File No. 763.72111/1050
The Ecuadorian Minister (Córdova) to the Secretary of State
Washington, December 3, 1914.
[Received December 5.]
[Translation]
Honorable Mr. Secretary: In accordance with the agreement reached at our interviews of the 1st and 2d instant, I beg leave to state to your excellency that my Government’s views on neutrality, already well known, are embodied in the proposals forwarded to me by Senor Elizalde, Minister of Foreign Affairs, in cablegrams dated the 15th and 25th of October last.
The said propositions may be reduced in substance to the necessity of an agreement of the American diplomats tending to induce the belligerents to declare the seas that wash the coasts of America a neutral zone, so as to exclude from them entirely the warlike operations that are inflicting so much harm on neutral commerce; and that the danger of the neutrality of some of the American countries being violated by the belligerents be met by a declaration that the respect due to the neutrality of any one of them is a matter of concern to all the nations of the American Continent.
I further desire to put on record the explanation I offered to your excellency of the manner in which the words of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ecuador spoken at an interview with the Chargé d’Affaires of Great Britain at Quito had been distorted in London. And as the said explanation was founded on a cablegram I received on the 30th of November last from the Minister of Foreign Affairs of my Government, I deem it proper to state its substance herein below:
Upon a statement of the American Minister that the Ambassadors of France and Great Britain complained of Germany’s using some of the Galápagos Islands for a naval base, I declared to the British Chargé d’Affaires that our Government had no knowledge of what was supposed to have occurred in the Galápagos, for want of communications. I may perhaps have given him some Indication that I feared some infringement of our neutrality might have been consummated by one of the nations at war, on account of the lack of Ecuadorian [Page 695] forces in the archipelago; but I never asserted that Germany had made actual use of the Galápagos as a naval base. This the British Chargé d’Affaires admits and he so declared to me to-day. On the other hand, I persist in asserting that no wireless communication of any kind has been carried on in our country in the service of any of the belligerents. Deny through the press any false report that may in any way impugn the good name of Ecuador and the propriety of her proceedings in the present European war.
With the most [etc.]