osmin Aguirre y Salinas, overthrew the provisional president in October and was himself appointed to that position by the National Assembly, while the President of the Supreme Court set up a 'government in exile' in Guatemala, and in December

THE CARIBBEAN DANGER ZONE

13

Salvadorean exiles attempted, without success, an invasion on behalf of Dr. Romero. Finally, in J a n u a r y , 1945, General Salvador Castaneda Castro, who was now the sole candidate and who represented the coffee growers and the military, was triumphantly elected to the presidency. H e took office in March, to exchange the presidential palace for a presidential jail some four years later. Hernandez Martinez, meanwhile, had taken himself and his theosophy to Guatemala—a mistaken choice of refuge,68 since the revolutionary infection had quickly spread from the one country to the other. General Ubico, who had ruled Guatemala even longer than Hernandez had dominated El Salvador, had disapproved of the blood-bath in which his colleague had indulged. Nor had he incurred quite the same degree of odium, though a plot against his continuance in office was unmasked in 1943. But he had become increasingly isolated, out of touch both with the urban middle classes and with the student generation whose support he had once enjoyed. 69 T o these groups the war, and the thousands of Americans guarding and manning air bases in Guatemala, had opened a new window on the outside world. T h e 'Four Freedoms', the Atlantic Charter and the Declaration of the United Nations were heady wine. T n the Guatemala of Ubico, one did not generally advertise any freedoms, much less four of them, without evoking some invidious comparisons, and younger Guatemalans were quick to respond.' 70 As in El Salvador, so in Guatemala, it was a student strike which precipitated an urban civilian strike and Ubico's fall. Depositing $50,000 in the Bank of London and South America, 71 he resigned on 1 July, handing over his powers to a military j u n t a of three, the strongest of whom, General Federico Ponce, was elected Provisional President by the National Assembly. But the Ponce regime was as ephemeral as the Menendez regime in El Salvador. It was destroyed in October by a revolt of junior officers, who seized Lend-Lease tanks and forced loyal garrisons to surrender, 72 and, in contrast to the turn of events in El Salvador, a liberal progressive candidate was elected to the presidency in December. This was J u a n Jose Arevalo, who had returned to Guatemala after prolonged residence as a university lecturer in Argentina. Ubico fled to Mexico and

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then to New Orleans, where he died in 1946. Arevalo, who professed 'spiritual socialism', not only initiated a programme of social, economic and political reform, but, taking office in March, survived twenty-two military coups during the six-year term allotted to him under a new and more socially advanced constitution adopted in 1945.73 The fall of the two oldest dictatorships in Central America was bound to have repercussions elsewhere. There were disturbances in Honduras in May, 1944, and an invasion (from El Salvador) of Honduran exiles in October.74 But defeating the invaders and denouncing (a mild word) the demonstrators, Dr. and General Carias Andino went on his way undisturbed.75 General Somoza, who had first become President of Nicaragua in 1937 and had been given a 'transitory' term till 1947, also had his critics when he sought a constitutional amendment to enable him to succeed himself. But Somoza well understood the meaning of reculer pour mieux sauter, though he may not have known the phrase. He promised this and promised that, though showing the iron hand behind the velvet glove to demonstrators in June, appeased dissidents by announcing that, while he would not leave his post until his term was ended, free elections would then be held, and. thanks to the vigilance of the Costa Rican authorities, was spared the necessity of repelling an invasion of Nicaraguan exiles from Costa Rican soil.76 No one could deny that he did permit elections in 1947, though the President elected, having the temerity to dismiss a few of Somoza's relatives from their positions, lasted for only twenty-five days.77 Somoza was in fact so solidly entrenched both in politics and business that he continued to rule Nicaragua either indirectly or directly till his assassination in September, 1956, and, Somoza dead, Nicaragua remained a fief of the Somoza family for another twenty-three years. Costa Rica came into a different category. But even Costa Rica did not wholly escape the unrest which swept much of Central America. There Dr. Calderon Guardia's term of office ended in February, 1944. He had done much for the welfare of his country by his social security and labour legislation, the construction of roads, and efforts to diversify the economy. In this programme he had had the support, much to the alarm of

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the Costa Rican elite, of the Communist party, 78 transformed in 1943 into the Vanguardia Popular and led by the able and by no means revolutionary Manuel Mora. But his administration was accused of fiscal laxity, to say the least, and, however exaggerated such a charge may have been and however motivated by political opportunism, there was no doubt that the presidential election of 1944, in which the candidate of the Government coalition, Dr. Teodoro Picardo, an able lawyer, was the victor, was stained by fraud, intimidation and violence. Such were the tensions of Costa Rican politics, partly the result of Calderon Guardia's own programme, partly of economic disturbances caused by the war, and partly of the 1944 election itself, that Picardo's presidency was to end in 1948 in violence and bloodshed not far removed from civil 79

war. No social upheaval and few overt manifestations of discontent troubled Generalissimo Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. T h e miserable lot of the many, made worse by the rising cost of living, contrasted starkly with the way of life of Trujillo and his favourites. But, supported by a well-cared-for army and, despite the erosions of inflation, a generally wellpaid police, Trujillo lived in an atmosphere of sycophantic adulation. His despotism was so complete that, as the British Minister reported, it would have made even Hitler green with envy. 80 Active or passive opposition came, in general, not from within the republic, where it was exceedingly dangerous, as student demonstrators discovered in 1945 when their leaders were severely punished and some of them shot, 81 but from Dominican exiles in Mexico, C u b a and Venezuela, whose relations with Trujillo were particularly strained. But the exiles long fed on dreams. Trujillo ruled his country as a highly efficient business enterprise, 82 making such improvements and plans as kept the more articulate employees quiet and were profitable to the principal proprietor and the shareholders. T h e Sosua refugee settlement, which had been launched with a flourish of trumpets in 1940,83 had no place among these profitable ventures, and most of the refugees finally abandoned it. Trujillo himself survived till nemesis, in the shape of an assassin, overtook him on a lonely road on the night of 30 May, 1961.

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Across the Haitian-Dominican frontier President Elie Lescot was a man of considerable ability and commanding presence and a far more loyal ally of the United States than his predecessor, Stenio Vincent. (Roosevelt described him, when he was staying as a guest at the White House in 1943, as 'a very old friend of mine', and Trujillo, to whom he was financially in debt, might have said the same till the two men exchanged friendship for enmity about this same time.84) He had been given extraordinary powers for the duration of the war in order to provide for the public safety, maintain public order and safeguard the national economy. Constitutional guarantees had been suspended.85 But, yielding to the temptations of power, Lescot became increasingly iron-handed and domineering and compounded these tendencies by inducing a docile National Assembly in April, 1944, to extend his term of office from five to seven years and to make him eligible for re-election, proposing, moreover, that further elections to the Assembly should be postponed until a year after peace had been signed. But his popularity was diminishing. In July there was an attempt by non-commissioned officers in the Garde d'Haiti, discontented with their pay and conditions of service, to overthrow him. A further wave of opposition was set off by the complete failure and final abandonment of Shada's plans for growing natural rubber, thus throwing many peasants out of work and adding to the economic distress caused by rising living costs. Finally, though Lescot had repeatedly declared that the negro race could not stand aloof from the war and the Haitian delegate at the Rio de Janeiro Conference had spoken of the slavery that Hitler designed for it,86 Lescot himself, like every Haitian President since 1915, was a mulatto, and even more than his predecessor, he had filled the higher posts in the army, the civil service and the diplomatic corps with men of colour. The black elite was offended both by the mulatto monopoly of offices and by Lescot's increasingly arbitrary conduct. There was a general demand for economic and social reform, for the lifting of the state of siege, and for freedom of the press and assembly. Student disorders broke out at Portau-Prince when Lescot ordered the arrest of the editors of a small left-wing weekly, La Ruche, which attacked dictatorship though without naming Lescot. Unable to quell the rising

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revolt, the President, amid popular rejoicing, resigned on 11 J a n u a r y , 1946, and left for C a n a d a . A military j u n t a took control, and, with the election of Dumarsais Estime in August, a black elite supplanted in considerable degree a mulatto one. 87 Trujillo had been a frequent visitor to the United States. Lescot was there both in 1942 and 1943. In December, 1942, it was the turn of President Batista of Cuba. Received in state, he addressed the House of Representatives, attended banquet after banquet, was described by Cordell Hull as 'the distinguished President of the marvellous people of Cuba', and, in reply, declared that it was the responsibility of the western hemisphere to safeguard western civilization and to ensure the continuance of the democratic system. 88 T h e ex-sergeant stenographer was now at the height of his power. 89 His idea of democracy may not have been precisely that of President Roosevelt or Cordell Hull, and from top to bottom his administration was riddled with corruption. His own fortune, when he retired in 1944, was of the order of $20 millions, all of it amassed since 1933.90 But corrupt as the regime was, a semi-parliamentary, democratic system operated in Cuba. It did not operate particularly well. T h e members of congress were apt to combine a devotion to their private interests with a lack of attention to their public duties and were too often both factious and procrastinating. But it was something of a triumph that it worked at all, though, with or without the system, Batista himself was secure in the oddly contrasting support of the armed forces, the United States 91 and the Communists. The latter changed their name to the Partido Socialista Popular in 1944—Cuba, in October, 1942, had become the first Latin American republic to resume relations with the U.S.S.R. 92 (as she was the first to sever relations with Vichy France)—and the Communist party secretary, J u a n Marinello, was given a cabinet seat in March, 1943.93 Batista's achievements, moreover, were not to be despised. T h e press was free. T h e trade union movement flourished. A public works programme was prosecuted with some vigour. And when, in 1944, presidential elections approached, Batista declined to be a candidate himself but put forward the name of his Prime Minister, Dr. Carlos Saladrigas. Had Saladrigas won, as was

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generally expected abroad, Batista would, no doubt, have remained the power behind the throne. But despite pressure from some of his supporters, notably the Chief of Police, Batista, to his credit, allowed free elections to take place. T h e American Ambassador, Spruille Braden, made it clear, for his part, that any American firm contributing to party funds would lose the support of the Embassy; 94 and Saladrigas did not win. T h e victor was the university professor and physician, Dr. Ramon Grau San Martin, Batista's one-time ally, whom the United States had refused to recognize as President in 1933-4, but who was now his arch-rival. Profiting from a growing disillusionment with the ten years of Batista's virtual dictatorship and from the mass popularity derived from his earlier radical and nationalist reputation, Grau San Martin took office on 10 October, 1944. He began his presidency with a purge, by no means overdue, of the civil service, the army and the police, while Batista made a tour of South America and then retired with his millions to Florida. But impossible as it seemed, the new regime turned out to be more corrupt than the old. Grau San Martin, it has been said, 'did more than any other single man to kill the hope of democratic practice in Cuba'. 9 5 His successor was no improvement, and when, in 1952, Batista again seized power, it was a Batista who had degenerated with the years. IV Like the Central American and island republics Panama, which, with the Canal Zone, was the centre-piece of defence strategy in the Caribbean, instantly declared war on the Axis powers in December, 1941—on J a p a n on the 10th and on Germany and Italy on the 12th, severing relations with Vichy France in November, 1942. T o the great relief of the United States the friendly President Ricardo Adolfo de la Guardia had replaced the deposed, discredited and dubious Dr. Arnulfo Arias on 9 October. 96 Even before declaring war on J a p a n the new President had taken stringent measures, in accordance with the spirit of the General Treaty of Friendship between Panama and the United States in 1936, to meet the emergency which, as he declared, threatened the security both

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of P a n a m a and the Canal Zone. Japanese subjects had been interned, Japanese funds frozen, radio and cable communications censored and a strict surveillance ordered of all elements likely to constitute a threat to Panamanian and United States interests. 97 Later, Axis nationals were gathered together at Fort Amador in Balboa until they could be deported for internment in the United States. 98 T h e Government, as the Canal Zone authorities gratefully acknowledged, gave 'unstinted co-operation' in its response to the 'many and varied requests' made for its assistance. 99 It instituted an isthmian black-out, censored postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications, and restricted travel in security zones, welcoming, at the same time, United States naval patrols off Cristobal on the Caribbean shores and, across the isthmus, in the Bay of Panama. Thousands of Panamanians worked on war-time projects, a trans-isthmian highway from Colon to P a n a m a City, the Pan American highway from the Costa Rican border to Rio H a t o and Balboa, the 'by-pass' locks of the P a n a m a Canal at Miraflores, United States military and naval installations at West Balboa, Taboga Island, Fort Clayton and elsewhere, and an oil pipeline across the isthmus. 100 Numerous base areas in Panamanian territory, including the great Rio Hato field, had been made available for occupation by United States forces, pending a formal agreement, in 1941.101 They were used for gun-emplacements, aeroplane detector stations, bombing ranges, airfields and the like. But not till May, 1942, was a formal agreement signed. 102 By this P a n a m a granted the temporary use for defence purposes of the lands required by the United States until a year after 'the definitive treaty of peace' which brought about the end of the war should have gone into effect. They included not only the Rio H a t o area but army radio stations on the Perlas Islands and the naval base on Taboga Island. T h e annual rental for privately-owned lands was to be $50 a hectare and, for publicly-owned, $1, except that the rent for the entire Rio H a t o area was put at $10,000. The American authorities were granted exclusive jurisdiction over their civilian and military personnel in the leased areas. By way of return the United States was to complete at her own expense a road from Piha

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on the Caribbean side of the isthmus to the Canal Zone boundary at the Rio Providencia, the Madden Lake by-pass into P a n a m a City on the trans-isthmian highway, and a number of secondary roads to the base sites. She was also to bear onethird of the maintenance costs of all Panamanian roads used by United States forces. In an exchange of notes which took place simultaneously the United States agreed to a number of demands, known as the 'twelve points', which P a n a m a had long insisted on as conditions of a lease agreement. Of these the most important were the liquidation of Panama's share of the cost of the construction of the Pan American highway from La Chorrera to Rio Hato, the transfer to Panamanian ownership of the water and sewage systems of Panama City and Colon, and the transfer also of nearly all the lands, worth several millions of dollars, owned by the Panama Railroad in the two cities.103 President de la Guardia described these agreements as 'a high point' on the road towards the 'material and political consolidation' of Panama and the United States, 104 and they were immediately followed by the appointment of a Colonel to advise the Panamanian Foreign Minister on all matters pertaining to defence. 105 P a n a m a had no army of her own and hence received no Lend-Lease aid. She was held to be dependent for defence on the forces under the Canal Zone command. But with the widespread fear of a Japanese attack in 1942 military training was introduced into schools, a civil defence organization was created, and diBatallon Primero del Istmo of 500 men was established at Panama City. 106 As some Cubans enlisted in United States forces, so some Panamanian seamen and ships under Panamanian registry took part in the ordeal endured by the Allied convoys from Iceland to Murmansk and Archangel, and there were losses both of ships and men. 107 Like other Caribbean republics, the country suffered shortages of shipping, essential supplies and foodstuffs. T o relieve the latter, thousands of additional acres, through the instrumentality of the Board of Economic Warfare and the Defense Supplies Corporation, were given over to the cultivation of rice and corn, and, to supply war-time demands for critical materials, thousands more were devoted to the cultivation of hemp, 108 while the Rubber Reserve Company contracted in September, 1942, to buy all surplus rubber production till 1946.109

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But though Panama's exports were disrupted and her tourist trade was ruined, she enjoyed, on the whole, a considerable degree of prosperity during the war years. Its character, no doubt, was somewhat artificial, depending, as it did, on the inflow of money from the greatly reinforced military and naval garrisons of the Canal Zone and the large number of persons engaged in construction projects—airfields and other defence sites, barracks, roads. Most of these projects were completed by the end of 1943, though work had been suspended both on the third set of locks at Miraflores and on the western portion of the Pan American highway towards the Costa Rican frontier, neither of which the United States authorities regarded as a matter of military necessity any longer;110 and as the war drew to an end, so did the honeymoon period, if such it may be termed, between Panama and the United States. There had always been bitter opposition from nationalists and Falangists, the devotees of Hispanidad, to President de la Guardia's alleged subservience to the United States. But at the time of Dr. Arias's deposition in 1941 all political parties—there were nine of them—had agreed to support the new regime. It was generally believed that de la Guardia would remain in office till the National Assembly elected new VicePresidents in February, 1943. But the Assembly, in J a n u a r y , decided not to take this step nor to change horses in midstream. The President remained in power, and, except for an attempted coup d'etat by a former Vice-President in August, political life remained relatively quiescent. T h e party truce, however, was broken in May, 1944, with the approach of presidential elections in the not too distant future. O n the one hand, Dr. Arias's Constitution, still in force, was declared to be illegal. O n the other the President's critics, including Dr. Arias's half-brother, ex-President Harmodio Arias, the owner of the Panama American newspaper, began to take the offensive. So delicate did the situation become that at the end of the year the President suspended the Constitution, dissolved the Assembly, and called for a National Convention to meet in J u n e , 1945, to which delegates would be elected in May. Some of his opponents, denouncing him as a dictator, fled to the Canal Zone, where a full alert was called.111 But the elections were duly held, a new Constitution was approved and the Convention in J u n e appointed Dr. Enrique A.Jimenez, de la

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Guardia's Foreign Minister in 1944, as Provisional President. Dr. Arias, foolishly allowed to return in October, attempted a coup d'etat in December and was arrested. His new day was yet to come—and go. Meanwhile Panama and the United States were to be involved in controversy over the surrender of the base sites established in the republic.112 V Intimately concerned with Caribbean defence both strategically and economically, but mindful of the vulnerability of their coastlines, their lack of preparedness and their military and naval weakness, neither Venezuela nor Colombia followed the example of Panama and of the Central American and island republics in declaring war in December, 1941. But both affirmed their solidarity with the United States; both broke offdiplomatic relations with Japan, Germany and Italy; and both joined with Mexico in sponsoring the recommendation of the Third Meeting of American Foreign Ministers at Rio de Janeiro that all American states should take the like step since Japan had attacked and Germany and Italy had declared war on an American country. Venezuela's rupture took place on the last day of the old year. But the Government had already frozen Axis funds, declared its ports to be open to the ships of all American nations at war with the Axis, and suspended radio communications outside the western hemisphere. Special security measures to safeguard the vital oilfields were taken in January and later reinforced. In the same month an agreement was signed with the Caribbean Defense Command under which the United States was to furnish batteries to protect oil installations along the Venezuelan coast and to instruct Venezuelan soldiers in the operation of their guns and equipment, and Unites States flight privileges over Venezuelan territory were confirmed. One fully-manned battery was offered early in February and somewhat reluctantly accepted.113 The troops beginning to arrive in March, President Medina Angarita told Congress in April that he had authorized their landing in order to train local forces and handle special defence equipment.114 Their appearance, even though disguised as instruc-

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23

tors, caused some resentment among the President's more conservative supporters, in some army quarters and even in the Venezuelan Foreign Office.115 But the advent of the German U-boats in the Caribbean, the sinking of oil tankers, including the Venezuelan Monagas, and the attack on Aruba on 16 February—events which roused violent anti-German demonstrations in Caracas—were generally taken to prove the wisdom and necessity of the President's decision. It was not, however, till May that the new coastal artillery installations became operational and a full year before Venezuelan soldiers had gained sufficient experience to take charge of them. The arrival of the American troops more or less coincided with the signing of a Lend-Lease agreement116 and with the appropriation of six Axis vessels interned in Venezuelan ports. It had been preceded by two treaties with Britain, the one providing for Venezuelan sovereignty over the island of Patos (which Britain had regarded as a dependency of Trinidad), the other for a partition of the submarine oil-bearing areas in the Gulf of Paria,117 and it was soon followed by the authorization of a line of credit from the Export-Import Bank of some $20 million to assist in financing a programme of public works, including the construction of highways, hospitals and schools, put forward by the President in January. 118 A number of German and Italian nationals were arrested in February and others interned later; the Humboldt College in Caracas was closed in May; a watch was instituted over the old German agricultural colony of Colonia Tovar; and later, in 1943, the German-owned railway (nominally Spanish) between Caracas and Valencia was expropriated.119 Most of these measures were measures of precaution. But however much Venezuela had striven in the days before Pearl Harbour to preserve a strict neutrality,120 few countries could less easily isolate themselves from the economic consequences of the war. Venezuela was the greatest oil exporter in the world. In 1940, when production was falling because of the closure of European markets and a lack of tankers, oil still accounted for 94 per cent of her exports. With a rudimentary agriculture, except for coffee, which ranked second among her exports and received some protection under the InterAmerican Coffee Agreement, she was also dependent on the

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rest of the world for some three-quarters of her consumer goods,121 including a half of her foodstuffs and the greater part of her raw materials. Because of growing British and United States demands in 1941 and a greater availability of American tankers, oil production again rose, to reach, indeed, a record height.122 But this did nothing to relieve an increasing scarcity of imports. Dollars were abundant. But consumer goods—machinery, spare parts, raw materials, wheat flour, rice, sugar—all were in short supply. The economic situation worsened with the advent in February, 1942, of submarine warfare in the Caribbean. Sailings between Venezuelan ports and the refineries in Aruba and Curasao were temporarily suspended at an estimated cost to the Venezuelan treasury of 350,000 bolivars a day,123 and when they were resumed the tanker crews demanded danger money. Unemployment rose as oil production fell. Even in July production only amounted to about 400,000 barrels a day instead of the normal average of 600,000,124 and during the year as a whole it fell by eighty million barrels. The almost complete elimination of the submarine menace in 1943 did much to lessen Venezuela's war-time hardships. Shipping became more abundant. The import crisis was alleviated. The output of oil—Venezuela's great contribution to the Allied war effort—again increased, and from 1944 the growth of the industry, and of the government's revenues, was spectacular. With the increasing liberalization of political life since the death of President Juan Vicente Gomez in 1935, first, and most cautiously, under the regime of General Lopez Contreras and more rapidly since 1941 under that of General Isaias Medina Angarita, a rising tide of economic nationalism, that common phenomenon in Latin America, had been directed against the foreign oil companies. Political parties had been legalized in 1941, and, among them, the voice of Action Democrdtica, a strongly nationalist, reformist and semipopulist party, in whose interests the future President Romulo Betancourt travelled the length and breadth of the country, was especially insistent that Venezuelan oil should be refined on Venezuelan soil and that a greater share of company profits should be retained at home.125 But these demands, increasing in volume and accentuated by the economic crisis, were

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not Action Democrdtica's alone,126 and in his message to Congress in July, 1942, the President made it clear that while his Government would respect legally-acquired rights, it intended to secure for the state a more just share of its sub-soil riches. He repeated this promise, to the great satisfaction of Action Democrdtica, at Maracaibo on 15 November,127 and by the end of the year the draft of a new Hydrocarbons Law had been completed. Venezuela could not have expropriated the oil companies and have attempted to run the industry herself, as Mexico had done, even had she wished to do so, which apparently she did not.128 The scale of operations was far greater than in Mexico and the revenue derived from them far more important, nor could Venezuela have coped with the technical and marketing problems. But there were ways in which the life of the companies could have been made more difficult should they oppose reform, and, alternatively, ways in which they might benefit by it. At first they were inclined to resist. But wiser counsels prevailed, and, after long and delicate negotiations, an agreement (with the assistance of the petroleum adviser to the State Department, Max Thornburg) was reached early in 1943. The Government undertook to prolong the companies' concessions, converting old ones into new, and to abandon investigations into disputed titles. Taxes and royalties were raised to a point where the Treasury's petroleum receipts were expected to equal the profits of the industry, thus increasing the nation's oil revenues, it was hoped, by about 80 per cent. A mass of old legislation was unified, the authority of the state was strengthened, and either by law or agreement the companies undertook to increase their domestic refining capacities. Approved by Congress late in February, the Law received the President's assent on 13 March. Together with Allied demands for oil, it prepared the way for the greatest oil boom in Venezuelan history. New explorations were carried out, new leases granted. Production soared to unheard-of heights.129 Only Action Democrdtica held that revision had not gone far enough. The improvement in economic conditions encouraged the President to press on with, and amplify, his five-year plan of public works announced in 1941 and in part inherited from his

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predecessor. His popularity seemed assured. Twice, first in July and August, 1943, when, in the interests of closer association, he visited the northern states of South America from Peru to Panama, and again, in J a n u a r y , 1944, when he addressed the House of Representatives in Washington, he had been able to leave the country without the slightest fear that his political opponents would take advantage of his absence to try to deprive him of office.130 It was a notable feature of his regime, perhaps unprecedented in Venezuelan history, that there were no political prisoners and no political exiles. A government party, which became known as the Partido Democrdtico Venezolano, was founded in May, 1943. But opposition parties, such as Action Democrdtica, functioned peacefully, and the quarrelsome Communist party (founded in 1931), as part of a left-wing group, the Union Municipal, later renamed the Union Popular, illicitly but actively. T h e trade union movement, a new growth, encouraged by a labour law promulgated by Lopez Contreras in 1936, increased in strength, somewhat to the concern of the oil companies, though when a National Labour Convention was held in Caracas in March, 1944, it was quickly closed as a result of Communist attempts to obtain control, and ninety-three syndicates, affiliated to Union Popular, were dissolved. 131 They were, however, soon allowed to re-organize on condition that they confined their activities to economic matters. And the President recommended not only that the Constitution of 1936 should be amended to permit the election of senators and deputies by direct 'popular' vote instead of by municipal councils and state legislatures, but also that the ban it contained on communism and anarchism should be removed. 132 These measures, with the addition of votes for women, were approved by Congress in July, 1944, and ratified by the state legislatures in J a n u a r y , 1945.133 T h e Government party even entered into an electoral pact in 1944 with Union Popular in anticipation of forthcoming municipal elections. O n the wider world stage Venezuela severed relations with Vichy France in November, 1942, proclaimed her adherence to the principles of the Atlantic Charter in February, 1943, and, under pressure from the United States, anxious that the Latin American states should participate in the coming conference of the United Nations at San Francisco, 134 recognized the existence

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of a state of war with Germany and Japan and signed the Declaration of the United Nations in February, 1945. Diplomatic relations with the U.S.S.R. were established in March. Yet, in October, Medina was overthrown. A plot on the part of a group of non-commissioned officers to seize the barracks at Caracas and take control of the Government had been discovered, and thwarted, in November, 1944. It was generally attributed to discontent with low pay and the conditions of service.135 The October revolution, conducted by a group of junior officers and Accion Democrdtica, and certainly not bloodless, took Medina by surprise. Presidential elections were due to be held in 1946. The conservative classes and the higher echelons of the army supported the return of ex-President Lopez Contreras. The President favoured the candidature of the Venezuelan Ambassador in Washington, Dr. Diogenes Escalante, and Escalante, though not himself'of the Left', was acceptable to Accion Democrdtica.m But Escalante was a sick man. The substitute chosen by Medina pleased neither Accion Democrdtica nor the younger army officers. A mariage de convenance was arranged between the two groups. On 18 October the junior officers and troops in all three branches of the armed services, with the aid, it is alleged, of Lend-Lease equipment, seized strong points throughout the country.137 Medina was forced to resign. Both he and Lopez Contreras were arrested, finally to be exiled, and on the 19th Romulo Betancourt became President of a seven-man junta. For over two years he ruled by decree, until the installation, after free and fair direct presidential elections, of Romulo Gallegos, a former Minister of Education, the symbolic leader of Accion Democrdtica and the country's most distinguished novelist, as President in 1948. But Gallegos was overthrown within a few months. Venezuela fell into the hands of a military junta and thereafter the dictatorship of Major, later General, Marcos Perez, Jimenez. It was the turn of Betancourt and Gallegos to be exiled. VI While Venezuela had enjoyed an era of peace under President Medina, so had Colombia under President Eduardo Santos;

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and Colombia, like Venezuela, had aligned her policy with that of the United States. She was the first South American country to sever relations with Japan on 8 December and on the 19th with Germany and Italy. And though President Santos declared that Colombia would not declare war against anyone who did not attack her, the Government, in the words of the American Ambassador, Spruille Braden, was 'galvanized into energetic and surprisingly effective action against the totalitarians'.138 As in Venezuela, non-belligerent status was granted to American nations at war. Decrees were issued instituting a close watch on undesirable aliens and empowering the police to dissolve clubs and associations which might be dangerous to public order. The Bogota office of the Transocean news agency was shut down. German schools in Bogota, Medellin and Barranquilla were closed. Several hundred Axis diplomats and citizens left the country voluntarily or involuntarily. Controls over Axis assets were introduced in January and Axis-owned businesses placed under Government administration,139 and these measures were intensified when, in June, 1942, the Colombian schooner, Resolute, was sunk and her survivors machine-gunned. Axis funds were now almost completely blocked and Axis nationals compelled to evacuate both Colombian coastal areas and even ports on that great artery of Colombian commerce, the Magdalena River.140 Colombia lacked the vast oil resources which made Venezuela so important to the Allied powers. Her major export was coffee—and her oil production was not much more than a half of Mexico's and less than a ninth of Venezuela's. Rubber indeed she supplied to the United States under a contract signed with the Rubber Reserve Company in July, 1942—Venezuela signed a similar agreement in October141—and, of other strategic materials, Colombia also supplied platinum. But what mattered most to the United States in 1942 was that the South American country nearest to the Panama Canal was in the hands of a 'stable and friendly administration'.142 With the approval of Santos, United States military and naval observers (in civilian dress) were stationed at Barranquilla, Medellin and Cucuta.143 The War Ministry allowed the island of Providencia to be used as a fuelling base. The United States air force enjoyed virtually unrestricted fly-

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ing privileges over Colombian territory and the United States navy the right to enter Colombian waters in pursuit of enemy craft.144 A Lend-Lease agreement was signed in March, 1942,145 though Colombia only availed herself of a small part of its provisions, and the 1938 United States aviation mission was converted into a full-scale army mission in May. A decree in July provided for the introduction of compulsory military service in the following January, though the regulation was then declared unconstitutional by the Council of State, to the gratification of the organ of the Colombian Conservatives, El Siglo.m Relations with Vichy France were broken off in November, 1942, and recognition was extended to the U.S.S.R. in February, 1943—diplomatic relations had been nominally established in 1935 but never carried into effect. Finally, after the sinking of yet another Colombian schooner, the Ruby, in November, 1943, and the machine-gunning of her crew, the Senate by a vote of 33 to 13, and the Chamber unanimously, endorsed a Government pronouncement that a state of belligerency existed between Colombia and Germany.147 Santos's successor, Dr. Alfonso Lopez, who was then in the United States, approved the declaration and on 17 January, 1944, signed the Declaration of the United Nations. Late in December all German schools were ordered to be closed. A number of Germans were placed in internment camps and, in the following spring, still others were expelled, and, the last step of all, certain German-owned firms were expropriated in July. Alfonso Lopez, like Santos, was one of the most outstanding of Colombian statesmen. As a Liberal reforming President from 1934 to 1938, he had carried through a revision of the Constitution, separating the Church from the State and depriving it of its monopoly of education, empowering the Government, for just cause, to intervene in both public and private business, emphasizing the social obligations of property, and declaring that public assistance was a function of the state and that labour should enjoy the state's special protection. With these revisions he was enabled to enact an advanced labour law, providing for minimum wages, paid holidays, the right to strike and similar provisions, to reform the tax system, and to introduce mild agrarian legislation.148

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This was the Liberal 'New Deal', or, as Lopez described it, the 'Revolution en Marcha'—a serious attempt to raise the level of the downtrodden masses. But the philosophy behind it149 roused the fears not only of the Conservative party, of which one faction or another had governed the country for nearly four decades before 1930, but also of the moderate wing of the Liberals. Under their aegis and the presidency of Dr. Santos from 1938 to 1942 the 'march' was halted or slowed down. Not only did Santos hold less advanced views than Lopez, but he was confronted with the economic problems—the loss of markets, the shortage of supplies, the rise in living costs—as well as the political problems associated with the coming of the world war.150 But in 1942 Lopez was again a candidate for the presidency. He was not the unanimous choice of his party. His previous record, which had seemed to threaten the power of the Colombian oligarchy, Conservative or Liberal, was not forgotten. A dissident Liberal stood against him with Conservative support, the Conservatives knowing that they could not win alone. The Conservative leader, Dr. Laureano Gomez, who was an ardent admirer of General Franco and a champion of Hispanidad against Pan Americanism,151 and his henchmen violently abused Lopez in the pages of El Siglo.152 But on 3 May Lopez was elected by a substantial majority, and, after paying a visit to the United States, was inaugurated on 7 August. Dr. Gomez threatened rebellion.153 There was no rebellion. True, an exchange of revolver shots between a Lopista and an anti-Lopista deputy in the Chamber soon after the President's inauguration, added little to the reputation of Congress.154 In Congress, as outside, the Liberals remained divided, despite strenuous efforts to unite them. The question of the ratification of a Concordat with the Vatican inflamed Conservative passions. There were disturbing rumours of a military conspiracy in March and April, 1943, and the Secretary-General of the War Ministry, General Eduardo Bonitto, was placed under preventive detention, much to the indignation of the army, most of whose officers above the rank of major were said to be Conservative.155 The congressional elections in March, though they revealed that the electoral strength of the Liberals was still approximately twice that of the Conservatives,156 revealed also a gain in

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Communist strength (the Communists had one deputy) and a marked public apathy which seemed to indicate disillusionment with both traditional parties. But the Government's efforts to control prices, curb speculation and prevent profiteering, all associated with ambitious fiscal and economic defence plans, were moderately effective. T h e inflationary trend was retarded. As shipping became more abundant, the import situation eased. A loan was contracted with the Export-Import Bank for assistance with road construction and agricultural development. And until the late summer of 1943 the President's administration could be counted a success. Whether from conviction or necessity, Lopez was no longer the radical reformer of the nineteen-thirties. Faced with problems similar to his predecessor's, he governed with a like moderation, and, refusing to give in to the demands of strikers, with a like insistence on law and order, and a like cooperation with the United States. 157 A Committee for Victory was formed in J u n e to promote assistance to the Allies,158 and a visit from President Medina of Venezuela in J u l y roused great enthusiasm. But Lopez's prestige had been declining both in the army and among the workers, and an incident in mid-July was turned to his almost irreparable injury. A somewhat disreputable negro boxer, Francisco Perez, popularly known as Mamatoco and said to have acted on occasion as a bodyguard to Dr. Gomez, was found murdered in a public garden near to the home of the Minister of the Interior, whom he had been trying to see, in order, it appeared, to make important disclosures. T h e Conservative press demanded a full investigation, from which the police emerged with extreme discredit. T h e Director-General of the Police Force was compelled to resign and a number of higher officers were dismissed. El Siglo did not scruple to insinuate that the President's secretary, and, by implication, the President himself, were concerned in the murder 159 (to which a policeman eventually confessed), and the Conservatives and dissident Liberals launched a campaign of vilification against the President and his family, accusing them of graft, corruption and still worse improprieties. T o cap all, there were further labour troubles and a series of disturbances in the department of Caldas led to its

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being placed temporarily under a state of siege. The degeneration of political life reached such a pitch that Lopez was constrained to tell the Liberal leaders in September that he was quite prepared to resign and that he and his family needed rest and recuperation.160 Finally, on 16 November, exhausted and disillusioned and anxious also about the health of his wife, who had been seriously ill, he asked the Senate for ninety days leave of absence and, that granted, went to the United States, leaving the presidency in the hands of the first Vice-President, Dr. Dario Echandia.161 No such period of political turmoil and demoralization had been known in Colombia for years, though it did not impair the Government's support for the Allied cause. Lopez, indeed, had long made it clear that under certain circumstances he would favour a declaration of war (it came in November). He had hoped to induce the non-belligerent Latin American states to act together, and in October he had sent a telegram to the President of Argentina urging him to bring his foreign policy into line with that of the other South American republics.162 But there was n® abatement of the political turmoil. El Siglo continued its denunciations of scandals in high places, citing, among wild allegations, some genuine examples of maladministration. Above all, the Mamatoco affair was revived, Dr. Gomez accusing the new Minister of the Interior of trying to hush it up. The Minister instituted an action for defamation, and on 9 February Dr. Gomez, refusing to answer the judge's questions, was arrested for contempt and imprisoned. He was released on the following day, but the event provoked disorderly demonstrations in Bogota and other cities, and three prominent members of the Conservative party directorate sent a memorandum to the foreign diplomatic missions in Bogota asserting the party's adherence to the United Nations and denouncing the Lopez Government as criminals.163 Lopez himself returned to the capital on the 19 th, warning the public that revolutionary activities were brewing, and there were, indeed, sporadic risings in March.164 On his way home he had announced at Santa Marta his intention of resigning the presidency, since he felt that his continuance in office was a threat to national unity.165 He was still on leave of absence, which the Supreme Court extended to 15 May, and on that day he sub-

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mitted his resignation to the Senate. The Confederation of Colombian Workers (founded in 1935) staged a protest strike against it. The Conservative members of the Senate walked out. The Liberals, sooner than face a further split in the party in view of the numerous contenders for the succession, including Dr. Jorge Eliezar Gaitan, a former Minister of Labour and an ambitous populist leader,166 unanimously rejected it.167 Lopez's triumph was short-lived. On 9 July he arrived at Pasto to attend army manoeuvres and in the early hours of the following morning was arrested with his son by the orders of one Colonel Diogenes Gil, who proclaimed himself President. The news promptly reached Bogota, where Dr. Echandia again assumed presidential powers and declared martial law and the Confederation of Colombian Workers discussed a general strike. On the next day the tables were turned. While the President was being escorted from one place of imprisonment to another, his escort released him and arrested the incompetent Colonel Gil instead. Lopez returned to Bogota to resume his functions on the 12th, telling the American Ambassador on the 13th that Conservatives, Nazis, Spaniards, and, he added, Argentines, were all mixed up in the affair. Rebel troops in Pasto and elsewhere laid down their arms. Dr. Gomez, even before Lopez's return, took refuge in the Brazilian Embassy and later retired into voluntary and temporary exile in Ecuador—events which El Tiempo interpreted as evidence of a guilty conscience.168 The publication of El Siglo was suspended till 7 August. Colonel Gil and his associates were cashiered and imprisoned and a large number of officers were retired. But so bizarre an episode still further impaired the President's dignity and credibility. It also discredited the Conservatives and increased public disillusion with the two great parties, to the temporary benefit of the Communists, who changed their name to the Partido Social Democrdtico. Meanwhile the split between the moderate and the left-wing elements in the Liberal party widened. It was a sign of the times when Dr. Santos resigned his presidency of the Liberal party directorate, revolted by the press censorship which the Government imposed and by the postponement of the opening of Congress in September while Lopez promoted new reforms by decree.169

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But Lopez's days were numbered. He was at odds with Santos, with the moderate Liberals, with the Conservatives and with Congress. There was public alarm at the apparent growth of Communist influence. A further intended coup d'etat was discovered early in June, 1945, followed by a prison mutiny and an attempted jail break by officers imprisoned after the Gil affair. On the 12th a state of siege was imposed in Bogota as a result of demonstrations by Falangist and Communist students and workers.170 Finally, late in the month, Lopez, in despair, told Congress of his wish to resign.171 He did so in July, warning the country in his message of resignation of the dangers which threatened it from the perpetual attacks upon the executive, the irresponsibility and weakness of Congress, and such new factors of disorder as that 'active industrial development which is causing and creating interests of such magnitude that they openly defy the force of the laws' and 'the awakening of a sleeping social consciousness which can turn towards violence more easily when it learns that violence produces concrete results'—prophetic words.172 On 9 August he left the presidency, Congress replacing him for the remainder of his term—one year—by the young and brilliant Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dr. Alberto Lleras Camargo, who attempted to form a government of national reconciliation, though in vain, and was himself succeeded by a like-minded Conservative in 1946. So ended the period of Liberal ascendancy. So also was foreshadowed the end of that stability on which the United States had counted so much, in the early days of the war, in that country of South America within the Caribbean danger zone nearest to the Panama Canal. Liberal reform had been at once too little and too much, and the consequence, after the murder in 1948 of Gaitan, who had become the Liberal leader of the masses against the classes, was to be not only the reactionary dictatorships of Dr. Gomez and his successor but the appalling outburst of civil and guerrilla warfare, savagery and terror known as La Violencia which was to ravage the Colombian countryside for years and to cost a quarter of a million lives.

II THE MEXICAN EXPERIENCE I Mexico, like Colombia and Venezuela, did not declare war in December, 1941, and for similar reasons. But she severed relations first with Japan, then with Germany and Italy, and finally with Bulgaria, Rumania and Hungary. President Avila Camacho and his able Foreign Secretary, Ezequiel Padilla, were quick to proclaim that the cause of the United States was the cause of America and that the United States could count on Mexico's friendship and solidarity.1 Vicente Lombardo Toledano, the powerful ex-Secretary of the Confederation of Mexican Workers (C.T.M.) and the actual President of the Confederation of Latin American Workers (C.T.A.L.), to which the Argentine, Chilean, Colombian, Cuban and Mexican federations were affiliated,2 declared that the war was a holy war against barbarism and assured President Roosevelt of the support of the workers of Latin America.3 The Council of the C.T.M. advocated the immediate introduction of compulsory military training—a military service law introducing compulsion had been passed in August, 1940, but its application had been repeatedly postponed—and so did the Youth Confederation.4 Ex-Presidents Calles and Cardenas offered their services to the Government, and Cardenas was appointed Commander of the Mexican forces on the Pacific coast. Japanese fishing licences were cancelled. Troops were sent to Lower California to guard against possible Japanese raiders.5 Precautions against sabotage were taken at such places as the Pacific port of Manzanillo. Axis funds were frozen and the privilege of naturalization was withdrawn from Axis nationals.6 Both Houses of Congress set up committees for the investigation of anti-Mexican activities.7 A new espionage law had already come into force in November, and in January, 1942, a secret counter-espionage branch of the

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THE MEXICAN EXPERIENCE

police became the special responsibility of the Secretary of the Interior, Miguel Aleman. In the preceding April a reciprocal flight agreement had been reached with the United States which enabled American military planes en route to the Panama Canal to use Mexican airfields, though a difficulty had arisen over the stationing of American Air Corps mechanics at the various fields. It had been solved by allowing them to enter Mexico as employees, in civilian dress, of Pan American Airways. Now, not only was permission granted for the United States air force to instal radar stations in Lower California, but Mexican ports were opened to United States warships and Mexican airfields to United States military aircraft, 8 and, on 12 J a n u a r y , it was announced that a Joint Mexican-United States Defense Commission—the fruit of prolonged military discussions in 1940 and 1941—was being established to study 'problems relating to the common defense of the United States and Mexico' and to propose 'co-operative measures'. 9 Three days later, at the opening of the Rio de Janeiro Conference of American Foreign Ministers, Ezequiel Padilla appealed to all American nations to join in 'the supreme imperative' of defending 'the free destinies of the Americas'. 'We are not assembled here today', he declared on the 22nd, 'to debate with honeyed words of peace but to speak in terms of that continental solidarity now so gravely threatened'. 10 This was not the language of mere rhetoric, though even as rhetoric it would have illustrated the extent of the transformation which had occurred in Mexican-United States relations. A Mexican Foreign Minister could not have said in 1939 what Padilla said in 1942, that the frontier between Mexico and the United States was a uniting not a dividing line. 11 President Cardenas's expropriation of the foreign oil companies in 1938 had been the culminating episode in a long history of strained relations. Had it not been for the wisdom of the American Ambassador, Josephus Daniels, who enjoyed the personal friendship and support of Roosevelt, it might easily have resulted in a break between Mexico and the United States, as it did between Mexico and Britain. 12 But as Hitler rolled back the m a p of Europe in 1940, it was Cardenas who was responsible for that forward, consistently anti-Axis movement in

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Mexican foreign policy which prepared the way for reconciliation between the two neighbours, though the completion of that task was left to his Secretary of War and successor, President Avila Camacho. It was signalized by the comprehensive agreements of November, 1941. These, which followed on the resumption of relations between Mexico and Britain, opened the way to the settlement of all, or almost all, the matters in dispute between Mexico and the United States and provided also for financial aid of one kind and another to Mexico. Despite some criticism in the United States and some residual reserve in Mexico, they inaugurated a new era of cordiality and co-operation.13 Mexico, a spectator of events in 1939, moved in 1940 and 1941 from a passive to a 'belligerent neutrality',14 more and more in harmony with the United States; and from belligerent neutrality it was no long step to war. But despite the patriotic fervour which the severance of relations with the Axis evoked, at least in Mexico City, the country was not ready for direct involvement. The left wing, whose vision of world events had been transformed by the German invasion of Soviet Russia, indeed insisted that the nation must be placed upon a war footing.15 But there were other groupings in Mexico, such as Action National (P.A.N.) and the Sinarquistas, right-wing organizations, the one in some respects the more sober, middle- and upper-class version of the other, which were advocates of the cult of Hispanidad, not of Pan Americanism, and condemned the Mexican Revolution and all its works;16 and the mass of the population was either apathetic or indifferent to the general international situation.17 In December, 194t, and the following months, the Government led the nation, not the nation the Government. The army and navy, the President declared, in a broadcast on 9 December, would, if necessary, do their duty. But principally, he wisely added, the duty of the Mexican people lay in intensifying production.18 'So long as no new political or military events call for new measures,' he said on the last day of the year, 'our part in the battle of Pan American solidarity will consist, above all, in steadily increasing our productive activities and in adapting our national life more and more every day to the needs of order, activity and discipline.'19 Mexicans, he repeated in February, could 'best help the cause of

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democracy in the world by intensifying production in the field and in the factory',20 and he used similar words to the new British Minister when he presented his credentials on 6 February.21 Mexico—it was his constant theme—must become what the United States had already been—an arsenal of democracy,22 though it would be a different kind of arsenal. The pace of co-operation with the United States quickened after the Rio de Janeiro Conference (where Padilla's speeches had made a deep impression). Its political and economic recommendations to promote inter-American solidarity and mutual assistance were far-reaching. An Inter-American Defense Board, which it proposed,23 held its first meeting in March. But so also, with more immediate results, did the Joint Mexican-United States Defense Commission. Its early decisions, in March and April, were concerned with the defence of the two Californias, Mexican and American, and with the construction of a heavy bomber aerodrome on the isthmus of Tehuantepec to be used for the purpose of maintaining a patrol of the Pacific approaches to the Panama Canal. In March also the Ministry of Defence announced that the United States had agreed to maintain liaison officers at five points in the northern and north-western Mexican military zones; the first Lend-Lease agreement was signed, and five naval patrol bombers, to be followed by other equipment, were at once tranferred to Mexico.24 In April Padilla visited Washington, and, 'in the short space of a few days', he and Sumner Welles entered into a series of agreements, very much in the spirit of the Rio de Janeiro recommendations, 'to develop the economic life of Mexico and the United States' and 'to speed the war effort of the United States'. A trade agreement was to be negotiated. The two countries were to collaborate in the establishment in Mexico, with the aid of the Export-Import Bank, of a 'series of basic industries to meet Mexican consumption needs and to supply goods required by the war effort of the United States', among them a steel and tin-plate rolling mill. Mexico was to establish a special office in Washington to ensure the closest co-operation with the appropriate authorities in matters of export priorities and allocations. A survey was to be made of the 'Mexican

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railway-transportation system' (in much need of rehabilitation) to enable it to 'transport to the United States the strategic war materials being produced in ever-increasing quantities in Mexico', and, 'in view of the urgent need of cargo vessels', experts were to determine the feasibility of the construction of such ships, with United States assistance, in Mexico. Finally, a high-octane gasoline plant was to be built in Mexico so soon as the necessary equipment could be spared.25 These agreements were quickly followed by the disclosure that both Governments had accepted the report of the experts appointed under the 'global settlement' of November, 1941, to determine the amount of compensation due to the expropriated American oil-companies—news received with great satisfaction in Mexico,, but, in view of the amount of compensation, with very much less by the companies.26 Concurrently Mexico had been intensifying her antiespionage activities and her precautions against sabotage in the mines and oilfields, on the railways and in vital installations generally.27 Amateur and private radio stations had been closed,28 foreigners required to register, and Japanese on the Pacific coast and in Chiapas ordered to move to Mexico City.29 The Axis diplomatic corps were, of course, expelled, and so was the staff of the Transocean news agency. A number of prominent members of the German 'colony', who were either Axis agents or suspected of having close relations with such agents, were arrested in the early months of 1942 and still others later. They were either sent to the United States for repatriation or internment or placed in safe custody in the concentration camp at Perote in the state of Vera Cruz, where some two hundred sailors from German vessels seized in Mexican ports were interned, or in other encampments.30 If some doubts might be entertained about the efficacy of the Government's anti-Axis network,31 there was none at all about its pro-Allied stance, illustrated, if illustration were needed, by the establishment of relations with the Czechoslovak Government in exile in March and by a Decree which the President sent to Congress in April empowering him to open Mexican ports to non-American (as well as American) nations contributing to the defence of the hemisphere.32

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II The Gulf of Mexico is joined to the North Atlantic between Cuba, the Bahamas and the North American mainland by the Straits of Florida and to the Caribbean sea by the Yucatan Channel. Geographically, the regions are distinct. But, like the hurricanes which afflict them, the German submarine campaign in 1942 made them one. In February Aruba had been attacked, and in the following months the shipping losses in the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico and in the North and South Atlantic rose steeply. Padilla had more than once emphasized that Mexico herself was in danger of aggression,33 and in May his warnings were justified. On the night of the 13th, the tanker, Potrero del Llano, with her lights on and her flag illuminated so that she could be easily identified, was torpedoed and sunk, with the loss of several members of her crew, off the Florida coast near Miami. The Government instantly sent a virtual ultimatum to the three Axis powers demanding satisfaction and reparation. Seven days were allowed for an answer. None was received, the Berlin radio stating in a Spanish-language broadcast, and Axis agents in Mexico repeating the story, that not Germany but the United States was responsible.34 To compound both the injury and the insult, another Mexican tanker, the Faja de Oro, was sunk on 20 May in the Gulf of Mexico, with a further loss of life, though it was not till late on the next day that the news was received. When this second outrage was reported in the press on the morning of the 22nd, messages of support and loyalty to the President, who had already urgently consulted General Cardenas, poured in from all over the country. The labour unions and their newspapers left no doubt but that they wanted war, though the more conservative journals and many 'soberminded' people were less belligerent.35 But there was no disunity in the cabinet when it met on the evening of the 22nd. Doubts existing, however, over the precise powers of the President, it was decided to take the safe course of convening an extraordinary session of Congress to enable him to declare the existence of a state of war with Germany, Italy and Japan. The language followed the precedent set by Britain in Sep-

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tember, 1939, and was intended to dispel any suggestion that Mexico was an aggressor. Meanwhile, the survivors of the Potrero del Llano, bearing the body of a member of the crew who had died of wounds after being brought ashore in the United States, were received everywhere on their way to the capital with crowds bearing draped flags. On the 24th a monster demonstration took place outside the Presidential palace to welcome the returned sailors and pay homage to the dead. Labour leaders delivered impassioned speeches and the swastika flag was burned while the President watched from his balcony. The C.T.M. called upon its members to refrain from strikes during the emergency. The police announced that they would deal effectively with rumour-mongers. Ex-Presidents Ortiz Rubio and Abelardo Rodriguez, and General Juan Almazan, the President's opponent in the 1940 elections, offered their services. On the 28th, when Congress met, the President called upon the nation to accept realities bravely and upon Congress to enable him to declare a state of war as from 22 May. He also asked for legislation suspending certain constitutional guarantees and granting him extraordinary powers to ensure the safety of the state. On the 29th all State Governors and Commanders of Military Zones were summoned to consult with him in order to concert unified plans of defence and production, and on the 30th the Senate followed the Chamber of Deputies in approving the bills submitted by the President. He signed them on 1 June, when the Axis Governments were notified of the existence of a state of war by the Swedish, Swiss and Portuguese representatives in Mexico City.36 Finally, on 14 June, the Mexican Ambassador in Washington, on behalf of the President, signed the Declaration of the United Nations. With Mexico's entry into the war—and the President left no doubt what a 'state of war' meant37—the whole of North America from Canada to Panama was united. So, to a great extent, was Mexican opinion, certainly in the capital.38 He was glad, the President told the British Minister, that he had not automatically declared war on the Axis immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbour, but had waited until the Axis powers had themselves provided Mexico with a casus belli, for now he was certain that the Mexican people would follow him

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without reserve. 39 T h e extraordinary powers which Congress had given him, with the sole safeguard that he should give an account of his actions at each session, were so far-reaching that he became little short of a legal dictator. T h e suspension, for the duration of the war, of a number of constitutional guarantees left it open to him to control labour, prices, wages and the press, to suspend habeas corpus, freedom of speech and assembly, and to control the free movement of foreigners. 40 These powers were none too willingly accepted by the rank and file, particularly among those of the more conservative persuasion. But there was no resistance, and the President continued to exercise them, though careful not to abuse them, till September, 1945.41 Ill A 'state of war', as the President had made clear, meant war itself, with all its implications. T h e more rigorous enforcement of measures to prevent trading with the Axis and to safeguard internal security naturally followed. Early in J u n e the principal German, Italian and Japanese concerns were placed under the control of a Junta de Administration y Vigilancia de la Propriedad Extranjera, the number taken over amounting to some 240 by October and very many more in later months. 42 They included coffee and cotton plantations, textile firms, drug-importing, chemical and wholesale firms, department stores, all on the American and British Black Lists, and the like. I n t e r v e n e r s were appointed to manage their affairs as going concerns. Profits were paid into the Bank of Mexico. A proportion was used to defray the costs of internment camps and of various social undertakings and large sums were invested in Government bonds. Later, a few enterprises, such as the Italian-owned insurance company, La Equitiva, were sold by auction, in this instance to the nominees of United States citizens. Forewarned or far-sighted, some Axis nationals had withdrawn their funds from the banks, or, illicit as such transactions were, had taken steps to transfer their investments, bank accounts and real estate to relatives, friends or employees who enjoyed Mexican citizenship. But though loopholes existed, measures to prevent trading with the enemy

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were generally effective. To circumvent dealings in gold of enemy origin or obtained from occupied countries, a decree of April, 1944, placed all imports and exports of gold under the control of the Bank of Mexico.43 Germans, like Japanese resident on the Pacific coast, had earlier been required to evacuate coastal and frontier districts, the Gulf area in particular, but the date by which evacuation should take place had been more than once postponed. These orders, and the registration of foreigners, were more strictly carried into effect in 1942. German schools and social clubs were closed. Enterprises such as Petroleos Mexicanos dismissed their Axis employees, and further arrests were made of real or suspected espionage agents.44 Some of these were later set at liberty and there were justifiable complaints that the restrictions on the movement of German nationals were not scrupulously enforced. In 1944, indeed, Aleman, as Minister of the Interior, dismissed the head of the Ministry's Secret Police because of his flagrant practice of selling work and travelling permits.45 Nevertheless the Ministry was a prime mover in eradicating Axis spy-rings and detaining enemy agents. A further consequence of the changed international situation was, as the President had foreseen, the unification, at least momentarily, of vocal Mexican opinion. T address all social classes,' he declared in a broadcast on 3 June. 'The mobilization that the Government contemplates is above all a civil mobilization . . . The hour of differences and doubts has passed.' It was the duty of all Mexicans to lay aside private interests and differences in the cause of national unity. The country was no longer a simple spectator of events but an active participant.46 On the right wing the Archbishop of Mexico called on all Catholics to support the civil government unless required to act in direct conflict with the dictates of conscience, and Excelsior insisted that Mexico was united 'in a solid patriotic bloc'.47 On the left, Lombardo Toledano, still, in 1942, the leading labour luminary, described the nation as 'one and indivisible'.48 Plans had earlier been made for the establishment of tripartite committees, representing Government, management and labour, to discuss all matters likely to impede or ensure victory in the 'Battle of Production',49 and Lombardo Toledano and the C.T.M., at its annual general

