A vast body of scholarship on the League of Nations has emerged over the past two decades.Footnote 1 Yet comparatively little attention has been directed to Latin America’s activity in Geneva. Apart from Thomas Fischer’s pioneering but largely encyclopaedic treatment, most work has taken the form of specialized studies that are quite narrow in their temporal and geographic scope.Footnote 2 Important scholarship has been published on Mexico’s policy after 1931 and Argentina, Brazil, and Chile’s activity in the International Labour Organization and other related subjects.Footnote 3 Most of the research has focused on the largest states and on two particularly important periods: the negotiation of the postwar settlement in 1919, and the 1930s, an era of intense Latin American activity in Geneva. What has been left unexamined is the important political realignment that occurred when the larger states were absent. This article demonstrates that, during the 1920s, a Latin American bloc with a common agenda emerged in Geneva and transformed the codification of international law in both the League of Nations and the Pan-American Union.
The gap in the scholarship is understandable considering the challenges of archival research in Latin America. Because of the unevenness in the preservation and the quality of sources, scholars have been forced to stitch together narratives from documents across many different collections, including from outside the region, in Britain, France, Switzerland, and the United States. This helps explain the limited temporal and geographic scope of much of the scholarship. Sources on well-known events and larger powers are easier to locate and their availability has determined the kind of questions that have been asked and the histories that have been written. But, normally, a narrower focus does not foreclose the possibility of examining how particular events illuminate larger political shifts. In this body of literature, however, the narrow approach has compounded the widespread misconception that Latin America’s activity in Geneva was so sporadic, inconsistent, and unorganized, that it defies general analysis.
The result has been relatively little work on how Latin America operated as a bloc and a jarring split in how the activity of Latin American delegates in the League of Nations is understood. International legal scholars generally assume that all Latin American delegates in Geneva shared the same objective, international legal reform, as though this was a simple and straightforward matter.Footnote 4 The leading historians of Latin America’s activity in the League of Nations, however, emphasize the political timidity, in-fighting, and status-seeking of its delegates, finding little evidence of a regional bloc or even a common agenda.Footnote 5 According to the first group of scholars, Latin American delegates were largely motivated by high-minded principles; according to the second group, by vanity and careerism. Both of these frameworks contain a grain of truth but, ultimately, neither is very convincing. Both are too sweeping, failing to capture the complex dynamics in the League. Legal scholars have underestimated the considerable pressure on delegates to avoid anything that could potentially jeopardize their country’s status, including demands for reform. Such pressure delayed the formation of a regional bloc and fuelled struggles between Latin American diplomats over the appropriate posture in Geneva. Historians, meanwhile, finding relatively little evidence of influence in the League’s high politics, have missed the bloc’s existence and its influence on the codification of international law on both sides of the Atlantic.
While the emergence of a Latin American bloc in the League of Nations is obviously relevant to the global history of international organizations, regional blocs, and small states, this story’s most relevant context is the long-standing aspiration of many Latin American diplomats to reshape global international law. This aspiration can be traced as far back as the 1850s when a group of Spanish American intellectuals living in Paris coined the name Latin America to distinguish their region from the more aggressive and lawless Anglo-Saxon parts of the continent.Footnote 6 To these intellectuals, Latin America embodied a stronger commitment to international law and a particular set of legal norms that they believed should become universal. Yet despite its cultural influence in Latin America at the time, this aim was never translated into diplomatic policy during the nineteenth century. The codification of international law languished in the Americas, partly because of US hostility to it, but also partly because the Latin Americans themselves did not always agree on a common vision.
The lack of unity and coordination was evident in the first two decades of the twentieth century, when Latin America began participating at a global level. At the 1907 Second Hague Conference, the Latin American delegations failed to uniformly support the Drago Doctrine, a measure limiting the use of force, and were only slightly more coordinated in opposing a court project whose composition would have discriminated against smaller powers.Footnote 7 Latin America was marginalized in the negotiation of the post-First World War settlement, but later, together with Scandinavian neutrals, influenced the design of the Permanent Court of International Justice.Footnote 8 But it was only through membership in the League of Nations that a permanent Latin American bloc was gradually created. The numerous obstacles that needed to be overcome to achieve consensus and joint action among such a large and diverse group of states will be a central focus of this article. Equally significant was that bloc politics unexpectedly emerged, not within regional organizations in the Americas, but around the League of Nations, a global organization in Geneva.
For over a decade now, scholars have worked towards a global history of international law by focusing on the emergence and circulation of principles and practices across a variety of regions.Footnote 9 During the same period, historians of international law in Latin America have generally relied on a regionalist or hemispheric framework. These works have often brilliantly illuminated important and neglected parts of history while, at times, also exaggerating the uniformity and distinctiveness of the region’s approach to international law.Footnote 10 The result has been a lack of research into the global dimensions of Latin America’s lawmaking, especially the role of Latin Americans who became dissatisfied with the limits of a regional framework and aspired for global reform. This article upends the conventional narrative regarding the development of international law in the Americas by demonstrating that key pressure groups thought to have operated exclusively within regional institutions were created in the League of Nations by diplomats who had lost faith in Pan-Americanism’s capacity for reform.
This article provides a global history of the Latin American bloc’s origins and operation using multiple scales of analysis. Identifying the bloc’s ideological origins requires delving into the national history of Uruguay, whose diplomats eventually spearheaded the international project in a bid to protect developing states. Explaining how Latin American delegates in Geneva began to prioritize legal reform over the traditional focus on status requires examination of the bureaucratic struggles within individual delegations. Examining how the bloc operated inside and outside the League of Nations requires attention to networks of diplomats who used the regional bloc’s power. Finally, measuring the bloc’s success requires identifying its influence on great powers, especially the United States, which ultimately made significant concessions to avoid losing influence over Latin America. The history of the League’s Latin American bloc, therefore, is national, regional, and global.
