Office of the Historian

840.50/2559: Telegram

The Ambassador in Uruguay (Dawson) to the Secretary of State

Montevideo, September 21, 1943—6 p.m.
[Received September 22—11:16 a.m.]

856. Reference Embassy’s airgram 412, August 3, noon.12 The Foreign Office has forwarded by airmail to the Uruguayan Ambassador in Washington an instruction directing him to advise the Department substantially as follows:

Uruguay accepts in principle the draft agreement for a relief and rehabilitation administration with the following “specifications”.

1.
That the associated Nations and the United Nations joining the Administration shall be placed on a footing of perfect and absolute equality of treatment.
2.
That from the composition, powers and method of functioning of the different organs, it is obvious that the countries represented on the Central Committee will predominate in the direction of the Administration. The Uruguayan Government accepts this arrangement in view of the fact that the principal burden of relief and rehabilitation in the liberated zones will fall on those countries and particularly because of the special connection between the Administration’s activities and the course of military operations. However the Uruguayan Government wishes to make clear that this does not imply the establishment of a precedent for other post-war organizations with regard to which it will in general maintain the American principle of the equality of states and it will consider undesirable the distinction between great and small powers.

The Foreign Office adds for the Ambassador’s information that Colombia and other American countries made representations with a view to the formation of a regional bloc to advocate equality in the organization of the Relief and Rehabilitation Administration13 in which Uruguay did not consider it desirable to join for the reasons already set forth and because it does not deem it opportune to follow regionalistic tendencies which might perturb the unity of action indispensable in all matters relative to postwar problems.

I am forwarding to the Department by airmail a copy of the Foreign Office’s instruction in question.12

Dawson
  1. Not printed.↩
  2. See vol. v , section entitled “Proposal by Colombia for consultation among American Republics not at war regarding status as to cooperation with the United Nations, especially in UNRRA.”↩
  3. Not printed.↩