The Third Century

Questions of regional organization in the Western Hemisphere ranked high as priorities at the end of the Second World War. Drawing on wartime experiences stressing hemispheric solidarity, government leaders fashioned a regional system of collective security at a series of international conferences in Mexico City, San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro, and Bogotá. The system consisted of two parts, the Rio Pact, a military alliance, and the Organization of American States (OAS), a political counterpart. Taken together, these devices perpetuated at least an appearance of cooperation but otherwise elicited divergent appraisals. For enthusiasts, the creation of a regional system was laudable for reasons of national security. For critics, the system emanated from U.S. hegemonic aspirations and functioned essentially as an alliance between the United States and the established elites of Latin America in defense of the status quo.²

Serious discussions of regional organization for the postwar period got under way late in the war, prompted mainly by Argentine ambiguities. By remaining neutral, the Argentine government upheld what its leaders regarded as sovereign prerogatives and drove secretary of state Cordell Hull to distraction. He attributed the Argentine position to pro-Axis preferences. He also feared the destabilization of neighboring countries by pro-Nazi influences and wanted a cohesive alignment in support of the Allies. Actually an amalgam of various tendencies, the Argentine policy of neutrality followed from traditional aversions. Argentine nationalists perceived Pan American formulations as instruments of U.S. domination. Moreover, in a sense pro-Axis, neutrality showed the impact of German and Italian immigration; indeed, many Argentines conceived of their country as European. Another consideration was economic. For the most part, the Argentines lacked restrictive dependence on U.S. markets and capital and so possessed some additional room to maneuver. As producers of primary agricultural commodities such as beef, wheat, and mutton, they sold mainly in the British market. The British, for their part, had less concern about Argentine neutrality than about maintaining a reliable food supply.

Meanwhile, cross-purposes in the State Department contributed to other diplomatic confusions. Hull’s successor, secretary of state Edward Stettinius, functioned mainly as a figurehead. For a time, he upheld Hull’s policy of nonrecognition toward Argentina and thus incurred a challenge from Nelson Rockefeller. Young, smart, rich, and ambitious, Rockefeller became the undersecretary of state for Latin American affairs following Sumner Welles’s departure. Unlike Hull and Stettinius, Rockefeller regarded nonrecognition as ineffective and counterproductive. He favored a more conciliatory position toward Argentina, a preference shared by most Latin American diplomats. As a means of clarifying its status the Argentine government requested a special inter-American conference. Disinclined to risk public embarrassment, Stettinius wanted no such gathering but hesitated to oppose it outright. To resolve the dilemma, Mexican foreign minister Ezequiel Padilla then proposed a conference of foreign ministers in Mexico City. This approach allowed for international discussions of the Argentine problem without direct Argentine participation: Under the rules, only those countries that had broken relations with the Axis powers or declared war upon them would receive invitations.⁴

The outcome of the Mexico City conference, the Act of Chapultepec, allowed for multiple approaches toward common goals. The measure endorsed Latin American preferences by recommending in favor of a “regional arrangement” to maintain peace and security in the Western Hemisphere. It also affirmed support for “the purposes and principles” of the United Nations.⁷ By combining the one with the other, the delegates maintained their options, seeking to accommodate both the universalist and the regionalist position.

For Latin Americans, economic relations in the postwar period took on special significance. During the war, they had benefited from special arrangements assuring extensive sales in foreign markets at good prices. Now they worried about the impact of falling prices and shrinking sales in contracting markets. As safeguards, some favored protective tariffs to nurture infant industries; others advocated commodity agreements to stabilize prices. Most hoped for U.S. aid, specifically in the form of loans and grants to bolster growth and diversification. As Mexican foreign minister Ezequiel Padilla pointed out at Chapultepec, it was “vital for the [Latin] Americans to do more than produce raw materials and live in a state of semi-colonialism.” He looked for some form of assistance from the United States.⁸

Instead of assurances, he got statements of high capitalist principle. The speeches by U.S. delegates indicated that prewar suspicion of economic nationalism and state enterprise in Latin America had not gone away. Indeed, according to official U.S. views, restrictive trade and investment practices in the 1930s had contributed to the world crisis by encouraging cutthroat international competition and eventually war. To avoid “shortsighted” policies, undersecretary of state Dean Acheson affirmed his belief in free trade as the best means of expanding commerce, enhancing prosperity, reducing world tension, and promoting peace. These views were established orthodoxy among U.S. leaders. As assessed by the historian R. A. Humphreys, the implications for Latin America meant some measure of U.S. encouragement for economic development but typically “within the context of an expanding, interdependent and liberalized world economy.” Overall, the discussion placed the United States in opposition to Latin American efforts to escape from “economic vassalage to the more industrialized countries.”