It is also a family history. The effort to create this regional bloc was led by Enrique Buero, a Uruguayan diplomat sent to Switzerland in 1923, and his brother Juan Antonio Buero, who was appointed head of the League’s Legal Section in 1927. The recent discovery of Enrique’s personal archive has made it possible to finally write the history of the bloc’s origins. The archive consists of five bound volumes containing hundreds of letters sent by Buero to his family, friends, and colleagues from 1923 to 1932, the period during which he was active in building the regional bloc. The letters provide exceptional detail and candour that normally would be omitted from official reports, including about the dynamics of the Uruguayan delegation and its relations with the other diplomats in Geneva. The uninterrupted nature of the correspondence, meanwhile, allows us to identify long-term aims and overcome the episodic approach that has characterized the literature until now.Footnote 11
The article is divided into three parts. Part I examines the ideological origins of the project to create a regional bloc at the League of Nations and the obstacles that it encountered, including an initial tendency among Latin American diplomats to prioritize status-seeking over the pursuit of international legal reform.Footnote 12 Once these obstacles were overcome, a regional bloc emerged and quickly achieved long-standing goals in the League. Part II charts the bloc’s success in dismantling Article 21 of the League of Nations Treaty, an obstacle to the League’s involvement in the Americas, and its push for a redistribution of international authority to give the League of Nations primacy over rival regional international organizations. These reforms reshaped Latin America’s relationship with the League of Nations. Part III shows how the rise of the bloc eventually generated leverage for reform beyond Europe, including at the 1933 Montevideo Conference, demonstrating that key pressure groups thought to have operated exclusively within regional institutions were created in the League of Nations. Latin America’s project of escaping Washington’s tutelage began as the search for a forum that was more open to Latin American agency, but it developed into the broader campaign to dismantle and reassemble regional institutions into something that more closely matched an emerging Latin American vision of international politics.
Origins and obstacles
From the outset, the League of Nations was seen by Latin American representatives as a place where they could meet, organize and, in the words of one Venezuelan diplomat, ‘counterbalance the all-absorbing influence of the United States’, by removing Latin America ‘from Washington’s tutelage, according us the international importance and the maturity that the United States prefers us not to have’.Footnote 13 That tutelage was embodied in the Pan-American Union, a US-dominated regional organization derided across Latin America as ‘the colonial office of the United States’. Founded in 1890, the Union was created to facilitate US economic expansion across the hemisphere. Latin American diplomats periodically tried to widen its remit to include developing international law, but these attempts were almost always rebuffed by the US, which fiercely guarded its freedom of action by maintaining a tight grip over the Union’s agenda. The League, which the United States chose not to join, was seen as a place where Latin Americans could finally pursue the projects that had been blocked in Pan-American meetings, strengthening sovereign equality and limiting recourse to diplomatic protection and the use of force. Yet despite the initial hopes, diplomats from the region were slow in creating a bloc and pursuing a common agenda. Building a coalition involved considerable organizational work, compromise, and a change in political aims that required the delegates in Geneva to prioritize reform even when it clashed with the traditional pursuit of status and great-power patronage.
Part of the problem was the absence of leadership. The two Latin American powers with the most ambitious agendas did not participate in the League of Nations for much of the first decade of its existence. Post-revolutionary Mexico was excluded outright and Argentina, a traditional counterweight to the United States at Pan-American meetings, distanced itself from the League after its demands for structural reform were ignored during the first assembly.Footnote 14 Most other large states from the region were too focused on more immediate national interests to lead a campaign for international legal reform. The only major Latin American power to take an active role in the League of Nations during the first decade was Brazil, whose leaders had little interest in reforming international law and instead pursued Brazil’s traditional aim of great-power status. Its diplomats feared the emergence of a Spanish-American bloc and focused almost single-mindedly on acquiring a permanent seat on the League Council.Footnote 15 When that campaign failed in 1926, Brazil withdrew from the League, without much effect on the other Latin American states. But despite the lack of leadership from traditional regional powers, a Latin American bloc emerged after 1923 as a result of Enrique Buero and Uruguay’s campaign for reform.
Uruguay’s agenda at the League of Nations was closely linked to its national history. For much of the nineteenth century the country was beset by foreign interventions and civil wars. It was only in 1904, with the decisive victory of José Batlle y Ordoñez and the Colorado Party in the last of these conflicts, that Uruguay began to form a clearly discernible political identity which crystallized around the notion that Uruguay’s greatness would be measured not by the country’s size but by the progressive nature of its government. Influenced by European legislation, Batlle implemented extensive economic reforms during his second term, including the introduction of social security, an eight-hour workday, and, most importantly for our purposes, the expansion of public enterprise. This last policy was designed to undermine exploitative foreign monopolies in tramways, railways, waterworks, oil refining, refrigeration, insurance, and port services. These fairly moderate reforms, smaller in scale than Mexico’s later agrarian reforms, prompted a backlash from British diplomats and investors. As a result, Uruguay became mired in international legal disputes and experienced a tightening of its credit at a moment of rapid economic growth.Footnote 16
This clash with foreign capital forced Batlle and his disciples to develop an international agenda. They quickly learned that domestic reform was impossible without international reforms to protect a country’s right to regulate its economy. Inspired by Uruguay’s precarious situation during the nineteenth century, Batlle had already advocated, as early as 1907, for the creation of a permanent international organization and a permanent international court that could resolve all international disputes.Footnote 17 Over the next two decades Uruguayan diplomats promoted the country’s image as a well-governed state, built networks within international organizations, and, ultimately, worked to reform international law to reflect the interests of small, marginal, and developing states. But achieving this through a regional bloc was not part of the initial strategy.
Under the leadership of President Baltasar Brum, many of these initial efforts were misdirected towards support for Pan-Americanism. Uruguay was relatively uninvolved in early regional conferences and was therefore spared the disappointments of its neighbours. What is more, an incident during the country’s final civil war had created the false but widespread belief that the United States could be relied upon to defend the country’s sovereignty.Footnote 18 Eager to escape London’s informal empire, Uruguayan diplomats worked to substitute US for British capital. But in the rush to win over their new idols, they ignored Washington’s repeated violation of principles, such as non-intervention, that would become central to Uruguay’s agenda. From 1917 to 1923, Uruguayan foreign policy was blindly Pan-Americanist, prompting derision from critics of US foreign policy.Footnote 19
Brum’s most important legal victory was a series of general arbitration treaties with Britain, France, and Italy, concessions made in exchange for Uruguay’s wartime cooperation. The treaties ensured that future disputes with investors from these states would be settled in national courts rather than through the type of diplomatic pressure that Britain had applied after Batlle’s reforms.Footnote 20 Although the Uruguayans valued these treaties, they continued to pursue a more fundamental reform, culminating in the failed attempt, blocked by the United States in 1923, to transform the Pan-American Union into a genuinely multilateral ‘American League of Nations’. This failure prompted some of Uruguay’s leading policymakers to pivot to the League of Nations.Footnote 21 It was only at this point that bloc formation emerged as part of Uruguay’s international reform agenda. Over the next decade, Uruguay sent its best diplomats to Geneva where they channelled regional disenchantment with Pan-Americanism’s failure to reform into support for the League. The US occupation of Nicaragua in 1927 and its defence of intervention at the 1928 Pan-American Conference in Havana produced a veritable pivot of Latin American diplomats toward the League and the emergence of a powerful bloc.
