Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960, American Republics, Volume V

292. Letter From President Kubitschek to President Eisenhower¹

Rio de Janeiro, July 19, 1960.

My Dear Mr. President: I have received from Ambassador John Moors Cabot Your Excellency’s letter of July 8,² the high significance of which I have duly appreciated. At the same time, Mr. President, that I thank you for the generosity of some of your thoughts with respect to my country and the importance which Your Excellency attributes to the exchange of impressions which we had during your visit to Brazil, in March (sic) of this year, I wish to express my satisfaction particularly for the high consideration which Your Excellency gives to Operation Pan America. I see that the intention with which the problem of a greater and more intimate collaboration was presented is receiving just appreciation on the part of Your Excellency. I see also that our points of view begin to grow closer with regard to the dimensions which the projected action should have.

Permit me to reaffirm to Your Excellency what already has been said concerning Operation Pan America: It is not a question of an appeal to generosity, but of reason. Reason dictates the necessity of fighting in the only efficacious manner against the cold war which insinuates itself and seeks to involve our continent. The fight which all of us must undertake together for the common ideals of the Americas will be valid only if we combat the causes of unrest and discontent, without seeking merely to correct and diminish their effects and consequences.

We ought, therefore, to have the courage to draw the conclusions which reality presents to us. The truth is that, despite all previous efforts, not enough has been done and an adequate rate of development for the Latin American people has not been achieved. To wish to attribute the present unrest of these peoples to mere propaganda or agitation by extra-continental agents would be to ignore the fact that poverty and the frustration of economically stagnant peoples have a much greater capability for agitation. The problem therefore consists in giving a new dimension to the work to be accomplished.

Your Excellency knows very well, because you are a statesman among the most illustrious and because you are a man just of heart, that liberty, democracy, the dignity of the human being, such as we conceive them, are words without meaning for the inhabitants of stagnated regions, where life itself is a continual sacrifice and an act of resignation and of patience. That in our regional family there should exist immense underdeveloped zones, I repeat to Your Excellency, is not only a grave danger for peace, but a contradiction of the positions we defend, whose base is human solidarity and whose exclusive guarantee is hope for a better existence.

At no moment in the campaign in behalf of the harmonious development of our hemisphere (Operation Pan America) has the US been considered to blame for the extreme inequalities in the living conditions of the various peoples of this part of the world. On the contrary, we must testify that good neighborliness has always been practiced and that, in one way or another, proofs of fraternal spirit between the great nation over which Your Excellency presides and Latin America have never been lacking. What appears to me to have been missing thus far, if Your Excellency will permit me to say it, is a truly constructive policy and the attribution of greater importance to this part of America.

However, if there is in this convulsed world a natural alliance for the West, it is that which can be offered by our countries, which have known how to fight for the conquest of liberty and have kept faith in the basic principles inherited from our European ancestors. To relegate to an inferior level almost 200 million men, whose rate of growth is the highest in all the world and whose integration in defense of the democracies is the surest road and inclination, is to commit an error, is to contribute to mutilating still further the security of that western cause, which includes all the political and spiritual values that are common to us. Reasons of a purely strategic order are not always good reasons, and often calculations must be reviewed and tactical criteria modified. What seems to me unquestionable is that there is no greater strategy than the strengthening of natural and not merely occasional allies.

The offer of a new policy of strengthening the American regional family is what I have understood Your Excellency to be announcing in your noble letter. In substitution for gestures of good will and of good neighborliness, Your Excellency has resolved to sponsor a new, fecund and vigorous action, creative of wealth. As I have already had occasion to state, it is not a plan of donations that I believe appropriate or even possible at this moment, but concrete and unpostponable measures of reciprocal interest to the country of Your Excellency and the other American nations and a more active collaboration in our development, through a new policy of public financing, in which would be observed other criteria than that of mere immediate economic profitability.

Your Excellency has demonstrated that you are following with attention the process of Operation Pan America, even to its most recent phase, The three items cited by Your Excellency are really ones that cannot be substituted and I repeat them here:

1) Financing of economic development;

2) Role of technical assistance for the obtaining of a growing industrial and agricultural productivity;

3) Subsequent consideration of the problems of basic products.

These themes were the object of consideration at the recent meeting of the Sub-Committee of Nine which was held in Washington, as Your Excellency pointed out. The results obtained in that meeting are timid, however, and they are below the expectations of many Latin American countries, among them Brazil, which took to the meeting concrete plans for augmenting the financing capability of institutions like the Inter-American Development Bank.

Pardon me, however, if as President of a friendly nation, a natural ally of Your Excellency’s country, I insist in reaffirming that the problem of Latin America, although economic, transcends the economic plane, and that there is necessary, without delay, a continental vision which would avoid in the future the many mistakes of the present hour, establish a route toward an era of security, of peace and social justice, and make impossible extra-continental political interventions, which we must certainly resist.

It is impossible to sum up in a simple letter what is necessary to say in this hour, in which important resolutions must be taken, I beg Your Excellency to accept what I am writing to you as the word of someone who does not forget the North American sacrifices in favor of man. Twice, in this century, the US has offered millions of precious lives, in addition to vast material goods, in defense of the free world. It is in defense of the free world, in fact, that OPA was launched.

May God illumine the person of Your Excellency and all the leaders of the great American nation, on the occasion in which the destinies of humanity are being determined. And may the Creator of the Universe give us all the sentiment of the greatness of our common task and the humility needed for us to serve truth and justice.³

1. Source: Department of State, Central Files, 611.32/7–2060. Official Use Only; Presidential Handling. Transmitted in two sections in telegram 151 from Rio de Janeiro, July 19, which is the source text. Telegram 151 indicates the text of the letter is an Embassy translation.
2. Supra.
3. Telegram 151 bears no signature.