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meeting in February, had called for the unity of all creeds and classes in the fight against 'Nazi-fascism', for increased production, price controls, and the general mobilization of the resources of the country in defence of democracy.50 Nevertheless there had been partial strikes in the oil industry, on the railways and by the sugar workers, the railwaymen demanding a 35 per cent wage increase and the sugar workers an increase of 40 per cent. The students of the National Polytechnic had also gone on strike, describing the Minister of Education as a reactionary.51 In each instance the President had been obliged to intervene, though the wage increases he had granted fell far short of those demanded. Early in March he asked the railway and oil workers to renounce the weapon of the strike for the duration of the international crisis, and, with the declaration of a state of war, the principal labour unions, after a series of conferences with the Secretary of Labour, entered into a so-called 'pact of unity', agreeing to suspend all inter-union conflict, to refrain from strikes for the duration of the war, to accept the settlement of disputes by the methods of conciliation and arbitration, and to participate with Government and management in the proposed tripartite committees. A National Labour Council, representing all the unions, was set up to achieve these objects, while maintaining the 'conquests' won by the workers in the last three decades.52 It promptly advocated the formation of a National Tripartite Council—a proposal regarded with great reserve by the representatives of the employers, who preferred their own Council. A pact between workers and industrialists was signed, however, in April, 1945.53 The Government, for its part, proceeded with the establishment of Mixed Councils of Regional Economy to foster production, and, above them, a Federal Economic Planning Board.54 The sinking of two more Mexican vessels on 27 June, 1942, seen as evidence of total war, still further contributed to the unification of opinion, and while the left wing was gratified by the appointment of Cardenas as Minister of Defence on 1 September, the right wing welcomed that of ex-President Abelardo Rodriguez, a wealthy industrialist, as Director of an office for the Co-ordination of Production,55 with unspecified powers over the Ministries of Finance, Economy and Agricul-

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ture.56 On the 11th the President gave a banquet to 218 generals, including both ex-Presidents Plutarcho Calles and Lazaro Cardenas, long at daggers drawn since the former had in effect appointed the latter and the latter deported the former. On the 15th, before a vast concourse in the Plaza de la Constitution, he hoisted the national flag assisted by six ex-Presidents, Adolfo de la Huerta, Calles, Emilio Portes Gil, Pascual Ortiz Rubio, Rodriguez and Cardenas. To the speech in which he declared that Mexico was resolved to collaborate with the democracies till final victory, Rodriguez replied that for the first time in a hundred years the Mexican people were beginning to realize the blessings of internal unity. To cap all, Calles and Cardenas shook hands, though their conversation was strictly limited to 'Adios, General'.57 (Lombardo Toledano was absent, organizing branches of the C.T.A.L. and meeting workers' delegates in various Latin American countries.) For the time being at least the Government could count, as never before during the long history of the Mexican Revolution, on the support of labour, business interests and the Church, and, though dissentient voices existed, they were subdued. At one extreme Narciso Bassols, who had edited one of the more violent newspapers of the small Communist party, telegraphed a message of support to the President. At the other Manuel Gomez Morin, the lawyer and banker who was the head of Action National, paid him a personal visit, and his party, once war had been declared, cautiously supported it.58 Also on the far right the Sinarquistas, whom Avila Camacho allowed to establish two ill-fated colonies in Lower California, changed their tone if not their tune. Divided against themselves, they ceased to be a potentially dangerous militant force so long as the war lasted,59 though, like the Falangists, with whom they were in sympathy as admirers of Franco-ist doctrines, they constantly came under attack in the press, in Congress and from the trade unions. Of the Falangists themselves little was heard. Relations with Franco's Spain, their spiritual home, had long been severed. In November, 1942, they were severed also with Vichy France but re-established, after fifteen years, with Soviet Russia, whose legation became a wellstaffed embassy in 1943 with the disagreeable Constantin Oumansky as the first Ambassador.60 To Mexico's credit she

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also admitted in 1943 some 1400 Polish refugees.61 Diplomatic relations with Canada were established in 1944. IV Together with the achievement of national unity, economic mobilization, the 'Battle of Production', was Avila Camacho's first priority. But economic mobilization meant more than the intensification of the production of strategic materials—minerals, metals, fibres, rubber—for export to the United States. It meant the creation of new and permanent industries as well as the development of existing ones, the stimulation of agriculture, and the general expansion of the economy. These were among the tasks of the Mixed Councils of Regional Economy, the Federal Commission on Economic Planning, designed to assist the Ministry of National Economy in both war-time and post-war planning, a Supreme Defence Council, and the Council for the Co-ordination and Promotion of Production. The Supreme Defence Council, which represented all classes and interests, capital, labour, agriculture, industry, the professions and the armed forces, first met on 24 September, 1942. It was divided into three sections—educational, military and economic. The Minister of Education, Vejar Vasquez, presided over the first, Cardenas over the second, and the Secretary of the Treasury, Eduardo Suarez, over the third, thus balancing the interests of the right, left and centre.62 Its purpose, as defined by the President, was to mobilize the material and spiritual resources of the nation and to seek solutions to its political, economic and social problems.63 The Council for the Co-ordination and Promotion of Production, under Abelardo Rodriguez, who was directly responsible to the President, was intended to foster agriculture so that the country might become self-sufficient in essential foodstuffs (which despite, or because of, the agrarian reforms carried out over the years and because, also, of the growing population, it was not), to establish new industries (already encouraged by tax exemptions granted under a Law of Manufacturing Industries of 21 April, 1941), to expand existing ones, to increase production for export and to improve internal communications. It was to serve as a link between governmental and

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private enterprise and be in close touch with the Councils of Regional Economy and the Federal Commission on Economic Planning, of which Rodriguez was a member.64 The United States did everything possible to assist this programme. To stimulate the production of critical and strategic materials the Metals Reserve Company had agreed in April to buy Mexican copper, zinc and lead at enhanced prices, the Defense Supplies Corporation contracted in May to buy henequen from Yucatan, the Commodity Credit Corporation in July to take the exportable surplus of alcohol and the Rubber Reserve Company in September that of rubber, providing also a substantial sum to increase production. Since an increasing burden was placed on the Mexican railways by the transport of these and other goods to the United States, the United States agreed in November to help in the rehabilitation of certain key lines by providing equipment, funds and technical assistance65 and an expert railway commission was appointed for the purpose. In August the Export-Import Bank granted an $8 million loan towards the financing, with the Nacional Financiera, S.A., the official Government investment bank, of a steel mill at Monclova in the state of Coahuila66 and permitted the more rapid expenditure of an earlier loan of $30 million for a vast programme of road construction. The Reciprocal Trade Agreement, promised in April, was signed in December, to come into force in January, 1943. Not till 1944, however, after much hesitation and controversy in the United States, were plans settled for the construction, also with the aid of a large loan from the Export-Import Bank, of the high octane gasoline plant which had likewise been discussed in April, 1942.67 The railway mission, headed by J. Oliver Stevens, arrived in Mexico in November, 1942, to find itself half-stultified by the perennial disputes between management and workers and union and union. The unions had rejected a number of proposals for the reorganization of the railways and, in a manifesto signed Tor the Class War', they rejected others in January, 1943. The President then accepted their offer to draw up their own plans for reform, and a working arrangement was patched up. Through the strenuous efforts of the expert technical commission some reconstruction of the permanent way,

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sidings, and marshalling yards was undertaken at substantial cost, and locomotives, freight and refrigerator cars were sent down from the United States. But indiscipline and inefficiency were such that the rate of accidents rose alarmingly, rolling stock was depleted, locomotives were wrecked, and serious delays in deliveries followed.68 So intolerable did the situation become that in February, 1944, the Manager of the National Railways and Stevens both resigned, Stevens, on his return home, writing an article on how not to run a railway. 69 Forced into drastic action, the President reorganized the administration of the railways, placing greater power in the hands of the government representatives and reducing the opportunities of the union leaders to interfere, and declaring that lack of discipline and efficiency and illegal strikes forced him to take such action. 70 A new manager was appointed with more authority and some improvement resulted. But the condition of the railways remained a national headache and a national scandal until reform and rehabilitation were at last achieved under the administration of Avila Camacho's successor, Miguel Ale'

71

man/1 T h e railway mission could hardly be regarded as an outstanding success. But it was only one, though a very important one, of several missions. American experts assessed the mining, petroleum, industrial and agricultural capacities of the country. American money, for deposit or investment, and American credits, flowed south; Mexican goods, despite the condition of the railways, flowed north in ever-increasing quantities. T h e British Minister calculated in September, 1942, that the United States would import seven times more metals and other products from Mexico in 1943 than in 1941, 72 In a lecture given on 6 April, 1943, the managing-director of the Bank of Mexico, Eduardo Villasefior (a former student of the London School of Economics), stated that sales of Mexican raw materials to the United States in 1942 realized over $50 million. Exports of minerals, always the dominant exports, increased by more than 50 per cent; exports of cattle, food products, fibres, timber, leather, cotton goods and sugar increased in some instances by as much as 500 per cent. 73 An export of a different kind, under agreements of which the first was signed in August, 1942, was that of Mexican agricultural

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workers, followed later by non-agricultural workers, to supply the inevitable shortages of labour, caused by the war and the expansion of the defence industries, on the farms and railways of the United States. These were the braceros, who came north in their tens of thousands, 74 quite apart from the large number of illegal immigrants, the so-called 'wet-backs', who also found their way across the Mexican-United States border. Though Mexican foreign commerce now lay almost wholly with the United States, the traffic, Villasehor complained in his April lecture, was a one-way traffic. Mexico wanted manufactured articles—machinery, lorries, motors, electrical equipment, spare parts—as well as consumer goods; and, ignoring the very real assistance given to Mexico, he went so far as to suggest that the result of harnessing Mexico's economy to that of the United States was an excessive influx of dollars, a steep rise in the cost of living, and inflation. He added that the United States had built up so intricate a network of formalities for the grant of priorities, and the quotas of finished goods allotted to Mexico were so niggardly, that the simplest course would be for the United States to set up a new office called the O.N.A.P., or Office for the Negation of Any Petition. 75 Criticisms of this kind, however one-sided, were not confined to Villasefior alone. T h e President himself declared in March that Mexico could not be expected to get on with the j o b unless she were given the tools, and the Mexican Ambassador in C u b a openly proclaimed his fears that the United States intended to dominate Latin America both politically and economically. 76 Other Latin American countries, as more than one American official pointed out, needed exactly the same kind of goods that Mexico wanted, though these were precisely what the United States, for obvious reasons, could not supply in the quantities desired. But Washington was inclined to take a serious view of the timing and general tone of these strictures; 77 Roosevelt, always concerned to demonstrate that the 'Good Neighbour Policy' was no mere matter of words, found occasion to confer with Avila Camacho; and the two Presidents and their staffs, including Sumner Welles and Padilla, met at Monterrey on 20 April, Avila Camacho then accompanying Roosevelt back to Corpus Christi in Texas. No

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United States president had ever paid an official visit to Mexico,78 and the fact that Roosevelt came to Mexican soil illustrated both the value placed by the United States on Mexican collaboration and an anxiety to eradicate suspicions. To cap the compliment Roosevelt, in an expansive mood, and apparently shocked by the gloomy picture he was given of Mexico's economic problems—the large excess of exports over imports, the exhaustion of stocks of consumer goods, the influx of refugee funds from all parts, inflated bank balances, and the rising cost of living—himself suggested the appointment of a mixed Mexican—American Commission for Economic Cooperation to smooth away difficulties.79 Appointed almost at once, it consisted of four members—the United States Under-Secretary of Commerce and the Assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury, together with the manager of the Monterrey Steel Works and a Mexican mining engineer. It was required to examine the balance of payments and the economic structure of Mexico in general and to formulate by 15 June a programme of economic co-operation.80 The Commission's report appeared not in June but in July, its tone affording no hint of the somewhat extravagant requirements which the Mexican members, their technical staff and the Mexican Embassy in Washington were said to have put forward initially.81 Its main emphasis was on the prosecution of the war and on Mexico's contribution to it by the continued, and indeed increased, production of strategic and critical materials, with the indispensable assistance of the United States. But the report considered also both the short and long-range problems of the Mexican economy. It repeatedly underlined the importance of increased food production. It took as a 'guiding principle' the industrialization of Mexico at as rapid a pace as was consistent with the necessary restrictions on the use of critical materials and equipment during the war.82 It advised that public works projects and the problems of transport should be the subject of continuing study. It pointed out that though difficulties in obtaining plant, machinery and consumer goods were at present inevitable—'victory was more important than trade'—use could be made of second-hand or idle equipment and, further, that the financial resources which Mexico was accumulating would be

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of inestimable value once the war was over. With one eye on American business interests and the other on Mexican opinion, it concluded that the 'days of exploitation or economic imperialism, whether by nations or by powerful private groups', were past, but that a fruitful field existed for Mexican—American co-operation in the development of industries to serve Mexico's needs, and it recommended the creation by Mexico of a small industrial commission on which the United States would be represented. Its function would be to continue the examination of plans for long-term industrialization, to implement the immediate programme outlined by the Commission by preparing detailed lists of machinery and equipment, second-hand if necessary, which were required, to recommend to the appropriate authorities in the United States the issue of priority export licences, and to encourage and assist in the conclusion of contracts between Mexican industrialists and United States manufacturers. 83 T h e industrial commission was set up in September. It was composed, however, of three American members (including the Under-Secretary of Commerce, Wayne Taylor, and the Co-ordinator of Inter-American Affairs, Nelson Rockefeller) and three distinguished Mexicans, 84 and, with the consent of both Presidents, assumed the name of its progenitor, thus becoming the (second) Mexican-American Commission for Economic Co-operation. T h e Commission proceeded to outline a so-called minimum economic programme for 1944, involving twenty projects, including developments in the steel, textile, cement, paper and chemical industries and costing some $24 million, approved a number of long-range projects, put the total cost of industrializing Mexico at $383 million, and was responsible for the creation of a Mexican-United States Agricultural Commission in J u n e , 1944. 8j Meanwhile, the flow from the United States to Mexico of partly-worn or idle machinery of all kinds was accelerated in 1943.86 Avila Camacho, in his end-of-the-year broadcast, went out of his way to point out that the sacrifices which Mexico had been called to make were insignificant compared with the terrible sufferings of some of her Allies. 87 A Federal Commission (which proved ineffective) was formed, under a decree of 1 J u n e , 1944, to draw up a plan for the rationalization of indus-

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try on a national scale, 88 and in July Padilla visited Washington and returned with what Excelsior called an 'economic alliance'. In a joint statement he and Cordell Hull affirmed the determination of their two Governments to preserve in the post-war world 'the exemplary co-operation' maintained during the war, to discourage trade barriers and to improve communications between their two countries by road, rail, air and sea. Padilla himself stated that machinery to the value of $12j million would be forthcoming, subject to the exigencies of war, for the minimum 1944 programme recommended by the Economic Commission, 89 and, six months later, the Commission announced in its final report in J a n u a r y , 1945, that the greater part of the equipment required for the projects it had recommended was already in Mexico or in process of manufacture. It took credit to itself also for the assistance it had been able to give in obtaining priorities and export licences in the United States. Mexico, in short, had gained special advantages in the allocation of scarce goods. 90 V T h e benefits reaped from the Commission for Economic Co-operation were real. But so also were the problems of the Mexican economy. T h e President particularized some of the financial and economic difficulties in his address to the nation on the last day of 1943. T h e year that had passed, he said, 'was, for us, a year charged with grave preoccupations. The rise in the cost of living, the scarcity of essential commodities, the demoralizing influence of those who were more concerned to profit from the war than to soften its impact, the inertia of some, and the indifference of others, were a source of constant anxiety to the Government'. 9 1 It is not easy to compare conditions in the countryside with those which prevailed in Mexico City or in such towns as Monterrey. But living costs, which had been rising at least since 1934, rapidly increased after the United States had entered the war. According to the British Ambassador, drawing on official sources, the cost of living in Mexico City in August, 1945, was two and a half times greater than in 1939. T h e indices compiled by the weekly magazine, Tiempo, showed that the price of food increased 327 per cent

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from 1939 to December, 1946, and clothing by 423 per cent.92 In 1943, when the maize and wheat harvests alike failed, both grains had to be imported from the United States and Canada. Shortages of foodstuffs were acute. There were bread riots in Monterrey, shortages of meat, green-stuffs, fruit and grain in Mexico City—coffee, fruit and vegetables, according to El Universal, became the food of millionaires—and harsh, near starvation conditions elsewhere.93 Elaborate machinery was devised to fix prices and control supplies, but none of it was particularly effective, and in 1944 responsibility for the supply and distribution of foodstuffs was transferred from the inefficient agencies of the Ministry of National Economy to the Ministry of Finance, which not only placed orders abroad for maize, wheat and sugar but instituted a system of import licences and export controls.94 Meanwhile speculators, hoarders, black-marketeers and profiteers (including a number of politicians, labour leaders and generals)95 flourished, and while the newly-rich grew richer, the poor grew poorer. Inevitably there was discontent among the workers on the railways, in the mining, textile and petroleum industries and in the telephone and tramway companies. The Government, condemning strikes, provided for wage increases to compensate for price increases by an Emergency Law on Insufficient Salaries in September, 1943, but the workers remained dissatisfied96 and prices still kept ahead of wages; and while Mexico City exhibited the characteristics of conspicuous consumption97 (as well as the extremes of poverty), banditry again appeared on the public highways. The reverse side of this picture of inflation, shortages and social distress was the boom in business and industry and the restoration of Mexico's international credit. The major industrial development of the country was a post-war phenomenon. But not only was the blast furnace at Monclova blown in during May, 1944, but the mining, metal and textile industries were stretched to capacity and large numbers of small manufacturing plants came into existence. The British Ambassador reported that ninety-nine grants of exemption from taxation were made in the year ending on 31 August, 1944, alone, in favour of 'essential' industries, including hardware factories, producers of building materials, mostly

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cement, and chemical and pharmaceutical factories,98 and that over three thousand new commercial and industrial undertakings, with a total capital of 366 million pesos, were registered between May, 1943, and May, 1944. The Government, moreover, was able to use its newly-acquired financial resources to begin paying off its obligations to the American oil companies, the holders of Mexican government bonds (on terms highly favourable to Mexico) and other international obligations, though, despite exhausting and protracted negotiations, no settlement of the oil dispute with Britain was reached till 1947." VI The continuous flow northwards of strategic and critical materials—copper, lead, zinc, mercury, antimony, tungsten, fibres, rubber, medicinal plants—was Mexico's major contribution to the war effort. In addition there were the many thousands of Mexicans who were recruited to relieve what Roosevelt described as the 'critical manpower shortage' on the farms and railways of the United States.100 There was the quarter of a million Mexicans resident in the United States who entered the American armed forces, 14,000 of whom were engaged in actual combat service; and, finally, there was the small Mexican expeditionary force which took part in 1945 in the liberation of the Philippines and the fighting in Formosa.101 That the army, which consisted of some 52,000 regulars, would ever serve outside Mexican territory was not contemplated when Mexico entered the war. Far-reaching defence arrangements had been concluded with the United States. A Presidential General Staff had been established to maintain liaison between the high command and the Departments of War, Marine and Education.102 Military training had been made compulsory in schools103 and new military regions created. Mexico's urgent concern in 1942 was with the defence of her eastern and western seaboards, the possibility of a Japanese raid on Lower California, the German submarine menace in the Gulf, which was the reason for a 'friendship pact' with Cuba looking to the exchange of air and naval facilities and of

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information.104 But it was not till August that the Law of Compulsory Military Service, enacted exactly two years earlier, was at last put into effect by presidential decree. Young men of the 1924 class were called upon to register in November and the conscripts were then selected by lot to begin training in the New Year.105 By the beginning of 1943 the threat of actual warfare had receded from the Mexican coasts and the defence of the national territory was no longer a matter of primary importance. But tanks, planes, jeeps, trucks and other equipment were received from the United States—the Joint Mexican-United States Defense Commission was increasingly concerned with Lend-Lease problems; contact was maintained between the Mexican and United States General Staffs; and conscripts continued to be called up.106 The armed forces, which Cardenas, as Minister of Defence, was engaged in reorganizing, were notably strengthened on the ground and in the air, though Cardenas, asked by an American journalist whether they would fight outside the Western Hemisphere, was reported to have said, 'What with? Bows and arrows?'.107 Cardenas had consistently maintained that Mexican troops would not be called upon to serve overseas. Lombardo Toledano, in contrast, argued that a Latin American force should be present at the battle front in order to ensure that Latin America was properly represented at the peace conference—a view which was echoed by the organ of the C.T.M., El Popular.m Privately Padilla had discussed with Sumner Welles, at the time of the Monterrey-Corpus Christi meeting between Roosevelt and Avila Camacho, the possible active participation of the Mexican armed forces, and, in July, he told the American Ambassador, George Messersmith, that it was not consonant with Mexico's dignity and her place among the United Nations that her army should not bear a part of the sacrifices, and that a good many high-ranking officers shared this opinion.109 Messersmith suggested the dispatch of a flying unit, later adding that if Mexico would make a formal proposal the United States military and naval authorities could consider it. In November he reported that both the President and Padilla had been thinking in terms of one or more squadrons of airmen who might, after proper training, serve at some

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of the fronts. The President, in the same month, publicly stated that the army would be prepared to act wherever circumstances required, even outside the national territory, if 'for justifiable reasons our allies should ask that of us', though he qualified this announcement with the condition that a special sector, however limited, would have to be allotted to the Mexican command and that any Mexican contingent should fight as a unit under the Mexican flag.111 Such a unit, he indicated in December, might be sent to fight alongside United States forces in the Pacific.112 A desire that some notice should be taken of the offer to send a force to one of the battle fronts grew in 1944 with the approach of the Allied victory in Europe and Mexico's anxiety to participate in the peace conference and the post-war organization of world security. The Government, moreover, had before it the example of Brazil, whose expeditionary force left in July to fight in Italy.113 In March the President attended a luncheon given by officers of the air force and said that, though Mexico's allies had not asked for military aid, the time was coming when she should actively participate in the war, and Padilla told Messersmith, who in turn told Roosevelt, that the President wished to send an air squadron to one of the fronts,114 journalists reporting a remark that Mexico should participate in the war 'if only in a symbolic manner'.115 Though the War Department in the United States was opposed to such participation, Messersmith, who had himself suggested the dispatch of an air squadron, favoured it, and Roosevelt supported Messersmith.116 In July the 201st Air Squadron, consisting of some 300 men, was sent to the United States for a period of training. In December Avila Camacho expressed the wish that it should serve in the Pacific theatre, and in January, 1945, General Douglas MacArthur agreed to receive it.117 It sailed to the Philippines at the end of March, and, after a further period of training with the Fifth Air Corps at Clark Field, went into action in June and did not return to Mexico until the war in the Far East had ended.118 If this was a 'symbolic act', it was an act in which the Mexican airmen acquitted themselves well.

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VII Historians may dispute whether the Mexican Revolution, that great political, social and economic upheaval which began in 1910 to become a thing of passion, love and hate, now apparently spent, now again in full spate, died during the years of the Second World War, or whether it merely entered a new, less militant, evolutionary phase. Avila Camacho removed the army from party politics (though not from political influence) by suppressing the military sector of the P.R.M. in 1940, and the P.R.M. itself was reorganized on a wider basis as the P.R.I., or Partido Revolucionario Institutional in 1946.119 Increasing the number of judges of the Supreme Court, he sought to safeguard their impartiality by a constitutional amendment in 1944 which gave them tenure for life, subject only to their exemplary behaviour. With his Minister of Education, Jaime Torres Bodet (later Director-General of UNESCO), he rewrote the famous third article of the Constitution of 1917, which, as revised in 1934, prescribed that education should not only be secular but socialistic, the new wording reflecting a more liberal conception of the ends of education. eSoy creyente\ he had declared, and he achieved a modus vivendi with the Church. The political militancy of organized labour was subdued, even, at long last, on the national railways. In the C.T.M. the more moderate elements gained an ascendency after Lombardo Toledano ceased to be the general secretary in 1941,120 while, for the benefit of labour, though only for certain classes of workers in the Federal District in the first instance, a Law of Social Security provided a measure of insurance from the cradle to the grave. Land distribution to the peasants, which had reached its height under Cardenas, continued, but at a less rapid pace. Amendments to the agrarian code gave a greater measure of security both to smallholders and to ejiditarios ,121 or communal farmers; and while strong emphasis continued to be placed on the need for increased agricultural production by means of irrigation and drainage works, mechanization, technical and financial aid to farmers and the use of new crops, the agrarian phase of the Revolution gave way to its industrial phase.122 But not for one moment did Avila Camacho regard himself as a counter-

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revolutionary. Left- and right-wing influences eddied around him. But he walked the path of moderation. His aim, he repeatedly declared, was to institute a new era in which the great conquests of the Revolution would be consolidated on the profound unity of the nation,123 and, significantly enough, his friendship with Cardenas remained unimpaired.124 Significantly also, Avila Camacho was the last of the revolutionary generals to become President. His successors were civilians. The Revolution, like its party, had become institutionalized. Accompanying these internal changes, Mexico's productive capacities were enlarged during the war years, her creditworthiness was restored and her international status enhanced. She was indeed heavily in debt to the Export-Import Bank, and a newer group of Mexican industrialists were by no means enamoured of the United States. Yet temporarily at least veiled suspicion and even open hostility had given way to what Padilla described as an 'unprecedented friendship'.125 On a still wider stage Mexico had taken a lively interest in the United Nations Conferences on Food and Agriculture, Relief and Rehabilitation and Money and Finance. She had been the instigator of the important Inter-American Conference on the Problems of War and Peace, at which Padilla had been chairman and had played a leading role, later representing his country at the San Francisco Conference on International Organization.126 Padilla was to be a defeated presidential candidate in 1946. But his activities in the foreign field, wrote the British Ambassador, had put Mexico 'on the map',127 and so, he might have added, had the general stance of the Mexican Government in the face of the world conflagration and the material assistance which Mexico had given to the United States and the United Nations.

Ill BRAZIL AT WAR I Brazil, in August, 1942, was the first South American state to declare herself at war with Germany and Italy. She was the only Latin American country to send air and ground troops to Europe. She was an important source of strategic materials— chrome, iron ore, industrial diamonds, quartz crystals, manganese, nickel, bauxite, tungsten, oil seeds, fibres—for the Allied war effort; and the air route from southern Florida to the airfields, built at United States expense, in the Brazilian north-east and then across the Atlantic narrows to western Africa was a life-line to the Allied forces. Along this route were ferried planes and supplies for the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern theatres, for Soviet Russia, for India and China and even for the south-west Pacific.1 Yet Brazil, in December, 1941, neither contemplated a declaration of war against the Axis powers nor, unlike Mexico, Colombia and Venezuela, did she sever relations with them. Her response to the attack on Pearl Habour was a declaration of solidarity with the United States, unanimously approved by President Getulio Vargas's cabinet and communicated by him to President Roosevelt in a personal message on 8 December. In this Vargas continued the cautious policy he had pursued throughout 1941. Step by step he had conceded privileges to the United States, accompanied by constant reassurances to Germany. Brazilian harbours had been made free to the United States Navy, and the South Atlantic Force (earlier the South Atlantic Naval Patrol and later the Fourth Fleet), under the command of Admiral Jonas Ingram, had begun to make use of the ports of Recife and Salvador. In June, even before Vargas had officially approved the construction or re-equipment by Panair do Brasil, a subsidiary of Pan American Airways, of a series of airfields in the

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north-east of Brazil, urgently wanted by the United States in the interests of hemisphere defence, transport planes had been allowed to be ferried by way of Brazil to the British forces in Egypt.2 A Lend-Lease agreement had been signed in October, a joint United States military board for the north-east proposed, and a United States naval air squadron allowed, late in November, to be sent for patrol duties to Natal, where it arrived on 11 December. But the Italian Lati transatlantic air service continued to operate and so did the domestic service of the German-controlled Condor line. The airfields in the northeast were defenceless and the Government steadily refused to contemplate the stationing of United States security forces on Brazilian soil for their protection and for that of the north-east as a whole.3 Solidarity proclaimed, Vargas, despite some opposition within the armed forces, allowed three companies of American marines, under the guise of technicians, to be stationed at the key fields of Belem, Natal and Recife. They arrived in late December and were permitted to wear uniforms. But their arms were crated and they carried short clubs instead of rifles.4 A Joint United States-Brazilian Military Board for the Northeast was instituted at much the same time. Lati and Condor were at last forced to suspend their operations, the American oil companies cutting off their fuel supplies and the Government placing a guard over the Lati planes and preparing to reorganize the Condor company.5 The funds of Axis nationals were subjected to controls. Axis news agencies were placed under special supervision and a number of pro-Axis newspapers suspended. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dr. Oswaldo Aranha, who made no secret of his own strong support for the United States, told the Latin American diplomatic corps that the struggle now being waged was the struggle of all the Americas, and warmly welcomed the summoning of the consultative meeting of American Foreign Ministers held at Rio de Janeiro in January—a meeting at which he played a prominent part. 6 But Vargas, as Roosevelt remarked, 'had to feel his way—be sure of his ground'.7 The American Ambassador reported him as saying: 'Sometimes our friends want to move a little fast; then I must defend myself; I hope to be completely out of the woods by the time the Foreign Ministers

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arrive here next month.58 At a banquet given by the armed forces on the last day of the year he again made Brazil's solidarity with the United States perfectly clear and affirmed her readiness to defend herself. But he spoke also of the 'material elements' which Brazil was hoping to receive—the army wanted, not American troops on Brazilian soil, but American military equipment and munitions; and Roosevelt took the hint. In a letter entrusted to Sumner Welles, who was leading the American delegation to the Rio de Janeiro Conference, he thanked Vargas for his assistance 'with regard to such matters as the ferry service to Africa and the naval and air patrols from your ports and airfields', and promised that the equipment wanted would be supplied before long.9 But Pearl Harbour was the death blow to any hopes that Vargas may still have entertained of preserving neutrality and thereby preparing Brazil for a post-war world shaped by whichever side should emerge victorious.10 By early January he had made up his mind, as he told his cabinet, that Brazil must stand or fall with the United States, a stand which, as he well knew, meant a severance of diplomatic and commercial relations with the Axis. Typically, his address of welcome on the 15th to the Foreign Ministers assembled at Rio de Janeiro, in which he promised that nothing would be left undone to ensure 'that within our gates no known or unknown enemies' would 'be given refuge to harm or endanger the safety of the Americas', gave no hint of such a step, though the severance of relations was the main question before the Conference. Indeed, his speech both gratified and reassured the Italian Ambassador.11 But while, behind the scenes, Aranha worked hard to secure a formula to which all members of the Conference could subscribe, those who favoured a severance and those who did not, Vargas refused to be intimidated by the warnings of the Axis Ambassadors, of his Minister of War, General Eurico Dutra, and of the Chief of Staff, General Goes Monteiro, both of them his long-standing associates and both impressed by German military might, that a break with the Axis would mean war, for which, as the generals argued, Brazil was unprepared. He spoke, however, to Sumner Welles of the grave responsibility which he had assumed on behalf of the Brazilian people and of his urgent need of planes, tanks

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and coastal artillery for the defence of north-east Brazil, thereby winning a further promise of military supplies from Roosevelt. But to Aranha's annoyance he kept the Conference waiting till the last minute before authorizing him to announce a severance of diplomatic and economic relations.12 The Italian and Japanese Ambassadors, according to Aranha, received the news, and the notification that they would have to leave, most churlishly. The German Ambassador, on the other hand, stated that he had foreseen developments, that he thanked the Brazilian Government for past courtesies, and that he knew that Brazil was not to blame.13 II With this break in relations the German Transocean, the Italian Stefani and the Japanese Domex news agencies were closed. Various pro-Axis organizations were suppressed. Restrictions were placed on the use of the German language in public places, and on travel and on the ownership of firearms by Axis nationals. A number of Germans suspected of espionage14 in Rio de Janeiro and elsewhere were detained and interrogated and some were held in such places as the encampment at Sao Jeronimo, no great distance from Porto Alegre, and on the Ilha das Flores in the Bay of Rio de Janeiro. But the view prevailed that, though energetic measures should be taken against Fifth Columnists, Brazil should continue to show her traditional hospitality to aliens and immigrants who respected her laws and had deserved well of the country of their adoption.15 As in the first World War, so in the second, the oldestablished and influential Teuto-Brazilian communities proved to be generally quiescent. In the three southern states of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina and Parana, which were the principal areas of their settlement and where they exercised an economic influence out of all proportion to their size, they had been subjected to intensive Nazi indoctrination and until 1938 had enjoyed a considerable freedom to organize themselves politically, socially and educationally. But with Vargas's nationalization campaign at that time—the closing of schools, the banning of political parties, clubs and associations and the prohibition of the wearing of emblems and

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uniforms—not only had there been an extensive repatriation of the more recently arrived Reichsdeutshe, but the Nazi party organization suffered a continuous process of disbandment.16 The state authorities, more particularly in Rio Grande do Sul, maintained an effective intelligence service and in all three southern states were successful in combating Nazi activities. Their greatest fears were of espionage and sabotage. Public buildings, public utilities and other key installations were guarded. But on the whole the Teuto-Brazilians realized that they were Brazilians first and Germans afterwards.17 As for the Italians and Japanese, some Italian institutions were closed and a number of persons were arrested. But though rumours were legion and eagerly seized upon by the press, the Italian and Japanese communities, like the German, gave comparatively little trouble, despite the strength of Japanese allegiance to the Emperor and the refusal of some Japanese, even when the war had ended, to believe that Japan could have been defeated. Nevertheless the army, consisting of some 60,000 men distributed in widely scattered units, was, for the most part, concentrated in the south and south-east.18 though this, perhaps, was due as much to the persistent Brazilian distrust of Argentina (and of the incapacity or unwillingness of the Argentine authorities to exercise control over Axis elements in their own frontier regions bordering on Brazil) as to fear of subversive activities among the Axis minorities.19 The Frontier Command and the 3rd Military Region in Rio Grande do Sul disposed of a considerable body of troops, reinforced by a substantial state police force, and so, though to a lesser degree, did the 5th Military Region, which embraced the states of Santa Catarina and Parana and had its headquarters in Curitiba. By contrast, the north-east, where the air corridor to Africa could have been capable of a two-way traffic, German as well as American, still remained, in the opinion of the United States War Department, deplorably vulnerable to attack from Dakar and French West Africa should the Germans control that area. The Joint Military Board for the Northeast did not meet till the middle ofJanuary and then, in effect, could do very little. Vargas had made it plain that the stationing of further American troops, beyond the three com-

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panies of marines sent to Belem, Natal and Recife, depended on the delivery of substantial quantities of equipment, so that Brazilian and American troops could engage in defence measures on an equal footing,20 and, immediately after the Rio Conference had ended, the Finance Minister, Artur de Souza Costa, with a group of financial experts, left for the United States on a mission designed, as he publicly explained, to reach agreement on 'the economic mobilization' of Brazilian resources in accordance with the resolutions of the Conference, but also, as he told the American Ambassador, to procure 'necessary armament'. No sooner had he arrived than he presented a formidable list of military equipment which Brazil wanted, indicating later, under pressure from Vargas, that he was completely dissatisfied with the United States army's programme for Brazil.21 Souza Costa did not return home till 17 March, having signed four important agreements. Two of these, Americaninspired, were arrangements for the mobilization of Brazil's 'productive resources', that is, her strategic raw materials in particular, with the aid of a $100 million line of credit from the Export-Import Bank, and for the establishment of a $5 million fund by the Rubber Reserve Company for the intensification of rubber production in the Amazon Valley and elsewhere, the company acquiring all the rubber not required for domestic use. A third agreement, also American-inspired, provided for the development of the iron ore deposits at Itabira in the state of Minas Gerais and of the Vitoria-Minas railway. The fourth was a revised Lend-Lease agreement.22 The Itabira agreement concerned the British Government as well as the American. For years a British-American syndicate, the Itabira Iron Ore Company, had struggled to exploit the rich iron ore deposits in the face of financial and transport difficulties—the mines were some 450 miles north of Rio de Janeiro and some 300 from the nearest port on the Atlantic—as well as of nationalist opposition. Britain now undertook, against compensation, to take over the shares of the Company under wartime powers and to transfer its properties without charge to the Brazilian Government—a gesture which greatly added to Britain's standing in the eyes of Brazilians.23 The Export-Import Bank was to advance $14 millions for the

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enlargement of the mines and the acquisition, rehabilitation and extension of the Vitoria-Minas railway, and Brazil undertook to furnish, and Britain and the Metals Reserve Company each to purchase, 750,000 tons of iron ore annually for the next three years. In June the Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, S.A. was set up, with Brazilian and American representation, to manage both the railway and the mines, and this, like the Companhia Siderurgica National's steel plant being built at Volta Redonda, which was given an additional line of credit of $25 millions in 1943, was seen as yet a further step on the road to economic independence.24 The revised Lend-Lease agreement provided for the delivery of military equipment to the value of $200 millions, precisely double the amount specified in October, 1941, and the War Department undertook to deliver a number of tanks, combat airplanes, anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns by the end of the year. Apparently satisfied, Vargas, six days later, approved a programme for military co-operation in the north-east which not only allowed unrestricted flight privileges for United States army aircraft but permitted the stationing there of eight hundred additional United States army maintenance personnel25—they amounted to two or three thousand by the end of the year26—and on 11 March Aranha and the Brazilian Chiefs of Staff drafted a BrazilianAmerican defence agreement which resulted in the establishment in May of a Joint Brazil-United States Defense Commission. This superseded the recently established Board for Northeast Brazil. It consisted of two mixed bodies, a main commission, which first met in Washington under the presidency of Brigadier-General Robert Olds in August and was concerned with Brazilian army requirements and the defence of north-east Brazil in particular, and a parallel but subordinate commission in Rio de Janeiro. This, meeting for the first time in December, was required to act in harmony with the existing United States Military and Naval Missions there.27 Meanwhile, on 15 February, the Lloyd Brasileiro merchantman, the Buarque, of some 5000 tons, was torpedoed and sunk without warning by a German submarine off the coast of Virginia,28 and three days later the Olinda suffered the same fate in the same area. Brazilian protests to Germany were

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ignored. Three more ships were sunk off the coasts of North America or the Antilles between 25 February and 8 March. Amid popular approval the Government on the 11 th issued a decree imposing a levy on the assets of Axis nationals and Axis-owned institutions in order to create an indemnity fund for damages done to Brazilian persons and property.29 There were popular demonstrations in Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, Recife, Curitiba, Porto Alegre and other cities. The Government ordered all ships to take refuge in the nearest ports,30 and Vargas urgently sought protection from the United States for merchant vessels sailing between the two countries. Neither the small Brazilian navy, however gallant its efforts, nor the still smaller United States Naval Air Arm at Natal could effectively patrol the 4500 miles of Brazilian coastline, let alone ships northbound beyond Belem or southbound from the United States. Late in April, however, Admiral Ingram of the South Atlantic Force, met Vargas for the first time and won his instant confidence. Ingram promised all the protection he could and Vargas instructed the Brazilian air and naval forces to act in conjunction with him.31 But the attacks on Brazilian vessels, which now carried guns on their decks, continued. The Comandante Lira was the first to be torpedoed off the Brazilian coast itself (by an Italian submarine) on 18 May, and in mid-June Hitler decided to launch a major offensive, taking the view that Brazil, in effect, was no longer neutral. A group often U-boats was detailed for the operation in July and struck in August.32 On the 15th, 16th and 17th five ships, plying between one Brazilian port and another, four of them passenger ships, carrying pilgrims to the Sao Paulo Eucharistic Congress and also troops, were sunk with the loss of hundreds of lives, including women and children; and yet another ship was destroyed on the 19th.33 This time the reaction in Brazil was still more violent. Angry demonstrations took place throughout the country, from Belem and Recife to Belo Horizonte and Porto Alegre. Students in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro demanded war. On the 18th crowds demonstrated before the presidential palace, where Vargas, appearing on the balcony, declared that Axis ships in Brazilian ports would be confiscated, Axis assets seized, and Fifth Columnists and spies put to work on making

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roads. On the 21st he told a delegation of sailors that the sea was a symbol of liberty and that a people who did not defend their waters did not deserve to survive.34 The Minister of War pledged that the armed forces would do everything in their power to resist aggression, and on the 22nd a united cabinet approved a declaration of the existence of a state of war with Germany and Italy, though not with Japan, Japan having committed no act of aggression against Brazil. To avoid any possibility of misunderstanding, the President, on the 31st, proclaimed a state of war to exist throughout the country.35 The sinking of two ships had sufficed to bring Mexico into the war on 22 May. A score of Brazilian vessels had been lost or seriously damaged, with extensive loss of life, before Brazil took the same action exactly three months later. Vargas himself had had a serious motor accident on 1 May, had been confined to bed, and had not been seen in public before 18 August. A struggle had raged around his sick bed between the holders of discordant views on the role that Brazil should play in the war. Aranha was accused of dragging Brazil, totally unequipped for hostilities, into the international conflict at the heels of the United States. Felinto Miiller, the Chief of Police, on the other hand, who enjoyed the support of the War Minister, General Dutra, entertained pro-Axis sympathies. In July he was made to resign; Vargas, however, indulging in one of his ingenious manoeuvres, patched up the situation by reorganizing his cabinet in such a way as to give his adversaries no tangible cause for offence,36 and with his recovery the political tension eased. It might be argued, as Hitler indeed did, that Brazil was already half at war before the onslaught on her shipping in August. But the declaration of a state of war, when it came, was not of the President's choosing. It was the result of strong public pressure. 'You protested indignantly', he declared in his address on Independence Day on 7 September. 'You asked by every form of expression of the popular will that the Government should declare war on the aggressors, and this was done.'37 Even before war had been declared, all Germans, except diplomats, who had embarked on the steamships Bage and Cuiabd for repatriation to Europe were detained as hostages for Brazilians who were being held at Compiegne, and it was

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not till mid-September that the ships were allowed to leave.38 'Nationals of enemy countries,5 the President said in his Independence Day speech, who had come to Brazil 'to make their homes in a regular and honest way, had nothing to fear, so long as they remained at work, obeyed the law and were quick to collaborate in the defence of the country.' Others would be dealt with rigorously, and there would be no room for rumour-mongers or defeatists.39 Decrees were quickly issued for the liquidation of German and Italian banks and insurance companies and the cancellation of any contracts entered into for the purchase of Axis ships which had taken refuge in Brazilian ports. Some 110,000 tons of shipping were confiscated. The network of banking, shipping, aviation and industrial companies known as the Lage Organisation of Rio was placed under Brazilian supervision.40 Various persons accused of espionage activities were arrested and put on trial.41 With the permission of the Ministry of Labour employers might cancel the work contracts of Axis nationals,42 and in October an Economic Defence Commission was set up, directly responsible to the President, with wide powers to administer, liquidate or expropriate the property of undesirable persons, sell blocked strategic materials being withheld from the market, expropriate patents and trade marks belonging to people whose activities were thought to be contrary to the national interest, cancel or liquidate contracts with any such persons, and revise the list of interventors, some of them of dubious repute, who had previously been put in charge of Axis enterprises.43 These measures were followed in November by the 'interruption' of diplomatic relations with Vichy France—the French Ambassador was invited to remain in Brazil as an honoured guest—and, reluctantly enough, by Brazil's adherence, on 6 February, 1943, to the Declaration of the United Nations.44 They were followed also by a semantic change. At a time of national crisis the Estado Novo became the Estado National, that 'Brazilian solution for Brazilian problems', as Vargas called it, when, on the fifth anniversary of the new but now national state, he referred also to the forms of'functional democracy' established in Brazil and to Roosevelt as the 'great leader of the American continent'.45

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III So far the expansion of trade with other Latin American countries and above all with the United States had done much to compensate Brazil for the loss of European markets and the decline of British trade. 46 In 1942, because of enlarged purchases of meat products by the Ministry of Food and Supply there was, incidentally, a small increase in Britain's share of Brazilian exports. 47 But though there was no more than a temporary reduction in the volume of United StatesBrazilian trade, the submarine attacks on shipping in the North and South Atlantic, and shipping shortages in general, had grave effects on the internal economy. Brazil was confronted with a scarcity of such essential goods as oil, coal, metals and machinery. Stringent petrol rationing was introduced in July. (Aranha, when asked during Vargas's illness, about a possible successor to the Presidency, was reported to have replied that it would all depend on who had sufficient petrol to enable him to arrive first at the Catete Palace.) 48 Some agricultural crops—Brazil nuts and cocoa—were cut off from their markets by lack of transport and shipping. Others—vegetable oils and oil seeds—were in increased demand. Similarly, there was a minor boom in strategic minerals (and a major, though temporary, one in textiles) but a serious scarcity of spare parts for local industries. Belem and other coastal towns in the drought-ridden north and north-east experienced food shortages. And because supplies were short and money in circulation increased as the Bank of Brazil bought from exporters their unexpended balances abroad, prices rose steeply 49 and far beyond wages. T h e United States, which had already contracted to take large quantities of such strategic minerals as quartz crystals, mica, industrial diamonds, chrome and bauxite, 50 set up a Purchasing Commission in Rio de Janeiro early in July, and engaged, soon afterwards, to buy further scarce strategic commodities such as vegetable oils and oil seeds, cotton linter and hessian. 51 T h e Commodity Credit Corporation bought for storage until shipping should be available coffee, cocoa and Brazil nuts. 52 A United States-Brazilian co-operative public health programme was launched to provide medical care for

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the producers of strategic raw materials—the mica and quartz miners in the mountains of the interior and the rubber collectors who were to be recruited for work in Amazonas. 53 A Brazilian-United States Food Commission was established to stimulate the production of foodstuffs in north and northeastern Brazil and in the Amazon area, the United- States contributing food production specialists as well as substantial funds. 54 A technical mission, led by a distinguished consulting engineer, Morris L. Cooke, was sent from the United States in September with the design of encouraging the local production of essential products, the conversion of local industries to the use of substitute raw materials, and the improvement of transport facilities, and to lay the foundation also of 'a longrange strengthening of Brazil's whole industrial economy; 55 and the United States, under a secret agreement, chartered thirteen vessels owned by the Brazilian Government and placed twenty-three others flying the Brazilian flag under the protection of American convoys, thus making herself responsible for the safety of the bulk of the Brazilian merchant marine. 56 Vargas himself took strong measures to meet the economic crisis and to complete that mobilization of economic resources which was already under way. T h e working day was extended in August and the workers were exhorted to 'produce, produce to the maximum'. 5 7 Late in September J o a o Alberto Lins de Barros, 58 who had been the first Brazilian Minister to Canada, was appointed Co-ordinator of Economic Mobilization with powers so wide that they extended to almost every aspect of the country's economic and financial life. They included the direction of mining, agriculture and industry, the control, through the Export-Import Department of the Bank of Brazil, of foreign trade, the co-ordination of transport, the rationing of fuel and power, the fixing of prices and the carrying out of all acts necessary to safeguard the public interest and to ensure the greatest return from the country's economic resources. Issuing order after order, he devised, with great energy, an elaborate administrative structure, including, among other departments, a Department for Industrial Production and a price control commission in each municipality, together with a co-ordinating body at Rio de Janeiro. 5 9 T h e

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Co-ordinator co-operated closely with the Cooke mission, which remained in Brazil for a couple of months and then drew up a voluminous report, which was, to Cooke's great disappointment, in effect pigeon-holed—the mission's mountainous labours, valuable as they were as a survey of Brazil's resources, produced only a few small mice.60 He was also concerned to assist in carrying into effect the agreement signed with the Rubber Reserve Company on 3 March for the intensification of wild rubber cultivation in the Amazon Valley.61 Agencies were established in December for the recruitment of labourers, preferably from the arid and poverty-ridden states of the north-east, and their transport to Amazonas, where the opera house at Manaus remained a monument to the rubber boom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and to deal with the local production and distribution of supplies.62 Vast sums of money were spent. An army of Americans, experts and others, descended on Brazil. But whereas it had been intended to recruit some 50,000 workers by 1943,63 far fewer were ever drafted, and these were inexperienced in the art of collecting rubber, suffered from climatic conditions and diseases and were met with hostility by the established traders. Rubber production only increased by about 6,000 tons between 1940 and 1944,64 and this at the expense of a dislocation of labour, disputes over the export of Brazilian rubber products to other South American countries, and considerable ill-feeling. The 'Battle of Rubber' could hardly be said to have been fought with distinguished success, though the public health programme which accompanied it was. So far as industry was concerned, Joao Alberto was able to refer not only to the Volta Redonda steel plant but to the 'courageous' industrialists who, in their anxiety to support the war effort, were producing 'an endless number of articles' (and, incidentally, like mining and commercial entrepreneurs, making considerable fortunes) whose output could not be justified except by the special circumstances of the times.65 But though the shipping situation became easier in 1943, local industries were still hampered by shortages of fuel, iron and steel. There were still shortages of food, and, throughout the war years, as exports of materials to win the war continued to flow to the United States and

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imports of goods needed for Brazilian development did not increase proportionately, inflationary pressures mounted. Despite successive efforts to stabilize prices, the cost of living soared. Minimum wages were increased, together with those of the civil servants and armed forces. But wages and salaries failed to keep pace with prices. O n the other hand, such were her favourable trade balances that Brazil was able to arrange in 1943 for the repayment of her dollar and sterling foreign debts. IV T h e mobilization of manpower accompanied the mobilization of economic resources, and fresh impetus was given also to naval and military co-operation with the United States. General mobilization was decreed on 16 September. Reservists between the ages of twenty-one and forty-five were to be called up as and when required and all Brazilians were made liable for civil defence duties. 66 In the same month Admiral Ingram assumed the title of 'Chief of the Allied Forces in the South Atlantic'. Such was Vargas's confidence in Ingram that he agreed to give him full operational control over the Brazilian naval and air forces in the north-east, asking Washington to confer the necessary authority upon him. T h e Joint BrazilUnited States Defense Commission recommended on 13 November that though Brazil should be responsible for the defence of her territory and of the military establishments there, the defence of coastal areas should be the joint responsibility of both countries and that Ingram should co-ordinate the operations of the Brazilian naval and air forces with his own fairly small South Atlantic Force—a recommendation that was accepted. 67 The Brazilian navy was to play its part so well that to the saying 'God is a Brazilian 5 was added the rider 'and His son is an officer of the Navy'. 68 While naval operations were thus unified, the military defence of north-eastern Brazil, which had formerly so greatly exercised the army chiefs in the United States, now preoccupied them much less. Circumstances were changing, and with the course of events in the Russian, Mediterranean and Far Eastern theatres, the view prevailed that this problem

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could safely be left to the Brazilian ground and air forces, the latter under the command of the energetic Brigadier-General Eduardo Gomes, both forces reinforced by suitable equipment from the United States and trained in its use.69 The Allied landings in North Africa early in November confirmed this view. But the Brazilian military and other groups were not content with so passive a role. Immediate interests (the continued strengthening of the armed forces with American aid) and post-war aspirations (the desire for an enhanced international status in the Americas and the world) were engaged. 'We entered the war to act and not to remain spectators,' wrote OJornal.70 General Dutra, in mid-December, exhorted a group of journalists to write articles in favour of sending troops to North Africa; Aranha declared that Brazil ought to play a more active part in the war; and Vargas himself, reviewing on 31 December, Brazil's contribution to the war effort—her supplies of strategic materials, the use of her ports and air bases, the operations of her navy and air force—spoke of the possibility of 'action outside the continent', with the comment that such action could not be limited to 'a simple expedition of symbolic units'.71 Not 'symbolic units' but the dispatch of three divisions was one possibility under discussion.72 The State Department favoured an overseas expedition, three divisions or not, on political grounds, including the strengthening of Brazil's voice in the post-war settlement.73 So did the Latin American Department of the Foreign Office, partly because of the effect it would be likely to have on Spain and Portugal, partly because it might tend to increase Brazil's post-war interest in Europe.74 But the general staff in Washington was opposed—other Latin American countries might wish to send troops which would have to be supplied, re-equipped and trained.75 And when the matter was raised by Sir Samuel Hoare with General Eisenhower, Eisenhower rejected the idea flatly.76 On 28 January, 1943, however, Roosevelt, returning by air from his meeting with Churchill at Casablanca, met Vargas at Natal, at Roosevelt's own suggestion. It was no secret that the two Presidents discussed the use of Brazilian troops, Roosevelt suggesting that, by agreement with Dr. Salazar of Portugal, they might be sent to relieve Portuguese

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troops in the Azores and Madeira, and Vargas impressing on Roosevelt Brazil's need for adequate military equipment.77 Thereafter the War Department in Washington 'reversed its position and supported the employment of Brazilian troops abroad'.78 At the invitation of General Marshall BrigadierGeneral Gomes paid an extended visit to North Africa in March and April.79 So also did a small Brazilian military mission. In April General Marshall received, and in May the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed in principle on, a plan presented by General Leitao de Carvalho, the Brazilian representative on the Joint Brazil-United States Defense Commission, for an expeditionary force, of which the details were then worked out during prolonged discussions both in Rio de Janeiro and Washington. There were to be three divisions, equipped, transported and supplied by the United States and serving under the United States high command. Half of the equipment for one infantry division would be sent to Brazil and used successively for training by all three divisions in rotation. The troops sent overseas would be reequipped in the theatre of operations.80 Special courses for Brazilian army and air officers were arranged in various United States training schools. General Mascarenhas de Moraes, the commander of the Sao Paulo military region, agreed to accept command of the first, and, as it turned out, the only division, and led a mission in December to North Africa and southern Italy—Italy had been invaded on 3 September—to study local conditions and establish liaison with the American forces, though even by December no great progress had been made in the preparation and training of the troops.81 This was not surprising. The troops were being brought together in three neighbourhoods, in the regions of Recife, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. Organizational difficulties were considerable, and not free from disagreements, both Brazilian and American. In January, however, the pace of training quickened. An air contingent had been decided upon and groups of airmen were sent for final instruction to the United States and Panama. Some four hundred sailed from Newport to Leghorn in September, joining the 350th United States fighter squadron. Vargas's eldest son, who had been a medical

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student in Berlin, was among them as a second lieutenant in the medical corps.82 The War Department's recommendations for the deployment of the expeditionary force as a whole were approved by the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff in May, when the dates for the movement of the first contingents of troops were fixed. Churchill, in London, had thought it a serious error to allow more than a token force, such as a brigade, to be sent, but both he and the war cabinet bowed to American representations.83 The Forqa Expediciondria Brasileira as finally constituted consisted of over 25,000 men. Five contingents left Rio de Janeiro for Naples in United States transports between 2 July, 1944, and 5 February, 1945.84 They were embodied in the United States Fifth Army under General Mark Clark, faced great hardships on arrival and during the winter of 1944—5, fought hard, experienced reverses as well as victories, and suffered many casualties. Their reward was the unconditional surrender to Mascarenhas de Moraes of the 148th German division in April, 1945. They returned to Rio de Janeiro in triumph between July and October. V As the war in Europe drew to an end, Brazil, on 2 April, 1945, established diplomatic relations with Soviet Russia and, on 5 June, declared herself to be at war with Japan. Both steps were taken under American advice, the one with an eye to Brazil's position at the forthcoming United Nations Conference at San Francisco, the other to her standing in Latin America and to avoid the cessation of Lend-Lease supplies.85 But Brazil's belligerent days ended with the return of her troops from Europe. Militarily, she emerged from the war with the best equipped armed forces in Latin America, forces, moreover, some of whose members in all branches had experienced the conditions of modern combat warfare. By far the largest recipient of Lend-Lease aid of all the Latin American states,86 she inherited also air and naval bases either newlybuilt or modernized and enlarged. Economically, the foundation of the great Volta Redonda steel plant was to Brazil what the expropriation of the foreign oil companies had been to Mexico—a symbol of'economic emancipation', and the war

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years had seen the foundation not only of the Companhia Siderurgica Nacional and the Companhia Vale do Rio Doce but of a large range of industries to produce at home products formerly imported from abroad. Many were mushroom companies incapable of surviving the return of normal trading conditions. But some at least were firmly founded. So great, moreover, had been the accumulation of dollar and sterling balances that Brazil found herself in 1946 with a surplus of some £40 millions in sterling or, altogether, $800 millions in gold and foreign exchange.87 Politically, a degree of centralization had been achieved during the reign of Vargas unimaginable when he took power in 1930, and such had been the extension of federal authority during the war years that Joao Alberto could refer to a 'structural revolution'.88 It was one more example of the President's autocracy that by a stroke of the pen in September, 1943, he could deprive five states of large portions of their lands and create on the country's frontiers five new federal territories under governors appointed by himself.89 In 1940 he had spoken of the 'March to the West'.90 The new territories together with the establishment of the Fundaqao do Brasil Central were part and parcel of the same conception. Thje Fundaqao organized, Joao Alberto himself led an expedition to examine the prospects for colonization and settlement in the great central area of Mato Grosso,91 and the new territories, apart from their strategic significance, were intended to stimulate a movement of population westwards and the economic development of Brazil's frontier regions.92 This forward movement within Brazil's own boundaries was accompanied by a forward movement in South America itself, where Brazil sought to regain the primacy earlier wrested from her by Argentina and where Rio de Janeiro had replaced Buenos Aires as the leading diplomatic capital. Officially, the two countries never failed to proclaim their cordial feelings towards each other, and, on occasion, to demonstrate them. But behind this friendly facade lurked a mutual distrust, especially marked in military circles, and competing interests in the vast economic hinterland of Paraguay and Bolivia. Paraguay had been, and was to remain, very much an economic colony of Argentina. But Vargas had visited Asuncion in 1941, when he had ratified a convention to link Para-

