This volume is an expanded and annotated reissue of the author’s Notas históricas y diplomáticas, Portugal y la independencia americana, which appeared in 1918. The present edition bears the elaborate subtitle, El reconocimiento de la independencia hispanoamericana y el proyecto de confederación de la independencia de las naciones del estadista portugués Silvestre Pinheiro Ferreira. The study focuses uncritically on certain aspects of Portugal’s policy toward the Spanish American republics in 1821-22, pointing up the early recognition of the United Provinces, Chile, and Gran Colombia and emphasizing the little-known proposal by Portugal’s foreign minister Pinheiro Ferreira for a confederation to link the independent states of Latin America, the United States, Greece, Spain, and Portugal. The text is devoted largely to the reproduction in Spanish translation of nearly a score of documents which the author unearthed from the archives of the Portuguese foreign ministry while he was Venezuelan minister to Portugal during World War I. The bulk of the documents are from the pen of Pinheiro Ferreira and includes diplomatic notes, letters of accreditation, instructions, the Zea circular and the Portuguese reply, and proposals for international cooperation. For students of the diplomacy of the independence period the major value of this work will doubtless lie in the collection of documentary materials it contains.
As diplomatic history this study is disappointing. The author’s main purpose is apparently to present Pinheiro Ferreira as a wise and far-sighted friend of Latin America, unjustly forgotten by posterity. However, in building a case for his hero as the architect of an altruistic Portuguese policy favorable to Latin America, he examines the documentary evidence out of the context in which it was drafted. For example, he makes no reference to the liberal revolution in Lisbon in 1820 as a factor contributing to the reversal of Portuguese policy toward the Plata region, nor to Portugal’s search for defense against the Holy Alliance as a basis for Pinheiro Ferreira’s proposed confederation of the new world and certain “liberal” states of Europe. Nor does the author consider the reasons for the lack of interest in this proposal, which he ranks with Bolívar’s plan of 1815 and with the original statement of the Monroe Doctrine.
Among the unexpected materials included in the present edition of Notas históricas y diplomáticas are an exchange of correspondence between Portugal and Haiti in the early 1820’s, a Brazilian proposal of 1834 for confederation with the United States, and a lengthy article, América y la Sociedad de las Naciones, written by José de Villalonga Ibarra in July, 1919, examining the incipient League of Nations from the Latin American viewpoint.
Throughout the text Planas-Suárez asserts his opinion that Latin America has a unique role to play in the field of cooperation between nations of the hemisphere and the world. He holds that such cooperation does not require an elaborate organization with a special body of international bureaucrats. He favors maximum guarantees against intervention in internal affairs—in short, something akin to the dreams of Bolívar and Pinheiro Ferreira. Yet he stops short of indicating how such an apparatus could meet the problems of the OAS and the UN in 1961.
