Awake at Last

We shall create a new Germany there.

We shall find everything we need there.

--Adolf Hitler.

The continent of South America, as few U. S. citizens seem able to remember, lies, not due south of the U. S., but southeast, poking a broad, inquisitive nose toward Africa, only 1,600 miles away. Valparaiso, on the west coast of South America, is east of New York City, on the east coast of the U. S. Paraguay, in the heart of South America, is equidistant from Kansas City and from the Mediterranean. Racially, politically, economically, this vast, rich and fractionally developed continent is much closer to Europe than to the U. S.

Yet the ten republics of South America, which, like the U. S., won their independence from Europe by revolutions, are jealous of their freedom. Last week, unlike the U. S., they were wide-awake to the dangers that seemed to threaten it. Mussolini's cynical declaration of war had been all that was needed to stir Latin America.

In its own ways it reacted: > In Bogota, La Paz and Montevideo, students stoned Italian commercial establishments, demonstrated in front of the German and Italian Legations.

>In Buenos Aires, some 200 Nazi toughs packed the Renacimiento Theatre for the showing of a German propaganda film, The Siegfried Line. They did not know that 100-odd young Argentine hotbloods. mostly athletes and amateur boxers, had also decided to see The Siegfried Line that night. When the Nazis began shouting "Heil Hitler!" the natives responded with "Abajo Hitler!" and a barrage of jumbo firecrackers. The lights went on, women screamed, and the Argentines systematically went to work on the Hitlerites. Police who tried to break up the melee had their clubs snatched and used on the Germans. Two score Argentines were arrested and released next day. Showing of The Siegfried Line was banned.

>In Buenos Aires, Minister of Justice Jorge Eduardo Coll resigned from the Cabinet after he had challenged Fascist-minded Senator Matias Sanchez Sorondo to a duel.

For the most part, however, official reactions were more coolheaded, if no less decisive. In Colombia, the Government-owned airline, Avianca (formed by the merger of Colombia's Saco Co. and the German Scadta System), fired all its German employes, arranged with Pan American Airways for U. S. pilots and instructors. Ecuador took steps to get rid of the Italian military mission which has been training her Army for 15 years. Argentina hastily sent her fleet of efficient river gunboats to patrol the river frontiers of Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil, rushed frontier guards into Entre Rios Province, where a Nazi plot was reported brewing. The entire Police Department of Buenos Aires was reorganized after the Ministers of War and Marine charged that it was not cooperating in rounding up fifth columnists.

Uruguay had the worst scare, and, like Mexico, went after big fish (see p. 34). A Congressional investigating committee gathered evidence on which it planned to dissolve German organizations and start criminal proceedings against "Fiuehrer" Julius Dalldorf and other leaders. Before this could be done, German Minister Otto Langmann announced that the Nazi Party and German Labor Front had been voluntarily dissolved. The Government replied by arresting twelve Germans, went ahead with its report, which traced Nazi activities directly to Minister Langmann. Three German gliders, one parachute and a dismantled radio station were found in a Nazi Stutzpunkt (strong point) near Montevideo and police in automobiles and airplanes began combing the country for more Stutzpunkte.

Getulio Sounds Off. Through all this excitement, to sensible men's minds came the realization that, not from obscure fifth columnists or Stutzpunkte, but within the Governments themselves, lay the chief danger of Fascist domination of South America. By far the largest of all South American countries, with a territory as great as all the rest put together (3,275,510 sq. mi.) and greater than that of continental U. S., is Brazil. It contains 44,000,000 of South America's 88,000.000 inhabitants. It is fabulously rich in natural resources almost completely undeveloped. It is potentially strong enough to dominate the continent. From Brazil's Dictator-President Getulio Dornellas Vargas last week came a speech that made the entire Western Hemisphere stop to think.

To celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Riachuelo, great Brazilian naval victory over Paraguay, tubby little Getulio Vargas went aboard a warship in Rio de Janeiro harbor, and, after wining well, got up to address the assembled officers. It was the day after President Roosevelt's Charlottesville speech and President Getulio first paid his respects to hemisphere solidarity. "We are united by ties of strict solidarity with all American countries around the ideas, aspirations and common interest in our defense," said he.

Next he launched into what sounded like a paean of praise for totalitarianism. Excerpts:

"Vigorous peoples fit for life must follow the route of their aspirations. . . . Political democracy is replaced by economic democracy. . . . There is no longer a place for regimes founded on privilege and distinction. . . . We are marching toward a future different from all we know in economic, political and social organization, and we feel that old systems and antiquated formulas have entered a decline. It is not, however, as pessimists and stubborn conservatives pretend, the end of civilization, but the beginning, tumultuous and fecund, of a new era."

