Excerpt from The Times History of the War, Vol. 15
South America towards the belligerents was generally one of detachment and neutrality, tempered by great and widespread affection for France, as the spiritual home of Latin civilization. The Governments of the Republics, in declaring their neutrality in 1914, acted in accordance with public sentiment, which, as in the United States, had then no desire to take an active part in the struggle. The foreign policy of the leading Republics Argentina, Chile, and Brazil reflected the Monroe doctrines theoretical aloofness from the destinies of monarchical and capitalist Europe; it reflected also an unmistakable though subdued undercurrent of popular opinion, that none of the belligerents had shown in the past sufficient appreciation of the moral and material progress of Southern (as distinguished from Central) America to justify any overt manifestation of sympathy or support. Material considerations, the financial and commercial interests involved, all tended at the outset to impose strict neutrality upon the Latin Republics of South America, and this policy was energetically reinforced in a vigorous Press propaganda by Germanys political and commercial agents all over the Continent. During the first onrush of the Teutonic hordes in the invasion of France the attitude Vol. XV. Part 183 of Germans from Patagonia to Pernambuco was so boastful and blustering as to lead many South American thinkers and writers to perceive something of the dangers to which the democracies of the new world must speedily be exposed in the event of victorious Germany becoming the paramount Power in Europe In Chile, and more especially in South Brazil, the typically insolent bearing of the German colonists during the first few weeks of the war was of the kind that is not easily forgiven or forgotten; it led to the rapid growth of feelings hostile to Germany in many quarters where none had previously existed, and prepared the public mind for the gradual process of its identification with the cause of the Allies. After the battle of the Marne, and even more markedly after the destruction of the German squadron at the Falkland Islands, the sons of the Fatherland began to walk more delicately overseas; their dreams of creating a New Germany to extend from Southern Brazil to the River Plate were relegated to the background of prudent silence.
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