Many diplomats participated in this effort but chief among them was Enrique Buero. His aim was to create an environment that was conducive to League involvement in Latin America and Latin American international lawmaking. This required dismantling Article 21 of the League Treaty. More substantively, Buero hoped to use the organization to limit the legality of armed reprisal and diplomatic protection. But before Buero and Uruguay could rally other delegations in Geneva behind this agenda, he had to redirect his own delegation away from the narrow pursuit of status.
Status mattered to small states because it determined how they were treated by others in ways that often had no relationship to a country’s territory, population, and economic or military strength. Status provided some diplomats from Latin America with outsized influence. The key assumption, however, was that status was conferred by the more powerful states that were invested in maintaining the status quo and this made it difficult to simultaneously pursue status and reform.Footnote 22 In practice, being able to convince representatives from more powerful states to accept reform was itself a source of status. But this involved a level of risk that most diplomats from Latin America preferred to avoid. For these reasons, many diplomats were reluctant to pursue legal reform or engage in bloc formation.
Superficially, Uruguay’s initial years at the League might appear like a breathless pursuit of status and much of Enrique Buero’s earliest activity would seem to confirm that first impression. As early as October 1923, he suggested that Uruguay leverage its position on the League’s Council to make his brother Juan Antonio Buero head of a proposed Latin American section.Footnote 23 Two years later, he began mobilizing Latin American support to have Juan Antonio appointed as head of the organization’s legal section.Footnote 24 By the end of the decade Uruguayans had sat on the Council, presided over the Assembly, led the legal section, and very nearly a Latin American section as well, in addition to sitting on some of the organization’s most important committees. Buero also succeeded in having Uruguay selected as the host of the first FIFA World Cup in 1930, a move unquestionably designed to improve the country’s standing.Footnote 25 But on closer inspection, it is clear that some of these objectives, especially the leadership of the legal section, were pursued as a means to advance reform. Determining which motivation, status or reform, was prioritized requires examining scenarios where these two aims clashed. The delegation confronted one such case soon after Buero’s arrival in Geneva, in the form of the 1923 Corfu crisis.
The crisis concerned the legality of Italian reprisals against Greece following the killing of an Italian general by unknown assassins on the Greek island of Corfu. Buero was appointed to a committee of jurists tasked with examining the rules governing arbitration, state responsibility, and reprisals, all matters fundamental to Buero’s reform agenda.Footnote 26 One would therefore assume that his position was predetermined. According to Uruguayan doctrine, Italy’s actions constituted a violation of international law. The situation was complicated, however, by Uruguay’s close ties to France, which desired to help Italy save face. Confronted with repeated German violations of the disarmament and reparations clauses of the peace settlement and unable to rely on Britain, which had retreated into appeasement and reneged on its continental commitments, France increasingly depended on Italy. In the Corfu crisis, France adopted a lenient attitude, reasoning that Italy’s violations of international law paled in comparison to Germany’s and that Rome was a necessary partner in addressing Weimar’s more serious violations of the international legal order.Footnote 27
Initially, Alberto Guani, the head of the Uruguayan delegation in Geneva, spoke fervently against Italy’s actions but, after a meeting in Paris, he began pressuring Enrique Buero to delay the release of the committee’s findings.Footnote 28 Buero responded by firmly defending his autonomy. He claimed to be ‘impressed’ by ‘the criteria prevailing in Paris’ and open to considering the situation of these ‘friends as much as possible’. However, drawing a distinction between himself and Guani, Buero insisted that the ‘situation of the jurist was different from the member of the Council’. Otherwise, the committee of jurists would be superfluous, amounting to just another political body. Buero worried that pressure to postpone the findings would destroy the work of the committee and reminded Guani that Uruguay’s position on the legal doctrine had long been settled.Footnote 29
But Buero went even further to safeguard the power of international law within the League. Conversations with the Swiss delegate Giuseppe Motta convinced him that if the jurists failed to reach a unanimous solution, this would prevent the Council from taking a stand, and this, in turn, would produce a destabilizing debate at the next assembly. Alarmed by this possibility and armed with information he had collected on the positions within the committee, Buero was prepared to leak details to the press in order to ensure unanimity.Footnote 30 Buero not only broke with France but risked Uruguay’s reputation by potentially leaking sensitive information. This was the first of a series of actions that demonstrated Buero’s willingness to prioritize legal reform even when it did not align with the pursuit of status.
In the Corfu matter, Buero’s steadfast commitment to international legal principles ultimately prevailed over Guani’s more status-oriented objectives. Buero believed the episode demonstrated that the region could play a more influential role if other Latin American delegations could be convinced to prioritize legal reform over the pursuit of status. There were other delegates, such as El Salvador’s José Gustavo Guerrero, who thought along the same lines, but they remained in the minority.Footnote 31 The effort to mobilize his colleagues would consume much of Enrique Buero’s efforts for the next five years. Much of the rest of his energy, however, would be devoted to defending the priority of the reform agenda within the Uruguayan delegation.
The disagreement between Guani and Buero during the Corfu episode was not over which legal principles suited Uruguay’s interests but about the weight such principles should be given relative to great-power patronage and who within the delegation should decide the matter. Buero’s stance momentarily stiffened Guani’s resolve to defend the rights of small states, but it also produced a backlash. Guani resented the newcomer’s boldness, independence, and encroachment on his own bailiwick. He may also have learned of plans to have him replaced with Buero.Footnote 32 The ensuing struggle for power delayed and frustrated Buero’s attempts to create a regional bloc.
