The Tango War

by Mary Jo McConahay

  President Jorge Ubico was an unlikely partner for the U.S. program. As an army officer, Ubico had been governor of Alta Verapaz, knew the Germans there well, and often professed his admiration for them. Fond of wearing military regalia with plenty of gold leaves on his hats, Ubico took over the government in 1931 and became known as Central America’s Napoleon for his dictatorial ways and haughty demeanor. A strongman who ruled with the help of a vicious secret police, Ubico admired Hitler and Mussolini. In this he was like leaders in Chile and Argentina—Chile sent its military to train in Germany, Argentina to Italy. Fascist regimes with their passion for order promised a model for the progress and stability lacking in many parts of Latin America, and legal fascist political parties grew. The populist Brazilian dictator Getúlio Vargas governed with his own version of fascism in the biggest country of the hemisphere.

  But Guatemalan president Jorge Ubico was nothing if not opportunistic. He hid his personal leanings, and soon watched the U.S. Air Force begin construction on a coveted airport that remains the nation’s international air depot to this day. He expropriated the fincas representing vast tracts of the country’s most productive lands, turning some of them into state property, selling others. He took Helmut Sapper’s land.

  * * *

  Why did the Americans want Helmut Sapper? Not only was he born in Guatemala, not Germany, but he did not participate in the 1938 shipboard voting held to approve the Anschluss. He was a known antifascist. At an event where others pledged readiness to fight for the Reich, he stood to declare that he was “not a supporter of the doctrines of Hitler.” And why did the Americans fail to release him for months after the war ended? The answer throws light on an underlying rationale for the capture of many Latin American Germans: Washington wanted to eliminate economic competition from the most formidable non-Latin business network south of the Rio Grande, clearing the way for U.S. firms.

  The U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City called Sapper and four others “the most important internees in the United States.” In a postwar dispatch to the State Department, the diplomats argued the five men should be prevented from returning to Guatemala not because they posed a political threat—Germany had lost the war months before—but because they were so important among German Guatemalan businessmen. Sapper was the baron of the Alta Verapaz coffee plantations and connected businesses. The Nottebohm brothers, Karl—who considered himself a “pure Guatemalan,” as the embassy cable itself reported—and Kurt, were also prominent businessmen and bankers, and, like Sapper, Guatemala-born. They were so wealthy that their family compound occupied an entire city block in the capital. Another of the “most important internees”—note that the embassy dispatch does not say “most dangerous”—was Hermann Kaltwasser, whose business sign in Guatemala City read: KALTWASSER: CHEMICAL AND PHARMACEUTICAL PRODUCTS, VETERINARY MEDICINE. Kaltwasser had been in Guatemala since 1914, and U.S. agents admitted they could find “no evidence” that he collaborated with Nazis, even indirectly. “Nevertheless, he was one of the main outlets of German products in Guatemala,” said the dispatch. The fifth man, Martin Knoetzsch, the Nottebohm’s general manager, had signed a public declaration to protest the Nazi party takeover of the Colegio Aleman. Knoetzch had delivered a list of Nazi party members to the Guatemalan government as an act of loyalty to his adopted country, another fact known to the diplomats.

  The U.S. Embassy warned Washington that the return of the men to their families in Guatemala “should be resisted on grounds of their economic importance, although reliable evidence of undesirable political activities is lacking.” Historian Max Paul Friedman wrote that the case shows how the U.S. capture and deportation policy evolved from being “an undertaking primarily motivated by the need to ensure security against subversion into a long-term project of permanently weakening German economic competition in a region long claimed as ‘America’s backyard.’” Latin American authorities willingly deported “owners of property that was easier to seize when there was no one left behind to defend it.”

  * * *

  In highlands Coban, on the morning Maya’s mother announced that their father had been arrested, the family walked from home across town to the jail, where they found others they knew already in the visiting room. Police took the prisoners to Guatemala City, a day’s drive away.