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guay by rail to the port of Santos.93 In May, 1943, President Morinigo paid a return visit to Rio de Janeiro, was taken on an impressive tour of inspection of Volta Redonda, told that the sea routes denied to Paraguay by geography were available through Brazilian ports, and assured that Paraguayan officers were especially welcome in the Brazilian armed forces. A treaty of commerce and a convention on tourism were signed and the assistance which Brazil was already offering Paraguay in the shape of credits was extended.94 Morinigo's visit was followed by that of President Peharanda of Bolivia. As with Paraguay, so with Bolivia, several agreements were signed looking to the increase of trade and facilities. Bolivia, like Paraguay, was offered a free port at Santos and Notes were exchanged for the completion of the railway from Corumba on the Paraguay River to Santa Cruz de la Sierra and beyond in Bolivia and for the construction of a temporary bridge over the Rio Grande River at the approach to Santa Cruz.95 An agency of the Bank of Brazil was to be opened in La Paz as in Asuncion. While Vargas sought by every available means to increase Brazil's trade and influence with her neighbours (and not only with Paraguay and Bolivia), the determinant of his foreign policy from the moment when he severed relations with the Axis was the necessity of close association and collaboration with the United States, a collaboration calculated to transform Brazil into the 'key-stone of the Pan American arch' in South America.96 The United Kingdom had occupied a somewhat special position in Argentina. Did the United States now occupy a similar position in Brazil? Warren Lee Pierson, the head of the Export-Import Bank, in an afterdinner conversation at the time of the Rio de Janeiro Conference, remarked that Britain could have Argentina but ought to clear out of Brazil. The American Ambassador, Jefferson Caffery, was said to be regarded by the State Department in much the same light as the British representative in Cairo was regarded by the Foreign Office.97 Sir Noel Charles, the British Ambassador, found him distinctly unhelpful in 1942, and Charles's staff had the feeling that they were treated by their American colleagues as poor relations.98 But Pierson's view, though it may have been shared by some 'dollar-a-year' men,

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was only one among many policy views in Washington; 99 and if the course of Anglo-American relations in Rio de Janeiro, though gradually improving, did not always run smoothly, neither did pure harmony prevail between Brazil and the United States Embassy, let alone the American purchasing commissions, 100 Caffery himself referring in 1943 to a 'general diminution of enthusiasm for the United States' and a 'whispering campaign' that Brazil was 'conquered territory' and that the Americans were there to stay.101 The presence of thousands of Americans in Brazil, the high wages paid both to civilians and servicemen, and the tactlessness, as the State Department and the Ambassador were well aware, with which some of them behaved, were partial explanations of this phenomenon. So was the nationalist fear of American economic and political domination and nervousness lest the United States should seek to retain a permanent control of air and naval bases in the north-east. 102 Neither the President, nor the most important members of the Government, Caffery believed, were affected by these apprehensions, though Aranha and Vargas dropped hints, from time to time, for what they were worth, that they did not wish to see all their eggs in one basket. 103 Soon after President Castillo of Argentina was overthrown in J u n e , 1943, Brazil displayed her independence of judgment and action in recognizing without. delay the government of General Ramirez, but thereafter, though Aranha was pointedly critical, at least in private, of the hard-line policy adopted towards both Argentina and Bolivia by Cordell Hull, Brazil, he declared, would follow the lead of the United States while trying to restrain Hull from provoking the Spanish American peoples of South America, of whose mentality he knew nothing. 104 Aranha was driven to resign as Foreign Minister in August, 1944, at a time when he had been invited to pay an official visit to Washington to confer with Roosevelt on the problems of post-war security which the United States, the United Kingdom, the U.S.S.R. and China were about to discuss at Dumbarton Oaks. H e resigned, as Admiral Ingram expressed it, just when he was about to gather in the fruits of his work towards the international recognition of Brazil's role during the war. 105 But Caffery, at any rate, did not expect his

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resignation to affect Brazil's foreign policy.106 Nor did it: Vargas, in his Independence Day speech on 7 September, carefully stated that Brazil's co-operation with the United Nations would be even closer in the period of reconstruction than it had been during the war and that solidarity with the United States was a Brazilian tradition strengthened by the confidence which President Roosevelt's policy inspired. 107 Brazil had played her part in the United Nations Conference on Food and Agriculture in the spring of 1943, in the establishment of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in the late a u t u m n — i n 1944 she was much the largest contributor to U N R R A in Latin America—and at the Bretton Woods Monetary and Financial Conference in the summer of 1944. At the end of 1943, in addressing the armed forces, Vargas had emphasized that a Brazilian Expeditionary Force to Europe would enhance Brazil's prestige at the peace table, adding that Brazilians would be the most numerous representatives of Latin culture among the victorious nations. 108 He returned to this theme at a luncheon in honour of the Expeditionary Force in May, 1944.109 H e claimed, moreover, that a permanent place should be allotted to a South American country—clearly Brazil—in a World Security Council; 110 and at the time of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference Hull supported and Roosevelt was inclined to favour Brazil's claim. 111 It proved, however, impossible to sustain either at Dumbarton Oaks or at the San Francisco Conference in the spring of 1945. In the end, supported by the United States, Brazil was forced to content herself with election by the first General Assembly of the United Nations in J a n u a r y , 1946, to a two-year seat on the Security Council. 112 VI By this time Vargas was no longer President of Brazil. Under the Constitution of the Estado Novo which he had promulgated on 10 November, 1937, his term of office was theoretically due to end in November, 1943. But, by a series of transitory articles, the Constitution, with its provisions for a Chamber of Deputies, a Federal Council and a Council of National Economy, was to be submitted to a plebiscite, after which the

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President would determine the date of congressional elections, and until Congress met the President would govern by decree. No plebiscite was held; no Congress (and no political parties) existed; and from 1937 to 1945 Vargas continued to govern by decree. Once Brazil had entered the war and was allied with the United States and the United Kingdom, he went so far, while lauding the achievements of the New or National State, as to admit that probably there were faults to correct and that 'What we must now do is to perfect the politico-administrative apparatus, complete the constitutional system, and prepare the country for the normal succession of leaders within the forms of functional democracy which we have set up'. 113 But though, in November, 1942, Vargas thus conceded that the implementation of the Constitution was ultimately desirable, he made it abundantly clear in November, 1943, that the time was not yet ripe. Attacking 'impromptu reformers' and 'democratic prophets', he insisted that it was only when the war was over and an 'environment of peace and order' prevailed that the 'political structure of the nation' could be readjusted and the popular will consulted; 114 and the promise that these measures would then be taken was repeated in April, 1944, and again in September. 115 Clearly there was some substance in the President's contention that the middle of a war was no time for political reconstruction with all the turmoil that this would entail, however glaring the contradiction between foreign and domestic policy, between the fight for freedom abroad and the maintenance of dictatorship at home. But not all Brazilians accepted the principle of the 'unripe time'. In October, 1943, a group of intellectuals in Minas Gerais (the 'impromptu reformers' and 'democratic prophets'), including an ex-President and former members of Congress, issued a manifesto calling for a restoration of democratic government and constitutional liberties, 116 and on 10 November, in Sao Paulo, a demonstration of law students wearing symbolic gags was violently and tragically suppressed by the police. There was unrest, too, in other states and widespread discontent, not political but social, at the rising cost of living. T o this Vargas's reply was an announcement, also on 10 November, of an increase in the salaries of civil servants and members of the armed forces and

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the promulgation of a vast consolidated labour code—labour syndicates were all carefully supervised—which gave various benefits to certain classes of workers; and this was followed, in May, 1944, by the promise of further benefits to come.117 But though, in 1944, there was a rising tide of expectations and a certain grouping of the forces of opposition, there was little sign of any attempt to unseat the Government.118 Aranha indeed resigned in August. So did his friend, Joao Alberto. Aranha, popular enough outside the cabinet, though not with the military, was increasingly unpopular within it, where he was at odds with the Minister of Labour and Justice, Marcondes Filho, and the Minister of War, General Dutra. A ridiculous incident in which, by the orders of the much disliked Chief of Police, Corialano de Araiijo Goes, he was prevented from addressing the Society of the Friends of America, of which he had been re-elected Vice-President but which Dutra regarded as very far to the left, precipitated the break, Aranha later stating that he could no longer work with the group around Vargas.119 His departure caused more disquiet abroad than at home, where a warning note was struck in December by the arrest of a number of members of the Minas group and a still larger number of alleged Communist sympathizers.120 With the defeat of Hitler in sight, however, it was evident, both from a national and an international point of view, that some change in the regime was inevitable. Dutra, who visited the war front in Italy in September, came back convinced from all he had heard and learnt in Europe that with the coming of peace the Estado Novo could not continue unchanged, and Goes Monteiro, the ex-Chief of Staff, returning from the Emergency Advisory Committee for Political Defense set up at Montevideo after the Rio de Janeiro Conference, was of the same opinion.121 Vargas himself, at the traditional banquet given by the armed forces at the end of the year, once again referred to the problems of constitutional organization and declared that Tree and ample consultation of [public] opinion' would take place shortly.122 He had made similar pronouncements before, but none quite so definite, and this time there was to be an end to perpetual postpone-

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ment. But what form would the 'free and ample consultation' take? A plebiscite? Elections for the presidency, the state governors and the federal and state legislatures, and, if so, direct, or, as the Constitution of 1937 specified, indirect elections? Would the Constitution be retained in whole or in part? Or would a constitutional convention be summoned to draw up a new constitution while Vargas still held the presidency? The first Congress of Brazilian Writers, meeting on 26 January, 1945, had few doubts of what ought to be done. It demanded complete freedom of speech, a government elected by 'universal, direct and secret vote' and the liberalization of the regime in accordance with the principles for which the Brazilian Expeditionary Force and the United Nations were fighting.123 Its conclusions were endorsed on 22 February by a former presidential candidate, Jose Americo de Almeida, in an interview published in the Correio da Manha, and, with this, the press, ignoring Government restrictions, enjoyed a field day, Jose Americo pronouncing, in a further interview with 0 Globo, in favour of the presidential candidature of AirBrigadier General Gomes.124 A week later Vargas signed a Constitutional Act. This amended the Constitution of 1937 in various particulars. The idea of a plebiscite vanished, and so did that of indirect elections. A date on which direct presidential, federal and state elections would be held was to be announced within ninety days.125 The Constitutional Act, which appeared to imply the retention of an amended Estado Novo, hardly satisfied the opposition, though the promise of direct elections was welcome enough. But would the promise be kept? In March the President publicly stated that he would not be a future presidential candidate, but that nothing would induce him to abandon his position before his elected successor took over.126 In April, by which time Joao Alberto had replaced the detested Corialano Goes as Chief of Police, he signed an amnesty for political offences and some six hundred persons were released, including the Communist leader, Luiz Carlos Prestes, who had been in prison for eight years,127 and at the end of May a new electoral law was published. It provided for the holding of presidential and congressional elections on 2 December and of state elections in the following May. The ban on political

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parties was lifted, so long as they were national parties.128 Vargas had already indicated that he favoured the somewhat colourless Dutra as his successor, and Dutra was officially adopted in July by the new Social Democratic Party (P.S.D.), whose organization Vargas had himself supervised.129 As a candidate Dutra then resigned his post as Minister of War, Goes Monteiro replacing him. There were now two contenders, Dutra and Gomes, whose support came from the National Democratic Union (U.D.N.), representing, in the main, the old liberal constitutionalists. But in the wings was another organization, the Brazilian Labour Party (P.T.B.), sponsored by some of Vargas's closest supporters, such as the Minister of Labour, Marcondes Filho—Vargas had always been, and was increasingly, alive to the value of working-class support.130 In July, he enjoyed an enormous triumph, as, side by side with General Mark Clark, he welcomed home the first contingent of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force, and the triumph was repeated when further contingents arrived in August. There was the sweet savour of triumph, too, in the appearance of the Queremistas. The Queremistas, so termed from their cry of 'Queremos Getulio' ('We want Getulio'), were drawn from the new Labour party, and, oddly enough, from the revived Communist party as well as from ordinary workingclass demonstrators. While Vargas's critics wanted a new president and then a new constitution, the Queremistas demanded, not presidential elections, but the election of a constituent assembly while Vargas still held the reins of power.131 The distinction was vital, and Vargas's attitude was ambivalent. He appeared neither to encourage nor to discourage the Queremistas, though stating categorically on 28 August that he did not intend to succeed himself in the presidency and that the Queremistas should vote for Dutra, and once again, on 7 September, promising free elections.132 At this point Adolf Berle, who had succeeded Jefferson Caffery as the American Ambassador, began to think that it would be well for him to take a hand, fearing, as he later admitted, that hopes for a freer, more liberal government were being thwarted by the Queremistas.133 On 29 September he seized the opportunity while addressing a meeting of journalists at Petropolis to express the gratification felt in the United

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States at the 'solemn promise' of free elections in Brazil and the 'regular march to constitutional democracy'. Americans, he said, did not believe that such promises were empty words. Nor would the holding of elections impede the reorganization of the Constitution by a constituent assembly. 134 H e had read the speech to Vargas, who later declared that he was tired and had misunderstood Berle's poor Portuguese, and while the opposition applauded, the Government was indignant. 135 Vargas retorted in kind when a great Queremista rally took place outside the presidential palace on 3 October in a final effort to induce him to remain in power and to substitute elections for a constituent assembly for presidential elections. Brazil, he said, needed no lessons in democratic procedure from abroad. T h e election of a constituent assembly was a profoundly democratic act which the people had a right to demand, though 'powerful reactionary forces' opposed it. And, in Delphic language he declared that if the summoning of such an assembly offered a better solution of the electoral problem, and if, in order to realize the popular aspirations, his own withdrawal became necessary, withdraw he would. 136 What the President meant by this cryptic statement he alone knew. But suspicions of his intentions now became widespread. T h e final straws were a modification on 10 October of the Constitutional Act, innocuous on the surface but enhancing the possibilities of political manipulation, and the nomination of Vargas's disreputable brother, Benjamim, as Chief of Police instead ofJ o a o Alberto, who was to become Prefect of the Federal District. Benjamim's reputation was such as to make it seem certain that he was to be used for improper purposes, 137 as, for example, the withdrawal of support from Dutra, the substitution of constituent for presidential elections, and possibly the use of violence. Goes Monteiro and Dutra, with the support of the armed forces, acted. Since Vargas refused to withdraw his brother's nomination, troops, on the 29th, surrounded the presidential palace and Vargas was told that he must go. Late at night he agreed to resign and at two o'clock on the morning of the 30th the Chief Justice was sworn in as Acting President. Vargas and his family were flown by military plane to his estate in Rio Grande do Sul. J o a o Alberto remained Chief of Police. Elections were duly

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held on 2 December, when Dutra was returned with a large majority, the P.T.B. voting for him on Vargas's instructions. He took office in January, 1946, Vargas reappearing in the role of Senator for his home state.138

IV BOLIVIA AND THE WEST COAST I By an executive decree of 7 April, 1943, Bolivia became the second South American state to declare war on the Axis powers, eight months after Brazil and seven before Colombia. The gesture was timed to coincide with the state visit of the VicePresident of the United States, Henry Wallace, then on a tour of various Latin American countries. It was followed on the 27th by the Government's adherence to the Declaration of the United Nations, which President Enrique Peharanda himself signed on 5 May when in Washington as the guest of President Roosevelt. The decree was officially welcomed in the United States, though there were unofficial reservations about the likely reactions of Bolivia's neighbours.1 Among these it was coolly received, except in Brazil. Chile felt that she should have been consulted, since Bolivia was far from the reach of Axis attacks but Chilean ships which carried Bolivian goods were not.2 The feeling also prevailed that Bolivia was stealing a march on her neighbours with an eye on the future peace conference, which she undoubtedly had. Was she proposing to stake out a claim for the recovery of a portion of the Pacific coast, long ago wrested from her by Chile? And other countries were by no means inclined to follow a lead set by 'pobre Bolivia'.3 Nor was the decree universally approved in Bolivia itself. The critics saw it, and the Mobilization of Labour Order which followed, as a means of strengthening the Government's hands. 4 The declaration of war, moreover, had been made without the consent, constitutionally necessary, of Congress, which was not in session. It never was submitted to Congress. But late in November Congress ratified the adherence to the Declaration of the United Nations, and, this being taken as a ratification also of the decree of 7 April, a further formal declaration of war was issued on 4 December.

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Two declarations of war within a period of eight months might seem to be a work of supererogation, even though one was a formal confirmation of the other. But they were at least evidence of the Government's commitment to the United States, a commitment which had become increasingly pronounced after the alleged Nazi conspiracy of July, 1941.5 A Lend-Lease agreement had teen signed in December of that year and in the same month a United States economic mission (the Bohan mission) had arrived in La Paz, its purpose to examine the inadequacies (which were glaring) of Bolivia's road and transport systems, the means of achieving a muchwanted degree of self-sufficiency in foodstuffs, the stimulation of mining—with Malaya and the Netherlands East Indies about to fall into Japanese hands Bolivia became the most important tin producer available to the United Nations—and the practicability of measures of financial co-operation. At the close of the Rio de Janeiro Conference in January, 1942, Bolivia had broken with the Axis powers, and, while the Conference was still meeting, she had reached a financial settlement, highly advantageous to herself, of the prolonged dispute arising from her seizure of the Standard Oil Company's properties in 1937. On the same day a programme of economic, financial and technical aid was agreed upon with the United States, to be carried out by means of a Bolivian Development Corporation whose president would be a Bolivian and the general manager an American. The Export-Import Bank was to furnish an initial credit of $10 millions for agricultural, mining and industrial purposes together with $5j millions for the development of petroleum resources.6 The final report of the Bohan mission went further. It envisaged a long-term programme to be completed in several stages and costing about $80 millions. This embraced the improvement of communications, including the building of a key road from Cochabamba to Santa Cruz de la Sierra, thus completing a link between the Andean plateau and the eastern lowlands,7 the intensification of the production of sugar, rice, cattle, timber and cotton as well as of tin, tungsten, antimony, petroleum, rubber and quinine, and the raising of the standard of public health.8 In the turbulent state of Bolivian politics, however, it was not till towards the end of the year that a decree

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was at last promulgated approving various loan agreements and establishing the Development Corporation. Meanwhile the Metals Reserve Company contracted to buy Bolivian copper and antimony and the Rubber Reserve Company the greater part of Bolivian rubber, the prices paid for tin and tungsten were raised, and an agreement for a health and sanitation programme was signed.9 Peharanda was not himself a party man, nor one of deep convictions.10 But he drew his support principally from a coalition (which did not always coalesce) of Bolivia's traditional parties, representing, in the main, the old governing oligarchy. It was bitterly opposed by such new and radical organizations as the left-wing Partido de Izquierda Revolucionaria (P.I.R.), led by Jose Antonio Arze, and the 'national-socialist' Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (M.N.R.), of which the economist, Victor Paz Estenssoro, was the founding father. These, and other diverse groups, together with an aroused labour movement, were the fruit of what a future distinguished Bolivian ambassador called those two great Bolivian tragedies, the economic collapse caused by the Great Depression and the traumatic experience of the disastrous war with Paraguay from 1932 to 1935.11 Though often deeply divided among themselves—the P.I.R. favoured the break with the Axis, the M.N.R. did not—the parties of the opposition, strongly entrenched in the Chamber of Deputies, particularly after the Congressional elections of May, 1942, harassed the Government on almost every conceivable issue—the Standard Oil settlement, the rubber and tin purchase agreements, the Export-Import Bank loans, which an M.N.R. spokesman declared meant that Bolivia was regarded as a colony of the United States,12 and even, on the ground that the President was conducting a foreign policy of his own, a meeting between Peharanda and President Castillo of Argentina in September, 1942, when the first sleeper was laid of a railway line to connect the Argentine railway system at Yacuiba with the Bolivian at Villa Montes.13 With the evident intention of controlling the activities of the radical and left-wing parties and of suppressing labour agitation—strikes and demonstrations had been increasing in number—the Government issued a stringent security law in

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April, 1942, revoked, such was the tempest of indignation, four months later.14 Decree or no decree, however, strikes continued, among school teachers, linotype operators and railway workers, all demanding higher wages to meet the still rising cost of living, and culminating in unrest among the newly unionized miners in the great tin-mining districts of Potosi, Catavi, Llallagua and Oruro. The Potosi and Oruro disputes were settled peacefully. But the Government refused to negotiate with the Catavi workers. Miners' leaders were arrested, the military authorities were instructed to maintain order, and a state of siege was declared. Soldiers and miners clashed on 21 December, when a number of miners were killed. Later on the same day the troops opened fire on a mass demonstration which included women and children. Hundreds died in a major catastrophe which shocked Latin America. The Government, panic-stricken, sought to lay the blame on the P.I.R., whom it accused of fomenting subversive activities, in conjunction, improbably enough, with Axis agents. The P.I.R., denying the charge, attributed the disorders to the misery of the miners, as did Lombardo Toledano, who had visited the country in November. But for the 'massacre' itself the Government could not escape the ultimate responsibility.15 The Catavi affair evoked protests from leaders of all parties. It occasioned the appointment of a Joint Bolivian-United States Labour Commission (the Magruder Commission) to investigate working conditions both in the mines (which the Secretary of the Patiho mines declared were the best in the country)16 and elsewhere,17 and the opposition parties— though the P.I.R. was 'all but outlawed'18—never allowed it to be forgiven or forgotten. The President's declaration of war in April, 1943, after Congress had adjourned, and his subsequent visits abroad, not only to the United States but to Canada and to several Latin American countries, created a diversion. But when Congress again convened in August the venom was unconcealed. In September a motion of censure on the Government was lost in the Chamber of Deputies by only one vote, and it was the M.N.R., rather than the P.I.R., that stole the thunder. A plot was already being hatched—and others were in the offing—for the overthrow of the Peharanda

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regime between Paz Estenssoro, representing the M.N.R., and Major Gualberto Villarroel,19 the leading light in a secret lodge of young military officers, the Razon de Patria, or RADEPA,20 formed from veterans of the Chaco War; and a Draconian Security Decree which Penaranda issued on 13 December, after his second declaration of war on the Axis, provided the occasion for the long simmering revolt. The Decree, which was followed by the closure of the German Club and of the newspaper, La Calk, notorious for its pro-Axis and pro-M.N.R. leanings, and by the postponement of municipal elections, amounted, according to the President of the Chamber of Deputies, to an inoffensive war against the Axis and an effective one against the Bolivian people.21 On the 20th Villarroel and the young officers of the military lodge, with the support of the M.N.R., struck in a lightning and almost bloodless coup d'etat.22 Betrayed by the head of his traffic police, Major Alberto Taborga, Penaranda was packed off to Chile. A military-civilian Junta took control with Villarroel as President, Paz Estenssoro as Minister of Finance and one of the more extreme members of the M.N.R., Augusto Cespedes, who was later to write one of Latin America's most distinguished novels, as Secretary. The coup d'etat took the nation—and the Americas—wholly by surprise. Most of the military members of the new Junta, including Villarroel himself, were completely unknown. Their affinities, so far as they could be defined, lay with the supporters of the late Colonel Busch, whose regime of 'military socialism' had come to an abrupt end with his suicide in 1939.23 Of the M.N.R. members Paz Estenssoro, the most moderate, had recently returned from Argentina with nothing but praise for a military dictatorship which maintained relations with the Axis and which was increasingly ill-regarded in the United States. His party had opposed the settlement of the Standard Oil dispute, the economic agreements with the United States and Bolivia's adherence to the Declaration of the United Nations. Aggressively nationalistic and authoritarian in outlook, it was highly inimical to the great Patiho, Hochschild and Aramayo mining interests (a hostility which was reciprocated), and was anxious in general to improve social conditions but entertained no very clear-cut

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ideas of what the reforms should be. Radical by inclination, it contained both a moderate socialist and an outright fascist wing, which had pinned its faith to a German victory.24 Whatever the prior predilections of its members, however, the Junta was forced to adjust itself to the realities of the international situation, and it lost no time in declaring its intention, in a note given to the Papal Nuncio, who was the Dean of the Diplomatic Corps, and by other assurances, both public and private, of honouring the international commitments of the Peharanda regime and giving its unreserved support to the United Nations.25 But were such assurances to be taken at their face value? Two former Foreign Ministers, Alberto Ostria Gutierrez in Santiago and Eduardo Anze Matienzo in Lima, promptly denounced the coup d'etat as Nazi or Argentine inspired, and their views carried weight with the Chilean and Peruvian Goverments. Dr. Oswaldo Aranha held similar views in Brazil.26 Jose Antonio Arze, the P.I.R. leader, who was then in Mexico, telegraphed to Cordell Hull to warn him against hasty recognition of the Junta27—a warning that was quite unnecessary. At his press conference on the 22nd Hull had already raised the question whether any outside influence 'unfriendly to the Allied cause had played any part in the revolution', adding that 'it must never be forgotten that the hemisphere is at present under sinister and subversive attack by the Axis, assisted by some elements from within the hemisphere itself—a plain reference to Argentina.28 Hull's doubts were not lessened by a report from the American Ambassador in La Paz that it was probable but not provable that the M.N.R. had received some slight financial assistance from German and Japanese sources and some support from Argentina. The assurances of co-operation from the Junta, he wrote, had to be viewed 'in the light of previous records of its members which are not remarkable for any consistency in support of either the United Nations or the United States'.29 In Montevideo the Emergency Advisory Committee for Political Defense recommended on the 24th that American Governments which had declared war on the Axis powers, or had broken relations with them, should not, for the duration of the war, recognize without consultation any government instituted by force,30 and resolved, on 5 January, 1944, that this

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novel procedure should be applied to Bolivia, Argentina doing the Junta no good by recognizing it on the 3rd. On the 8th the State Department circulated to the republics concerned a confidential memorandum (whose contents were later leaked to the press),31 indicting both the military members of the Junta and Paz Estenssoro and other members of the M.N.R. Based on rumour, fact and very doubtful interpretations of fact,32 it was designed to show that the new regime was connected with Nazi groups in Argentina and Germany and was unworthy of confidence.33 On the 22nd the Uruguayan Government announced that they did not recognize the Junta. The State Department followed suit on the 24th, the British Government on the 25th, and so did every Latin American state except, of course, Argentina. Individually and collectively members of the Junta denied the allegations made against them, Paz Estenssoro repudiating the accusation that he had ever received money or arms from Argentine nationalists or Nazi elements, Villarroel and his Foreign Minister, Jose Tamayo, protesting the sincerity of their desire to co-operate closely with the United States and the United Nations. T cannot understand,' declared the President, 'why we are not believed.'34 The reason, namely the composition of the Junta, was privately made plain enough by the State Department to the Bolivian representative in Washington, and publicly by the State Department's indictment.35 Economic sanctions were not imposed, though there were fears that they might be.36 Tin purchases were continued on a day-to-day basis—large stock-piles had already been accumulated in the United States though, owing to a diversion of Patiho ores to the new Texas refinery, much smaller ones in Britain. But Lend-Lease supplies were suspended and the contracts for the purchase of copper and antimony, which expired in January and February, were not renewed. In the hope of facilitating recognition the two most extreme members of the M.N.R.—La Razon was allowed to call them 'hot-heads', while Paz Estenssoro's name for them was 'medio locus'37—resigned from the Junta early in February, though only on condition that they were replaced by other, less 'hot-headed' members; and Major Taborga, who had acquired a taste for conspiracy and was reported to have been plotting to take over

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the presidency, was offered the choice between prison and resignation.38 He chose resignation. In March the Foreign Minister, Jose Tamayo, also resigned. To the Junta's annoyance he had been engaged in advocating to Argentina and Chile the formation of a 'southern bloc' in opposition to the United States—a proposal decisively rejected by Chile.39 He was replaced by Enrique Baldivieso, a respected Socialist who had been sympathetic to the revolution but was said to have made his appointment conditional on the removal of the M.N.R. members of the cabinet and on earnest efforts to secure a rapprochement with the United States.40 He hastened to emphasize this last point by declaring publicly his belief in continental solidarity and his opposition to the idea of forming regional blocs. A few days later the Junta issued a decree calling for elections to be held on 2 July for a Constituent Assembly; a political amnesty was proclaimed, under which Jose Antonio Arze, of the P.I.R., who had returned to Bolivia and been imprisoned on the charge of conspiring against the state, was released; the press was declared free (though censorship was soon re-established); and on 2 April Paz Estenssoro and the two recently appointed M.N.R. members of the cabinet resigned, ostensibly on the ground that they wished to take part in the coming electoral campaign. The Junta had its reward, though a delayed reward. Early in May, with some of the Latin American states growing restive, Cordell Hull sent Avra Warren, the new Ambassador to Panama, to observe conditions in Bolivia at first hand. On the 9th he reported that the Junta had decided to detain and expel all Axis nationals from the country, and on the 19th 83 Germans and Japanese were deported by air to United States internment camps. Four days later, leaving Bolivia, he recommended the immediate recognition of the Junta on the ground that no M.N.R. members now occupied any important official position in Bolivia and that the regime had shown its support of the United Nations both by its measures against Axis nationals and by maintaining supplies of strategic materials.41 His report was circulated to the interested Latin American governments, and, after hasty consultations, recognition followed not only by the other Latin American states but, on 23 June, by the United States and the United Kingdom. Elec-

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tions for the Constituent Assembly were duly held, with only two people killed and 51 injured, on 2 July.42 Warren had been assured by Baldivieso that the M.N.R. would obtain only a few seats. It won, not a few, but a plurality. The Assembly organized, Villarroel was formally elected to the presidency. For the next five months his predominantly military cabinet—Baldivieso resigned in August, to be temporarily succeeded by Victor Andrade, later Ambassador in Washington—ruled without any overt participation of the M.N.R., though from time to time the party, or Paz Estenssoro, was consulted. Villarroel was essentially a man of moderation, but he proved to be incapable of restraining his young military officers and the police, and the regime was a regime of violence. Political prisoners had been tortured by the police and the soldiers soon after the fall of Peharanda. The violence now spread from the prisons and the barracks to the streets. In July an attempt, Government-inspired, was made to assassinate Jose Antonio Arze, who, besides being the leader of the P.I.R., was also a deputy-elect.43 Gravely wounded, he was fortunate to be flown to the United States. The mine owner, Mauricio Hochschild, was seized by the National Director of Police, threatened with death and then mysteriously released, escaping from the country as quickly as possible.44 A Liberal deputy from Sucre was set upon by three officers in September, and in November an abortive revolt at Oruro was followed by a blood-bath. Not merely at Oruro, where opponents of the Government, whether implicated in the revolt or merely alleged to be implicated, were shot in haste and without trial, but at La Paz also prominent politicians, including three former cabinet ministers, were summarily and secretly executed; and the torturings continued.45 The outrages created so great a revulsion of feeling in Bolivia and so great a scandal in the Americas that the Government was held up to general execration. Seeking some sort of popular support, it turned in haste to the M.N.R., and on the last day of December Paz Estenssoro once again became Minister of Finance, two other members of the M.N.R. entering the cabinet with him.46 Out of office the M.N.R. had been building up its strength among the mine workers—the Federation Sindicalde Trabajadores

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Mineros, organized in June, was a particular object of its attention. But though it was beginning to formulate a reforming programme, little was in fact accomplished when it returned to power, more especially since Paz Estenssoro's own attention was concentrated on the state of the national finances. An important National Peasant Congress was held in May, 1945, however, and some attempts were made, not very effectively, to improve the lot of the agricultural labourers. For the rest the Government was represented both at the Inter-American Conference on Problems of War and Peace at Mexico City and at the subsequent San Francisco Conference. It established diplomatic relations with the U.S.S.R. and Italy and severed them with Spain. The Constituent Congress, after lengthy and often bitter debates, finally produced a Constitution which was little more than a simulacrum of that of 1938. But by its addiction to violence and repression the Government prepared for itself a fearful retribution. It had antagonized not only the old traditional parties, with whom even the P.I.R. joined in an Anti-Fascist Democratic Front, but, in La Paz itself, the urban workers, the students and the middle classes. There was an attempted revolt in June, 1946, barbarously suppressed, and a strike both of school teachers and of university students early in July. These were followed by a series of demonstrations which the Anti-Fascist Front had no difficulty in turning into a mass revolt—a revolt not of soldiers but of citizens. On 21 July the mob broke into the presidential palace where the distracted army ministers and police had left the President almost defenceless. Shot and thrown out of a window, he was hanged on a lamp-post together with the only two men who had remained with him.47 Paz Estenssoro and his associates, whom Villarroel, in a last ineffectual hope of calming the populace, had dismissed from his cabinet on the previous night, fled to exile.48 But the detested Chiefs of the National and City Police shared the same fate as Villarroel. II The dark shadows of the Chaco War, with its legacy of bitterness, frustration and revulsion against the traditional ruling oligarchy, including the Patifio, Hochschild and Aramayo

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mining groups, had overhung Bolivia. T h e shadow of her war with Peru in 1941, in which she was quickly defeated, overhung Ecuador. A peace had been patched up at the time of the Rio de Janeiro Conference. But it was a peace which left Ecuador shorn of a large portion of territory which she claimed to the east of the Andes, thereby curtailing her access to the Amazon and confining her eastern territory to a region bordering the foothills of the Andes, sparsely populated by Indians and believed to be of little economic value. It deprived her, also, of a small but rich piece of territory along the Zurumilla River, in the neighbourhood of Tumbes, fronting the Gulf of Guayaquil. 4 9 President Carlos Arroyo del Rio and his Foreign Secretary put the best interpretation on this settlement that they could. It was, they said, a sacrifice made by Ecuador in the interests of Pan American unity and solidarity 50 —the President, when he visited the United States at the end of the year, was hailed as an 'Apostle of Pan Americanism'. 5 1 But Ecuadoreans of all political persuasions felt betrayed. The news of the ironically-termed 'Protocol of Peace, Friendship and Boundaries' was received with anger and indignation. Students demonstrated in Quito. T h e Protocol was denounced as a 'capitulation' and the Government held responsible for a national humiliation. 52 There were subversive movements and conspiracies in March and April and a coup d'etat was openly attempted in May when the police frustrated an attack on the presidential palace, in which students participated, and some fifty persons were arrested. T o add to the administration's troubles it was faced with the rehabilitation of the province of El Oro, which the Peruvians had occupied, and with the devastation and loss of life caused by an earthquake which affected the coastal provinces and the President's home town of Guayaquil. Inevitably the Government turned to the United States for moral and economic support. Had it not sacrificed, or so it could be said, Ecuador's own national interests for the sake of a greater unity? H a d it not broken off relations with the Axis at the close of the Rio de Janeiro Conference, frozen the funds of countries at war with any American state, 53 closed the Transocean news agency, evacuated Axis nationals from the

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strategically important Santa Elena peninsula, granted bases to the United States in the Galapagos Islands and co-operated with her in the construction of a joint army and naval-air base at Salinas, near the harbour of Guayaquil?54 And was it not, by so doing, helping to guard the outposts of the Panama Canal and so of the United States herself? The reward duly followed—a United States Treasury loan in February for the stabilization of the currency,55 assistance from the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, Nelson Rockefeller, in the promotion of sanitary works in Quito and in the rehabilitation of El Oro province, a Lend-Lease agreement in April,56 and the establishment in June of an Ecuadorean Development Corporation, similar to the Bolivian Development Corporation, with an Ecuadorean president and an American manager and a capital of $10 millions, half of it advanced by the Export-Import Bank. It was broadly concerned with the development of natural resources, the encouragement of industry and the improvement of communications, but its initial attention was focused on the production of such wanted strategic materials as rubber, fibres, vegetable oils, quinine and balsa wood, the Rubber Reserve Company agreeing in July to buy all rubber not required for Ecuadorean internal consumption.57 But though Arroyo del Rio had felt free to visit the United States in November and December, and though there were no further economic misfortunes, the Treasury even acquiring a modest surplus both in 1942 and 1943, and exports, particularly of rubber, balsa wood and rice, to the United States, increasing, nothing could eradicate the President's personal unpopularity. By the end of 1943 it was becoming daily more obvious that, though, because of the disturbed state of the country, he exercised extraordinary powers, he could not long survive. Waiting in the wings, in exile first in Chile and then, in 1944, just inside the Colombian border with Ecuador, was his old opponent, the redoubtable and spellbinding exPresident Jose Maria Velasco Ibarra. 58 Presidential elections were due to take place in June, 1944. In the late summer of 1943 an Alianza Democrdtica Ecuatoriana (A.D.E.), a coalition mainly of left-wing parties, the Socialists, the Communists, the Vanguardia Revolucionaria Socialista, and the Democratic

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Front, but including also the Independent Liberals, adopted Dr. Velasco as their candidate. It was by no means certain that the Conservatives—Dr. Velasco had begun life as a Conservative before he became a Liberal and a dictator—and such right-wing bodies as the Asociacion Revolucionaria Nacional Ecuatoriana (A.R.N.E.) might not also turn to the 'Great Absentee',59 whose candidacy Arroyo del Rio declared to be illegal and who was not allowed to return to the country. Arroyo del Rio's own nominee was an elderly Senator of blameless mediocrity, who was, like himself, a Radical Liberal. There was no election. On 29 January, 1944, the second anniversary of the Rio Protocol, the A.D.E. issued a manifesto denouncing the agreement, root and branch. In May the Government announced that most of the outstanding points still at issue with Peru in the determination of the boundary line in the coastal region had been settled (somewhat, it seemed, to the advantage of Peru).60 Within a few days it had ceased to exist. Late in the evening of 28 May the military garrison at Guayaquil launched a rebellion. The headquarters of the Carabineros, or military police—the army's hated rivals—were stormed, those of the Government's candidate for the presidency were destroyed, and a provisional government was set up in Velasco Ibarra's name. The rebellion at once spread to Quito. Here there was no bloodshed, as in the rival city of Guayaquil, but a general strike was proclaimed and on the 29th Arroyo del Rio resigned. In Quito as in Guayaquil the A.D.E. formed a provisional government in Velasco Ibarra's name. On the 31st he himself arrived in the capital to assume the presidency of the Republic on 1 June. He had adopted the programme of the A.D.E., which involved the acceptance of 'true democracy', assistance to agriculture, industry, labour and sanitary works, and collaboration with the other American republics and with the United Nations.61 Appointing a ministry of all the talents, Conservatives, Liberals and Socialists (but not Communists), he announced that elections for a Constituent Assembly would be held on 23 July, and, after hasty consultation among the American republics, he was recognized without delay. The Assembly, meeting on 10 August, immediately elected

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Velasco Ibarra as Constitutional President. He was, he declared, in his inaugural address, a leftist, but, as head of Government, at once placed himself in the centre.62 But, since the Assembly, dominated by the A.D.E., moved steadily to the left, thereby forfeiting public confidence, while Velasco Ibarra became more conservative, his relations with it rapidly deteriorated. While it was still engaged in passionate debates, the Government, acting upon the advice of the United States, declared war on Japan (but not on Germany) on 2 February, 1945, making the declaration retrospective, quaintly enough, to 7 December, 1941. It also acceded to the Declaration of the United Nations,63 and later, in June, entered upon the establishment of diplomatic relations with the U.S.S.R. By this time the Assembly had framed a new and highly idiosyncratic Constitution (Ecuador's fourteenth), which the President signed under protest in March. The Assembly then adjourned amid a storm of unpopularity. Its Constitution survived for little more than a year, when Velasco Ibarra annulled it. He himself was removed from office in August, 1947 (when Ecuador had four presidents in four weeks), once more departing into exile but returning to the presidency in 1952 and again in 1960 and 1968. Ill For Ecuador the war with Peru was a national humiliation, for Peru a national'triumph; and while, in Ecuador, President Arroyo del Rio gained nothing but discredit, in Peru President Manuel Prado basked in the sunshine of popularity. There had been moments of tension in which each country suspected the United States of favouring the other.64 But these were transient misconceptions. More enduring were the fears which each entertained of the intentions of Japan. Ecuador not only allowed the United States to construct defensive and offensive installations in the Galapagos Islands (and recruited labourers to build them) but permitted also the formation of an army and naval-air base at Salinas. Peru, on the other side of the Gulf of Guayaquil, welcomed the siting of a United States coastal battery at Talara. Some 300 officers and men, with later reinforcements, arrived there on 12 March, 1942, and

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remained for rather more than a year. The existing airport was enlarged. A system of naval patrol was inaugurated by the Peruvian navy and Peruvian troops were sent to guard the port, as well as the nearby British oilfields at Lobitos and El Alto, in co-operation with the Americans, the Peruvian air force also participating.65 These were not the first Peruvian security and anti-Axis measures, nor the last. The Transocean news agency had been shut down in 1941 and the property of the Lufthansa airline attached. Immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbour Japanese funds had been frozen and trade with Japan prohibited except under licence.66 At the Rio de Janeiro Conference the Government had supported the decision to sever diplomatic and commercial relations with the Axis powers. Thereafter Axis clubs, schools and institutions were closed, as were the two remaining Japanese newspapers. In April the President was empowered to prohibit all financial and commercial transactions with persons resident in Axis or Axis-occupied countries and to arrange for the expropriation and administration of Axis interests in Peru. The rigour with which these latter measures were applied remained a matter of doubt, but in July, 1943, it was reported that nearly three thousand businesses had been affected.67 German as well as Japanese funds were frozen. Axis nationals were removed not only from such important coastal areas as Talara and Chimbote, but, inland, from the neighbourhood of the great Cerro de Pasco mining complex,68 and between April, 1942,'and June, 1943, large numbers ofJapanese and Germans were deported to the United States for ultimate repatriation,69 though very many, of course, remained. And whereas in August, 1941, the Chamber of Deputies had expressed its approval of the Atlantic Charter, the Government formally adhered to it in February, 1943,70 severing also relations with Vichy France. In July, 1941, the President had spoken of a 'dynamic neutrality', by which he meant, he said, the mobilization of Peruvian resources for the conservation of peace in the western hemisphere.71 In May, 1942, during a triumphant visit to Washington, he promised that these resources would be mobilized for the common defence of America so long as the war-time emergency lasted.72 The Metals Reserve Company

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had already contracted in October, 1941, to buy the exportable surpluses of Peruvian minerals not absorbed in the normal trade of the hemisphere or sold to Great Britain—an arrangement renewed on terms more favourable to Peruvian mining interests in August, 1943;73 and Prado's state visit to Washington had been preceded not only by a Lend-Lease agreement to the value of $29 millions74—some war materials and 50 aeroplanes were quickly dispatched to Peru—but by a series of important arrangements embodied in an exchange of notes between the Peruvian Finance Minister, David Dasso, and Cordell Hull. These provided, inter alia, for the establishment by Peru of a Peruvian Amazon Corporation to encourage industry and agriculture in the Amazon basin (where Iquitos was an Atlantic port for Peru), more especially the production of rubber, cinchona bark, tea, tobacco, cacao and timber; for an Export-Import Bank credit of $25 millions to assist in the acquisition in the United States of materials required for public works and for agricultural, mining and industrial projects; for the purchase by the Rubber Reserve Company of all surplus Peruvian rubber for a period of five years and by the Commodity Credit Corporation of surplus cotton, provided that the area under cultivation was not increased; for the establishment of an agricultural experimental station at Tingo Maria, a major point on the Huallaga river on the route from the coast through Cerro de Pasco to Pucallpa and Iquitos; and for the services of United States experts in highway engineering, soil erosion, coal mining and tea processing.75 As a result the Rubber Reserve Company made a substantial grant towards the collection of wild rubber—a hazardous occupation in which Peru's war-time experience was similar to Brazil's—and the Defense Supplies Corporation undertook, in February, 1943, to provide cargo planes to transport the rubber which had been collected, said to have been little more than a ton at this time.76 The Corporation also agreed in 1943 to buy cinchona bark, to provide technical assistance in surveying zones suitable for its production and financial assistance in the establishment of a State Quinine Laboratory.77 By an earlier agreement in 1942 Peru undertook to expand the cultivation of flax and the United States to buy the 1942 and 1943 crops.78

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The Dasso-Hull arrangements, followed by a reciprocal trade agreement, were warmly welcomed in Peru both by Congress and the press. Their primary object was to secure the fullest exploitation of Peruvian strategic resources for the sake of the war effort. But even though arrangements for the payment of the Peruvian External Consolidated Debt still hung fire, the United States was also concerned with providing finance to strengthen the country's economy. The development of the iron ore deposits near Chimbote, the creation of a steel industry there and the construction of a proper port were particular objects of attention. A mixed PeruvianUnited States commission examined the extensive sanitation and related works which would have to be undertaken, mainly at the expense of the United States, and the cost of the steel plant itself, it was anticipated, would be met out of the $25 million Export-Import Bank loan. The Government, in June, created the Corporation Peruana del Santa, the instrument for the construction of a hydro-electric plant on the Santa river to provide power for the steel industry. But the Chimbote scheme turned out to be more expensive than had been supposed and its completion was long delayed.79 Of a different order was the creation in May, 1943, of the Servicio Co-operativo Interamericano de Production de Alimentos, the United States providing technical assistance in crop-planning, bringing new lands into cultivation, supplying tools, machinery and insecticides, facilitating loans to small farmers and undertaking research work in nutrition.80 Peru, under the Prado administration, did not fare too badly. What was lost on the swings in trade to Europe and Japan (Britain continuing to take a proportion of cotton) was made up on the roundabouts in trade to the United States, Chile, Brazil and Argentina. Japanese successes in the Far East revived the demand for Peruvian sugar, forest plants and rubber. Minerals enjoyed an assured market, and large numbers of small home industries sprang up. Where the shoe pinched for the poorer classes was in the continued rise in the cost of living and in shortages of foodstuffs such as rice, meat, potatoes and flour. Charcoal, for cooking purposes, was also in short supply.81 It was a shock to the President that when the Vice-President of the United States visited Lima in April,

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1943, the crowd in the Plaza de Armas greeted him enthusiastically, but, when the President himself tried to speak, shouted 'We are hungry' and 'We want rice'. 82 T h e probability of these shortages and of a general rise in prices had indeed been foreseen in September, 1939, when laws had been enacted in an attempt to control such problems. They proved, however, to be ineffective.83 Peruvians were all too familiar with the cornering of supplies, the black market and profiteering. The demonstration in the Plaza de Armas shocked the President. As a result, more stringent action was taken, the newly created Ministry of Agriculture making strenuous efforts to ensure supplies, and, in theory at least, a far-reaching system of price controls and of the equitable distribution of the main foodstuffs came into operation. Periodic shortages, however, continued to occur and it was not till 1944 that a temporary improvement was apparent. 8 4 A second shock occurred later in 1943 in the form of a manifesto from Arequipa—the birthplace of the last two Peruvian revolutions—describing the country as a democracy only in name, denouncing corruption in high places, and demanding greater freedom of the press and a guarantee of free presidential and congressional elections in 1945.85 Since elections in Peru cast their long shadow before, the manifesto could be regarded as no more than an opening move in the game of politics. But it could also be interpreted as the first sign of overt, constitutional opposition to the President, as distinct from the illegal or underground opposition of the ultra-conservative, and indeed fascist, wing of the party calling itself the Union Revolucionaria, most of whose members were in exile,86 and of the much more important Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (A.P.R.A.), whose leader, Victor Raul Haya de la Torre, was officially in hiding (though his hiding place was well-known). A.P.R.A. had strong support in northern Peru and among the emergent middle sectors of society87 and was highly critical of Prado. But it had discarded its earlier revolutionary philosophy and its addiction to violence, had abandoned its hostility to the United States, no longer advocated the separation of Church and State, supported the United Nations and posed as a party of moderation. It had previously been excluded from the polls because it claimed to be an international movement. But,

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having changed its tactics, it changed also its name, becoming, in August, 1944, the Partido del Pueblo. The ban on its activities was lifted in May, 1945. As for those one-time enemies of the Government, the Communists, they had proclaimed their support for Prado in 1942 and were actually represented in the Chamber of Deputies. Prado himself, an ex-university professor and one-time president of the Central Reserve Bank, was the heir to the dictatorial, yet in several respects progressive, regime of exPresident General Oscar Benavides, who had become Ambassador to Argentina. Less formidable and also less authoritarian than his predecessor, he represented, as Benavides had done, the wealthy landowners, the sugar and cotton planters, and the banking and industrial interests, supported, of course, by the military. Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia all shared similar ethnic, regional and social problems. Explosive forces lay beneath the surface of each. But only in Bolivia did they ignite during the war years. There was nothing peculiarly distinctive or abnormal about the Ecuadorean revolution of 1944. And, except for an abortive 'general strike', undertaken without enthusiasm in late September, 1944, mainly confined to Lima and Callao and of slight significance, political life in Peru followed, to all outward appearance, a calm and peaceful course to the end of Prado's term of office. There had, of course, been other strikes. But Prado's general attitude to labour was conciliatory; there was no unemployment; and the standard of living of the urban workers, though deplorably low, was far better than it had been twenty years earlier.88 The elections took place in June, 1945. Before they were held and while the candidates were still manoeuvering for position, Peru, on 11 February, 1945, declared war on the Axis Powers, acting, as Ecuador had done, in her declaration of war against Japan, on advice from the United States.89 Three days later she signed the United Nations Declaration. Despite a spate of rumours as to who might or might not stand, there were only two candidates for the presidency. Of these General Eloy Ureta, the commander of the Peruvian forces in the war with Ecuador, stood as a right-wing candidate, supported, among other groups by the Union Revolucionaria. The other was Dr. Jose Bustamente y Rivero,

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lately the Peruvian Ambassador to Bolivia, a native of Arequipa, and a man of unquestioned integrity, who belonged neither to the right nor to the left. Bustamente was believed to have been one of the persons responsible for the Arequipa manifesto. He became the candidate of the Frente Democrdtico National, founded in Arequipa in July, 1944, and, in a singular conjunction offerees, the now supposedly moderate A.P.R.A., Benavides himself (who had returned from Buenos Aires in July, 1944, and died a year later), and the Communists all threw him their support, and so, finally, well aware of the changing temper of the times, did Prado. Bustamente proved to be enormously popular, receiving twice the number of votes cast for Ureta, the Apristas, at the same time, gaining a preponderant number of seats in the Senate and the Chamber. A.P.R.A. had at last attained a degree of power, and in power abused it. Bustamente was overthrown by a military coup d'etat in 1948 and Haya de la Torre spent the next six years as a refugee in the Colombian Embassy. IV Peru, and still more Bolivia and Ecuador, were properly to be described as democracies only in name, and President Prado himself was unusual among the Peruvian oligarchy or haute bourgeoisie in his 'passionate' support of the Allied cause. 90 Chile, by contrast, enjoyed the reputation of being both in spirit and practice one of the most democratic of Latin American states 91 and fundamentally pro-Allied. Yet, in the eight weeks after Pearl Harbour, Chile was one of the two Latin American countries—the other was Argentina—which neither joined the United States as a belligerent nor, as an 'associated nation', severed relations with the Axis powers. Both Chile and Argentina had agreed at the Havana meeting of American foreign ministers in 1940 that an attack on one American state would be an attack on all American states. Both had accepted the recommendations and resolutions of the Rio de Janeiro Conference in J a n u a r y , 1942, on the severance of relations, diplomatic, commercial and financial, with J a p a n , Germany and Italy, the suppression of subversive activities, the control of dangerous aliens and the elimination of radio-

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telephone and radio-telegraphic communications with the aggressor states. And however cautiously and indecisively the recommendation on the severance of diplomatic relations had been framed, neither could escape from what were, in effect, moral, though not legal, responsibilities. There was no political understanding between the two countries. Even in the crisis provoked by the war Argentina would not accede to Chile's wish, except on unreasonable terms, to fortify the Magellan Straits,92 whose importance would have been greatly enhanced had the Panama Canal been endangered; and Chile had no wish to yield to Argentine blandishments to form a southern bloc as a counter-weight to the United States. But she did fear for the safety of her Pacific islands, the Juan Fernandez archipelago93 and Easter Island, of her merchant fleet and of the power plants, service installations and copper and nitrate ports, where military surveillance was quickly established,94 on her exposed northern coast. The United States had made it plain that she could not supply the number of bombers, pursuit planes and antiaircraft guns which Chile would have liked,95 but in March, 1942, she did provide four coastal artillery batteries, the Minister of Defence denying that hundreds or even thousands of American troops had arrived with them,96 and, later, she provided also fifteen advanced training planes. But there was no such air cover as was in part afforded to Ecuador and Peru by American installations in the Galapagos Islands, at Salinas and at Talara; and till the repulse of Japanese advance in the South Pacific, the fear of Japanese naval and air hit-and-run attacks against Chile, a fear which the then Foreign Minister, Juan B. Rossetti, had expressed at the Rio de Janeiro Conference,97 was perfectly genuine. The uncertain outlook in the Pacific provided one reason for the maintenance of Chilean neutrality. The provisional nature of the Chilean Government in the early months of 1942 supplied another. President Aguirre Cerda had died on 25 November, 1941; presidential elections on 1 February resulted in the defeat of the right-wing and forceful ex-President Carlos Ibahez and the substantial victory of Juan Antonio Rios, who belonged to the more conservative wing of the same party, the Radical Party, and came from the same social stratum as his

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predecessor. His election ensured the retention in general of the policies inaugurated by Chile's one-time Popular Front,98 and Rios enjoyed a wide spectrum of support from its old constituents. But it was not till 2 April that he took office. In the meantime the Acting President, Dr. Geronimo Mendez, hesitated to take decisive action. Timidity, an 'extreme caution', were the order of the day." Even the sinking of the Chilean (ex-Danish) freighter, Tolten, off New York, with the loss of all her crew but one, on 13 March, though it caused immediate demonstrations of anger, was passed off lightly,100 with apologies from the three Axis ambassadors; and the mood thus illustrated was not merely the mood of the provisional government. It was the mood of the press, which tended to argue that neutrality was perfectly compatible with Pan American solidarity, that the United States could afford no protection to Chile, and that Chile, which was supplying copper and other strategic minerals to the United States—an agreement had been signed with the Metals Reserve Company on 29 January101—could contribute more to hemisphere defence by not breaking with the Axis than by doing so.102 It was the attitude of the public at large, with notable exceptions, including, as a group, the Communists and also the Chilean Confederation of Workers (C.T.Ch.), and, as it turned out, it was the attitude of President Rios and of his new Foreign Minister, Ernesto Barros Jarpa. Non-belligerent status had been accorded to the American states at war. But a 'moderate prudence',103 to use Rios's own expression, when he opened the regular sessions of Congress on 21 May, went no further than that and the promise that Chilean territory and territorial waters would not be used either directly or indirectly for activities prejudicial to other American countries.104 But was promise matched by performance? In August and September, 1941, the Government had been forced reluctantly to acknowledge the existence of a 'fifth column' when it detained for interrogation on charges of alleged activities against the state a number of Germans in the neighbourhood of Valdivia and Puerto Montt (where the German 'colonies' were old established) and others in Santiago and Valparaiso. Some were quickly released. The rest were to be tried in Valdivia, where the presiding judge, on the evidence sub-

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mitted to him, signed a report in December describing in detail the organization of a local Nazi party directed from the German Embassy. The revelations were such, he felt, that the case should be referred to the Military Court in Valdivia. It then became entangled in complicated legal wrangles and was still undetermined at the end of 1943. No fewer than 175 Germans were involved. Of these, some had died, some had escaped to Argentina, and all the rest were at liberty.105 The Senate, in October, 1941, had debated the question of Nazi activities at some length, but to no effect, and it was only in May, 1942, that the Chamber of Deputies approved, by a large majority, the appointment of a Committee to enquire into such activities.106 The Committee started work in June, amid a certain amount of contention, but its investigations, such as they were, roused little public comment. The press indignantly denied that Chile could be a focus of Nazi intrigue,107 and the official attitude was one of extreme circumspection. There was nothing unduly restrained about a confidential memorandum on espionage activities in Chile which the State Department submitted to the Chilean Government on 30 June. This was based on telegrams and messages, whose codes had been broken, from the German Embassy in Santiago and a secret radio station in Valparaiso which was in contact with receiving stations in Hamburg and Cuba (where Heinz August Luning was later executed as a spy),108 and on other sources of information. It purported to reveal the names of espionage agents in Chile, including not only diplomatic and consular officials but also employees of the Maritime Transport Company, formerly a branch of North German Lloyd, of the Banco Alemdn and other institutions, the assistance which the spy ring received from the Transocean news agency and various Chilean citizens, the methods by which it was financed and its connections in Chile, in other Latin American countries and in the United States. It stated that the clandestine radio station relayed not only political and military information but details of the arrival and departure of ships on the west coast, of their cargoes, and of the times of their arrival in Atlantic waters.109 There was no reply to this memorandum. The Government

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had to make its own investigations, the American Ambassador, Claude Bowers, bombarding the President, as time went on, with copies of intercepted messages. 110 A decree of 12 August prohibited the dispatch of information on the movement of ships and the use of codes for telegraphic messages. But this was of minor importance. It merely affected Transradio Chilena, a subsidiary of the International Cables and Wireless Consortium. In September El Mercurio111 published a report from Washington stating the belief of the United Nations that Axis agents in Argentina and Chile were sending out an increasing number of messages, and on 2 October Benjamin Subercaseaux, the brilliant president of the PEN Club, declared in an article in La Nacion that to the shame of the Chilean people ships were being sunk as a result of such messages. T h e Foreign Minister at once instituted proceedings against Subercaseaux, and was made to look ridiculous when on 6 October three Germans, including the manager of the Banco Alemdn, were arrested on the charge of belonging to an espionage ring which operated a secret radio station. 112 Two days later, on 8 October, Sumner Welles, in a speech at the National Trade Convention in Boston, declared that two American nations, Argentina and Chile, were still permitting their territories to be used by officials and subversive agents of the Axis as a base for hostile activities against their neighbours. As a result of the reports of these agents on Allied shipping, Brazilian, Cuban, Mexican, Colombian, Dominican, Uruguayan, Argentine, Chilean, Panamanian and United States ships had been sunk without warning and with loss of life in the waters of the western hemisphere. 'I cannot believe,' he said, 'that these two republics will continue long to permit their brothers and neighbors in the Americas . . . to be stabbed in the back by Axis emissaries operating' in their territory. 113 Chilean dignity was deeply affronted. T h e Foreign Minister, Barros J a r p a , published a riot very effective reply, twisting Welles's reference to a stab in the back from German agents in Chile to a stab in the back from Chile herself and exaggerating, by implication, the measures being taken to stop the use of code by Axis missions. T h e Chilean Ambassador in Washington, Rodolfo Michels, was instructed to protest.