Buero’s ideas received strong support from Uruguay’s foreign minister, Juan Carlos Blanco, who eventually added Enrique’s brother, Juan Antonio, to the delegation and prioritized reviving the arbitration and sanction mechanisms of the Geneva Protocol.Footnote 33 The government also supported the efforts of Julián Nogueira, a Uruguayan functionary in the League’s Information Section closely connected to the delegation, to recruit Latin American states to the League.Footnote 34 Like Buero, Nogueira was deeply committed to displacing Pan-Americanism and turning the League into the key forum for Latin American international cooperation.Footnote 35 Yet despite these clear signs of support for a new policy in Geneva, disagreements persisted. The Buero brothers considered the creation of a Latin American group indispensable for the success of Uruguay’s agenda and took it for granted that a coalition would require a greater sharing of the spoils.Footnote 36 Guani favoured an informal set-up, ostensibly because the League was a universal institution, but really because he prioritized winning great-power support.
Worried about this growing conflict, Juan Carlos Blanco took the unusual step of joining the delegation ahead of the 1926 assembly. Under Buero’s influence and against Guani’s protests, he integrated the delegation into the League’s Latin American group which was becoming increasingly formalized in its voting.Footnote 37 When the group organized a caucus vote for the three seats on the Council that had been apportioned to the Americas, Uruguay participated, sharing third place with El Salvador, behind Colombia and Chile. Buero and Guani reacted very differently to this perceived setback. Even before the vote, Guani had challenged the legitimacy of the Latin American group, arguing that it was unrepresentative of the region and that elections to the Council should always be decided exclusively by the Assembly. After the vote, he argued that Uruguay should continue pursuing the seat.Footnote 38 Blanco and Buero were unhappy with the result but attributed the loss to the damage done by Guani’s long-standing opposition to the regional caucus. They agreed to comply with the result after a second meeting of the group nominated El Salvador for the third place.Footnote 39 Unable to get Guani to go along, Blanco was forced to dissolve the delegation and replace Guani as lead representative in Geneva.Footnote 40
Allies of the ousted diplomat attributed the failure to secure a seat on the Council to Blanco’s dogmatic insistence on regional unity. Henry Ketels, the Belgian representative in Montevideo and a close friend of Guani, argued that Uruguay had ‘acquired such a position within the Assembly that it would have undoubtedly been elected, along with Chile and Colombia’ by relying on votes from non-American states. He acknowledged that such a move ‘would have broken the harmony of the peoples of America’ but, evidently, did not place much stock in such a coalition.Footnote 41 Blanco, however, valued the bloc and, as a result of his intervention, the Uruguayan delegation, once again, prioritized the advancement of its legal agenda over the pursuit of status.Footnote 42
The cumulative effect of all these interventions was to alter the direction of Uruguayan policy. Guani eventually used his connections to win back his seat but returned to Geneva chastened by his temporary exile and transformed into a proponent of bloc formation. Among the potential explanations for this change was the growing influence of an Ibero-American identity in Uruguay, regional outrage against the US occupation of Nicaragua, growing flexibility within the League, and, finally, Guani’s bureaucratic victory over Buero, which allowed him to adopt Buero’s agenda without undermining his own authority or benefiting his rival.
This new consensus in Geneva was largely the result of Buero’s and Blanco’s efforts, but it was also the product of larger forces catalysed by the Mexican Revolution, such as the renewed sense of Ibero-American solidarity that eventually worked its way into Uruguay’s domestic politics, forcing Batlle’s disciples to accelerate their shift from the Pan-American Union to the League of Nations.Footnote 43 Uruguay was frequently accused during this period of pursuing policies out of tune with the rest of Latin America. In 1925, José Vasconcelos, Mexico’s former minister of education, said as much in a in a popular book that rebuked Batlle and Brum’s policies.Footnote 44 Enrique Buero regarded this publication as a source of embarrassment that threatened to undermine his work in Geneva and he redoubled his efforts to overcome the idea that Uruguay was pursuing a self-centred internationalism.Footnote 45 For instance, in preparing the ground for Juan Antonio’s arrival in Geneva to head the legal section, Enrique omitted all mention of his brother’s many statements in support of Pan-Americanism and instead emphasized Juan Antonio’s role in accelerating the withdrawal of US troops from the Dominican Republic.Footnote 46 By the mid-1920 anti-imperialism and opposition to the United States had become a marker of regional trustworthiness.
The power of this new regional consciousness was also felt in domestic politics, resulting in the growing influence of the Nationalist Party, which nearly won the 1926 general election, and intellectuals such as Carlos Quijano who invariably focused on Geneva as the centre for reform.Footnote 47 Quijano argued that Latin Americans should embrace the League of Nations because it offered the best and only hope for transforming international relations.Footnote 48 Speaking in Paris at a meeting of the Federación Internacional Pro Sociedad de Naciones before an audience that included Guani, Quijano acknowledged the League’s shortcomings, such as the weakness of its sanctions, its insufficiently democratic character, and the role of Article 21 in bolstering the Monroe Doctrine, but emphasized the benefits of participation. He argued that Latin Americans would advance their agenda more effectively by joining the League than by protesting from outside. Delegates from the region could democratize it and strengthen the role of international law.Footnote 49
Quijano’s reports in El País were increasingly a thorn in the side of Uruguay’s political establishment, underscoring the country’s lack of boldness, clarity, and progress in the League.Footnote 50 Enrique Buero’s correspondence from the period is full of fears about what unnamed critics would publish in this newspaper.Footnote 51 Despite these fears, he and Quijano were in broad agreement over the policy that Uruguay should pursue. In 1926, during the clash between Blanco and Guani over the country’s approach to the bloc, Quijano sharply criticized the latter for underrating the importance of regional unity. Quijano argued, along much the same lines as Buero, that what mattered to Uruguay was not some trifling dispute over a seat on the League Council, but the recognition by the assembly of a Latin American group without which Uruguayan influence could not exist.Footnote 52
In 1927, Quijano began crediting Guani with working to align Latin America with Europe, counteracting the influence of the United States.Footnote 53 Much as Enrique Buero had suggested earlier, Quijano believed that far from opposing the creation of a Latin American bloc, European powers were happy to facilitate its emergence to weaken Washington’s influence over Latin America. Examining Guani’s election to the presidency of the General Assembly in 1927, Quijano argued that his candidacy represented not just the will of the European powers but a broader current organizing against US imperialism. Guani’s transformation was now complete. The Uruguayans now began working to make the League an engine for international legal reform and the centre of Latin American relations.
