"Foundation Stone"

The words intervention and non-intervention clashed last week like bayonets across the conference rooms of the American foreign ministers' meeting in Santiago, Chile. The U.S. ardently defended non-intervention -- against the wishful opinion of many Latin American citizens who have designs on their particular enemies. But a potent majority of the 21 ministers stuck to the proposition that intervention, no matter what the motives for it, is loaded with perils. By week's end a strong reaffirmation of the principles of nonintervention was the conference's main achievement.

Death to Yanquis. Fidel Castro's representatives arrived early with a mob of pistol-toting "newsmen" in tow. At a press conference, Minister of State Raul Roa presented Cuba's argument that those who insisted on strict non-intervention were only trying to save the skin of Dominican Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. Cuban Minister of Education Armando Hart headed for a rally of some 2,000 Communists. Two hours of his screamed charges of "U.S. imperialism" sent the mob storming down Bernardo O'Higgins Avenue toward the conference-site Carrera Hotel, chanting "Death to the yanqui murderers!" Only solid resistance by a line of grim-faced police backed by high-pressure hoses stopped the charge.

Secretary of State Christian Herter never wavered. In the 15th-floor roof-garden conference hall he told his fellow delegates that nonintervention is the "foundation stone" of hemisphere relations, although "the principle has been subjected to serious strain. Several of the revolutionary efforts directed at governments in the Caribbean area have set out from other countries. To weaken the principle of nonintervention in an effort to promote democracy is self-defeating," he emphasized, because the Caribbean tensions of the last six months have provided "just the opportunity that international Communists are always seeking."

Red-Ink Octopus. What can be done to establish democracy and human rights in dictatorships? Herter proposed the "establishment of an Organization of American States commission to chart a course that the OAS could follow in evoking the maximum cooperation for the effective achievement of democratic principles." It was the first time Herter's colleagues had heard him speak, and they were impressed. He speaks, said Colombia's Julio Cesar Turbay, "the way the representative of a great power should speak." Even Cuba's Roa said that "it was a good and hopeful speech." During Roa's own turn at speaking, he lit into the Dominican Republic, accusing it of organizing a "foreign legion" of European and Asian "mercenaries" to invade Cuba. When Dominican Delegate Porfirio Herrera Baez denied the charges, Roa yelled, "I say it all over again. You are arming a foreign legion to invade my country. I mean now, in the time of Trujillo." Cried Herrera Baez: "The octopus that has been writing in black ink now writes in red!" Shouted Roa: "Trujillo is a cretin!" A pounding gavel downed the insults in confusion.

Next day calm returned, and the delegates quietly discussed a straight-shooting definition of intervention, introduced earlier by Colombia's Turbay: supplying weapons to start a civil war, allowing the export or import of such weapons, recruiting and training revolutionaries, permitting radio or TV broadcasts that encourage rebellion in another state.

Castro himself served notice in advance that nonintervention did not apply to him. The conference was a "farce," he charged on TV, called at the urging of Trujillo. Ignoring him, the delegates hammered out their proposal for ending such threats: a revival of the OAS's Inter-American Peace Commission, with power to investigate trouble on the spot. Formed after the 1940 foreign ministers' meeting at Havana, the peace committee was crippled in 1956 by an amendment that required both the accuser nation and the accused to agree to an investigation. The renewed committee will eliminate that hobble.

In another era, intervention to protect national interests was accepted international practice, and the U.S. (having in the Monroe Doctrine forbidden Europe from intervening in the Western Hemisphere) used the doctrine at San Juan Hill, on the Isthmus of Panama, and in several other Caribbean countries where U.S. property and business were threatened. Then, bowing to Latin American opinion and cries of "dollar diplomacy," the U.S., under Coolidge, Hoover and Roosevelt, abandoned intervention, first in practice (the troops were withdrawn from three countries) and then in principle (the U.S. signed the 1936 nonintervention agreement of Buenos Aires). Today the principle of nonintervention, far more than a weapon against out-of-date U.S. meddling, is a rule of law that must apply to all of the hemisphere's nations. As Colombian President Alberto Lleras Camargo (onetime head of the OAS) once said: "A group of democratic nations may destroy an antidemocratic government by coercion and intervention. But who is going to guarantee that a coalition of antidemocratic governments will not proceed in this identical form against a pure and democratic regime?"

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