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Ex-President Alessandri, now in his seventies, but stiil a name to conjure with, described the speech as 'aggressive and insulting'.114 President Rios, who had accepted on 15 August an invitation to Washington and was due to leave on 14 October, cancelled his visit, and the Chilean Ambassador in London, Manuel Bianchi, called on Sir Alexander Cadogan at the Foreign Office to deny that Chile was doing nothing to counter Axis machinations, only to be told that though it might be true that Chile was taking action against Axis nationals, she was not, because of her policy of maintaining relations with the Axis, proceeding against the most dangerous centres of espionage and sabotage, namely the Axis missions themselves.115 The public, of course, knew nothing of the secret memorandum of 30 June. But Sumner Welles was favourably regarded, and not all Chileans could bring themselves to believe that there was nothing of substance behind his words.116 Earlier in the year the Communists, supported by the Chilean Confederation of Workers, had taken the lead in demanding that Chile should join the Allies. Communist militancy was counter-productive. But in June the Communists gained the powerful support of the Socialists, when Oscar Schnake, the Socialist Minister of National Development, declared that 'Chile could not and should not remain neutral'.117 The Socialists then entered into conversations with the Communists, the Confederation of Workers, and with Sr. Marcial Mora, the president of the Radical Party itself, with a view to the formation of a National Democratic Front.118 They were joined by the small group of Democraticos, and, at a mass meeting on 21 June, not only did Mora declare that Chilean policy was evasive but that the country could not remain isolated. The meeting passed resolutions in favour of a rupture with the Axis, the establishment of relations with the U.S.S.R., and the suppression of the 'fifth column'.119 But Barros Jarpa, speaking against a rupture during a secret session of the Senate on 24 June, successfully carried an anodyne motion more or less reaffirming official policy. The Government, it was announced, remained true to its engagements of continental solidarity and would accentuate its control and repression of activities in its territories and waters prejudicial to other

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American states. New acts, it was added, such as attacks on Chilean shipping in the Panama Canal, on commercial navigation in the Pacific between Panama and Cape Horn, and on Chilean shipping anywhere, might lead to fresh developments.120 This was something of a set-back to the anti-Axis movement, though Mora, who resigned as leader of the Radicals, again spoke in favour of a rupture on 19 July and the Socialists, on the 28th, presented a memorial to the President in favour of immediate action.121 In part the Government's re-affirmation of its policy may have been helped by rumours, vigorously denied by the United States Embassy, that the United States was attempting to exert an improper pressure on Chile.122 These emanated from Axis propaganda that Peru, and for that matter Bolivia, were being favoured as against Chile, and with hostile intent, in the supply of arms123—Lend-Lease negotiations with Chile, begun in 1941,124 had come to a halt. They stemmed partly from the scarcity of such products imported from the United States as petroleum—petrol rationing had begun in April—a scarcity wrongly attributed to economic discrimination.125 It was an illustration of the Chilean confusion of mind that the Ministers of Finance and Commerce told a member of the staff of the United States Embassy early in June that they favoured a rupture of relations with the Axis—the cabinet was inded divided—but wanted some economic concessions in return. These, it appeared, included, among other items, an increase in the price of metals and a loan of the order of $100 millions. Their remarks were reported by Bowers to Washington and flatly negatived as an attempt at bargaining. Bowers then saw the President and Barros Jarpa. Rios endorsed the economic proposals but denied the accusation of bargaining, saying that the Finance Minister had perhaps inadvertently joined together the problems of breaking relations and economic aid;126 and there the matter ended. Economic bargaining was one thing, economic pressure another. But in fact the American and British Ambassadors had both acted with great restraint and neither had attempted to exert unreasonable pressure on the Chilean Government. Bowers indeed told Barros Jarpa that Chile could not expect greater favours, or

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favours as great from the United States as countries which had definitely linked their policies with his country. T h e British Ambassador, Sir Charles Orde, believing that pressure from below was better than pressure from above, enlisted the help of the west coast manager of the Bank of London and South America in encouraging business interests to bring to the personal notice of the Minister their concern that they were receiving less favourable treatment than their rivals in other South American countries. 127 Nevertheless there was a thin line between fiction and fact. In the United States Sumner Welles, certainly, was losing patience by late June, 1 2 8 and in London Manuel Bianchi called on Anthony Eden early in July to enlist his good offices as Foreign Secretary in the problem of Chilean-United States relations. *He enquired also whether there was any service which Chile could render the Allies by declaring war on the Axis. Eden replied that the closure of Axis embassies, always centres of intrigue and espionage, would be most advantageous, that Britain would like to see Chile become an ally and a member of the United Nations, and that the moral effect of a rupture on Germany would be considerable. 129 These remarks were reinforced by a letter from Roosevelt at the end of the month, which Bowers showed Rios, clearly stating that for her own sake and for the sake of American defence Chile should break relations with the Axis. 130 Shortly before Rios had been shown Roosevelt's letter, Ambassador Michels, who had been in Santiago for consultation, returned to Washington authorized to express Chile's readiness to do anything which the United States might indicate as necessary for the defence of Chile herself or of the Americas in general, and in a speech on 24 July Rios declared that a new line in foreign policy would be adopted 'when clearly imposed by the facts or demanded by the interests of the American continent'. 131 T h e British Ambassador reported that the Conservative Senator, Dr. Cruz-Coke, who had long been indignant over Chilean policy, the former Radical leader, Marcial Mora, and the one-time Socialist Minister of Health, Dr. Salvador Allende, were all expressing optimism. 132 In the Senate, on 12 August, Cruz-Coke carried a motion condemning German reprisals against civilians and intellec-

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tuals in France and their ill-treatment in Poland. Rios himself, on the 15th, accepted Roosevelt's invitation to visit the United States, and Brazil's entry into the war on the 22nd made a profound impression.133 But the new line which Rios had promised was long in coming. Early in September Oscar Schnake resigned as the Socialist Minister of Development; a new organization, Union for Victory, appeared, supported by members from all political parties and by intellectuals, professional, trade and labour organizations,134 and official policy met with strong Socialist criticism when the Senate once again met in secret session, Barros Jarpa having to appeal, in the President's name, that no vote or resolution should be taken.135 Nelson Rockefeller, the Co-ordinator of InterAmerican Affairs, who was in Chile on a brief visit, bluntly told Rios, who was preparing for his visit to Washington, that he should break relations with the Axis before he went,136 and less blunt instructions to the same effect were sent by the State Department to Bowers. But Sumner Welles told Lord Halifax that he would believe that Chile would break with the Axis when he saw it, and not before.137 Whether or not Welles intended to bring matters to a head before Rios came to Washington, this was the time he chose to drop his bombshell about Axis activities in Chile as well as Argentina in his speech at Boston on 8 October.138 Cordell Hull was displeased, as, by now, he usually was with actions taken by Welles. The speech, he thought, produced a set-back in United States-Chilean relations.139 But though Chilean resentment and anger were the natural and immediate effects, the transports of indignation were soon modified. Roosevelt's reply to Rios's announcement of the cancellation of his visit was a masterpiece of cordiality,140 and was replied to in kind. Though public sentiment rallied round the President, the Socialist and Communist press blamed the incident on the Government's previous policy, and the position of Barros Jarpa, no friend to the Axis but certainly opposed to a break in relations, was seriously weakened.141 The whole cabinet resigned on 20 October in order to give the President a free hand and Barros Jarpa was succeeded by Joaquin Fernandez y Fernandez, the Ambassador to Uruguay. Raul Morales Beltrami, the Radical Minister of the Interior, remained at his post to

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pursue the matter of the spies who were arrested two days before Welles' speech (they were later interned), to arrest still more, and to expel a number of Germans including the head of the code section of the Valparaiso consulate and the code chief of the German Embassy. He disapproved of the publication on 3 November by the Emergency Advisory Committee for Political Defense at Montevideo (at the instigation of the United States)142 of the memorandum of 30 June on Axis espionage in Chile, on the ground that it hindered his own investigations.143 But though it did not please Morales and received a mixed reception in the press, this was the first intimation to Chileans in general of the dangers to which they and their neighbours were thought to have been exposed by Axis agents, and in the view of the State Department it was essential that they—and other Americans—should have such information.144 A warm expression of appreciation from Cordell Hull on 5 November of the vigorous action being taken by Chile to combat Axis activities and espionage served as an emollient. The Government's attention had meanwhile been drawn to another problem—its failure to institute the economic and financial controls recommended by the Rio de Janeiro Conference over undesirable business enterprises, to ensure full governmental control over telecommunications, direct or indirect, with Axis and Axis-occupied countries, and to prevent the continuance of commercial and financial relations with them. The United States note on these matters originated in a lack of co-operation in securing Chilean observance of the American Proclaimed List and the British Black List and had long been under consideration. Bowers presented it to the new Foreign Minister on 27 October. In language which hinted at economic discrimination, it declared that so long as effective controls were not exercised locally over firms inimical to the United Nations, it would be difficult for the United States to furnish goods and materials which might eventually find their way into the hands of enemy concerns and individuals whose activities were undermining hemisphere defence; and the American note was supported on 2 November by an aidememoire from Sir Charles Orde. Orde, who had already told the President late in September that he feared that, if Chile

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did not act quickly, she would forfeit her place in the Council of Nations, now said that the British Government had hoped that, by breaking relations with the Axis powers, Chile would have denied them a basis for activities against the Allied war effort, that Britain felt she had a claim on Chilean goodwill to secure the observance of the Black List, and that she hoped that the Government would do everything to facilitate and nothing to obstruct the smooth working of the economic warfare measures of the United Nations. He concluded by confirming, though in slightly more diplomatic language, the point made by Bowers, that Britain and the United States were concerned to secure an equitable distribution of such supplies as were available, but that they must give priority to countries where they could be sure that such supplies would not indirectly benefit Axis interests.145 There was no satisfactory reply to these communications, and none at all till December.146 But the political tide was turning. The heads of the Radical, Socialist, Communist and Democratic parties, together with the Chilean Confederation of Workers, launched in October the Alianza Democrdtica—a very loose alliance which was a revival of the National Democratic Front attempted in June—and arranged a series of demonstrations and meetings.147 El Mercurio, a. consistently cautious journal, added its voice on 4 November. Rios, who received the leaders of the Democratic Alliance, was in what Orde described as a 'lamentable' state of indecision 148 But he was much pleased with a renewed invitation to visit Washington. He sent his congratulations to Roosevelt on the invasion of North Africa, promising that Chile would continue to accelerate the production of indispensable materials and combat Axis propaganda and espionage.149 Finally, later in the month, he declared that if the defence of democracy and continental unity required further measures, Chile would be prepared to take them and to break relations with the Axis, though he coupled this declaration with what appeared to be a strong hint that the provision of armaments ought to precede a rupture.150 The hint, if such it was, fell on stony ground, and Sumner Welles did not hesitate to make it perfectly clear that it would be wiser for Rios to come to Washington after a rupture had taken place than before.151 Sending a cordial mes-

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sage of sympathy to Roosevelt on the anniversary of Pearl Harbour, the President also sent in December a delegation to Washington headed by Morales Beltrami, who presented what one member of the State Department described as a 'fantastic' list of weapons which Chile wanted. 152 But the State Department was in no mood for bargaining; wiser counsels prevailed; Morales contented himself with giving a long explanation of why Chile had not acted earlier and a categorical assurance from Rios that relations with the Axis would be severed on his return home, and the State Department promising that when the breach was actually made a Lend-Lease agreement would be signed. 153 T h e point of no return had now been reached. There were impassioned debates in the Senate during the absence of Morales. Alessandri, at the eleventh hour, attempted to create a diversion by an article published by most papers on 12 J a n u a r y , 1943, arguing that a rupture would be equivalent to war and that a plebiscite ought to be held, thus calling in question the President's constitutional prerogative. Rios, on the same day, told the cabinet of his intention to break relations with the Axis, and, on the 19th, the Senate, asked for a vote of confidence, approved his decision by a vote of thirty to ten, with two abstentions and three absentees. O n the 20th the rupture with Germany, Italy and J a p a n was formally announced to the Heads of Missions and in a presidential broadcast to the nation. There was no pronounced enthusiasm. But a large open-air meeting on the 27th, representing all parties except the Liberals and the Conservatives (and even some of these were present), expressed support for the President's action. 154 T h e long-delayed Lend-Lease agreement was signed early in March. 155 A number of anti-Axis or precautionary measures followed the rupture. Various districts, mainly coastal areas, were declared to be strategic zones over which the military had special authority. A long list of Germans who were to be transferred from certain places to others were issued—a transfer nullified in practice. Axis nationals were forbidden to carry firearms without a permit. T h e German Club and the Transocean and Stefani news agencies were closed, and telegraphic and telephonic communications in code with Argentina were

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subjected to strict control.156 In May relations were severed with Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania and Vichy France. But any effective economic measures against the Axis had to wait till the passage through Congress of an Economic Emergency Law in the following December. Thereafter, in January, 1944, the property of Axis nationals was made subject to state control and the Banco Germdnico de la America del Sur and the Banco Alemdn Transatldntico were ordered to be liquidated.157 A great sensation was caused in the next month by the announcement of the discovery of an Axis spy-ring in possession of a secret radio transmitter. Fourteen Germans and Chileans were arrested, though five were quickly released, and further arrests took place in March and April. But, as with the Valdivia enquiries in 1941 and 1942, so in 1944 the judicial proceedings became so protracted and involved that the impression could not but prevail that, after the first flush of righteous indignation, the Government was not over-anxious to take strong measures.158 There were, perhaps, reasons both of the heart and of discretion why they were not. Chileans were familiar with the good qualities of Germans rather than the bad. They knew them 'not as conquerors or Gestapo bullies', but as husbands, fathers, teachers and friends. They found it difficult to believe in stories of atrocities,159 and the esteem which the immigrant German community had built up for itself was not to be eradicated by a simple severance of relations with Nazi Germany. A simple severance it remained. But a rude shock was received when the United States revealed in December, 1944, that only those countries which had declared war and had signed the Declaration of the United Nations were likely to receive invitations to the Conference on International Organization which, it was later decided, would be held at San Francisco. The 'associated nations', which had merely severed relations with the Axis, would not be invited. This had certainly not been Roosevelt's intention. It was a concession to Soviet Russia (with whom Chile had at long last established diplomatic relations on 12 December), and Roosevelt had hoped that with this warning to Chile, Chile would give a lead which the other 'associated nations' would follow, thus avoiding the notice which he felt personally forced to give to

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Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, Uruguay and Paraguay in January.160 Rios and Fernandez y Fernandez were dismayed. They knew that in her own interests Chile must be represented at the Conference. But, though the possibility was contemplated, they were unwilling at this late date to risk the dissensions which a declaration of war on Germany might provoke, more especially should it appear to be the result of pressure from the United States. Chileans had little interest left in the war in Europe—V.E. Day on 8 May was received in Santiago with apathy.161 But Japan was a horse of another colour. In January, 1943, she had declared that she would regard a severance of diplomatic relations by Chile as an act of war. In February, 1945, Chile, referring to reasons of high international policy and to the identity of her aims with those of the United Nations, recognized a state of war to exist with Japan. Two days later, on 14 February, she signed the Declaration of the United Nations. Congressional approval of the proclamation of a state of war followed in April, Fernandez y Fernandez leading, in the same month, the Chilean delegation to San Francisco.162 Rios had not long to live. He died in office in 1946. As President he had constantly appealed for unity and discipline not only in the nation but within and between those middle and left-wing parties he nominally represented. But he appealed in vain. His own party, the Radicals, was divided between its right and left wings, the Socialists between the factions led by Senator Marmaduke Grove and Dr. Salvador Allende. In the face of party dissensions and party pretensions to control cabinet ministers who were party members, government was in a perpetual state of flux. Chile might be said to have suffered from an excess of democracy. Only one cabinet survived for as long as a year. Twice the President was compelled to resort to the appointment of 'administrative' or non-political cabinets. His difficulties were not lightened by irresponsible and dilatory tactics in Congress. An Economic Emergency Bill, which he asked for in April, 1941, to give him powers for a period of six months to deal with the problems of supplies, prices, finance and credit, to establish a Ministry of National Economy, and to declare any part of the country an emergency zone, was so emasculated that, when it was finally

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approved in June, Rios vetoed it until suitable amendments were made, as they were in July.163 A second Economic Emergency Bill164 which he asked for in April, 1943, was not finally approved till December, and even then failed to give him all the authority he required, though it did empower him to carry into effect such economic resolutions of the Rio de Janeiro Conference as he wished. A Constitutional Reform Bill, long mooted and long needed, which put a stop to congressional propensities to alter the President's financial proposals by initiating expenditure (for vote-catching purposes) did, however, become law in November, 1943.165 Meanwhile the cost of living continued to rise, social legislation of less interest to Rios than economic matters, remained in abeyance, and the President, in June, 1943, had again to postpone his visit to Washington for fear of internal troubles.166 He did not finally get there till October, 1945. On the other hand, unemployment, despite the number of strikes, hardly existed. Industry, if not agriculture, prospered. Rios's visit to the United States ended with the promise of American aid in the construction of a steel works at Huachipato, near Concepcion. And it was greatly to his credit that, despite grave internal and external problems, Rios never during his presidency, however undistinguished, stepped beyond the bounds of constitutional propriety.

V T H E S T A T E S O F T H E R I O DE LA P L A T A I No Latin American country had followed a more consistently pro-Allied or anti-Axis policy between 1939 and 1942 than Brazil's southern and Argentina's north-eastern neighbour, Uruguay. Geographically, Uruguay commanded the entry to the estuary of the Rio de la Plata—the Battle of the River Plate in December, 1939, had taken place in full view of the peninsula of Punta del Este, which was washed on one side by the waters of the Atlantic and on the other by those of the Rio de la Plata. Militarily, her importance was negligible. A large airport or air base had been planned near the famous Carrasco beach and an air-naval base in the Laguna Negra-La Paloma district. 1 But little progress had been made on the one project and none at all on the other. A Lend-Lease agreement with the United States, long under consideration, was signed in J a n u a r y , 1942,2 and a first consignment of arms arrived soon afterwards. But the army, navy and air force were all small and ill-equipped. Uruguay, President Alfredo Baldomir rightly remarked in December, 1941, would have been 'virtually helpless in the event of an attack'. 3 Nevertheless the spirit of her people was as high as their defences were weak. When the United States entered the war, Uruguay at once treated her as a non-belligerent. German and Japanese assets were frozen, Axis nationals and Axis governments forbidden to engage in commercial transactions. O n 25 J a n u a r y , 1942, relations were severed with J a p a n , Germany and Italy. In February the privileges of non-belligerency were extended to Great Britain and in August Uruguay seriously considered following Brazil into the war. 4 One merchant ship, the Montevideo, had been sunk in March with the loss of seventeen lives—the authorities seized in reprisal the Tacoma, the interned supply ship of the ill-fated GrafSpee.5 Another, the

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Maldonado, was torpedoed on 1 August and her master taken prisoner.6 But though every facility was afforded to belligerent Brazil, Uruguay felt unable to become belligerent herself. Not only was she almost defenceless, but also she was in the throes of a constitutional crisis. Presidential and congressional elections should have been held in March. But on 21 February the President carried out a coup d'etat, dissolved Congress and cancelled the elections. Later, he instituted an Advisory Council of State in place of Congress and on 29 May issued a revised Constitution, the subject of prolonged debate, to go into force when ratified by a plebiscite. Uruguay had experienced one coup d'etat nine years earlier. It had been provoked by a breakdown in the remarkable system of collegiate government established in 1917. But it had deeply divided each of the country's two traditional parties, the Colorados and the Blancos, or Nationalists, whose differences were more a matter of faith, residence and personalities than of a precise definition between liberals and conservatives. In protest, Outraged sections of both parties refrained from taking part in future elections, to the benefit, of course, of the 'official' Government Colorados and the 'official' Nationalist opposition, led by Senator Luis Alberto de Herrera. Since a new Constitution, promulgated in 1934, allowed the largest minority party, namely, the Herreristas, to occupy half the seats in the Senate and three in the cabinet, it soon became obvious to everyone, except the Herreristas, that a system whereby two parties, each of which had a voice in the government, might be divided on almost every issue, foreign and domestic, also had its defects. The Herreristas (certainly Senator Herrera himself, though not all of his followers) sympathized with the nationalists in Argentina, bitterly opposed the foreign policy of President Baldomir and his Foreign Minister, Dr. Alberto Guani, including the Lend-Lease agreement with the United States, and appeared to range themselves on the side of the Axis rather than of the democracies. By an act of dubious legality the President, all patience spent, expelled them from his cabinet in March, 1941, and dismissed them altogether in 1942.7 The coup d'etat reflected no desire on Baldomir's part to perpetuate himself in power. Like its predecessor in 1933 it arose

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from an intolerable constitutional position, and, except by the Herreristas (though there were Socialist and other critics too), it was accepted with comparative calm.8 The President promised that the constitutional hiatus would not be prolonged, and he kept his word. The cancelled elections were held on 29 November. They were notable in that Colorados and Nationalists of all persuasions participated and that women voted for the first time. The Baldomirista candidate, Dr. Juan Jose Amezaga, a former Minister and an ex-Ambassador, was elected to the presidency and Dr. Guani to the vicepresidency. The Herreristas were handsomely defeated. The revised Constitution was approved and Baldomir gained his object. The Senate was now elected by proportional representation and the President obtained control of his own cabinet.9 His successor was inaugurated in March, 1943, when Dr. Guani was replaced as Foreign Minister by Dr. Jose Serrato, a former President and Minister, and Chairman also of the Pro-Allied Committee. Uruguay returned to her ordinary political life, marked by intense personal and factional rivalries and by strained relations also between the executive and legislative powers. As Vice-President instead of Foreign Minister, Dr. Guam's influence was somewhat diminished. But he remained Chairman of the important Emergency Advisory Committee for Political Defense, which had been established by the Rio de Janeiro Conference and had its seat at Montevideo.10 Its purpose was to combat Axis methods of political warfare. It met for the first time in April, 1942, and thereafter pursued its task with enthusiasm. Liaison officers were appointed in the several republics and national defence committees in some. Consultative visits of inspection were instituted. A regional meeting between representatives of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay was organized in September, 1942 (despite Argentina's reluctance), to consider the clandestine movement of Axis agents across their frontiers; and the Committee recommended various measures for the control of Axis aliens, the prevention of sabotage, and the censorship of international communications. Most sensationally, it made public in November, 1942, the United States memorandum on the activities of Axis agents in Chile, and, in January, 1943, evi-

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dence of espionage rings in Argentina, roundly declaring in its first Annual Report that it would make similar disclosures whenever the defence of the hemisphere demanded it. Uruguay had made her own disclosures in 1940 when the nation had been shocked by the revelation of the so-called Fuhrmann plot, which seemed to threaten the very foundations of the state. Further evidence came to light in 1941,11 and in October the Chamber of Deputies appointed a committee to investigate subversive activities, replaced, after the dissolution of Congress, by a Comision Investigadora de Actividades Anti-Nacionales, nominated by the Supreme Court.12 In the weeks after Pearl Harbour the offices of Transocean and other likely Nazi and Fascist centres had been raided, an investigation into the conduct of the Banco Alemdn Transatlantic begun, and the circulation of the Argentine Nazi paper, El Pampero, forbidden.13 Several Germans were arrested and three German schools closed. What most disturbed the press and the public in 1942, however, were reports of Axis infiltration into the public services and the nationalized industries. Official enquiries were instituted; some employees were dismissed;14 a special tribunal, the Juzgado de Defensa National, was established, and, after the Emergency Advisory Committee had held a consultative visit, an Inter-Ministerial Committee for Political Defence. Belatedly enough, the Germans, including the notorious Fuhrmann himself, who had been arrested in connection with the 1940 plot, then released and again arrested, were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment in February, 1944.15 Inevitably, the presence of the Emergency Advisory Committee on Uruguayan soil was something of an embarrassment to the Government, anxious, as it was, not to cause too much umbrage to Argentina, one of the targets of the Committee's criticisms. But President Amezaga and Dr. Serrato followed the same foreign policy as their predecessors. Amezaga, indeed, almost so soon as he had taken over the presidency, declared that when the United States could supply a few batteries of heavy artillery and anti-aircraft guns, together with a hundred planes, Uruguay would declare war, but that, in existing circumstances, a belligerent Uruguay would be more of a liability than an asset. What he could and

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would do was to support Great Britain and the United States in their measures of economic warfare and enforce observance of the Statutory and Proclaimed Lists. Uruguayan resources, he repeated in July, were at the disposal of the United Nations. 16 This was an attitude of pre-belligerency rather than of non-belligerency. It was emphasized by the formal severance of relations with Vichy France and their re-establishment, after an interval of eight years, with Soviet Russia—a reestablishment towards which Dr. Guani had been working during his last months as Foreign Secretary. Some friction arose between Dr. Guani and Dr. Serrato when, after the Bolivian coup d'etat in December, 1943, the Emergency Advisory Committee adopted what came to be known as the Guani doctrine, the doctrine that American governments which had declared war on the Axis powers or had broken relations with them should not recognize without prior consultation American governments established by force. Dr. Serrato did not disagree with the doctrine. Indeed, he^applied it. But he was annoyed by Dr. Guani's delay in informing him of the Committee's proposal; 17 and when, in February, 1944, General Edelmiro Farrell in effect displaced General Pedro Pablo Ramirez as President of Argentina, Uruguay was placed in a dilemma. Argentina was a near neighbour, and a powerful one at that. Nevertheless the Guani doctrine was applied, and the Senate, in secret session in March, upheld it. Admiral Ingram, in command of what was now the American Fourth Fleet, had made it plain at the time of Amezaga's inauguration, that he was by no means indifferent to events in the Rio de la Plata, 18 and, after the Bolivian coup d'etat, which the State Department believed to have been organized in Argentina and to be a possible precursor of other coups in Chile, Peru and Uruguay, he appeared at Montevideo in J a n u a r y , 1944, with a small naval and air squadron—a calculated display offeree indicating that the United States stood ready to supprt Uruguay in all circumstances. 19 While at Montevideo he and Amezaga agreed on a proposal for the construction of an a i r naval base at Laguna del Sauce sixty miles east of the capital. Ingram also promised to forward from Brazil heavy equipment for work on the Carrasco airport. 20

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There was no crisis between Argentina and Uruguay, merely a degree of ill-feeling. Nor was there any support in Uruguay for the establishment of a citizen army, either for defence or offence. T h e enthusiasm displayed by Uruguayan youth, in the aftermath of the F u h r m a n n plot, for short periods of voluntary military training, waned with experience and the passage of time and almost wholly vanished when it was proposed to substitute compulsory for voluntary training. This was to the taste neither of the press nor of the proposed trainees, and it was no longer timely, if it ever had been. After the declaration on 30 October, 1943, at the close of the second Moscow Conference, that the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and China recognized 'the necessity of ensuring a rapid and orderly transition from war to peace' and 'of establishing at the earliest practicable date a general international organization based on the principle of the sovereign authority of all peaceloving states', 21 Uruguayan thoughts were diverted from the problems of war to those of peace. Dr. Serrato established a Commission on Post-war Problems, whose Legal Commission was especially concerned with the questions of international organization. T h e end result was a memorandum which the Government issued on 28 September, 1944,22 less than a fortnight before the proposals of the Dumbarton Oaks Conversations were made public. It argued that a reformed, broadened and strengthened League of Nations should be re-established. T h e Dumbarton Oaks proposals themselves were not wholly approved in Uruguay, though their general outlines were, and, in preparation for the United Nations Conference on International Organization, Uruguay, on 22 February, 1945, declared war on Germany and J a p a n and two days later signed the Declaration of the United Nations. She claimed, with some justice, that she had been 'fully united with the forces defending the rights of humanity' since the war had begun and that by this formal declaration she assumed in law a position which she had occupied in fact, especially since the attack on Pearl Harbour. 2 3 O n balance Uruguay did not fare too badly during the war. She experienced the usual shipping difficulties and the usual problems of shortages—petroleum and building materials

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were notable examples. The cost of living rose. The construction of the great hydro-electric plant on the Rio Negro, originally undertaken by a German consortium headed by the firm of Siemens-Schuckert, was retarded. But it was rescued by an Export—Import Bank loan of $12 millions,24 the exact amount being determined at the same time that a Reciprocal Trade Agreement was signed with the United States in July, 1942.25 A further loan of $20 millions was made available in 1943 for public works, including the Carrasco airport.26 The United States became the principal market for Uruguayan wool,27 and trade between the two countries greatly increased. Uruguay found acceptable markets also in Brazil, Argentina and South Africa. From Britain she bought little, since Britain had little to sell. But Britain bought on her own behalf and on that of her allies large quantities of Uruguayan meat, with the result that Uruguayan blocked sterling balances notably increased. They were partly used, when the war had ended, for the purchase of British-owned public utilities, such as the railways, tramways and Montevideo waterworks, and for the reduction of the external debt.28 II Paraguay, dependent on the riverine system of the Rio de la Plata, was very much more at Argentina's mercy than was Uruguay.29 Except by air, the only practicable routes to the outside world from the capital, Asuncion, were by river, flowing for 800 miles alongside or through Argentine territory, to Buenos Aires, or by rail, crossing the Alto Parana by ferry, also to Buenos Aires. Communications with Brazil and Bolivia were rudimentary. With a deeply-rooted tradition of dictatorship but also of a fiercely-guarded independence characterizing its remarkable history, the country had the smallest population of any South American state. Even so, under the rule of General Higinio Morinigo, some 200,000 Paraguayans preferred, or were compelled, to live outside its borders.30 Its economy was almost exclusively the economy of the ranch, the farm and the forest. It had little to offer a warring world but canned beef (which Britain needed), hides and skins, quebracho extract, and cotton. None of these could

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it export directly; and for most Paraguayans the war itself was of remote concern. From 1940 to 1948 the country's history was very much the history of Morinigo.31 He had come to the presidency by accident.32 He remained there by design. When elections were staged in 1943, Morinigo was the sole candidate. The elections, a newspaper in Uruguay reported, were 'original and festive' and 'quite unique in the history of democratic peoples'.33 But they produced the desired result, and the President, soon afterwards, was enabled to pay a series of visits to Brazil, the United States (where he was given an honorary degree by the University of Notre Dame), Mexico, Bolivia, and, at the very end of the year, Argentina. This was a unique experience for a Paraguayan President. Never before, as the British Minister observed, had Paraguay been courted as she was in the war years.34 The United States, in the interests of Pan American solidarity, provided armaments, under a Lend-Lease agreement signed in September, 1941, credits for road building, public works and agricultural enterprises, agricultural expertise, financial and technical assistance for public health services, assistance also in the enlargement of Asuncion's airport, and, by an agreement in December, 1943, a Military Aviation Mission.35 Brazil, anxious to extend her influence westwards and to tap the Paraguayan hinterland, had entered into conventions for the improvement of trade and communications. They included a railway link (never completed) to connect Paraguay's second city, Conception, to the port of Santos, and a free port at Santos itself; a commercial treaty signed in May, 1942; and credits, amounting to about £1,500,000, to be expended over a period of six years on public works and economic development.36 Argentina dispatched a naval mission to Asuncion early in 1942, established a branch of the Banco de la Nation there to balance a branch of the Bank of Brazil, countered Brazil's grant of free port facilities at Santos by similar facilities at Rosario and Buenos Aires, and concluded in December, 1943, a commercial treaty and a financial convention looking (in vain) towards the establishment of a customs union. Morinigo's standing in the western hemisphere was

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enhanced by the abilities of his Foreign Minister, Dr. Luis Argaha, his representative at the Rio de Janeiro Conference when Paraguay severed relations with the Axis powers on 25 February, 1942, the same day as Uruguay. Argaha's sympathies lay with the United States, and, after Paraguay had ranged herself in the anti-Axis camp, various decrees were issued prohibiting the publication and broadcasting of news from Axis agencies and regulating the conduct of Axis nationals. But there were contrary sympathies at work. Not only Axis news but all news, foreign and domestic, was strictly censored. Axis institutions continued to flourish. T h e Club de Amigos de Alemania counted the Chief of the Secret Police among its members. 37 T h e German school, with its predominantly Nazi staff, inculcated Nazi doctrines. Anti-semitism was evident in the columns of the Government newspaper, and since ministers and officials were often closely connected with German and Italian families and Axis firms were influential, the British Black List and United States Proclaimed List were virtually ignored. 38 Dr. Argaha, like Morinigo himself, was inclined to argue, in language which echoed some of the earlier pronouncements of Dr. Vargas of Brazil, that the Government was in no sense totalitarian. O n the contrary, it was an example of'authentic democracy', and there was much discussion in the press of the supersession by Paraguay's 'Nationalist Revolution' of the decadent tenets of nineteenth-century liberalism. 39 These dicta may not have carried much conviction in the minds of dissident students, troublesome labour leaders and political opponents who were confined in Paraguay's concentration camps, of which the most notorious was that of the Isla de Peha Hermosa, near the confluence of the Paraguay and the Apa, nor of those members of the former ruling Liberal party whom Morinigo had exiled or imprisoned. 40 In exile, also, were exPresident Colonel Rafael Franco, who had inaugurated Paraguay's brief experiment in totalitarian Socialism in February, 1936, as were the leading Febreristas, or men of February, who had supported him. But it was not on the politicians that Morinigo relied, but on the army, above all on the young army officers who had fought in the Chaco W a r with Bolivia, had inherited some of the Febrerista doctrines and felt it their destiny to control Paraguay's future.

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Military support could be oppressive, and Morinigo's position was not easy when such pro-Axis sympathizers as Colonel Victoriano Benitez Vela, who commanded the Campo Grande cavalry garrison, Colonel Pablo Stagni of the air force, and Colonel Bernardo Aranda of the General Staff, formed the powerful Frente de Guerra; while ex-President Franco waited in the wings at Montevideo;41 and while the disgruntled Liberals sought opportunities to stage a revolt. The Frente de Guerra was credited with the removal of Dr. Argaha in March, 1944, though his successor, an ex-President of the Supreme Court, declared that there would be no change in Paraguay's foreign policy.42 And Frente de Guerra or no Frente de Guerra, elementary prudence demanded that Paraguay should declare war on the Axis, in common with the other 'associated nations', in February, 1945, and sign the Declaration of the United Nations. In the game of'pull devil, pull baker', it was the turn of the Frente de Guerra to be eliminated in 1946.43 Given the temper of the times Morinigo then sought to liberalize his dictatorship and to come to terms with the politicians, only to find himself involved in civil war in the following year. Victorious in that, he gave way to a very temporary successor in 1948. Finally, in 1954, Paraguay fell into the hands of General Alfredo Stroessner. She was still in his hands in 1982. Ill However outspoken in her democratic and Pan American sympathies, Uruguay was loath to quarrel with Argentina; Paraguay could scarcely afford to do so; and Argentina, the most powerful of South American nations apart from Brazil, and notoriously resistant to Pan American programmes, proved to be a headache not only for her immediate neighbours, but for the United States, for Latin America generally and for Great Britain. Her immediate response to the attack on Pearl Harbour was 'disarmingly friendly'. The United States, by December, 1941, had become not only her chief source of supply but, temporarily at least, her principal market. A Reciprocal Trade Treaty, the first formal treaty between Argentina and the United States since 1853, had but lately come into force; a three-year contract had been signed with the Metals Reserve Company for the acquisition of

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Argentine tungsten; and a purchasing mission, seeking antiaircraft artillery, aeroplanes, tanks and munitions, had been sent to Washington. So soon as the news of Japanese aggression reached Buenos Aires, the American Embassy was swamped with messages of goodwill. Ex-Presidents Marcelo de Alvear and Agustin P. Justo, the legal but ailing President, Dr. Roberto Ortiz, and the Acting-President, Dr. Ramon Castillo, all sent telegrams to President Roosevelt, Castillo condemning the Japanese attack and expressing the 'friendly wishes of the Argentine Government and people'; and decrees of the 9th and 13 December, while affirming Argentina's neutrality, affirmed also her determination to afford to the United States all the privileges of a non-belligerent.44 But cordiality was soon replaced by reserve. Except for a brief period in 1940 when President Ortiz had been in command and his Foreign Minister, Jose Maria Cantilo, had proposed that the Americas should abandon neutrality in favour of non-belligerency in sympathy with Britain,45 the Argentine Government had followed a policy of rigid neutrality; and Castillo had no intention of abandoning it. Castillo's Foreign Minister, Dr. Enrique Ruiz-Guihazu, and he himself were quick to give reassurances to the German Ambassador, Edmund von Thermann, reassurances of which Britain and the United States knew nothing.46 A state of siege was instituted on 16 December; the press and public were enjoined to refrain from all tendentious comment on the international situation and from the publication of anything likely to affect Argentine neutrality or disturb internal political tranquillity; and a meeting to pay homage to Roosevelt was cancelled. 'We don't want anyone to speak ill of anybody' was Castillo's slogan;47 and though the Government responded as a matter of course to the call for the emergency meeting of American Foreign Ministers at Rio de Janeiro, it responded, the British Ambassador, Sir Esmond Ovey, remarked, with the intention of emasculating the Conference's decisions.48 It was no happy augury that on the eve of the Conference Argentina agreed to take charge of Italian interests (which she was soon constrained to relinquish) in Mexico and Central America and that Ruiz-Guihazu sought to induce Chile, Peru and Paraguay to join in a neutral bloc. Sumner Welles, before the

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Conference opened, had been optimistic of its outcome, and Britain's offer to take any positive action which the State Department might think useful and calculated, in particular, to influence Argentina, was not accepted. Assistance from Britain in Pan American affairs was a delicate matter which neither Welles nor the State Department encouraged.49 Nor, indeed, was there much that Britain could do. But the event verified Ovey's prediction. Argentina failed to form a neutral bloc—there was no collaboration with Chile—but she succeeded in so emasculating the main motion before the Conference, in favour of a general severance of diplomatic relations with the Axis Powers, that a resolution became a recommendation and the recommendation was so hedged about with qualifications as to enable any country that wished to ignore it.50 As for the complementary resolution that commercial and financial relations should also be severed, to this Argentina appended the reservation that she was prepared to control the economic and financial interests of all non-American belligerents—a reservation whose impartiality no one could deny and which enabled her, if she so wished, to make a show of action against British-controlled firms as well as against those of the Axis. The other resolutions and recommendations of the Conference, Ruiz-Guihazu rudely remarked in February, 1943, were so numerous that it was impossible to give them proper consideration.51 How far did this attitude reflect a consensus of opinion in Argentina, as Castillo (who professed to believe that a rupture of relations would have meant war) contended,32 and the United States disputed? Of the main parties in opposition the small Communist party, the Socialists, whose strength was limited to Buenos Aires itself, and the Radical leadership were staunchly pro-Allied; and in September, 1942, the Chamber of Deputies, in which the opposition parties retained a slight majority after the March congressional elections, carried a motion in favour of a rupture by sixty-seven votes to sixtyfive.53 But the Radicals were not all of one mind on the question of neutrality. They had been neutralists when in office during the first World War and might well have been neutralists again had they been allowed to regain office during the second. Such a possibility, however, was unlikely in the

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extreme while Castillo presided over the Concordancia or Government coalition of the National Democratic or Conservative party, dissident Radicals and dissident Socialists, who had enjoyed the sweets of office for the last ten years. T h e Concordancia or, more exactly, its elitist core, represented the traditional ruling families, the great landowners of Buenos Aires Province, the principal rural proprietors of the interior and their associates among the haute bourgeoisie of Buenos Aires. In general they shared the dislike which a majority of Argentines felt for Nazi doctrines, and there were many who both privately and publicly supported the Allied cause. 54 T h e economic interests of the estancieros had been bound up with Europe and particularly with Britain, the staple markets for the agricultural and pastoral products of the pampas. Whether Argentina severed relations with the Axis or not, Britain remained their main market, certainly so far as the great ganaderos, or cattle-breeders, were concerned. Whereas the rising class of industrialists, who might be Radicals or Conservatives, so slight were the doctrinal differences between the two parties, were anxious for a rapprochement with the United States, the source of industrial equipment and reequipment, those estancieros who had no industrial affiliations believed it to be impossible to integrate the Argentine and United States economies. Their pride had been offended by the refusal of the United States to buy Argentine beef, ostensibly on sanitary grounds, and they feared at one and the same time economic penetration and political domination by the United States. 55 Dislike of the United States, though easy to exaggerate, was combined with a deep-rooted fear of Communism and the influence of Soviet Russia. Allied to both these phobias, though not new, was a rising tide not only of nationalism but of ultra-nationalism, of equal moment to Britain and the United States. T h e Fuerza de Orientacion Radical de la Juventud Argentina was one such group among the Radicals. Another, on the extreme right, was the Alianza de la Juventud Nacionalista. This, a para-military organization, of which the fascist-minded but retired General J u a n Bautista Molina was president, was mostly composed of young men from well-to-do families. In May they marched past the Foreign Office (Ruiz-Guihazu appearing on the balcony), in a demonstration

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organized by Molina's equally fascist-minded colleague, Dr. Manuel Fresco, the ex-Governor of Buenos Aires Province, chanting 'down with the English pigs' and similar offensive slogans, thereby incurring the censure of the Supreme Court.56 National pride, economic interest, lack of confidence in an Allied victory, doubts of the ability of Argentina to defend herself and of the United States to protect her, fears for the safety of the newly-created State Mercantile Marine (formed by the acquisition of Italian, Danish and other ships), all reinforced the traditional Argentine bias to neutrality in 1942 and 1943 and, more especially, that of Castillo. But Castillo's Government could not properly be labelled pro-Axis. Dr. Ruiz-Guihazu, certainly, was an admirer of the Spanish brand of fascism and sufficiently naive to think that nothing was to be feared from a German domination of the world. The human race, he thought, would invent some new weapon and re-acquire its freedom. As late as September, 1942, he seems to have believed that the war would end in a stalemate and even to have fancied himself in the role of a mediator.57 But that is not to say that he hoped for an Axis victory. Nor did Castillo, though he long believed it likely and wished to destroy no bridges with the contending sides. A provincial of the provincials, from the remote province of Catamarca, he was principally concerned not with the fortunes of war but with the fortunes of the oligarchy to which he belonged and with excluding by fair means or foul, mostly foul, any return to power of the Radicals.58 The judgments of the American and British Ambassadors on his character, behaviour and motives were far more acute than the sensational reports reaching Washington, from such United States agencies as the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Office of Strategic Services, that Castillo was as much in the pay of Hitler as was Laval, or than Nelson Rockefeller's opinion that he rested on the support of pro-Axis elements to keep himself in power.59 The issue . ever-present to his mind was the presidential election of September, 1943. This he intended to control just as he controlled the Senate and most of the provinces, though not the Chamber of Deputies, with which he was constantly at odds. Naturally enough Castillo was detested by the Radicals and the Socialists; and he was not a popular figure in his own

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party. T h e continuance of the state of siege and increasing Government intervention in the country's economic life disturbed the Concordancia as well as the opposition, 60 and, as time went on, Castillo increasingly cultivated the support of the nationalist field officers and the senior army and navy commanders, 6 1 for many of whom admiration for the German military machine was matched by fear of the growing military strength of Brazil. T h e dissensions and lack of leadership among the Radicals (especially after the death of ex-President Alvear in March, 1942) were his good fortune. He was strengthened, too, by his assumption of the presidency in name as well as in fact after the resignation of Ortiz, now near to death, in J u n e , and by two other deaths, that of his distinguished ex-Foreign Minister, Julio Roca, in October and of exPresident J u s t o in the following J a n u a r y . J u s t o , who had histrionically offered his sword to Brazil when she entered the war and had increasingly demonstrated his pro-Allied sympathies, had been Castillo's most formidable critic in the Concordancia and a strong candidate for the presidency in 1943. Castillo benefited further in that a powerful section of society (he was not concerned with the growing working-class population of Buenos Aires) was enjoying great prosperity because of the price and quantity of meat sold to England under bulk contracts negotiated in 1939 and thereafter renewed or renegotiated. 62 T h e Government might be compelled to buy up surplus crops of maize and to seek new markets for wheat as well as maize both in Latin America and Spain. Because of shortages of such commodities as oil and coal, the packing plants, when they could not obtain coal, might have to run on maize. But not only did the cattle-breeders flourish, so also did various sections of industry, stimulated by reduced imports; and business activity was intense. 63 Sterling balances, which Britain hoped would be used for the purchase of the Britishowned railways, as well as for the repatriation of sterling bonds, were accumulating. They amounted to £8 millions early in 1941 and to some £100 millions in 1945.64 Neutrality, it could be argued, paid as well in the second World War as in the first, and suited Argentine material interests best. 65 Castillo had never been prepared to travel far down the Rio road. T h e Argentine Ambassador to Germany and the Ger-

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man Ambassador to Argentina had each been summoned home to report at the end of December, 1941. Von T h e r m a n n had in fact become an embarrassment to the Argentine Government (though it was extremely apologetic about it) because of the revelations in the previous September of the Damonte T a b o r d a Committee set up by the C h a m b e r of Deputies to investigate anti-Argentine activities and the Chamber's demand, with only one dissentient vote, that he should be expelled. 66 In J a n u a r y , before he had left, some twenty leading Nazis were arrested, accused of diverting funds raised for charitable purposes to those of propaganda, and a special division to deal with anti-Argentine activities was established in the Ministry of the Interior, though the American Embassy had no confidence in its chief.67 But the accused Germans were released on bail and later acquitted, and the Government paid a minimum of attention to the findings of the Damonte Taborda Committee. It appeared, indeed, to be more interested in detaining Communists than Nazis. Damonte T a b o r d a himself resigned the chairmanship of the Committee in July on the ground that the authorities hindered his work, but the Committee, nothing daunted, carried on under that of its former secretary, the Socialist Deputy, Dr. J u a n Antonio Solari. It reported adversely in September on the nature of German sporting, cultural and education activities. 68 It accused the Government of great laxity in not preventing the escape from internment of some former members of the crew of the Graf Spee, pointing an accusing finger also at the German naval attache, Dietrich Niebuhr, whom it wanted removed. It stigmatized the Federation of German Welfare and Cultural Societies (whose dissolution had already been decided upon by the Minister of the Interior) as the National Socialist Party in disguise. 69 It published a full report on Niebuhr's activities in October, demanded the disbandment of the German Labour Front, 70 criticized the part played by certain priests in spreading totalitarian doctrines and, in a report on the activities of diplomatic and consular agents, 71 declared that the German cultural attache, Dr. H e r m a n n Metzger, supervised German schools in a manner detrimental to Argentina and should be declared persona non grata. T h e Ministry of Foreign Affairs angrily retorted that such a report

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was a grave breach of constitutional propriety, rallied to the defence of Metzger and pointed out that he had anyway been recalled, with a colleague, in J u n e and only awaited a safeconduct. 72 But the Government was sufficiently stung by the reports of the Committee, together with three memoranda on Axis activities delivered by the United States early in November, 73 into arresting a number of Germans, six of whom were charged with operating a clandestine radio station; the Minister of the Interior instructed provincial governors to exercise greater vigilance against anti-Argentine activities; and Niebuhr's withdrawal, on the ground that he had abused his position, was requested. 74 He left at the end of J a n u a r y , 1943. Despite the rebuke of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs the Solari Committee, as it now was, refused to be intimidated, and papers such as La Nation and La Prensa, which were powers in their own right, became increasingly outspoken. But throughout 1942 Axis propaganda continued to flourish, though, it is fair to say, so also did Allied propaganda. As for the Rio resolutions, they were almost totally ignored. The placing of official supervisors in firms, insurance companies and public utility enterprises belonging to non-American belligerents might be regarded as a gesture of compliance, but it was no more than a gesture. Little action was taken to control financial relations with the Axis 75 and the British and United States Black Lists were ignored. T h e Government refused to co-operate with the United States in convoying ships off the Argentine coast and providing escorts. 76 When, to great popular indignation, the tanker, Victoria, was torpedoed in April, three hundred miles from New York, and the freighter, Rio Tercero, was sunk off New Jersey in J u n e , the Foreign Ministry made as light of the incidents as it could. Germany apologized and offered reparation and Argentina tacitly acquiesced in the German blockade of the North Atlantic, directing that Argentine ships should only call at Gulf ports. 77 The British and American Embassies both protested that radio cypher messages led to the sinking of Allied ships and asked that they should be prohibited. But not till 3 December, 1942, did the Government take action and then only to the unsatisfactory extent of limiting such messages to one hundred words a day. 78

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When, in April, 1943, delegates of the Emergency Advisory Committee for Political Defense visited Argentina and interviewed Government officials, they were unimpressed. There was, they reported, a fundamental difference between the defensive measures recommended by the Committee in accordance with the resolutions of the Rio de Janeiro Conference and those adopted by Argentina, which were quite inade7Q

quate. IV The Castillo regime was almost equally disliked in the Foreign Office and in the State Department. Understandably enough, the State Department saw no reason why the United States should supply arms and munitions to Argentina so long as she maintained friendly relations with the Axis, refrained from implementing tne Rio de Janeiro resolutions and refused to co-operate in the matter of convoys and escorts. The Argentine purchasing mission, which had been in Washington since December, 1941, returned empty-handed to Buenos Aires in March,80 and Castillo promptly set about obtaining arms through various channels from Germany, though without success.81 But Washington had other means at its disposal for exerting pressure on Argentina than the withholding of military materials. It could and did discriminate in the allocation of critical exports and scarce commodities, the granting of priorities and the issue of licences. It favoured certain firms, American branch factories for example, and, in the supply of newsprint, certain newspapers, at the expense of others, thus applying what was in effect a policy of economic sanctions, though the term was only used within the State Department and never openly avowed. Philip Bonsai, of the Division of the American Republics, criticized it as a species of economic warfare and an ineffective one at that, though he thought the withholding of military supplies to be sound and realistic and likely to have a salutary effect in military, naval and political circles, since it placed Argentina at a real disadvantage in relation to Brazil.82 Since pin-pricks were not enough, the policy of the cold shoulder was intensified in October. Sumner Welles's speech

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before the National T r a d e Convention in that month, in which he spoke of Allied ships being lost as the result of Axis espionage, referred to the Americas being 'stabbed in the back' by Axis agents operating in Argentina as well as in Chile. 83 The Argentine Government at once expressed its displeasure, inviting Welles to furnish specific instances of the acts which occasioned his remarks—an invitation which Welles declined on military grounds. 84 Early in November, however, three notes were delivered by the American Embassy to Ruiz-Guihazu. These purported to reveal the names of agents operating in Argentina under orders from the German high command, stated that there was convincing proof that members of the German Embassy were an integral part of the espionage service, that four groups of agents, each with secret radio transmitters, were collaborating with Axis agents in other countries, and that both the Axis embassies and the clandestine radio stations sent information on the sailing and cargoes of ships, defence measures, the British authorities at Trinidad, military and naval movements and the like. T o clinch these allegations, examples of messages which had been intercepted were included. Norman Armour, the American Ambassador, was at first anxious that the Argentine Government should be given an opportunity to act on these disclosures before any publicity was given to them, and fourteen persons who had been named by the United States were in fact arrested. 85 But there the energies of the Argentine Government appeared to flag. Those of the State Department, on the other hand, were invigorated. A memorandum embodying the substance of the three notes was prepared for the use of the Emergency Advisory Committee for Political Defense at Montevideo and on 22 J a n u a r y , 1943, two days after Chile had broken with the Axis, the Committee made it public, the Argentine Ministry of Foreign Affairs describing this publicity as 'prejudicial and redundant' and likely to hinder investigations in progress. 86 T h e attitude of the Foreign Office towards the Argentine regime was less belligerent than that of the State Department—Britain, after all, was not a party to the Rio de Janeiro resolutions and recommendations though she wished them to be implemented—and belief in the pro-Axis character of

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Argentina's rulers was less pronounced. Like the United States, Britain deplored the presence of Axis missions on Argentine soil, the Government's sufferance of Axis propaganda and espionage and its failure to put an end to the use of cypher in radio messages. She had other sources of displeasure in the revival of Argentine claims to the Falkland Islands and their dependencies, the escape of Graf Spee internees, and the self-imposed exclusion of Argentine ships from 'belligerent' Empire ports. But despite her long-established economic and financial interests in Argentina, she had less freedom of manoeuvre than the United States. Even before she became the sole Anglo-American purchasing agent for South American meat on behalf of the United Nations, she needed all the meat she could get from Argentina (as well as hides and wheat) both for her civilian population—the meat ration was around one shilling and two pence a week—and for the fighting forces; and, with some reason, she had no confidence that adequate replacements for Argentine beef could be supplied from the United States or elsewhere. Her exports, moreover, had dwindled to a bare minimum—even coal, much needed for the meat-packing plants, had had to be cut, let alone exports of manufactured and capital goods, including textiles. She could and did deny ex-passes for German war material ordered before the war began (which the State Department had urged her to grant in 1941 in the interests of Pan American defence); she could and did deny any special favours; and she could and did transfer from Argentina to Switzerland the care of British interests in J a p a n which she had somewhat obtusely asked Argentina to undertake when war between Britain and J a p a n had seemed likely in mid1941. 87 At the time of the Rio de Janeiro Conference there had been unfounded rumours that Britain was indifferent to the independent attitude which Argentina was reported to be about to adopt. 88 Thereafter a 'whispering campaign' began that Britain was actively encouraging Argentina in her policy of neutrality. Armour, in March, declared that he was well aware that 'every effort' was being made to divide Britain and the United States, but that so long as he was in charge of the American Embassy the agents provocateurs would have a hard

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time, though there were a good many, among American journalists and among businessmen of both the British and the American communities, who liked to stir up trouble. Moreover, the United States had two voices in Argentina, and 'money talked'. 89 Ovey, in May, insisted on the importance of making the Argentine Government understand that they could not get between Britain and the United States, 90 and the State Department was informed in July that Ovey's successor, Sir David Kelly, had been instructed to make it plain that the two countries stood together. 91 In England Eden told the very delightful Argentine Ambassador, Miguel Angel Carcano, that the British people found it hard to understand why Argentina should not break relations with the Axis, and, again, that her entry into the war, like Brazil's, would be of great benefit to the cause of the United Nations, 92 and while Kelly, in Argentina, strongly criticized the whispering campaign to ex-President Justo and to the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Chamber of Deputies, the Foreign Office circularized the British missions in South America warning them to contradict Argentine propaganda wherever and by whomsoever expressed. Britain and the United States, the warning read, did not require that Argentina should enter the war, but relations with the Axis should be broken. 93 But the whispering campaign continued. According to Carl Spaeth, the United States representative on the Emergency Advisory Committee for Political Defense, the State Department and the United States Foreign Service were convinced that Britain was secretly encouraging Argentina to stand out against the United States. This belief, he said, was 'literally part of Sumner Welles's mental fibre', and the British Minister in Uruguay expressed the opinion that it was, or had been, the ingrained conviction of Adolf Berle. (It was also Cordell Hull's.) Spaeth thought it likely that the myth (for myth it was) had an 'enemy origin' and was part of a clever compaign to make trouble between Britain and the United States. 94 Whatever its origin, it was exploited by American journalists 9 5 and by the Argentine Government itself; and it still survives. 96 Both Kelly and Armour, in September, 1942, thought that the relations between the British and American communities in Buenos Aires were 'very good indeed', 97 though Kelly, com-

