Europe Is Back

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The U.S. is still far & away the leading supplier to the hemisphere, which remains, after the ECA countries, the leading U.S. market abroad. The U.S. will probably keep many of its wartime gains. In the Caribbean countries it will continue to dominate trade for the good reason that its business there runs on a two-way street. But in Argentina and Uruguay, and to a lesser extent in Brazil, Chile and Peru, the U.S. will have to reconcile itself to the European trend.

The U.S. itself—through ECA—had helped set the trend. The $400 million in Latin American business that the U.S. lost to Europe last year was one measure of Europe's recovery and the Marshall Plan's effectiveness. This year might see Europe again in possession of more than one-third of the Latin American market, now four times its prewar size and a valuable prize indeed. "Our European competitors," griped a U.S. businessman in Mexico City last week, "are simply using U.S. taxpayers' money to compete in U.S. markets." Like it or not, U.S. citizens would have to accept competitive individual defeats in Rio or the Colombian canebrakes as victories in fact for the U.S. program of rebuilding democracy's.ramparts in Western Europe.