United We Stand

(See Cover) In Rio de Janeiro this week U.S. diplomacy faces its first severe test since World War II came to the Americas. It is a test that may spell victory or defeat in the war. For as Japanese diplomatic treachery on war's eve cost the U.S. the first round of the Battle of the Pacific, so a setback at Rio might well lead to discord in the hemisphere, Axis inroads, even defeat in the Battle of the Atlantic.

More than a year ago, in Washington, President Roosevelt gave to visiting Latin American military men the words of Alexandre Dumas in The Three Musketeers as a maxim of hemisphere defense: "One for all, all for one." This week, as the top diplomats of the 21 American Republics arrived in Brazil for the war's third conference of American Foreign Ministers, that maxim was uppermost in the minds of all.

The Welcome. It was under the shrewd hazel-grey eyes of an able, forthright realist, Brazil's Foreign Minister and the Conference's administrator, Oswaldo Aranha, that the delegates began assembling in Rio. In fine fettle, Aranha snapped orders to painters, rushed completion of a new five-unit air-conditioning system, supervised the refurbishing of crimson satin wall coverings and rich Aubusson rugs in the Itamaraty Palace, Brazil's Foreign Office. He conferred daily with President Vargas, with taut, ascetic U.S. Ambassador Jefferson Caffery and with a stream of other diplomats, some of whom left the Palace with fresh paint on their coattails.

Later, when the 46-man U.S. delegation headed by Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles arrived in the middle of a heat wave, Aranha was ready and waiting. Three times the 42-ton Clipper circled the lavender hills around Rio's bay. At the airport 2,000 Brazilians cheered themselves hoarse, knocked down one lone man who started to boo, trampled over gaily uniformed grenadier guards. Before leaving Washington the supposedly icy Mr. Welles had kissed his wife good-by with the tenderness of a lad going off to the wars. Now the Rio welcome must have touched him as much as a lad coming home.

Donning fresh white linens, Mr. Welles joined others from the Americas in presenting credentials to Foreign Minister Aranha, paying a courtesy call on President Vargas. He talked with early Argentine delegates. He had a look at the site of the coming meetings--historic Tiradentes Palace, named for Brazil's revolutionary hero, a dentist (tiradente means "tooth-puller") who was hanged by the Portuguese 150 years ago and his body quartered and sent in brine as a warning to all parts of the country.

Mr. Welles, calm, cool when the action set in, confident of the support of the overwhelming majority of the other delegates and the countries which had instructed them, was determined to put through his program--complete rupture, diplomatic and commercial, with the Axis.

As he undertakes this task, Sumner Welles will be helped by his thorough understanding of the four delicately balanced springs of policy in the intricate mechanism of Pan-American relations.

The policy of the U.S. is one of ever-increasing hemisphere solidarity within the bounds of the militarily desirable and the politically practical. Thus the U.S. does not want a Pan-American declaration of war because it would be neither militarily desirable (the other 20 republics need their entire armed forces for defense), nor politically practical (other countries besides Argentina might balk at such a step). The U.S. will be satisfied to carry its war to the Axis so long as its neighbors stand squarely behind it.

Argentina's Policy. For reasons both psychological and geographical, Argentina has opposed U.S. policy consistently since Franklin Roosevelt gave the first diplomatic twist to the words Good Neighbor nine years ago come April. Argentina is nationalistic, European-minded, antagonistic to U.S.--or any other--leadership, jealous of its own leadership in the southern end of the hemisphere. Foreign Minister Enrique Ruiz Guinazu said just before the Conference last week: "This America of ours must be preserved for peace." Translated from the diplomatic, this meant that Argentina might oppose Mr. Welles's program.

Yet the logic of circumstances impels Argentina toward a more & more pro-U.S. policy. Cut off from her European markets, she is dependent on U.S. economic aid. Her closest neighbors have rejected isolationism and a good 85% of her people, if not her Government, are decidedly pro-Ally in this war.

Two other policies within the hemisphere are often scarcely distinguishable from those of the U.S.

One is that of countries closest to, and dependent on, the U.S., both for their economy and their defense. Through friendship for the U.S., both practical and idealistic, they sometimes go even further than the U.S. believes politic in declarations of policy. It was doubtlessly partly fear that one of these republics would call for a hemisphere declaration of war that led Ruiz Guinazu to make his statement before the Conference opened.

The other is the policy of those independent-minded countries which, though many are remote from the U.S., and some have clashed with the U.S. in the past, have faith in the Good Neighborliness of the U.S.--such countries as Mexico and Chile. While they may differ with the U.S. over occasional issues, within the framework of Pan-Americanism they are friendly collaborators. Their attitude was expressed last week in a prompt rebuke administered to Argentina's Ruiz Guinazu by Chile's Foreign Minister, Juan Bautista Rossetti, who issued the first call for the Conference. Although handicapped by a headless Government at home and weather-eyeing an Argentine customs-union proposal, Rossetti declared: "America is one. There are no blocs, no artificial distinctions between north, center and south. America is one and must remain one."

The Strategy. In every American conference of the last decade (since the conferences became more than empty phrase-boxes) the U.S. has yielded ground to Argentina in order to get unanimity. In every conference Argentina has also yielded ground to the U.S. to escape being a lone dissenter. This time it will not be the U.S. alone which demands an open diplomatic break with the Axis. This time those countries which do demand the rupture will probably not yield an inch for the sake of unanimity.

The pressure will fall on the shoulders of Argentina's Foreign Minister. A career diplomat and author of heavy works on jurisprudence, Ruiz Guinazu rose from obscurity to president of the League of Nations Council because Argentina alphabetically led off the member nations. Descendant of an autocratic Spanish family and stubborn stickler for legal details, he is temperamentally simpatico with Acting President Castillo but out of tune with popular sentiment. Officially quiet under "state-of-siege" orders, Argentines began the New Year with a spate of "last-time" hilarity, as if they realized there might be significant changes by New Year's, 1943.