Latin America’s pivot to Geneva
The timing of the new consensus within the Uruguayan delegation in Geneva could not have been more auspicious. In January 1927, Washington sent its marines to Nicaragua to support the overthrow of the Liberal government, demonstrating that intervention was not a thing of the past. Across Latin America, this provoked a political earthquake. Even Brum, the most committed supporter of Pan-Americanism, published a scathing editorial against the occupation, upbraided Washington’s minister in Montevideo, and concluded his own political transformation by becoming the head of the largest pro-League of Nations organization in Uruguay.Footnote 54 According to observers, the intervention revealed that Pan-Americanism was ‘nothing more than words’.Footnote 55 The United States responded to mounting criticism with cosmetic reforms. In 1928 President-elect Herbert Hoover stopped in Montevideo during a goodwill tour intended to burnish the country’s image and was met with protests.
Latin American representatives had long complained that Pan-Americanism lacked substance. Diplomats had repeatedly tried to use regional meetings to impose limits on the use of force but were always prevented by the United States which maintained a tight grip over the agenda and limited discussion to areas of mutual agreement. However, at the 1928 Havana Conference they were determined to discuss the occupation of Nicaragua. The events in Havana are well known. The United States tried but failed to keep the proceedings secret. It then worked to confine delicate matters to secret committees, but, inevitably, these debates spilled into the plenary meetings. During a final session, José Gustavo Guerrero, El Salvador’s delegate to the League of Nations, provoked a debate on the question of non-intervention during which the former Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes defended the unilateral right of the United States to use force to protect US nationals and their interests.Footnote 56 After the conference, delegates openly spoke about their dissatisfaction with Pan-Americanism in ways they had never done before.Footnote 57 Increasing numbers began to look to Geneva.Footnote 58
Even before the end of the Havana Conference, Guani had drawn the ire of US diplomats by denouncing Washington’s protectorate over Cuba.Footnote 59 His criticism was echoed by Uruguay’s network in Geneva. José Maria Cantilo, Argentina’s representative, publicly challenged the validity of the Monroe Doctrine. Most importantly, Guerrero, demanded that the United States address the right of intervention during the conference, prompting the outburst by Hughes. Whether this activity by Latin America’s most devoted champions of the League of Nations was part of a concerted strategy designed to embarrass the Pan-American Union and mobilize support for the rival organization is not entirely clear. That said, Enrique Buero’s correspondence testifies to his close relations with Guerrero, Carlos Saavedra Lamas, José León Suarez, and others who aimed to achieve legal reform by disconnecting Latin America from the Pan-American Union and working instead through the League of Nations.Footnote 60
The combined result of the Latin American pivot to Geneva and the growing coordination of regional networks was a flowering of regional cooperation. Even the reclusive Chileans gushed in 1928 that there was ‘no other city in the world’ where delegates from across Latin America could meet as frequently: ‘while [Pan-]American international conferences bring us together only sporadically, in Geneva we count on the certainty of periodic contact’.Footnote 61 The following year the Chilean diplomat added that the League was facilitating solidarity ‘not only regarding problems of increasing universal interest that are aired in the League, but also, in certain cases, in problems of exclusive American interest’, by which, of course, he meant regional hemispheric interest.Footnote 62 Most importantly, he added, unlike with Pan-American meetings, the ones in Geneva were ‘free of dominating influences’, a reference to the absence of the United States.Footnote 63 Argentine diplomats, notoriously reluctant to delegate authority to international organizations, likewise concluded that ‘nothing would help us better to maintain our position of equidistance and avoid greater obligations of a strictly continental nature, than our definitive incorporation into the League of Nations’.Footnote 64 But perhaps the most emblematic symbol of this pivot was Juan Antonio Buero. He had spent much of his earlier career as a cheerleader for Pan-Americanism, second only to Baltasar Brum. Five years into his tenure as the head of the legal section, the US minister to Uruguay reported Juan Antonio’s ‘almost fanatical support of the League’.Footnote 65
Fanaticism is not an adjective most people associate with legal advisers. Juan Antonio Buero understood his mission at the League of Nations in deeply political terms, but quickly learned that such ideas could not be expressed. This became clear after statements he made ahead of his move to Geneva were published in La Razón. When Enrique read these remarks, he sternly advised his brother to avoid making political statements that would undermine his image of impartiality.Footnote 66 Enrique likely drew from his own experience, having been forced to deny making declarations against the Monroe Doctrine immediately prior to his arrival in Geneva in 1923.Footnote 67 Yet despite the anti-political rhetoric that the Buero brothers were forced to pursue, their project remained deeply political in nature. Juan Antonio’s appointment in June 1927 was the result of intense lobbying by the Latin American bloc for a greater Latin American role in defining the jurisdiction of the League and Enrique repeatedly stressed that control of the legal section was essential to this pursuit.Footnote 68
After Juan Antonio’s appointment, the Latin American delegations secured several important legal and political victories on both sides of the Atlantic. First, they dismantled Article 21 of the League of Nations Treaty, an obstacle to the organization’s involvement in the Americas. Second, they renegotiated the division of labour between the Pan-American Union and the League in order to give the latter primacy in international lawmaking and codification. Finally, they leveraged the growing power of Latin America to block the codification of undesirable legal norms at the 1930 Hague Codification conference and to extract unprecedented concessions from the US during the 1933 Pan-American conference in Montevideo. In this way, the Uruguayan campaign was able to transform both the League of Nations and the Pan-American Union.
Juan Antonio’s initial objective was to dismantle Article 21, which provided that nothing in the League treaty affected the validity of regional understandings such as the Monroe Doctrine. The article was inserted by the United States to ensure that the new international organization would not interfere with its interventions in the hemisphere, especially against Mexico.Footnote 69 Some Latin American representatives at the Paris Peace Conference opposed the article from the outset, arguing that the Doctrine had never been accepted as a regional understanding and that its inclusion violated the principles of collective security set out in Article 10. Ultimately, they failed to keep the article out, but over subsequent years they worked, individually and without a concerted plan, to reduce Article 21 into nothingness. Their arguments initially fell on deaf ears. Afraid of upsetting the United States and jeopardizing its accession to the League, Secretary-General Eric Drummond invariably deflected the pressure from Latin American representatives.Footnote 70
In 1923, at around the time that Enrique Buero arrived in Geneva, Julián Nogueira renewed efforts to pressure Drummond. The doctrine, Nogueira argued, had never been accepted as a regional understanding and it was therefore imperative to define Article 21 in order to reassure Latin American states of the League’s capacity to act in the Americas.Footnote 71 Far from facilitating the entry of the United States into the League, the refusal to define the Doctrine had only alienated prospective members such as Mexico and Argentina.Footnote 72 In 1926, Nogueira unsuccessfully proposed the creation of a committee to clarify the meaning of Article 21.Footnote 73 This was the context within which Enrique Buero put his plan to dismantle the Article into motion.