At San Francisco, Latin Americans displayed special interest in the structure of decision-making authority but otherwise exercised scant influence. To head off Great-Power domination, they hoped for a broad allocation of responsibility to the smaller states in the General Assembly and also for a permanent Latin American seat on the Security Council; President Vargas of Brazil thought his country a candidate for such a spot. In these matters, Latin Americans achieved none of their goals. The Security Council fell under the control of the Big Three, each with veto power, and the General Assembly functioned primarily as an international debating society. These outcomes reflected political realities. The United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union, having invested the greatest effort in winning the victory over the Axis powers, also wielded the greatest influence when the conflict ended.

Other discussions centered on ways to reconcile regional and universal approaches. For Latin Americans, the Act of Chapultepec remained the guide. They wanted to reconcile the purposes and principles of the inter-American system with those of the world organization, seeking among other things safeguards against outsiders, including the United States. Meanwhile, the U.S. delegation divided into factions. Secretary Stettinius espoused the universalist option while affirming Great-Power prerogatives. In his view, “we must not be pushed around by a lot of small American republics who are dependent on us in many ways—economically, politically, militarily.” But different arguments based on other considerations undercut Stettinius’s position and prepared the way for a kind of blending process.

Meanwhile, the disintegration of the wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union initiated a Cold War, resulting in mounting levels of acrimony, mistrust, and confrontation. During the early stages, as Walter LaFeber has explained, the rivalry centered on the shape and structure of the postwar world, symbolized for him by the terms “Open Doors” and “Iron Curtains.” For U.S. leaders the essential parts of Woodrow Wilson’s liberal-capitalist internationalism retained fundamental validity. They wanted an open world based on free trade, liberal democracy, and collective security. For Soviet leaders, however, the Open Door approach had no appeal. To restore their war-ravaged country, they preferred an emphasis on spheres of influence, notably an extension of the Soviet system into the countries of Eastern Europe. An immense historiographical controversy surrounds the causes of the Cold War. In accounting for Soviet behavior and the split with the United States, modern scholars debate among themselves the relative importance of economic and security considerations, Joseph Stalin’s distinctive personality, and the impact of Marxist ideology. For a combination of reasons, Stalin chose to seclude the Soviet domains after the war through the creation of a “closed system” sealed off, in Churchill’s phrase, by an Iron Curtain.11

In response to mounting difficulties around the world, the Truman administration took alarm over the possibility of Soviet expansion into other regions and endorsed the necessity of containing the communist threat. At the same time, U.S. leaders pursued their own spheres-of-influence policies in the New World. Unbothered by the inconsistency, they denied any sort of parallel. Only secretary of commerce Henry A. Wallace perceived an incongruity, noting that the Russians “might feel about the Balkan states in somewhat the same way as we feel about Latin America.” In a famous speech in March 1946 at Madison Square Garden in New York City, he stated his conviction that “we should recognize that we have no more business in the political affairs of eastern Europe than Russia has in the political affairs of Latin America.” For enunciating such heresy, Truman fired him soon thereafter.¹²

Caught up in a contradiction, the leaders in the Truman administration wanted the Open Door in other regions but regarded Latin America as closed because of special ties with the United States. But then in the famous speech setting forth the Truman Doctrine before the Congress on March 12, 1947, the president found a way of bridging the gap. This speech, the first component in what became the containment policy against Soviet communism, called for extraordinary measures in response to a civil war in Greece. Truman wanted an allocation of $400 million from the Congress to sustain programs of economic and military aid and assistance in the eastern Mediterranean region. In justification, he stressed “the gravity of the situation.” In his view, the ideological struggle between democrats and communists in Greece also had geopolitical implications. A communist victory in Greece could threaten Turkey and the rest of the Middle East with Soviet subversion and aggression. To ward off this dread possibility, Truman argued, “it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities and outside pressures.” For good measure, he insisted, “We must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.”¹³

Meanwhile, Latin American diplomats initiated a process for creating an inter-American collective security system through the implementation of article 51 of the UN Charter. In August 1945, Brazil offered to host a meeting of American republics in Rio de Janeiro to devise a treaty. At first the United States resisted, again because of Argentina. The Truman administration was reluctant to sign a treaty with president Juan Domingo Perón’s government. Indeed, U.S. leaders regarded Perón as an unreconstructed pro-fascist and mounted a determined campaign against him.

