The “Vanguard of Pan-Americanism”

Standing before a meeting of the American Luncheon Club in London in 1916, the Chilean Minister to Great Britain, Agustín Edwards, offered his thoughts on Pan-Americanism. “I am an American,” he began, “a South American, and I have won my spurs as a businessman.”1 In this, Edwards targeted the commerce-minded men that were the majority of his listeners and granted authority to the statement that followed. Edwards spoke with more than the authority of a businessman. He was the founder of one of the most important newspapers in Chile (El Mercurio, Santiago edition), an alumnus of Chile’s National Congress, a former Chilean foreign minister, and a scion of one of the wealthiest and most influential families within Chile’s oligarchy. In sum, he was closely attuned to the attitudes of his government and the ruling elite in Chile. Within this context, Edwards made a bold claim: Argentina, Brazil, Chile (the so-called ABC nations) and the United States were called to be the “vanguard of Pan-Americanism.” This may have been merely an example of Edwards’ rhetorical exuberance (he also saddled the Americas with the epithet, “the reservoir of humanity”). Yet Edwards’s statement was a genuine reflection of Chile’s official foreign policy.