Hour of Decision

(See Cover)

In a small house in Buenos Aires' Calle Juncal last week a bustling blonde housekeeper dusted provincial furniture, straightened somber religious pictures, made an old-fashioned brass bed. Icy rains had brought autumn to Argentina, and the master of the house in the Calle Juncal, Ramon S. Castillo, was moving in from his suburban quinta in Martinez beside the Rio de la Plata. In the domed Palacio del Congreso, Acting President Castillo's political housekeepers were similarly occupied. They swept out the debris of one of the most extraordinary sessions any legislative body had ever held, made ready for the opening of a new session of Congress this month. At this session Acting President Castillo must make a decision that will vitally affect Argentina, the U.S. and the world: which world to join in World War II.

If Britain fell, Argentines knew that they must choose between Germany and the U.S. But Argentines also knew that the decision could not wait until the war was decided. Each new move of the U.S. toward war brought more & more un comfortable pressure on Argentina to choose -- and choose now.

Most of Argentina's fellow American republics thought Axis ships should be seized and had seized as many as they could. Bases were wanted by the U.S. throughout Latin America and most of the Latin-American republics were willing to make bases available. But Argentina had not yet decided to seize ships. Argentina had not yet decided to yield bases for hemisphere defense. With not much trust in the good intentions of any great power, Germany, Britain or the U.S., Argentina was trying to be neutral in an almost totally unneutral world. Acting President Castillo said so again last week: "Argentina will continue to maintain neutrality in the European war." It was significant that the No. 1 Argentine should refer to the World War as European. Replied U.S. Ambassador Nor man Armour (in a speech to the Buenos Aires English Club) : "Between those who destroy the law and those who observe it there is no admissible neutrality." The decision was a desperately difficult one for Argentina to make. In no free country was the economic outlook bleaker or the contrast sharper between what the nation wanted and what it had.

Ships and Sheep. Turning the problem over in his mind as he sat at his desk in the Casa Rosada,* Ramen Castillo had only to look out of the window to see one miserable aspect of it: Buenos Aires har bor, once South America's busiest port, almost deserted of shipping, with 18 German and Italian vessels lying at anchor as reminders of the pressure on him. Once an average of 150 ships a day put into Buenos Aires. Now there are about 26 a week. Of 400,000 tons of meat which Britain contracted for six months ago, Britain has been able to move only some 75,000 tons so far. In Patagonia, where storage space is already crammed to capacity, 1,500,000 head of sheep cannot be slaughtered because there are no ships to take the mutton away. Yet soon they must be slaughtered anyway, to keep the rest of the herds from starving.

The basic fact in Argentine economy is that Argentina is normally the greatest surplus-food producer and exporter in the world. Animal and agricultural products make up 93% of her total exports, and exports represent about half the value of her total national production. Argentina supplies three-fourths of the world's trade in beef and veal; she grows two-thirds of the world's linseed; she is the world's largest exporter of corn, its second-largest exporter of wheat, wool, lamb and mutton. Blockade and counter-blockade have played havoc with this trade, for the No. 2 fact in Argentine economy is that 70% of Argentina's foreign trade is normally conducted with Europe. In the first quarter of 1941 her foreign trade was off 48% from last year.

In this extremity the U.S. has lent Argentina $50,000,000 to support the peso, has made $60,000,000 available in Export-Import Bank credits for industrialization. These loans have done nothing to solve the fundamental problem, which is simply this: Where is Argentina to sell most of her surplus food? Britain cannot take it. The U.S. will not take it. Germany says she will.

Though the U.S. takes 25% of Argentina's linseed export, which ranks far above chilled and frozen beef, beef has become the sourest note of the economic disharmony between Argentina and the U.S. The reasons are psychological as well as economic. Argentines bitterly resent the fact that their beef is barred from the U.S. for so-called sanitary reasons (hoof-&-mouth disease, which the Argentines deny their cattle have). They resent the fact that in 1935 Secretary of State Cordell Hull signed a convention which would have admitted some meat into the U.S., but the Senate has never ratified it. From the Argentine point of view, Argentina's export troubles are not hers alone, but also a U.S. problem. If the U.S. wants Argentina on the U.S. side against Germany, the U.S. must provide an export market. The alternative is doing business with a victorious Germany, and that does not yet present many terrors to Argentines.

