Diplomats like to say, with an air of sour professional amusement, that their function is to rush about the world cautiously filling in holes their policy-making superiors have dug. Perhaps it is so; Mr. Dean Rusk, being neither a diplomat or policy-maker, but a little of both, has been digging and filling furiously during the past two weeks. He insisted on the Punta del Este conference, and had to spend his time in Uruguay extricating himself from it.

The first conference (the success) was called, or so the delegates to it imagined, to launch an Alliance for Progress, that is, a program to unite Latin America through social reform and economic development. The second (something of a flop) appeared at first to have a directly opposite purpose--For Cuba, as the State Department saw it, pervades Latin America much as the Devil occupied the New Testament herd of swine, and Mr. Rusk's proposed solution closely resembled the ancient one: to excise the Devil, you drive the herd into the sea.

With a good deal of unwarranted confidence Mr. Rusk sailed into Punta del Este asking that the O.A.S. invoke diplomatic and economic sanctions against Cuba; we must keep the hemisphere pure, he said, the Alliance depends on it. By the time the most important O.A.S. members made it perfectly clear that they could not follow Mr. Rusk's logic, that they could not, in fact, see that sending coffee and Ambassadors to Cuba would injure the Alliance, Mr. Rusk's efforts shifted direction. To his credit, he persuaded Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Mexico to abstain from his resolution rather than voting against it.

But despite President Kennedy's curious enthusiasm about the results of the conference and the Secretary's ingenious diplomacy, the effect of Punta del Este has been, if anything, divisive. Dr. Castro has not penetrated South America by means of his currency and rep-resentatives; his principal value to the Latin American Left has been symbolic. That value, by virtue of what the Left calls imperialist persecution, has lately increased considerably, and one may reasonably expect the outbreaks of violence of the last month to continue.

Those countries which abstained from the resolution may well be in worse trouble. The Right, particularly the military, which has always stood as one embarassing obstacle to social reform, begins already to object to the abstention. Argentina provides at the moment the most conspicuous example; the wavering President Frondizi can scarcely cope with his generals. The nation coldest to the U.S. resolution at Punta del Este, Brazil, is also a nation where President Quadros resigned partly because of the Right's heavy criticism of his decoration of Mr. Guevara, and where a trio of generals kept a crisis going for weeks because of their hostility to the substitute President's leftist politics.

Mr. Rusk's attempt, in short, to make an enormous, formal, issue of Cuba's role in the O.A.S. shows all too well how bureaucrats will behave when there is no substantive definition of policy behind them. The Alliance has started slowly and jerkily as it is, and surely the Administration realises how fragile and tenuous an instrument of progress it must be. By diverting attention from the goals of the first conference to the irrelevant questions of the second, the U.S. has dealt the Alliance a bad blow in its weakest moments. This was to be an era of liberal and realistic attitudes toward Latin America. On the diplomatic and bureaucratic levels no doubt the attitudes are there, but they cannot retrieve all the errors that aimless makers of policy perpetrate.