Liberator's Dream

For their final session, the delegates to the Inter-American conference rode out of scarred Bogota to the white-walled home of the first Pan American. A chill Andean drizzle fell as they gathered at the Quinta de Bolivar to sip champagne and then duck by turns into the Liberator's dark dining room to sign their treaties and conventions. As each delegate signed, a band in the patio struck up his national anthem. Halfway through, the electricity faltered, and Uruguay signed by the flickering light of a candelabra.

Except for a little weekend patching on the treaty that would set out general principles for economic cooperation, the ninth International Conference of American States was over. The hemispheric system still seemed a long way from Simon Bolivar's dream of 1822--"a society of brother nations . . . united, strong, powerful to resist the aggressions of the foreigner"--but it was headed in that direction.

No Super State. Through the Panama conference in 1826 Bolivar had tried in vain to build a league against the despotism of the Old World. Sixty-three years later U.S. Secretary of State James G. Blaine headed the first modern Pan American conference in Washington, in hopes of building a hemispheric trade system based on a newly industrialized U.S. For all the oratory, nothing much happened until World War II turned the system into a virtual Good Neighbors' alliance. It had been Bogota's job to make the wartime relationship permanent.

At Bogota, delegates had finally founded an Organization of American States, to function regionally within the U.N. setup, and had drawn up its constitution. Its new council, replacing the Pan American Union governing board, would not have the power of the U.N.'s Security Council. Screaming "super state," Argentina had squelched that move, and decisions, large & small, would still be made in 21 different chancelleries.

No Final Answer. The hemisphere got a joint military staff committee, a system for compulsory arbitration of legal disputes, an economic and social council. Henceforth a hundred unrelated activities--hemispheric postal union, sanitary conventions, cultural institutes--would be coordinated under Secretary General Alberto Lleras Camargo in Washington. At last an integrated system existed, on paper.

A unanimously adopted anti-Communist resolution had been Bogota's proof that on fundamental political questions the hemisphere's republics stood solidly together. Economic integration was something else again. Even if the new economic charter's guarantees brought a southward flow of private U.S. capital, it would not be enough for all of Latin America's economic needs. The only final salvation for dollar-short countries like Argentina lay in restoring Europe's capacity to pay for their agricultural produce with the girders, dynamos and machines so badly wanted. Economically, as Walter Lippmann put it, the hemisphere would have to learn to "take its place in the larger community of the Western world."

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