The anti-Perón movement, eventually a kind of fiasco, followed from wartime suspicions and Spruille Braden’s obsessions. A professional diplomat with experience in Latin America, Braden went to Buenos Aires as U.S. ambassador in May 1945 and developed an intense dislike for Perón, then the vice president, because of his pro-fascist reputation and a reportedly anti-U.S. attitude that Braden characterized as “neurotic nationalism.”¹⁵ When Braden later adopted the practice of criticizing Perón in public, presumably seeking to bring him down, he went too far. Perón turned the tables, depicting Braden as persona non grata because of his undiplomatic partisanship.

To avoid trouble, the Truman administration recalled Braden to Washington in September 1945, assigning to him responsibilities as assistant secretary of state for American republic affairs. Now, unwisely and ineffectively, he pursued a long distance vendetta. For example, he allowed himself to become identified with a loosely conceived proposal floating about to destroy Perón by means of a joint international intervention. Braden also meddled in Argentine politics. Perón had become the front-running candidate in the presidential campaign. Seeking to block him, Braden instigated the publication of a State Department Blue Book in February 1946, a short while before the election; it consisted of a compilation of documents, reiterating the charge that Argentina had pursued pro-fascist policies during the war. Without much plausibility, U.S. officials denied any political intent. Unpersuaded, the historian Roger Trask explains that “the Blue Book was an effort to influence Argentine votes against Perón,” and it failed. Indeed, it enabled Perón to mobilize Argentine nationalism against the United States by brandishing the slogan “Perón or Braden.” Given the choice, Argentines voted for Perón. An embarrassing failure on all counts, Braden’s obsession with Perón not only demonstrated an incapacity to influence Argentine elections but also aroused concern among Latin Americans elsewhere over resurgent threats of U.S. intervention. The debacle further diminished the legacies of the Good Neighbor policy.

Formally known as the Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Continental Peace and Security, this assembly resulted in the negotiation of a mutual defense treaty among nations within the region. In the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, also called the Rio Pact, the participants accepted three vital provisions. In the first, they promised to seek peaceful settlements in disputes among themselves before appealing to the United Nations. In the second, they embraced the essential feature of collective security by vowing to look upon an attack against any one of them as an attack against all of them. In the third, they agreed that any resort to collective action would depend upon a two-thirds majority vote and that no state ever would have to use force against its will. Senator Vandenberg, a leading player, waxed eloquent in his request for Senate ratification: “We have sealed a New World pact of peace which possesses teeth. We have translated Pan-American solidarity from an ideal into a reality . . . This is sunlight in a dark world.” The Senate then passed favorably on the treaty by a vote of 72to 1. As Gaddis Smith notes, “For Vandenberg the Monroe Doctrine had never been so alive and well.”17

Among Latin Americans, too, the pact aroused enthusiasm although, as Roger Trask observes, “the motives of the various American republics varied to a considerable extent.” Some took the affirmations of anticommunist purpose seriously. The Argentines, for example, expressed their desire for “a completely united front against extra-hemisphere aggressions, particularly against Russia.” For others, economic needs assumed importance. As Trask notes, “One gets the impression that the mutual defense treaty was a secondary concern, perhaps looked upon as something to trade to the United States in return for economic assistance.” Mexican foreign minister Jaime Torres Bodet candidly remarked that economic development was “the one way to provide [the] only sound basis for hemisphere peace.” Brazilian foreign minister Raúl Fernandes urged that the United States instigate a large-scale program of aid and assistance to bring about economic change in the Western Hemisphere. To the extent that such words represented Latin American expectations, Truman effectively squelched them in his address before the assembled delegates. While claiming that he understood “the economic problems common to the nations of North and South America,” he stated, “We have been obliged . . . to differentiate between the urgent need for rehabilitation of war-shattered areas and the problems of development elsewhere.” To underscore the point, he said, “The problems of countries in this Hemisphere are different in nature and cannot be relieved by the same means and the same approaches which are in contemplation for Europe.” Although acknowledging a need “for long-term economic collaboration,” Truman assigned “a much greater role . . . to private citizens and groups than is the case in a program designed to aid European countries to recover from the destruction of war.”¹⁸ In other words, he envisioned no equivalent of the Marshall Plan for Latin America.

