714.1515/714: Telegram
The Minister in Honduras (Summerlin) to the Secretary of State
[Received 11:40 p.m.]
73. Your telegram No. 44, June 4, 4 p.m.29 Honduranean reply dated June 12 received. After detailed resume of your note, the text is as follows:
“The Government of Honduras has always appreciated with cordial sentiments of gratitude the friendly efforts toward which the distinguished American Government has dedicated and dedicates to the peaceful and equitable settlement of the boundary question between Honduras and Guatemala: efforts to which Honduras has always responded to loyally and even with ardor, receiving with entire good will the many suggestions which have been made to it with a view to accomplishing this high purpose.
To this end the Government of Honduras participated in the mediation of 1918–1920 and it was not to blame that a satisfactory solution was not reached at that time. In the same spirit Honduras received in 1923 the suggestion of an arbitration agreement with the President of the United States of America as final Arbiter. His Excellency the former Secretary of State Mr. Hughes took occasion to make this a matter of official record at the second plenary session on February 7, 1923, of the Washington Conference on Central American Affairs.30 Later, following the lamentable death of His Excellency, Mr. Warren G. Harding, the President of the United States of America, the Government of Honduras reiterated its obligation for arbitration to the American Legation on August 23, 1923, asking that the Arbitrator might be the new President of the United States, His Excellency Mr. Calvin Coolidge.31 The latter having indicated his acceptance, according to a note of September 17, 1923, from the Minister of the United States in Tegucigalpa, Honduras has only waited for a similar action on the part of Guatemala to make formal her obligation to arbitrate.
From that date to the present the distinguished American Government on various occasions both officially and in other ways has expressed its understanding that there exists between Honduras and Guatemala a definite obligation for arbitration. This understanding was especially to be inferred from the declaration made by the Honorable Roy T. Davis, mediator and representative of the American Government at the Cuyamel conference, during the session of April 23rd, 1928. It was also expressed in the communication from the Department of State which Your Excellency was so good as to transmit to me and to which I now have the honor to refer.
In view of these considerations which my Government submits respectfully to the attention of Your Excellency and of your Government, [Page 750] permit me to point out that in the light of the stipulation in article 1, paragraph 1, of the convention for the establishment of an International Central American Tribunal that the contracting parties agree to submit to the said Tribunal questions for which ‘they have not accepted some other form of arbitration,’ the Government of Honduras would desire to know first the judgment of the Department of State in regard to the earlier existing obligation with Guatemala; that is to say, if the Department does not consider, as it considered in the past, that there is still existing a solemn promise of arbitration agreed upon between Honduras and that Republic, then I am of the opinion that my Government would be relieved of the obligation which has bound it for more than five years and would be in a position to consider itself free to assume another obligation without failing in its pledged word before the American Government.
While asking Your Excellency to transmit to your Government the respectful statement which I now have the honor to submit to its high and just consideration, I await the reply, in order that I may make due and careful answer to the note of Your Excellency to which I have had the honor to refer.”
Repeated to Guatemala and Salvador.
- See footnote 14, p. 746.↩
- See Conference on Central American Affairs, p. 56.↩
- See telegram No. 58, Sept. 14, 1923, 4 p.m., to the Minister in Guatemala, Foreign Relations, 1923, vol. i, p. 355.↩