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ing home on leave in December, spoke of an atmosphere of defeatism about post-war prospects among the British.98 Influential United States interests, he reported in the early months of 1943, after his return to Buenos Aires, were working hard to prepare the ground for a great extension of American economic influence after the war had ended. He instanced, in particular, a sensational advertising campaign organized by the Rockefeller Trust and various American corporations, the great expansion of the American Embassy, the efforts made to attract Argentine groups and individuals to the United States, and the remarks in Buenos Aires of Eric Johnston, the president of the United States Chamber of Commerce, who created the impression that Argentine needs would be met by the United States after the war—all of which, Kelly thought, tended to weaken the anti-Castillo campaign of the United States." The British community, on the other hand, was depressed by the continued shrinkage of British exports, due not only to shipping shortages and the exigencies of war, but to the rigour with which the restraints on British export policy under the White Paper on Lend-Lease of September, 1941,100 were applied. Clearly there had been, and would be, scope for 'whisperings'. Welles seems to have asserted in 1942 not only that one or two British officials in Latin America had sometimes in their conversations or actions taken a line rather different from official British policy—a charge for which the Foreign Office would have liked chapter and verse,101 but that many of the most important commercial and financial figures in the British community at Buenos Aires were 'consistently and publicly stating that Argentina should not break relations with the Axis, and that British interests favored the Argentine position of "neutrality" \102 If such statements had come to Kelly's ears, he would have been seriously at fault in not reporting them. Yet he hastened to draw the attention of the Foreign Office in November, 1942, to an article printed in the Stock Exchange Gazette in London on 29 August which was seized upon by the hostile newspaper, El Cabildo (subsidized from Axis sources), to draw invidious comparisons between British understanding of Argentina and the lack of it by the United States.103 This, he thought, would not escape the 'vig-

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ilant eye' of the American Embassy and might undo much of the confidence which Britain had been trying to build up. The Foreign Office, for its part, drew the Gazette's attention to the danger of publishing matter which, even by implication, could be made use of for the purpose of driving a wedge between Britain and the United States. 104 T h e Stock Exchange Gazette, though it clearly reflected certain views in the City, had a small circulation and slight claims to represent authoritative opinion. Those of the South American Journal, an old-established but not widely-read London weekly, were also small. T h e Foreign Office believed it to be in close touch with the Argentine Embassy and that an article which it published on 12 December was Argentine-inspired. This, referring to Argentine neutrality, affirmed that, by contrast with the Nazis, Britain recognized the right of sovereign states to be masters of their own destinies and that the Argentines, both rulers and ruled, remained the traditional friends of Britain. 105 Taken by itself such an article would have been of no more consequence than the pronouncement of the Stock Exchange Gazette, or the later eulogy of Argentina delivered by Lord Davidson in a speech to the Royal Empire Society in March (at much the same time as Eric Johnston was speaking in Buenos Aires). 106 But the gist of the article was at once reproduced in the official Information Bulletin of the Argentine Ministry of Foreign Affairs to prove the efficacy of Argentina's foreign policy and British approval of it.107 This was too much. Churchill, on hearing what had happened, immediately cancelled an invitation to lunch at the Argentine Embassy, and the Foreign Office, as it had long been pressed to do and had long considered doing, issued a strongly-worded official communique on 31 December stating that His Majesty's Government deplored the policy of Argentina in remaining in diplomatic relations 'with the enemies of humanity' and were astonished that an official Argentine publication should apparently have attempted to express the contrary, since they had been at pains to leave the Argentine Government in no doubt of their views. 108 T h e police in Argentina banned the publication of the communique on local radio stations and in the press, and no comment was at first allowed except for a violent tirade in the pages of El Cabildo.109 T h e Brazilian Gov-

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ernment, by contrast, was reported to be greatly pleased; the State Department, according to Laurence Duggan, warmly approved; and Roosevelt described the communique as 'grand'.110 To drive the point home, Eden, welcoming in the House of Commons on 22 January the Chilean rupture of relations with the Axis, stated, amid loud applause, that he hoped the time would come when the whole of the western hemisphere would have severed relations with Britain's enemies, and told the Argentine Ambassador that the British Government was well aware that German and Italian activities in Argentina were responsible for the loss of British lives and shipping and that consequently Britain had her own reasons for deploring the attitude of the Argentine Government.111 No further initiative was taken by the British Government, though the formulation of a common directive on economic policy towards Argentina as proposed by the United States was kept under constant review.112 The Foreign Office had long acknowledged Argentina's forbearance over the accumulation of sterling balances. It could not forget Britain's relative dependence on Argentine meat. But it was anxious to restrict purchases from Argentina as much as possible.113 In internal discussions members of the South American Department argued that what mattered more than the nominal policy of the Argentine Government was its behaviour, and with this they were by no means satisfied. Argentina, they thought, was quite undeserving. Nor was it in the interests of AngloAmerican relations to condone a policy which the Americans regarded, on a moral plane, as an act of treachery to the Pan American ideal. On the other hand, it was, they considered, for the United States to make the running, and they deplored that they knew too little, 'even dangerously too little' of what was in the mind of the State Department in respect of their Argentine policy and the role which Britain was expected to play in it. They deplored also what they considered to be a complete lack of co-ordination in the United States administration. In the circumstances they proposed to do no more than what was required to allay State Department suspicions.114 In Argentina, after the first shock of the British communique, of Chile's severance of relations with the Axis, and of the

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publication of the United States' memorandum on espionage, Castillo's complacency remained unshaken, though his doubts about an Axis victory were growing.115 Nor was he disturbed by signs of uneasiness in his own party. Dr. Justo V. Rocha, the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Chamber of Deputies, published an open letter on 5 February, for example, in which he declared that the country's foreign policy was 'inconceivably inert'.116 Castillo, on the other hand, told a reporter from the pro-Axis El Cabildo that Argentina's international policy was 'dignified and just. . . We keep on the edge of the present conflict with which we have nothing to do, and are at peace with the whole world'. He added that 'the man who succeeds me will have to give guarantees that the present policy will be maintained and will not be departed from at any time'.117 The man whom Castillo decided to impose on the nation was the President of the Senate, Rubustiano Patron Costas, a rich sugar planter from Salta and an ultra-conservative. Patron Costas was a landowner and an industrialist, variously described as 'a model employer' and 'an Indian slavedriver'.118 His views on foreign affairs were nebulous and contradictory. Disliked by the opposition, he was unpopular with the army, critically regarded by the great metropolitan dailies, and not wholly acceptable to some sections of the Concordancia. There were rival candidates, including the Governor of Buenos Aires Province. But the Governor was no match for Castillo, and the Concordancia, after Castillo had announced his support for Patron Costas in February, had little option but to adopt him in May as a compromise candidate, Kelly implies, between 'anglophil estancieros and pro-American financiers'.119 As for the opposition, the Socialists had long been campaigning for a Democratic Union with the Radicals and other parties, including the Communists. But the Radicals displayed a constitutional inability to agree among themselves, let alone with the Socialists and Communists. Their anger at the impending constitutional fraud was shared in sections of the army. Secret Radical-military conversations took place, and in May plans for a revolution in September were revealed by army plotters to a group of Radical leaders in Buenos Aires Province. These, in turn, suggested that the

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War Minister, General Pedro Pablo Ramirez,120 might stand as the Radical candidate for the presidency. At a meeting with the Minister, he neither declined nor accepted the proposal. But Castillo learnt of it and rumours circulated among the public at large. Ramirez tried to allay them by an anodyne statement on 1 June. But Castillo was not satisfied. He awaited Ramirez's resignation, and, when that was not forthcoming, prepared, on 3 June, to dismiss him.121 The military plotters were alerted and, on the 4th, 10,000 troops from the Campo de Mayo and Liniers garrisons, led by the Chief of Cavalry, General Arturo Rawson, marched on Buenos Aires. There was a skirmish at the School of Naval Mechanics, in which nineteen lives were lost. Otherwise there was no resistance. Castillo, with some of his ministers, took refuge on the mine-sweeper, Drummond, landed near La Plata on the following day and signed his resignation. Rawson assumed the presidency for two days and was then forced out in favour of Ramirez, who was in turn displaced by General Edelmiro Farrell in February, 1944. Civilian government in Argentina had ended, and, with it, the rule of the oligarchy.

VI ARGENTINA UNDER MILITARY R U L E - 1 I The coup d'etat of 4 J u n e , 1943, took not only Argentina but the world by surprise, or at least that part of the world which had any interest in Argentine affairs. It was precipitated by Castillo's attempted dismissal of General Ramirez as Minister of War. But this was the occasion, not the cause of the military revolt. Fundamentally, the coup d'etat was the price paid for the fraudulence and corruption of public life, for a general indifference to public affairs among Argentines of every class, 1 for the lack of integrity among the political parties—the Socialists were a notable exception, and for the failure to adapt the structure of politics to the structure of society. A large urban proletariat had grown up in metropolitan Buenos Aires, a new industrial society was in process of formation, and the world which the great landowners had known was changing. 2 But of this change both the Concordancia and the Radical party displayed a marked lack of appreciation. Some months before the coup d'etat the Foreign Office in London had been warned that Argentina was heading for 'a full-blooded' revolution against the propertied classes. It did not believe this. Only the army, it was felt, could make a revolution, and the army supported Castillo. Kelly, asked for his opinion, replied that twenty years earlier all the elements were present for a 'first-class social revolution', but, as things were, the interest of all classes in both political and social questions was 'superficial' and the prevailing materialism was likely to maintain the general apathy and indifference. 3 He was wrong. T h e seeds of revolution, though it was not to be a 'full-blooded' one in any violent sense, had been sown, and a 47-year-old Colonel, J u a n Domingo Peron, who had returned in 1941 from a two years' assignment in Italy, would reap the increase. T h e Foreign Office, of course, was right in thinking that no

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revolution could succeed without the support of the army. But between the army officers and the landowners there was a wide social gulf, and, despite his assiduous wining and dining of the high command, the army was no longer wholly loyal to Castillo. The refusal of the United States to supply armaments to Argentina and the steady flow of Lend-Lease supplies to Brazil had deeply disturbed the armed forces. Nationalists, neutralists, Axis sympathizers and Allied sympathizers alike were concerned at the increasing military disequilibrium between Argentina and Brazil, which Castillo, despite all his efforts, could do little to remedy. Neither the ultra-nationalist nor the less ideological and more simply professional elements in the army, moreover, approved of the partisan use which Castillo appeared to be making of it to support the election of Patron Costas as his successor.4 In some quarters, indeed, the opinion prevailed that, given the character of party politics and politicians, the time had come to put an end to civilian rule altogether. In March a secret society, or lodge, the G.O.U., or, to give these initials their most commonly accepted interpretation, the Grupo de Oficiales Unidos, had been formed. It included Peron, fifteen other colonels or lieutenant-colonels, three majors and one captain, who was the private secretary to Ramirez. A propaganda leaflet attributed to it lauded Germany's 'titanic effort' to unite the continent of Europe, declared that it was Argentina's destiny to become the guardian and leader of South America, and proclaimed the necessity for a military dictatorship. The attribution of this leaflet to the G.O.U. may be doubtful, but there is evidence that it represented, accurately enough, the opinions of Peron, who later admitted that his early sympathies were on the side of the Axis, and of some of his friends and associates in the G.O.U. 5 In any event, the lodge, which included Allied as well as Axis sympathizers, was determined to prevent the election of Patron Costas, and its members, or some of them (though not Peron), played a prominent part in the coup d'etat of June. Castillo overthrown, Rawson assumed the headship of government as though it were his automatically. Martial law was proclaimed and Congress, due to meet on the 8th, was dissolved. There is little reason to doubt that Rawson

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intended to break with the Axis, 6 in the hope of obtaining military supplies. But, devoid of political sense, he chose a cabinet so discordant in itself, and its two civilian members so totally unacceptable to the army chiefs, that he found himself compelled to surrender his authority to Ramirez on the night ofJ u n e 6th to 7th. An elderly retired admiral, Segundo Storni, whom Rawson had appointed to the Ministry of the Interior, became Minister of Foreign Affairs. He was, he told Kelly, the son of a Swiss and, as such, disliked dictatorships, wished Argentina had declared war on the Axis, and believed that friendship with Britain must be the basis of her foreign policy. 7 Dr. Jorge Santamarina, the respected head of the National Bank, who was appointed Minister of Finance and was the only civilian member of the cabinet, shared Storni's general sympathies, and so did the new Ministers of Public Works and of Justice. But General Edelmiro Farrell, who took Ramirez's place as Minister of War, and Colonel Alberto Gilbert, the Director of Army Materiel, who became Minister of the Interior, belonged to a different camp; and though no G . O . U . members were elevated to cabinet rank several of them were assigned to important positions in the War and Interior Ministries and as troop commanders. Peron, the eminence grise behind General Farrell, took over the War Ministry Secretariat and Lieutenant-Colonel Enrique Gonzalez, a friend both of Gilbert and Ramirez, the Presidential Secretariat. Yet a third member of the G.O.U., Colonel Emilio Ramirez, was appointed Chief of the Buenos Aires Police. 8 The new Government, whose policy, General Ramirez declared, would be one of friendship and 'loyal co-operation' with the nations of America and of neutrality, for the moment, towards the rest of the world, 9 was recognized by the Supreme Court on the same day that it was established, by Brazil, Chile, Bolivia and Paraguay on the 9th, and, in the face of this display of Latin American independence and of revolt, as it were, against United States tutelage, by the United States herself, as also by the other American states and by Britain, on the 11th. Martial law had been lifted, but not the state of siege. A decree of the 10th prohibited, despite Axis protests, the use of secret codes in international radio communications. T o public bewilderment an avowed Germanophile, General Basilio Pertine, was

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appointed intendente, or Lord Mayor, of Buenos Aires;10 presidential elections, due to be held in September, were cancelled; and the Government ceased to be provisional. Both at home and among the Allied and 'associated' nations, the immediate reaction to the coup d'etat had been favourable. On 5 June newspapers in Buenos Aires of such very different political views as the pro-Allied El Mundo, the pro-Axis El Cabildo, and the Catholic El Pueblo, all expressed approval, though for quite different reasons. La Nation and La Prensa were also well-disposed, and, to take two examples from abroad, so were 0 Globo of Brazil and the New York Times.11 Armour, who thought the coup to be both 'popular' and 'democratic', believed that it heralded an eventual rupture with the Axis12—an opinion which Kelly seems cautiously to have shared,13 though he had no illusions about its nationalist character. In Washington Roosevelt and Hull, according to one observer, were 'very much pleased',14 and Eden, in London, told the War Cabinet that the formation of a new Government under Ramirez was a favourable event and that he had good hopes that, when properly established, it would break with the Axis.15 Disillusion quickly followed, not only among those Radical politicians who had hoped to benefit by the coup, but in Washington and London. The State Department, indeed, had begun to have misgivings even before recognition was accorded to Ramirez,16 and while, thereafter, these misgivings grew ever stronger, so did the doubts of the Foreign Office.17 It is not necessary to take at their face value the highly adverse reports which reached Washington from various intelligence agencies during the next few weeks, reports which went so far as to suggest that Ramirez and what soon came to be known as the 'colonels' clique' were on the Nazi payroll.18 But the Argentine Government, nominally in the hands of a weak and wavering general, who was pulled this way and that by rival interests, trod the path of illiberalism with a rake's progress.19 It began by promises of a thorough house-cleaning, the elimination, in Ramirez's words, of 'venal, incapable or parasitic elements'20—the former Ministers of the Interior and Agriculture were arrested and imprisoned on charges of corruption—and by appealing to popular favour by a reduction of

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rents and prices. 21 It continued by laying its hands on almost every aspect of public activity. Reform was followed by regimentation, regimentation by repression. Military interv e n e r s took command of the provinces. T h e civil service, the autonomous boards, the public corporations, the Consejo Nacional de Education, the universities, the police, the judiciary, all felt the military hand. T h e state of siege was maintained. Communists, the 'scourge of society', so Gilbert described them, 22 were arrested; and from anti-Communism to antiSemitism was but a small step. Pro-Allied committees such as Action Argentina, the feministjunta de la Victoria, and the Democratic Federation of Free Peoples, were dissolved on the ground that they were being used as a cloak for Communist activities, though similar pro-Axis groups were also banned. T h e wing of the General Confederation of Labour known as Lista No. 2—the Confederation had recently split into rival factions, of which No. 2 was the more militant—was dissolved, broadcasting subjected to minute control and the press to ever closer restrictions. 23 Colonels, if not generals, were everywhere elevated to positions of authority. A colonel even replaced the manager of the celebrated Colon Opera House, whose committee instantly resigned. 24 More than 9500 decrees were issued in less than four months. 2 5 Argentina was in the grip of a military and highly nationalistic dictatorship, and the driving force behind it was the G.O.U., of which Colonel Peron intended to be the dominant figure. Late in July Eden spoke to the Argentine Ambassador in London of British disquiet at these internal developments. It was hardly surprising, he said, that to many people they seemed to smack of fascism—a remark whose justice Carcano admitted, though the phenomenon, he thought, was a passing phase. The new military government believed in force, but forceful methods could not long survive in Argentina. Meanwhile its foreign policy was moving in a direction which Britain would welcome. T h e new Foreign Minister, Storni, was a man of absolute integrity and Britain could be sure that under his guidance Argentine policy would show itself favourable to the Allied cause. 26 If Carcano felt as embarrassed as did his colleague, Felipe Espil, in Washington, 27 there was at any rate some basis for this last expectation. Both Armour and Kelly

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had reported the opinion of Santamarina at the end of J u n e that a break with the Axis would occur shortly, despite nationalist and neutralist opposition. 28 T h e Government had even thought of sending Rawson on a military and goodwill mission to Washington—a mission which Washington was not prepared to receive so long as Argentina had not broken with the Axis. Above all, while the State Department spelt out for itself what actions it expected Argentina to take, including not only the severance of relations with the Axis, but the suppression of radio and press propaganda, the observance of the Proclaimed List and the complete interruption of telecommunications, 2 9 Ramirez himself went so far as to tell Armour on 6 J u l y that a rupture would take place no later than 15 August. 30 Was this a serious intention? Only a few days earlier Ramirez had a secret interview, arranged by LieutenantColonel Gonzalez, with a German agent. O n this occasion Gonzalez had said that, though cypher messages by radio had been prohibited, messages could be sent to Berlin in code through the Argentine Embassy there, and Ramirez, then making his appearance, stated that he had no wish to break with the Axis but that pressure from the United States and Brazil was terribly strong. T h e tone in which the United States Ambassador presented his demands, he added, 'made his blood boil'. 31 And on the 10th or 20th J u l y he expressed his intention, according to the German charge d'affaires, of ordering the Argentine military attache in Berlin to examine all possibilities of acquiring arms from Germany. 3 2 Matters so rested till at the end ofJ u l y Armour was recalled to Washington for consultation. O n the 29th he saw Storni, reminding him of the assurance he had been given on the 6th that relations with the Axis would be broken off within four or five weeks, only to be told that, in view of the sentiments of many army officers, Ramirez had decided that they would not be broken off at all. Indeed, said Storni, to break them now—Mussolini had been arrested on the 25th—would be 'cowardly' and 'inelegant'. 33 When Armour asked that he might be provided with a written explanation of the reasons for Argentina's continued neutrality, Storni replied that such an explanation was already being drafted. It took the form of a

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personal letter from Storni to Hull, dated 5 August, Storni confessing to Kelly that he was 'tired of the whole business'. 34 But the letter was not wholly Storni's composition. Drafted in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it was then sent to Ramirez, to be returned drastically altered, partly, no doubt, as Kelly and the Brazilian Ambassador believed, by Ramirez, 35 but possibly also by Gonzalez and Peron. 36 II Armour delivered Storni's letter to Hull on 14 August. In Kelly's later opinion it was a naive but genuine appeal for American goodwill and trust written by the most friendly, honest and straightforward of all the members of the various Argentine governments he had known, as well as 'by the equally innocent General Ramirez', 37 and intended, so Storni had told him, to show that Argentina was neither pro-Nazi nor anti-democratic. 38 Naive it certainly was. It explained at length that Argentina had no sympathy with totalitarianism or with the Axis powers; that, so far as the United Nations were concerned, she had always been an exceptionally friendly neutral; that she had made considerable sacrifices in placing her exports, including commodities which she needed herself, at the almost exclusive service of the Allied cause and of the Americans; and that the country, living 'in an atmosphere of peace, work and abundance', was unprepared for any violent change. The Argentine 'conscience' could not be led 'solely and without any immediate motive' to break off diplomatic relations. Moreover, when the defeat of the Axis was 'inexorably drawing closer', an unexpected rupture would put Argentine chivalry to a hard test. Finally, Storni recalled the difficulties Argentina had experienced from shortages of machinery, petroleum and other materials and concluded with a singularly inept appeal. T h e Axis countries, he said, had nothing to hope from Argentina, but the evolution of Argentine public opinion would be 'more rapid and effective for the American cause if President Roosevelt' made a gesture of genuine friendship. Such a gesture might be 'the urgent provision of airplanes, spare parts, armaments and machinery to restore Argentina to the position of equilibrium' to which she

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was entitled 'with respect to other South American countries'.39 Hull's reply, on 30 August, was couched in severe and sarcastic terms which could hardly fail to bring the Argentine Government into ridicule. It welcomed Storni's assurance that the Argentine people felt themselves to be 'indissolubly linked' with the other inhabitants of the hemisphere, though their 'undoubted sentiments' had not been implemented by the commitments 'freely entered into by their Government'. It recited a number of the resolutions and recommendations of the Rio de Janeiro Conference and the failure of Argentina to fulfil them, despite the declarations made by Ramirez and Storni during their first weeks in office. Admittedly Argentine agricultural and mineral products had been of the greatest value to the United Nations, but then they had been sold in the only markets in which they could be sold and at prices highly beneficial to Argentina. Other points in Storni's letter were dealt with in similar vein. As to the supply of arms and munitions, these, said Hull, had nothing to do with the military and naval equilibrium between the South American states. They had been furnished to the other republics for the purpose of hemisphere defence, and since Argentina had clearly indicated both by words and actions that her armed forces would not be used to forward the security of the New World, it was impossible for the President of the United States to furnish arms and munitions under the Lend-Lease Act. Hull concluded by regretting that by her non-participation in the defence of the hemisphere, Argentina was also depriving herself of participation in the studies and discussions designed to meet post-war problems.40 Both Governments published this exchange of letters on 7 September, Storni, for his part, telling Kelly that he favoured publication in order to make clear Argentina's denial of sympathy with the Axis and her belief that it was already defeated, the United States, in Kelly's view, hoping to discredit the Argentine Government.41 If this was indeed Hull's aim, it fell short of the mark. The liberal press in Buenos Aires, certainly, displayed shame and distress, even implying that Hull's reply, though deeply wounding, was justified. The nationalist press reacted with violence, attacking Storni per-

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sonally for dragging Argentina's name in the mud. In the political storm that followed Storni had no option but to resign, generously taking upon himself full responsibility for his letter, while Ramirez ungenerously disclaimed all complicity.42 But though Buenos Aires was alive with rumours, and Rawson, who had been appointed Ambassador to Brazil, significantly postponed his departure, only Storni resigned, to be replaced temporarily by Gilbert. Leaning now to one course and now to another, the vacillating President accepted the advice of Gilbert, Gonzalez and the Navy Minister, Admiral Benito Sueyro, to send a special envoy to Berlin to negotiate the purchase of armaments. T h e man selected was a young naval reserve officer, Oscar Alberto Helmuth, who, whether Ramirez knew it or not, was himself an espionage agent and claimed to have such excellent connections in Germany that he would be received by Hitler himself. He was to go by ship to Spain and then to be flown by the Sicherheitsdienst, or Nazi Party Intelligence Organization to Germany, and, in addition to his instructions, he was given letters of introduction to German officials by Gilbert and Sueyro. He sailed on 2 October on the Spanish steamer, Cabo de Homos, which was due to call at Trinidad on her way to Bilbao, and, for purposes of camouflage, Helmuth was designated Argentine Consul at Barcelona. 43 Throughout this period Armour remained in the United States initially engaged in policy discussions. Philip Bonsai, of the State Department's Latin American Division, was anxious that Britain and the United States should maintain a common front—an anxiety the Foreign Office shared. 44 It welcomed Bonsai's invitation to Lord Halifax to take part in the discussions with Armour, but thought that Kelly might also participate with advantage. 4 5 But Sumner Welles (who left his desk in the State Department, however, on 21 August, his political career in ruins), 46 was clearly lukewarm in his reception of this proposal, and Kelly remained at Buenos Aires. 47 Hints had been dropped both by Bonsai and Duggan that the Department was 'toying' with the idea of 'covert intervention' to overthrow the Argentine Government. But the State Department and the supply authorities in the United States did not see eye to eye, the latter, like the Foreign Office, taking the

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view that food supplies were a more important consideration than a break with the Axis,48 and this opinion prevailed. Early in September it was announced that Armour would be returning to Buenos Aires in due course, and no objection was raised by the State Department to the conclusion on 21 August by the Ministry of Food, after long and leisurely negotiations, of a new contract to run till October, 1944, for the purchase of Argentine meat by Britain on behalf of the United Nations,49 or, indeed, to a later contract for the purchase of Argentine eggs. The Department was anxious, however, that the British Government should issue a statement to dispel all possible suspicion that the signing of the meat contract implied in any way British approval of Argentine neutrality. The Foreign Office and the Ministry of Food had in fact^already drafted a communique stating that the contract had no political significance, and this was issued on 30 August.50 The Department was also anxious that, after the publication of the Hull-Storni letters, Britain should make a statement similar to that of 31 December, 1942, confirming Anglo-American solidarity. After some hesitation and confusion about the timing, content and manner of the statement (including a strange misapprehension about the short length of the parliamentary session, during which the matter might have been raised), the Foreign Office chose the signing of the egg contract as an appropriate occasion to meet the Department's wishes.51 Accordingly a statement was issued on 27 September to the effect that the conclusion of two contracts within a short space of time for the purchase of Argentine meat and eggs should not be taken as having any political significance; that Britain 'remained disappointed' at the determination of successive Argentine governments to maintain neutrality during a struggle so patently threatening the principles which animated the founders of the Western Republics; that she had never understood why Argentina had failed to give effect to the recommendations of the Rio de Janeiro Conference, with the result that Axis nationals were still free to conspire on Argentine soil against the interests and security of the United Nations; that she expected the rights and interests of British subjects in Argentina to be given all possible protection; and that she hoped

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Argentina would range herself at an early date whole-heartedly on the side of the freedom-loving nations. 52 Ill This statement satisfied the State Department, which announced almost simultaneously and, at least in Kelly's opinion, most inopportunely, 53 the impending return of Armour to Buenos Aires, and the Argentine Government issued a mild, conciliatory, but evasive and unconvincing reply. 54 More to the point, La Prensa and La Nation published in the early days of October strong leading articles in favour of a change of policy and the fulfilment of the Rio resolutions. 55 These bold pronouncements culminated in the publication by both papers on 15 October, the day of Armour's return, of a manifesto signed by 150 prominent persons. They included such notables as Dr. Tomas le Breton, an ex-Ambassador to Britain, Jose Maria Cantilo, an ex-Foreign Minister, Dr. Nicolas Repetto, the Socialist leader, Dr. Mariano Castex, the country's most distinguished physician, former members of Congress, and representatives of the universities, the banking and business community, journalism, student centres and workmen's unions. It asked, very simply, for freedom of the press and freedom of assembly, 'effective democracy' through the faithful application of all the provisions of the national Constitution, and 'American solidarity' through the loyal performance of national undertakings signed by the country's representatives. 56 But the cause of the signatories was already lost. A contest for power was inherent in the coup d'etat of J u n e , and the struggle between moderates and extremists in military circles, as the liberal Bishop Miguel de Andrea termed them, and between the supporters of moderation and eventual rupture and what the Bishop called the 'wild men' in the cabinet, 57 exacerbated by the publication of the Hull-Storni letters, came to a head on 11 October. Ramirez had repeatedly been warned against Farrell and Peron. But, 'in doubt to act', he found himself constrained on the 11th to bow to a meeting of officers at the W a r Ministry and to appoint Farrell, still Minister of War, as Vice-President on the following day. 58

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Santamarina and his like-minded colleagues resigned on the 13th. They were replaced on the 16th by two extreme nationalists—Dr. Gustavo Martinez Zuviria (better known as the novelist, Hugo Wast) as Minister of Justice and Public Instruction, Dr. Cesar Ameghino as Minister of Finance, and, of less pronounced views, a retired naval captain, Ricardo Vago, as Minister of Public Works. O n the 21st Gilbert was confirmed in the office of Foreign Minister and General Luis Perlinger, who equated liberalism with communism, 59 took his place as Minister of the Interior. Colonel Gonzalez was also given cabinet status, and Peron, having added to his post of Secretary of the W a r Ministry that of head of the National Labour Department in October, also joined the cabinet at the end of November as Argentina's first Secretary of Labour and Social Welfare. 60 T h e Buenos Aires Police Chief, Colonel Emilio Ramirez, was placed in charge of a new federal police force. Even before this cabinet transformation was completed, Ramirez, whom Armour, when he saw him, found extremely irritable, particularly over the manifesto of the 15th,61 had ordered the dismissal of all persons in any way connected with government employment, honorary or titular, including a large number of professors, who had signed it, and the Presidential Secretariat denounced them in absurd and abusive terms as a mixed group of 'politicians without hope and [of] inflammatory ideologies', foreigners, and extreme leftists with anti-social and anti-Argentine records. 62 T h e Government dismissed also, or forced the resignation of, the distinguished general manager of the Central Bank, Dr. Raul Prebisch, and a number of permanent officials in the Ministry of Finance. 63 Dr. Castex, threatened with arrest, took refuge in the Brazilian Embassy and then fled to Montevideo, and a number of university students went on strike. But the strike soon collapsed—the Government held too many guns, and there was no serious resistance to its policies. Dr. Castex was allowed to return and resume his practice, though a small bomb was thrown into his house. 64 The University Federation was disbanded and a number of universities were closed. T h e Radical party distinguished itself in November by postponing its convention 'at the kind suggestion of the Chief of Police',

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and on the last day of the year all political parties were dissolved —a ban shortly afterwards extended to nationalist groups on the ground that political activities were unnecessary when there was a government to 'guide' the nation.65 Other decrees froze rents, made Catholic teaching obligatory in schools and still further tightened control of the press, broadcasting and the theatre; and while the Government ignored public opinion at home, it ignored also appeals from Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela and other Latin American states to conform to the policy of the American republics in general.66 Meanwhile, as it slipped ever further down the totalitarian path, a new rivalry became apparent, this time between Ramirez, Gilbert and Gonzalez on the one side and Farrell and Peron on the other, Peron assiduously seeking to extend his influence among the junior officers, and, as Secretary of Labour and Social Welfare, to curry favour with the working masses. 'The era of Argentine social policy,' he announced, 'has been initiated.'67 But a double threat overhung the Government. On 29 October the British authorities detained Helmuth for questioning as he stepped off the Cabo de Homos at Trinidad. His detention was known in Buenos Aires a few days later, and in Berlin, through information supplied to German intelligence officers by Gonzalez and Peron, by mid-November. The German Foreign Office at once realized that if the compromising documents which Helmuth carried were discovered and he himself made a confession, the Ramirez Government and the continuation of Argentina's neutrality policy would be endangered.68 It was not till a month later that the same realization seems to have been brought home to the Argentine Government when, having been told by the British that Helmuth had admitted to being a German agent, it understood that it would be compelled to prepare an alibi for itself by taking action against the Nazi espionage network which the confession had revealed. The German charge d'affaires was indirectly warned of this on 20 December.69 On the same day the Government of Bolivia was overthrown by a nationalist-militarist coup d'etat. Armour believed it to have been organized in Buenos Aires,70 though the evidence was far from convincing. So did the State Department,71

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which regarded the coup as confirmation of the sinister design, long attributed by United States intelligence agencies to the Argentine Government, of fomenting unrest in South America in collaboration with the Nazis. 72 Argentina's hasty recognition on 3 J a n u a r y , 1944, of a regime which appeared to chime so closely with the interests of her own extreme nationalists, while all the other American republics held back, did nothing to lessen this conviction. T h e question was at once raised, was this the prelude to further coups d'etat in Chile, Peru, Uruguay and elsewhere? Not only the State Department but Roosevelt himself was disturbed. Hull was all for the imposition of sanctions, not the disguised sanctions which had long been applied, but avowed sanctions and the imposition of an embargo, the freezing of Argentine funds (which the United States Treasury had long advocated but the State Department had hitherto resisted), the recall of Armour, and the issue of a statement pillorying both Argentina and Bolivia, accompanied by parallel action by Britain. Meanwhile, as a measure of precaution, additional military equipment was sent to Brazil and a naval and air squadron to Montevideo. 73 T h e Foreign Office was disquieted by these 'battering ram' 7 4 proposals. It urged that no precipitate action should be taken before the Combined Boards 75 had been consulted and it was known what effect sanctions might have on the war effort. T h e only measures likely, it thought, to produce what the United States wanted, namely, the overthrow of the present Argentine regime and of German influence in Argentina, might involve direct intervention contrary to the principles of the Atlantic Charter and the Good Neighbour policy. It pointed out that in 1944 Argentina would be providing 14 per cent of the wheat, 70 per cent of the linseed, 40 per cent of the carcass meat, 29 per cent of the canned, and 35 per cent of the hides imported into Britain. It believed that the British meat ration could not be cut and doubted whether the United States could replace Argentine supplies. T h e resulting deficiencies would affect not only Britain but all the United Nations. T h e British Chiefs of Staff feared that military operations in 1944 could not continue as planned unless the civilian meat ration were severely curtailed, that a reduction in the leather supply would have a serious effect on military opera-

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tional capacity towards the end of the year and that a shortage of linseed would affect maintenance of material and the production of essential camouflage. The Combined Chiefs of Staff took a similar view. The Combined Raw Materials Board saw no alternative sources of supply of hides and leather. T h e Combined Shipping Adjustment Board was equally discouraging and the Combined Food Board declared that it would regard the cessation of Argentine supplies 'with the gravest apprehension'. Meat, wheat, animal fats, vegetable oils and dairy products, it reported, were the principal foodstuffs it was hoped to obtain from Argentina in 1944. Of these, meat and wheat were of critical importance, Argentina furnishing more than 30 per cent of total United Nations meat imports; and the Board saw no practical possibility of meeting the position which would result if Argentine supplies of these two commodities were withdrawn from current use. 76 Churchill, who was at Marrakesh when the problem was first brought to his attention, had initially seen no reason why the British should not join with Hull 'in bashing Argentina', but quickly changed his tune when Eden told him of the supply situation, and himself appealed to Roosevelt on 23 J a n u a r y . 'We really must look,' he said, 'before we leap.' 77 T h e Argentine Government kept silence till 21 J a n u a r y , when it stated that the Argentine Consul, Helmuth, detained at Trinidad, had proved to be an enemy agent and that the resulting enquiry had revealed the existence of an espionage organization in Argentina. An ample investigation would be made to put an end to all activities contrary to international policy—a statement which left Hull unmoved, though he had earlier given way on the immediate imposition of sanctions. Indeed, Laurence Duggan suggested that Helmuth's confession might warrant publication as it contained a clear implication of the direct complicity of members of the Argentine Government, including Ramirez himself.78 O n the 24th, however, Gilbert told Kelly and Armour that the Helmuth investigation had convinced his Government of the truth of the allegations about Axis espionage, that Argentine hospitality had been abused, and that it had been decided to break relations with Germany and J a p a n . This, he said, was conditional on no action being taken which could give rise to the belief that

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Argentina was acting under pressure. When told that the United States was about to make a statement on the nonrecognition of the Bolivian regime which would include a reference to Argentina, he said that surely there was time for this to be stopped.79 Hull acquiesced, though still doubtful of Argentina's real intentions. There was no freezing order, no pillorying of Argentina in the statement issued on the 24th on the Bolivian regime,80 and no recall of Armour; and on the 26th January, in a decree signed by Ramirez and Gilbert, Argentina severed relations with Germany and Japan. 81 IV It is open to question whether Gilbert and Ramirez were seriously perturbed at the prospect of the publication by the United States of a memorandum accusing Argentina of complicity in the Bolivian coup d'etat and feared the imposition of sanctions, or whether they were mainly anxious to forestall any revelations which the British and American Governments might make as a result of Helmuth's confession, and, by a purely tactical move, escape from a position of growing isolation without loss of dignity. In itself a United States denunciation might merely have inflamed nationalist sentiment in the army and, indeed, in the country at large and, when, early in February, Armour apologized because an earlier confidential memorandum circulated to the American republics, which did condemn Argentina, had been leaked to the press, Gilbert made light of the matter.82 Sanctions would doubtless have been worrying—the legal counsellor to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was interested enough to ask on 25 January whether they would really have been imposed.83 But the State Department itself did not believe that they would have resulted in the overthrow of the Government.84 The revelations of the mission entrusted by the President and members of his cabinet to a German espionage agent, on the other hand, would have provoked a major scandal. Was it not the part of wisdom to take the high ground that Argentine hospitality had been abused by a secret espionage ring which Helmuth's confession had unmasked85 (if unmasked is the word), to avoid, at all costs, as Gilbert made clear to Armour the impression that the rupture

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was due (as in fact it was) to external pressure, and to avert, with simulated indignation, a further crisis in inter-American relations? Neither Britain nor the United States regarded the rupture with anything but cynicism. Both officially welcomed it, Roosevelt in a direct message to Ramirez, Hull in a public statement,86 Eden in the House of Commons, in an interview with Carcano, and in a message through Kelly expressing his satisfaction at an action taken 'at long last'.87 But both made it plain that they expected what Armour, on Hull's behalf, called 'stern action against Argentine nationalists', immediate implementation of the Rio resolutions and the expulsion of the staffs of the German and Japanese Embassies, and what Eden described as 'immediate, energetic and final action' against all Axis activities such as clandestine wireless communications, Nazi propaganda and espionage.88 And when Kelly, referring to the importance of British investments in Argentina, suggested that, though the Government was a nationalist one, normal relations should be resumed, he was told that the Argentines were entitled to no credit for their anti-Axis actions; that the Foreign Office would not feel justified in treating the regime as though there were no differences between it and other Latin American dictatorships; that to some extent it was fascist; that its actions were dictated by expediency; and that in all dealings with it there must be the fullest understanding between Britain and the United States.89 Meanwhile, though the State Department declined, on grounds of security, to furnish the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with the evidence of Axis espionage in its possession, the Foreign Office forwarded a memorandum, based on Helmuth's confession, containing the names of ten key Axis agents.90 Without waiting for this, the Ministry, on 5 February, announced that proofs of German and Japanese espionage were complete and would be published. 'For those who believe we gave way to foreign pressure,' said Gilbert, 'we shall prove that Argentina acted for herself and in defence of her sovereignty.'91 An official statement, giving details of the German espionage organization, with names, was published on the 20th. Yet the anti-Axis measures of the Government were not

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full-hearted. Non-belligerent status was granted to all American countries (but not Great Britain). Relations were severed with Rumania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Vichy France. Telegraphic and telephone communications with Axis countries were cut off and financial and commercial operations suspended. El Pampero was suppressed, but reappeared under the name of El Federal. The German military and the Japanese naval attaches were placed under house arrest as leaders of espionage organizations, but were soon released;93 and while the press in general welcomed the break and the popular attitude was approving, though apathetic, the nationalists reacted with violent hostility. On the evening before the rupture was officially announced, a stormy meeting of officers called together by the G.O.U. refused to accept Gilbert's assurance that the Government was not acting under foreign pressure.94 The break proclaimed, leaflets began to appear accusing Ramirez of betraying the country's honour. Rumours of plots and resignations abounded. On 15 February both Gilbert and Gonzalez were forced out of office by the colonels' group and younger officers excited by false reports that the Government was about to declare war. Gilbert attributed his dismissal to a cabal of pro-Nazi nationalists, Gonzalez blamed Peron.95 Finally, on the night of the 24th a palace revolution overthrew Ramirez. Ramirez fell from power very much as he had attained it. On the morning of the 24th he attempted to bring Gilbert and Gonzalez back into the cabinet and to compel Farrell to resign from the War Ministry. That same evening Peron, Farrell and numerous officers demanded the President's resignation. Yielding to force, Ramirez signed it. The malcontents then realized that a resignation would inevitably raise the question of the recognition of a successor. They therefore suppressed the resignation and in the early hours of the 25th made Ramirez sign a prepared statement that, fatigued by the intense task of government, he needed a rest and delegated his powers to the Vice-President, General Farrell.96 Purporting to have been signed on the 24th, this statement was issued to the press by the Ministry of War at dawn on the 25th. Peron announced that 'nothing had happened': the President was simply tired. He himself stepped into Farrell's shoes as Acting

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Minister of War on the 28th, and a new Acting Foreign Minister, General Diego Mason, declared on the same day that Argentine foreign policy would remain unchanged.97 There was a feeble attempt at a counter coup by the officer commanding the 3rd Infanty Regiment on the 29th. But this was quickly suppressed, and when, on 9 March, Ramirez sent his formal resignation to the Supreme Court, the Chef de Protocol announced on the 10th that Farrell automatically became President. President he remained till the inauguration of his successor, Colonel Peron, in June, 1946.

VII ARGENTINA UNDER MILITARY RULE—2 I Under the pretence that Ramirez had simply delegated his powers for reasons of health to his Vice-President, and in the hope of avoiding any problem of international recognition, Farrell at first assumed the title of Acting President. But this piece of deception availed him little. Nor was Ramirez prepared to lend himself to it for long. On 9 March, 1944, he not only sent his resignation to the Supreme Court but, in a letter addressed 'to the people and to the armed forces', he gave his own abbreviated account of his downfall. The opinion of the officers turned against him, he said, because they had been deceived into thinking that he was about to declare war. 'Intrigue availed more than reason.51 The Government did its best to prevent the circulation of this document, but failed to suppress it, and, Ramirez having resigned, Farrell became President in name as well as in fact. But the affectation that there had been no coup d'etat, but only a delegation of power, was the more difficult to sustain at home and abroad; and abroad, if not necessarily at home, the opinion prevailed that Farrell himself was a roi faineant and that the key figure in the Government was Colonel Peron. Peron, a Foreign Office minute noted, 'is stronger behind the scenes than ever, and, if the present regime continues, will become more or less the uncrowned king of Argentina'.2 Armour had advised on 25 February that there should be no recognition of the Farrell Government without consultation with the other American republics.3 Edward Stettinius had taken the place of Sumner Welles as Under-Secretary of State and was, at the moment, Acting Secretary. Convinced that the new regime was definitely pro-Axis,4 he instructed Armour to avoid any action which might be construed as recognition5 and gave instructions that all the other Latin

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American states (except Bolivia, whose Government was also unrecognized) should be told of the concern with which the United States viewed the events which had resulted in the removal of Ramirez, her suspicion that their purpose was to prevent Argentine co-operation with the other nations of the hemisphere and to resume it with the Axis powers, and her expectation that the republics would wish to consult together in accordance with the resolution taken by the Emergency Advisory Committee for Political Defense in December on the recognition of American governments established by force.6 T h a t Bolivia and also Paraguay should ignore the procedure laid down by the Committee was not unexpected. But so, too, somewhat apologetically, did Chile; and Brazil and Uruguay, Argentina's remaining neighbours, were unhappy. Hull, Aranha remarked, behaved more like a judge than a diplomat. 7 But both countries, as well as the more distant republics, remained faithful to the Committee's resolution. Moved by Chile's defection, or impending defection, Stettinius, on 4 March, issued a press communique in which he expressed the belief that 'groups not in sympathy with the declared Argentine policy of joining in the defense of the Hemisphere' had been active in the turn of events in Argentina, stated that Armour had been instructed to refrain from entering into official relations with the new regime, and emphasized that 'in all matters relating to the security and defense of the Hemisphere' it was necessary to 'look to the substance rather than the form'. 8 At a press conference three days later he accused the Farrell Government of having neutralized Argentina's break with the Axis and suggested five measures which would prove that it had not. These were the internment of all Axis diplomats and agents still at liberty, a 'clean u p ' of Axis spy-rings, the prevention of the smuggling of critical goods to the Axis, more effective control of communications with the Axis, and the prevention of transactions by Argentine entities which benefited Axis interests. 9 Hull, having sent a long 'background' account of Axis activities in Argentina to the Latin American diplomatic representatives (except those of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Paraguay), on 21 March capped Stettinius's five points by reciting the 'unfriendly' acts which, he said, had characterized the first

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four weeks of the new regime. He instanced, in particular, the arbitrary censorship of American films and news-reels, the cavalier treatment of the news services of United Press, the reappearance of pro-Axis newspapers, large contracts awarded to German firms for the construction of barracks and the appearance of 'notorious pro-Axis sympathisers' in the Secretariat of Press and Information, which had been placed under the control of 'the pro-Axis Minister of the Interior', General Perlinger.10 The Foreign Office, at once more cautious and more sceptical in its interpretation of what had happened than the State Department, doubted whether what was obviously a disturbing situation was the result of an internal struggle for power or a reaction to the rupture of relations with the Axis.11 Kelly thought that the explanation might well lie in the personal ambition of one military adventurer pitted against another and that perhaps no final change in policy was intended12—a remark which Churchill took amiss. 'I do not like Sir D. Kelly's attitude at all,' he wrote. 'He seems to be looking at the situation both locally and in its world-bearing setting from the wrong angle . . . When you consider the formidable questions on which we may have difficulty with the United States, oil, dollar balances, shipping, policy to France, Italy, Spain, the Balkans etc., I feel that we ought to make them feel we are their friends and helpers in this American sphere. It is not a case . . . that the "personal ambition of one military adventurer" has to be backed against another; but which Government in the Argentine is most likely to break with the Axis. Anyhow it should be the foreign policy of Great Britain to work with the United States on every occasion where we can do it without detriment to our own interest and where their feelings are stronger than ours . . .'13 But Kelly, like Armour, felt that 'in point of toughness', 'bedrock' had been reached with Farrell. Like Armour, he refrained from official communications with the new Government, first on his own initiative and then under instructions,14 and Eden, in response to the wishes of the State Department, made Britain's position clear in reply to a parliamentary question on 8 March. In view of the obscurity surrounding FarrelPs assumption of power, he said, Kelly had confined his communications with the Argen-

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tine Government to routine matters only; Britain attached particular importance to definite action being taken to fulfil the declarations made by General Mason, the Acting Foreign Minister, afid General Farrell that Argentina's foreign policy remained unchanged; 15 and this attitude corresponded to that taken up by the United States. He added, in a further statement on 29 March, that Farrell had said that Argentina was fully conscious of the moral duties born of her community of origin with other American nations. It remained to be seen how this sentiment and earlier assurances would be translated into action. 16 Meanwhile the question of economic sanctions had again 'raised its ugly head'. T h e Combined Chiefs of Staff and the Combined Boards had reported clearly and strongly against them in J a n u a r y , and, in the State Department, Laurence Duggan, at any rate, regarded their reports as conclusive. But they were not what Hull and Stettinius wanted to hear, and Stettinius, on 28 February, put forward the theory that, by cutting the United States meat ration by 15 per cent, the Americans could make good any deficiency resulting from a cessation of Argentine exports, though he was 'blithely silent upon the subject of hides and leather', about which the Chiefs of Staff had been equally adamant. 1 7 Britain reluctantly agreed on 10 March to re-submit the whole question of sanctions to the Combined Food, Shipping and Raw Materials Boards on the ground put forward by the State Department that their conclusions might be modified by changing circumstances. 18 T h e Boards, however, remained unmoved, 19 and in England the Chiefs of Staff were warned by the responsible officers that in the event of an immediate cessation of Argentine supplies, military operations could not be continued on the scale planned for 1944 except by drastic cuts in the civilian meat ration; that, even so, there were grave doubts whether meat supplies to the Services in the Mediterranean could be maintained; that any severe reduction in the supply of leather would begin to have a very serious effect on military operational capacity towards the end of 1944—they referred also to the dangers of a shortage of linseed; and that even a temporary stoppage would reduce reserve stocks, particularly of meat and hides, well below danger point. 20

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These fresh reports appeared to clinch matters. But the ghost of old suspicions, which greatly troubled the Foreign Office, that Britain was actuated by purely selfish motives, not connected with these problems of supply, but very much so with old-established British interests in Argentina and their future, continued to walk in the United States21—it is still not laid22—and Stettinius was unconvinced. He preferred to believe that the Boards had got their statistics wrong.23 When he came to England in April he returned to the idea that the United States, with stricter rationing, could replace Argentine meat supplies for a period of six months, and, without entering into details, said that he thought that the problems of leather and wheat supplies could also be met.24 But at a time when the meat storage situation in the United States was extremely tight and when pressure was growing both in the United States and Canada, not to cut the meat ration, but to abandon it altogether, he could give no assurances that the deficiencies would be made up;25 and it was hardly likely that in an election year Roosevelt would have curtailed American supplies for the sake of British. It was not without irony that in May the United States herself contemplated buying a large quantity, not of meat, but of maize, from Argentina and proposed that a British ship should be used to transport it.26 II The reaction of the Farrell Government to American and British expressions of disapprobation was one of injured innocence. To Stettinius's statement of 4 March General Mason replied in pained surprise that his Government's aim was to strengthen the close ties of friendship which effectively united Argentina and the United States and that it would maintain the same international policy as Ramirez, carrying this through in a manner which would leave no doubt of its sincerity and firmness of purpose.27 As for Stettinius's five points, Farrell complained, with truth, that it was not his fault that the Axis diplomats were still in the country: they were unable to leave because of delays in obtaining safe-conducts and because, also, of German procrastination.28 He further asserted, more questionably, that they were subject to adequate

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vigilance. 29 Peron, who declared that he now considered the 'nationalist' programme to be a 'mad dream' and that he intended to pursue a 'middle course', maintained that the Government had imprisoned or was imprisoning all persons convicted of espionage; that all radio communications with the Axis powers had been cut off; that steps were being taken to intervene in the chief Axis firms specified in the Black List; and, triumphantly, that the press was not muzzled. Look at the way, he said, that La Prensa and La Nation attacked the Government every day. 30 H e might have added, but did not, that the enforcement of measures to stop smuggling—one of the five points—was difficult, but that some energy had been put into the anti-Axis smuggling drive with considerable effect, though the smuggling of less easily detectable articles such as platinum and industrial diamonds still continued. 31 These protestations did not all carry conviction. But there was no denying the freedom of comment allowed to the press in the early weeks of the new regime. La Prensa, on 4 March, spoke of a 'minute group of people' who were trying to govern the country as absolutists and to suppress civil liberties. O n the 12th it declared that the Government should 'look for truth among the people' and, in an article entitled 'Discipline before Everything', clearly blamed the 'colonels'junta' for the lack of it. In still stronger terms it criticized on the 16th both the Ramirez and the Farrell regimes, the imposition of taxation by decree, the enforcement of religious teaching in schools, the control of the press and the dissolution of political parties, and both it and La Nation argued that the country needed a return to constitutional and civil rule. But this remarkable editorial freedom was unaccompanied by any relaxation in the strict censorship of news, external or internal, 32 though even that could not be wholly controlled. A manifesto signed by sixteen generals, including General Rawson, made its appearance on the 22nd, demanding an immediate restoration of constitutional guarantees, the holding of elections, and the return of the army to the performance of its proper functions; 33 and on the 26th ex-President Castillo himself gave an interview to the press in which he maintained, on the one hand, the virtues of neutrality, and criticized, on the other, the conduct of the army, maintaining that the rupture

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of relations with the Axis was not sincere because it ought to have been followed, and had not, by measures to clear the country of Germans and Japanese. 34 Peron's boasted press freedom was not long maintained. The Government ignored the Generals' manifesto and the Castillo interview. But on the 25th it fined All America Cables 1000 pesos for the unauthorized delivery to United Press of three cables from Lima, and a ban imposed on United Press was only raised after a humiliating apology. A decree of 4 April—the work of Perlinger—granted a quasi-monopoly of the supply of news to local radio stations to the Argentine news agency, Audi.35 A 'Statute for Journalists' in late March obliged all journalists and persons employed in the newspaper industry to enter their names in a national register, and on 25th April the unprecedented happened. La Prensa, which had maintained its independence for seventy-five years, was ordered to suspend publication for five days on the trivial pretext of having falsified facts in an article on 'thrift in municipal hospitals'. The Socialist paper, La Vanguardia, was closed, and the editor of the English language paper, The Standard, was sent for and warned. But El Federal, which was simply El Pampero under another name, continued its pro-Axis propaganda, and there were other disturbing signs. An arbitrary decree of the Interventor of the National Board of Education in late March temporarily deprived the entire administrative, technical and teaching staff under the Board's control of their established civil service status, so that they were no longer assured of their posts36—as many of them found to their cost. More colonel-interventors were appointed in the administration of the State Railways and the National Roads. There was increasing evidence of xenophobia in the treatment of foreign enterprises, British and American. The appointment of an extreme nationalist, Dr. Alberto Baldrich, as Minister of Justice and Public Instruction on 2 May was far from reassuring to foreign opinion—Baldrich was &Rosista, a devotee, that is, of the cult of the nineteenth-century tyrant, Juan Manuel de Rosas, as the great defender of Argentine sovereignty. Unwelcome also, though to a lesser degree, was that of another soldier, General Orlando Peluffo, instead of a civilian, as Minister of Foreign Affairs; and though the Axis diplomats

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were at last repatriated in July and a number of Axis agents had been arrested, others had disappeared and of those arrested some had been released. Baldrich was Perlinger's appointment, Peluffo was Peron's, and within the cabinet and the army Perlinger and Peron, who was not yet the 'uncrowned king of Argentina', contended for pre-eminence. Perlinger represented the extreme right wing both among officers and civilians. While the great powers were fighting for predominance, he observed, little ones must sit quiet in a corner. Argentina knew that the war was not waged for liberty but for other things. Referring to Armour, he was the first, he said, to 'make a sour face' at an ambassador whose country did not maintain relations with 'the master of the house', and every Argentine should do likewise. 37 As Minister of the Interior he controlled both the police and, ultimately, the press—it was Perlinger who was responsible for the attack on the United Press, the suspension of La Prensa^ and the strict control of news. Peron, in contrast to the extremism of Perlinger, was said by the UnderSecretary for Foreign Affairs to have 'evolved in office' and, by himself as well as by" the Under-Secretary, to be now definitely opposed to the extreme nationalists—a statement which the Foreign Office received with scepticism, though Kelly, without vouching for so rapid a conversion, drew an analogy with Gilbert's sudden and complete change of front.38 It was not impossible, he thought, for the extremists of yesterday to become the moderates of today. Peron, a far more astute politician than his rival, had the advantage of the personal friendship of Farrell, and he held two posts as against Perlinger's one. He was both Secretary of Labour and Social Welfare and Minister of War, an office in which he was confirmed in May. T h e War Ministry, of course, was the older and, on the face of it, the more important of these two offices, and, within it, Peron exerted his talents to win the confidence of the younger officers, manipulating assignments, promotions and retirements, obtaining written pledges of allegiance to himself and Farrell, and, in an exhibition on 4 J u n e , celebrated the military achievements of the revolutionary government during its first year by unveiling the first heavy tank produced in Argen-