First proposed by the secretary of state in a commencement address at Harvard University in June 1947, the Marshall Plan was the second component in the containment policy, after the Truman Doctrine. It called for the use of large-scale aid and assistance, ultimately $12.4 billion, to promote the economic reconstruction of Western Europe. For the citizens of the United States, it became a subject of “almost limitless self-congratulation . . . then and since.” For Latin Americans, it became a cause of resentment and ill will, a “sorry proof of American priorities.” When asked at a press conference about a Marshall Plan for Latin America, Truman replied: “Well, I think there has always been a Marshall Plan in effect for the Western Hemisphere. The foreign policy of the United States in that direction has been set for one hundred years, known as the Monroe Doctrine.” As Gaddis Smith observes, “It is difficult to say whether that comment demonstrated more confusion about the Marshall Plan or about the Monroe Doctrine.”¹⁹

With apprehension running high, U.S. diplomats anticipated trouble at Bogotá. The ambassador, Willard S. Beaulac, cautioned against possible disruptions by “Communists and left wing Liberals.” As if in fulfillment of his forecast, on April 9 an assassin killed Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, a Colombian politician and reformer in the Liberal Party. Subsequently, a mob lynched the suspected murderer, Juan Roa Sierra, and put the corpse on display in front of the presidential palace. The ensuing violence, known in Colombian history as the Bogotazo, featured several days of killing, rioting, and looting in the course of which the conference site, the Capitolio, came under attack. State Department officials urged General Marshall to come home at once, but he refused. In his view, fleeing would encourage revolutionary movements elsewhere. Marshall attributed the outbreak to communist provocations. Historians with the advantage of hindsight are less categorical. According to Roger Trask, “The riots were essentially an emotional response to the death of a charismatic leader and communist participation was incidental”; Stephen J. Randall points out that CIA observers at the time attributed Gaitán’s assassination to an act of personal vengeance. Whatever the cause, the rioting had important consequences. For one thing, it intensified the conflict between Liberals and Conservatives in Colombia and brought about “the virtual collapse” of the political system. For another, it encouraged Latin American support at the conference for an anticommunist resolution favored by the United States. Formally titled “The Preservation and Defense of Democracy in America,” the resolution affirmed “that by its antidemocratic nature and its interventionist tendency, the political activity of international communism or any totalitarian doctrine is incompatible with the concept of American freedom.” As a safeguard, each nation should adopt “measures necessary to eradicate and prevent activities directed, assisted, or instigated by foreign governments, organizations, or individuals.”21

Most significantly, the Bogotá conference brought into existence the Organization of American States, which, according to Trask, “provided an institutional framework for the inter-American system and machinery for implementation of the Rio pact.”²² The OAS charter endorsed as goals the pursuit of “peace and justice”; the advancement of “collaboration” and “solidarity” among the states; and the defense of national “sovereignty,” “territorial integrity,” and “independence.” As a fundamental principle, the document affirmed equality among the states; decision making would depend on simple majority rule, whether carried out during inter-American conferences or during meetings of foreign ministers. Unlike the UN Security Council, the OAS gave no government a veto power. Finally, article 15 formally embraced an absolute version of the principle of nonintervention: “No State or group of States has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other State.” It also excluded the use of armed force and “any other form of interference or attempted threat” against the state and “its political, economic and cultural elements.”²³ Whether such terms actually could constrain the United States remained an issue for decision in the future.

ORDER, STABILITY, AND ANTICOMMUNISM

The legacies of Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy faded away during the early Cold War, providing ever less guidance for diplomatic conduct in the Western Hemisphere. Under Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, anticommunism dominated official thinking. The consequences encouraged order and stability as the primary goals and afforded conservative elites in Latin American with incentives to counteract recent political losses. According to the historians Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough, the “conjuncture” at the end of the Second World War had important ramifications, among them, a halt in the growth of democratization and a restoration of more traditional forms of authoritarian rule.²⁴

This thesis appears more fully in Bethell and Roxborough’s Latin America between the Second World War and the Cold War. Presented as a series of case studies on a country-by-country basis, the essays argue that from 1944 to 1948 each Latin American republic fashioned “its own history” yet displayed “striking similarities.” As the editors explain, late in the war and immediately after, “three distinct but interrelated phenomena” threatened to undermine the political status quo. These consisted of, first, more extensive popular participation in government, second, a shift to the political left and, third, a growing militancy within the labor movement. Seeking to thwart such challenges, conservative elites marshaled resistance, blunted the effects, and reasserted their traditional prerogatives.25

Popular parties with mass followings toward the end of the Second World War expanded democratic bases by insisting upon free elections. In some countries the existence of rudimentary democratic forms already existed. In others, authoritarian traditions presented formidable obstacles. In most of Latin America, “reformist” and “progressive” parties became identified with urban interests, including middle- and working-class elements. At the same time, radical groups, often Marxist in orientation, scored political gains, usually in conjunction with the mobilization of labor unions. In some countries, “the incorporation of organized labor into democratic politics” took place for the first time.