"Valiant words!" cried a "war bulletin" issued by the German Embassy in Buenos Aires. The Buenos Aires Critica thought differently, headlined its report of the speech: VARGAS, WITH FASCIST LANGUAGE, JUSTIFIES THE AGGRESSION OF THE BARBARIANS. In Washington, the State Department refused to get excited, intimated that Getulio was talking for domestic consumption. That was what the Brazilian Press & Propaganda Department said. Getulio himself assured the President by cable that his speech could "in no sense be regarded as contradictory" to the Charlottesville address.

These protestations did not satisfy U. S. Pundit Walter Lippmann, who shook a stern forefinger and warned: "President Vargas made it clear to us that if we permit the Axis to win in Europe, the Axis will not have to conquer what it covets in South America. . . . There will be dictators . . . who will ally themselves with Hitler and Mussolini. . . . Our problem, then, will not be how to defend this hemisphere against Europe. Our problem will be how to defend ourselves in this hemisphere."

Brazil's Problem is no less difficult than the U. S. problem Pundit Lippmann posed. In the ten years that he has maintained himself in power by rewriting the Constitution when he pleased, Dictator Vargas has played a game of posing as the U. S.'s best South American neighbor while yielding more & more to totalitarian influences. Today his Foreign Minister, Oswaldo Aranha, is prodemocratic, pro-Ally, pro-U. S., while his War Minister, Eurico Dutra, and his Marine Minister, Enrique Guilhem. are outspokenly pro-Nazi. His people are prodemocratic, his Army pro-totalitarian.

Foreign influences are strong. Brazil has some 3,500,000 Italians and sons-of-Italians. Last year Edda Mussolini Ciano took a "health trip" to Brazil, where her chief host was Dom Joao de Orleans e Braganga, "heir" to the Brazilian throne and patron of the Integralistas, super-Fascist greenshirts whom Dictator Vargas has so far managed to suppress.

Less numerous (500,000 to 1,000,000), but far more influential and vociferous, are the Germans. Cultural infiltration by Naziism has been carefully planned, is systematically carried out. Schools get textbooks, funds and teachers from Germany. Nazi organizations are affiliated with parent bodies in Germany. A German-controlled news agency provides radioed news from the Fatherland via teletype at a nominal charge. German radio broadcasts come in clear while U. S. programs are blotted out. Cinema houses get German entertainment and propaganda films and even radioed war photographs free. There are 15 German-language news papers in Brazil and many Portuguese and Spanish papers are subsidized from Berlin.

More significant, even, than propaganda are Nazi influences on the military classes and on business interests. German military prestige with the Brazilian Army grows with each new success in Europe. Military missions go back & forth between Rio and Berlin; Berlin courts Army, Navy and Air Corps heads with assiduity. Last April. War Minister Dutra and Chief of Staff Goes Monteiro were given Germany's highest decoration awarded to foreigners, the Grand Cross of the Order of the German Eagle, and officers down to the rank of colonel were decorated. In a country with 75% illiteracy and a dictatorship from above, one Dutra or Goes Monteiro is worth 100,000 gauchos.

Germans in Brazil own textile factories, dye works, paint & chemical plants, machine and tractor factories. They run retail establishments, hotels and restaurants up & down the country. The German-owned airline, Syndicato Condor, operates down the Brazilian coast to Buenos Aires, across the Andes to Santiago. It also runs a profitless branch line to Xapury, 2,000 miles up into the Amazonian wilderness. Germany tried to underwrite a huge Brazilian steel industry, but was outmaneuvered by Washington, which last week was waiting for approval from Rio of a $17,000,000 Export-Import Bank loan.

To combat totalitarianism Brazil has no democratic tradition worth the name. It is split by sectional, racial and cultural differences. About 30% of its population is white, about 5% pure Indian, 12% pure black; the rest are mixed. There is a small upper class, a smaller middle class, a large, illiterate, exploited lower class. This class has no franchise, no influence, no right of assembly, of organization, of free speech. Dictator Vargas' Estado Novo (New State), has talked loudly of bettering their lot, is still talking.

A Brazilian monthly Observador Economico e Financeiro, last year defined Brazil's three possible courses as follows: "1) Absolute understanding with the totalitarians; 2) economic understanding with them and political identification with formal democracy; 3) economic understanding and political identification with democracy." Preferred was the third--"if it is possible." The great and all-important economic rub to Course 3 is that coffee is the only thing Brazil exports that the U. S. wants, whereas the Germans want many raw materials, including cotton, from Brazil in exchange for her manufactured goods.

Brazil has been within the orbit of U. S. influence because of two things and two things only: U. S. financial help and U. S. military might. Last week both of these seemed to weigh less as Adolf Hitler and his army continued their march across Europe capturing riches as they went.

Last week Dictator Vargas still had not decided which way to go. He was still trying to wangle favors from both sides, to keep the favor of both sides. But he did the U. S. and South America a big favor by calling attention to Brazil's dilemma and to the Western Hemisphere's prime danger.

"We shall not land troops like William the Conqueror and gain Brazil by the strength of arms. Our weapons are not "visible ones."--Adolf Hitler

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.