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tina and a new aeroplane built at the Cordoba military aviation factory. 39 Six days later he inaugurated a chair of national defence at the University of La Plata, seizing the opportunity to ingratiate himself still more firmly with his professional colleagues. War, he declared, was 'an inevitable social phenomenon'. Nations were divided into the 'haves' and the 'have-nots', and, though Argentina belonged to the 'haves', she must strengthen her military might lest she fall a prey to the evil intentions of others. War was 'total' and could not be 'improvised'; preparations for it must start in peace. Diplomacy was a form of war, and if a nation could not obtain what it wanted by diplomacy, then it must resort to war; and Peron cited, 'if not with positive approval, at least without reprobation', Hitler's diplomatic and other activities in the 1930s. T h e speech was well received, notably by La Prensa, and the emphasis it placed on the need to create a heavy industry in Argentina as well as a powerful army and navy enhanced Peron's prestige at home though not abroad. 40 As Secretary of Labour and Social Welfare Peron had other and equally important fish to fry. The Secretariat, he told a mass meeting on 28 March, was the true representative of the working forces of the country; 41 and as, in the War Office, he appealed to the officer corps, so, in the Secretariat, he devoted himself to the task of winning over the working man. His slogan, he declared on May Day, was 'unity and mutual comprehension of aim between employers, workmen and the State'. Extremists and paid agitators must be excluded from the trade union movement; false apostles, they represented foreign ideologies and were enemies of social progress. But the Secretariat stood for social justice, and, looking on this picture and on that, he compared the lot of the workers since the Secretariat had been created with that which had preceded it. The railway workers had been given holidays with pay—they saluted Peron with the title of 'first worker' of the republic; 42 workmen's houses were being built; workers who brought their problems to the Secretariat had achieved 'appreciable advances'. T h e Secretariat had been responsible for hundreds of interventions. 43 And with liberal promises of better pay, better housing, pensions and social insurance, Peron began the reconstruction of the General Confederation of Labour,

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wooing the friendly labour leaders and roughly handling the unfriendly. By July, 1944, he could count on substantial support from two reservoirs of power—his recruits among the army officers and his tame trade unions. He had also flirted with Radical politicians and had held out hopes to the industrialists—a decree of 6 June empowering the Government to stimulate and defend industries of national importance by additional import duties, quotas and subsidies was followed at the end ofJuly by the establishment of a Secretariat of Industry and Commerce;44 and by July Peron was ready to bring the rivalry between Perlinger and himself to a head. He proposed that the office of Vice-President should be filled. In the ensuing contest Perlinger was more or less driven to resign, a resignation followed by that of many of his appointees and friends in various government departments. On the 7th Peron became Vice-President and one step nearer to the presidency. Ill By now relations between the United States and Argentina were reaching their lowest ebb. It was Hull's conviction, which time and experience did nothing to erode, that the Farrell regime was intent on establishing a fascist dictatorship, gave aid and comfort to the Axis, and was engaged in subversive intrigues in other South American countries. 'Bad as had been the Castillo and Ramirez Governments, the Farrell regime was worse.'45 His attitude combined the moral indignation which moved President Wilson, in his dealings with President Victoriano Huerta of Mexico on the eve of the first World War, with pique and frustration46 at the refusal of the Argentine Government, with its insistence on sovereignty and independence, to be pressured into actions it professed to know not what (and sometimes did not know), and with genuine fears for the security of the hemisphere unless the fascist danger which he foresaw was scotched. There were warning voices both in the State Department and outside it, from Philip Bonsai, of the Division of the American Republics, Laurence Duggan and others within,47 and from Sumner Welles outside. Duggan consistently argued that Hull's Argentine policy was mistaken, finally writing, three weeks before he

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left the Department in despair, a long memorandum denying that Argentina constituted a threat to hemisphere security and suggesting an immediate meeting of American foreign ministers to consider the situation.48 Sumner Welles, in a series of syndicated articles in 1944, as well as in his Time for Decision, castigated Hull for using the act of recognition as a diplomatic weapon and so undermining the Good Neighbour policy, declaring that 'democracy within an independent nation was never yet created through imposition from abroad'—a thrust against the idea that once the Farrell dictatorship had been overthrown the Radicals would come to the rescue—and that the return to democratic government would only be retarded by nationalistic resentment at coercion from abroad;49 and Welles, like Duggan advocated later in the year a meeting of American foreign ministers.50 These criticisms were well founded, though not, in some respects, wholly consistent with Welles's own past Argentine policy. But Welles's was for long a lone voice crying in the wilderness, and Hull was in no mood to be influenced by attacks from what he called 'political cut-throats', an epithet which he bestowed on his former Under-Secretary,51 or by the views of Welles's old supporters within the Department. They found short shrift also with Welles's successor, Stettinius, who was reported in May to be 'in a dangerous cold rage' and once again hinting at severe economic sanctions, because America 'did not intend to be thwarted by a bunch of twopenny ha'penny generals, or to lose a million men' in the war only to find that Argentina was still present to oppose the United States in the post-war years.52 Late in June Duggan declared that Hull's hatred of Argentina was becoming an obsession. He refused to hear advice from his Department in any way contrary to his preconceived views,33 while Adolf Berle claimed that the Argentine Government was a wholly Nazi organization bent on war and determined to upset the continent.54 For some weeks after his communication of 21 March Hull held his fire. But as the celebration of Argentina's independence day on 25 May drew near and a restlessness became apparent among the Latin American states about how they should respond to invitations to the official celebrations,55 he

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was again stirred to action. On 17 May he sent to the American missions in Latin America an elaborate impeachment of the Farrell regime, repeating the charges that it was sabotaging the Allied war effort.56 At Armour's own request he also authorized him to discuss privately with the new Foreign Minister, General Peluffo, the 'basic question' of Argentina's implementation of the rupture with the Axis.57 The meeting resulted in little except irritation. Nor did a further secret meeting on 3 June, held at Peluffo's wish, at which Peron, the Navy Minister, Rear-Admiral Alberto Teisaire, and the ex-Ambassador to the United States, Felipe Espil, were present, lead to any conclusion other than that matters be left, in Peluffo's words, to 'our great ally Providence' to decide. Argentina could not appear to act under pressure; the United States could not accord recognition till further anti-Axis measures had been taken.58 Both Armour's position and Kelly's were rapidly becoming more difficult.59 No accommodation seemed possible with Argentina, and Peron's speech on 10 June, in which, four days after the Allied invasion of Normandy, he spoke with equal coldness of the achievements of the United Nations and the Axis, was a further nail, so far as Hull was concerned, in the Argentine coffin.60 His mind was now made up that the 'proNazi' and 'fascist' sector of the Government was in the ascendancy (despite the fact that the most prominent and pro-Nazi nationalist, in American eyes, General Perlinger, had resigned) , and that no more reliance could be placed on Argentine promises than on German or Japanese before the war.61 On the 22nd he sent a telegram to American missions in Latin American (copied to the American Ambassador, John Winant, in London) reciting Argentine iniquities at length, asserting that a 'domestic totalitarian system' fully complementary to a 'pro-Axis international policy' was being installed, that the Government was attempting to divide the American republics, and that the time had come to break the impasse. 'As a first step' Armour was being recalled, and it was hoped that the heads of Latin American Missions would be recalled also.62 At midnight on the same day Armour was instructed to return by air to Washington for consultation at the earliest possible moment—he left on the 29th—and on the 23rd Hull informed

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Halifax of the step he had taken and the reasons for it, expressing the hope that Britain would recall Kelly. A similar message was sent to Winant. 6 3 T h e Farrell Government defended itself in two memoranda of 30 J u n e and 10 July circulated to the Latin American governments and made available to the State Department by the Chilean charge d'affaires in Washington. These purported to summarize the actions taken by the Castillo regime and its successors to assist the Allied war effort and the moves of the Farrell administration itself to implement the break with the Axis. Argentina also sought the mediation of one or another of the republics, some of which were dismayed and others, such as Paraguay and Uruguay, alarmed by the turn of events. 64 None of them responded. Nevertheless Hull thought it wise to issue on 20 July a further call for non-recognition which recited the iniquities of the Argentine Government, 65 following this by a press conference on the 24th and the release on the 26th of a blistering public denunciation. This sensational indictment publicized in effect the confidential telegrams of 22 J u n e and 20 July. It opened with the assertion that 'at the most critical moment in the history of the American Republics' the Government of one of them had deliberately violated the pledge 'taken jointly with its sister republics to co-operate in the war against the Axis powers' and had 'openly and notoriously been giving affirmative assistance to the declared enemies of the United Nations'. There followed a denial that the procedure of recognition was being abused and a detailed bill of particulars against the Ramirez and Farrell regimes, more especially the latter, which, it was stated, had 'implicitly disavowed any intention to honor the rupture with the Axis by insisting repeatedly' that this had been 'due to foreign pressure'. Axis diplomatic and consular officials had remained at large. Assistance had been given to Axis firms. Axis spies and agents had been set at liberty. Axis propaganda flourished. A 'domestic totalitarian system' had been implemented that fully supported a 'pro-Axis foreign policy, through control of the press, the courts, the schools and other key institutions'. Basic civil rights had been nullified and the Minister of W a r had openly admitted that the 'keystone of Argentina's international policy' was to be 'milit-

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ary force'. As for the memoranda which the Government had circulated in its defence, these amply demonstrated that, so soon as the Ramirez regime had been overthrown, potentially significant anti-Axis measures were brought to a full stop. Save for the departure of the German diplomats, the sentencing of four Germans for espionage, the suspension for a few days of one pro-Axis newspaper, the Farrell Government had done little or nothing to implement the action taken by its predecessor. The 'net effect' of its position was 'a firm adherence to the thesis that recognition should be accorded' to it 'on the basis of a few acts' of the Government it had displaced 'and mere promises of future performance'. Castigating its conduct as one of 'procrastination and evasion', the indictment went on to accuse it of granting contracts to Axis firms, placing advertisements in, and supplying newsprint to, Axis newspapers, giving aid and comfort to the enemies of the American republics in general, but making 'superficial antiAxis gestures' to weaken the collective determination of the non-recognizing governments. It was the judgment of the United States that 'the American Republics and their associates among the United Nations should firmly adhere to the present policy of non-recognition' until a fundamental change of Argentine policy had been conclusively demonstrated.66 In the opinion of the New York Times this statement was probably the most severe criticism ever made by one government of another short of a declaration of war.67 Eden told Churchill that it put the case for the prosecution very much more strongly than the facts warranted.68 General Peluffo, in a nation-wide broadcast, declared that Argentina had been subjected to an unjustified campaign of propaganda, criticism and discrimination and that his Government's policy was based on the defence of national sovereignty and the maintenance of continental harmony.69 The Argentine Ambassador in Washington was withdrawn, and normal diplomatic intercourse between the two countries was suspended, not to be renewed till April, 1945. IV As early as September, 1943, the head of the South American Department in the Foreign Office had observed that the State

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Department had been 'consistently wrong' in its handling of Argentine affairs.70 But though, in his opinion, the right course was to avoid any pressure likely to counteract favourable tendencies in Argentina,71 the Foreign Office's instructions were to 'keep in step' with the Americans and anyhow not to let it appear that there were, or could be, any differences with them.72 When Stettinius was in England in April, 1944, an undertaking had been given of general support to the United States Government, coupled with the hope that matters would not be pushed to extremes by imposing sanctions or withdrawing ambassadors,73 and Hull, in correspondence with Churchill, had spoken of the need 'for consultation and parallel action'.74 But extreme measures were what he had in mind, so Duggan, perhaps improperly, revealed to Halifax, urging him to speak to Hull personally and frankly. Eden heartily approved of this suggestion. Indeed, he minuted on 20 June that he was hoping that the Department would move him to 'a grand remonstrance to the Americans about the way we suffer from them in South America in general and Argentina in particular'. 73 But Halifax, for one reason or another, delayed in approaching Hull,76 and Hull's idea of consultation and parallel action turned out to be American action first, consultation second, and parallel action third. The British Government were told of Armour's recall only after the order had been given, Hull then expressing the hope that Kelly would also be immediately recalled for consultation so that there should be 'no appearance of division' between Britain and the United States.77 Eden was greatly exasperated. Not only had he not been consulted about the recall of Armour and then asked to recall Kelly, but he regarded the withdrawal of ambassadors as an impotent gesture. He did not believe that the Argentine Government was succeeding in breaking South American solidarity or was giving any significant assistance to the German war effort. He was disturbed because the all-important meat contract with Argentina would soon be coming up for renewal, and, as he told Churchill, Britain needed the whole of the Argentine export surplus to maintain the limited ration necessary to feed the fighting forces and the British people, and competitors were appearing in the market. Besides this, Britain had very large capital interests in Argentina. These had

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been under threat from the Nationalist Government, and Kelly had only just been able to protect them by informal protest and activity. 78 Churchill's view that Britain had so many differences with the State Department at the moment that this 'might be an opportunity to do them some service' did not appeal to him at all. 79 Hull was equally disturbed by Eden's hostile reaction, the more particularly because both Chile and Uruguay had hinted that the British attitude to the recall of ambassadors was a matter of moment to them. 80 He appealed to Roosevelt, 81 who in turn appealed to Churchill, 82 and Churchill's word was final. Kelly was to be recalled for consultation. 'The decision,' Churchill told Roosevelt, 'has been taken in response to your appeal for a "common stand". There is a good deal of anxiety in the Foreign Office and the War Cabinet. I do not myself see where this policy is leading to nor what we expect to get out of the Argentines by this method. I only hope it will not adversely affect our vital interests and our war effort. I hope you will not mind my saying, as is my duty, that we ourselves were placed in an invidious position by the American decision, to which we are now asked to conform, being taken .without consultation with us. We were faced with a fait accompli.' Roosevelt returned his heartiest thanks but ignored the criticism. 83 With this volte face, Kelly was ordered to return to England by air as quickly as possible. The night before his hurried departure he had what he himself called a 'cloak and dagger meeting' with Peluffo, Peron and Teisaire, the three most important members of the Government, at Peluffo's invitation. His recall, he said, was for bona fide consultation; he hoped that events would permit his return; and he suggested that the Argentine Government thought too much about their grievances against the United States and too little about the South American governments and the British Government, 'who would gladly act as a bridge but could not do so unless the Argentine Government themselves produced more facts to inspire confidence'. Peron replied crossly that these were mere 'pretexts'—the United States had a grudge against Argentina; and Peluffo produced the documents already circulated to South American embassies defending Argentina's anti-Axis record. 84 To Eden's annoyance, instead of returning directly to

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London, Kelly then spent a few days in Washington, where he saw Hull. T h e interview was not particularly profitable, since Kelly thought that the importance to the war effort of what ought still to be done by Argentina was out of all proportion to the fuss made about it and Hull was of the opposite opinion. Kelly did not believe, as Hull did, that Argentina was a fullyfledged fascist state and the headquarters of the fascist movement in the western hemisphere, nor, as some members of the Foreign Office did, that it was a fascist state in embryo, entirely contrary to the principles for which the war was being fought. He regarded it simply as a military dictatorship with totalitarian ideas. But so, he thought, was the Brazilian and even the Chilean Government. 85 Hull was accompanied by Armour, and Kelly by the British charge d'affaires, Sir Ronald Campbell, and he had received precise instructions about what he should and should not say. H e was not to seek to interpret British policy. He was not to underestimate the genuine apprehensions of the United States or to appear to whitewash Argentina. But he could emphasize the acute sensitivity of Argentine opinion, the result of which was that snubs and pin-pricks had the contrary effect to that which was intended. And he could try to extract from Hull his view of the actual damage which Argentina was inflicting on the war effort, the terms on which he would be prepared to recognize the Farrell Government, and the means by which he thought these terms could be obtained in practice. H e might also point out the lack of any public expression of official United States appreciation of the loyalty of Great Britain in contradiction of the stream of malicious comment in the United States press. 86 According to Campbell, Hull did most of the talking, insisting that Argentina had deserted the Allies in the face of the common enemy, that there could be no conversations with her about doing this or that unless there was a 'complete change of heart', that Britain failed to appreciate his real preoccupation, which was with the question of principle, but laid too much emphasis on her meat supplies. W h a t he wanted was that, without endangering these, Britain should remonstrate with Argentina and co-operate in political non-recognition. Campbell's impression was that he was trying to convey the hope that recognition would be withheld for an indefinite

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period, until the 'change of heart' had taken place, and this impression was confirmed by Hull's parting words when he wished Kelly a very happy and very long vacation. 87 O n the next day Hull apologized to Campbell for what he called a 'stump oration', and then delivered another, repeating that Argentina was a 'deserter' and that he himself was moved purely by considerations of the war. 88 Eden's comment was: 'Mr. Hull at his most purblind, and he was able to get away with too much.' 8 9 But Hull had the last word, sending a personal message to Churchill that it would be madness, when the United Nations was making the greatest sacrifices to destroy the enemy in Europe, 'to tolerate aid to the enemy in our own backyard'. 'We are,' he said, 'going to stand firm against the recognition of the Farrell Government and we hope the British will stand with us.' 90 A much worried Minister of Food, J o h n Llewellin, had meanwhile warned Churchill on 13 July of his anxieties about the Argentine situation. Britain, he said, depended on Argentina for over 40 per cent of her imported meat. If she failed to get it, the l/2d meat ration would have to be reduced by about 5d. He did not believe that the United States could make up for the loss of Argentine supplies. In any event, whereas the United States might supply pork, British requirements were beef and mutton. T h e contract with Argentina would run out in October, and Llewellin was anxious to renew it for three or four years so that 'the people of this country will get the meat they want and need, not only for the rest of the war, but for the period of shortage afterwards'. It was, he concluded, going to be most difficult to persuade the Argentines to let him have all their exportable surplus (which would go to the common pool for allocation by the Combined Food Board) unless the present political difficulties could be overcome. 'If we fail to get it both the Americans and ourselves are running the risk of those liberated countries which have foreign balances competing independently for the meat, running up the prices and thus benefiting only the Argentines.' 91 Churchill at once sent this minute to Roosevelt. 'We wish to do everything we can to help you and Mr. Hull with the South American countries,' he said, 'but we think that you ought to have the formidable arguments of this minute before you.

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Please remember that this community of 46 millions imported 66 million tons a year before the war and is now managing on less than 25 millions. The stamina of the workmen cannot be maintained on a lesser diet in meat. You would not send your soldiers into battle on the British Service meat ration, which is far above what is given to workmen. Your people are eating per head more meat and poultry than before the war while ours are most sharply cut. I believe that if this were put before Mr. Hull he would do all he could to help us to obtain a new contract and nothing which would jeopardize its chances.'92 Roosevelt replied on the 23rd: T would not do anything in the world to cut down the supply of meat to England. Heaven knows that it is already quite short enough. We would do nothing to prevent your getting a new contract. I hope, however, that you will, in very firm, clear disgruntled tones of voice let Argentina know beyond a doubt that we are all fed up with her pro-Axis sentiments and practices . . . I think it would help if you could instil this into their stubborn heads and, at the same time, get the meat contract.'93 This message was followed almost immediately by Hull's public indictment of Argentina on 26 July—a s e c o n d / ^ accompli, so the Foreign Office regarded it, promulgated without the slightest consultation. Eden expressed his resentment to Winant but promised that Kelly would not be sent back and that either he or Churchill would make a public statement.94 'We cannot,' he told Churchill, '. . . send Kelly back; and we cannot and should not back Hull up too strongly, because his facts and his methods are both all wrong.' But Churchill, he thought, might take the opportunity of reminding the Argentines that 'we are not at all pleased with them';95 and on 2 August Churchill did as he was asked. 'We all feel deep regret,' he said in the Commons, 'and also anxiety as friends of Argentina in this testing time for nations that she has not seen fit to declare herself wholeheartedly, unmistakably and with no reserve or qualification upon the side of freedom and has chosen to dally with the evil, and not only with the evil, but with the losing side . . . Not only belligerents but neutrals,' he added, 'will find that their position in the world cannot remain entirely unaffected by the part they have chosen to play in the crisis of the war.'96

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This statement appeared in the Argentine newspapers without comment, though the Argentine Embassy in London complained that it left 'an unfavourable impression' and that the Argentine Government was 'loyally trying to smooth out all difficulties'. 97 Stettinius sent his warm congratulations on his own behalf and on that of Hull, who was away; and Churchill, in thanking him for his message, added 'Please do not forget our beef and mutton'. 9 8 Eden told Winant that he hoped that the United States would now desist from open attacks on Argentina until the country had time to re-adjust its policy; and again voiced his resentment, though in a friendly way, at unilateral actions by the United States. 99 Churchill, on 23 August, telegraphed to Roosevelt: 'Now that we have said in public just what we think of the present Argentine Government, I do most earnestly hope that you will ignore the Colonels for a good many weeks, thus giving both of us the opportunity to examine a common policy and the Argentines a chance to mend their ways, which they can never do under the glare of public indictment.' 100 These were vain hopes. In his conversations with Kelly and Campbell in J u l y Hull had said that he was moved purely by considerations of the war and that the internal policy of the Argentine Government was not the affair of the United States, but that there would have to be a 'change of heart'. 101 It is difficult to resist the conclusion that by a 'change of heart' he meant a change of regime, and that he continued to believe that external pressure would effect this change. But where was an alternative government to be found? And how was the military regime to be unseated? Increasingly worried by the continued deterioration of United States relations with Argentina, the resultant repercussions on Anglo-Argentine relations, and the strain, concealed as it might be, on AngloAmerican collaboration, Eden proposed th&t Britain might act as a mediator. In a carefully framed letter, which made no attempt to defend Argentina but recalled British experience in dealing with the Government of Eire, a neutral member of the Commonwealth—Hull had described Argentina as a 'deserter' from the Pan American Union—this offer was made to Hull on 4 August. The very fact that Britain was not a member of the Pan American family, it was suggested, might

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make it easier for her to secure that Argentina should be less of an obstacle and contribute more to the war effort. A necessary preliminary to the exercise of such British initiative would be a 'clear, factual and expert estimate' of the injury which Argentina had inflicted on the war effort, the extent of her help to the Axis powers, and the further assistance which, if a more satisfactory state of affairs could be brought about, she could afford to the United Nations. These questions might usefully be referred to the Combined Chiefs of Staff. In the light of their expert assessment definite requests for positive contributions to the war effort could be put to the Argentine Government after full consultations between the governments concerned, and if these requests were satisfactorily fulfilled, recognition of the Farrell regime would naturally follow. The note containing these proposals alluded also to the serious misgivings of the British Government over the effects in Argentina of ostracizing the country's Government, to the danger of invidious comparisons being drawn in Parliament and elsewhere between the lack of diplomatic protection whereby British interests in Argentina were likely to suffer at the hands of an ultra-nationalist Government and the continued presence of United States Service Missions advising the recalcitrant state. It gave a warning that Parliament was unlikely to acquiesce in British participation in an economic embargo, which would involve harsher steps against a country which, at least in appearance, had severed relations with the Axis, than either the United States or Britain had enforced against Eire, which had not, and it expressed a wish to consult with other Latin American states, such as Brazil, Uruguay and Chile, with which Britain had long-standing ties of friendship and common interest, about the line of policy which should be adopted towards Argentina.102 Hull's rejection, on 30 August, of this offer of mediation, Britain acting, as he put it, as an 'intermediary in presenting conditions precedent to recognition to the Farrell Government', was not unexpected.103 In the interval he had declared that the stamping out of Nazism was a major objective of United States policy, as it ought to be of British,104 and had described the members of the Argentine Government as 'bandits and desperados'.105 In his long and frank reply to the

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British offer he declared that the recognition of the Farrell regime by the United Nations would be a 'deadly blow' at the system of co-operation which the United Nations had undertaken to develop; it would everywhere be taken as approval of conduct which had repeatedly involved the disregard of solemn international obligations; and it would mean that there could be little hope for a future system of international security created to maintain the principles for which the Allies were fighting. With this plain speaking on either side, there the mediation proposal ended. T h e British charge d'affaires in Buenos Aires reported more than once that the Argentine Government, with which, of course, he had no direct contact, was worried and unhappy about the diplomatic situation, and General Peluffo even sent a message that it would like British help and mediation. 106 But, as Lord Halifax rightly assumed, Britain, despite a strong divergence of opinion, did not wish to run into a head-on collision with Hull over a Latin American question about which he felt so strongly. 107 Hull's views, moreover, were sustained by Roosevelt, and despite Eden's and Churchill's pleas for a cessation of public statements, Hull, on 7 September, again denounced Argentina as the headquarters of the fascist movement in the western hemisphere, and there was a further statement from Roosevelt (drafted by Hull) on the 29th upholding Hull's policy and denying rumours of divided counsels among the American republics and their associates in the United Nations on the course of that policy. 108 V Meanwhile the United States moved towards overt sanctions. In August two shipments of Argentine gold held in the United States were prohibited, an action amounting at least partially to the freezing of Argentine funds, 109 and Hull proposed, by stopping all purchases not absolutely necessary for war purposes, to reduce Argentine imports by as much as 40 to 60 per cent.110 In September he called for a reduction of United States exports to Argentina by approximately 10 per cent in value. No Argentine development project was to be approved

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unless it directly contributed to the war effort. T h e export of locomotives, rolling-stock and automobiles and of supplies and materials for the Argentine armament industries or the armed forces would be forbidden and that of fuel oil limited. 111 Further, the September maize shipments from Argentina completed, a ban was imposed on United States shipping calling at Argentine ports on the northbound run unless specifically instructed by the United States Purchasing Departments—an embargo regarded by one official of the War Shipping Administration as a useless piece of camouflage. 112 T h e United States army contract for the purchase and shipment from Buenos Aires of 43,000 tons of Argentine canned corn beef was cancelled, with the result, according to the Foreign Office, that while the army showed no willingness to reduce its own requirements, it had to call on existing British stocks for an even larger supply of similar meat because of commitments to Soviet Russia. 113 But to make this programme effective, British co-operation in economic matters was, in Hull's opinion, essential. British exports to Argentina had, of course, fallen drastically between 1939 and 1944, and, such as they were, including fuel oil, none of them, in the British view, contributed to the Argentine armed forces or the armament industry, and between J u l y and October, 1944, almost nothing arrived because of the diversion of shipping on account of the European invasion. 114 T h e crux of the matter, however, was not so much British exports as British imports, particularly meat, of which Britain was the sole purchaser on behalf of the United Nations. In August and September Stettinius and Hull both urged that negotiations for the renewal of the Anglo-Argentine meat contract, now about to expire, should be used to support a common stand and that only a short-term contract, sufficient to supply immediate needs, should be contemplated. 115 T h e Ministry of Food, on the other hand, wanted a four-year contract, and, in their exchange of telegrams in July, Roosevelt had seemed to support the British position. 116 T am thankful that you see our point about getting a new Argentine meat contract,' Churchill told Roosevelt on 23 August. 'We are going ahead accordingly with these difficult negotiations and hope that nothing will happen to hazard them. We have no wish or intention to

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present the colonels with anything they can represent as a diplomatic triumph'; and Roosevelt replied, 'We are watching with sympathetic interest your efforts to get Argentina in line with our appetites, and we hope that your efforts will be crowned with success.' 117 These exchanges hardly indicated that the United States would seriously object to a new meat contract. But while Roosevelt was at the second Quebec Conference between 11 and 16 September, Hull sent him two memoranda, which were then given to Churchill, 118 urging that it was a matter of major policy that not even a two-year, let alone a four-year, contract, should be concluded with Argentina, but that British purchases should be continued on a month to month or 'spot basis', and reduced in quantity, a measure which Hull thought would 'bring the Argentine Government to reason and send it running after the British'. 119 T h e production of the liberated areas in Europe, he contended, was increasing. 120 Moreover, the United States was likely to have a surplus of 'utility beef as well as of certain commercial grades, which could be Lend-Leased to Britain, provided a reduction in British purchases of Argentine beef took place. In view of the enormous American aid in supply matters, he concluded, it was not too much to ask that Britain should forgo the 'petty commercial advantages of a long-term bargain with a Fascist Government'. Like arguments were employed by the Embassy in London and to Halifax in Washington, Hull asserting that not only was the production of the liberated areas increasing but enormous reserves had been stockpiled in the United Kingdom, and, anyway, that a long-term contract was undesirable in itself,121 and the State Department feverishly compiled a long memorandum transmitted to the British Embassy on 25 September. 122 Though Eden demurred, Churchill, from the first, felt that 'commercial or monetary considerations within the modest limits involved ought not to stand in the way' of meeting United States wishes so far as possible 'in view of the immense help we are receiving in other directions', though that was no reason for not expressing dissatisfaction to the State Department. 1 2 3 But the British Food, Shipping and Raw Materials Supply Missions in Washington, the Foreign Office

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was told, threw doubt on Hull's premise that Britain could afford to reduce her Argentine purchases, pointing out that Europe would need more, not less, Argentine meat and foodstuffs in 1945, that American 'utility beef was no substitute for Argentine and by some was thought to be uneatable, and also that the United States Purchasing Departments did not really agree with the State Department. T h e Ministry of Food supported Eden rather than Churchill, and the W a r Cabinet, despite Churchill's reluctance, decided to put a stronglyargued case to the Americans in favour of proceeding with the negotiations but not concluding them till after the coming American presidential election. 124 O n 11 October, however, Roosevelt himself telegraphed to Churchill that the conclusion of any contract at the present time would seriously prejudice the entire United States stand over Argentina, that Britain had negotiated for ten long months before the last contract was signed, and that he hoped she would continue on a month-to-month basis for some time to come. 125 Churchill, who was in Moscow, at once instructed the Minister of Food not to negotiate any long-term contract during the next two months and that everything must be held in suspense in a discreet manner. 126 Hull, in the meantime, but unknown to Churchill, made what can only be considered as an implied threat. 'We cannot divorce our consideration of this matter from our consideration of British requests for co-operation and assistance of a much more substantial kind in other areas.' 127 Lord Keynes, in Washington, emphasized the extreme significance of the meat negotiations to British relations with Hull. 'It is not merely that this is, as is well known, King Charles's head to the old gentleman. It is also mixed up in his mind with his public contention with Sumner Welles in this field which absorbs all his thoughts and emotions.' Advising against the conclusion of a four-year contract, there could be little doubt, he said, that Hull would take such a contract as a 'deliberate personal affront and all sorts of non-existent ulterior motives will be suspected'. He added that 'all of us here find it difficult to discover any such indirect advantage' in the projected agreement 'as would justify this risk of offence to one [to] whom our debt in the past is great and whose influence for good or ill is second only to that of the

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President'. In Keynes's view all that was wanted was that Britain should be content with the renewal of the agreement for one year and that Hull would regard this as a routine measure and be fully satisfied.128 T h e outcome was a further exchange of telegrams between Roosevelt and Churchill in November. T h e President thanked the Prime Minister for his agreement early in October to defer the signature of a meat contract. It had, he said, been of tremendous help, increasing the uncertainty of the colonels and driving them to a desperate position, so much so that there was now a good chance of putting an end within a reasonable time to a fascist regime that otherwise would be a threat to the peace and security of the American continent for years to come. It would be disastrous if a contract were to be signed now. T would not of course urge this so strongly,' he concluded, 'if it meant less meat for your people. As you know you are getting all the meat you can carry from Argentina right now even though you have no contract . . . I know that we can continue to count on your help to liquidate this dangerous Nazi threat.' 129 Churchill replied that he would be prepared to continue on a month to month basis for six months from 1 December on the understanding that Roosevelt would use all his influence to keep other buyers out of the market and ensure that they did not get refrigerated space; and Roosevelt, on 5 December, nine days after Hull, ill and exhausted, had ceased to be Secretary of State, expressed his deep gratitude. 130 VI Meanwhile the military Government pursued the uncertain tenor of its way, worried by its isolation but unyielding to foreign pressure. Public denunciations from the United States, far from undermining its authority, merely enabled it to pose more convincingly as the defender of the dignity, sovereignty and independence of the nation, and, coupled with the repudiation of the charges that the country was the headquarters of fascism in the western hemisphere and would or could become a haven for Nazi war criminals, 131 won for it a considerable measure of sympathy among the Latin American

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fraternity. But politically the nation was deeply divided. The public rejoicings at the liberation of Paris in late August, in contrast to official apathy or indifference, illustrated the Government's imperfect contact with the people at large. Almost inevitably the demonstrations took on a political flavour, leading to police violence in many cities.132 Prominent Argentine exiles, politicians and others, maintained a barrage of criticism from Montevideo.133 But no alternative government was in sight, even if the extreme nationalists would have permitted one to be formed. As against these, Peron, in alliance with General Peluffo and Admiral Teisaire, was now the exponent of moderation. His chief rival, the ultra-nationalist General Perlinger, had been eliminated in June. The like-minded Minister of Justice and Public Instruction, Dr. Baldrich, was forced out at the end of August, and a purge of some of his partisans in the educational world followed. Though the state of siege was maintained, the press censorship was lifted at least in part, and a decree of 2 September which forbade private persons from expressing at public or official ceremonies any views on foreign policy was interpreted by La Prensa as a welcome restraint upon the nationalists.134 Peron, moreover, spoke of the Government in August as a Government de facto and not dejure.135 The Interventor of the Province of Tucuman referred to it as 'provisionally' controlling the destinies of the nation.136 The President, in September, declared that, once the army had accomplished what it had set out to do, the Government would be returned to civilian hands.137 At the end of the month it was announced that provisional lists of electors would be printed and distributed by April, 1945, and then revised by the following October.138 A further announcement that all officers fulfilling public duties would return to barracks by the end of the year139 was followed in November by the appointment of a commission to enquire into the reform of political parties and prepare an appropriate statute.140 These declarations and moves certainly appeared to foreshadow an ultimate intention to return the country to constitutional rule. That Peron himself entertained presidential aspirations few could doubt. With his abounding energy and magnetic charm, he alone among the members of the military

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regimes since June, 1943, had sought to establish a popular following of his own. In addition to the duties of VicePresident, Minister of War and Secretary of Labour and Social Welfare, with all the influence these offices enabled him to exert, he had been entrusted by a decree of 25 August141 with responsibility for the economic and social reconstruction of the country, aided by a National Post-War Council, and this post also could be turned to his advantage. Asked by a party of Chilean journalists in December whether he would stand for the presidency, he replied, 'No man can escape his destiny5,142 alluding also to the recent benefits accruing to the workers as a result of the Government's, that is, his own activities. But his path was not all smooth. His highly public association with the actress, Maria Eva Duarte, offended, if not the morals, at least the conventions observed by the officers of the Campo de Mayo garrison. A speech to the members of the Stock Exchange, in which he referred to the dangers of unorganized working masses and of the spread of Communism in Latin America and emphasized that it was in the interests of employers, industrialists and businessmen to support his own social programme and the principle of trades union syndicalization, led to the accusation that he was 'betraying the workers to the bosses'.143 And there were other indiscretions. But Peron was equal to most emergencies. The Stock Exchange speech he explained away at a special workers' meeting,144 and on 13 October anEstatuto del Peon extended the benefits of his social legislation from the urban to the rural worker.145 A further decree in December established pensions for employees in business houses, and in January he put forward a cheap housing programme and used his Post-War Council to propose measures to relieve unemployment and reduce the cost of living. The army, for its part, was gratified by a new organic statute which expanded the size of the officer corps and by the introduction of military service for all twenty-year-olds. The air force was given an organic statute of its own and also a secretariat. In his anxiety to secure armaments Peron was still trying to obtain supplies from Germany through Spain as late as the end of September,146 and the provision of military equipment remained one of his major

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preoccupations, curbed, however, by a growing financial stringency. All this told in his favour with the military, and when, in January, 1945, General Peluffo, once a friend but now a critic, resigned as Foreign Minister, allegedly on the ground that he was opposed to Peron's presidential aspirations and increasingly personal rule,147 Peron, without question, was the most influential figure in the country. Throughout these months, whatever the signs of an intention to return to constitutional government in the long run (and Peron seems to have had no scruples in representing Peluffo as an obstacle to this process),148 there had been no relaxation of the tension between Argentina and the United States. Whether or not Peron was able to convince the colonels and majors that the time had come, as was indeed suggested,149 for a definite swing towards the United Nations, the Government, on 27 October, 1944, took the strategic step of making a formal request to the Governing Board of the Pan America Union that it should summon a meeting of American Foreign Ministers 'to consider the existing situation between the Argentine Republic and other American Republics'. A circular note addressed to each State made it plain that in no circumstances could 'the adoption of internal measures relating to the juridical and institutional regime' of Argentina be the subject of international discussion, but that the Government was willing 'to discuss with their peers a fundamental aspect of their international conduct' in the interests of unity and harmony.150 This stroke took the State Department by surprise. Stettinius described it as a 'brazen and insincere move',151 and for Hull, who was in hospital, the idea of such a meeting was anathema. But the Mexican Foreign Minister, Ezequiel Padilla, had long pressed for a meeting of foreign ministers, so numerous were the problems they should discuss as the end of the war came in sight; and Padilla's was not the only voice.152 The idea had found little favour in Washington. But the Argentine request could not be ignored, and Padilla repeating the argument that a meeting was desirable, with or without Argentine co-operation, Stettinius saw a heaven-sent opportunity to escape from an awkward dilemma. On 2 November he encouraged Padilla to make a formal proposal that the

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ministers of those states which had collaborated in the war effort should meet in Mexico City. Argentina's international position could be the last item on the agenda.153 After discussion with the Brazilian, Uruguayan and Cuban Ambassadors, Padilla on the 6th, drew up a memorandum which elaborated his proposal and was circulated to all heads of missions except the Argentine, There was a flurry of diplomatic interchanges, the State Department making clear its opposition to any recognition of the Farrell regime or its participation in the proposed conference, and varying opinions being expressed by a number of states.154 Finally a meeting of the foreign ministers of those states which had co-operated in the war effort was agreed. It was to be held in Mexico City and convened, not by the Pan American Union, but by the Mexican Government through the ordinary diplomatic channels; and in January the Governing Board of the Pan American Union decided that since the meeting would enable the republics to give joint consideration to the Argentine request, no action need be taken on it by the Union itself. Argentina promptly announced that so long as her rights remained unrecognized, she would abstain from participation in the Union's meetings. Stettinius's hostility to the Argentine regime, like that of Hull, whom he succeeded as Secretary of State on 30 November, had no whit abated. The United States, he told a Californian Congressman in December, 1944, had constantly refused to enter into diplomatic relations with a fascist military clique and would do nothing to benefit or strengthen it.155 But Roosevelt had appointed Nelson Rockefeller, the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, as Assistant Secretary in charge of Latin American relations, and Rockefeller strongly disapproved of the State Department's policy. Soon after his appointment he told the Counsellor of the British Embassy that he was determined to bring Argentina back into the fold by way of early elections and the establishment of a constitutional government, and that he would need British help.156 Believing that Argentina might welcome a rapprochement^1 he sent, with Roosevelt's approval but without Stettinius's knowledge, a secret emissary to Buenos Aires, who met both Peron and Colonel Eduardo Avalos, the Commander of the Campo de Mayo garrison. Peron, the envoy reported, had declared

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that the Government had sworn to restore democratic rule and to hold elections and was ready and willing to do everything that was needed provided there was no intention of humiliating the Government or the nation.158 The general picture, Rockefeller told the Counsellor of the British Embassy on 5 February was one of increasing co-operation, as against the previous squabbling in the Pan American 'set up': he had hopes of his Argentine 'gamble' coming off.159 The Farrell Government, meanwhile, had issued on 29 January a Draconian decree for the suppression of crimes against the security of the state, which La Nacion interpreted as aimed against minority groups, namely the ultra-nationalists.160 It took measures to reinstate in February those university professors and others who had been dismissed from their posts for signing the manifesto of October, 1943,161 though some of them refused to accept a so-called pardon. It laid an embargo on German funds to cover the cost of maintaining GrafSpee internees and the damage done to Argentine ships by German submarines,162 and it suspended the publication of the notorious El Cabildo and El Pampero newspapers. It was notable that when the Mexico City Conference on Problems of War and Peace opened on 21 February most of the Latin American delegates did not disguise their regret at Argentina's absence.163 The Argentine question remained under constant discussion behind closed doors,164 and the fifty-ninth resolution, recognizing that the unity of the American peoples was one and indivisible, expressed the hope that the Argentine nation would identify itself with the common policy of the Americas, achieve its incorporation into the United Nations and adhere to all the principles and policies embodied in the Final Act of the Conference.165 Returning to Washington, Rockefeller at once sent for the Argentine charge d'affaires, telling him that it would be wise for the Argentine Government to declare war on the Axis and implement the Mexico City resolutions by decree. The restoration of ambassadors could be settled by cable, and, provided that Argentina was prepared to make some marked anti-Axis gesture, it should be possible to put forward an invitation for her to attend the San Francisco Conference of the United Nations which was due to open on 24 April. Stettinius, he

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added, agreed, and, in telling the Counsellor of the British Embassy what he had done, Rockefeller stated that he wanted nothing from the British Government save moral support and any encouragement Britain could give in Buenos Aires and London to induce the Argentine Government to take the plunge. 166 Ten days later, he invoked British aid in cutting the Gordian knot with still greater urgency. He had, he said, consulted the President, and he wanted the British charge d'affaires in Buenos Aires to convey to Peron that a declaration of war and the implementation of the Mexico City resolutions were essential to the rehabilitation of Argentina, with a broad hint that if these measures were carried out within a week they would ensure Anglo-American support for an invitation to the United Nations Conference at San Francisco. But every precaution must be taken to ensure secrecy.167 This urgency had been anticipated. In Buenos Aires the British charge d'affaires, Sir Andrew Noble, who had received a number of hints that Peron would like to see him, had enquired of the Foreign Office whether he ought to speak to Peron privately in order to support Rockefeller's representations. 168 Eden, who, like Churchill, favoured an Argentine declaration of war, 169 instructed him to do so, though he was not to commit himself to an invitation to San Francisco. 170 At Rockefeller's express request, and to Noble's embarrassment, nothing was to be said to the United States Embassy. Accordingly, on the evening of 20 March a secret meeting, which lasted for an hour and a half, took place in Peron's flat. Noble said that it was necessary to act and to act quickly. If he were running Argentina, he would first give effect to the Mexico City resolutions, then declare war on the Axis and, finally, look round for some striking measure which would demonstrate that Argentina was acting, not talking. It might help to announce the date of elections. All this was taken in good part. Peron thought that the Mexico City resolutions presented no difficulty. A declaration of war would require a little preparation. There was opposition to be overcome within the armed forces and among the civilian nationalists. But Noble felt that he had strengthened Peron's will in following a policy that he had already decided on, had helped him to realize the need of quick action, and had discouraged him from an idea of de-

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claring war on J a p a n alone. O n 27 March, after Noble had expressed his dismay, through an intermediary, at a sign of further delay, 171 Peron hesitated no longer. Argentina declared war on J a p a n and on Germany 'as an ally of J a p a n ' , and announced her intention of acceding to the Final Act of the Mexico City Conference. It was signed on 4 April. T h e United States, Great Britain and those Latin American republics which had not recognized the Farrell regime established diplomatic relations on the 9th—the day of Hitler's suicide—and the unrecognizable having been recognized, the 'bandits and desperados' were invited on the 30th to be represented at the San Francisco Conference. 172 VII Argentina having been re-admitted to the Pan American fold, the Government was spurred on to a number of anti-Axis measures. Ultra-nationalists and Axis newspapers were closed. Graf Spee internees were declared prisoners-of-war. Japanese consular and diplomatic staff were interned. A special register of enemy nationals was created, and steps were taken to supplement previous measures of intervention in Axis firms.173 T h e United States, for her part, lifted restrictions on sales to and from Argentina to the extent that she stood on the same footing as other Latin American states—much to the satisfaction of American businessmen who feared a revival of British competition. A joint diplomatic and military mission led by Avra Warren of the State Department and General George Brett of the Caribbean Defense C o m m a n d arrived in Buenos Aires to discuss the problems of political, economic, naval and military collaboration and to canvass the possibility of the establishment of diplomatic relations with the U.S.S.R. 174 (These were eventually accomplished on 6 J u n e , 1946.) Britain renewed negotiations for a long-term meat contract, suspended at the wishes of the United States the previous November, the State Department now showing itself all compliance, though reservations were to be raised later on the ground that the contract would offend against the principles of multilateral, non-discriminatory trade. A hungry Europe was crying out for food. Supplies from Argentina had been falling,

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and the Minister of Food, Colonel Llewellin, had urgently asked Churchill for permission to resume discussions. 175 He found, as he had expected, that a seller's market was replacing a buyer's, that the demand on visible supplies was growing, that the European allies were becoming restless and threatening to enter the Argentine market themselves, and that Argentina wanted not only higher prices but also more British goods. 176 But the after-glow of the radiance spread by the W a r r e n Brett mission soon faded, and so did the rehabilitation of Argentina in American eyes. Days of tension had preceded the declaration of war, and though nationalist protests were confined to a few street demonstrations, the public response had been apathetic. There was a sense of humiliation at what seemed to be a last-minute and undignified scramble on to the Allied band-waggon, and politicians who were unable to remove Peron by their own efforts were dismayed by the failure of the United States to do it for them. 177 Barely had the mission departed than several hundred officers and civilians, including General Rawson, were arrested on a charge of conspiring to overthrow the Government. 178 With memories of what had occurred when Paris was liberated, the authorities effectually quelled by police methods any public celebration of the fall of Berlin and of the ending of the war in Europe. 179 Foreign correspondents were interfered with, journalists arrested. Charges of fascism and lack of compliance with the Mexico City resolutions again began to be bandied about in the United States, and on 19 May the new American Ambassador, the ebullient Spruille Braden, arrived, 'with the fixed idea', Sir David Kelly, who had returned to Buenos Aires and liked Braden, was later to write, 'that he had been elected by Providence to overthrow the Farrell-Peron regime'. 180 Barely had he presented his credentials when he was condemning the Government as weak, unscrupulous and anti-American, recommending that a halt be called to all questions of staff talks, enlarged military and air missions and the provision of military supplies as recommended by the W a r r e n - B r e t t mission—they were in fact cancelled—and telling Peron that he was profoundly dissatisfied by the continued arrests, press censorship and the absence of effective controls of German

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firms.181 Thereafter a stream of condemnatory telegrams flowed from Buenos Aires to Washington, and by the end of August even Rockefeller was reading his recantation and making way for Braden to succeed him as Assistant Secretary. As the apostle, so Kelly described him, ofDelenda est Carthago,182 Braden minced his words neither privately nor in public. Peron, who said, in a particularly disagreeable interview, that he had the support of four million workers, Braden described as a 'dangerous, uncontrollable megalomaniac',183 and while Vice-President and Ambassador indulged in a campaign of mutual denigration, the opposition to the Government rose to new heights. The Stock Exchange, representing the business community, published a manifesto on 16 June roundly condemning Peron's social and economic policies. The Rural Society, representing the cattle ranchers, issued a similar manifesto two days later. The Radical Party, to some of whose members the Government had made overtures, held its first public meeting in two years at the end of the month and joined in the attack. The Federation Universitaria Argentina staged a one-day strike and the National Council of the Socialist Party, on 3 July, denounced the state of siege and demanded that elections should be held by the end of the year. Peron's reply to an almost total opposition from the possessing classes was to attack what he called the selfish and reactionary economic oligarchs and to appeal to the trade unions in the language of class warfare, describing his Secretariat of Labour and Social Welfare as 'a magnificent bridge for the evolution of the bourgeoisie into the rule of the masses'.184 The President so far ceded to the popular clamour as to announce on 7 July that elections would be held by the end of the year,185 to lift the state of siege on 7 August, and to permit victory celebrations at the ending of the war in the Far East. But these themselves resulted in violent clashes between Government and antiGovernment supporters, and the turmoil deepened. There were more student strikes, demonstrations at the Rural Society's National Cattle Show and at the Law Courts, and on 19 September a monster March of the Constitution and Liberty was staged by all the political parties without exception186 with the demand that the Government should hand over power to the Supreme Court. Four days later Braden left Buenos Aires

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to succeed Nelson Rockefeller as Assistant Secretary of State. 'Let no one imagine,' he remarked at a farewell luncheon, 'that my being transferred to Washington means the abandonment of the task I have undertaken.'187 A climacteric now approached. The Naval Chief of Staff, Admiral Vernengo Lima, supported by nine other admirals and some thirty generals, had made his discontent clear at the end of July, and a manifesto in favour of the restoration of constitutional government was issued on 24 September by fifty-one retired admirals and captains.188 On the same day General Rawson, already arrested once and released, attempted to bring out the Cordoba garrison in favour of handing over the Government to the Supreme Court, only to be rearrested and to precipitate the re-imposition of the state of siege and a wave of arrests of editors, journalists, politicians, university leaders and others. Finally the powerful Campo de Mayo garrison, under the command of Peron's one-time friend, General Avalos, decided that enough was enough. On -9 October the President was presented with an ultimatum: Peron must go, or the troops would march on Buenos Aires. There followed a week of extraordinary confusion but of immense importance in the history of Argentina. Peron resigned,189 but was imprudently allowed to make a farewell broadcast 'violent to the point of hysteria' in manner,190 in which he recapitulated the measures taken by his Department of Labour and Social Welfare on behalf of the workers. On the 13 th he was arrested and taken to the island of Martin Garcia, to be brought back, on the plea of sickness, to the Military Hospital in Buenos Aires on the 17th. The cabinet had been dissolved on the 12th and for a few days Farrell, Avalos and Vernengo Lima formed a sort of governing junta. But while naval opinion was in favour of handing over power to the Supreme Court, army opinion was not, and the President of the Court shrank from the thankless task of becoming President of the Republic. Avalos looked to the co-operation of the civilians. But the politicians, immersed in 'Byzantine disputes',191 failed to agree among themselves until it was too late. Peron's closest collaborators mobilized the workers. On the 16th and 17th, unhindered in the end by the police, they streamed from the suburbs and industrial quarters to the

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heart of the city, the Plaza de Mayo. On the 17th Peron had to be brought to the Casa Rosada, or Government House, to quiet his descamisados, or shirtless ones, telling them in triumph that there was now no need for starting workers5 movements and that they should return to their homes.192 'From that day onwards, until the elections early in 1946,' wrote Kelly, 'affairs marched swiftly to what appeared to me, though not to an Opposition blinded by hatred and wishful thinking, their inevitable end.'193 Peron did not again take office, but his supporters were entrenched in the cabinet formed on the fall of Avalos and Vernengo Lima, and occupied key positions elsewhere. Marrying Eva Duarte, he devoted his energies to the forthcoming elections, announced on 9 October but put forward in November from April to February. The Radicals, Socialists, Progressive Democrats and Communists at last succeeded in forming a Democratic Union, an alliance of incompatibles, and chose as their presidential candidate, with no very positive programme, a one-time Radical deputy, senator and Minister of the Interior, Dr. Jose P. Tamborini. Peron had the support of a new political party, the Labour Party, which trade union leaders had begun to form even before the October crisis, a dissident group of Radicals, most of the police, a considerable section of the army, and, with few exceptions, the Catholic hierarchy, which remembered the establishment of religious instruction in schools, feared the separation, by Peron's opponents, of Church and State,194 and could not, in any event, support a Democratic Front which included Communists. He benefited by a decree in December, which greatly angered the employers' associations, ordering all commercial and industrial establishments not only to pay their workers a minimum wage linked to the cost of living but an annual bonus equivalent to one month's salary. He may well have benefited also by the publication, twelve days before the election, of the United States Blue Book on Argentina.195 This the State Department, more particularly Braden, had been engaged in compiling from captured German documents and other sources since October. A comprehensive but not wholly convincing indictment of successive Argentine governments from the Castillo regime onwards, it impugned their

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good faith, condemned their policies, internal and external, and purported to establish the Nazi connections and fascist proclivities of their leaders, including Peron. It sufficed to inflame nationalist feeling anew and to enable the Peronistas to employ the slogan of Braden versus Peron. There was an atmosphere of violence before the elections. But the election day itself, on 24 February, passed off quietly, Peron obtaining 52.4 per cent of the votes cast in what were generally considered to be honest and free elections. He was inaugurated on 4 June, 1946.196

VIII FROM WAR TO PEACE I 'When peace is restored,' Sumner Welles declared at the Rio de Janeiro meeting of American foreign ministers in January, 1942, 'it is to the interest of the whole world that the American Republics present a united front and be able to speak and act with the moral authority to which, by reason of their own enlightened standards as much as by reason of their number and their power, they are entitled.'1 T cannot believe,' he remarked a few weeks later, that 'the peoples of the United States and of the Western Hemisphere will ever relinquish the inter-American system they have built up. Based as it is on sovereign equality, on liberty, on peace, and on joint resistance to aggression, it constitutes the only example in the world today of a regional federation of free and independent peoples. It lightens the darkness of our anarchic world. It should constitute a cornerstone in the world structure of the future.'2 Humble and entirely non-political in origin, the movement from which the inter-American system evolved had been in existence for more than half a century. But it was only in the last few years, under the stimulus of the Good Neighbour policy and with the acceptance of the principles of non-intervention by one state in the affairs of another and of consultation in the event of danger from without the hemisphere,3 that it had begun to assume the semblance of a genuine system of regional security, political and economic. It had no written constitution, no council, no assembly, no permanent court, no coercive authority. An entirely voluntary system of theoretically equal sovereign states, each of which was free to reject at will any or all of the resolutions or recommendations of its fellow members—the response of Argentina to those of the Rio de Janeiro Conference of Foreign Ministers

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was an outstanding example—it consisted, first, of the International Conferences of American States, supposedly meeting at five-yearly intervals and limited in scope only by their own agenda; secondly, of specialized and technical conferences, called for specific purposes, as well as, since 1939, of consultative meetings of American foreign ministers or their representatives; thirdly, of the Pan American Union in Washington, which was the permanent secretariat of the International Conferences and of whose governing board the Secretary of State of the United States was invariably the elected chairman; and, fourthly, of a variety of permanent or semi-permanent agencies, boards and committees, some of which were only remotely connected with the Pan American Union itself and whose inter-relationships were exceedingly complex. With this framework of inter-American organization there was associated an elaborate network of declarations, resolutions and conventions designed, not altogether successfully, to ensure the preservation of peace in the western hemisphere. Since the advent of the European war inter-American agencies had burgeoned like flowers in the spring. They ranged from the Inter-American Neutrality Committee (later the Inter-American Juridical Committee) and the InterAmerican Financial and Economic Advisory Committee, the children of the first meeting of American Foreign Ministers at Panama in 1939, to the Emergency Advisory Committee for Political Defense and the Inter-American Defense Board, devised at their third meeting at Rio de Janeiro in 1942,4 the Inter-American Development Commission established by the Financial and Economic Advisory Committee, together with its national councils, 5 the Inter-American Maritime Technical Commission, the Inter-American Coffee Board, and the Inter-American Institute of Agricultural Sciences. All, or most, of this machinery owed much to the initiative of the United States. It was supplemented both before and after the Rio de Janeiro Conference by a variety of bilateral agreements between the United States and various Latin American states, military and defence agreements, economic agreements, technical aid agreements. The purchasing arrangements entered into by the United States, the efforts to stimulate the production of Latin American strategic materials, Lend-Lease

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arrangements, the defence commissions established with Brazil and Mexico suffice to illustrate their range. But while new vigour had been injected into the interAmerican system both before and during the earlier years of the war, Pan Americanism, though an exclusive, was not necessarily an isolationist, doctrine. In the past there had been little formal co-operation between the Union of American Republics (to give the Pan American system its proper name) and the League of Nations. But all the Latin American states had been members of the League at one time or another and some still were, 6 and the idea of a League was still alive in Latin America though the League itself, for all practical purposes, was dead. World peace, the Rio de Janeiro Conference affirmed, 'must be based on the principles of respect for law, of justice and of co-operation which inspire the Nations of America'—a declaration couched in the conventional language of Pan Americanism as well as of Sumner Welles; 'a new order of peace' must be supported by economic principles which would ensure 'equitable and lasting international trade and equal opportunities for all Nations'; 'collective security must be founded not only on political institutions' but also on 'just, effective, and liberal economic systems'—a deeply held conviction of Cordell Hull. And, so affirming, the Conference charged the Inter-American Juridical Committee with the task of formulating specific recommendations designed to meet the problems of post-war international organization. 7 T h e Committee made a preliminary report to the Pan American Union in September, 1942. It laid down a number of general principles—the use of force must be repudiated except by the community of nations 'acting through its organized agents'; disputes must be settled by peaceful means; an act of aggression against one nation must be considered as an act of aggression against all; the concept of sovereignty must be modified, since no state could be judge in its own cause; armaments must be curbed; political and economic imperialism and exaggerated political and economic nationalisms must alike be eliminated; the international community must be organized on the basis of the co-operation of all nations—none could stand aloof; and whether the organization was 'to be based on the League of Nations amended and

