Jefferson Caffery

As the U.S. ambassador to Colombia, Jefferson was heavily involved in the Banana Massacre that occurred in 1928 in the small, coastal town of Ciénaga. Tired of terrible working conditions and very little wages (workers were paid in United Fruit Company store credit), banana farmers went on strike in protest. In order to protect the interests of the United Fruit Company, Caffery reported to U.S. Secretary of State Frank Billings Kellogg that leaders of the strike would be immediately arrested and sent to prison in nearby Cartagena. Martial law was declared soon after and an unknown number of workers and their families were shot by a firing squad in the town square.[5] After the banana massacre he wrote, a dispatch from U.S. Bogotá Embassy to the U.S. Secretary of State, dated December 29, 1928, "I have the honor to report that the legal advisor of the United Fruit Company here in Bogotá stated yesterday that the total number of strikers killed by the Colombian military authorities during the recent disturbance reached between five and six hundred; while the number of soldiers killed was one."[6]

In 1934, while ambassador to Cuba, four assailants attempted to assassinate Caffery in front of his home in Havana. The assailants waited outside of his residence for his daily departure to his yacht club. One assailant was killed by a bodyguard, the others escaped. Caffery was not hurt. The event was reported on the front page of the New Orleans Times Picayune, dated May 28, 1934.[2][7]

While ambassador to Brazil, Caffery took part in the Potenji River Conference also known as the Natal Conference. The conference was a meeting that took place on January 28 and 29, 1943 between the President of Brazil, Getúlio Vargas and the President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that occurred during the return of President Roosevelt from the Casablanca Conference to the USA.[8][9] The Potenji River Conference involved discussions of the ongoing support and role of Brazil in World War II and took place aboard the USS Humboldt in the Potenji River harbor in Natal, Rio Grande do Norte and defined the agreements that led to the creation of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force.[9]

After his appointment to Cairo in 1949, there was a coup d'etat headed by a junta of Egyptian army officers that led to the abdication of King Farouk on July 23, 1952. The junta was headed by Mohammed Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser, who demanded the departure of the British from the Suez Canal zone.[3]

Caffery served as intermediary between the Egyptian and British Governments in the negotiations, and his "long experience in diplomacy, together with the respect in which he was held by the Egyptian Government, enabled him to arrange for the gradual departure of the British."[3] In 1954, the British agreed to evacuate their military bases in the Canal Zone until the summer of 1956, but were given the right to return in case of an attack by an outside power against an Arab League member state or Turkey.[10]

In total, he worked 43 years in foreign service under eight U.S. presidents: Taft, Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, F. D. Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower.[2][11]