Hello, But No Help

One after another, President Kennedy has sent his New Frontiersmen winging south to test the temper of Latin American opinion, particularly in Brazil, where new President Janio Quadros' enigmatic ways and hands-off-Castro attitude create problems for the U.S. Last March, Latin America Task Force Chief Adolf A. Berle met an icy reserve that bordered on hostility. Two months ago, Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon, in Brazil to present Quadros with aid of nearly $1 billion, got a somewhat bigger hello, but was still hustled in and out of Brasilia's Planalto Palace via the underground garage.

Last week U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, for whom Latin Americans have a great regard, got the warmest welcome in Brazil yet. On a ten-nation tour to discuss Kennedy's Alliance for Progress --and incidentally to see if anyone had changed his mind about joint action on Castro--he found expressions of friendship and enthusiastic talk about development. But it was still no sale on Castro.

Brazil's aloof Quadros unbent farther than he has for any other U.S. diplomat. He chatted with "my dear friend" Stevenson for two hours, told the press: "I firmly believe that relations between this democracy and the great democracy of North America will become constantly closer and more intimate." On Castro, whom Stevenson tactfully refrained from bringing up first, Quadros simply reiterated his previous stand: the dictator was a problem for Cuba, not the U.S. or the hemisphere, to solve.

The message -- nonintervention -- was the same most everywhere Stevenson went. He did not have far to look for reasons. In Venezuela last week, the Communists and Castroites, who threaten every hemispheric democratic government, burned U.S. Ambassador Teodoro Moscoso's car. In Chile, where famine breeds the same Red-led peasant leagues that already plague Brazil, rioters smashed windows to protest Stevenson's visit. In hapless Bolivia, he witnessed a continuing feud between the government and tin miners that ended in five dead. And in Peru, leftist students who had declared Stevenson persona non grata were dispersed by police with tear gas.

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