Latin America declares war on the Axis

Over three weeks in February 1945, five South American states that had formally remained non-belligerent throughout the war announced that they were at war with the Axis powers. Ecuador did so on 2 February, Paraguay on 7 February, Peru on 11–12 February, Venezuela on 15 February and Uruguay in the days that followed. None of these countries sent a single soldier to the front, and none intended to. The declarations had a political purpose: to secure them a place among the founders of the organisation that was to replace the League of Nations after the war.

The dates usually attached to these decisions call for some qualification. The dispatches of American diplomats, published in the State Department’s official series Foreign Relations of the United States, show that on 2 February Ecuador declared a state of war with Japan only, and not – as some lists have it – with Germany and Japan. Peru did not use the word “war” but recognised a “state of effective belligerency”. Uruguay, for its part, had not yet declared war on 15 February: the government submitted the relevant bill to parliament the following day and finally promulgated it on 22 February.

The Yalta deadline

The idea of a new world organisation had been worked out by the great powers at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in the autumn of 1944. Who was to belong to it from the start was settled only by the Big Three at the Yalta Conference. It was agreed that the founding conference in San Francisco, convened for 25 April 1945, would be attended by the states that had already been parties to the Declaration by United Nations on 8 February 1945, together with those “associated nations” that declared war on the common enemy by 1 March 1945. Only states at war with the Axis could sign the declaration of 1 January 1942. Neutral and non-belligerent states, even those most favourable to the Allies, therefore had a few weeks in which to change their status.

Washington had not, in any case, waited for Yalta. As early as January 1945 the State Department had been urging the Latin American governments that had so far only broken off relations with the Axis to formalise their position. On 26 January the Acting Secretary of State, Joseph Grew, sent to the ambassadors in Asunción, Caracas, Quito, Lima, Santiago and Montevideo personal letters from President Franklin D. Roosevelt to the presidents of these six republics. The Americans left them a free hand: it was enough to declare war on Germany or on Japan, or on both. In his instructions to the ambassador in Paraguay, however, Grew noted that a country not bordering the Pacific would gain “considerably more dignity” if it named Germany as well.

The long road from Rio

The five February declarations completed a process that had begun after the attack on Pearl Harbor. In December 1941 nine states of Central America and the Caribbean, from Cuba to Panama, declared war on the Axis. The conference of foreign ministers in Rio de Janeiro in January 1942 recommended that the American states break off relations with Germany, Italy and Japan; Brazil did so, along with most of the others. Subsequently Mexico declared war in May 1942, after U-boats sank its tankers, Brazil in August 1942, Bolivia in April 1943, and Colombia, which in November 1943 declared a state of belligerency with Germany. Of these, only Brazil sent troops to Europe – its expeditionary force fought in Italy from the summer of 1944.

Ecuador, Peru, Paraguay, Venezuela, Uruguay and Chile broke off relations with the Axis but did not declare war. They cooperated with the Americans – providing bases, selling raw materials, interning German and Japanese nationals – but their governments saw no reason to expose themselves to submarine reprisals or domestic quarrels. After Germany’s defeats in 1944 that risk ceased to exist, and what was now at stake was a seat at the table at which the post-war order would be arranged.

Ecuador – 2 February

Ecuador had only recently been humiliated. In July 1941 Peruvian troops had occupied its southern provinces, and the Rio de Janeiro Protocol of January 1942, concluded under pressure from the United States, had stripped Ecuador of extensive territory in the Amazon basin. Even so, Quito cooperated with Washington: the Americans built an air base on one of the Galápagos Islands and a station on the Santa Elena peninsula near Salinas, which covered the approaches to the Panama Canal. In May 1944 a revolution overthrew President Carlos Arroyo del Río and José María Velasco Ibarra took power; a Constituent Assembly was in session.

On 18 January 1945 the foreign minister assured the US ambassador that Ecuador wished to “formalise” a declaration of war on Japan, but stressed that it could do no more than it had done so far and that the decision had nothing to do with any concessions to the Americans. The declaration, signed by the president and the government and dated 2 February, was announced by Velasco Ibarra to journalists on the evening of 3 February, and on 4 February its text was published in the Quito press. In it the government, authorised by the Constituent Assembly, stated that Ecuador “has been and is in a state of war with Japan since 7 December 1941, the date of the attack on Pearl Harbor”. It justified this by its commitments under the Pan-American conferences and its cooperation in the defence of the continent, while stipulating that the declaration did not entail accepting any obligations beyond those matching the country’s capabilities. Germany, as the US ambassador reported, was not mentioned in the text. Many lists, including popular lists of declarations of war, nevertheless state that on that day Ecuador declared war on both Germany and Japan.

Paraguay – 7 February

Paraguay had been ruled since 1940 by General Higinio Morínigo, a dictator who for years was regarded in Washington as an Axis sympathiser, but whom generous American aid (loans, roads, military missions) had helped to stay in power. Paraguay broke off relations with the Axis in January 1942. On 6 February 1945 the US ambassador in Asunción was told that the National Defence Council had authorised the president to declare a state of war with the Axis powers. Morínigo did so by a decree-law of 7 February – in practice the declaration concerned Germany and Japan. On 12 February the Paraguayan minister in Washington informed the State Department that his country was adhering to the Declaration by United Nations, and on 14 February he signed it.

