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THE AMERICAS: Toward a Moral Entity

7 minute read
TIME

We shall not see, nor the generation which follows us, the triumph of the America we are building.

The U.S. was rambunctiously bursting its boundaries to the West when South America’s “Great Liberator,” Simon Bolivar, wrote these words in 1822. Latin American countries all had grandiose ideas, a few had paper constitutions, many had military despots.

Last week foreign ministers of 21 republics representing 300,000,000 Americans opened consultative sessions, and a triumph—one that could at last vindicate Bolivar’s Pan Americanism—was within their grasp.

The formal end in view was a hemisphere-wide rupture, diplomatic and commercial, with the Axis countries. But the triumph might be far greater than that: at Rio de Janeiro the Americas had a good chance of being forged into an America.

Eyes on the Argentine. From a speaker’s podium banked with orchids, Brazil’s suave; nimble-witted Foreign Minister Oswaldo Aranha stepped on to the floor to greet various delegates at the opening session. But when Argentina’s Foreign Minister Enrique Ruiz Guiñazú came in, walking gingerly, Oswaldo Aranha hurried forward to shake hands, pat his shoulder, and chat warmly. For Argentina’s Ruiz Guiñazú was the man who might wreck the Conference. He was the man to watch.

A moment later cheers from the crowds outside heralded the arrival of U.S. delegates led by Under Secretary Sumner Welles, who walked in, poker-faced, managing despite midsummer heat and a double-breasted blue suit, to look as cool as a glass of maté. The applause which greeted him was real. For the first time in the long history of Pan-American conferences, delegates, influenced by a common fear of Axis aggression and the past nine years of friendly U.S. relations, seemed to share a feeling that this time the U.S. was not a hypocritical boss but a Good Neighbor who had been attacked. Sumner Welles took a seat on the opposite side of the hall from Señor Ruiz Guiñazú.

Brazil’s President Getulio Vargas opened the Conference with a speech calling for “the most solid and powerful alliance of free and sovereign nations that the history of humanity has ever known.” Señor Ruiz Guiñazú began to fidget.

Sumner Welles stepped to the podium. In a long and carefully worded resume of Axis plans, promises and attacks, Sumner Welles explained the U.S. position. Mr. Welles gave figures on U.S. armament production: “45,000 military airplanes in the coming year; some 45,000 tanks; 600 merchant ships. …” Señor Ruiz Guiñazú ran his finger around his collar.

Dismissing a diplomat’s usual generalities, Mr. Welles spoke specifically of 218,600 tons of tin plate allocated for Latin America, new allocations of “20 essential agricultural and industrial chemicals,” besides farm equipment, iron and steel products. When he spoke of the “shibboleth of classic neutrality,” Señor Ruiz Guiñazú wiped his face with his handkerchief. When the Under Secretary concluded with a ringing declaration that democratic ideals “will yet triumph,” Señor Ruiz Guiñazú fanned himself, being careful to use a scratch pad and not a copy (translated into Spanish) of Mr. Welles’s speech.

Eyes on the Mexican. It was Mexico’s Ezequiel Padilla who really thrilled the delegates. Courtly, cultured Foreign Minister Padilla is a direct descendant of Indians who suffered under Conquistadores centuries before Europe heard of a Schicklgruber; his ancestors were Americans when millions of Yanquis’ ancestors were still Cockney barrowmongers, Swede fishermen, Italian wine merchants. With a fine, sensitive face, a soft voice and a mild manner, he had come to Rio with something in his heart to say. Softly he began speaking, as papers rustled, feet scraped. But delegates sat bolt upright from the moment that he said:

“The men who have fallen in Wake and the Philippines . . . have not fallen only to defend the honor and sovereignty of the United States; they have also fallen to defend the human liberties and the common destiny of America”

When he spoke of “the free American, the man in whose face shines the dignity of being one,” the delegates knew that they were looking into such a face. They forgot all about Argentina, and tin, and the war, when they heard him plead for an idea bigger than all those things—for the organization “not only of an economy, but at the same time an American moral entity, so that we will be able to prove . . . that we are not only interested in the construction of shipyards and airplanes . . . but also in the development and progress of the free man of America.”

There was no approving murmur when Padilla finished, no polite slapping of palms. Instead the applause broke like the first clean crack of thunder very near, and it went on & on, while this Man of America stood by his seat in his coffee-colored linen suit and bowed his thanks and his hope. It was the vision that Ezequiel Padilla projected which might be Rio’s triumph.

The Signs. After the first meeting it seemed much more likely that most of the Americas would find a meeting ground—and leave Argentina the choice of hanging on or dropping off, isolated, at the southern tip of the hemisphere. A showdown was expected on Thursday of this week.

It was impossible to predict exactly what Argentina would do, but there were signs of rapprochement. Some of the bright young economists of Argentina’s smartest money man, Dr. Raúl Prebisch, began surfing and sunning with U.S. economists at the Copacabana Palace Hotel beach. Acting President Ramón Castillo, prodded at home and jealous of the positions of leadership taken by Brazil and Mexico, telegraphed the Conference that Argentina’s policy of neutrality was being misunderstood. There were reports that the thorniest momentary problem—solution of the century-old border dispute between Peru and Ecuador—might be diplomatically and suggestively handed to Señor Ruiz Guiñazú to be mediated.

Able, friendly, hard-working President Vargas, scorning Axis war threats, conferred directly with Ruiz Guiñazú (and by telephone with Castillo) in an effort to speed up a break with the Axis countries. Perspiring freely, as usual, Ruiz Guiñazú hurriedly visited Sumner Welles’s hotel room, No. 401, in the Copacabana, then went to room 301 to see Chile’s Foreign Minister Juan Bautista Rossetti. Behind him trailed rumors that Argentina, as usual, was trying to cook up compromise proposals.

As the delegates this week headed into committee problems ranging from subversive activity to post-war rehabilitation, they counted up the signs—good, bad, but never indifferent. As they did so a leading Latin American statesman, looking beyond the immediate necessity of a common American front against the Axis, expressed to a TIME correspondent an opinion that brought Bolivar up to date, and beyond:

“It would be better for a united America to lose this war than for America to remain disunited; for a united America would rise from defeat, but if a part of us won and a part of us lost, we would remain divided forever.”

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