Wallace to Mexico

Last week, without fuss or fanfare, the State Department announced the first great act of the Third Term: "The President has named the Honorable Henry A. Wallace, Vice President-elect, as his special representative . . . at the ceremonies of the inauguration of General Avila Camacho as President of Mexico, December 1, 1940."

That announcement was significant not because of the choice of modest, unassuming Henry Wallace for the honor. It had long been prophesied that Henry Wallace would have a big part to play in Term III. By the announcement the U. S. officially recognized swart, genial, polo-playing Manuel Avila Camacho as the winner of the election last July--but it had long been generally known that Avila Camacho would get the U. S. nod. What the Wallace announcement showed was the direction of Third Term Latin-American diplomacy. Through the first two administrations of President Roosevelt, U. S. citizens gradually became aware of the patient, unpretentious work of Secretary of State Cordell Hull in pushing the Good Neighbor policy. That Henry Wallace would attend the Avila Camacho inaugural meant that a big effort was being made to turn Cordell Hull's Pan-American preparation into dramatic accomplishments.

The Wallace visit promised to be the curtain raiser. The Mexican Government had invited an imposing list of U. S. dignitaries: Under Secretary Welles from the State Department, Democratic Senator Robert Wagner and Republican Senator Charles McNary, two Representatives from the House, Defense Commissioner Sidney Hillman and others. Henry Wallace planned to drive quietly with his secretary James Le Cron to Laredo, Tex., join the Mexican Ambassador to the U. S. there, then motor over the Pan-American highway that cuts straight through the bleached desert to Monterrey before it climbs the mountains to the plains of Mexico City. There were no longer fears 14 that an uprising of Almazanistas would mar the ceremony.* There was no doubt that warmhearted, impulsive Mexicans could give a magnificent show for the Vice President-elect-- putting into it the same emotion, enthusiasm and exuberance that they display on their occasional anti-American demonstrations, or, the celebrations that commemorate the seizure of the foreign oil properties.

In Henry Wallace they would be saluting the New Deal's foremost theoretician of Latin-American relations. He believes that Latin America must be prosperous if U. S. democratic forms are to survive. He visualizes great intercontinental highways, college students vacationing through Latin America, Spanish and English interchangeably spoken.

Thus when Henry Wallace crosses the Rio Grande he will be in the position of a theoretician facing reality. Well-wishers feared that the experience might not be entirely comfortable. Exquisitely polite and hard-boiled Mexican politicians never yawn during a speech on U. S. friendship with Mexico.

Last week one hard reality that Ambassador Wallace will face popped into the news, popped out again. From Mexico City came detailed reports that a secret U. S.-Mexican agreement on naval and air bases--at Tampico, Veracruz, Acapulco and five other key spots--had been signed two weeks before. The report was quickly denied (see p. 32). Whatever the military importance of these bases, they dramatized the difficult position of Avila Camacho in Mexico's internal politics. There seemed little logic in Mexico's continuing a defiant policy on oil expropriations if Mexicans believed stories that the U. S. would have naval bases near the oil fields. If U. S.-Mexican relations flowed smoothly, Avila Camacho would be in the position of having solved the great problem of friendship with the U. S. that has baffled every President before him. If they did not, he would be vulnerable to the most deadly charge hurled against a Mexican politician--that of having turned over harbors and strategic centres to the hated Yanquis.

Ambassador Wallace planned to travel on through Latin America after the inauguration. In every Latin-American capital notes will be taken on his performance in Mexico City. When the thoughtful agrarian from Iowa sits down with the affable polo player from Puebla, theories of the Pan-American future will have come face-to-face with Pan-American realities of the present. What Latin America thinks of his actions in Mexico will set the course for the rest of his visit. What the U. S. concludes may well sound the overture for the great events of the Third Term.

*In Manhattan, General Juan Andreu Almazan warned that Mr. Wallace would be taken on a staged tour of the country comparable to the staged tours of Soviet Russia, but added that Mr. Wallace was a man of the world and intelligent and would discover that the people of Mexico themselves were for Almazan.

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