Competing for Latin American Markets

Abstract

SPEAKING of our Latin American trade it has been advocated that must not repose in fancied security that we can forever everything and buy little or nothing, but that should take from our customers such of their products as we can use without harm to our own industries and labor. Much as sentiment savors of late 1939, the foregoing utterance dates from 1901.1 United States advisers in South America in 1924 were chorusing that in all their experience, competition (European) had never been more keen. By 1927 deprecation of the use of the phrase commercial conquest was voiced by American authorities even as the same phraseological implications were being shushed in the early days of the present war. By that time, too, the cheery slogan Buy only from those to whom we sell had been unfurled and had drawn the fire of outraged American export interests, while of barter it was being observed that this whole conception rests upon the fallacious assumption that trade is still in the dark ages. In 1933 our trade specialists and advisers were becoming familiar with and somewhat reconciled to the devices of exchange control, import licensing boards, quota systems, and similar expedients which had been improvised to circumvent the hampering provisions of most-favored-nation clauses in international treaties. At that time direct barter was still eschewed by American authorities, but critics were less scornful of the likelihood of its adoption, claiming only that any return of such primi-