THE AMERICAS: Chile Chooses

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Chile last week chose the United Nations course. While some 2,000 Chileans gathered outside the Senate building in Santiago's Montt-Varas Square, the Senate voted 30-to-10 for a break with the Axis. When the result was announced, the crowd broke into the national anthem. That evening tough, silent President Juan Antonio Ríos conferred at length with his Cabinet at his summer home in a Santiago suburb. The next morning he put his signature on the rupture decree.

It was no easy step for Chile. In his broadcast to the nation President Ríos warned: "Destiny may drive us to days of sacrifice and trial. We shall face them with the strong temper of Chilean character and the certitude that [they] are the price of the defense of democracy and the future of the country's honor." Chileans remembered how last November he had told them that breaking with the Axis would be tantamount to war.

The teeth of the External Security Law, which the President had signed three weeks ago (TIME, Jan. 18) for the control of enemy alien activity, were immediately bared. The regions of Chile's vital raw materials—copper, nitrate, coal—and her key ports and cities were proclaimed emergency zones. The interests of the Axis Governments were taken over by Spain. Steps were taken to arrange Axis diplomats' departure through Argentina.

Chile's break with the Axis had been expected sooner. But one last fling at an attempt to tie her course to Argentine neutrality had delayed the action by a week. Robust old (74) Arturo Alessandri, three-time President and "Lion of Tarapacá," rallied the opposition parties of the Right, brought forth a manifesto asking for a plebiscite on the issue. Perhaps the most vigorous and picturesque bourgeois liberal in half a century of Chilean politics, Alessandri succeeded in provoking a new storm of discussion. But the Government prudently declared a plebiscite unconstitutional. A Congress majority, from Radicals through Democrats to Conservatives, was for the break. The Lion of Tarapacá's roar turned out to be neutrality's swan song.