714.1515/941: Telegram
The Minister in Honduras ( Summerlin ) to the Secretary of State
[Received October 12—2:50 p.m.]
104. In an informal note dated September 23, I transmitted textually to the Minister for Foreign Affairs the instructions contained in your telegram No. 63, September 21, 11 a.m.
I am now in receipt of a reply dated today in which after repeating the substance of my note the Minister for Foreign Affairs continues:
“I informed His Excellency the President of the content of Your Excellency’s courteous note, and he has given me instructions to answer it, advising you that the Government of Honduras accepts with the greatest pleasure as arbitrator in the boundary question with Guatemala any one of the above-named jurists and designated by the President of the Republic of the United States of America, with the understanding that the arbitration must be juridical, taking into account limit defined in public documents not contradicted by others of the same or weightier category, giving each of them fitting importance, according to their antiquity and juridical efficacy; the comprehension of the territory which constituted the ancient provinces of Guatemala at the date of its independence; the provisions of the royal ordinance of the intendants which was then in force; and in general all of the documents, maps, plans, et cetera, which may lead to the enlightening of precise truth, preference being given to those which by their nature should have more weight, by reason of their antiquity, of being clearer, more just and more impartial or for any other established reason, according to the principles of justice, and also taking into account the observations and studies of the mixed commission which accomplished some labors and had been organized in conformity with the boundary conventions between Honduras and Guatemala of 189533 and 1914;34 it being necessary to give importance to it only when it may be judicially legitimate and established, in conformity with the general principles of law and with the rules of justice which in connection with this case are sanctioned by law of peoples. The Government of Honduras believes that the Government of Guatemala will have no reason to decline the suggestion which the Secretary of State of the United States now makes; but in the lamentable case that it may not accept any of the jurists mentioned my Government would be excessively gratified if the arbitrator might be the President of the Republic of the United States of America or the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the same nation.
In replying in these terms to Your Excellency’s courteous note I take pleasure in expressing the gratitude of my Government to the Government of the United States of America for the good will and generous interest with which it has been good enough to offer its [Page 960] important cooperation in this matter whose solution would insure forever the peace of Central America; and I avail myself of, et cetera.”
Repeated to Salvador and Guatemala.
- Signed March 1, 1895, British and Foreign State Papers, vol. lxxxvii, p. 530.↩
- Signed August 1, 1914, Foreign Relations, 1917, p. 786.↩