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strengthened' or was to be a new institution, 'it must be so construed as to reconcile the principle of universality of membership with the existence of regional groups formed by natural bonds of solidarity and common interests'. 8 This report, remarkable for its reflections on sovereignty and nationalism as well as on the place of regional systems in the world order of the future, owed much to the United States representative on the Committee, Professor C. G. Fenwick. It attracted less attention than it deserved in 1942. There were other, more pressing, matters to occupy the public mind. But as the lights on the horizon grew brighter, the questions involved in the transition from war to peace took on a greater urgency among public and private bodies in the United States and excited an increasing interest, particularly in their economic and social aspects, in Latin America. In the State Department Sumner Welles was the protagonist of a world organization built on regional foundations 9 (a view which commended itself to Churchill and at one time to Roosevelt), Hull the exponent of Wilsonian internationalism rooted in a strong centralized institution. 10 But for both men the choice was not between a security system for the western hemisphere and a world-wide system, but between a world-wide system, in which the regional inter-American system would play a part, or no security system at all. A similar perception was evident in Latin America. Before the Four Power Declaration at Moscow in October, 1943, which recognized the necessity o f ' a general international organization, based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all peace-loving states, and open to membership by all such states, large and small, for the maintenance of international peace and security', 11 President Avila Camacho of Mexico had declared that the solidarity of the western hemisphere was only a step in the direction of another solidarity, still more estimable, and standing on higher ground. 12 After the Declaration, the Uruguayan Government initiated a detailed study of the structure and functions which the wider organization should have, pronouncing, in September, 1944, in favour of a much-strengthened League of Nations whose members would be required to demonstrate 'a real respect for the liberties essential and inherent in the h u m a n person'. With its Council, Assembly and Court, the

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League should have the power to ensure peaceful co-existence by force if necessary and the Court's jurisdiction should extend to all 'differences of an international character without exception'. But the general organization should have the flexibility to admit regional organizations, 'among which would be comprised that of the American peoples'.13 All the Latin American states, except Argentina, were invited to take part in the first United Nations conference, the Conference on Food and Agriculture, held at Hot Springs, Virginia, in May, 1943, which led to the eventual creation of the Food and Agriculture Organization. All, again with the exception of Argentina, signed the agreement in November, 1943, establishing the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. The former body, concerned as it was with nutritional standards in the post-war world and the production and marketing of food and agricultural products,14 was obviously of close concern to the Latin American countries. The second, looking to the relief and rehabilitation of the liberated areas, was a tax upon their generosity—they were to contribute one per cent of their budgets to its expenses, much the largest individual Latin American share falling to Brazil15 and nine of the states failing to pay their contributions by September, 1944. But, however onerous these obligations might seem to be, UNRRA, as ex-President Santos of Colombia, who became a Deputy Director-General, pointed out, could serve as a bridge for the more effective distribution of Latin American raw materials and finished goods to Europe and Asia,16 again a matter of close interest to the Latin American states. Characteristically, too, the Latin American members played their part in reducing the powers of the Central Committee of UNRRA so that it could not function 'as an omnipotent "Big Four" behind the Council',17 and both at the Hot Springs Conference and at the first meeting of the UNRRA Council at Atlantic City, New Jersey, they ventilated their hopes for assistance to their own economies from the more highly industrialized countries of the world and their need, as they saw it, not only for expanded agricultural production but for equipment, machinery and technical aid in solving their agricultural and industrial problems.18 At the third of the United Nations conferences—the Monet-

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ary and Financial Conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July, 1944, concerned with the creation of an Internation Bank for Reconstruction and Development able to make loans to countries torn by war, and with the establishment of an International Monetary Fund intended to lead to the stabilization of world currencies, Argentina was again the only Latin American absentee. At this the Latin American states obtained two of the twelve executive directorships of the Fund and a seat on the executive board of the Bank, and in the conference debates they once again emphasized the need for aid not only to the countries which had suffered by war but to the underdeveloped countries, as most of them were, generally.19 These conferences, together with a Civil Aviation Conference at Chicago, when the Latin American states tended to vote as a bloc, served, in Hull's opinion, to bring the United Nations and 'associated' states together in detailed discussions and to accustom them to 'working with one another'.20 By contrast, neither in 1943 nor in 1944 was there any purely inter-American conference of comparable importance.21 The Ninth International Conference of American States, not only due but overdue, was postponed—till 1948. At the Rio de Janeiro meeting in 1942 the foreign ministers had asked the Pan American Union to summon an Inter-American Technical and Economic Conference, for which the Financial and Economic Advisory Committee would make preparations, to discuss present and post-war economic problems.22 But though such a conference was contemplated in each of the years 1943, 1944 and 1945—Argentina was to be pointedly excluded23—there the matter ended. A like fate attended the proposal of the Rio de Janeiro Conference that there should be a fourth meeting of American foreign ministers to consider the recommendations which the Inter-American Juridical Committee was to prepare on the problems of international organization and post-war security—the Committee's preliminary recommendations in September, 1942, were followed by more specific proposals in July, 1944.24 But no meeting was held. The formation of a United Nations security organization involved, as Hull later wrote, 'special responsibilities on the part of the four major powers',25 and it was between them that

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preliminary discussions must take place. As the State Department formulated its own proposals, senators and representatives were consulted—Hull was ever mindful of the fate of the League of Nations at the hands of Congress—but not, except in the most general terms, the Latin American states. All but Argentina were notified in July, 1944, of the progress of organizational plans, and told that conversations were about to be held between the four great powers at Dumbarton Oaks, that so soon as possible thereafter there would be exchanges with the other United Nations and the 'associated' states, and that the United States was paying special attention to the question of inter-American relationships.26 But formal or informal discussions there were none. II The Dumbarton Oaks conversations between the United States, the United Kingdom and Soviet Russia, while China waited in the wings for her own turn,27 opened in Georgetown on 21 August, 1944. Lasting till 7 October, they were informal, exploratory and officially secret, though the distinguished journalist, James Reston, of the New York Times was able (apparently with the aid of the Chinese) to reveal remarkably accurate details. The end result was a tentative scheme28 for the establishment of a general international organization to be entitled 'The United Nations', to maintain 'international peace and security' and 'achieve international co-operation in the solution of international economic, social and other humanitarian problems'. Based on the principle of 'the sovereign equality of all peace-loving states', it was to have a broadly-based deliberative General Assembly, a small Security Council with the prime responsibility for the maintenance of peace, a Court of Justice, a Secretariat, an Economic and Social Council, and such other agencies as might be thought necessary. No mention was made of the interAmerican system by name. But nothing in the proposed United Nations Charter was to preclude the existence of 'regional arrangements or agencies' for dealing with such matters relating to peace and security as were appropriate for regional action. On the contrary, such agencies were to be en-

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couraged to settle local disputes and to be utilized by the Council for 'enforcement action under its authority'. But no enforcement action could be taken without the authorization of the Council, which was to be kept informed of all activities contemplated or undertaken. The Council was to consist of eleven members, among which the four great powers and ultimately France would be given an entrenched position. Hull and Roosevelt had wanted a sixth permanent seat for Brazil, but this suggestion was acceptable neither to the Soviet Union or Britain nor to the American Group itself.29 No agreement was reached on voting procedure in the Council, the right of a great power to vote in a dispute to which it was a party, and its ultimate use of a veto—questions of great interest not only to the Latin American states but to all middle and smaller powers. The status of 'associated' nations, which had severed relations with the Axis but had not declared war, was also unresolved. The United States had assumed that the six Latin American 'associated' states (excluding Argentina) would be initial members of the future United Nations Organization. But though each of them had been invited to the United Nations economic conferences, the Russians held that membership of the Organization should be limited to those states which had signed the Declaration of the United Nations—unless, indeed, all sixteen of the Soviet republics also ranked as initial members. Roosevelt exclaimed 'My God', when he was told of this, and rejected the idea decisively.30 By mid-November he had come round to the conclusion that it was 'entirely proper' that only full members of the United Nations should be invited to the conference which would frame the final Charter, and the State Department was instructed to induce the six Latin American 'associates' to declare war and to sign the United Nations Declaration. Otherwise they might be excluded from participation in the founding conference.31 None had signed before the 'big three' met at Yalta in the Crimea from 4 to 11 February, 1945, when it was agreed to hold the founding conference at San Francisco in April and that those 'associated' states which had signed the Declaration by 1 March should be invited to attend. Roosevelt had already written personally to the presidents of the six Latin American 'associates'—Argen-

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tina, he declared, was not to be considered as an 'associated' state—and the State Department exerted further pressure. It caused some irritation, but between 2 and 24 February all six declared war either on Germany and Japan or on Japan only and signed the Declaration.32 While the Dumbarton Oaks conversations were in progress Hull held two meetings, each with a different group of Latin American ambassadors. Three days after the talks had ended Roosevelt was at pains to assure all of them that the interAmerican system could and must 'play a strong and vital role' in the future world organization, and Stettinius arranged three or four discussion meetings or 'seminars'. 33 This was an attempt to assuage hurt feelings. Sumner Welles, in the bitterness of his heart, declared that by 1945 the 'whole of the hemisphere' was 'shot through with suspicions and animosity towards the United States',34 and, exaggerated as this statement was, it contained a substantial measure of truth. With the prolonged ostracism of Argentina and with American preoccupation with European and world reconstruction, the bloom had blown off the inter-American system in the United States. A large question mark had also arisen in Latin America. There had been rumours that the United States wanted to acquire bases in Latin America after the war. Senator Hugh Butler, at the end of 1943, had indulged in a philippic against the Rooseveltian Latin American programme. Sumner Welles, widely regarded as the principal architect of the Good Neighbour policy, had been extruded from the State Department. The continued impasse with Argentina caused mounting irritation, and the failure of the United States to consult Latin American opinion before the Dumbarton Oaks conversations was deeply resented.35 Just as, at the time of the framing of the Constitution of the United States, the small states at the Philadelphia Convention had feared the power of the large, so now the Latin American states became suspicious of a new 'holy alliance' of the great powers, especially when one of them was the Soviet Union, when the United States consulted with these alone, and when the future of United States policy in Latin America seemed to be clouded by uncertainties. Nor were they reassured by what they learned about the Dumbarton Oaks conversations. Ven-

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ezuela, for example, pressed for an allocation of three seats to Latin America on the Security Council, Uruguay deplored the omission of any allusion in the proposals to the general principles of law and justice and expressed her preference for an amended League of Nations. As for the inter-American system, the feeling prevailed that, reformed and strengthened, it might be a safeguard not only against external interference in Latin America but a restraint on the political influence of the United States on the one hand and an incentive to the continued channelling of United States economic aid to Latin America as well as to Europe on the other.36 This was the climate of opinion when Argentina, on 27 October, formally requested the Pan American Union to summon a meeting to discuss her own situation. Stettinius would have none of it. But the Latin American states had long chafed at the want of a further inter-American conference, and the adroit substitution by Ezequiel Padilla of Mexico, with the encouragement of Stettinius, of a conference of American states collaborating in the war effort for the inter-American meeting requested by Argentina did much to placate Latin American opinion in general. To preserve appearances the conference was summoned by the Government of Mexico, not by the Pan American Union, its purpose to discuss the problems of war and peace, with the prospect that the Argentine situation might be considered at its close.37 Ill The Mexico City Conference met in the palace of Chapultepec from 21 February to 8 March, 1945. Once the meeting had been decided upon, the importance which the United States attached to it was illustrated by the size and character of its delegation. Stettinius, who came straight from Yalta by way of Moscow, merely stopping in Brazil to see President Vargas, and Nelson Rockefeller were the official representatives, but they were supported by the Democratic Senator, Tom Connally, and the Republican, Warren R. Austin, and by three members of the House of Representatives, together with an army of political, economic and military advisers. The General Secretariat of the League of Nations and the International

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Labour Office sent observers, and the Counsellor of the British Embassy in Washington, R. H. Hadow, was present at Rockefeller's invitation. There were impressive delegations also from the Latin American states.38 An attempt on the part of Paraguay at a preliminary session to secure an immediate discussion of the Argentine situation was unsuccessful,39 and the first item on the agenda, namely the consideration of further efforts to intensify co-operation in the war effort, was relatively plain sailing. The republics agreed to replace the Inter-American Defense Board in due course by a permanent military agency, to control the manufacture of, and the trade in, armaments, not to harbour war criminals nor to serve as a refuge for properties unjustly obtained by individuals or entities whose activities were inimical to the security of the hemisphere and the post-war world, and to intensify, individually and collectively, their efforts to eradicate the remaining centres of Axis subversive influence.40 'Under the resolutions adopted here,5 Stettinius declared, somewhat optimistically, 'no Axis leader, official, or agent who is guilty of crimes against law and civilization in this war will be able to escape punishment by finding refuge in this hemisphere.541 But the problems at the heart of the Conference were those of world organization, the future of the inter-American system and the social and economic difficulties of Latin America both during and after the transition from war to peace. So far as the Dumbarton Oaks proposals were concerned, the hands of the United States were tied both morally and diplomatically. Those of the Latin American states were not; and, whereas Stettinius hoped for a common front in support of the proposals, a majority of the Latin American delegations came primed with suggestions for their amendment. These resolved themselves into a consensus of opinion on seven points: all states should ultimately be members of the World Organization; its principles and purposes should be amplified and made more specific; so also should the powers of the General Assembly; the jurisdiction of the International Court should be strengthened; an agency should be created to promote 'intellectual and moral co-operation among nations5; 'controversies and questions of an inter-American character5 should properly be solved in accordance with inter-American

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methods and procedures; and the Latin American countries should be given adequate representation on the Security Council. Since the United States could neither accept nor reject these suggestions, the Conference adopted an ingenious compromise. It declared that the Dumbarton Oaks proposals constituted a 'basis for, and a valuable contribution to the setting u p ' of a general international organization, but that its own Secretary-General should transmit to the other nations invited to the forthcoming San Francisco Conference the views and comments of those American republics which did not take part in the Dumbarton Oaks conversations, and especially the seven points on which they were generally agreed. 42 Perhaps happily for the adoption of this compromise Stettinius was unable to announce the voting procedure in the Security Council and the use of the veto, which the great powers had agreed upon at the Yalta meeting but not at Dumbarton Oaks, till the end of the conference, too late for discussion. They became the subject of private consultation among the Latin American states themselves. 43 T h e United States, like the Latin American states, favoured a reorganization of the inter-American system on account of the 'major role', in Stettinius's words, 'which it should play in the world of the future', 44 in harmony,'however, with the general international organization. But there were differences over timing and degree. In the United States view the reorganization should be postponed till the next regular International Conference of American States, by which time the relations of the regional to the world system would have been defined. T h e Latin American states preferred more immediate action. There was little disagreement over the need for systematizing and consolidating inter-American arrangements, and none which could not relatively easily be resolved over increasing the functions and amending the constitution of the Governing Board of the Pan American Union, establishing, in due course, an Economic and Social Council, and even endowing the Pan American system with a charter, which the Governing Board would draft and the next regular Conference of American States consider. 45 But this was not enough. The Latin American countries wanted the inter-American security system to be strengthened at once—a matter on which the

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United States representatives were divided. A Colombian proposal that an act of aggression against an American state, committed from without or from within the hemisphere, should be considered as an act of aggression against all appeared to be unexceptionable, and ex-President Santos had discussed a like suggestion with Roosevelt.46 So also was an Uruguayan proposal renouncing the use offeree for the settlement of disputes except in self-defence or by collective action. But when these proposals, together with a Brazilian motion, were combined into a single resolution obliging all states to defend by every means, including, if necessary, the use of force, the territorial integrity and political independence of each, should an absolute majority so decide, the implications were far-reaching. This was to commit the United States in peace as well as in war-time to the use of force without the necessary consent of the Senate. It was to make the inter-American system independent, in effect, of the world security system and possibly to encourage similar regional arrangements elsewhere.47 The result, embodied in the cumbrous circumlocutions of the Act of Chapultepec,48 was a further compromise. Part I of the Act confined the pledge to apply sanctions of whatever kind to the duration of the war, on the premise, however, that the American states would consult together over what measures it might be advisable to take. Part II recommended the conclusion of a treaty establishing similar procedures to meet future threats after the war had ended. Part III explicitly stated that the Act and its recommendations constituted a 'regional arrangement for dealing with such matters relating to the maintenance of international peace and security' as were appropriate for regional action in the western hemisphere. The 'arrangement', activities and procedures were to be 'consistent with the purposes and principles of the general international organization when established'. The Act of Chapultepec loomed large in the eyes of the Latin American delegates. So also did the present and future prospects of the Latin American states. Apprehensive of declining prices and diminishing markets, the sudden ending of procurement contracts, the diversion of United States interest from America to Europe, what they sought were assur-

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aiices of economic assistance in the difficult transition period from war to peace and of long-term aid in their industrial development. 'What they received was primarily jadvice—and unwelcome advice at that.' 49 In draft resolutions on the 'Maintenance and Development of the Internal Economies of the American Republics' (the title was changed to 'Industrial Development') and an 'Economic Charter of the Americas', the United States enunciated the general principles of her foreign economic policy: non-discrimination; the abolition of restrictive trade practices; the effective reduction of trading barriers; the elimination of economic nationalism 'in all its forms'; the just and equitable treatment of foreign enterprise and capital; the promotion of private and the discouragement of state enterprise in the conduct of trade; the necessity that industrial development should be 'soundly based'; and, in addition, the need for higher living and progressive labour standards. This was to place the economic and social development of Latin America within the context of an expanding, interdependent and liberalized world economy. It collided with Latin American desires to protect their infant industries, to maintain a high level of exports, and to escape from what was considered to be economic vassalage to the more industrialized countries, including the United States. More compromises followed. T h e Economic Charter did not condemn all economic nationalism, but only its excesses. Equal access to trade and raw materials was amended to include equal access to the producers' goods needed for Latin American economic and industrial development. T h e reference to state enterprise was omitted. And though the reduction of trade barriers was stated to be the common aspiration of the Americas, the aspiration was cautiously worded. Similarly, the resolution on industrial development contained the caveat that the investment of foreign capital in private enterprises should preferably be made in such a manner as to assure to national capital a 'just and adequate participation' both in the establishment of such enterprises and in their management. 5 0 And while further discussion of certain economic problems was referred to the long-overdue Technical Economic Conference (in effect to the Greek Kalends), the Assistant Secretary of State in charge of Foreign Economic

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Affairs, William Clayton, in a notable speech, could only make very moderate promises of immediate and post-war assistance to the Latin American countries.51 Clearly the United States expected hemispheric economic arrangements to conform to the general pattern of world economic arrangements. The penultimate resolution of the Conference related to Argentina. It deplored the failure of the Argentine nation to take those steps which would have permitted it to participate in the Conference, hoped that it would conform to the principles and declarations there formulated and would achieve incorporation into the United Nations, and declared that the Final Act (which included all the Conference's resolutions and recommendations) was open to its adherence.52 Stettinius, on his arrival at Mexico City, had found the Argentine situation 'boiling'. He was now prepared to reverse, as Rockefeller had long wanted to reverse, American policy in respect of the recalcitrant state, and he left Mexico City on 9 March well content. The Conference, he believed, could reasonably be seen as a 'culmination of the Good Neighbor Policy and as an attitude [sic] pursued by President Roosevelt and his Government consistently over the last twelve years'.53 Hardly more than a month later, on 12 April, Roosevelt died. When the San Francisco Conference opened on the 25th, a new administration was in office. Stettinius again led the United States delegation. But this time Rockefeller was not his associate. Nevertheless, as Assistant Secretary of State in charge of relations with the American republics, Rockefeller was there, staying at the hotel which was the headquarters of the Latin American delegates and making a point of meeting many of them at breakfast.54 IV Of the forty-six states originally gathered together at San Francisco nineteen were Latin American. Argentina had not been invited. She had indeed declared war on the Axis on 27 March, had signed the Final Act of the Mexico City Conference on 4 April and her Government had been recognized by the United States, Great Britain and such Latin American states as had not already done so on the 9th. She had not

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signed the Declaration of the United Nations. Rockefeller had certainly hinted that if she did so she might be invited to the Conference,55 and he had been present with the Brazilian Foreign Minister at a meeting of Latin American diplomats at Blair House, the presidential guest house, in March when a memorandum had been drawn up to the effect that if Argentina complied with the principles and declarations of the Mexico City Conference the other republics would recognize her Government and that the United States, as the depository of the Declaration of the United Nations, would request that Argentina be invited to sign it.56 This memorandum he had shown to Roosevelt. Much, of course, depended on the word 'complied', and though the story got about that Roosevelt had given his approval to Argentina's membership, Hull, at any rate, was certain that he had not.57 An embarrassed Stettinius reported to President Truman on 21 April that Argentina had asked to sign the Declaration, that there was a large political issue at stake, that Rockefeller, during his absence, had seen Roosevelt and that Roosevelt had agreed that if the Argentines 'cleaned house' and took the necessary steps, 'they would be received into the United Nations family'. Truman, far from pleased, declared that he would abide by any commitment that Roosevelt might have made but hoped that the United States would not have to take the lead in advancing the proposal.58 Nor did she. But the Argentine question could not be dismissed. At Yalta Roosevelt had agreed that two Soviet republics, the Ukraine and White Russia, should be admitted to the United Nations, though not to the San Francisco Conference. The Russians, on their arrival at San Francisco, wanted them to be there too. 'It is really impossible to forecast how things are going to work out here,' Eden telegraphed to Churchill. 'We start at 9 a.m. tomorrow with a free for all, the South Americans and Molotov being apparently the chief protagonists. The South Americans want Argentina admitted and won't allow two Soviet republics to function at San Francisco until she is. We could watch this with detachment except that the moment the South Americans raise their demand, Molotov returns to the charge over his Moscow Poles.'59 Since the Latin American delegates made it perfectly clear that they

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would not agree—Stettinius thought at Rockefeller's instigation—to the admission of the two Soviet republics unless Argentina were also seated, Stettinius, with Truman's approval, reluctantly committed himself to their support. On the 30th it w&s first agreed to invite the attendance of the Ukraine and White Russia and then of Argentina, but not before there had been acrimonious exchanges between Molotov and Padilla of Mexico and Molotov had delivered a violent tirade against Argentina's delinquencies.60 This question resolved, the main concerns of the Latin American delegations were the relation of the inter-American security system to the world security system, the powers and composition of the Security Council, and the role of the General Assembly, though their influence was reflected in various changes in the wording of the Charter, such as the references in the preamble to the equal rights of men and women and respect for treaty obligations and, in Article 1, to the principles ofjustice and international law. Their efforts to enlarge the powers of the Assembly were only to a minor degree successful, and they failed to alter the structure of the Security Council, to gain a permanent regional seat for themselves, or to secure any change in the voting procedure and the use of the veto.61 On these matters the Latin American states and the United States belonged to different camps. On the regional problem they were more successful. The Dumbarton Oaks proposals had both permitted and encouraged regional security arrangements under the ultimate authority of the Security Council. At Mexico City the Act of Chapultepec recognized that the security of the hemisphere, and its solidarity, were equally affected by an act of aggression on the part of an American state as on that of a non-American state; it took some steps to define an aggressor; and it laid down the procedure which the American states, after due consultation and agreement, should be free to adopt in the face of aggression, including the application of economic sanctions and the use of armed force. It declared that, so long as the war continued, these procedures should become effective immediately an act of aggression took place and recommended that, at the end of the war, the republics should consider their embodiment in treaty form. To all this there was the overriding proviso that

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such a regional arrangement must be 'consistent with the purposes and principles of the general international organization, when established'. But what was meant by 'consistent'? Was it to be understood that the security arrangements outlined at Dumbarton Oaks and defined in the Act operated automatically, or were they subject to the prior approval of the Security Council? 62 This question was left to the wider stage of San Francisco, and, apart from the problem of the veto, it was the most acute difficulty which the delegates faced. O n the one hand the Act had strengthened, not weakened, the Monroe Doctrine, and while the United States was anxious to do nothing to impair the success and prestige of the the World Organization, the Monroe Doctrine still remained a United States doctrine. T h e Latin American states, for their part, were plainly unwilling to contemplate the possibility of external intervention in the affairs of the western hemisphere and the possibility, as the Colombian Foreign Minister put it, that a single great power in the Security Council could veto a decision of the interAmerican regional organization. They wanted their own arrangement 'to be completely free of the world arrangement'. O n the other hand, to include within the Charter a formula which would give general application to provisions to meet the requirements of the inter-American system was to invite the disintegration of the universal organization into semiindependent regional groups. 63 If future rivalry between possible regional groupings which might endanger world security was to be avoided, the paramount authority of the Security Council must be maintained. T h e old battle between regionalists and universalists was now again joined. T h e United States delegation and official United States opinion were alike divided, 64 Rockefeller supporting the Latin American point of view, Hull (by long distance telephone) opposing it,65 and Stettinius, in an outburst of irritation, exclaiming 'we must not be pushed around by a lot of small American republics who are dependent on us in many ways—economically, politically, militarily', 66 words which assorted ill with the old Good Neighbour policy. T h e solution was provided by Articles 51 to 54 of the Charter. 6 7 T h e principle that regional arrangements could be entered

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into for dealing with such matters relating to the maintenance of peace and security as were appropriate for regional action was affirmed in language identical with that of the Dumbarton Oaks proposals. Such arrangements must be consistent with the purposes and principles of the United Nations, and no action (except against an existing enemy state) could be taken without the authorization of the Security Council. The Council, moreover, was entitled to investigate any dispute which threatened international peace and security, and any member of the United Nations could bring such a dispute before the Council or the Assembly.68 But there was an important proviso. This was contained in Article 51. It affirmed 'the inherent right of individual and collective self-defence', should an armed attack occur against a member of the United Nations, until the Security Council had taken the measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. The great compromise of the Charter, it reconciled the principle of 'collective self-defence' enshrined in the Act of Chapultepec with that of the ultimate authority and responsibility of the Council—and, incidentally, provided 'the legal basis of the post-war blocs that marked the Cold War'.69 Nevertheless the Latin American delegates were unwilling to accept it unless, as proposed at Mexico City, the Act of Chapultepec was strengthened by an inter-American treaty.70 As the San Francisco Conference ended cold lights were already visible on the horizon, and even while the Conference was in session the quarrel between the United States and Argentina had been renewed.71 The treaty contemplated by the Act of Chapultepec was to have been drawn up at a special inter-American conference to be held at Rio de Janeiro on 20 October. But early in the month the Acting Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, announced that the United States could not properly negotiate or sign a treaty of military assistance with the existing Argentine regime. A few days later, at the wish of the United States, the conference was indefinitely postponed. On the other hand, the United States warmly endorsed in November a proposal of the Uruguayan Foreign Minister, Dr. Eduardo Rodriguez Larreta, in favour of 'multilateral collective action' against any American state repeatedly violating the elementary rights of man and the citizen and failing to

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respect its international obligations. This, plainly aimed at Argentina, commanded little support and was widely believed to have been inspired by the United States.72 The doctrine was strangled at birth. But the proposed Rio de Janeiro Conference did not take place till August, 1947, when an InterAmerican Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, none of whose provisions conflicted with the United Nations Charter, was signed. It was followed a few months later, and at long last, by the Ninth International Conference of American States. Meeting at Bogota in March, 1948, at a time when the city was given over to an unprecedented outburst of rioting and looting, the Ninth Conference approved a 'Charter of the Organization of American States', thus providing the interAmerican system with a new name together with a formal constitution as a 'regional agency' within the United Nations.73 V At Bogota the inter-American system attained its highest degree of organization. But instead of that continued increase in hemispheric solidarity which the Good-Neighbour policy, the safety of the Americas, the economic straits of Latin America and the importance of its economic resources had encouraged in the early years of the war, the latter years witnessed the onset of a deterioration in the relations between north and south. The war-time partnership between the two Americas showed signs of dissolution. The Good Neighbour policy, as Sumner Welles had understood it, was itself overshadowed, particularly by the troubled relations between the United States and Argentina,74 and when Peron became President of Argentina in 1946 the greatest power in the world had suffered a severe diplomatic defeat in her own hemisphere. Unable to direct the Latin American continent by force, the United States had failed to do so either by persuasion or by indirect intervention. Economically as well as politically her power was overwhelming. Britain and Germany had been her chief competitors in Latin America. Germany, like Japan, was temporarily crushed. Britain had been compelled to mortgage her

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future to her present. By the autumn of 1944 she had parted with assets to the value of £1000 millions, had incurred external liabilities of over £3000 millions,75 and, as Lord Willingdon had so graphically put it, her export trade had gone to the devil.76 Its volume had fallen to below a third of its pre-war level. In Latin America exports to Mexico in 1944 were only slightly greater than in 1857, to Central America and the island republics they were little more than a fifth of what they had been in 1937. They were less than a fifth to Colombia and Venezuela, less than a half to Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Chile, less than a third to Brazil, and in the countries of the Rio de la Plata they had fallen from nearly £23 millions in 1937 to less than £5 millions in 1944. In these seven years United Kingdom exports to Latin America as a whole had fallen by three quarters, and the fall in exports was accompanied, or followed, by an equally dramatic process of disinvestment.77 At first Britain had sought to promote her export trade by every means in her power in order to acquire the foreign exchange needed for essential purchases. Though the great Lend-Lease Act was signed in March, 1941, even as late as the attack on Pearl Harbour the greatest part of the supplies which she received from the United States had to be paid for in dollars.78 Payments agreements eased the situation in various Latin American countries, where it had been noted in the Office of the Co-ordinator of Inter-American Affairs in November, 1940, that there were 'some good properties in the British portfolio and we might well pick them up now'.79 But Willingdon, on his mission to Latin America in 1940 had found that, because of labour, supply and shipping difficulties and the demands of the British war economy, the United Kingdom had less and less to offer to Latin America. Then, with the advent of Lend-Lease, the 'ugly charge' was made in the United States and 'taken up joyfully by isolationists' that Britain was using Lend-Lease raw materials, and even some finished products, not for war purposes but to revive her export trade, particularly to Latin America.80 The Government found it essential to issue in September, 1941, a White Paper which categorically stated that all materials obtained under Lend-Lease were required for the war effort, that none

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of them had been or would be used for export, and that neither would similar materials except in strictly defined instances. 81 But despite the White Paper, and despite the fact that the Office of Lend-Lease Administration established an organization of its own for policing the observance of the terms of this unilateral declaration, 82 the charge was repeated again and again. With the supplies derived through Lend-Lease, through Canadian Mutual Aid, 83 and through mounting sterling indebtedness to other countries such as Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, exports sank to a mere trickle. It might have been supposed that, under the principles of equality of sacrifice and mutuality of aid, the restrictions imposed by the White Paper and supervised by United States officials, would have been replaced, after the United States had entered the war 'by something better: the joint planning of essential exports on a basis of equality and maximum efficiency'.84 It was not so. T h e rigour with which the restrictions were applied was in marked contrast with the rapid expansion of United States trade with Latin America, 85 just as the paucity of British official or commercial visitors contrasted sharply with the plethora of United States visitations, missions, exchanges and scholarships. T h e concern felt by British interests traditionally connected with Latin America was not unnatural, 8 6 nor was it allayed by such dicta as those of Eric Johnston, the President of the United States Chamber of Commerce, that trade after the war would be 'vertical' rather than 'horizontal', whatever these bogus geopolitical terms meant. 87 Commercial and financial competition was, as everyone recognized, a matter of course. But the tendency of some American officials to regard Latin America as a special preserve and of some American business interests, more vocal, perhaps, than numerous, to look upon the area as a 'natural' market from which European competitors (including British) should be excluded, could not be ignored, though such attitudes represented only one strand in the complex web of American opinion, and, as some, but not all, Whitehall officials appreciated, were not the official view of the State Department. 8 8 So far as the relations between the British and American resident communities and the British and American diploma-

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tic representatives in Latin America were concerned, there was not a great deal of cause for complaint. Kelly, in Argentina, was on excellent terms with Armour, and Orde, in Chile, with Bowers, though Charles had his difficulties with Caffery in Brazil. But Caffery, he admitted, seemed to dislike the members of his own community as much as he did the British.89 Other instances of a lack of harmony could be found, in Cuba, for example, where the British Minister complained in 1944 that he was spied upon by the United States Embassy,90 and in Paraguay. But more ill-will was generated by a number of American journalists, who, in Armour's view, liked to stir up trouble,91 than by unfriendly diplomats or members of the British and American 'colonies', though there were some irresponsible persons in each of these. Latin American politicians, moreover, were apt to speak with two voices, one reserved for criticizing the British to the Americans, the other for criticizing the Americans to the British. But however much a traditional Anglo-American rivalry in Latin America was subordinated to a common cause, as the war progressed British representatives from Washington to Buenos Aires were united in reporting their concern about the future of British trade, Halifax himself stating in April, 1943, that indications reached him daily of efforts on the part of United States agencies, both official and private, to lay the foundations of an undue degree of economic predominance.92 The whole question of post-war economic prospects was urgently considered in Whitehall in 1943. After much interdepartmental discussion, Halifax was instructed in May to raise the question with Hull, noting the impression 'in some quarters' that the United States wished to supplant the British in their established and traditional markets.93 He did so in July, met with a most friendly reception and was assured that it was not the policy of the United States Government to drive the United Kingdom out of Latin American markets.94 Accordingly, on 27 July, the President of the Board of Trade stated in the House of Commons that Britain did not intend to disinterest herself in Latin America and no one had suggested that she should, that in the post-war world she must participate in the expansion of trade in Latin America as everywhere else, and that he had every reason to believe that the United

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States shared this view. 95 T h e restrictions imposed by the White Paper and the Lend-Lease administrators, however, were not removed till Lend-Lease itself was abruptly terminated on V J . day, or, more exactly, on 2 September, 1945, when the Japanese signed the instrument of unconditional surrender. Britain was then faced with what Lord Keynes described as a 'financial Dunkirk', and the necessity of contracting a loan with the United States, granted on condition that she would agree within a year to the convertibility of sterling. Exports increased in 1945 over the lowest of all wartime levels in 1944 but were still not much more than 'forty per cent by volume of the 1938 level'. T h e need for a 'relentless export drive', upon which Britain must depend for 'daily work and daily bread', was never plainer, 96 and its success in the next few years was remarkable. But given the enormous losses in capital investment, shipping and trade, the burden of international indebtedness (and, it may be added, the determination of the United States, in the name of multilateralism and the ending of colonialism, to undermine the British Empire), 9 7 Britain, 'the greatest debtor in the history of the world', 98 exhausted and over-extended after five years of total war, posed little immediate threat to the economic predominance of the United States in Latin America. 99 VI By means of the purchase both of strategic and surplus commodities, of loans and grants for the improvement of communications and transport, the intensification of national production, the diversification of agriculture, the development of non-competitive products, the promotion of noncompetitive industries and sometimes of competitive ones as well, by commodity, currency and stabilization agreements, and by technical aid and other programmes, the United States had done much to mitigate the effects of the war on the Latin American economies. 100 She had extended military 101 as well as economic aid, together with assistance in public health and sanitary projects, and she had taken what steps she could to provide allocations of goods in short supply and to alleviate food shortages. But the blessings had been mixed. Procure-

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ment programmes had tended to increase Latin American dependence on the export of a few commodities, and their benefits had been by no means uniform. Projects such as the Bolivian, Ecuadorean and Haitian Development Corporations and the cultivation of wild rubber in Brazil had failed in their high hopes, resulting as much in economic dislocation as in increased production.102 And despite United States allocations, all the Latin American countries were left, as the war drew to a close, with large unsatisfied demands both for capital and consumer goods. All suffered from inflation, which, together with pent-up demand, soon tended to dissipate reserves of gold and foreign exchange. Argentina, though outstripped in military power by Brazil, seemed to have weathered the economic storms more successfully than many of her neighbours. The nominal value of shares on the stock exchange had reached unprecedented heights. The export of pastoral, though not of agricultural, produce had steadily increased. No other Latin American country had accumulated such vast reserves of gold and blocked sterling. Unemployment was minimal, inflation still under control. New light industries had been developed. But the transport and oil refining industries had been allowed to run down. There had been no such development of heavy industry as in Brazil and Mexico. Capital stock of machinery and equipment had deteriorated. Shortages were everywhere. And though a hungry world was crying out for the products of the farm and the ranch, Argentine prosperity was not all it seemed. The future held a question mark, and while massive economic and social changes were in progress, it was a political as well as an economic question mark.103 For their part the Latin American states had taken some steps to improve communications and to stimulate closer economic relations with one another. They had talked of larger market units, the opening up of new resources, even of the establishment of customs unions, just as, politically, there had been discussion of regional blocs, as, for example, among some or all of the states which had once formed a part of the historical Great Colombia. But, cut off from major alternative sources of finance and trade, they had become increasingly dependent upon the United States. Never had the disparity of

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power between north and south been greater, and, inevitably, the old fear of United States domination revived. If Hull had seen the war, at least in part, as an opportunity to 'remold the world along the lines that would aggrandize' the United States economy and 'spread democratic ideology', 104 that was not the Latin American view; and the clash of economic interests was clearly illustrated at the Mexico City Conference. There, Clayton, as Assistant Secretary of State in charge of economic affairs, promised his southern neighbours that there would be no sudden ending (as they feared) of the huge procurement programmes, which would be adjusted so as to afford the least possible shock. He promised also that the United States would do her best to provide the goods and services which the Latin American states so urgently needed, though the correctness of his warning that the availability of capital goods, tools, machinery and equipment raised difficult problems was soon seen to be amply justified. And he emphasized the intention of the United States to promote the removal of discrimination in international trade, the reduction of tariff barriers and equal opportunities for all.105 But the Latin American states, while they sought the continuance of economic aid from the United States and feared its diversion to Europe and other parts of the world, wanted protection for their infant industries, economic expansion free from external financial and political domination, national control of natural resources, planned industrialization and controlled investment, and, with freedom of access to the rest of the world, economic mastery in their own houses. Economic nationalism was no new doctrine. Nor was political. But they were now the dominant creeds. It may or may not be true that, by the end of the war, policy makers in the United States sought to supervise and control the economic development of Latin America, that they wanted 'a closed hemisphere in an open world', 106 both militarily 107 and economically, and were anxious to contain that revolutionary nationalism of which the signs were plain for all to read. If such was their intention, they failed to achieve it. T h e Latin American countries looked outside the hemisphere as well as within it. Even before the Charter of the Organization of American States had been approved at Bogota, the United Nations, at Latin American

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insistence, had established an Economic Commission for Latin America (E.C.L.A.), whose Economic Survey in 1949 was in the nature of a Latin American Manifesto.108 A new cloud, moreover, had appeared on the Latin American horizon, though as yet it was no bigger than a man's hand. Three quarters of the Latin American states had established relations with Soviet Russia by the middle of 1946.109 But very few had exchanged diplomatic representatives, and with the coming of the Cold War, of those which had, only Mexico, Uruguay and Argentina still maintained diplomatic links seven years later.110 Castro's Cuba was yet undreamed of. But, more particularly since the Great Depression of 1929, the face of Latin America had been changing; and as the war had magnified nationalist ambitions, so it had enhanced social, political and economic pressures. Argentina and Bolivia in 1943, El Salvador, Guatemala and Ecuador in 1944, Brazil and Venezuela in 1945, all had experienced revolutionary changes of regimes, though differing in character and in permanence, and there had been shifts of power in other countries too. Whether the war that had ended had brought not peace but a sword to parts of Latin America, whether it had weakened the traditional structure of society, strengthened the partisans of an old order, contributed to the rise of new political forces or revived and given new directions to old, these were questions for the future. They were fraught almost equally with illusion and disillusion.

ABBREVIATIONS Documents on American Foreign Relations (13 vols., various eds., Boston, World Peace Foundation, 1939-53). F.O. Foreign Office Records, Public Record Office. F.R. Foreign Relations of the United States, Diplomatic Papers (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1862—) [The series began as Papers relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, etc.] L.A.S.W.W. Latin America and the Second World War, Volume One 1939-1942 (London, 1981) D.A.F.R.

NOTES NOTES TO CHAPTER I 1

R. E. Sherwood, The White House Papers of Harry L. Hopkins (2 vols., London, 1949), ii, 503. 2 S. E. Morison, The Battle of the Atlantic, September 1939-Mqy 1943 [History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, vol i] (London, 1948), p. 198. 3 ibid., p. 145. 4 Stetson Conn, Rose C. Engelman and Byron Fairchild, Guarding the United States and its Outposts [United States Army in World War II. The Western Hemisphere] (Washington, 1964), p. 414. 5 See L[atin] A[merica and the] S[econd] W[orld] W[ar, Vol. I, 1939-1942] (London, 1981), pp. 108, 140. 6 ibid., pp. 76-7, 92, 95, 99, 103. 7 Morison, op. cit., pp. 257-8. 8 ibid., pp. 145, 153; Conn, Engelman and Fairchild,op. cit., p. 423; A. P. Whitaker, ed., Inter-American Affairs (5 vojs., New York, 1942-6), ii, 223. 9 Conn, Engelman and Fairchild, op. cit., pp. 430-1; Morison, op. cit., pp. 198, 347-8. ^ C o n n , Engelman and Fairchild, op. cit., p. 436. 11 I. F. Gellman, Good Neighbor Diplomacy. United States Policies in Latin America, 1932-1945 (Baltimore and London, 1979), p. 135. 12 Morison, op. cit., p. 150, specifically refers, however, to sporadic help from the small Honduran air force during the first eight months after Pearl Harbour. 13 ibid., pp. 208-9, and cf President Batista's message to Congress, El Mundo, 16 Nov., 1941. 14 eg. Guatemala City airport, Ilopango in El Salvador, Managua in Nicaragua, and Camaguey in Cuba. 15 eg. at Chancerelles in Haiti, Villa Duarte in the Dominican Republic, San Julian and San Antonio de los Bafios in Cuba, San Jose in Guatemala, and a base near Guatemala City, a naval patrol station at Corinto in Nicaragua, an emergency air base in Costa Rica and a fuelling station in the Honduran section of the Gulf of Fonseca. See also L.A.S. W. W., i, 95, 96, 99. l6 Diario de la Marina, 20 Dec, 1941, 20 Jan., 1942; New York Times, 9 April, 1942; Hugh Thomas, Cuba, or the Pursuit of Freedom (London, 1971), p. 729. "La Nacion (Dominican Republic), 17 Dec, 1941, 27 July, 1942; Haiti Journal, 20 Dec, 1941; R. D. Heinl, Jr. and Nancy Gordon Heinl, Written in Blood. The Story of the Haitian People, 1492-1961 (Austin, 1978), p. 539. 18 £7 Imparcial, 6, 24 Feb., 15 June, 1942; F[oreign] Relations of the United States, Diplomatic Papers], 1944, vii, 1164; Kenneth J. Grieb, Guatemalan Caudillo. The Regime ofJorge Ubico. Guatemala, 1931-1942 (Athens, Ohio, 1979), pp. 259, 263. 19 Leche (Guatemala City) to F.O., 11 July, 1945, F.O. 371/44904, AS 3871/3871/8. 20 F.R. 1943, vi, 324-6; Alistair White, El Salvador (London, 1973), p. 167. 21 J. P. Bell, Crisis in Costa Rica. The 1948Revolution (Austin, 1971), p. 110; New York Herald Tribune, 7 July, 1942. 22 Ubico hoped to receive the colony outright as part of the peace settlement or of

232

NOTES TO CHAPTER I

British payments for Lend-Lease. F.R., 1941, vi, 207; Grieb, op. cit., pp. 259-60. For the Belize dispute see L.A.S.W.W., i, 191 n. 15. 23 F.R., 1942, vi, 267 ff., 282 ff., 1943, vi, 136 fF; Documents on] A[merican] Foreign] Relations] (13 vols., Boston, World Peace Foundation, 1939-53), iv, 350-1, v, 363; Hobson (Havana) to Hadow, 30 June, 1944, F.O., 371/38073, AN 2722/80/14; Thomas, op. cit., pp. 730-1. 24 F.R., 1942, vi, 467-9; Hillyer (Port-au-Prince) to F.O., 19 March, 1943, F.O. 371/33943, A 3009/496/20; Heinl and Heinl, op. cit., p. 540. 25 F.R., 1943, vi, 280; G. Pope Atkins and L. C. Wilson, The United States and the Trujillo Regime (New Brunswick, N.J., 1972), p. 81. 26 The largest share went to Guatemala. 27 New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, 6 Sept., 1942; Whitaker, op. cit., ii, 24; Thomas, op. cit., p. 731. 2S Diario de la Marina, 19 Aug., El Mundo, 29 Aug., 1942. Thomas, op. cit., p. 731. Cuba and the United States concluded a reciprocal agreement in February, 1943, for drafting each others nationals into their respective armed forces. 30 Diario de la Marina, 30 Aug., 1942. 31 15 Jan., 1942. J. W. Gantenbein, The Evolution of our Latin-American Policy. A Documentary Record (New York, 1950), pp. 241-2. 32 D.A.F.R., v, 427; Thomas, op. cit., p. 730; Bell, op. cit., p. 72; Whitaker, op. cit., iii, 156. 33 L.A.S.W.W., i, 57. 34 Cf Resolution X X X of the Conference. 35 Bell, op. cit., p. 26. 36 D.A.F.R., vi, 516; Laurence Duggan, The Americas. The Search for Hemisphere Security (New York, 1969), p. 141. 37 Cf. Grieb, op. cit., p. 260. 38 See Recommendation II of the Rio de Janeiro Conference; for the United States Act to Provide for the Planting of Guayule and Other Rubber-bearing Plants, etc., 5 March, 1942, D.A.F.R., iv, 379; and, for the rubber agreements, F.R., 1941, vii, 96; 1942, vi, 228 ff., 428, 457, 478, 566, and D.A.F.R., iv, 378, v, 405-6, vi, 516-7. 39 New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, 20 July, 1942. *°F.R., 1942, vi, 467-9. l * L.A.S.W.W.,i, 95-6. A2 F.R., 1942, vi, 460; Tuson (Port-au-Prince) to F.O., 10 July, 1944, F.O. 371/38257, A 2823/254/20; David Green, The Containment of Latin America. A history of the myths and realities of the Good Neighbor Policy (Chicago, 1971), pp. 104, 195; Heinl and Heinl, op. cit., pp. 541-2. 43 Thus at last linking the Mexican railway system with the Guatemalan, though the one was broad gauge and the other narrow. 44 D.A.F.R., v, 407-8; Whitaker, op. cit., iii, 156; Patron (San Jose) to F.O., 28 March, 1944, F.O. 371/28298, AS 2189/2189/32, enclosing and endorsing an article by a Costa Rican engineer, Alvaro Facio, entitled 'Forty Million Dollar Lesson', Inter-American, iii (March, 1944), pp. 10-12. See alsoF.tf., 1943, v, 77-8. 45 Seymour E. Harris, ed., Economic Problems of Latin America (New York and London, 1944), pp. 73, 362; Whitaker, op. cit., ii, 61. Harris served as Director of Import and Export Price Control in the United States Office of Price Administration. The successor to the Board and then the Office of Economic Warfare. ^D.A.F.R., vi, 519; Atkins and Wilson, op. cit., p. 98. For the situation in the European islands see D. M. Dozer, Are We Good Neighbors? Three Decades of InterAmerican Relations, 1930-1960 (Gainesville, 1959), pp. 117-20. 48 Harris, op. cit., pp. 73, 366. 49 Green, op. cit., pp. 273-4. 50 Mayers (San Jose) to F.O., 22 Jan., 1945, F.O. 371/45069, AS 1004/220/32.

NOTES TO CHAPTER I

233

51 Andrews (Ciudad Trujillo) to F.O., 17 March, 1944, Political Review for 1943, F.O. 371/38261, AN 1231/680/20; Green,.op. cit., p. 274. 52 L.A.S.W.W.,i,57. 53 Duggan, op. cit., p. 84. 54 ibid., p. 77. 55 Thomas, op. cit., p. 735. 56 See, for the problems of sugar, R.J. Hammond, Food (3 vols., London, 1951-62), iii, 33-52, and for United Kingdom and United States purchases of the Dominican and Haitian crops, Harris, op. cit., p. 81. 57 Rowe-Dutton (Treasury) to Butler, 20 Jan., 1944, F.O. 371/38076, AN 312/160/14; Ogilvie Forbes (Havana), 21 April, 1944, F.O. 371/38076, AN 1745/160/14. 58 Grieb, op. cit., p. 261. " 59 Mayers (San Jose) to F.O., 22 Jan., 1945, F.O. 371/45069. m L.A.S.W.W., i, 83, 90, 98; Stetson Conn and Byron Fairchild, The Framework of Hemisphere Defense [United States Army in World War II. The Western Hemisphere] (Washington, D.C., 1960), p. 213. 61 Grieb, op. cit., p. 259. 62 New York Times, 6 Dec, 1941; Chicago Daily News, 14 April, 1942. 63 Eduardo Crawley, Dictators Never Die. A Portrait of Nicaragua and the Somoza Dynasty (London, 1979), p. 100. 64 He had ruled since December, 1931, suppressing with great savagery a peasant revolt in 1932. 65 Diario Oficial, 29 Feb., 1944. ^F.R., 1944, vii, 1090; Duggan, op. cit., p. 180. 67 White, op. cit., pp. 103, 114—5. All American legations in Latin America were raised to the status of embassies in 1943. 68 He later removed to Honduras. 69 Grieb, op. cit., pp. 265-78. 70 Richard N. Adams in R. N. Adams, Oscar Lewis, et al., Social Change in Latin America Today: its Implications for United States Policy (New York, 1960), pp. 233-4, and R. N. Adams, Crucifixion by Power. Essays on Guatemalan Social Structure, 1944-1966 (Austin, 1970), p. 183. 71 Minute by Miss McQuillen, 3 July, 1944, F.O. 371/37932, AS 3460/966/8. 72 Duggan, op. cit., p. 180. 73 R. L. Woodward, Jr., Central America. A Nation Divided (New York, 1976), pp. 228, 231. The Constitution contained a declaration that Belize formed part of Guatemalan territory. 74 New York Times, 5 June, 6 July, 16 Oct., 1944. He had won the presidency in the elections of 1932 and resigned it, to the general surprise, in 1948, in favour of his Minister of Defence. W. E. Stokes, Honduras. An Area Study in Government (Madison, 1950), p. 296, describes him as personally honest, which was more than could be said for all of his fellow dictators. 76 Whitaker, op. cit., iv, 257. 77 Franklin D. Parker, The Central American Republics (London, 1964), p. 228. 78 Founded in 1930, as in El Salvador. 79 Bell, op. cit., pp. 4, 28-33, 44, 112. ^Andrews (Ciudad Trujillo), Political Review for 1943, 17 March, 1944, F.O. 371/38261, AN 1231/680/20. See the similar remarks of his United States colleague, Ellis O. Briggs, F.R., 1944, vii, 1015-16, and Atkins and Wilson, op. cit., pp. 60-1. 81 Andrews to F.O., 26 Sept., 1945, F.O. 371/4441, AN 3166/54/20. 82 Cf J. E. Fagg, Latin America. A General History (New York and London, 1963), p. 778, and R. D. Crassweller, Trujillo. The Life and Times of a Caribbean Dictator (New York, 1966), pp. 207-11. 83 L.A.S.W.W., i, 94-5.

234

NOTES TO CHAPTER I

84 Hillyer (Port-au-Prince) to F.O., 7 Nov., 1942. F.O. 371/30539, A 11166/758/20, and for Lescot's very strange relations with Trujillo see Heinl and Heinl, op. cit., pp, 535, 537, 544, and Crassweller, op. cit., pp. 153, 160-3. 85 Haiti Journal, 14 Dec, 1941, 27 Feb., 1942. ibid., 31 March, 1942. Curiously enough, some negroes, such as Jean Magloire, later Minister of the Interior under the notorious 'Papa Doc', F. D. Duvalier, Haiti's black dictator from 1957-71, had nothing but praise for Hitler and Mussolini. David Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier. Race, Colour and National Independence in Haiti (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 183-90. Nicholls holds that discrimination against the blacks was a major cause of the revolution of 1946. See also R. W. Logan, Haiti and the Dominican Republic (London, 1968), pp. 147-9. 88 New York Herald Tribune, 10, 11 Dec, 1942; Diario de la Marina, 10, 12 Dec, 1942. 89 For his career see L.A.S.W.W., i, 91 ff. 90 Thomas, op. cit., p. 736. But Spruille Braden, who became Ambassador to Cuba in 1942, never concealed in private his poor opinion of Batista's administration. Dodds (Havana) to F.O., 1 Jan., 1945, Annual Report for 1944, F.O. 371/44411, AN 391/74/14. 92 That is, since 1935. Mexico had maintained relations between 1924 and 1927 and Uruguay between 1926 and 1935. Colombia accorded recognition in 1935, but there was no exchange of diplomats. 93 The Polish Minister in Havana expressed the interesting opinion in 1943 that Cuba, as the Latin American country where Communist influence was strongest, was being used by the Russians as a testing ground for the establishment of Communism in Latin America. Ogilvie Forbes (Havana) to F.O., 17 Sept., 1943, F.O. 371/33844, A 8903/3895/14. 94 According to Dodds (Havana), 1 Jan., 1945, Annual Report for 1944, F.O. 371/44411, the Government candidate, who was in a stronger position to exert pressure, had expected to raise two million dollars from American sources and was, of course, badly hit. It was even said that it was this that turned the tide of the election. 95 Thomas, op. cit., p. 737. ^L.A.S.W.W., i, 104. 97 ibid., p. 100; Proclamation of 7 Dec, 1941, D.A.F.R., iv, 342-4. 98 Lawrence O. Ealy, The Republic of Panama in World Affairs, 1903-1950 (Philadelphia, 1950), p. 112. Ealy was resident in Panama, engaged in naval and censorship duties, from Dec, 1941, to Oct., 1942. 99 Star and Herald, 2 May, 1942. 100 Panama American, 14 Jan., 3, 7 May, 1942, 25 March, 1943; Star and Herald, 3 May, 1942; Ealy, op. cit., pp. 112-4. ldl L.A.S.W.W., i, 100-3. m F.R., 1942, vi, 577 ff.; D.A.F.R., iv, 344^50; Conn, Engelman and Fairchild, op. cit., pp. 346-7; Ealy, op. cit., p. 118. The agreement was formally approved by the National Assembly of Panama in May, 1943. 103 D.A.F.R., iv, 344, v, 447-50. See also L.A.S.W.W., i, 103. The United States Congress approved these concessions in April, 1943. 104 Panama American, 30 May, 1942. m D.A.F.R.,iv, 350. 106 Star and Herald, 28 April, 1942; Ealy, op. cit., p. 117. 107 Morison, op. cit., pp. 191, 367; Ealy, op. cit., p. 115. 108 Panama American, 21 April, 1942; Ealy, op. cit., p. 118. m F.R., 1942, vi, 642. 110 Irving (Panama) to F.O., 6 Jan., 1944, F.O. 371/38384, AS 563/563/32. 111 New York Times, 30, 31 Dec, 1944; F.R., 1945, ix, 1240 ff. 112 J. Lloyd Mecham, The United States and Inter-American Security, 1889-1960 (Austin, 1961), pp. 295-7.

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235

n3 L.A.S.W.W., i, 108; El Heraldo, 22 Jan., 1942; Conn and Fairchild, op. cit., pp. 203-4, 264. 114 New York Times, 27 April, 1942. 115 Gainer (Caracas) to F.O., 31 March, 1942, F.O. 371/30741, A 4371/302/47. m F.R., 1942, vi, 739. 117 L.A.S.W.W., i, 106-7. 118 El Heraldo, 3 Feb., New York Herald Tribune, 30 May, 1942. 119 El Tiempo (Colombia), 25 Oct., 1943. m L.A.S.W.W., i, 106-7. 121 Cf El Heraldo, 25 March, 1942. 122 Edwin Liewen, Petroleum in Venezuela. A History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1954), pp. 86-8, 121. 123 El Heraldo, 22 Feb., 1942. 124 Minute of 14 July on Gainer to F.O., 16 June, 1942, F.O. 371/30755. 125 See Romulo Betancourt, Venezuela. Politicay Petroleo (3rd edn., Bogota, 1969), pp. 167 ff., and for Accion Democrdtica, J. D. Martz, Accion Democrdtica. Evolution of a Modern Political Party in Venezuela (Princeton, 1966). 126 Gainer to F.O., 29 July, 11 Aug., 1942, F.O. 371/30742, A 7573/503/47 and A 7468/503/47. 127 Liewen, op. cit., p. 94. 128 Gainer to F.O., 6 July, 1942, F.O. 371/30568, A 6414/9/26. 129 Liewen, op. cit., pp. 94-9, and see his Venezuela (2nd edn., London, 1965), pp. 58-9. 130 Gainer to F.O., 16 March, 1944, F.O. 371/38793, AS 1918/528/47. 131 B. T. W. van Hasselt to Godber, in Gainer to F.O., 1 April, 1944, F.O. 371/38807, AS 2186/2033/47. 132 La Esfera, 23 March, 1944. m ibid., 22 Jan., 1945. 134 F.R., 1945, ix, 1419. 135 Forbes (Caracas) to F.O., 17 Nov., 1944, F.O. 371/38793, AS 6317/528/47. 136 Forbes to F.O., 23 July, 1945, F.O. 371/45152, AS 4199/19/47; Martz, op. cit., pp. 58-61, 300-4. 137 Forbes to F.O., 19 Oct., 1945, F.O. 371/45152; to Perowne, 19 Nov., 1945, F.O. 371/45171, AS 5462/19/47 and AS 6401/2386/47. 138 David Bushnell, Eduardo Santos and the Good Neighbor, 1938-1942 (Gainesville, 1967), p. 104. 139 ibid., pp. 104-5; L.A.S.W.W., i, 111; New York Times, 26 Jan., 1942. 140 Bushnell, op. cit., p. 106; New York Herald Tribune, 27 June, 1942. 141 F.R., 1942, vi, 170-89, 1943, vi, 15 ff. (Colombia); 1942, vi, 735 (Venezuela). 142 Bushnell, op. cit., p. 119; W. O. Galbraith, Colombia. A General Survey (2nd edn., London, 1966), pp. 137-8. 143 F.R., 1942, vi, 142-4; Bushnell, op. cit., p. 106. IU F.R., 1942, vi, 150, 152; Bushnell, op. cit., pp. 106-8. 145 F.R., 1942, vi, 189. m ElSiglo, 1 March, 1943. 147 Snow (Bogota) to F.O., 27 Nov., 1943, F.O. 371/33811, A 10798/2612/11; F.R., 1943, vi, 2, 10-11. 148 W. M. Gibson, The Constitutions of Colombia (Durham, N.C., 1948), pp. 363 ff; V. L. Fluharty, Dance of the Millions. Military Rule and Social Revolution in Colombia, 1930-1956 (Pittsburg, 1957), pp. 51-7. 149 Fluharty, op. cit., p. 53. l50 L.A.S.W.W.,i, 109 ff 151 For Gomez see ibid., pp. 110-11. 152 Cf. El Siglo, 26 Jan., 8, 11, 14, 23, 25 March, 4, 14 April, 1942.

