Colossus of the South

INSIDE LATIN AMERICA--John Gunfher --Harper ($3.50).

There are plenty of good books on Latin America* in the bookstores, but this is the one that everybody is going to read. Last week its advance sales (including Book-of-the-Month Club orders) reached 225,000 copies.

There are two good reasons why: 1) John Gunther has enormous prestige as a news coverer of continents (Inside Europe; Inside Asia); 2) his amassing of colorful detail is as easy to take as gossip.

The worst and best that can be said of Inside Latin America is that it is typical Gunther--broadsides of factual beef boiled down to the shreds assimilable by the man in the street. The continental scale is impressive; the book is an amazing condensation job, and so plausible that tens of thousands of readers will be sure they have been to Latin America.

How accurate is the reporting? It is probably full of slips and glib judgments.

They are inseparable from books like this, and it is idle for old South America hands to fuss & fret about them. The total picture is accurate enough--allowing for the fact that Gunther was in Latin America last winter and the tempo of changes in the Western Hemisphere is now geared to the tempo of changes in Europe. But for tabloid readability John Gunther can't be beat.

Mexico. John Gunther tore down the west coast of South America, then looped back north through Brazil and the West Indies. He began with Mexico, where he "flew over pyramids bigger than those in Egypt ... ate limes stuffed with coconut . . . found that Mexico is the country where the letter 'x' is pronounced three different ways... and where during one civic riot the taxicabs charged mounted cavalry like tanks--and won." He also talked to President Manuel Avila Camacho, who is "about as colorful as a slab of halibut," but "steady, cautious and efficient." In Mexico Gunther shed some common U.S. illusions: 1) that Mexican Presidential terms usually end with assassination (there are seven ex-Presidents living in Mexico today); 2) that all Mexican Governments are overthrown by violence (none has been overthrown since 1920).

He learned a lot about Mexican labor, land, Church, oil and political problems, and about the German colony, "probably the most effective Fifth Column agency in all Latin America." Central America. "One of the most remarkable characters in the Americas" is 63-year-old General Jorge Ubico, Guatemala's "constitutional President" who is "an utterly complete dictator." He keeps Guatemala "as orderly as an empty bil liard table," himself patrols the whole country on a motorcycle. When he finds a lazy official relaxing in an automobile, he takes the car away from him, gives him a motorcycle. "Try this for a year," he says, "and see how it shakes your kidneys up." Germans in Guatemala completely dominate the coffee industry in two provinces, in another own the railroad which is the only outlet to the sea. But Dictator Ubico would like nothing better, says Gunther, than to "toss every German . . . into a concentration camp." Then he could confiscate all their properties.

General Maximiliano Martinez, the President of El Salvador, turned out to be a theosophist. "He likes to put bottles of colored water out in the sun; once the sun's rays penetrate them, he thinks the water has therapeutic use. . . ." He has also trained himself to stare at the sun without blinking, claims it cures shortsightedness.

Martinez is a vegetarian, and what is even rarer in Latin America, a teetotaler.

President Anastasio Somoza, "absolute and undisputed boss of Nicaragua," has machine guns mounted outside his palace and moves around in a bullet-proof car.

He enjoys calling the U.S. Minister (Meredith Nicholson, aged 74) "Boy." Once the Minister's wife complained that there was no good milk in Managua, the capital. Next morning she found a cow on her doorstep -- a gift from the President.

Since President Dr. Arnulfo Arias fled from Panama, was succeeded by Adolfo de la Guardia, while Inside Latin America was in the press, the chapter on Panama is slightly dated. But there are excellent sidelights on Arias and some disturbing pages on the vulnerability of the Canal. People usually forget that there is no road across the Isthmus parallel to the Canal. "The Panama Railway (which is owned and operated by the United States) had, by charter, the right to veto any proposal for a highway that would cut into its lucrative business." President Roosevelt has ordered work begun on a road.

Colombia. In Colombia, bootblacks shine your shoes with orange peel, everybody always carries an umbrella, people consume "fantastic quantities of Scotch" at $7 a bottle, and are so polite that they call North Americans misteres instead of gringos. President Dr. Eduardo Santos is a newspaperman; the Foreign Minister (Dr. Luis Lopez de Mesa) is a psychological novelist. The first Colombian Author Gunther met was an interviewer who asked: "Do you think that intellectual fermentations, as represented by the left-wing element of the first phase of the first New Deal, are on the whole more beneficial to democracy than otherwise?" The last Colombian he met was an interviewer who asked: "What is your opinion of Dostoevsky?"