In June 1927, Buero complained to Joseph Avenol, a high-ranking member of the Secretariat, about the League’s excessive fear of upsetting the United States. He stressed the need to arrive at a definitive interpretation of Article 21 and warned that if the article was interpreted to mean that the Council was powerless to mediate disputes involving member states from Latin America, the League would be useless to them and they would have no interest in remaining in Geneva. Avenol was impressed by Buero’s arguments and promised to support the campaign, already supported by Drummond, to appoint a Latin American head to the legal section.Footnote 74 Before the end of the month, Juan Antonio was the new head of the legal section and Enrique began laying the groundwork for dismantling the despised article. Buero attributed this success to the growing influence of Latin American in the League.Footnote 75
The opening to redefine Article 21 was provided when Costa Rica responded to an invitation to rejoin the League of Nations by demanding a clarification of the article. Under growing pressure, the Secretariat responded with a declaration, read by the League Council’s president, affirming that Article 21 ‘neither weakens nor limits any of the safeguards provided in the Covenant’. The statement also underscored that ‘the Covenant of the League forms a whole; the Articles of which it is composed confer upon all the Members of the League equal obligations and equal rights, in order, as the Preamble says, to promote international cooperation and to achieve international peace and security’.Footnote 76 In sum, the declaration confirmed that nothing in Article 21 limited the League of Nations and its Latin American members.
This statement was significant, so much so that over the years there has been speculation regarding the origins of this new interpretation and the identity of its author. Some attribute the text to José Gustavo Guerrero, others to Pierre Comert, the head of the information section.Footnote 77 The strongest evidence, however, points to Juan Antonio Buero. Although there are no drafts of the note in the League of Nations archives, Buero’s name is all over the cover page of the relevant file which contains metadata about those who handled the documents.Footnote 78 What is more, later in October, Enrique Buero wrote a letter congratulating Juan Antonio, identifying him as ‘the author of the note to Costa Rica on the Monroe Doctrine’.Footnote 79 The League’s new interpretation of Article 21, therefore, should be understood as part of the larger campaign of international legal reform.
The effects of the new interpretation of Article 21 were immediately visible later that year when the League of Nations was forced to address the emerging conflict between Bolivia and Paraguay over the Chaco region. Earlier internal memoranda were uncertain about the organization’s role in the Americas, but the ones drafted after the release of Buero’s note boldly affirmed the equality of member states and the right of the League of Nations to resolve conflicts in the region.Footnote 80 In December 1928, mere weeks after it had been published, Latin American representatives successfully invoked the note during a secret session of the League Council to justify League intervention in the Chaco dispute.Footnote 81
Buero’s memorandum laid the ground for greater League involvement in Latin American conflicts, first in the Chaco, and later in Leticia, a border war between Peru and Colombia. It also facilitated another one of Uruguay’s objectives in Geneva, securing greater Latin American participation in the League of Nations. In 1929, Peru, Bolivia, and Honduras returned to Geneva. Mexico entered the League in 1931. Argentina, which had sent an observer since 1928, returned in 1932. The next couple of years witnessed a blossoming of Latin American participation in Geneva and League activity in Latin America. Aside from the involvement in conflict resolution, the League’s technical bodies began to address labour, health, and social problems in the region.Footnote 82 This was in large part because, following Buero’s victory against Article 21, the Uruguayan delegation moved to expand the authority of the League on matters that had been previously the domain of Pan-American meetings.
Focusing on international legal codification, the Uruguayan delegation worked to overturn the notion that the American hemisphere was distinct from the rest of the world. The League’s most devoted champions, Enrique Buero, José Gustavo Guerrero, and Carlos Saavedra Lamas, all rejected the idea of a regionally distinct body of international law, perceiving it as a marker of second-class status and an obstacle to Latin American influence in the making of international law. Above all, they associated it with US-dominated institutions, such as the Pan-American Union and the American Institute for International Law, which they believed were obstructing codification. In 1927, when American jurists met in Rio de Janeiro to prepare the ground for codification, the Latin American delegates overwhelmingly voted against regional international law and for separating their project from the Pan-American Union.Footnote 83 In the years after, prominent Latin American proponents of codification continued to publicly complain about the politicization of the Pan-American Union, a dog-whistle for US influence, and the delays and obstructions of the US-dominated American Institute for International Law.Footnote 84
Latin Americans responded to these obstacles not by renouncing Pan-Americanism outright but by arguing for a redistribution of functions between the Union and the League. Pan-American institutions could continue working on purely technical matters, such as sanitation, but the more politically sensitive work, such as codification and enforcement, would be carried under the auspices of the League. In 1929, a Uruguayan delegate to the League of Nations already made this distinction when arguing that the Union’s activity was focused on ‘cultural and labour problems rather politics’ and that, unlike the League of Nations, it lacked ‘any effective means whereby it can immediately arrest hostilities and enforce an armistice’.Footnote 85
One of the main champions of this division of labour was Enrique Buero. Invited in 1929 to speak to the Groupement Universitaire pour la Société des Nations, Buero criticized efforts to give the Pan-American institutions ‘political functions’.Footnote 86 He concluded by insisting that there was no rivalry between the two international organizations. Each one had its distinct characteristics: one universal, the other regional; one political, the other apolitical.Footnote 87 Enrique Buero’s statement about ‘political functions’ was a veiled reference to the power of the United States and the need to pivot from Pan-American institutions. A case in point was the American Institute for International Law, which Buero privately denounced as a political rather than a scientific organization.Footnote 88 The ultimate aim was a redistribution of competence that would turn the League into the centre of lawmaking.
