Gaunt Champion

Next fortnight, in Rio the 21 American republics will send delegates to the Inter-American Conference on Peace & Security. For gaunt, scholarly Raul Fernandes, Brazil's 69-year-old Foreign Minister, the meeting will be something of a personal triumph. It will give him opportunity to push his, and Brazil's, two-fold policy: Pan-Americanism and friendship with the U.S. As Brazil's chief delegate, he will wield great, if not always apparent, power.

The chief business of the conference will be the drafting of a permanent mutual defense treaty to replace temporary wartime defense measures laid down by the Act of Chapultepec (TIME, March 12, 1945). At the Pan-American Conference in Bogota next January a permanent Inter-American defense board to implement the treaty will be established. While all the American republics see eye to eye on the general nature of the defense treaty, Argentina has an important reservation. She wants the right to veto collective action. On that issue, Fernandes will have a chance to fulfill Brazil's traditional role of honest broker.

Old Hand. Ironing out rough spots is an old story to Fernandes. He was a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, to the Reparations Commission, to the League of Nations. As one of the jurists appointed to draw up the statute for the Permanent Court of International Justice, he worked out a formula that won support for the Court from both great & small powers. Those were great days for Fernandes. He has not forgotten them, and somewhat wistfully has hoped that at Rio oldtime formality could be recaptured by the wearing of white ties at plenary session.

Fernandes' wrinkled parchment skin, his few wisps of grey hair, his stooped walk, belie his energy and drive. When he stands against a window in his second-floor office in Rio's ornate Itamarati Palace, it seems almost possible to see through his fragile frame. Yet Fernandes tackles a diplomatic fight with all the enthusiasm of a young attache.

At the Itamarati, where he starts work every morning at 11, he has inherited the traditional policy of friendship for the U.S. It is one with which he has no quarrel. He does not share the cynicism of the unknown sage who once defined Brazil's foreign policy as "friendship with the U.S. because we have no alternative." He is as sincere in pursuing that policy as he is in his support of Pan-Americanism.

Strong Friend. For Fernandes the Rio conference will be chiefly significant for what it contributes to Pan-Americanism. Said he recently: "Under the impact of war, Pan-Americanism has developed from an association with strictly economic and cultural ends to an institution with political activity . . . imposing upon us a constant watchfulness and a wider understanding. The first factor of success in this new task is the friendship we must keep on cultivating zealously with the sister republics . . . and with the U.S., that proven friend."

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