800.6354/265
The British Embassy to the Department of State
Memorandum
Reference is made to the State Department’s memorandum of March 25th, 1941, regarding the proposed United Kingdom-Bolivian Agreement on tin ore, and to subsequent exchanges of views with the State Department, particularly at the meeting which the Commercial Counsellor of the British Embassy had with the Deputy Federal Loan Administrator on April 10th.27
The Embassy has now been informed that the British Government accept the amendments to the draft Agreement suggested at that meeting by the Deputy Federal Loan Administrator and that the British Minister at La Paz has been instructed to incorporate them in the Agreement. These amendments are:—
- (1)
- Insertion of words “or to the United Kingdom” after the words “to the United States” in Article 1 of the Agreement as worded in paragraph 2 of the State Department memorandum of March 25th.
- (2)
- Retention of Article 10 of the Agreement as revised in the Embassy’s memorandum to State Department of March 7th28 with the addition of a provision that the Article applies only to the period of the Metals Reserve Company’s contract. For this purpose the words “at any time during the period ending June 30, 1945” have been inserted after the commencing words of the Article “The Bolivian Government shall ensure that if …”.
In order to conform to the wishes of the State Department for the retention of the words “or in the United States” in Article 1, the British Government have also agreed to add the same words after “in the United Kingdom” at the end of Article 4.
At the request of the Bolivian Government, Article 8 of the Agreement has been omitted and will form the text of notes to be exchanged concurrently with the signature of the Agreement.
[Page 489]The only other material alteration in the text of the Agreement as communicated to the State Department with the Embassy’s memorandum of February 17th29 is the insertion in Article 1 after the words “ensure that” of the words: “apart from such specified amounts as shall from time to time be agreed between the two contracting Governments”. The British Government agreed to this insertion on insistent pressure from the Bolivian Government who urged that there existed in Bolivia small smelters capable of producing up to 5000 tons of fine tin annually and that other smelters now under construction in the country would have a capacity of 3000 tons, while very small quantities of tin ore were occasionally shipped to small smelters in Argentina.