SOUTH AMERICA: On the Map

The second of three maps visualizing the progress of President-Elect Herbert Hoover around South America appears this week in TIME. The Hoover Odyssey is chronicled in National Affairs. Lands mapped pass in brief review.

Chile. Astute observers have called Chileans the Prussians of South America. The comparison is worth remembering. Here is a compact, militant, intensely nationalist people. Though considerably less in number than the residents of New York City, Chileans command official parity among the Great Powers. Thus the U.S. sends an ambassador to 4,000,000 alert Chileans but has never sent more than a minister to 400,000,000 spineless Chinese (see China).

As were Prussians in their prime, so

Chileans are convinced that theirs is a race of destiny. Even this pretension is not an idle one. By the War of the Pacific (1879-82) Chileans wrested from ineffectual Bolivians the region of Antofagasta and from Peruvians not only Tarapaca but Arica an Tacna (see Map).

The prodigious importance of this conquest appears from its three major effects: 1) Bolivia, third largest South American country, was cut off from all access to the sea; 2) Chile acquired the largest nitrate fields in the world, taxes from which now supply over half the revenues of the Chilean Treasury; and 3) Peru was deprived even of Tacna and Arica, without which strategic provinces she cannot hope to wrest back her ravished nitrate fields.*

Naturally U. S. financiers approve the activist, acquisitive qualities of Chileans, and have dealt hugely and profitably with nearly all of Chile's able and kinetic dictators. The last of these,' Colonel Carlos Ibanez who is only incidentally President of Chile, has cleverly adopted the Anglo-Saxon technique of calling his opponents "Communists" and dealing with them as though they were desperadoes. For example the Dictator deported as "dangerous reds" (TIME, March 21, 1927) a venerable judge of the Chilean Supreme Court and several financiers who opposed his views.

Geographically it is interesting that Santiago. Chile, on the West Coast of South America, is due south of Boston, on the East Coast of North America. In other words the whole South American Continent lies thousands of miles farther East than most U. S. citizens would guess.

Racially Chileans are extremely pure, far purer than the people who seethe in the famed U. S. melting pot. Emigration to Chile has been negligible for centuries. Therefore the nationalism of Chile is like that of Prussia or France, concentrated, organized and militant.

Argentina is the melting pot of South America. Article XXV of the Argentine Constitution provides: "The Federal Government shall encourage European immigration and shall not restrict, limit, or place any tax upon the entry into Argentine territory of foreigners who come with the object of cultivating the soil and engaging in local industries."