Peru – 11 and 12 February

The Peru of President Manuel Prado Ugarteche was one of Washington’s closest allies in the region. It broke off relations with the Axis in January 1942, supplied raw materials and deported residents of Japanese and German descent to internment camps in the United States – according to American figures, almost 1,800 people of Japanese descent, more than from any other country in the region. In a note of 11 February 1945 Peru’s chargé d’affaires in Washington transmitted a declaration by his government, which recognised the existence of a “state of effective belligerency” between Peru and Germany and Japan and adhered to the Declaration by United Nations. The embassy explained that this wording was equivalent to the phrase “at war” in the text of the Declaration. Most lists give 12 February as the date of the Peruvian decision. A Peruvian diplomat signed the Declaration on 14 February, together with the representative of Paraguay.

Venezuela – 15 February

Venezuela mattered more to the Allies than all the others put together: it supplied enormous quantities of oil, which was processed in refineries on the neighbouring Dutch islands of Aruba and Curaçao. In February 1942 German submarines attacked tankers and refineries off the coast, and in the months that followed they sank several Venezuelan ships. The government in Caracas had broken off relations with the Axis as early as 31 December 1941 but delayed declaring war, fearing attacks on its oilfields and tankers. By 1945 that threat had practically disappeared. President Isaías Medina Angarita issued a declaration recognising the existence of a state of war between Venezuela and Germany and Japan; it was published in the official gazette on the evening of 15 February, and on 16 February every newspaper in Caracas printed it as a Foreign Ministry communiqué. The same declaration gave the ambassador in Washington, Diógenes Escalante, full powers to sign the Declaration by United Nations. The State Department made sure that the Venezuelan note made it clear that the country was “at war” – only that formula opened the way to the Declaration.

Uruguay – in the second half of February

From the beginning of the war Uruguay had been the most pro-Allied country in the region. In December 1939 Montevideo had witnessed the epilogue of the Battle of the River Plate, and in 1942 the government broke off relations with the Axis and opened its ports to the Americans. Uruguayan law, however, required the consent of parliament, so it was only on 16 February 1945 that President Juan José de Amézaga submitted to the General Assembly a bill authorising the government to declare a state of war with Germany and Japan and to sign the Declaration. In the accompanying statement he pointed out that eighteen American states were already at war and that Uruguay, which had joined the cause of the United Nations “when the outcome of the war was uncertain”, could not now remain outside that community. The Chamber of Deputies passed the bill on 20 February (by 62 votes of the 81 members present), the Senate on 21 February, and on 22 February the government promulgated it, declaring war. The date of 15 February given for Uruguay in many chronicles is therefore premature – on that day only Venezuela declared war.

The Argentine exception

Washington’s efforts also extended to Chile. President Juan Antonio Ríos, who had broken off relations with the Axis in January 1943, recognised a state of belligerency with Japan in mid-February 1945; Chile formally declared war on Japan only in April. Argentina, by contrast, remained outside. Ruled by the military since 1943 – in 1945 by General Edelmiro Farrell, with Colonel Juan Perón growing ever more powerful – it had been the last country on the continent to break off relations with Germany and Japan, only in January 1944, and the United States did not recognise its government. It was not invited to the Inter-American Conference on Problems of War and Peace, which opened at Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City on 21 February 1945.

War on paper

The February declarations changed nothing in the course of the fighting. Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Venezuela and Uruguay had neither the means nor the intention of sending troops overseas, and Germany and Japan were no longer in a position to threaten them. The President of Syria, Shukri al-Quwatli, who was considering a similar step at the same time, asked the American minister in Damascus on 20 February whether such a declaration was really necessary – after all, he had read that “Peru and two other Latin American republics” had just declared war on Germany.

For the countries concerned, however, the gesture mattered. The Latin American states made up some two-fifths of the participants in the forthcoming conference, and a common position could carry weight in the voting. The governments in Quito, Asunción, Lima, Caracas and Montevideo wanted a say in shaping an organisation in which, they feared, the great powers would have the decisive word. They also counted on American economic aid and arms deliveries after the war. For Washington, every new declaration strengthened the image of a united Western Hemisphere, in which Argentina remained the only breach.

What came next

The Chapultepec Conference lasted until 8 March 1945. Its most important document was the Act of Chapultepec, which provided for the joint defence of the American states against aggression, including aggression by another American state; from it grew the later Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance of 1947. The participants called on Argentina to join the common policy. Farrell’s government declared war on Germany and Japan on 27 March 1945, after which the United States recognised it, and at San Francisco – despite the objections of the USSR, which pointed to its wartime conduct – Argentina was admitted as a participant. In April Chile formally declared war on Japan, and in June so did Brazil, which had previously been at war only with Germany and Italy.

In the last days of February the states of the Middle East hurried to follow Latin America’s example: Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. The San Francisco Conference opened on 25 April 1945 and ended on 26 June with the signing of the Charter of the United Nations. All five of the states that declared war in February were among the 51 founding members of the United Nations. None of them took part in the fighting before the end of the war – their war with the Axis lasted a few months and was waged entirely on paper.