  “My mother packed us into a car and followed him to the capital,” Maya remembered. They rented a room at a downtown hotel. For a few days, Helmut Sapper was allowed to visit, sometimes to stay overnight, as long as he reported back to police every day, until January 19, 1943. “Then, without warning, they took them. Later we found out it was in a plane with windows covered so they couldn’t see out.”

  Weeks later the family discovered that Helmut Sapper was being held with other prisoners at the Kenedy Alien Detention Center in southeast Texas. Named for Mifflin Kenedy, a nineteenth-century entrepreneur, the town was once known as Six Shooter Junction—bar patrons on the main street near the rail line entertained themselves by jocularly firing at passing trains. Texas Rangers mounted on horses, lassos in hand, met the first internees as they stepped from the train.

  In Guatemala, the government froze the bank accounts of the captured men and seized their assets. In a show of loyalty, workers on the Sapper plantations collected the gasoline ration coupons that still arrived for the now-silent machinery and passed them quietly to Maya’s mother, who sold them to buy food for the children. “Kind people” gave them clothing, or a chicken, but shock remained. In the hotel rooms in Guatemala City, Maya convinced her mother to let her sleep in her father’s pajamas. “I knew he was gone,” she said. “I just wanted to be hugged by his skin.”

  Maya’s brother Horst, barely a teenager, had learned about machines on the plantations and now began repairing cars and motorcycles to help support the family. Letters arrived from Helmut at Camp Kenedy with holes in them where U.S. censors had snipped out words or phrases. He hung his things on a nail, he wrote, worked in a kitchen, and it was always very hot. “Don’t go to Germany,” one letter said. With the Nottebohm brothers, Kaltwasser, and Knoetzsch, Helmut Sapper said he was fighting his circumstances. “We are going to sue,” he wrote. The men charged they were being unlawfully detained, and in a habeas corpus challenge they demanded to know the charges on which they were imprisoned, or be set free.

  After three years at Camp Kenedy, Helmut Sapper won his case and returned to Guatemala on December 24, 1945, giving his family their best Christmas in memory. With home and property gone, however, there was no way to pick up life where he had left it. He sold kitchen gadgets and cheap cameras from Germany door-to-door. Young Horst’s repair business was thriving, and, taking a risk, he joined with his father in a venture to import motorcycles—they could offer guaranteed maintenance. Eventually Maya’s siblings presided over a lucrative German import agency. Helmut Sapper, however, remained embittered.

  When Maya was a nursing student in Canada, she fell in love with a young American doctor who flew to Guatemala to ask Helmut for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Sapper refused. He said he didn’t want his grandchildren growing up speaking English. (The couple eloped.) Maya returned to Guatemala when her father died in 1972, but she was not there when her beloved brother Horst was brutally murdered by unknown assailants in 1981, in the midst of Guatemala’s internal war.

  I asked Maya whether she, too, carried the kind of resentment that had made her father bitter.

  No, she said, but she did take a stark lesson from what he went through. “There are times when you have to prove your innocence, instead of having someone prove your guilt,” she said.

  “The Americans didn’t want business in the American continent to go on with Germans,” she said. “They were in charge of the continent, the way they saw it.”

  Maya Sapper stepped from the room and returned with miniature albums filled with sepia-toned photos. There was her father Helmut seated with his children at home, a relaxed look on his young face. There was Maya as a
girl standing outdoors in a light-colored frock before a steep-roofed house in Alta Verapaz.

  Maya walked me through her garden to leave, toward a wooden gate. An overwhelming perfume of roses stopped me, the kind of deep, rich perfume you rarely find in roses today, the flowers peach-colored, voluptuous. “They were my mother’s,” she said.

  6.

  IN INCA COUNTRY, CAPTURING “JAPANESE”

  Throughout 1940 and 1941, Japan had evinced great interest in Latin America as a possible trading partner, and the guardians of the security of the United States viewed the burgeoning Japanese presence in the region with considerable suspicion. They began to weave a web of contingency plans for Latin America.

