Halt in the Dialogue

Scarcely a year ago, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger proclaimed the beginning of a "new dialogue" between the U.S. and Latin America. By last week, however, the dialogue had stuttered to an awkward halt.

The immediate cause was the new U.S. Foreign Trade Act. The act eliminates tariffs on about $750 million worth of Latin American goods, but excludes members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries from these benefits. OPEC members Venezuela and Ecuador are directly affected, though neither supported the Arab-led oil embargo of 1973-74.

Diktat Diplomacy. To many Latin Americans, the slap at Venezuela and Ecuador smacked of old-style U.S. diplomacy by diktat--no consultation, no negotiation. Twenty of the 24 members of the Organization of American States blasted the trade act as "discriminatory and coercive." Last week Argentine Foreign Minister Alberto Vignes announced that his country was postponing "indefinitely" the March meeting of OAS foreign ministers. Vignes was partly motivated by a reluctance to host a conference whose outcome--on the question of regularizing relations between the hemisphere and Fidel Castro's Cuba--was likely to fail. But the trade act gave him a handy excuse.

Kissinger denounced the cancellation of the meeting and pointed out, quite accurately, that the Administration had opposed the clause concerning OPEC members from the first but was overridden by Congress. Then the Administration persuaded Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas to introduce an amendment to the act that would grant nondiscriminatory trade treatment to those oil exporters that had not participated in last year's oil embargo.

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