The Caudillos. For reasons psychological and political, Argentina has always been, and still is, reluctant to join any front, to surrender even to the smallest degree control of her destiny to others. The most powerful and ambitious country in all South America, Argentina nevertheless feels herself frustrated. The causes date back to the "Period of Anarchy" just following independence, when the vast southeastern regions of the continent were ruled by provincial caudillos (leaders) and Buenos Aires was trying to establish authority over the provinces. By the time the great caudillo, Juan Manuel de Rosas, had succeeded in unifying a part of the country, three States had broken away from it: Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia. Although Argentina has long since rejected any idea of recovering these countries, she considers herself leader of the entire region which once formed the United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata.

After the rebellion of 1852, which ousted Rosas, the country began to grow in strength and in wisdom, until it forged far ahead of other South American countries of its time. The Presidency of General Julio A. Roca (1880-86) was the golden age of Argentina. Railways doubled their length, and wherever the railroad went it multiplied tenfold the value of the fabulously fertile land. Wider and wider tracts of the southern plains were opened to pasture and to tillage. Foreign trade almost doubled. British capital poured in. Improved steam navigation brought Europe nearer; exports of grain increased year after year and the export of meat began.

During those six years nearly 500,000 Spanish and Italian immigrants came in, and every year thousands of Italians traveled 6,000 miles to reap the harvest and carry home their pay in golden coins to squander in Calabria and Sicily. The Argentines called them golondrinas, after the migrating swallow.

But Argentina never realized the great promise of her golden age. After Roca there was a period of political corruption, speculation, overexpansion and bitter boundary disputes with Brazil and Chile. Against the power of the upper-class landowners a rising middle class and the masses united in a Radical Party, and though both Conservatives and Radicals have split into many factions, this-fundamental political cleavage has continued. It has torn the country internally and prevented it from achieving the destiny it dreamed of.

One of Argentina's best friends and severest critics, Spanish Philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset, wrote of the Argentine predicament: "A nation may plan for itself a mediocre existence or a soaring ascent. Argentina is not satisfied with being run of the mill. She lays claim to a superb future, a history studded with triumphs; she is resolved to rule. . . . But so lofty a project entails certain inconveniences. . . . When ... by dint of focusing on the project we forget that it is not yet accomplished, we may easily end by believing ourselves already in the state of perfection. And the worst of this is not that we are mistaken, but that it prevents our actual progress, there being no more unfailing way of not progressing than regarding one's self as perfect. . . . Something of this sort, I fear, is happening in the Argentine nation."

Whether or not this appraisal is sound, through five Pan-American Conferences sponsored by Good Neighbor Roosevelt and his Apostle to the Latins, Cordell Hull, Argentina has not felt that it was to her best interests to go the way the U.S. and the majority of the other American republics wanted to go. Though her reasons have been modeled on juridical correctness and advanced with logical precision, shrewd observers have suspected that another reason was prestige, that Argentina was naturally determined, if there must be a caudillo in hemisphere affairs, the caudillo would be Argentina. Against this caudillo principle the U.S. has advanced the principle of cooperation as equals, but realistic Argentines never believed in it. Still less did they believe in it when last year the U.S. tried to get naval and air bases in next-door Uruguay.

The Argentines feel about bases for the U.S. almost as strongly as the Irish feel about bases for Britain. Opposition to the bases among the Argentine people was so nearly unanimous that no political leader has dared to come out openly in favor of them. As one of his last acts before resigning his post, Foreign Minister Julio Argentino Roca patched up a deal with Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia and Paraguay, whereby any bases that are built will be built by the five countries concerned.

Problem in Democracy. Last week Acting President Castillo announced that he would govern by decree temporarily, i.e., until the Chamber of Deputies ends the legislative boycott which caused its last session to accomplish nothing. The issue which caused the Chamber to refuse to pass legislation was fundamental: how far can the democratic process survive in Argentina?

Because Argentina's middle and lower classes are more numerous than its landowners, the Radical Party has held power most of the time since election laws were reformed in 1912. The Conservatives have been able to govern only through coup, coalition, accident or coercion. Ramon Castillo got into politics through a coup, became Vice President through coalition and Acting President through accident. He may become President through his Party's custom of thwarting the democratic process at the polls.

