Office of the Historian

810.154/1821: Telegram

The Secretary of State to the Ambassador in Costa Rica (Des Portes)2

Washington, September 14, 1943—7 p.m.

With reference to the Department’s telegram no. 255 of June 20, 1942, 7 p.m.,3 instructions are being sent by the War Department to Colonel Kelton4 to prepare immediately a plan for the orderly cessation of construction on the pioneer highway project, bearing in mind its effect on our relations with Central American countries. These orders have been sent as a result of a decision of the General Staff that there is no further military need for the pioneer highway, and that further expenditures must therefore be limited to the balance now available for the project. This balance is sufficient only for the liquidation of the project.

The Department is insisting that any plan for the liquidation of the project must take fully into account the disruptive effects of this liquidation on local economies and on our relations with the Central American countries, and that it must be so drawn up as to mitigate these effects to the greatest possible extent.

The above is for your own information only. The Department intends to send you further instructions as soon as more definite plans have been developed by the War Department.

Hull
  1. The same, mutatis mutandis, September 14, to the Ambassadors in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama.↩

  2. Not printed; it informed the Minister in Costa Rica of a proposed plan to link the finished segments of the Inter-American Highway, and requested that he secure Costa Rican cooperation. It was repeated to Panama (No. 578), El Salvador (No. 137), Guatemala (No. 236), Honduras (No. 137), and Nicaragua (No. 263). All the countries thus consulted assented to preliminary surveys and, by July 21, 1942, signified their general concurrence with the construction program outlined in the June 20 telegrams.

    Survey and construction on the uncompleted segments of the Inter-American Highway were begun soon afterward by the Army Corps of Engineers with a fund of $15,000,000 appropriated for the War Department for military construction. The construction of the uncompleted segments, approximately 625 miles total length, became known as the Pioneer, or Emergency, Military Highway Project. See press release on this highway, issued July 28, 1942, Department of State Bulletin, August 1, 1942, p. 661.

    ↩
  3. Col. Edwin C. Kelton, United States Army Corps of Engineers, Director of the Pioneer Highway Project.↩