  —P. SCOTT CORBETT, Quiet Passages: The Exchange of Civilians between the United States and Japan during the Second World War

  The U.S. forced rendition and removal program swept more than two thousand ethnic Japanese from their homes in Latin America and brought them to concentration camps in the United States. The given justification for this mass abduction was to prevent a fifth column from sabotaging the Allies. But the real reasons went deeper.

  Like Germany, Japan maintained intense interest in Latin America as a market and as a source of raw materials—Japan was second only to the United States as an importer of Peru’s primary export crop, cotton, for instance. Just as the wartime U.S. blacklist struck at German-owned firms in Latin America, prohibiting them to do business, the Allies wanted to restrain competing Japanese enterprises to clear the way for the friendliest possible postwar trade. And Latin governments were ready to take over the blacklisted businesses.

  Racial prejudice was key—the same prejudice that drove the U.S. wartime imprisonment of 120,000 U.S. Japanese residents, two-thirds of them born in the United States, without charges or evidence of wrongdoing. Governments in Latin America could see that Washington was incarcerating its own “Japanese,” although they did not need to look to the north for lessons in racial bias. Latin politicians and elites often saw themselves as European—white—despite a mixed heritage with black and indigenous populations. In policy and inclination, many were comfortable with discrimination, if not hostility, against Asians.

  The most important reason of all for capturing ethnic Japanese out of Latin America, however, was that the United States urgently needed “Japanese” individuals to exchange for Americans held prisoner in Asia. Washington needed trade bait.

  During the war, the imperial Japanese interned some 12,100 American men, women, and children: 6,000 in China, 5,000 in the Philippines, and 1,100 in Japan. Some were diplomats who might be exchanged for other diplomats, one for one, in traditional fashion. Most, however, were businesspeople or other Americans who had decided to make their homes in Asia. The numbers included missionaries whose churches had not moved them out in a timely way, despite State Department warnings that hostilities were imminent. Or they had decided to take the chance to stay since they did not feel directly threatened. Once war started, diplomats and other high-value prisoners were among the first to be exchanged; but for U.S. authorities it was intolerable to think that thousands of other U.S. citizens and their families might endure imprisonment or worse at enemy hands. A way must be created to trade for them and bring them home.

  Japanese residents in the United States and Japanese Americans were not an option to use for the trades. Even penned up in remote camps, they had more rights as U.S. citizens and legal residents than Latin American “Japanese” brought to the United States as illegal aliens. The captives from Latin countries would come under the control of the U.S. State Department’s Special War Problems Division charged with the prisoner exchanges.

  The State Department created the division in 1939 “to handle special problems arising out of the disturbed conditions in Europe, such as aiding in the repatriation of American citizens.” By July 1942, its prisoner exchange program, which came to be called “Quiet Passages,” had effectively cleared Europe of the American civilians who wanted to come home. The Quiet Passages with the Japanese were more protracted. They were complicated by a shortage of transport, overlapping responsibilities among U.S. government agencies, and the shortfall in eligible “Japanese”—such as employees of Japanese government agencies or Japanese citizens who wanted to be repatriated—to trade for the Americans. Secretary of State Cordell Hull thought the use of ethnic Japanese captives from Latin America such an excellent idea that he suggested not stopping at a few, but virtually cleansing the continent. He encouraged President Roosevelt to continue “our efforts to remove all the Japanese from these American Republic countries for internment in the United States.”

  * * *

  More than any other country, Peru collaborated with Washington in sending away its residents of Japanese ancestry. Successful entrepreneurs and social leaders were taken from a thriving community of thirty thousand. Of the twenty-two hundred Japanese sent to the United States from Latin America, about eighteen hundred came from Peru. Many were the best and brightest of the community.

  FBI agents, diplomats, and U.S. military intelligence personnel looked for Peruvian Japanese who might be security risks. Not everyone on the hunt was fluent in Spanish. Sometimes denunciations were accepted at face value from suspicious neighbors or business rivals. Peruvian Japanese say that FBI agents combed newspapers to make their arrest lists, seeking men who played important roles in Japanese cultural, trade, and self-help groups, even noting who attended social events. When detectives brought in the suspected subversives, there was little recourse to the law, although local officials were not above bribery to free a suspect if the price was right.

