Man Against Tin

In his cluttered office on the ground floor of the Pan American Union's exotic building in Washington, shock-haired Ernesto Galarza gazed thoughtfully through a dirt-dimmed window at the sunken gardens below. What he would do next, now that he had quit his job as Chief of the Union's Division of Labor & Social Information, he did not know. Nor did he care. He had made his point.

Simon Patino's tin miners in Bolivia, whose cause Galarza had championed (TIME, Dec. 28), were back at work,* producing needed metal for the Allied war machine. Their demands for improvement of their substandard living conditions were as yet unanswered, though a special U.S. commission was preparing to investigate the dispute. By appointing such a commission, the U.S. Government had acknowledged a definite interest in the controversy, had shouldered a certain responsibility for its solution.

Said Galarza: "If the men have gone back, they have been starved back. I got down and talked with those Bolivian laborers. Most of them could neither read nor write. . . . But most of them talked warmly of President Roosevelt and Vice President Wallace. They knew what we were fighting for. ... I resolved that something must be done to help them."

Because of one thing Galarza chose to do, he got a letter from Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles. The letter castigated Galarza for spreading charges that U.S. Ambassador Pierre de Lagarde Boal had intervened with the Bolivian Government against the strikers. Galarza answered: if an impartial jury could prove his charges erroneous, he would make a "complete retraction." His resignation from the Pan American Union was the one thing left for him to do, and none knew better than Ernesto Galarza that it probably was not enough. Many a knotty problem of Latin-American economy must be solved, many an involved question of Inter-American responsibility must be answered, before Simon Patino's tin miners receive their due.

*All except (as the Bolivian Government revealed this week) 19 killed, 30 wounded.

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