Brum, Baltasar

Born June 18, 1883; died 1933. Uruguayan statesman. A lawyer by education.

Brum was a proponent of the bourgeois liberal reforms of J. Batlle y Ordóñez. From 1913 he occupied various ministerial posts and was president of Uruguay from 1919 to 1923. Brum proposed a plan for creating an American League of Nations (the Brum Doctrine, 1920), which would unite all Latin American countries and the USA in case of aggression by a non-American state. This plan was directed against the Monroe Doctrine, a weapon of the USA’s interventionist policy with regard to the countries of Latin America. Under pressure from the USA, the Fifth Inter-American Conference rejected Brum’s plan. He committed suicide as a sign of protest against the establishment of G. Terra’s dictatorship in March 1933.