638.5131/139: Telegram
The Minister in Haiti ( Gordon ) to the Secretary of State
[Received 2:40 p.m.]
10. My despatch No. 447 of March 16.57 Having been informed that negotiations with the French are now rapidly coming to a head and that over and above the additional non-specialty articles referred to on page 3 of my said despatch it is proposed to include additional products in the avenant, I thought it well this morning to see the Foreign Minister, verify this information and remind him of the position of our Government as declared to the Haitian Government in 1935 when Haiti was negotiating with France58 for the resumption of the commercial treaty and the avenant of 1934.59
When I called upon the Foreign Minister he verified the information above set forth and I thereupon read him the pithy passages of the Department’s telegraphic instruction No. 21 of June 20, 1935.60 [Page 563] I told him that I wished our construction of the most-favored-nation principle to be clearly understood and that I should like equally clearly to understand that his Government agreed with this construction.
After a brief discussion he stated that wherever by treaty Haiti had granted most-favored-nation treatment she intended to stand by it fully and to do nothing to evade the obligations thus assumed.
Amplifying despatch by air mail tomorrow.
- Not printed.↩
- See Foreign Relations, 1935, vol. iv, pp. 650 ff.↩
- Signed March 10, 1934; for text, see Le Moniteur, Journal Officiel de la République d’Haiti, April 23, 1934, p. 255. The avenant extended the Franco-Haitian commercial convention of April 12, 1930.↩
- Foreign Relations, 1935, vol. iv, p. 661.↩