And the Germans are active not only in trade. They have learnt from British example that the road to business in Latin America is the investment of capital. And, strange as it may seem, the German has peculiar opportunities of investment at the present time. Such limited trade as can be carried on yields great profits. There is difficulty about remitting funds to Germany; and in any case "victory war loans" and other investments in the Fatherland may seem less attractive than investments in those Latin-American lands which look forward to rapidly expanding prosperity after the war. Accordingly, the German merchant is not only buying raw materials; he is also taking a share in the movement of home manufactures which now offers peculiar opportunities to foreign enterprise. Moreover, German firms in Buenos Aires have invested largely in short loans to the Argentine Government. Besides these private investments, which, like all German activities, have their official side, loans have been repeatedly pressed on the Argentine Government, ostensibly by neutral financiers (first in the United States and afterwards in Spain) but in fact by Germany, evidently for immediate political as well as for ulterior economic objects. These offers have been declined. A German loan openly offered to Uruguay has also been refused.
Obviously, the whole story of German war-efforts in Latin America cannot yet be told. Enough has been said to indicate the character and the intensity of those efforts. For this far western front Germany has mobilised a business army, specially trained for the nature of the country and for the kind of operations wherein it is to be engaged. These efforts and aspirations are best illustrated by a recent utterance from the Hamburg branch of the League for Germanism abroad:—"We should like to insist that South America, the main field of our activity for many years past, constitutes a great sphere. Wide areas, with great possibilities of development, but little cultivated hitherto, are waiting to be opened up. It must be our business to employ here all our strength in order to retain and to make useful to ourselves these countries with their markets and raw materials. What we have to do is to arm for the Peace and to collect money, in order to be able immediately to act with energy—with our whole strength and with adequate resources."
In this "arming for the Peace" there is one weapon which demands special mention, namely the influencing of opinion by printed propaganda.
The German mobilisation of the Press is a vast business controlled by the State. Upon the outbreak of war this organisation undertook the special work of war propaganda through two newly formed departments: (1) Press Office for influencing neutrals, (2) News Service for Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries. This institution of a special Ibero-American service proves the prominence given to the work in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking lands. The last words obviously include the Peninsula as well as Latin America. Nor can the propaganda carried on in Spain be dissociated from that in Spanish America. "Spain is the way to South America," writes a Spaniard discussing this very point. The popular illustrated Spanish prints A.B.C. and Blanco y Negro, which carry on a vehement Germanophil propaganda, are carefully perused, as coming from "home," by Spanish emigrants throughout Latin America, who thus become, half unwittingly, disseminators of German views and of belief in German victory.
For the first object of this propaganda is to represent Germany as invincible in war. This military propaganda is an essential part of economic efforts. The Germans hold up a picture of German sagacity, system, thoroughness, efficiency. They desire to impress as well as to persuade. They know the effect produced by their victory in 1870. Credit and confidence are the greatest of commercial assets; and in this case economic credit is to rest upon belief in military strength.
In South America, as in Spain, the method is to capture the press, and so disseminate German war-news, pro-German articles, photographs and cartoons. But it was not enough to control or inspire existing newspapers. In many capitals the Germans started new journals, printed in the vernacular. Naturally, the chief effort was made in Buenos Aires. Early in the war, a German organ, La Unión, was founded, in order that the Porteño, as he walked the street or travelled by train or tramway, might have the German case daily and forcibly presented to him. Throughout Latin America, a dozen or more of newspapers have been thus founded for propaganda purposes, some of them illustrated by effective cartoons. The strangest examples of this journalistic campaign are two Turkish newspapers, La Bandera Otomana of Buenos Aires and O Otomano of São Pãolo, which urge the cause of the Central Powers among Orientals in those countries. Besides these purely German efforts, a host of newspapers, many of them the local journals of country towns, serve the German cause throughout Latin America, the newspaper offices sometimes acting as distributing agencies for periodicals printed in Germany in the Spanish tongue.
For, besides German and Germanophil periodicals published in America, others are produced in Germany for circulation in those countries. The number and the excellent quality of these Spanish productions of the German printing-press are remarkable. La Revista de la Exportación Alemana is a most effective organ for German business, exhibiting side by side, in pictures and letter-press, triumphs in the field and triumphs of industry. The monthly Mensajero de Ultramar and the weekly Heraldo de Hamburgo have been already mentioned. Hamburg also produces the well-known weekly picture-paper, Welt in Bild, with letter-press in twelve languages. These well-written and well-printed newspapers are widely circulated in Latin America in order to uphold the German cause.
In addition to these permanent publications, special war periodicals are issued, every one of them a German trumpet. Not least of these is the comic paper La Guasa Internacional, which holds up the Allies to ridicule and abhorrence in cartoons, squibs and sketches. A diary of the war with a review of political and military movements is given in the illustrated monthly Crónica de la Guerra. Another chronicle is La Guerra Europea Mirada por un Sud-Americano, a piece of war propaganda written by a Latin-American soldier, Señor Guerrero, who was, until recently, Peruvian military attaché at Berlin. But perhaps the most effective of these war periodicals is La Gran Guerra en cuadros, which presents, in a series of pictures, the war as meant to be seen by neutral eyes. All these periodicals attribute economic blunders and financial errors or weakness to the Allies, sometimes making adroit use of British or French self-criticisms: on the other hand, they magnify German economic strength and organisation. This main object appears in an article on "After-war commercial relations between Spanish America and Europe" published in El Mensajero de Ultramar, which argues that Germany will suffer least of all the belligerents from the effects of the war; and that afterwards she will be the best purchaser and also the most capable provider for Latin America. Such is the reiterated refrain of a host of periodical publications.
In addition to periodicals, Germany pours over the Spanish-and Portuguese-speaking world a constant inundation of fly-leaves, photographs, pamphlets, books and miscellaneous war literature, preaching German strength, efficiency, humanity, and even the democratic character of German institutions.