FATEFUL WAR AND PEACE STUDIES
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elite moved governments and others to suit their agenda. The UN was to be their vehicle, as they saw it, wrapped in the clothing of world democracy. According to historian John Loftus, Rockefeller used behindthe-scenes pressure to get the backing of all Latin American nations in the founding San Francisco conference of the United Nations in 1945. This included the pro-Axis regime of Juan Peron in Argentina. Rockefeller and Washington pressured Peron to officially declare war on Germany and Italy, even though it was two weeks before the war's end. That allowed Argentina to vote with the "winning" side. Rockefeller's politiCal strategy was to use his block of Latin American nations to "buy" the majority vote at the UN. The Latin American bloc represented nineteen votes to Europe's nine. As a result, Washington and the powerful international banking business interests shaping its postwar agenda, ended up with decisive control of the IMF, the World Bank and a dominant role in the United Nations. I? The Rockefeller family, generous to a fault, even donated the land for the headquarters of the new United Nations in New York City. It was also good business, and a nice tax write-off to boot. On the whole, Nelson Rockefeller was well situated in 1941, more than perhaps anyone else in US business circles, to launch his major Latin American agribusiness initiative. The Rockefeller-Wallace Report In 1941, some months before Pearl Harbor had brought the United States into the war, Rockefeller and US Vice President Henry A. Wallace, the former Agriculture Secretary of Franklin Roosevelt, sent a team to Mexico to discuss how to increase food production with the Mexican government. Wallace was a well-known agriculturist, who had served as Roosevelt's Secretary of Agriculture until 1940, and who had founded the seed company that became Pioneer Hi-Bred International Inc., which decades later would become a DuPont company and one of the Big Four GMO seed giants. The Wallace-Rockefeller team's Mexico report emphasized the need to breed crops that had higher yields. At the time, corn was