Bogota, the capital, has more bookshops than restaurants. The deputies "read their poems aloud to one another, and talk about the quantum theory." Gunther sat down to his first dinner hoping to hear about the Fifth Column and the Panama Canal, "but no one would talk about anything except Marcel Proust."

Venezuela, the poverty-stricken source of fabulous oil fortunes, has the highest cost of living in South America. Gunther's small, windowless hall bedroom cost him $8 a day. The first thing he saw in Venezuela was a large signboard reading: CURE YOURSELF OF SYPHILIS.

Peru's most important figure--more important than President Dr. Manuel Prado--is Raul Haya de la Torre, fugitive head of the outlawed Aprista Party. President Prado, says Gunther, would probably like to lift the ban against the Apristas, but if he did, they would sweep him out of office at the next election. So he doesn't.

Bolivia is "a kind of 'company town' of the tin merchants," dominated by the Army. The character of most Bolivians, says Gunther, varies from apathy "almost to the point of physical numbness, to an intense nervous irritability." Most Bolivians are illiterate, "grindingly, intolerably poor."

Paraguay's population is 60% to 70% illegitimate. The women "roll big black cigars on their thighs, and puff them stolidly," but a European woman may be stoned if she wears slacks. President General Don Higinio Morinigo, a young man whose "black hair starts an inch above his brows," has "pronounced totalitarian sympathies," but has taken "fairly strong action against Fifth Columnism."

Chile. Most detailed of Gunther's chapters are on the ABC countries--Argentina, Brazil, Chile. Chile controls the Straits of Magellan, and most of the Germans in Chile liye within easy troublemaking distance of them. These Germans are "the most typical German colony in the Americas. . . . Here a powerful race-conscious group of native-born and Chilean Germans live like Germans in The Reich." The Chilean Army was German-trained for more than 20 years and deputies in the Chilean Congress recently charged that 95% of its officers are pro-German. The "semi-militarized" police are also German-trained.

Chile has one of the world's few remaining popular-front Governments. Hence President Pedro Aguirre Cerda, an affable and astute politician, has "one of the most ticklish jobs in the Americas." His hobby is public health and "even his small talk was about diseases." He is a great admirer of President Roosevelt. The Left calls Aguirre Cerda a "bourgeois," the Right calls him "that man," other names that Author Gunther could not print.

Argentina, says Gunther, "is the key to everything"--Latin America's richest, most powerful, most progressive--and "least 'American' " State. "Its roots, its instincts, its markets" are European.

Gunther has a long section on the rights & wrongs and possible solutions for the U.S.Argentine beef problem. He also discusses such things as why Buenos Aires busses are called mata gent es (man-killers) and their drivers, asesinos (assassins); why Argentina has two Presidents (Roberto Marcelino Ortiz, Dr. Ramon Castillo); why Buenos Aires has two of the world's best newspapers (La Prensa and La Nation); what Argentines think about World War II; what they are doing about their "powerful and dangerous" Fifth Column; why they say: "When the United States talks about bases it is like stamping on every finger of our two hands." Brazil, on the other hand, is overwhelmingly pro-American, "but there are strong pro-German influences. . . ." The Fifth Column (the expression is banned from Brazilian newspapers) centers in the German Embassy, "and its life blood, the L.A.T.I., Condor, and other Axis airlines." President Getulio Dornelles Vargas is reported to have said that if his local Germans make trouble, he "will eat them alive." But "the Nazis realize the extreme importance of Brazil, and devote tremendous energy to it. ... The Germans are reputed to spend $2,500,000 per month on propaganda."

In a chapter called What to Do About It, Author Gunther makes some suggestions for bettering U.S.-Latin American relations, furthering hemisphere security:

Economics. The U.S. bought $340,000,000 worth of Latin American goods during the first four months of 1941, 50% more than it bought in 1940. Gunther's advice: buy more & more.

Aviation. The U.S. Government should "continue strenuous help" to Pan American Airways in maintaining "its splendid Latin American services."

Radio. In Latin America private U.S. short-wave stations "are pitted against the massive totalitarian efficiency of Dr. Goebbels." Latin Americans listen on some 2,000,000 short-wave receiving sets to Germany, "hear the official voice of the German nation." From the U.S. they hear "a lamentable hodgepodge of advertising talk, incomprehensible jokes . . . band music."

Propaganda. "If the United States wishes to combat Fifth Columnism successfully, it must develop a positive, aggressive propaganda of its own." At the same time, Author Gunther urges the U.S. to import Latin American culture rather than try to "uplift" Latin Americans by exporting U.S. "culture" southward. The Latin American name for U.S. cultural ambassadors: Sixth Columnists.

*Notably Hubert Herring's Good Neighbors (Yale; $3).

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