The Hemisphere: Why It Happened

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Four hours after he reached Washington, Vice President Richard Nixon called to his Capitol office the newsmen who had traveled with him to Latin America and said: "The riots were a symptom. The real, basic question is why it happened."

There was surprisingly unanimous agreement throughout the hemisphere on one point: the Reds had exploited an already rotten situation. Said Puerto Rico's Governor Luis Muñoz Marin: "The Communists must have taken advantage of a feeling among certain groups well beyond the small number of Reds there are."

"You Cannot Be Loved." For some of the ill feeling that emerged there could be no remedy. The U.S. had grown to a position of world power similar to ancient Rome or 19th century Britain. Historically, strength excites fear and dislike. "You cannot be a basic power and be loved," said Ecuador's U.S.-educated ex-President Galo Plaza, with whom Nixon talked at length in Quito.

Another hate-building emotion that the U.S. cannot do much about is Latin American embarrassment over the political immaturity shown in the frequency of revolutions. Another is envy, and although the U.S. can help, it cannot bring the economic millennium full-blown to Latin American nations, raising their combined gross national product fourfold to the U.S. level.

Moreover, many noisy attacks on the U.S. are simply irrational. Nationalists denounce U.S. firms for "exploiting" the countries with investments, then charge that the U.S. hinders industrialization when its investors hold back. The U.S. was roundly condemned 13 years ago for intervening in Argentina when its ambassador criticized Dictator Juan Peron, is today condemned for not having intervened against Venezuelan Dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez.

But Nixon found out that anti-U.S. feeling is rooted in more than the emotional and the irrational. Since World War II, the U.S. has scored bad errors in policy, diplomacy and economic relations.

Dictator-Coddling & Neglect. The charge that most impressed Nixon is that the U.S. has let itself seem more and more the friend of hated dictators. Thrown in his face again and again were such questions as, "Why did Eisenhower give Perez Jimenez the Legion of Merit? Why was that ruthless dictator admitted to the U.S. with such ease after he fell?" Nixon concluded that his unhappy reception in Caracas was a direct result of "ten years of dictatorship" associated in the public mind with the U.S.

Nixon also found poor performance in Latin American diplomacy -what Latinos call "blah-blah" Pan-Americanism. The Presidents' Conference in Panama in 1956, sponsored and attended by President Eisenhower, is scorned as "just a gesture" by U.S. friends such as Galo Plaza. Except for Communist crises -the Red threat to Guatemala -Secretary of State Dulles is virtually inaccessible to hemisphere diplomats for serious discussions. He is criticized for staying at the 1954 Tenth Inter-American Conference in Caracas just long enough to jam through an anti-Communist resolution, and fly home, leaving the question of economic relations, dear to the hearts of the other delegations, to be handled by subordinates.