The Frankness of Friends

This week Edward Miller, the U.S.'s fast-stepping Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, is off on another quick swing around his circuit. In a 20-day South American tour, he will pay an official visit to Brazil's new Foreign Minister Joao Neves da Fontoura, represent the U.S. at the inauguration of Uruguay's President Andres Martinez Trueba, attend the Pan American Olympic games at Buenos Aires, address the U.N. Economic and Social conferences at Santiago, and pay a courtesy call in Lima.

Reciprocal Cooperation. Miller has always been at his best on such field trips, speaking fluent, straight-from-the-shoulder Spanish and handling himself with tact and wit. This time, with the 21 hemispheric foreign ministers due to gather in Washington next month, latino leaders could expect more straight talk from the U.S. Government's top Latin American policymaker.

In Brazil, where the Dutra administration's attitude toward the U.S. sometimes seemed poisoned by a sort of grandiose inferiority complex, Miller will find a different and in some respects greatly improved situation. President Getulio Vargas has announced that he wants to cooperate with the U.S. on a reciprocal basis. In particular, he wants industrialization loans. Miller, who knows as well as Vargas that Brazil can absorb far more in development loans than the $175 million the U.S. has allotted in the last two years, will take along Francis Adams Truslow, retiring head of the New York Curb Exchange (see BUSINESS). Truslow's assignment: to provide expert financial advice and get the Point Four ball rolling in Brazil. Though Miller is sure to hear Brazilian gripes against U.S. price lids on coffee, Getulio Vargas is one statesman shrewd enough to grasp the equality-of-sacrifice idea that the U.S. hopes to get over to its Latin American neighbors.

Profitable Neutrality. At Buenos Aires' regional Olympics, Miller is likely to discuss much more with Juan Peron than track & field events. If he wants to, Miller could certainly tell Peron that U.S.Argentine relations have sagged lately, and that they are not likely to be improved by turgid Peron speeches proclaiming that not only Communism but capitalism must go. The general might also be told that the U.S. public and press do not cotton to the gagging of La Prensa or the bilious, Kremlin-style attacks on U.S. business by Evita Peron's newspaper, Democracia.

It may not be easy to convince the Argentines that friendship is a two-way street, and that full membership in the Western Hemisphere community rules out the profitable neutrality which Argentina pursued through two world wars. But Ed Miller himself has often said that Peron is "the kind of guy you can talk to."

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