With these objectives in mind, Enrique Buero began preparing, as early as 1927, for the 1930 Hague Codification conference, where he hoped to project the power of the Latin American bloc on the question of state responsibility for injury to foreigners.Footnote 89 Buero had already touched on this subject during the Corfu crisis and he now launched himself into debates that had raged since the late nineteenth century regarding the standard of protection that states should provide to foreigners. Small post-colonial states such as Uruguay insisted that international law required only that states treat foreigners the same as nationals and that foreigners must exhaust local legal remedies before appealing for the protection of their home governments. More powerful states, however, insisted on the existence of a universal minimum standard of protection and frequently tried to supplant the jurisdiction of national courts with mixed claims commissions that were usually biased in favour of the claimant.Footnote 90
Appointed to represent Uruguay at the conference, Buero linked up with Urrutia of Colombia, his old ally in Geneva, and mobilized a coalition that included all seven Latin American states at the conference, the members of the Little Entente, plus Turkey, China, Persia, and Portugal, to block a standard that required more than equal treatment.Footnote 91 To the Uruguayan foreign minister, Buero reported he had ‘resolutely opposed granting foreigners a kind of international status, that would remove them from the jurisdiction of national courts’ and that he had ‘alluded to the 1917 treaties signed with England and France, and stated that we should not go back now’.Footnote 92 This statement demonstrates once again the importance of Uruguay’s domestic reform agenda to Buero’s new direction after 1923. The position on state responsibility stemmed from a desire to safeguard Uruguay from the interventions experienced in the 1910s and to ensure the primacy of national courts.
All of this activity, from the League’s involvement in the Americas to the bloc’s successful manoeuvres in The Hague, began to attract attention of those in the United States who opposed international legal reform. At least one influential lawyer, Edwin Borchard, looked on with enmity toward the Latin Americans who, he admitted, were making ‘serious inroads upon what we have thought were well-established doctrines’.Footnote 93 Eventually the entire State Department mobilized against the Latin American bloc.
Reforms prepared in Geneva
The United States was slow in reacting to the upswell of Latin American discontent after the occupation of Nicaragua. When informed that a loyal Pan-Americanist such as Brum had protested against the occupation, Francis White, the assistant secretary of state for Latin America, responded by dismissing outright those who ‘carp about the rights of small states’.Footnote 94 Weeks later, the US minister to Uruguay was forced to warn, once again, about the ‘astonishing’ lack of understanding in Washington regarding ‘the anti-Yankee psychology which is prevalent throughout this part of the world’.Footnote 95 But White was deaf to the warnings and even downplayed the negative results of the Havana conference which one State Department official later described as ‘one of the worst diplomatic defeats ever suffered by the United States at an important international conference’.Footnote 96 Still, White was not completely blind to the emerging bloc, recording his belief that Argentina intended to ‘become the champion and leader of the so-called weak states of this hemisphere against the hegemony of the United States’.Footnote 97
But it was only in January 1929, after the Latin American delegations in Geneva succeeded in getting to the League to mediate the Chaco dispute, that White finally became alert to the source and magnitude of the regional shift. He became obsessed with the idea of the League as a rival and with held cooperation from the international organization.Footnote 98 Several months later, White detected the Uruguayan element in the realignment and began to worry that the next Pan-American conference had been scheduled in ‘that hot bed of anti-Americanism, Montevideo, where the League and all European propaganda is at its height and most effective’.Footnote 99 He also began looking for ways to undermine criticism of the United States, eventually focusing on the fact that the ‘League, in its propaganda, has seized upon the Monroe Doctrine’.
The Monroe Doctrine had become so controversial that when Secretary of State Frank Kellogg attempted to win support for the Kellogg-Briand Pact across Latin America in late 1928, his envoys were met with questions about the treaty’s value considering that the United States had signed with reservations that allowed Nicaragua’s occupation and the exercise of the Monroe Doctrine.Footnote 100 Kellogg responded by asking J. Reuben Clark, a legal adviser at the State Department, to draft a memorandum that would repudiate the Roosevelt Corollary while also affirming the legality of armed intervention as a form of self-preservation.Footnote 101 Kellogg did not publish the memorandum and it was up to White to determine whether to release it.
Jefferson Caffery, the US minister to Colombia, and White’s closest friend in Latin America, supported the publication of the memorandum ‘in view of the humbuggery that has been spread abroad by friends of the League’, but warned that hemispheric relations were also being harmed by the US approach to diplomatic protection. Caffery pointed to ‘our attitude to Latin-American judicial institutions’ and noted the widespread belief that ‘our Government does not distinguish sharply enough between bona fide cases of legitimate American concerns and cases of concerns which have resorted to sharp practices in one way or another’.Footnote 102 White agreed that claims were ‘one of our sorest spots in our relations with Latin America’ and admitted that ‘the Solicitor’s Office has been too open to the attorneys of claimants and that it has done too much for them’.Footnote 103 But despite this acknowledgement, the administration’s position on diplomatic protection and military intervention does not appear to have changed. This was particularly evident in the reports of the minister to Montevideo who supported the line taken by Hughes in Havana and intensified pressure on Uruguay over the controversial claims connected to the International Telephone & Telegraph Corporation.Footnote 104
White’s reforms were only superficial, starting and ending with the publication of Clark’s memorandum. White carefully monitored Latin American reactions and observed that newspapers ‘were not so much interested as to whether we intervened in countries of this hemisphere on [the basis of] the Monroe Doctrine or the Isthmian Doctrine or the Doctrine of Self-Preservation but whether we were going to intervene. Nothing will satisfy those voicing these sentiments except a flat and categoric statement that under no circumstance will we intervene in any American country.’Footnote 105 The attempt to repudiate the corollary while conserving the legal right to intervene under a different name had failed to appease the Latin Americans and the Hoover administration was manifestly unwilling to provide the real thing, a categorical prohibition on intervention. The pressure for more genuine reform continued.