Soon after the war the traditional, conservative elites in Latin America struck back, often by repressive means. They targeted for special attention political activists, agitators, union organizers, radicals, communists, and others they looked upon as dangerous. The outcome, a “historic defeat” for the popular parties, marked a lost opportunity “for significant political and social change.” Two developments account for the setback: “The shifting balance of domestic political forces in each country” and “the complex interaction between domestic and international politics as the Second World War came to an end.” In the latter case, the U.S. role in Latin America took on special importance.

Convincing evidence of increased democratization exists for the mid-1940s. At the beginning of 1944, only Uruguay, Chile, Costa Rica, and Colombia could claim with much veracity to possess functioning democracies: that is, elected civilian governments operating under the rule of law, while respecting civil liberties such as freedom of speech, association, and assembly. Mexico, a special case, conducted regular elections under the tight control of the ruling party, the Partido Revolucionario Mexicano (PRM). Elsewhere, authoritarian governments prevailed. They were “narrowly oligarchical and often repressive regimes,” typically “military or military-backed dictatorships, some benevolent, some brutal, and most personalistic.”

Overall, the Cold War diverted U.S. attention away from Latin America. The containment policy initially manifested a Europe-first orientation that culminated in 1949 with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a formal military alliance and collective security system. It rounded out a sequence of impressive victories for the United States. But then, a turnabout ostensibly situated the advantage with the other side. In August 1949, only four years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviet Union broke the U.S. atomic monopoly by setting off a nuclear device. In October 1949, another hammerblow fell: Communist forces under Mao Zedong triumphed in the Chinese civil war, and in the following year the People’s Republic of China negotiated a mutual defense pact and military alliance with the Soviet Union. Even worse, the onset of a war in Korea in June 1950 threatened to ignite a global conflict.

As viewed from Washington, these calamitous events indicated a shift in the distribution of world power favoring the Soviet Union, and U.S. responses incorporated frightening, perhaps distorted, assessments of Soviet aims and capabilities. One such appraisal by the National Security Council known as NSC-68 took shape early in 1950. A powerful endorsement of prevailing assumptions among U.S. officials, the text remained classified until 1975. Alarmist and hyperbolic in content, it presumed the existence of a grave crisis and a mortal threat. As the historian Walter LaFeber observes, it established “the American blueprint for waging the Cold War during the next twenty years.”²⁷

Such expansive definitions of the communist menace encouraged U.S. leaders to think of Latin America almost exclusively in a Cold War context. The region ceased to have much significance in its own right; instead, it became an arena of Cold War competition in which the United States and the Soviet Union would play out a contest for power, resources, prestige, and influence. Typically, U.S. leaders looked upon Latin Americans as minor players who should subordinate their wishes, interests, and aspirations to Cold War imperatives as defined by the United States. Indeed, their countries took on importance not because of anything intrinsic to them but because of connections with the larger struggle. U.S. officials tended to regard Latin America mainly as a place in which to turn back communist intrusions for reasons of high policy.

Ignorance of the region compounded the tendency. Those in charge—presidents, secretaries of state, secretaries of defense, national security advisers, CIA directors, and the other inhabitants of the U.S. foreign policy apparatus—never possessed much knowledge and understanding of Latin America. Secretary of state Dean Acheson confessed early in 1950 that he was “rather vague” about its people, unsure “whether they were richer or poorer, going Communist, Fascist or what.” President Truman made comparisons based on ethnic stereotypes, claiming that Latin Americans reminded him of the Jews and the Irish: They were “very emotional” and hard to manage. Later, secretary of state John Foster Dulles claimed to know what to do: “You have to pat them a little bit and make them think you are fond of them.” President Eisenhower acknowledged that he had a fondness for the Argentines because they are “the same kind of people we are.” This kind of condescension at least hinted of racism.

