Headlines at Last

The most deeply felt charge that serious Latin American critics level at U.S. policy is not stinginess or economic domination, but simple indifference--a lack of attention in high places. Last week the attention was coming from all over. President Dwight Eisenhower dropped word that he plans to make a good-will visit to Latin America next spring, before his trip to Russia (likely stops: Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile). And politicians of every stripe were paying Latin America the ultimate compliment of playing expert.

Claims Staked. Three presidential hopefuls have staked out claims on the area. In Puerto Rico last week, Senator Hubert Humphrey proposed a program of greater economic aid, arms reductions, a review of U.S. trade and tariff policies. Adlai Stevenson will tour Latin America in February. Nelson Rockefeller, the State Department's 1940-44 coordinator of inter-American affairs, recently suggested a single common market embracing the U.S. and the 20 Latin American states. Other high-level concern:

P: A sober warning by Central Intelligence Agency Director Allen Dulles that Latin American Communists gathered in Moscow last February, got orders to use the slogans of nationalism to "break the ties of friendship" with the U.S

P: recommendation fromOregon's Senator Wayne Morse, visiting in Buenos Aires, that the U.S. aid state oil monopolies, such as Argentina's.

P: complaint from Indiana's Senator Homer Capehart, who said after a tour of Latin America that the U.S. appoints too many do-nothing committees.*

Stop & Start. The main theme of criticism is that the U.S. merely reacts to events--"stop-and-start" diplomacy, Capehart calls it--rather than taking imaginative initiative. One example of policy drift was Panama, where the U.S. was hastening to make concessions after a series of riots. Other examples: the no-medals-to-dictators policy, which came only after all but two of the dictators had fallen, and the $1 billion Inter-American Development Bank, which seemingly grew out of the stoning of Vice President Nixon.

But the U.S., if merely reacting, has lately done so intelligently. A Caribbean arms embargo coupled with an obvious show of patience toward Cuba has taken any hemisphere-wide punch out of Castro's anti-Yankee tirades. Current U.S. investment policies are increasingly based on partnership (see below). The Inter-American Bank, mostly U.S. financed, will be in business just as soon as the remaining 18 of the 20 Latin American countries cough up their donations.

* Even Harry Truman got into the act, with a judgment that Fidel Castro "would be all right if he had a haircut and decent clothes."

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