Nixon on Communist Poison

Yes, I see what you’re saying, and I think the President should emphasize this in his talk to the business leaders: that they cannot look at Latin America as a divisible entity, but they must look at the whole hemisphere. And if poison afflicts one part of the body, it eventually is going to affect the other. If the poison of communist dictatorship spreads through Latin America, or the poison of unrest and [unintelligible] revolution spreads through Latin America, it inevitably will infect the United States. You cannot separate one part of the body from the rest.

The problem that the President will run into with the businessmen – which he will not run into with regard to his own country, but with regard to the other countries of Latin America, except possibly for … the big country is Brazil – is this: which comes first, the chicken or the egg? The big American businesses, I think, are now ready to make major investments on a partnership basis, on a basis in which the nationals of the countries involved will – as is the case of American partnerships in business there in Mexico – will participate in management and stockholding [unintelligible]. But the difficulty is they now are afraid many times to invest – afraid because of the fear of instability in certain countries, and of expropriation.

Richard Nixon, conversation with Mexican president Luis Echeverría Alvarez, Conversation No. 735-1 ,July 15, 1972