Nobelman's Doctrine

Argentina for 50 years has been the leader of Latin-American efforts to have done with the Monroe Doctrine. Therefore this week 400 banquet guests in Buenos Aires audibly rustled and gasped with surprise as Argentine Foreign Minister Dr. Carlos Saavedra Lamas, recent Nobel Peace Prizeman (TIME, Nov. 30), not only praised the Monroe Doctrine but went on to deliver what cables soon called "the most laudatory speech made about the United States in any Latin-American country in the last generation."

"The great Republic of the North," cried Dr. Saavedra Lamas, "is a magnificent spectacle of human progress, continues to be in the contemporary world a creation that has never been surpassed in its political genius!" Monroe held, among other things, that a "republic is and always will be the invariable form of all governments in America," postulated the Argentine Foreign Minister. "Five countries of America, including our own. are about to elect new governments.*... It is NOT true that our Constitutions must be changed to adapt them to certain idealisms! . . . Monroe set up a retaining dam against any tendency ... to disturb the republican principles and existing political regimes in the Americas!"

Doughty General Agustin Justo, President of Argentina, has long been running this Republic in a manner smacking of Dictatorship. While still acting as Foreign Minister, Dr. Saavedra Lamas expects soon to retire. Not being in sympathy with Dictatorship, he gave the Monroe Doctrine a clever new twist, managed to make a speech which created a Latin-American sensation and which hardly could have been delivered in General Justo's Argentina had it been less clever.

*Others: Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Uruguay.

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