THE AMERICAS: No Cause for Celebration

In the great Luna Park sports stadium of Buenos Aires, thousands of Argentine "Nationalists" gathered last week to celebrate, in their own way, the first anniversary of the Rio de Janeiro Conference. That conference had sought to achieve hemispheric solidarity against the Axis, but the festivities last week were sponsored by Naziphile General Juan Bautista Molina's Afirmación Argentina. The speeches, hailing neutrality as a diplomatic victory, were calculated to please President Ramón Castillo, who had prudently stayed away.

But all was not quite as well with "prudent neutrality" as the mass meeting seemed to indicate. For the first time, a really serious split was developing in no less a quarter than Ramón Castillo's National Democratic Party.

Tough, outspoken Justo Vincente Rocha, National Democratic Party member and president of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Argentine Chamber, brought the split into the open. In a public letter to Gilberto Suárez Lago, rotund chairman of the Castillo party, he declared that neutrality had isolated Argentina in the Hemisphere, and called for a plebiscite among the nation's leading governmental, military, religious and educational leaders. "Our role of Robinson Crusoe," he said, "is not opportune. . . ."

The good life that Argentina had known was beginning to wear thin, and with shortages cropping up here & there—notably of corn and gasoline—the serene isolationists who supported President Castillo were feeling a pinch in their pocketbooks.