These things Sumner Welles knows thoroughly, for he learned Argentine problems as first secretary in Buenos Aires during the last two years of World War I. Although Argentina remained neutral throughout World War I her neutrality was benevolently pro-U.S. and pro-British. For that, much of the credit goes to Sumner Welles. In Rio, Mr. Welles's diplomacy will be reinforced by the web of cooperation and compromise which Brazil's Oswaldo Aranha wove in a recent good-will trip to Argentina, Uruguay and Chile.

The Spider. His admirers say that Aranha (pronounced Aran-yah) has the eloquence of Aristide Briand, the romantic dash of D'Artagnan and the Pan-American idealism of the great Simon Bolivar. Actually Aranha is a onetime fire-breathing revolutionary who believes with cold logic that Brazil's self-interest now, as traditionally in the past, lies in close ties with the U.S. He has cemented those ties through hard work, U.S. loans and a charming gift of gab in Portuguese, French, Spanish and English. The word Aranha means "spider" in Portuguese and Aranha, audacious, hypertonic, sometimes theatrical, has blue spiders embroidered on his cream-colored silk shirts, his pajamas and his underwear.

Industrious and endowed with a spider's timing for the coup de grace, Aranha was the "strong man" of the 1930 revolution which put dumpy little Getulio Dornellas Vargas into power. As No. 1 man, Vargas has been an old-fashioned South American dictator with newfangled ideas patterned on the academic peasant-paced authoritarianism of Portugal.

Aranha's philosophy of government is like that of many a Latin American who thinks democracy concerns personal rights and liberties, not necessarily a parliamentary form of government. He has parried claims that Brazil brought Fascism to the Americas by referring to Britain's class system and to slavery under the U.S. Constitution. But he was disappointed and angry when a Vargas coup in 1937 shackled elective government. For three months Aranha and Vargas were on the outs. Then Brazilians circulated the story that Aranha, a crack pistol shot, had hinted that settlement of the break "depends on one man, on one revolver, on one bullet." When Aranha was named Foreign Minister three days later, Brazilians agreed over their coffee cups that the old revolutionary cronies--one leaning toward totalitarianism, the other toward democracy--now understood each other.

The Gaucho. Aranha was born Feb. 15, 1894 in the state of Rio Grande do Sul which, like Virginia, breeds patriots; like Texas, fires them with devil-may-care dynamics. One of 17 children, he grew lean and tough as a gaucho on his father's cattle ranch. Educated in a military academy, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Sociales in Paris and the Rio de Janeiro University law school (class orator), Aranha practiced law successfully and peacefully until 1923. From then until 1930 he engineered five revolutions, picked up two bullets in his body, had part of a heel shot away and had his legs nicked with machine-gun bullets.

When word that Aranha's fifth revolution had finally deposed President Washington Luiz and his "tyranny of coffee barons," hysterical crowds carried Aranha six blocks on their shoulders, begged for a balcony speech which Aranha was too choked with emotion to give.

As Minister successively of Justice and Finance, Aranha squelched an inevitable counterrevolution, juggled Brazil's gold milreis. He started the ruthless burning and dumping of 6,000,000,000 lb. of coffee (enough to supply the world for two years) which attempted to change Brazil from a depression-ridden, one-crop nation to diversified farming.

As Ambassador to Washington in 1934, Aranha arrived wearing high, button shoes and a raincoat with a rabbit-fur collar. He could speak only two words, "Washington" and "Wonderful" with a whooshy Portuguese accent, but in a month he made a passable radio speech, in three years had signed a new U.S.-Brazil trade treaty, and had arranged to have $50,000,000 in U.S. gold pledged to bolster Brazilian currency.

Aranha's charm in explaining to matrons that, among other things, "Brazil produces orchids and diamonds for ladies as lovely as you," his parties with champagne properly chilled and dry Martinis just dry enough, and his friendship with the President and Cabinet members strengthened the prestige of the entire Latin American diplomatic corps.

The Bargaining. Most of the specific questions which Oswaldo Aranha, as President of the Conference, will have to put through the mill of discussion are questions in which the U.S. is prime mover. On the table were proposals to pool hemispheric shipping even at the immediate expense of a few individual countries; and for gearing all nations to a war economy providing maximum aid for the U.S. fighting machine. Here the checkbook of the Export-Import Bank's Warren Lee Pierson would come in handy.

But goods, not gold, were the great need of the U.S. and of other American nations. "Dollar diplomacy" was giving way to "emergency diplomacy," needing the slide-rule minds of such U.S. experts as bright, young Carl Spaeth of Washington's Economic Warfare Board, and Wayne Chatfield-Taylor, wealthy, onetime Chicago businessman, now with Jesse Jones's powerful Department of Commerce.

With Far Eastern supplies grabbed by the Jap, the U.S. needs quickly and in great quantity such strategic materials as rubber, tin, hemp, industrial diamonds, chemicals. To get them, the U.S. was prepared to talk about such specific deals as supplying railway equipment to Colombia, copper wire to Chile, a rayon "silk-hose" factory to Argentina. Long-term planning sounded a note in tune with the recent Washington pact of the 26 "United Nations."

A sour note that Ruiz Guinazu's arrival might be delayed was offset by the preConference action of Uruguay in proposing the use of Uruguayan bases by U.S. ships. From the offer of such military cooperation as this to the suggestion of an overt declaration of war against the Axis was not a step for seven-league boots. But even without a declaration, it was probable that the Conference would see wartight integration of many of Latin America's vast resources to U.S. war plants.

Out of the Palace of the Toothpuller could come a Good Neighbor policy with teeth in it.

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