Hosts with Troubles

Officially, Vice President Richard Nixon flew south from Washington this week to represent President Eisenhower at the May 1 inauguration of Argentine President-elect Arturo Frondizi. Unofficially, the U.S. Vice President was offering himself as the first top-level live target in five years* for the politicians and economists of Latin America, tight-pinched by world commodity prices and U.S. trade policies.

On his way to Buenos Aires, Nixon fitted in a good-will stopover in Uruguay; on his way back, he planned to spend one or two days each in Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru. Ecuador. Colombia and Venezuela. Good will or not. batteries of high-caliber fiscal experts in almost every capital along the way loaded their biggest guns with facts and figures aimed at one big question: What does the U.S. propose to do to help them out?

Nixon took along a pair of Latin American experts, the Export-Import Bank's President Samuel Waugh and Roy Rubottom. Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs. Pat Nixon went along to provide the feminine touch at banquets, receptions and wreath-layings along the way. The country-by-country rundown of problems and complaints: P: Uruguay's exports of wool tops to the U.S. have been virtually wiped out by a heavy U.S. duty. In addition. U.S. meat packers shut down their Uruguayan plants four months ago because of ceaseless, expensive strikes and government favoritism to a company in which it held an interest. P:Argentina needs massive help in rebuilding its Peron-shattered economy and developing natural resources, but its main exports, beef and livestock products, suffer from rundown equipment and a transportation shortage rather than from U.S. policies or the recession in the U.S. and Canada.

P:Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru, already burned by falling prices for their metal exports, are sizzling over a punishing protective tariff on lead and zinc recommended to President Eisenhower last week by the U.S. Tariff Commission. P:Colombia, like all Latin American coffee-growing countries, is squeezed between surpluses and sagging U.S. prices. P: Venezuela is dismayed at U.S. imposition of a quota on oil imports, will find faint consolation in the fact that the U.S. has restricted production at home in order to permit Venezuelan producers to keep their percentage of the U.S. market.

Said Nixon before takeoff: "Sometimes we may be such good friends that there is a temptation to think we take our friends in this hemisphere for granted. One purpose of our trip is to show them our friendship and talk over with them our mutual problems."

*Last target: Presidential Representative Milton Eisenhower, in 1953.

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