Red Carpet

LATIN AMERICA

THE HEMISPHERE

As a part of its make-friends-with-Peron policy, the U.S. Army rolled out the red carpet last week for Argentina's No. i military man, War Minister Jose Humberto Sosa Molina. Bulky (225 Ibs.), beribboned Sosa Molina loved it. In four days of Washington wining and dining he got on the outside of everything from filet mignon (at a dinner given by Army Secretary Kenneth Royall) to Army 5-in-1 rations (at the Quartermaster General's experimental kitchen). Brisk, soldierly and correct, he went out of his way to make friends, one day waddled into the White House to present President Truman with a gift from boss Peron--a small equestrian statue of Liberator Jose de San Martin. Along with the present went a little sales talk--a copy of Social Doctrine of President Peron inscribed by Juan Domingo to Harry Truman "with great affection."

Between protocol and gastronomy, Sosa Molina got down to the business which brought him to the U.S.: military materiel for Argentina. His list included almost everything in the weapons catalogue, with a total value of about half a billion dollars. Army officials explained to him that U.S. munitions factories, unlike those in Argentina, are free to make private contracts with foreign customers (although the U.S. Government has to grant export licenses), that if Argentina had the money, it could buy arms wherever it could find them. The Army itself could do nothing for him until Congress passes the long pigeonholed Inter-American Military Cooperation bill to authorize the U.S. to sell weapons to Latin America at bargain prices.

With his country eyeing the bare bottom of its dollar barrel, Sosa Molina was in no position to order U.S.-made arms. But he would not go home emptyhanded. With the Army Department's O.K., he would probably get permission to manufacture U.S.-model weapons in Argentina.

This prospect brought no joy to Brazilian diplomats, whose nation has long been the fair-haired hemispheric boy of U.S. military planning. The U.S. had no intention of abandoning so old and strategically located a friend as Brazil. But planners in the Pentagon, thinking in terms of securing the U.S.'s southern flank, figured that Argentina is the most powerful nation in Latin America, and that Washington would do well to be on the good side of its army leaders.

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