Coffee Nerves

To the U.S. Senate subcommittee's buckshot blast at high coffee prices (TIME, June 19), Latin America reacted with its loudest collective yelp in years. By accusing the latinos of rigging the coffee market and by bluntly suggesting some undiplomatic ways to force prices down aga (e.g., "scrutinizing" loan to coffee countries, encouraging production in other countries, policing the coffee trade, etc.), Iowa's Senator Guy Gillette and his colleagues had managed to wound the good neighbors' sensitive pride and threaten their pocketbooks as well.

"A model of indelicacy, intimidation and _ revolting brutality," snapped Rio's leading conservative newrpaper Correio da Manha. "A tremendous blow to the Good Neighbor-policy ... an unwarrinted set of interference," cried Colombia's Foreign Minister Evaristo Sourdis. While a crowded Chamber chorused "Muito bem--hear, hear," Brazilian Deputy Plinio Barreto boomed: "For reasons of demagoguery, electoral expediency or exhibitionism, Senator Gillette has roused an anti-Brazilian movement in the U.S." A Nicaraguan cartoonist drew Senator Gillette stripping Central America's coffee trees to their roots with a thin, blue blade.

Roused by angry, sputtering cables from home, Washington's coffee-country ambassadors rushed into action. In short order they had Senate Majority Leader Scott Lucas, a member of the subcommittee, declaring that he had never attended a meeting and didn't go along with the report at all. The Organization of American States' coffee commission whipped out a report charging, among other things, that Senator Gillette was encouraging Communism by trying to get the price of coffee down. The ambassadors themselves huddled for days at sage, broom-browed Mauricio Nabuco's Brazilian embassy, batted out a lengthy rebuttal of the Gillette report ("it proposes . . . [potential] economic warfare against our nations"), defended the year's 70% rise in coffee prices as the natural consequence of "the law of supply & demand."

This week Dean Acheson received a joint protest from 14 Latin American envoys, assured them that the U.S. was still their good neighbor. Senator Gillette's forthright recommendations seemed likely to be modified or shelved. As long as coffee sold in U.S. stores around 77-c- a lb., the latinos would continue to enjoy what one cynical ambassador had called "a Marshall Plan of our own."

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