in Central America and the Caribbean reached its height in the early 1920s, and many league members had already joined a coalition of anti-imperialists opposed to U.S. policies like Dollar Diplomacy.31 In her original proposal for the conference agenda, Engle argued that one important benefit of the meeting was that it would give Latin American women a chance to get to know U.S. women and to “learn that we are not as bad as we are painted.”32 Her inclusion of “reduction of armaments,” along with “international friendliness,” would have won approval not only from opponents of U.S. interventions in Latin America within the United States but also from many Latin Americans. Yet neither phrase appeared on the final version of the conference agenda. No record exists of why the change was made, but it is important to keep in mind that the entire project hinged on the endorsement of the U.S. State Department. Despite the groundswell of support for disarmament during the early 1920s, State Department officials were likely reluctant to sanction discussion of the topic at an inter-American conference during a time when the United States was involved in myriad ongoing military interventions in Latin America. Reliance on State Department support also may well have made Engle, Park, and the organizing committee feel they could not encourage any discussions at the conference that might have sounded like criticisms of U.S. foreign policies.
But the fact remains that Engle and the committee chose the topics for the conference without consulting any Latin American women, or even any U.S. women with greater knowledge of Latin America, and that they assumed the topics they chose were of common concern to all American women. They were not wrong; their issues were important to activist women throughout the hemisphere, as the delegates’ lengthy contributions to the roundtable discussions proved. But neither Engle nor the committee took into account the myriad problems unique to Latin America as a whole and to various countries in particular. Not least among these, despite the LWV’s reluctance to discuss it, was the problem of U.S. imperialism.
The Mexican delegation did not share the league’s reluctance. Two months before the conference opened, the members of the Consejo Feminista Mexicano sent a telegram to the league, begging all U.S. women to exert pressure on their government to change its Mexican policy. The concerns they iterated echoed closely the arguments Elena Torres and Elena Landázuri had been making to the Women’s Peace Society and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom for over a year. “The Mexican ground has been bloodied by more than ten years of revolution,” they wrote, and “all the implements of destruction have been furnished by the United States.” They charged that American mining companies continued to exploit Mexican workers, paying them infrequently and with devalued currency. The CFM implored U.S. women to demand action from their government to stop facilitating the devastation in Mexico.33
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