812.6363/3367
Memorandum of Conversation, by the Under Secretary of State (Welles)
The Mexican Ambassador called this afternoon at my request. I told the Ambassador that I had asked him to come to see me in order that I might tell him of the instructions that had been sent to Mr. Daniels and I repeated to the Ambassador the points that Mr. Daniels had been requested to make in the interview which he was instructed by cable this morning to obtain with General Hay.
The Ambassador told me that he had again talked with President Cárdenas on the long distance telephone on Saturday night and that he himself on that occasion had said to President Cárdenas, first, that as specific a reply as was possible should be made to the precise inquiries this Government had formulated with regard to the method of the compensation payment and the time thereof; second, that he knew from his conversations with me that this Government would be prepared at any time after this step had been taken to undertake informal conversations between responsible officials of the two Governments with regard to the issues involved; and third, that he also knew that this Government felt it would be preferable for various practical reasons to have these conversations held here in Washington. The Ambassador told me that President Cárdenas had told him that he would immediately summon Dr. Suarez, Mr. Buenrostro,96 and Mr. Villalobos97 in order to formulate certain plans which would be responsive to our request, and for the first time, the Ambassador said, specifically authorized him to say that the Mexican Government would be prepared to send to Washington at any time we desired the necessary responsible officials of the Mexican Government to talk over informally a solution of the problem.
I asked the Ambassador if he had any word from President Cárdenas as to the nature of the plans which he had in mind. He said he did not.
I then said to the Ambassador that of course many suggestions were being made to us and that it might be desirable for the Mexican Government to know of some of these suggestions but without, of course, this Government assuming any responsibility for fathering them, so that the Mexican Government would not work out one sole alternative and then feel obliged to stick to it. The Ambassador said that from his conversations with President Cárdenas he believed that some immediate conclusions would be arrived at and all that President [Page 745] Cárdenas intended to do in his reply to this Government was to indicate certain ideas to be advanced as a basis for discussion. He said that it seemed to him that the time to consider these various suggestions was as soon as conversations in Washington commenced.
The Ambassador further told me that President Cárdenas had said to him that the Mexican Government had refused to enter into any discussion even of an agreement with Mr. Rickett98 and that it had no intention of doing so. The President had said that some two hundred proposals had already been received by him and that of these only three or four were even worth thinking about. He said, however, that the Mexican Government had no intention of entering into any arrangements at this time with regard to outside interests in connection with new concessions.
The Ambassador said that he had seen the texts of the appeals taken by the oil companies to the courts against the upholding of the expropriation decree of the President of Mexico. He said these documents appeared to him to be ill founded and badly drafted. I made the remark that I had not yet read them.
In conclusion I said to the Ambassador that I had seen that some purported officials of the Mexican Government now in the United States had been giving out statements to the press and I wondered if the Ambassador did not feel as I did that publicity of this character was unfortunate at the present time. I said that it had now been made evident that both our Governments were on the most friendly possible terms and had decided to exert their best efforts to finding a friendly solution of the problem which confronted them. Under these conditions I thought that the less publicity the better, and in particular, the less recrimination the better. The Ambassador said that of course I knew that he himself was entirely in accord with this point of view and that he had already requested his Government to keep the people I referred to quiet.…