Only A Beginning

Recognizing that fulfillment of our goals will require the continuation of the Alliance for Progress beyond 1971, I wish to inform the conference that the United States will be prepared to extend mutual commitments beyond the time period foreseen in the charter of Punta del Este.

If Latin Americans had any lingering doubts about U.S. sincerity in the Alianza, President Johnson last week laid their fears to rest. In a message read by Secretary of State Dean Rusk at the OAS foreign ministers' meeting in Rio, Johnson said that the original ten-year, $20 billion program for social and economic progress is only a beginning. The U.S. is prepared to go perhaps another ten years, possibly longer, to help Latin America achieve its economic aims.

Rusk also told the delegates that the U.S. hopes to bring the Alianza into the actual framework of the OAS, thus making the program more multilateral in scope. In a special resolution, the U.S. called for the appointment of a joint committee to propose OAS charter amendments incorporating the economic and social goals of the Alianza. Final approval of the amendments would come at a future meeting.

Time to Sink In. In an otherwise generally successful conference, there was one area of doubt that was not dispelled. Throughout the meeting, the U.S. delegation quietly worked to drum up support for a permanent inter-American peace force, patterned on the six-nation brigade currently on duty in the Dominican Republic. "If we face the fact that there are those who seek with purpose and persistence to destroy democracy," Rusk told delegates, "we ought to be prepared to move fast and effectively and, if possible, together." Hardly any Latin American statesman today would deny the danger of Castro-Communist subversion. Yet so strong is the tradition of nonintervention that only twelve of 20 nations expressed any interest in an OAS peace-keeping force. Led by Mexico and Chile, the others were still against the idea. Colombia even introduced a resolution--which was swiftly pigeonholed--censuring the U.S.'s "unilateral armed intervention" in the Dominican Republic.*

The U.S. and its supporters at Rio, most importantly Brazil, are hopeful that a genuine hemisphere peace force will one day come into being. But Rio was not the place to press the issue. As Brazil's Foreign Minister Vasco Leitao da Cunha said: "It's going to take time for the idea of an interAmerican peace force to sink in."

Taste for Answers. In the meantime, the U.S. sought only a friendly consensus on the basic need to make the OAS mechanism more sensitive to to day's needs. In their final report this week the delegates will agree on the urgent need for a general foreign ministers' meeting once a year, instead of waiting eleven years as they had the last time. The next conference will probably be held in July. "We face new realities now," said OAS Secretary-General Jose A. Mora. "Because of growing social and economic pressures, there is no time for leisurely analysis. Our people have developed a taste for fast answers and urgent change."

* Which at that was not so far from the position taken by New York's peripatetic Junior Senator Bobby Kennedy, who during a three-week Latin American tour has been drawing student cheers by calling the original U.S. Dominican intervention "a mistake."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.