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3. Sanitary Embargo, Cultural Connections, and Wartime Neutrality, 1924–1946
- University of Georgia Press
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3 Sanitary Embargo, Cultural Connections, and Wartime Neutrality, 1924–1946 Traditionally, historians have considered the period from 1924 to 1946 one of escalating misunderstanding and conflict between the United States and Argentina. It began with the political fallout from the Fordney-McCumber Tariff (1922) that imposed heavy duties on many Argentine exports. Argentine leaders accused the United States of restricting fair and free competition. Then came the spread of footand -mouth disease in Argentina, the U.S. ban on Argentine beef in 1926, and Argentine denunciations that the United States was now relying on trumped-up charges of unhealthy cattle to block beef imports from South America. Problems continued in 1928 at the Sixth Conference of American States in Havana. At that meeting Argentine representative Honório Pueyrredón spoke out against U.S. intervention in Nicaragua and elsewhere in the Americas. In 1936, U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt traveled to Argentina for a meeting the United States had called to promote a new inter-American security agreement. Although Roosevelt received a warm welcome from Argentines , the meeting ended without the agreement the United States had sought. Argentina was among the nations most suspicious of what looked like an American effort to revive the Monroe Doctrine. Many U.S. diplomats and policymakers began to view Argentine leaders as uncooperative and irascible. The period ended with the Second World War and the rise of Juan D. Perón in Argentina. During the war, Argentines viewed the United States as hostile and limiting of Argentine strategic and commercial ambitions. American leaders became mistrustful of what they viewed as fascist tendencies in Argentina’s government and pro-Nazi positions. 56 This chapter challenges those historical assumptions. It argues that while there was episodic conflict between the two countries, the years 1924 to 1946 represent a period of generally sound relations. Argentines excoriated the United States for military intervention in the Caribbean basin, for the activity of American trusts in Argentina, and for limitations placed by Washington on the importation of Argentine beef. But anti-Americanism grew in conjunction with a powerful attraction among Argentines for Hollywood films and other areas of American culture. Pueyrredón’s 1928 outburst proved anomalous in the context of Argentina’s supportive positions for U.S. policy in the Americas. And while the Great Depression slowed the growth of U.S.-Argentine economic ties, those relations remained strong during the 1930s. During World War II, despite tensions, Argentina played a wartime role not unlike what it had played during the First World War. Although remaining neutral for most of the war, Argentina was a strong supporter of the Allied cause through the foodstuffs and other goods it shipped to the United States and Britain. Anti-intervention Federal political and military interventions against the provinces were the most hotly debated Argentine political problem of the 1920s, an issue contributing to a growing awareness of U.S. intervention in Latin America, the other major source of Argentine animosity toward Washington in the 1920s. Argentine opposition to U.S. military intervention in the Caribbean basin reached a peak in the late 1920s and generated strong popular backing but shallow support among Argentine political leaders. Argentine cattle rancher and ambassador to the United States Honório Pueyrredón led the charge against the United States at the Sixth Conference of American States in Havana, criticizing U.S. military and political intervention in the Americas. His subordinate, Felipe Espil, a future ambassador to the United States, attached less significance to U.S. intervention than to Argentina’s traditional backing for U.S.-led Pan-Americanism regarding business. In the end, Espil’s vision 57 Sanitary Embargo and Wartime Neutrality [54.204.117.206] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:41 GMT) prevailed among an Argentine political leadership willing to challenge the United States on animal disease, tariff policy, and intervention—but unwilling to allow any of that to alter strong bilateral economic ties.1 In Havana, the 1928 Sixth Pan-American Conference began as U.S. military activity in Nicaragua intensified in the hunt for rebel leader César Augusto Sandino. The United States had intervened repeatedly in Nicaragua since the first decade of the century. In 1912, U.S. Marines had joined Adolfo Díaz’s successful insurgency. When Díaz won the presidency, one hundred Marines remained in Nicaragua to prop up the shaky regime. The United States all but ran Nicaraguan affairs through 1925, keeping...