Economic Relations with Latin America

Report Outline
Latin Economic Ilis and U.S. Policies
Course of Economic Relations Since 1933
Requirements for Economic Development
Special Focus

Latin Economic Ilis and U.S. Policies

Review of policies tiwards latin america

Pressure is building up in Latin America for a review and reordering of relations, particularly economic relations, among the Western Hemisphere republics. The President of Brazil, Juscelino Kubitschek, took the problem up a month ago in a letter to President Eisenhower; more recently, in a broadcast address at Rio de Janeiro on June 20, Kubitschek called for an inter-American conference “on the highest political level of the continent” to seek remedies for the “disease of underdevelopment.”

Whether a conference of the presidents of the 21 American republics actually will be convened probably will be clarified when Secretary of State Dulles makes a scheduled visit to Brazil in the first week of August. A lower-level parley may be considered a more effective forum for attacking the complex economic problems in question. Whatever the medium, it is becoming plain that United States participation in a curative effort in Latin American countries beset by chronic economic ills is essential to improvement of over-all relations in the hemisphere community.

The violent mob attack to which Vice President Nixon was subjected in Caracas, Venezuela, on May 13 shocked the people of the United States into awareness of the fact that something had gone radically wrong in inter-American relations. Nixon himself, though blaming “Communist bullies” for engineering the outbreak, was the first to say that “We need a reappraisal of our policies so that we can counteract what has been a very insidious effect of the Soviet propaganda and subversive offensive.” The Vice President said on his return home, May 15, that “The problem in South America is accentuated by economic factors—like the fall in the prices of coffee, tin, wool-tops, lead, zinc and copper—which have increased the difficulties for the moment.”