File No. 817.812/64.
The Minister of Salvador to the Secretary of State.8
Washington, March 11, 1914.
Excellency: Under special instructions from my Government, I have the honor to answer your excellency’s polite note dated February 18 last, in which you were pleased to state the reasons for the Department of State’s opinion that there is no substantial ground for the protest which I brought to your knowledge on the 21st of October 1913, for the protection of any right or interest of the Republic of Salvador that might be affected or impaired by the consummation of the concession granted to your excellency’s Government by that of Nicaragua for the establishment of a naval station in the Gulf of Fonseca.
Your excellency declares that the Department is not disposed to dispute the point that the Gulf of Fonseca is a territorial bay whose waters are under the jurisdiction of the bordering States, and that disposition of your excellency’s is well understood by my Government because it bears upon a fact which is the essential foundation of the protest and which it deems incontrovertible.
Since your excellency, without doing me the honor of arguing to the contrary, confines yourself to declare that the grounds upon which my Government rests its contention that the Gulf of Fonseca [Page 957] is the joint property, as it actually is, of the States of Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua are not clear, and inasmuch as, on the other hand, no convention or agreement has been arranged to make an end of that state of undivided common interests, I let every one of the reasons presented by me on this point in the aforesaid protest stand. But inasmuch as your excellency further believes that those fundamental points do not appear to have been accepted by the bordering States, I venture to say to you that the terms of the Treaty of April 10, 1884, to which I refer in my protest, are clear in the sense that the purpose of the signatory Governments was to do away with the indivision of the Gulf of Fonseca, and do not afford the inference which your excellency appears to have drawn, that the High Contracting Parties previously supposed, when they concluded the treaty, that every one of the bordering States claimed as its own a certain part of the Gulf over which they exercised jurisdiction.
That Treaty, which never was raised to the rank of law, is one of the best proofs that the Contracting States recognized the Gulf of Fonseca as joint undivided property.
Your excellency is pleased to tell me that your Government would be prepared to take into consideration a concession from Salvador like that voluntarily offered by Nicaragua, and, on this point I have to say $o you that Article 38 of our Fundamental Charter is positive in forbidding the constituted powers to conclude or approve treaties, or conventions which in any way impair the territorial integrity or national sovereignty.
The Government of the United States whose boundless respect of its institutions is so justly and universally recognized, gives me the fullest confidence to hope that your excellency will value as it deserves my Government’s due observance of constitutional law.
Both the people of Salvador and my Government, true lovers of the Union of Central America, will appreciate to its full value your excellency’s declaration that in no sense will the United States oppose obstacles to the political union of the Central American States.
I think I have demonstrated that the waters of the Gulf of Fonseca belong, as undivided joint property, to the riparian Republics, and consequently my Government insists that the concession of a naval station in that Gulf would require the plebiscitary approval of the peoples whose territorial and jurisdictional rights may be affected.
I cannot conclude this note, Mr. Secretary, without confirming the views offered in my protest already referred to and expressing to you my Government’s confidence that your excellency will do it justice.
I renew [etc.]
- Receipt acknowledged by the Department of State July 11, 1914.↩