Not Even Leftovers

Latin American military attaches in Washington were down in the dumps last week. After all the fine talk since war's end about U.S. arms for the Americas, the news had leaked out that the Truman Administration's arms program would leave the Good Neighbors out in the cold.

Latino arsenals would get no more than the surplus material, originally worth $112,200,000, which the U.S. Army had rationed out to them at knockdown prices as low as 10-c- on the dollar after World War II. Of the total, the biggest amount ($20.3 million worth) went to Mexico, followed by Chile ($19.9 million), Brazil ($19.5 million) and Cuba ($15.6 million). Argentina got only $5.7 million.

When Argentina asked for more arms last summer, the Army's authority to sell at bargain prices had already expired. Thereupon Argentina made a deal to buy $7,000,000 worth of U.S.-made arms at current cost, but the dollar-shy Peron government has so far been able to pick up only $1,800,000 worth of the order. Since the Argentine deal was made, Brazil, Colombia, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Peru and Uruguay have all tried to buy in the U.S. market. Their orders have not been big enough for U.S. manufacturers to start up production lines.

Latinos who had looked to the arms bill to solve their problems now knew that the program proposed to put guns in the hands of signers of the North Atlantic pact, as well as five other strategic countries outside the Hemisphere. Awareness that the U.S. could not arm the whole world at the same time did not soften the blow. It only aggravated the soreness already caused by U.S. preoccupation with other areas as evidenced by EGA. One attache blurted out: "We Latin Americans have been getting the leftovers ever since the end of the war. Now it seems that we are not even going to get any more leftovers."

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