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NOTES TO CHAPTER I

153

Fluharty, op. cit., pp. 65-6. El Tiempo, 28, 29 Aug., 1942. 155 Snow to F.O., 21 April, 1943, F.O. 371/33796, A 4510/308/11; El Tiempo, 8 April, 1943. 156 Snow to F.O., 31 March, 1943, F.O. 371/33796, A 3676/308/11. 157 Cf Snow to F.O., 1 Jan., 1943, Annual Report for 1942, F.O. 371/33800, A 741/741/11, and Fluharty, op. cit., pp. 66-7. 158 El Tiempo, 10 June, 1943. 159 Snow to F.O., 16 July, 13 Oct., 1943, F.O. 371/33796, A 7047/308/11, A 9757/308/11; El Tiempo, 2 Sept., El Siglo, 16 Sept., 1943. 166 El Tiempo, 18 Sept., 1943. 161 Snow to F.O., 29 Nov., 1943, F.O. 371/33796, A 11432/308/11. 162 Snow to Eden, 23 Oct., 1943, F.O. 371/33510, A 10190/4/2. 163 Snow to F.O., 10, 19 Feb., 1944, F.O. 371/38043, AS 1047/195/11 and AS 1199/195/11. 164 Snow to F.O., 18 April, 1944, F.O. 371/38043, AS 2436/195/11. 165 Snow to F.O., 21 Feb., 1944, F.O. 371/38043, AS 1199/195/11. 166 Gaitan's murder in Bogota during the Ninth International Conference of American States in 1948 provoked a horrifying orgy of violence not only in Bogota but throughout the country. See R. E. Sharpless, Gaitdn of Colombia. A Political Biography (Pittsburg, 1978), pp. 177-81. 167 Snow to F.O., 30 March, 16 May, 1944, F.O. 371/38043, AS 1949/195/11 and AS 2799/195/11. 168 Snow to F.O., 10, 13 July, 1944, F.O. 371/38043, AS 3614/195/11 and 371/38044, AS 3740/195/11; El Tiempo, 19, 29 July, 1944. 169 El Tiempo, 10, 15 Aug., 1944; Snow to F.O., 26 Aug., 12 Dec, 1944, 25 Jan., 1945, F.O. 371/38044, AS 4814/195/11, AS 97/97/11, F.O. 371/44949, AS 1128/97/11. 170 Sir Frederick Godber to Perowne, 6 June, Ogden to F.O., 12 June, 1945, F.O. 371/44949, AS 3042/97/11 and AS 3058/97/11. 171 Snow to F.O., 11 July, 1945, F.O. 371/44949, AS 3913/97/11. 172 Fluharty, op. cit., pp, 76-7. 154

NOTES TO CHAPTER II 1

El Universal, 8 Dec, El Popular, 10 Dec, 1941. 2 Joined in 1942 by federations in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. 3 Excelsior, 8 Dec, 1941; L.A.S.W.W., i, 119. 4 El Popular, 13 Dec, 1941. 5 Excelsior, 15 Dec, 1941. 6 ElNacional, 16, 28 Dec, 1941. 7 El Popular, 31 Dec, 1941, £7 Universal, 7 Jan., 1942. 8 Conn and Fairchild, Framework of Hemisphere Defense, pp. 340-41, 344-7, 337-9; L.A.S.W.W., i, 117; D.A.F.R., iv, 351-2. 9 Conn and Fairchild, op. cit., pp. 340-42. 10 International Conciliation, No. 380 (May, 1942), pp. 289, 290. 11 El Nacional, 8 Feb.7^42. 12 L.A.S.W.W., i, 16. l3 D.A.F.R., iv, 357-61; L.A.S.W.W., i, 117-19. 14 H. F. Cline, The United States and Mexico (rev. edn., New York, 1963), p. 265. 15 El Popular, 9 Dec, 1941. 16 L.A.S.W.W., i, 112. For P.A.N, see Donald J. Mabry, Mexico's Accion Nacional. A

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237

Catholic Alternative to Revolution (Syracuse, New York, 1973), and, for Sinarquismo, Nathan L. Whetten, Rural Mexico (Chicago, 1948), pp. 484-522. 17 Cf. Cline, op. cit, p. 267, and the opinion poll taken on 20 May, ibid., p. 268. 18 El Popular, 10 Dec, 1941. 19 ibid., 1 Jan., 1942. 20 Excelsior, 11 Feb., 1942. 21 Bateman to F.O., 6 Feb., 1942, F.O. 371/30581, A 1325/872/26. The legation was raised to the rank of an embassy in 1944. 22 Cf. Cline, op. cit., p. 267. 23 Recommendation XXXIX. 24 Christian Science Monitor, 18 March, 1942; Conn and Fairchild, op. cit., pp. 343, 348, 353-5. Lend-Lease aid to Mexico totalled $39 millions by the end of 1946, much of it in the form of aircraft. 25 D.A.F.R.,iv, 361-2. 26 ibid., pp. 427-8; L.A.S.W.W., i, 118; Bateman to Eden, 25 April, 1942, F.O. 371/30567, A 4529/9/26. 27 Betty Kirk, Covering the Mexican Front. The Battle of Europe versus America (Norman, Oklahoma, 1942), pp. 342-3. The author had been in Mexico since 1938. 28 New York Times, 28 Jan., 1942. 29 El Nacional, 15 March, New York Times, 17 March, 1942. 30 e.g. San Antonio in the State of Mexico and at the capital itself. Secretaria de Gobernacion, Sets Ahos de Actividad Nacional (Mexico, 1946), p. 302. 31 A report enclosed in Bateman to Eden, 13 April, 1944, F.O. 371/38342, AN 1638/1638/26, maintained that only a handful of German residents were sent to Perote, to be later released, and that no more than 250 Germans left Mexico, all of whom were repatriated. ^Excelsior, 27 March, 9 April, 1942; Seis Ahos, p. 56. 33 El Nacional, 20 Feb., Excelsior, 20 March, 1942. 34 Kirk, op. cit., p. 326; Bateman to Eden, 15 June, 1942, F.O. 371/30575, A 6161/430/26. ^Excelsior, 18, 24 May, El Universal, 22 May, 1942; Bateman to Eden, 15 June, 1942, F.O. 371/30575. 36 Memoria de la Secretaria de Relaciones Exteriores, 1941-1942 (Mexico, 1942), i, 97-102; Bateman to Eden, 15 June, 1942, F.O. 371/30575. 37 El Nacional, 29 May, 1942; Seis Ahos, p. 57. 38 Cf. the opinion poll taken immediately after 30 May. Cline, op. cit., p. 269. 39 Bateman to Eden, 15 June, 1942, F.O. 371/30575. 40 ibid.; El Nacional, 30 May, 1942. 41 They were finally abrogated on 28 December, 1945. Seis Ahos, p. 11. 42 Report of the funta de Control de Bienes del Eje, Excelsior, 5 Oct., 1942; Seis Ahos, pp. 301-2. 43 £7 Nacional, 13 June, El Popular, 16, 18 June; New York Times, 3 July, New York Herald Tribune, 3 July, 1942; Enclosures Nos. 1 and 2 in Bateman to Eden, 13 April, 1944, F.O. 371/38342; Bateman to Eden, 22 Jan., 1945, Annual Report for 1944, F.O. 371/44478, AN 1638/1638/26 and AN 479/20/26. 44 El Popular, 29 June, Excelsior, 14 June, 5 July, 20 Aug., 12 Oct., 2 Dec, El Nacional, 25 June, 5 July, 4, 31 Oct., 9 Nov., 1942. 45 El Universal, 11 Nov., 1942; Enclosure No. 2 in Bateman to Eden, 13 April, 1944, F.O. 371/38342, AN 1638/1638/26. 46 El Nacional, 4, 10 June, 1942. 47 Excelsior, 2 June, 1942. 48 El Popular, 26 May, 1942. For Lombardo Toledano's activities and beliefs see R. P. Mellon, Mexican Marxist. Vicente Lombardo Toledano (Chapel Hill, 1966) and Frank

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Brandenburg, The Making of Modern Mexico (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1965), pp. 82-5, 92-3. 49 El National, 13 Feb., 1942. 50 Bateman to Eden, 23 March, 1942, F.O. 371/30571, A 3682/133/26. 51 ibid.; El National, 15 Feb., El Popular, 10 March, Excelsior, 14 March, 1942. 52 El National, 6 June, 1942; Seis Ahos, pp. 249-50. 53 El Popular, 25 June, Excelsior, 26 June, 1942; Seis Ahos, p. 250; Alfonso Lopez Aparicio, El Movimiento Obrero en Mexico (Mexico, 1952), pp. 232-3. 54 El Universal, 1 July, 1942. 55 Bateman to Eden, 28 Sept, 1942, F.O. 371/30571, A 9380/133/26. 56 They were defined on 25 October. Rodriguez resigned in March, 1943, and the office was abolished in February, 1944. 57 Bateman to Eden, 28 Sept., 1942, F.O. 371/30571; El National, 16 Sept., 1942. 58 Kirk op. tit., pp. 345-6; Mabry, op. tit., p. 40. 59 Cline, op. tit., pp. 293-4, 318-9. 60 He was killed in an aeroplane accident in January, 1945. 61 Bateman to Eden, 10 Jan., 1944, Annual Report for 1943, F.O. 371/38312, AN 293/138/26. 62 El National, 2, 25 Sept., 1942, 1 Jan., 1943; New York Times, 11 Oct., 1942, 17 Jan., 1943; Bateman to Eden, 28 Sept., 1942, F.O. 371/30571. Vejar Vasquez was anathema to the left wing. He was replaced as Minister of Education late in 1943 by the equally courageous Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Jaime Torres Bodet. 63 El National, 25 Sept., 1942; Bateman to Eden, 28 Sept., 1942, F.O. 371/30571. 64 Excelsior, 12 Oct., El National, 16 Oct., El Universal, 20 Oct., 1942; Bateman to Eden, 10 Nov., 1942, F.O. 371/30571, A 9380/133/26. 65 D.A.F.R.,v, 399-403. 66 S. A. Mosk, Industrial Revolution in Mexico (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1950), p. 142. National Financiera was created in 1934 and given extended powers in 1941 and again after the war. 67 El National, 3 March, 1944. An Export-Import Bank credit of $10 million towards the construction of this plant was authorized in January, 1944. Mosk, op. tit., p. 86. 68 Bateman to Eden, 10 Jan., 1944, Annual Report for 1943, and 14 Feb., 1944, F.O. 371/38312, and 22 Jan., 1945, Annual Report for 1944, F.O. 371/44478, AN 293/138/26, AN 798/138/26 and AN 479/20/26. 69 Cline, op. tit., p. 273. 70 New York Times, 10 March, 1944. 71 Bateman to Eden, 22 Jan., 1945, Annual Report for 1944, F.O. 371/44478; Cline, op. tit., p. 273. 72 Bateman to Eden, 28 Sept., 1942, F.O. 371/30571, A 9380/133/26. 73 Bateman to Eden, 19 April, 1943, F.O. 371/33995, A 4332/1396/26; Excelsior, 8 April, 1943. 74 D.A.F.R., v, 393-9; F.R., 1942, vi, 537 ff., 1943, vi, 531 ff. Seis Ahos, p. 254, puts the total of labourers recruited during the war years as 353,182, of whom 217,888 worked on the farms and 135,294 on the railways. 75 Bateman to Eden, 19 April, 1943, 10 Jan., 1944, Annual Report for 1943, F.O. 371/33995 and 38312; Excelsior, 8 April, 1943. 76 Bateman to Eden, 19 April, 1943, F.O. 371/33995, A 4332/1396/26. 77 Bateman to Eden, 10 Jan, 1944, Annual Report for 1943, F.O. 371/38312. 78 Only once had there been a meeting between the heads of the two states, when Presidents Taft and Diaz met on the Ciudad Juarez-El Paso border in October, 1909. 79 Wright (for Halifax) to Eden, Washington, 22 July, 1943, F.O. 371/33991, A 7099/706/26.

N O T E S T O C H A P T E R II m

239

D.A.F.R., v, 404-5; F.R., 1943, vi, 417. Halifax to F.O., 13 July, 1943, F.O. 371/33981; Wright to Eden, Washington, 22 July, 1943, F.O. 371/33991, A 6766/113/26 and A 7099/706/26. 82 The electrical, steel, rubber, cement, textile, sugar and alcohol and pulp and paper industries were singled out for special mention, but only those projects were to be executed which would either contribute to the war effort or not interfere with it. S3 D.A.F.R.,vi, 503-12. 84 Lie. Primo Villa Michel, Rodriguez's successor as the head of the office for the Co-ordination and Promotion of Production, who became Chairman, the manager of the Monterrey Steel Works, and a distinguished banker. S5 D.A.F.R., vi, 515, vii, 762-9. 86 Bateman to Eden, 10 Jan., 1944, Annual Report for 1943, F.O. 371/38312, AN 293/138/26. 87 Bateman to Eden, 4 Jan., 1944, F.O. 371/38302, AN 282/15/26. 88 Bateman to Eden, 22 July, 1944, F.O. 371/38319, AN 2976/292/26; Mosk,o/>. cit., pp. 95-6. 89 Excelsior, 16 July, 1944; D.A.F.R., vii, 790-1; Bateman to Eden, 22 Jan., 1945, Annual Report for 1944, F.O. 371/44478, AN 479/20/26. ^D.A.F.R., vii, 766-7; Mosk, op. tit., p. 93. 91 El Popular, 1 Jan., 1944; Bateman to Eden, 10 Jan., 1944, Annual Report for 1943, F.O. 371/38312. 92 Bateman to Bevin, 7 Aug., 1945, F.O. 371/44494, AN 2547/285/26; Whetten, op. cit., p. 569. Compare the various figures given in Mosk, op. cit., p. 274, Cline, op. cit., p. 285, Seis Ahos, p. 244, Lopez Aparicio, op. cit., p. 239. 93 L.B. Simpson, Many Mexicos (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1950), pp. 308-9; Bateman to Eden, 2 June, 1943, F.O. 371/33990, A 5638/671/26; El Universal, 22 March, 1943. 94 Bateman to Eden, 22 July, 1944, F.O. 371/38319, AN 2976/292/26. 95 Bateman to Eden, 2 June, 1943, 10 Jan., 1944, Annual Report for 1943, F.O. 371/33990 and 38312. The President's 'roughneck' but wealthy brother, General Maximino Avila Camacho, who died in 1945, may perhaps be included in the list. The President is said to have once pointed to the grey hairs in his head and said 'Maximino put them there'. 96 El Universal, 24 Sept., 1, 2 Oct., Excelsior, 10 Oct., 1943; Seis Ahos, p. 310. 97 Simpson, op. cit., p. 310. "Bateman to Eden, 22 Jan., 1945, Annual Report for 1944, F.O. 371/44478. According to Siete Ahos, p. 307, 340 grants of exemption for new and essential industries were given between December, 1940, and the end of 1945. "L.A.S.W.W., i, 119. m D.A.F.R., vii, 764. 101 Cline, op. cit., pp. 276-8. 102 El National, 12 Dec, 1941. 103 El Universal, 21 Feb., 1942. 104 Christian Science Monitor, 17 Oct., 1942. 105 Bateman to Eden, 10 Nov., 1942, F.O. 371/30571, A 9380/133/26; El National, 19 Aug., 6 Nov., 1942. A decree of 23 Nov. made military service obligatory for foreigners who were nationals of co-belligerent states. British subjects were exempted under an agreement of 8 July, 1943. 10(f Bateman to Eden, 10 Jan., 1944, Annual Report for 1943, F.O. 371/38312. 107 Bateman to Eden, 19 April, 1943, F.O. 391/33995, A 4332/1396/26. The report appeared in Time magazine. 108 Bateman to Eden, 10 Jan., 1944, Annual Report for 1943, F.O. 371/38312; El Popular, 18 Nov., 1943. 109 F.R., 1943, vi, 404-5. 81

240

NOTES TO CHAPTER II

110

ibid., pp. 408-9, 413-14. El National, 17 Nov., 1943; Bateman to Eden, 10 Jan., 1944, Annual Report for 1943, F.O. 371/38312. 112 Whitaker, Inter-American Affairs, iii, 252. 113 Bateman to Eden, 22 Jan., 1945, Annual Report for 1944, F.O. 371/44478. lH F.R., 1944, vii, 1182-4. 115 New York Times, 3 March, 1944. 116 Gellman, Good Neighbor Diplomacy, p. 136. 117 F.R., 1944, vii, 1196; 1945, ix, 1109. 118 Cline, 0/>. tit., p. 278. 119 H. F. Cline, Mexico. Revolution to Evolution, 1940—1960 (London, 1962), pp. 153-4, 175. 120 Mellon, op. tit., pp. 138-9. See also the opinions on the decrease in political power of the C.T.M. of Lopez Aparicio, op. tit., pp. 234, 248-9. m SieteAhos, pp. 17-18, 179. 122 Oscar Lewis rightly calls attention to the significance, in this respect, of the last year of the Cardenas administration. R. N. Adams et al., Social Change in Latin America Today, p. 285. 121 Cf El National, 12 Nov., 1942. 124 See the interesting discussion in Brandenburg, op. tit., pp. 79-100, and L.A.S.W.W., i, 113-14. 125 Bateman to Eden, 11 Jan., 1945, F.O. 371/44495, AN 396/396/26. 126 See Chapter VIII. 127 Bateman to Eden, 16 July, 1945, F.O. 371/44478, AN 2295/20/26. 111

NOTES TO CHAPTER III 1

Conn and Fairchild, Framework of Hemisphere Defense, pp. 304, 326; W. F. Craven and J. L. Gate, eds., The Army Air Forces in World War II (7 vols., Chicago, 1948-58), i, 319-42, 353-6, vii, 46-50. Ascension Island became an important staging post in July, 1942, for some of this traffic. 2 The ferry service was inaugurated by an ad hoc subsidiary of Pan American Airways. The first ten planes were transferred to British registry at Miami and their crews arrested and held for three days on their arrival at Belem for violating Brazilian neutrality. Thereafter transfer of registry was delayed till the planes arrived in Africa. The Air Corps Ferrying Command began its own ferrying service in November. Craven and Gate, op. tit., i, 319-28. , 3 See, on these points, L.A.S.W.W.,i, 139-40, 142-3; Conn and Fairchild, op. cit., pp. 284-97, 302-4, 310; Morison, Battle of the Atlantic, pp. 377-8; F. D. McCann, The Brazilian-American Alliance, 1937-1945 (Princeton, 1973), pp. 227-35. 4 McCann, op. cit., p. 233. 5 L.A.S. W. W., i, 142-3; W. M. Burden, The Struggle for Airways in Latin America (New York, 1943), p. 76. 6 L.A.S.W.W., i, 143, 166-7. 7 Conn and Fairchild, op. cit., p. 309. 8 J. W. F. Dulles, Vargas of Brazil (Austin and London, 1967), p. 222. 9 Getulio Vargas, A Nova Politica do Brasil (11 vols., Rio de Janeiro, 1938-47), ix, 188-90; Conn and Fairchild, op. cit., p. 313. 10 Cf the comments of Wilson-Young, Annual Report on Brazil for 1942, in Charles to Eden, 15 Feb., 1943, F.O. 371/33678, A 2624/2506/6. u L.A.S.W.W.,i, 170; Nova Politica, ix, 195-8;Helio Silva, 0 Ciclo de Vargas (14 vols., Rio de Janeiro, 1964-76), xii, 189-94. 12 See F.R., 1942, v, 633-6, and L.A.S.W.W., i, Chapter V.

NOTES TO CHAPTER I I I 13

241

Charles to F.O., 4 March, 1942, F.O. 371/30350, A 2367/4/6. On German espionage see S. E. Hilton, Hitler's Secret War in South America, 1939-1945 (Baton Rouge, 1981). Hilton, pp. 4, 181-2, describes Brazil as the major centre of German military intelligence in South America at least until March, 1942. l5 OJornal, 1, 4 Feb., 1942. l6 L.A.S.W.W., i, 37-8. 17 Cf. the interesting report of I. Wilson-Young (First Secretary at the British Embassy) to Sir Noel Charles on a tour through the three southern states, 13 April, 1942, F.O. 371/30361, A 4770/677/6. 18 Manoel Thomaz Castello Branco, 0 Brasil Na II Grande Guerra (Rio de Janeiro, 1960), p. 77. 19 Cf. Wilson-Young, loc. cit. Brazilian generals later nourished fantastic fears of Axis landings in Santa Catarina combined with an Argentine attack. McCann, op. cit., p. 345. 20 F.R., 1942, v, 634-5; Conn and Fairchild, op. cit., p. 314. 21 F.R., 1942, v, 637; Conn and Fairchild, op. cit., p. 315; Silva, op. cit., xii, 286-8. 22 D.A.F.R., iv, 364; F.R., 1942, v, 678-81. 23 Cf Jornal do Comercio, 5 June, 1942. 24 Ofornal, 3 June, A Noite, 6 June, 1942; L.A.S.W.W., i, 137. 25 F.R., 1942, v, 815-18; Conn and Fairchild, op. cit., pp. 315-17. 26 Annual Report for 1942, in Charles to Eden, 15 Feb., 1943, F.O. 371/33678, A* 2624/2506/6. 27 Silva, op. cit., xii, 90-96, xiii, 105-7; Conn and Fairchild, op. cit., 318-19; McCann, op. cit., p. 272. 28 Brazil had the largest merchant navy in Latin America. The most detailed accounts of its losses are in 0 Brasil e a Segunda Guerra Mundial (2 vols., Ministerio de Relacoes Exteriores, Rio de Janeiro, 1944), ii, and Silva, op. cit., xii, 332-66 and xiii, 87-97. See also Castello Branco, op. cit., pp. 54—61. 29 Printed in Silva, op. cit., xii, 397-400. 30 F.R., 1942, v, 731. 31 McCann, op. cit., pp. 274-7; Silva, op. cit., xii, 101-4; Conn and Fairchild,op. cit., pp. 322-3. 32 McCann, op. cit., pp. 277-8; Morison, op. cit., p. 381. 33 Silva, op. cit., xii, 356-9; F.R., 1942, v, 665. The ships were theBaependi, Araraquara, Anibal Benevolo, Itagiba and Arara, together with the facira. 34 Nova Politica, ix, 227-34. 35 Silva, op. cit, xii, 383, 411-2. 36 Charles to Eden, 24 July, 1942, F.O. 371/30362, A 7405/800/6. For Muller see Hilton, Hitler's Secret War, pp. 258-60. 37 Nova Politica, ix, 260. Ofornal do Comercio, 21 Aug., 18 Sept., 1942. 39 Nova Politica, ix, 261. Ofornal do Comercio, 3, 17 Sept., 1942; Charles to Eden, 26 Jan., 1943, F.O. 371/33651, A 1527/166/6; F.R., 1942, v, 751. 41 For the trials see Hilton, Hitler's Secret War, pp. 289 ff. 42 Jornal do Comercio, 24, 25 Aug., 1942. 43 ibid., 8 Oct., 1942, Charles to Eden, 26 Jan., 1943, loc. cit. 44 It was signed in April. Vargas had begged the American Ambassador in December not to ask him to join the United Nations, possibly because of his dislike of finding himself in the same boat as Soviet Russia. He yielded, however, to the solicitation of Roosevelt at the meeting of the two Presidents at Natal in January, 1943. Broadmead to Perowne, 12 Dec, 1942, Annual Report for 1943, in Charles to Eden, 13 Jan., 1944, F.O. 371/33651 and 37846, A 367/166/6 and AS 871/95/6. 14

242

NOTES TO CHAPTER I I I

45 Nova Politica, ix, 311-17. The Minister of Justice and Labour, Alexandre Marcondes Filho, used the term 'Estado Nacional' in October. Ofornal, 14, 16 Oct., 1942; Charles to Eden, 28 Oct., 1942, F.O. 371/30362, A 10661/800/6. ^L.A.S.W.W., i, 54, 137-8. 47 Annual Report for 1942, in Charles to Eden, 15 Feb., 1943, F.O. 371/33678, A 2624/2506/6. The United States and Britain had agreed that all purchases of canned meat on behalf of the United Nations in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay should be made by Britain. ^Charles to F.O., 8 June, 1942, F.O. 371/30362, A 6129/800/6. 49 M. L. Cooke, Brazil on the March. A Study in International Co-operation (New York and London, 1944), p. 12; Harris, ed., Economic Problems of Latin America, p. 286. 50 L.A.S.W.W., i, 85, 138. 51 F.R., 1942, v, 687. 52 ibid., p. 689 (October). 53 Charles Wagley (who was a member of the Servico Especial de Saude Publica, which resulted from agreements of March and July), Amazon Town. A Study of Man in the Tropics (New York 1964), p. vii. ™ (September). F.R., 1942, v, 688-9; D.A.F.R., v, 389-93. 55 D.A.F.R., v, 388-9; Cooke, op. cit., passim. 56 (October). F.R., 1942, v, 743. The United States agreed to make good any tonnage losses due to enemy action. Charles to Eden, 28 Dec, 1942, F.O. 371/33653, and Nosworthy Memorandum in Charles to Eden, 12 April, 1943, F.O. 373/33666, A 541/541/6 and A 3934/518/6. 57 Nova Politica, ix, 248. 58 Succeeded in August by General Anapio Gomes. 59 Jornal do Comercio, 29 Sept., 1942; Harris, op. cit., pp. 290-4; Castello Branco, op. cit., p. 71; Charles to Eden, 26 Jan., 1943, F.O. 371/33651, A 1527/166/6. 60 F. L. Gardner, Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy (Madison, 1964), pp. 212-3; McCann, op. cit., p. 386." 61 F.R., 1942, v, 692-4, 704-6. 62 Ofornal, 1, 5 Dec, 1942. 63 F.R., 1942, v, 727; Castello Branco, op. cit., p. 74. 64 Wagley, op. cit., p. 54. 65 Address to the Brazilian Standards Association, 14 Sept., 1943, in Charles to Eden, 11 Jan., 1944, F.O. 371/37856, AS 633/278/6. 66 Jornaldo Comercio, 17, 18 Sept., 1942. In January, 1943, conscription was widened to include eighteen-year-olds. 67 Cf Morison, op. cit., pp. 382-3; McCann, op. cit., pp. 293-6; Castello Branco, op. cit., pp. 88-9. Ingram was in close touch also with the British West African Command. Nevertheless the Allied merchant marines suffered heavy losses in the South Atlantic before proper convoys could be organized. 68 Morison, op. cit., p. 391. 69 Cf Castello Branco,op. cit., p. 123; Conn and Fairchild,op. cit., pp. 319-23, 327. 70 14 Nov., 1942. 71 McCann, op. cit., p. 346; Nova Politica, ix, 323-7. 72 Charles to F.O., 31 Dec, 1942, F.O. 371/33650, A 70/70/6. 73 F.R., 1944, vii, 566-7. 74 Minute by J. V. Perowne, 2 Jan., 1943, F.O. 371/33650, A 70/70/6. 75 Conn and Fairchild, op. cit., p. 328. 76 Perowne Minute, loc. cit. 77 F.R., 1943, v, 654-8; Silva, op. cit., xiii, 53-62. 78 Conn and Fairchild, op. cit., p. 328. 79 Silva, op. cit., xiii, 190-99.

NOTES TO CHAPTER III

243

80 ibid., pp. 129-42, 305-8; Conn and Fairchild, op. cit., p. 328; McCann, op. cit., pp. 352 ff. 81 Charles to F.O., 13 Dec, 1943, F.O. 371/33650, A 11271/70/6. 82 Castello Branco, op. cit., pp. 507-25; Silva, op. cit., xiii, 205-6. 83 F.R., 1944, vii, 566-7, and see the report of Stettinius (Welles's successor as Under-Secretary of State), F.R., 1944, iii, 13-14. 84 The most detailed account of the organization and operations of the F.E.B. is in Castello Branco, op. cit. 85 Silva, op. cit., xiii, 268-71, 275-6. 86 Over $331 millions by Sept., 1946. D.A.F.R., viii, 154. 87 R. S. Sayers, Financial Policy, 1939^5 (London, 1956), p. 447; Dulles, op. cit., p. 246, and see Harris, op. cit., p. 172. m Jornal do Comercio, 14 Nov., 1942. 89 Amapa, Rio Branco, Guapore, Ponta Pora and Iguacu. 90 L.A.S.W.W., i, 137. 91 O Estado de Sao Paulo, 1 Oct., 1943. 92 Nova Politica, x, 269-7\;Jornal do Comercio, 18 Sept., Estado de Sao Paulo, 19 Sept., 1943; Charles to Eden, 27 Sept., 1943, F.O. 371/33678, A 9299/2506/6. 93 X.A.S.W.W., i, 135, 137. The line remained a pipe dream. 9 *Jornal do Comercio, 6 May, Estado de Sao Paulo, 7 May, 1943; Charles to Eden, 15, 26 May, 1943, F.O., 371/33671 and 33673, A 5040/1263/6 and A 5644/1270/6; Nova Politica, x, 45-61. 95 Nova Politica, x, 95-105; Charles to Eden, 6 July, 1943, F.O. 371/33697, A 6665/6170/6. See alsoL.A.S.W.W.,'\, 128, 137. The line was begun in 1938 and opened in 1956. The temporary bridge over the Rio Grande was completed in 1965. The railway was intended to become ultimately a transcontinental line linking Santos on the Atlantic to Arica on the Pacific by way of Cochabamba. The idea was still being pursued in the 'seventies. 96 Charles to Scott, 5 Feb., 1942, F.O. 371/30365, A 2674/G/2674/6. 97 ibid. Charles reports a conversation between Pierson and a member of his staff, and recalls a view expressed in the State Department. 98 Charles to Eden, 4 Nov., 1942, F.O. 371/30365, A 11226/2674/6. 99 A wise Foreign Office minute by Francis Evans in March, 1942, recorded that the 'weight of evidence' did not reveal any considered policy of the United States to exclude Britain from the South American market, 18 March, 1942, F.O. 371/30504, A 1817/234/51, and the Embassy in Washington in May, 1943, took a similar view. Sir R. Campbell to Perowne, 29 May, 1943, F.O. 371/33903, A 5359/348/51. See also S. E. Hilton, 'Brazilian Diplomacy and the Washington-Rio de Janeiro "Axis" during the World War II Era', Hispanic American Historical Review, 59 (May, 1979), p. 228. 100 Nosworthy (Commercial Counsellor, Rio) to Fraser (Board of Trade), 12 Sept., 1942, F.O. 371/30369, A 9580/5146/6. 101 F.R., 1943, v, 623, 647. See also Charles to Scott, 2 March, 1943, F.O. 371/33666, A 2572/518/6. lU2 F.R., 1943, v, 623-4; Charles to Scott, 2 March, 1943, F.O. 371/33666; Whitaker, Inter-American Affairs, iv, 61-2. 103 Cf. Charles to F.O., 18 Jan., 3 May, 29 July, 1943, F.O. 371/33651, 33655 and 33656, A 795/166/6, A 4149/231/6 and A 7123/231/6. 104 Charles to F.O., 18 Jan., 1944, F.O. 371/37859, AS 446/446/6. 105 Notes of an Interview with Oswaldo Aranha, in Stone to Chancery (Rio), 24 Oct., 1944, F.O. 371/37859, A 5989/446/6. 106 Gainer to F.O., 23 Aug., 1944, F.O. 371/37846, AS 4509/95/6. 107 Nova Politica, xi, 30; Gainer to F.O., 8 Sept., 1944, F.O. 371/37847, AS 4284/95/6.

244

NOTES TO CHAPTER I I I

108

Nova Politica, x, 244; A Noite, 31 Dec, 1943. Nova Politica, x, 299; Annual Report for 1944, in Gainer to Eden, 10 Jan., 1945, F.O. 371/44806, AS 687/52/6. 110 Annual Report for 1944, loc. cit. 111 The Memoirs of Cordell Hull (2 vols., London, 1948), ii, 1678-9; Gellman, Good Neighbor Diplomacy, p. 215; Hilton, 'Brazilian Diplomacy', pp. 224—5. See also Chapter VIII. 112 For contrasting interpretations of United States policy towards Brazil see McCann, op. cit., together with his article on 'Brazil, the United States and World War II. A Commentary', Diplomatic History, iii (Winter, 1979), pp. 70-76, and Hilton, op. cit. 113 10 Nov., 1942, Nova Politica, ix, 312-13. 114 10 Nov., 1943, ibid., x, 178. 115 15 April, 7 Sept., 1944, ibid., x, 282, xi, 28-9; Broadmead to Eden, 18 April, 1944, F.O. 371/37846, AS 2413/95/6; Gainer toF.O., 8 Sept., 1944, F.O. 371/37847, AS 4824/95/6. 116 p r i n ted in Silva, op. cit., xiv, 65-75. 117 Charles to F.O., 13 Nov., 7 Dec, 1943, F.O. 371/33678, A 10402/2506/6, A 11526/2506/6; Charles to Eden, 20 Dec, 1943, Broadmead to Eden, 18 May, 1944, F.O. 371/37846, AS 871/95/6,AS 2729/95/6; Nova Politica, x, 166, 175, 287-93. 118 Gainer to F.O., 23 Dec, 1944, F.O. 371/37847, Annual Report for 1944, in Gainer to Eden, 10 Jan., 1945, F.O. 371/44806. AS 6619/95/6 and AS 687/52/6. 119 Silva, op. cit., xiv, 41-3; Notes of an Interview with Oswaldo Aranha, in Stone to Chancery, 24 Oct., 1944, F.O. 371/37859, A 5989/446/6. 120 Gainer to F.O., 23 Dec, 1944, F.O. 371/37847. 121 Silva, op. cit., xiv, 124-5; Dulles, op. cit., p. 255. 122 Silva, op. cit., xiv, 107-8. 123 ibid., p. 82. 124 ibid., pp. 86-97. 125 ibid., pp. 480-88. 126 Gainer to F.O., 15 March, 1945, F.O. 371/44806, AS 1598/52/6. 127 Silva, op. cit., xiv, 192. 128 ibid., p. 153. 129 T. E. Skidmore, Politics in Brazil, 1930-1946. An Experiment in Democracy (New York, 1967), p. 56. Skidmore provides an admirable analysis of the end of the Estado Novo. 130 Cf. his speeches of 1 May and 10 Nov., 1943, Nova Politica, x, 31-7, 178. 131 Silva, op. cit., xiv, 135-6, 171. 132 Gainer to Bevin, 29 Aug., 1945, F.O. 371/44808, AS 4822/52/6; Silva, op. cit., xiv, 137-8; Nova Politica, xi, 182-3. 133 Gainer to Perowne, 9 Oct., 1945, F.O. 371/44808, AS 5553/52/6. 134 Silva, op. cit., xiv, 214—19. 135 Dulles, op. cit., p. 270. 136 Nova Politica, xi, 191; Gainer to Bevin, 5 Oct., 1945, F.O. 371/44808, AS 5518/52/6. 137 Gainer to Bevin, 30 Oct., 1945, F.O. 371/44809, AS 6006/52/6. 138 He again became President in 1951 and died by his own hand in August, 1954. 109

NOTES TO CHAPTER IV 1

Snow (Bogota) to F.O., 9 April, 1943, F.O. 371/33811, A 3417/2616/11. O r d e (Santiago) to Eden, 14 April, 1943, F.O. 371/33771, A 4204/4204/9; El Mercurio (Chile), 7 April, 1943. 2

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245

3 FR., 1943, v, 544; Minute by Perowne, 12 April, 1943, F.O. 371/33638, A 3422/3241/5; Whitaker, Inter-American Affairs, iii, 7. The revision of treaties, with the question of Bolivia's landlocked position, was much in the minds of the Bolivian delegation at the San Francisco Conference in 1945. 4 Cf La Razon, 6, 7 April, El Diario, 7 April, 1943. 5 L.A.S.W.W., i, 129-32. 6 F.R., 1942, v, 592-5. 7 The road became passable in 1954. 8 F.R., 1942, v, 592-4, 604-6, 613;D.A.F.R.,v, 385-6; Howell (La Paz) to F.O., 28 Dec, 1942, F.O. 371/33614, A 679/679/5. 9 F.R., 1942, v, 542-3, 576-80, 631. 10 H. S. Klein, Parties and Political Change in Bolivia, 1880-1952 (Cambridge, 1969), p. 334. 11 Victor Andrade, My Missions for Revolutionary Bolivia, 1944-1962 (edited by Cole Blasier, Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1976), p. 5. See also L.A.S.W.W., i, 20-21, 127. 12 La Razon, 26 Aug., 23 Oct., 4 Nov., 1942. 13 ibid., 26 Sept., 1942. By agreements concluded in February Argentina had agreed to advance sums for the improvement of road and rail communications with Bolivia, and Bolivia to supply Argentina with petroleum from the Bermejo oilfield. 14 Klein, op. cit., p. 352; Guillermo Lora, A History of the Bolivian Labour Movement, 1848-1971 (Cambridge, 1971), p. 218. 15 Klein, op. cit., pp. 355-6; Lora, op. cit., pp. 218-25; New York Times, 22 Dec, 1942; El Nacional (Mexico), 25 Dec, 1942; Augusto Cespedes, El Presidente Colgado (2nd edn., Buenos Aires, 1975), pp. 92-3, 98-103. 16 New York Times, 10 Jan., 1943. 17 The Report, published by the International Labour Office as Labour Problems in Bolivia (Montreal, 1943), drew wide attention to the wretched working conditions in Bolivia, though 'favourably' comparing the lot of the mine workers with that of the rubber, agricultural and factory workers. 18 Klein, op. cit., p. 359. 19 Cf. Andrade, op. cit., pp. 15-16. 20 'Cause of the Fatherland'. 21 Porfirio Diaz Machicao, Historia de Bolivia. ePeharanda\ 1940-1943 (La Paz, 1958), p. 105. 22 ibid., pp. 108-13 (Peharanda's account); Cespedes, op. cit., pp. 129-32; Alberto Ostria Gutierrez, Una Revolucion Tras Los Andes (Santiago, 1944), p. 201, and The Tragedy of Bolivia (New York, 1956), p. 6. ^L.A.S.W.W., i, 22. 24 Cf Klein, op. cit., p. 371, and his essay in J. M. Malloy and R. S. Thorn, eds., Beyond the Revolution. Bolivia since 1952 (Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1971), p. 37. 25 Murray (La Paz) to F.O., 21 Dec, 1943, F.O. 371/33610, A 11481/346/5. See also F.R., 1943, v, 537; Lora, op. cit., p. 232; Green, Containment of Latin America, pp. 143-8. 26 Orde (Santiago) to F.O., 24 Dec, 1943, Forbes (Lima) to F.O., 27 Dec, 1943, Charles (Rio) to F.O., 21 Dec, 1943, F.O. 371/33611, A 11584/346/5, A 11634/346/5, A 11503/346/5. 27 Ostria Gutierrez, Una Revolucion Tras Los Andes, p. 212. 28 Hull, Memoirs, ii, 1388. 29 Ambassador Pierre Boal, 29 Dec, 1943, F.R., 1943, v, 540-41. 30 D.A.F.R., vi, 543. The Guani doctrine, so named after the Uruguayan Foreign Minister, who was chairman of the Committee. 31 New York Times, 31 Jan., 1944. 32 Murray to Gallop, 26 Jan., 1944 (Private), F.O. 371/37808, AS 993/1/5. Murray's was a correct assessment.

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33 Halifax (Washington) to F.O., 14 Jan., 1944, F.O. 371/37807, AS 630/1/5; F.R., 1944, vii, 431 ff. 34 Murray to F.O., 25 Jan., 1944, enclosing copies of Despatch No. 2994 from U.S. Embassy to State Department, and Murray to Gallop, 14 Jan., 1944, with enclosure, F.O. 371/37808, AS 1007/1/5 and AS 854/1/5. 35 F.R., 1944, v, 445-6. See also Hull's statement of 24 Jan., ibid., p. 440. 36 ElDiario, 26 Jan., 1944. 37 Carlos Montenegro and Augusto Cespedes. La Razon, 12 Feb., 1944. Paz Estenssoro was reported to have divided the cabinet into four categories: 'Locos', 'Medio Locos', lPoco Locos' (including himself) and 'moderates', including Villarroel. Murray to F.O., 25 Jan., 1944, with enclosure, F.O. 371/37808, AS 1007/1/5. 38 Murray to F.O., 12 Feb., 1944, F.O. 371/37808, AS 1074/1/5. 39 Murray to F.O., 17 March, 1944, F.O. 371/37808, AS 1728/1/5. 40 ibid. 41 F.R., 1944, vii, 457, 563-4. Cuba also sent an observer to Bolivia, whose report, very different from Warren's, warned against recognition. Ostria Gutierrez, Tragedy of Bolivia, pp. 22-3. For critiques of United States policy towards the Junta see Green, op. cit., pp. 143-52; Cole Blasier, 'The United States, Germany and the Bolivian Revolutionaries', Hispanic American Historical Review, 52 (Feb., 1972), pp. 40-52; Gellman, Good Neighbor Diplomacy, pp. 186-7. 42 So the New York Times, 3 July, 1944. ^ElDiario, 10 July, 1944. 44 La Razon, 1, 2, 3, 15, 16 Aug., 1944. 45 Rees (La Paz) to F.O., 7 Dec, 1944, F.O. 371/44787, AS 114/45/5. ^Cespedes, op. cit., p. 191; Klein, op. cit., p. 377. 47 Cespedes, op. cit., and Ostria Gutierrez, op. cit., give very different accounts of the July revolution. 48 Paz Estenssoro was to hold the presidency from 1952 to 1956 when he inaugurated what has been called the 'Bolivian National Revolution' and again from 1960 to 1964. 49 L.A.S.W.W., i, 126. 50 Cf El Telegrafo, 30 Jan., El Comercio (Peru), 4 Feb., La Nacion (Chile), 15 Feb., 1942. 51 Lilo Linke, Ecuador (3rd edn., London, I960), p. 30. 52 El Telegrafo, 17 Feb., 1942; Hughes-Hallett (Quito) to F.O., 27 Jan., 17 March, 23 June, 1942, F.O. 371/30467 and 30469, A 988/53/54, A 3976/574/54 and A 6557/574/54. 53 El Telegrafo, 11 Feb., 1942. ^L.A.S.W.W., i, 122-3; F.R., 1942, vi, 362-8, 370-71. 55 F.R., 1942, vi, 383. 56 ibid., pp. 379, 385-6, 388. 57 ibid., pp. 383, 388; 1943, vi, 284 ff. ™L.A.S.W.W., i, 17. 59 For the 'Great Absentee' see the account in G. I. Blanksten, Ecuador: Constitutions and Caudillos (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1951), pp. 44—51. 60 El Comercio, 25 May, 1944. 61 Blanksten, op. cit., p. 46. 62 El Telegrafo, 11 Aug., 1944. 63 F.R., 1945, ix, 998-1006; D.A.F.R., vii, 290-91. 64 L.A.S.W.W.,i, 125-6. 65 Conn and Fairchild, Framework of Hemisphere Defense, p. 203; Forbes (Lima) to Eden, 7 Jan., 1943, enclosing Review of Events in Peru during 1942, F.O. 371/34052, A 1049/317/35.

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247

L.A.S.W.W., i, 123-5; El Comercio, 9, 10, Dec, 1941. El Comercio, 13 April, 1942; President Prado's Message to Congress, 28 July, 1943, in F.O. 371/34066, A 7897/3700/35. 68 Christian Science Monitor, 6 Aug., 1942. 69 El Comercio, 26July, 1942; New York Herald Tribune, 16Jan., 1943; Forbes to Eden, 7 Jan., 1943, F.O. 371/34052, A 1049/317/35. Forbes reported in 1945 that some 700 Germans had been deported since 1942. Forbes to Perowne, 23 July, 1945, F.O. 371/45117, AS 4009/3432/35. C. Harvey Gardiner, The Japanese in Peru, 1873-1973 (Albuquerque, 1975), p. 87, puts the number of Japanese deported at 1771. 70 Adolfo Solf y Muro to Eden, 8 Feb., 1943, F.O. 371/34059, A 1426/1426/35. 71 LaPrensa, 27 July, 1941. 72 El Comercio, 10 May, 1942. 73 Forbes to Eden, 13 Aug., 1943, F.O. 371/34056, A 8096/575/35. 74 F.R., 1942, vi, 673. 75 Halifax to Eden, 16 May, 1942, F.O. 371/30625, A 4969/521/35; Statement by the Peruvian Cabinet, 25 April, 1942, F.O. 371/30625, A 5023/521/35; D.A.F.R., iv, 369-73. 76 F.R., 1942, vi, 667; Dept. of State Release, No. 79, 19 Feb., 1943, in F.O. 371/34056, A 3501/575/35; Forbes to Eden, 30 April, 1943, F.O. 371/34064, A 5420/2674/35. 77 Forbes to Eden, 24 Oct., 1942, F.O. 371/30625, A 10742/521/35. 78 La Cronica, 14 June, 1942. 79 Forbes to Eden, 17 Oct., 1942, 9 Sept., 1943, F.O. 371/30625 and 34056, A 10143/521/35, A 8697/575/35. The hydro-electric plant and the Chimbote iron and steel works were both inaugurated in 1958. The scheme was finally carried out with the aid of French contractors, R . J . Owens. Peru (London, 1963), p. 104. 80 F.R., 1943, 745 ff.; Forbes to Eden, 28 May, 1943, F.O. 371/34056, A 5658/575/55. 81 Forbes to Eden, 27 Oct., 1942, 26 Jan., 20 March, 1944, F.O. 371/30627, 38430 and 38467, A 10691/619/35, AS 1055/120/35, AS 2049/2049/35. 82 Forbes to Eden, 5 May, 1943, F.O. 371/34060, A 4893/1648/35. 83 Forbes to Eden, 21 Nov., 1942, 7 Jan., 14 June, 1943, F.O. 371/30627 and 34052, A 11575/619/35, A 1049/317/35, A 6134/317/35. 84 Forbes to Eden, 14 June, 1943, 26 Jan., 1944, enclosing Review of Events in Peru during the year 1943, F.O. 371/34052 and 38430, A 6134/317/35, AS 1055/120/35. 85 La Prensa, 26 Nov., 1943; Forbes to Eden, 4, 26 Jan., 1944, F.O. 371/38430, AS 568/120/35, AS 1055/120/35. 86 Forbes to Eden, 14 June, 1943, F.O. 371/34052, A 6134/317/35. 87 ibid.; L.A.S.W.W., i, 19; and see F. B. Pike, The Modern History of Peru (London, 1967), p. 277. 88 Forbes to Eden, 6 Nov., 1944, F.O. 371/38430, AS 6374/120/35. m F.R., 1945, ix, 1312-17. 90 Sir Robert Marett (Ambassador to Peru, 1963-67), Peru (London, 1969), p. 168. 91 A reputation warmly but uncritically endorsed by Claude G. Bowers (American Ambassador to Chile, 1939-53), Chile through Embassy Windows, 1939-1953 (New York, 1958), pp. 33-42, 69, 99, 121-3. 92 The Straits had been neutralized under the Argentine-Chilean Treaty of 1881. 93 Now Robinson Crusoe, Alejandro Selkirk and Santa Clara islands. 94 ElMercurio, 14 Feb., 1942. 95 F.R., 1942, vi, 5-7; Michael J. Francis, The Limits of Hegemony. United States Relations with Argentina and Chile during World War II (Notre Dame, Indiana, 1977), pp. 94-5. 96 El Mercurio, 27 March, 1942; Conn and Fairchild, op. cit., p. 203. Some 100 men 67

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were dispatched to set up the batteries. Pride and caution made the Government unwilling to accept the larger number offered. Even so, Axis propaganda referred to an 'army of occupation'. Bowers, op. cit., p. 77. 91 L.A.S.W.W., i, 169, 177. 98 ibid., p. 159. " O r d e (Santiago) to Eden, 13 March, 27 May, 1942, F.O. 371/30435 and 371/30436, A 3912/52/9, A 5656/52/9. The Tolten had extinguished her lights at the orders of a United States patrol vessel. Thereafter Chilean vessels were instructed to sail with their lights full on. 101 F.R., 1942, vi, 47-8; El Diario Ilustrado, 30 Jan., 1942. 102 La Nation, 7, 19 Jan., 7, 19 Feb., El Mercurio, 2, 21 Feb., El Diario Ilustrado, 15 Jan., 8, 27 Feb., 1942. Cf. Bowers, op. cit., p. 99. 103 Orde to F.O., 25 May, 1942, F.O. 371/30434, A 5007/18/9. 104 El Mercurio, 22 May, 1942; Orde to Eden, 27 May, 1942, F.O. 371/30436, A 5656/52/9. m L.A.S.W.W.,i, 160-1; Allen (Santiago) toF.O., 30Dec, 1941,F.O. 371/30439, A 1470/1405/9; Orde to Eden, 29 Dec, 1943, F.O. 371/37991, AS 371/371/9. l ^La Nation, 27 May, 1942; Orde to F.O. 27 May, 1942, F.O. 371/30439, A 5043/1405/9. 107 £/ Mercurio, 23 May, La Nation, 21 June, 1942. 108 Above, p. 6. For examples of German espionage in Chile see Hilton, Hitler's Secret War, pp. 49,290-1. 109 Summarized in F.R., 1942, v, 225-8; Bowers, op. cit., p. 108; La Prensa (Argentina), 4 Nov., 1942. U0 F.R., 1942, v, 138; Francis, op. cit., p. 122. 111 5 Sept., 1942. 112 F.R., 1942, v, 228; El Mercurio, 3 Oct., La Nation, 1, 8 Oct., New York Times, 1 Oct., 1942. m D.A.F.R.,v, 18. 114 Orde to Eden, 19 Oct., 1942, F.O. 371/30438, A 10116/52/9. 115 Eden to Orde, 14 Oct., 1942, F.O. 371/30437, A 9533/52/9. 116 Orde to Eden, 19 Oct., 1942, F.O. 371/30438. 117 La Nation, 5 June, 1942. m El Diario Ilustrado, 11 June, El Mercurio, 12, 21 June, 1942. 119 El Mercurio, 22 June, 1942; Orde to Eden, 26 June, 1942, F.O. 371/30437, A 6607/52/9. 120 El Mercurio, 26 June, 1942; Orde to F.O., 26 June, 1942, F.O. 371/30436, Orde to Eden, 30 June, 1942, F.O. 371/30437, A 6063/52/9, and A 7088/52/9. 121 El Diario Ilustrado, 20 July, El Mercurio, 28 July, 1942. 122 La Nation, 21 May, 1942; Orde to Eden, 27 May, 1942, F.O. 371/30436, A 5656/52/9. l2i El Mercurio, 22, 27 May, 1942. 124 L.A.S.W.W.,i, 162. 125 F.R., 1942, vi, 99-100; Francis, op. cit., pp. 123-4. m F.R., 1942, vi, 22-5; Francis, op. cit., pp. 110-12; Orde to Eden, 23 July, 1942, F.O. 371/30437, A 7478/52/9. 127 Orde to Eden, 27 May, 1942, F.O. 371/30436, A 5656/52/9. 128 Gellman, Good Neighbor Diplomacy, p. 173. 129 F.O. to Orde, 15 July, 1942, F.O. 371/30436, A 6471/52/9. 130 Bowers, op. cit., p. 109; Orde to Eden, 1 Aug., 1942, F.O. 371/30437, A 7910/52/9. 131 Orde to F.O., 24, 26 July, 1942, F.O. 371/30440 and 30437, A 6929/1702/9 and A 6985/52/9. 132 Orde to Eden, 1 Aug., 1942, F.O. 371/30437, A 7910/52/9.

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El Mercurio, 24 Aug., 1942. New York Times, 5 Sept., 1942; Bowers, op. cit., p. 103. Orde to F.O., 11 Sept., 1942, F.O. 371/30437, A 8504/52/9. 136 Orde to F.O., 17 Sept., 1942, F.O. 371/30437, A 8692/52/9. 137 Halifax to F.O., 24 Sept., 1942, F.O. 371/30437, A 8903/52/9. 138 Orde to Eden, 19 Oct., 1942, F.O. 371/30438, A 10116/52/9. 139 Hull, Memoirs, ii, 1383-4. m D.A.F.R., v, 423-4. 141 Orde to Ministry of Information, 14 Oct., to F.O., 16 Oct., 1942, F.O. 371/30437 and 30440, A 9569/52/9 and A 9540/1702/9; Orde to Eden, 19 Oct., 1942, F.O. 371/30438. 142 F.R., 1942, v, 101. 143 ibid., pp. 237-9; Francis, op. cit., p. 127. 144 F.R., 1942, v, 101-2. 145 Orde to F.O., 28 Sept., 1942, F.O. 371/30437, A 9066/52/9; Bowers to Fernandez y Fernandez, 27 Oct., 1942, Orde to same, 2 Nov., 1942, both in Orde to Eden, 12 Nov., 1942, F.O. 371/30441, A 1156/2588/9. 146 The Government then took the line that it was already co-operating on an ample scale by reserving Chile's strategic materials for the United Nations and that a secret commission was studying the manner by which measures already adopted could be perfected. Orde to Eden, 16 Dec, 1942, F.O. 371/33751, A 329/148/9. 147 La Nacion, 2 Oct., El Mercurio, 8 Oct., 1942. 148 Orde to Eden, 13 Nov., 1942, F.O. 371/30438, A 11240/52/9. 149 Orde to F.O., 11 Nov., 1942, F.O. 371/30438, A 10505/52/9. 150 Orde to F.O., 24 Nov., 1942, F.O. 371/30438, A 10994/52/9; to Eden, 27 Jan., 1943, F.O. 371/33750A, A 1481/7/9. 151 Cf. F.R., 1942, vi, 38-43; Francis, op. cit., p. 127. 152 Francis, op. cit., p. 128. 153 F.R., 1942, vi, 41-6; Halifax to F.O., 29 Dec, 1942, F.O. 371/33750, A 7/7/9. 154 Orde to Eden, 27 Jan., 3 Feb., 1943, F.O. 33750A, A 1481/7/9, A 1850/7/9. 155 Francis, op. cit., pp. 134-5. m F.R., 1943, v, 806-10; Orde to Eden, 27 Jan., 3 Feb., 1943 (A 1881/7/9). 157 F.R., 1944, vii, 753-4. 158 ibid., pp. 789-801; Orde to Eden, 4 March, 1944, F. O. 371/37991, Chancery (Santiago) to F.O., 1 Aug., 1944, F. O. 371/37991, AS 1772/371/9, AS 4505/G/371/9. 159 Orde to Eden, 21 March, 1944, F.O. 371/37991, AS 2064/371/9. 160 F.R., 1944, vii, 691-70; 1945, ix, 758-60, 998-1006, 1312-17; See alsoF.R., The Conferences at Malta and Yalta, 1945, pp. 49, 52, 53, 91; Francis, op. cit., pp. 141-4; and see Chapter VIII. 161 Orde to Eden, 12 May, 1945, F.O. 371/44932, AS 2828/855/9. m F.R., 1945, ix, 769-70;D.A.F.R., vii, 294; Francis,