Having built a powerful and cohesive coalition in Geneva, Enrique Buero looked for new ways to project the group’s influence back into the Western hemisphere. In 1929, just a year after the Havana conference, the negative results of which had done so much to bolster his efforts in Geneva, Buero was already preparing for the next Pan-American conference that was scheduled to take place in Montevideo. His involvement in the planning of this conference should not be understood as a repudiation of his support for the division of labour between the international organizations, much less as a turn to Pan-Americanism, but as evidence of his confidence that these meetings could be used to achieve legal reforms that he portrayed as purely technical matters.Footnote 106 Although he had not yet been selected to head Uruguayan planning, in 1929 Buero was drafting the agenda, emphasizing the need to make use of the knowledge and ‘experience of how things are prepared in Geneva’. His activity at the League of Nations served as a model for a challenge to the status quo in the Americas.Footnote 107
Geneva remained the centre of Buero’s activity. He worked to maintain the bloc and strengthen international law, including during the Manchurian crisis.Footnote 108 The Uruguayan delegation also continued its long-standing support for effective sanctions with the understanding that enforcement was the obvious and necessary means of defeating aggression and protecting small states.Footnote 109 But despite its growing influence and prestige, the Uruguayan delegation began feeling the effects of the economic depression.Footnote 110 Buero lobbied for a larger budget, emphasizing that his diplomacy in Geneva had won ‘friendships for our country, taking on a role that I can immodestly say is far superior to what we could aspire to given our international and political significance’.Footnote 111 Buero eventually secured the role as chief organizer of the Montevideo conference and worked to create an agenda that would affirm the principles of sovereign equality and non-intervention.Footnote 112
Enrique Buero’s family archive ends abruptly in 1932. This makes it difficult to chart the final twelve months before the conference, a particularly important period in Uruguayan history. In March 1933, Gabriel Terra, the constitutional president, carried out a largely bloodless auto-coup. The only victim was Baltasar Brum, who publicly shot himself in protest. Enrique and Juan Antonio Buero continued to serve in Terra’s government, acts for which they were later persecuted by the Colorado Party after the return to democracy in 1938. Without Buero’s letters it is difficult to discern the complicated questions that he confronted in March of 1933. Brum had been a close friend and brother-in-law to both Enrique and Juan Antonio Buero. But resigning their positions would have meant also renouncing control over the organization of the conference. Ultimately, without the correspondence one cannot say much about their thinking at the time.
What is clear is that the coup did not have much influence on the planning of the conference.Footnote 113 Terra does not appear to have meddled in foreign policy during his first year in power and Uruguay’s delegates at the Montevideo conference acted in line with the policy Enrique Buero had implemented since 1923. They sided with Argentine counterparts and echoed the most cutting criticisms of US policy.Footnote 114 Perhaps the strongest evidence of Buero’s autonomy was his ability to involve Nogueira in the conference as a representative of the League of Nations despite US opposition.Footnote 115
US policy in Montevideo was influenced by fears of a Latin American bloc, especially after reports indicated Latin American support for a proposal to discuss the multilateralization of the Monroe Doctrine.Footnote 116 The initiative was supported by Josephus Daniels, the US ambassador to Mexico, but opposed by the administration.Footnote 117 Edwin C. Wilson, the chief of the Latin American Division, argued the doctrine was a ‘national policy’. Assistant Secretary of State R. Walton Moore warned that any declaration ‘might create embarrassment in the future, as for example in the event it should become absolutely essential for us to do something having an aggressive aspect for the purpose of protecting the Panama Canal’.Footnote 118 Secretary of State Cordell Hull rejected the proposal outright.Footnote 119
Yet though he was unwilling to renounce intervention, Hull was eager to make the necessary deals to avoid controversy at the conference. His instructions to the US delegates in Montevideo noted that a ‘willingness on our part to sign Señor [Carlos] Saavedra Lamas’ Anti-War Treaty might conceivably be of considerable assistance to our delegation in … avoiding the creation of embarrassing incidents’. Because the Anti-War Treaty prohibited occupation by armed force, Hull insisted on a reservation to prevent ‘questions as to our rights under certain existing treaties’ and the supposed right to ‘protect our nationals when they are in danger owing to a breakdown of local government’. The hope was that by signing the treaty with such reservations, the United States would preserve the status quo but also win the support of Saavedra Lamas, the foreign minister of Argentina who, not coincidentally, had been a major proponent of the pivot from the Pan-American Union to the League of Nations.Footnote 120
In his instructions, Hull acknowledged the ‘vast difference’ that existed between the position of the United States and of Latin America on ‘many fundamental principles of International Law’. The secretary of state anticipated that ‘the United States will, from the necessity of the situation, stand alone against the consolidated view of all Latin American countries, in so far as concerns some of the questions now on the Agenda’. He reiterated that the US delegation would oppose ‘most of the proposals advanced by the Latin American countries’, including a treaty supported by the Latin American delegations on the rights and duties of states. He also rejected the notion that US policies could ever be judged by ‘a tribunal composed for the most part of Latin American nations’.Footnote 121
During the conference, in an unplanned concession to the changed political environment, Hull supported the prohibition on intervention. The United States signed the Montevideo Convention, which provided in Article 8 that ‘no state has the right to intervene in the internal or external affairs of another’. The concession was a small victory for a bloc that had emerged in the League but which now exercised its influence on both sides of the Atlantic. The existing literature portrays this moment as a turning point in hemispheric relations and in the history of international law.Footnote 122 These claims are debatable, especially considering the State Department lawyers continued to argue internally that Article 8 was compatible with armed intervention to protect life and property.Footnote 123 But to the extent that Montevideo marked a shift, it was the product of a bloc created within the League of Nations.
Carlos Saavedra Lamas is usually credited with getting the United States to sign the Montevideo Convention. What is never mentioned is that he participated in the same networks and shared the same world view as Enrique Buero, where the Pan-American Union served a limited technical role and the key of political decisions were taken in the League of Nations in Geneva. In Montevideo, Saavedra Lamas bitterly criticized the refusal of the American Institute for International Law to codify international law and, subsequently, continued to focus on integrating Latin America into the League of Nations.Footnote 124 The success in Montevideo was seen by its chief architects not as a detour from Latin America’s integration in Geneva, but as consistent with a particular division of labour among the two international organizations. For Buero, the conference involved the passing of the baton to those who were better positioned to carry out his agenda.
Yet despite the overwhelming evidence that Saavedra Lamas, Buero, and others benefited and were shaped by their experience in Geneva, this dimension of the story continues to be excluded from accounts of the Montevideo conference and Latin America’s history of international law, which, all too often, is reduced to a regional story. The story of Latin America’s bloc in Geneva, however, underscores that Latin Americans pursued the aspiration to reform international law beyond the hemisphere and on a global scale that is a key part of our global history.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Haakon A. Ikonomou, Karin van Leeuwen, Morten Rasmussen, Rachel Nolan, Quinn Slobodian, Heidi Tworerk, and three anonymous reviewers for feedback on earlier versions of this article. Funding for this research was provided by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Financial support
Funding for this research was provided by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Grant Agreement No. 188302).
Competing interests
The author declares none.
Andrei Mamolea is an Assistant Professor at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies.
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