INTERNATIONAL: INTERNATIONAL Looking Forward

INTERNATIONAL

"Looking Forward"

The smallest South American nation— which is also wealthy, salubrious and progressive—played handsome host this week to the Seventh Pan-American Conference.

On the opening day Uruguay's picturesque Civil Guard marched glittering through the streets of Montevideo in uniforms dating from the War of Liberation from Spain (1810). Escorted by galloping lancers Dr. Gabriel Terra, heavyset, heavy-jowled President & Dictator, sped to open the Conference at 6 p. m. Alighting from their limousines in a sudden squall of wind and rain, delegates of 21 American nations clutched their silk hats and fled with flapping coattails up the marble steps of Uruguay's Legislative Palace to take refuge from the weather in its high-domed, multi-marbled and scarlet-trimmed Congressional Chamber. In the excitement the delegates of Paraguay got shunted into the spectators' gallery, failed to squirm out of the fashionable crush before President Terra took the rostrum. Their empty seats touched off pinwheels of rumor that "Paraguay has withdrawn from the Conference! She is afraid it will try to stop her war with Bolivia" (TIME, July 17).

Star delegates of the Conference were silver-haired, sweetly reasonable U. S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Mexico's darkling, pugnacious Foreign Minister Puig Casauranc, high-powered salesman of the idea that there ought to be a Spanish American League of Nations to "offset" the Yankees and Canadians. Uruguayan Communists let Senor Casauranc alone—though Mexico does not recognize the Soviet Union—but strewed the path of the U. S. Secretary of State with leaflets reading "Down with Bandit Hull! Down with Yankee Imperialism!"

Mr. Hull had come to Montevideo under the same handicap which bound him at the London Monetary & Economic Conference (TIME, June 19). On Montevideo's agenda, as on London's, were the major problems of currency and tariffs. Because President Roosevelt remains cheerfully opposed to negotiating these problems, Mr. Hull's mission at Montevideo was to carry out what Mr. Roosevelt has called his "good neighbor policy." This Secretary Hull did for several days before the Conference opened by going about Montevideo in an ordinary business suit and calling on the always cutaway-clad Latin-American delegates without previously announcing his arrival—a novelty in violation of diplomatic precedent. Especially flabbergasted were delegates of warring Bolivia and Paraguay when they returned to their hotels one day and found that the neighborly U. S. Secretary of State had called while they were out.

In his speech opening the Conference, President Terra urged the delegates to grapple: 1) with the economic issues: and 2) with the 18-month-old Chaco War of Bolivia and Paraguay.