Six Tired Men

The Rio de Janeiro Conference of American foreign ministers officially adjourned last week with ringing denunciations of Axis aggression, loud vivas for American unity. But late the night of adjournment the Peru-Ecuador border question, which had never been on the agenda but had delayed the conference windup for 24 hours (and made all unity speeches sound slightly hypocritical), was still being threshed out. Not until 2 the next morning did Brazilian Foreign Minister Oswaldo Aranha, making his final attempt to please everyone, order up punch, beer, assorted fruit juices and highballs for the five key diplomats who had argued, orated, threatened, compromised and finally agreed after a four-hour session in his private office.

Senhor Aranha, U.S. Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, Argentina's Foreign Minister Enrique Ruiz Guinazu, Chile's Juan Bautista Rossetti, Peru's gaunt-jowled Alfredo Solf y Muro and Ecuador's pink-cheeked Julio Tobar Donoso, each to his own taste, drank up. Still rumpled and tired, the six men filed out to a bronze-studded table in the Itamaraty Palace's Salao de Baile and before glaring camera lights and sleepy-eyed newsmen signed a protocol which settled-after 113 years of intermittent border warfare-the last major inter-American boundary dispute.

Protocol terms gave Ecuador 30,000 of a disputed 117,000-square-mile area of the arid mountains and steaming jungleland in the upper watershed of the Amazon River. Ecuador was also given free navigation rights on the Amazon and its tributaries (for potential oil shipments), but grumbled that pressure to sign had been severe. Peru did not grumble. To non-grumbling Peru Franklin Roosevelt sent a message praising "friendly consultation and mutual adjustment." To grumbling Ecuador went praise for "the spirit of cooperation and cordial collaboration."

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