(2 of 2)
Last week one hard reality that Ambassador Wallace will face popped into the news, popped out again. From Mexico City came detailed reports that a secret U. S.-Mexican agreement on naval and air bases—at Tampico, Veracruz, Acapulco and five other key spots—had been signed two weeks before. The report was quickly denied (see p. 32). Whatever the military importance of these bases, they dramatized the difficult position of Avila Camacho in Mexico's internal politics. There seemed little logic in Mexico's continuing a defiant policy on oil expropriations if Mexicans believed stories that the U. S. would have naval bases near the oil fields. If U. S.-Mexican relations flowed smoothly, Avila Camacho would be in the position of having solved the great problem of friendship with the U. S. that has baffled every President before him. If they did not, he would be vulnerable to the most deadly charge hurled against a Mexican politician—that of having turned over harbors and strategic centres to the hated Yanquis.
Ambassador Wallace planned to travel on through Latin America after the inauguration. In every Latin-American capital notes will be taken on his performance in Mexico City. When the thoughtful agrarian from Iowa sits down with the affable polo player from Puebla, theories of the Pan-American future will have come face-to-face with Pan-American realities of the present. What Latin America thinks of his actions in Mexico will set the course for the rest of his visit. What the U. S. concludes may well sound the overture for the great events of the Third Term.
*In Manhattan, General Juan Andreu Almazan warned that Mr. Wallace would be taken on a staged tour of the country comparable to the staged tours of Soviet Russia, but added that Mr. Wallace was a man of the world and intelligent and would discover that the people of Mexico themselves were for Almazan.