838.51/2639
The Minister in Haiti (Armour) to the Secretary of State
[Received May 6.]
Sir: With reference to my despatch No. 30 of April 27 last,49 I have the honor to inform the Department that, at his request, I called upon the President this morning. M. Blanchet, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, was also present at the interview.
The President confirmed what M. Blanchet had told me of his, the President’s talk with the Presidents of the Senate and Chamber when, after studying our draft of the treaty, they had said they were convinced that it would be impossible to secure ratification of such a treaty at this time. The President said that he had been thinking the matter over and that he was convinced they were correct. He mentioned the so-called Hudicourt Resolution recently voted by the Senate,50 adding that it had obviously been Senator Hudicourt’s intention, by introducing such a resolution, to render impossible ratification of a new treaty, at any rate one following the lines of the September 3 treaty. The President felt, therefore, we must be prepared to proceed along different lines. His plan was substantially that outlined to me by M. Blanchet (see despatch No. 30); namely, to deal with Protocols A and B as two separate units, reaching an accord on each separately, somewhat along the lines of the Haitianization accord of August 5, 1931.51 The President felt that there was nothing to prevent our reaching an accord at once covering the Haitianization of the Garde and Marine withdrawal, suggesting as a basis his Government’s draft of Protocol A, recently submitted to us, with which, he noted, we appeared to be in accord. When I asked him whether the date mentioned therein for the completion of the Haitianization of the Garde, namely, December 31, 1934, still stood, the President said “Yes”, unless it was proposed to move the date up a few months, but he did not feel that a date earlier than September 1st, 1934 would be feasible. (The President was quite emphatic on this point, digressing to remark that the real interest of intelligent Haitians lay in securing return of the financial control; in other words, that it was the financial rather than the military aspect that most interested them.) He thought that if an accord on this point could be reached immediately and announcement made, it would clear up all uncertainty and have a good effect throughout the country. We could then, he felt, proceed at our leisure to discuss the terms of the financial accord. [Page 740] This completed, he proposed our concluding a Treaty of Amity, Commerce and Navigation. (The President did not make it quite clear whether he felt that the accord covering financial control after 1936 would have to be submitted to the Legislature or not. In a talk later with the Foreign Minister, he expressed the opinion that an accord of such a nature would require legislative approval.)
The President asked me what I thought of the plan. I replied, as I had to M. Blanchet on previous occasions, that my instructions were to continue negotiations with the Haitian Government with regard to a treaty covering both the Haitianization of the Garde and the financial control after 1936; that I had no authority to discuss any other plan, certainly not one representing such a departure as this did from the procedure we had been pursuing now for over a year. I added that if he felt that it would be useless to submit our draft of the treaty to the Legislature for ratification, I did not think it would be advisable to insist upon having this done as we were all agreed that a second rejection would be most unfortunate. In view of this, I would present his plan of procedure to Washington: in fact, I had already indicated to the Department, following my talk with M. Blanchet, that the Haitian Government had some such idea in mind. I told the President, however, that, speaking quite unofficially, I thought it unlikely that this procedure would appeal to the Department unless the Haitian Government would be disposed to give definite assurances with regard to the nature of the accord covering financial control which they would be willing to enter into later. In other words, that when the time came to conclude it, the accord would be in substance that represented by Protocol B of the treaty of September 3 rather than that recently submitted by the Haitian Government for the State Department’s approval, which, as he already knew, we had found to be quite inacceptable. The President replied that he could not understand why we did not consider the Haitian plan as offering the necessary guarantees to protect the bondholders. He then launched into the old arguments with which the Department is too familiar to require repetition here. I endeavored to point out the objections, even to the extent of reminding him that only a few months ago, with a balanced budget, he had proposed a moratorium on payments of amortization of the loan. But I could see that my arguments were of no avail and the discussion terminated with the understanding that I would report the conversation to the Deparment for its consideration.
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The most important point brought out in the conversation was the clear indication given by the President that he did not desire an earlier Haitianization of the Garde than that called for in Protocol A [Page 741] of the treaty of September 3. This flatly contradicts what the Minister of Finance told me in a talk I had with him late in March, just prior to my visit to Washington.…
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Before, therefore, accepting these statements of the President at their face value, I shall see M. Hibbert and endeavor to ascertain discreetly how far they do represent the considered views of the Government. I shall then be in a position to present to the Department in more definite form what appear to be, from this angle at any rate, the possible courses open to us to pursue. In general, however, I fear that we must reconcile ourselves to the fact that there is virtually no hope of securing ratification of a satisfactory treaty from the present session of the Legislature.
In the meantime, should the Department be able to give me a very general indication of how it will be disposed to view this new proposal, it would be useful to me as background in future talks with Haitian officials.
Respectfully yours,
- Not printed.↩
- See telegram No. 39, April 7, 1933, 9 p.m., from the Chargé in Haiti, p. 789.↩
- Foreign Relations, 1931, vol. ii, p. 403.↩