Policy Preview

Probably no one outside the U.S. listened more intently than the Latin Americans to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles' first words on new U.S. foreign policy (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). The Latinos liked what they heard about the Western Hemisphere--and wished there had been more.

The Truman Administration, said Dulles, had slipped into a "policy of neglect" toward its southern neighbors, concentrating on Europe and Asia and "taking it for granted that we could forget about South America for a time and then go back and find everything the same as it was before." Brazilians, who had been saying exactly this for years, were delighted. Said onetime Foreign Minister Oswaldo Aranha: "We are beginning a new era." Headlined Montevideo's El Pais; FOSTER DULLES HITS BULLSEYE. Bogota's El Tiempo, one of Latin America's clearest democratic voices, commented: "What is heartening is the insistence on ending the policy of indifference."

"This Rising Menace." Ranging as he did over the whole field of world relations, Dulles could touch only briefly on the dangers resulting from past neglect of the hemisphere. But two weeks earlier, testifying in hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the new Secretary had said plenty. He had in fact set forth vigorous views likely to provide the basis for a new U.S. Latin American policy. "There is a very strong, well-organized Communist movement in most of the Latin American republics," said Dulles. "There is also a fascist movement in the Argentine which has tentacles elsewhere. At the present time, in my opinion, there is ... a working alliance between the fascist and .the Communist elements to agree on at least one proposition. That is hatred of the Yankee--to destroy the influence of the so-called Colossus of the North in Central and South America."

Dulles summed up the situation in terms well calculated to rouse Senators against any further neglect: "I have a feeling that conditions in Latin America are somewhat comparable to conditions as they were in China in the mid-'30s when the Communist movement ,was getting started. They were beginning to develop hatred of the American and the Britisher, but we didn't do anything adequate about it. It ... came to a climax in 1949.

"Governor Stevenson said in his campaign that the time to deal with revolutionary activity of this sort is in its early stages and not in its late stages, and that is very true. And the time to deal with this rising menace in South America is now."

Friendship Available. With the exception of the Argentines, whose ambassador promptly denied that his government was "extremist" or meddled in the affairs of other countries, and the Dominicans, who anxiously asked their U.S. legal counsel whether Dulles could have been talking about the Trujillo dictatorship, Latino governments welcomed the new approach. Diplomats in Washington naturally wondered in what specific ways Dulles would "take adequate steps to maintain the friendly relations available to us in most of these countries." But none could doubt that the new Administration would do all in its power to repair neighborly relations and to bar a re-enactment of the China tragedy in the U.S.'s own backyard.

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