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Latin America

My Lords, in the first debate today, I declared an interest as an ex officio member of the board of the Conservative Party. It may be more relevant to make that declaration now as, shortly before the previous debate ended and this debate began, I was summoned to join a conference call of the board at two o’clock. I was conscious of infringing the rubric of your Lordships’ House by not being present when the opening speaker—my noble friend Lady Hooper—began the debate. I made my peace with her and gained some insight into what she would say. In those circumstances, I hope that the House will recall the definition in Blackstone’s law dictionary of an act of God as an act that no reasonable man would expect God to commit, and forgive me for speaking in the debate not having been present at the beginning. I apologise especially to the noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall, most of whose speech I also missed. I congratulate my noble friend on winning the ballot and introducing the subject, which is eminently worth while. I heard the remarks of my noble friend Lady   Gardner and the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, whose speech I much enjoyed. My background to speaking is more modest than theirs, but perhaps worth recounting in the spirit not only of this debate, but of Latin American affairs. In 1964, I became engaged to my late first wife. When I announced it at breakfast, my brother—a lawyer and now a judge—said, ““Ah yes; Brazil is one of the few countries where you can be married by proxy””. It so happened that a proxy marriage was convenient, as my late first wife wished to leave the country on a Brazilian passport and travel thereafter on a British one; she was Anglo-Brazilian. We arranged that the civic ceremony, which is the critical one in Brazil, should take place on 3 March—my birthday, and therefore a date that we were likely to remember. On 4 March when I went to my office, fastening my seatbelt believing myself to be a married man, there was a telegram from the British consul-general in Sao Paulo, who was supposed to be representing me, to say that he had completely forgotten to go. I was therefore not married. We then had to devise another date between that and the church wedding in Sao Paulo that I would also be likely to remember. We chose St   Patrick’s Day on the grounds that the British consul-general was not likely to be taking part in Irish celebrations on that day. I was then married, and due to go out to be married in church on 6 April. In the week before 6 April, a coup occurred in Brazil against the then president, President Goulart. My late noble kinsman was at that stage Home Secretary, and the Foreign Office said that under no circumstances could the Home Secretary go into a war zone. The British consul-general in Sao Paulo, clearly anxious to make amends for the fact that he had not turned up at the initial civic ceremony, sent us a telegram that said, ““All aviation gasoline commandeered. Have secured final place on final BOAC flight out of Sao Paulo for Mrs Brooke””, as she then was. We sent back a stiff-upper-lip telegram that simply said, ““Continuing to pack””. Our faith in the oscillation of Latin American affairs was wholly confirmed, because Goulart moved to either Paraguay or Uruguay on the Wednesday. We flew out on the Thursday night, and I arrived in Sao Paulo on the Friday. The streets were still lined with tanks, which made for a new interpretation of a shotgun wedding. The rest of my family arrived at the weekend. The stock exchange, which had been shut for the whole of Friday, reopened on Monday and rose vertically by 85 per cent in the course of the day. In the index of a stock exchange, 85 per cent is a considerable amount of money. That greatly enhanced the celebrations of our church wedding, which occurred at six o’clock that evening. We honeymooned in Brazil and Peru but I fear that, before my first wife’s death, I went back to Brazil on only a couple of occasions. Therefore, my credentials for speaking at large in this debate are extremely modest. On the other hand, in an international development debate in the last Session of the previous Parliament, I indicated that I had for 20 years chaired a British charity operating at 7,000 feet in the Andes in Peru. It started out as an archaeological charity working on Inca forts, and then became by way of the Inca canals a developmental charity as well. I shall not go over ground that I covered in that debate, however. After my wife’s death, all three of my sons travelled widely in Latin America, wanting to know more about their mother’s background; they were children or young people when she died. They travelled to at least two-thirds of the Latin American countries and, as a consequence, I acquired vicarious knowledge through them. I think that I am right in saying that the first reference to ““Latin America”” occurred as late as 1826. That would be later than the Monroe doctrine or the death of Canning. Yet, it coincided with the liberation movements and my former constituency in Westminster is studded with blue plaques to the liberators of various Latin American countries and who briefly lived in London during that time. Admiral Lord Cochrane, a British liberator of several Latin American countries and a predecessor of mine as the Member of Parliament for Westminster, is buried in the central nave of Westminster Abbey. It will be apparent from my modest credentials that I shall not make an exhaustive speech about every Latin American country. However, I shall mention a development that has been good, although it has not been accomplished without some vicissitude and controversy. I declare an interest as the pro vice-chancellor of the University of London. Those who take an interest in Latin American affairs will be aware of The Americas published in 2003 by Professor Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, which is a powerful polemic which argues that we should be looking at the affairs of Latin America and the United States together and that there is an overlap between them. That is why he called it The Americas, to provide a composite and portmanteau title. Given that neither of the Libraries in this Palace has a copy of that book, although they have copies of a number of books that he wrote in the 1990s, I have not been able to verify that one of his points to illustrate where we started from was that, of the 10 richest people in the United States, one was the beneficiary of ““old”” money, the others all made their fortunes in their own lifetimes. Whereas, in Latin America exactly the opposite was true. Nine were the   beneficiaries of ““old”” money and one is an entrepreneur who made his money from his own resources. Perhaps, in part, due to Professor Fernandez-Armesto’s book, the University of London, which previously had within its School of Advanced Study an Institute of Latin American Studies and an Institute of United States Studies, decided at a council meeting in December 2003, over which I presided, that those two bodies would be merged into a single institute. Some of the American advisers to the original American institute had understandably felt that that was not right, but I am confident that it has been a thoroughly satisfactory development in terms of raising the profile of Latin America and Latin American studies in this country. In the first instance, it will be a three-year experiment and we shall have to see how it goes but, so far, the omens are good. I am, due to sympathy with my late wife’s provenance, from time to time embarrassed about how little some of us know about Latin America. Therefore, my noble friend’s initiative on starting this debate has been admirable and I hope that the initiative in the University of London will play some part in increasing our knowledge.