  Of all the U.S. Embassy posts in Latin America, Lima may have been the only one where a diplomat with command of both Japanese and Spanish was assigned to scrutinize the Japanese community. John K. Emmerson, a native of Canon City, Colorado, had attended the Sorbonne and served ambassadors in Tokyo and Taipei before coming to Peru in February 1942. As third secretary of the U.S. Embassy, he wrote, his brief was “First, the expulsion of the leaders of the Japanese colony; Second, the control of their movements and activities; and Third, measures to counteract Axis propaganda.”

  In looking for “dangerous” Japanese, Emmerson engaged the help of a Chinese Embassy functionary. In the provinces, he looked for informers among local Peruvian Chinese whose ancestral home was at war with Japan, and who were often commercial competitors with Peruvian Japanese. Emmerson’s assessment that Peru’s Japanese were “dangerous, well organized, and intensely patriotic [for Japan]” supported the State Department’s effort to eliminate an ethnic minority that Lima was glad to be rid of.

  The Peruvians were so eager to expel their Japanese that diplomats had to turn down many of their suggestions. Nevertheless, it is worth asking whether, for all his expertise, the embassy’s point man in Lima had been swept up in the fervor to find subversives where they did not exist.

  After twenty months at the job, John Emmerson seemed to take a step back. He questioned whether the “Japanese colony” was indeed a threat. He wrote a hundred-page report that, among other observations, charged Peruvian officials with graft in connection with the deportations. The report was shelved, “for the sake of the kind of international harmony that avoids unpleasant truths,” wrote historian C. Harvey Gardiner. Thirty-five years after he left Lima, Emmerson wrote of the Peruvian Japanese: “During my period of service in the embassy, we found no reliable evidence of planned or contemplated acts of sabotage, subversion, or espionage.”

  On Emmerson’s watch, nevertheless, Peruvian Japanese “believed to be dangerous” were shipped out of the country, and others were prohibited from traveling, their telephones disconnected, schools closed, property confiscated.

  Chuhei Shimomura, who owned a small import company, was arrested without charge, and there was no hearing. More than seventy years later, Flor de Maria Shimomura remembers visiting her father at Lima’s forbidding Panoptico prison in 1943. A few days after his daughter
’s visit, with a thousand other prisoners, Chuhei Shimomura boarded the oil-fired steamer Etolin, seconded from the Alaska Packers’ Association, newly painted with the word DIPLOMATE starboard and port.

  “We went to the dock to see if they might have mercy,” Flor de Maria said. But no one was released. Her brother Carlos said the picture of that day “queda gravado,” remains engraved in the mind. With their mother, they watched the ship “until it disappeared.”

  In the United States, Breckinridge Long, a confidant of President Roosevelt and chief of the Special Division, suspected that the Justice Department would object to thousands of persons being imprisoned on U.S. soil without due process. He tried unsuccessfully to convince the War Department to take over responsibility for the Latin American captives, and they remained in State Department custody. Long was right about Justice Department concerns: Attorney General Francis Biddle asked Secretary of State Hull to consider hearings for the prisoners when they came to U.S. soil, “similar to those given to alien enemies of the United States to determine whether they should be strictly confined.” The Justice Department also desired to have one of its representatives present in Lima to “review the facts” as individuals were being arrested, “to avoid the task of detaining persons who are not dangerous.”

  But Secretary of State Hull didn’t like the ideas. The embassy was carefully managing the process, he said. Biddle folded. The war was raging, concern for “due process” a casualty.

  The wartime crisis of the Peruvian Japanese is virtually unknown outside Peru, and memory of their experience is largely disappearing or ignored inside the country. But those who remember portray a dark and complex moment, not only in the modern history of the Andean land but also in the history of U.S. allegiance to its own principles.