The Pan-American Conference in Panama

On 25 September 1939, in Panama City, the capital of Panama, the United States Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, head of the American delegation, addressed a meeting of the foreign ministers of the American republics. He set out the plan Washington had brought to Panama: the states of the Americas, all of them neutral in the European war, were jointly to declare that the coastal waters of the continent must remain free of hostilities. The deliberations lasted until 3 October and ended with the Declaration of Panama, which drew around the Americas a security zone generally some 300 nautical miles wide.

The date of 25 September, given in chronologies as the day the conference opened, needs to be stated more precisely. According to American diplomatic documents and the Organization of American States, the meeting, officially named the First Meeting of Consultation of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the American Republics, convened on 23 September. Welles’s speech fell on 25 September, in the first days of the proceedings.

The invitations of 5 September

The conference was the result of two earlier agreements. At the Buenos Aires conference of December 1936, opened by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the American republics undertook to consult one another should peace on the continent be threatened. The Declaration of Lima of December 1938 added that such consultation could take the form of a meeting of foreign ministers convened at the request of any republic. This was part of the “Good Neighbour policy” with which Roosevelt had replaced the former armed interventions of the United States in Latin America, and at the same time an attempt to build a common front against German and Italian influence in the region.

On 3 September 1939, the day on which Britain and France declared war on Germany, Secretary of State Cordell Hull asked the governments of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Panama and Peru whether they would join in a common request for consultation. In Washington’s view the European war constituted “a potential threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere”. The replies were favourable, and it was agreed that the government of Panama would invite the remaining twelve republics on behalf of nine states, itself and the United States included. The Panamanian invitations were sent out on the evening of 5 September, at about 10 p.m. Some lists also name Venezuela among the initiators, but American documents do not confirm this. Venezuela was among those invited, and its foreign minister complained that no one had consulted it beforehand and doubted whether a conference held so soon after the outbreak of war made sense. In the end he took part.

The meeting was planned for 21 September, but at Washington’s request it was postponed by two days so that delegates from more distant countries could arrive in time. The agenda, prepared in the State Department and approved by the governing board of the Pan American Union, covered three matters: neutrality, the protection of peace in the Western Hemisphere, and economic co-operation. The American delegation was led by Welles, Roosevelt’s closest expert on Latin America.

The deliberations

Representatives of all 21 republics of the Americas, from Mexico to Argentina, came to Panama. Canada, which as a British dominion had declared war on Germany on 10 September, did not belong to the Pan-American system and was not invited. The German envoy in Panama asked for German observers to be admitted, but the host government refused.

The Latin American states had already declared their neutrality, as had Argentina, Brazil and Mexico on 4 September and the United States on 5 September. What worried them most was the war at sea. They remembered how in 1914–1918 German submarines and raiders, and the British blockade, had paralysed their trade with Europe. Now it was happening again. The sinking of the Athenia on the very first evening of the war had shown that Germany would not hesitate to use its submarines, and Britain had introduced convoys and contraband control. Some 80 German merchant ships had taken refuge in the ports of the American republics and of Dutch Curaçao, kept there by British warships.

The Americans brought a ready-made idea, based on the neutrality patrol that the US Navy had been conducting off the coast of the United States and in the Caribbean since the first days of September. The republics were to declare a belt of water around the continent within which the belligerents could not conduct hostilities, and to patrol it jointly or separately. The idea was not new. In 1914 Argentina and other South American states had put forward similar proposals, to which the declaration itself later referred. The State Department attended to the details: its geographer calculated the extent of the zone in nautical miles, and Welles was constantly agreeing with Washington how the interned German ships were to be treated. Washington feared that under cover of the zone they might sail freely between the ports of the Americas, and even supply German submarines on its edge.

The British viewed the plan with suspicion. On 27 September the British ambassador in Washington, Lord Lothian, reminded Hull that his government upheld the principle of the freedom of the seas, which belligerents enjoyed equally with neutrals. Hull replied that the republics would ask the belligerents to respect the zone and, should it be violated, would meet for consultation, but would not decide in advance what steps they would take.

The Declaration of Panama

On 3 October the ministers adopted the Final Act. Welles reported to Roosevelt that the deliberations had been marked by “complete harmony”. The most important document was the Declaration of Panama. Its first point stated that the American republics, so long as they maintained their neutrality, were “as of inherent right” entitled to have the waters adjacent to the American continent, which they regarded as of primary concern to them, kept free from the commission of any hostile act by any non-American belligerent nation, whether attempted from land, sea or air. The boundary of the zone was defined by coordinates. The line ran from the Canadian–US border on the Atlantic around the whole of Latin America to the border with Canada on the Pacific, usually at a distance of some 300 nautical miles from the coast, and further out in places. The waters of Canada and the territorial waters of European colonies in the Americas were excluded. The republics were to approach the belligerents jointly to secure respect for the zone, to consult one another if it was violated, and to guard it with patrols, each on its own or several together.

Alongside the Declaration of Panama a general declaration of neutrality of the American republics was adopted, laying down common rules for the treatment of belligerent warships and merchant ships, including submarines, and for the internment of their crews. An Inter-American Neutrality Committee of seven jurists was established, with its seat in Rio de Janeiro, together with an Inter-American Financial and Economic Advisory Committee in Washington, which was to soften the effects of the loss of European markets. Police co-operation against subversive activities by agents of the belligerent powers was also agreed.

Significance

The security zone remained largely on paper. Britain, France and Germany, which the republics asked to respect it, would not recognise it without reservations. It soon became clear that the zone could not be defended by a declaration. On 30 September, before the conference had even ended, the German “pocket battleship” Admiral Graf Spee sank her first British ship off the coast of Brazil. On 13 December 1939, at the mouth of the River Plate, in the very middle of the zone, she fought a battle with three British cruisers, and a few days later she was scuttled by her own crew off the coast of Uruguay. On 23 December the American republics sent a joint protest to both sides, but did nothing more.

The conference nevertheless had more lasting political consequences. For the first time all the republics of the Americas had jointly defined their position towards the world war, and the neutrality patrol, extended to Latin American waters, gave the United States a pretext for ever more distant US Navy cruises in the Atlantic. In practice this served Britain: reports from the American patrols helped the Royal Navy to intercept German ships trying to return from America to the Reich. After the defeat of France and the Netherlands, the ministers met again in Havana in July 1940 and resolved that European colonies in the Americas could not pass under the rule of another non-American power, and that should such a threat arise, the republics would place them under joint administration. At the third meeting, in Rio de Janeiro in January 1942, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, most of the republics broke off relations with the Axis powers. The meetings of consultation of foreign ministers, begun in Panama, became after the war one of the organs of the Organization of American States, established in 1948.