HARRY TRUMAN LIBRARY Papers of NATHANIEL DAVIS. I agreed to carry the message to the Archbishop.
The latter said he did not feel he could do anything more. He felt that Dr. Calderon reply to his overtures amounted to a refusal and anyhow he was convinced that Calderon representatives felt he had Ulate on the run since the latter twice had offered to negotiate and that, therefore, they would be adamant. He could only hope that someone else would be more successful than he had been.
Later in the afternoon, feeling that if should adopt the Archbishop defeatist attitude would have failed to make every effort legitimately opened to me to prevent bloodshed, asked Mr. Miguel BRENES Gutierrez to come to see me. Brenes is a lawyer wellrespected in all circles. He is a member of Dr.
Calderon party and was, in fact, Minister of Labor until August 1947. had been told that he had won the respect of both employers and labor by his fair administration of the Labor Code. He has not been engaged actively in the present campaign, expressed to Mr. Brenes my fears of imminent bloodshed without telling him of my other conversations.
during the day. He asked what thought could be done and said it seemed to me as an observer that the practical situation, quite apart from any questions of right or wrong, personal honor, or party feeling, is that neither Ulate nor Calderon could take the presidency and maintain order. It seemed to me that the only alternatives are bloodshed or compromise. The necessary bases for a compromise as saw it were a truce in political activity, which ipso facto means no strike call, and then a getting together of the parties under the auspices of some neutral intermediary to work out a face saving formula as, for example, the annulling of the elections implies no guilt on the part of either candidate but simply results of necessity from inability of the Tribunal within the time allowed it by law to perform the functions imposed upon it by law. This might be followed by a promise by both parties to set up a committee to write up a new law which would remedy the defects which experience had shown to exist in the present one. Having thus cleared the ground and the congress already having indicated that it was able to authorize reimbursement of campaign expenditures, emplo aere Everyone had talked to agreed that there woudd bersemana little difficulty in finding a compromise candidate.
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