Last December, elections were held in the Provinces of Santa Fe and Mendoza. In Argentina provincial elections determine the outcome of the Presidential election because the victorious party controls the election machinery. The Conservatives won in Santa Fe and Mendoza and outraged Radicals marched on Buenos Aires, loudly charging fraud. The Conservatives did not deny the charge. To demands by the Radical-controlled Chamber of Deputies that Federal interventors be appointed in the two provinces, Acting President Castillo turned a deaf ear. The Radical Deputies thereupon declared their legislative boycott. Not even a budget could be passed.

Ramon S. (for nothing) Castillo-was born in the small mountain town of An-casti in the backward, religious, traditionalist, poverty-stricken Province of Catamarca on the 20th of November, 1873, the son of Rafael Castillo and Maria Barrionuevo. The family was partly of conquistador stock; a family of small estancieros, not rich but well-connected in the Province. When he was eleven Ramen entered the Colegio Nacional in the provincial capital of Catamarca, where he founded Argentina's first student paper, El Estudiante. Between his graduation from the law school of Buenos Aires University in 1896, and 1918, when he retired from the bench, he was a judge of many courts. As a jurist he was juridically impeccable; no decision of his was ever reversed by the higher court. On resigning from the bench he decided to enter politics and took an active part in the Uriburu-Justo Conservative coup of the 6th of September, 1930, which forced General Hipolito Irigoyen out of the Presidency. Castillo was rewarded with the post of Interventor in Tucuman Province.

In 1932 he became Senator from Catamarca Province. His legislative record consisted of pork-barrel projects and the world's best bankruptcy law. In January 1936, President Agustin P. Justo made him Minister of Justice, later Minister of the Interior. His most notable accomplishment in that office was the establishment of the still-existent Argentine postal censorship. In June 1937 he resigned to campaign for the Vice-Presidency on the coalition ticket headed by Roberto M. Ortiz. Ortiz was a Radical whom the Conservatives thought they could handle, Castillo a Conservative who was considered harmless by the Radicals. Nobody could foresee then that Ortiz would infuriate his Conservative supporters by fighting for honest elections, or that before he could complete his reform he would be laid low with diabetes, plumping Castillo into the Casa Rosada. Castillo has been Acting President of Argentina since last July 3 (TIME, July 15).

This short, slight man with the slightly scraggly grey hair has more in common with the late Calvin Coolidge than the fact that he came to power by accident. He has a sardonic sense of humor, a deliberate manner and enormous practical shrewdness, which has earned him the nickname El Zorro (The Fox). He has no hobbies, takes no exercise; his family life consists of daily visits to his daughter Delia's house, where he plays with his grandchildren (see cut, p. 40). A hard, patient worker, in the ten months he has been Acting President he has worked hard and patiently to perpetuate his Party in power.

Behind Castillo is a junta of shrewd politicians: onetime President Justo, Senate President Robustiano Patron Costas, Senator Antonio Santamarina, Boss Alberto Barcelo of Buenos Aires Province, Fascist-minded Manuel A. Fresco, onetime Governor of Buenos Aires. About the only thing that could upset their plans would be the return of President Ortiz, and a Conservative-controlled Senate Committee has ruled that the President is too nearly blind to read the bills he would sign. Disorganized by Ortiz' illness and frightened for Argentina's future, the Radicals are now split into two camps, one led by onetime President Marcelo Torcuato de Alvear favoring cooperation with the Conservatives. Even Radicals are beginning to fear that unless Argentina ends the political strife which has weakened her for two generations, she will commit national harakiri.

What choice Acting President Castillo would make in Argentina's most pressing question was still his secret. "All solutions will become known as the Government issues new decrees," said he last week. Onetime President Justo, however, had already made up his mind: that the U.S. would "git thar fustest with the mostest men."

Those Argentines who would go the London-Washington way see Argentina's future in gradual industrialization that would free her from utter dependence on exports. But Argentina's old-guard Conservatives, of whom Castillo is the archetype, represent landowners and not the masses. Above all they are for Argentina and her still-unrealized destiny.

* Argentina's White House is pink.

* Pronounced Castijo. The Castilian liquid Il which is sounded as y in most Spanish-speaking countries, becomes a soft j in Argentina.

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