Kennan left Washington, DC, by train on February 18, 1950, on his way to Mexico City and then traveled by plane to Caracas, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Lima, and Panama City. What he saw and experienced along the way dismayed and distressed him. In Mexico City, he disliked the altitude and the disturbed, sultry, and menacing sounds of “nocturnal activity.” In Caracas, he reacted against a “feverish economy debauched by oil money.” In Rio, the “noisy, wildly competitive” traffic and “the unbelievable contrasts between luxury and poverty” repelled him. In Lima, he became “depressed” while reflecting “that it had not rained . . . for twenty-nine years.” Overall, his memorandum conveyed an impression of distaste for the people, the leaders, and their countries. In Kennan’s words, “It seemed unlikely that there could be any other region of the earth in which nature and human behavior could have combined to produce a more unhappy and hopeless background for the conduct of human life than in Latin America.” Placing heavy responsibility on the legacies of miscegenation, he wrote, “The handicaps to progress are written in human blood and in the tracings of geography; and in neither case are they readily susceptible of obliteration. They lie heavily across the path of human progress.”³⁰

The Korean conflict intensified apprehension over communist expansion and the possibility of a third world war. The causes, much discussed in historical literature, appeared straightforward to U.S. leaders at the time. In their view, the North Korean invasion of South Korea on June 25, 1950, came about because the Soviet Union had willed it, establishing another case in which totalitarian aggression threatened the freedom of peace-loving nations. Recalling Nazi behavior in the late 1930s, Truman acted upon a set of analogies derived mainly from the Munich conference in 1938. Constituting for him and others of his generation the primary lesson of the Second World War, the Munich analogy set forth a simple proposition: Appeasement in the face of totalitarian aggression never works. Indeed, shows of weakness and irresolution merely invite further aggression. Therefore, democratic nations must stand their ground or subsequently run the risk of bigger wars. Scholars have since questioned Truman’s analysis, asking whether the Munich analogy holds in this instance. Some recent works depict the conflict less as Stalin’s creation than as a consequence of a Korean civil war. North Korean leader Kim Il Sung probably took the initiative on his own to unify the country, and Stalin, for his own reasons, went along. Indeed, some scholars now wonder whether U.S. intervention improved the situation or made it worse.³²

Taking the lead, the Truman administration resisted Soviet aggression while working through the Security Council of the United Nations. The United States obtained a resolution urging a cease-fire, the withdrawal of North Korean forces, and the restoration of the status quo ante bellum. When North Korea failed to comply, a second UN resolution called upon members to respond with military support for South Korea. During the next three years, until the armistice on July 27, 1953, the United States supplied most of the ground, air, and naval forces from the outside. Other contingents came from the United Kingdom, Turkey, Greece, the Philippines, and Thailand.³³

The countries of Latin America, whose twenty votes constituted two-fifths of those in the General Assembly in 1950, initially backed the United Nations. Moreover, the Organization of American States went on record on June 28, 1950, declaring its “firm adherence to the decisions of the competent organs of the United Nations” and reaffirming “the pledges of continental solidarity which unite the American States.”³⁴ Latin American republics displayed no equivalent readiness to take part in the fighting, however. Only Colombia sent a token force, an infantry battalion, primarily because the dictator, Laureano Gómez, anticipated payoffs from the United States in return.³⁵ U.S. leaders tried to recruit the participation of other Latin American ground forces as a sign of commitment, especially after the Chinese intervention late in 1950. These attempts centered on Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, Mexico, Peru, and Brazil and failed in each instance. At first, Brazil and Peru indicated some interest but only in return for military and economic subsidies. Most Latin American governments claimed that public opinion in their countries would not accept troop commitments.

Latin American recalcitrance became apparent at the Fourth Meeting of Consultation of Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the American Republics in Washington from March 26 to April 7, 1951. Summoned by the Truman administration “to consider problems of an urgent nature and of common interest to American States,” and sponsored by the OAS, the conference revealed deep divisions over questions of hemispheric security and economic development. Latin American delegations denied the existence of a communist threat in the Western Hemisphere and argued that in any case, improved living standards sustained by U.S. aid would provide the best means of defense.³⁷ Resisting this appeal, the United States emphasized the military requirements of collective self-defense. Later on in 1951, the U.S. Congress implemented a program under the Mutual Security Act, which authorized the negotiation of “mutual defense assistance agreements” with Latin American countries. Beginning with Ecuador in January 1952, twelve such pacts eventually came into existence. Under the terms first established with Ecuador, the United States agreed to make available “equipment, materials, services, and other military assistance designed to promote the defense and maintain the peace of the Western Hemisphere.” In return, Ecuador would utilize the aid to strengthen its military defenses and, significantly, “to facilitate the production and transfer . . . of . . . strategic materials required by the United States.” From the U.S. standpoint, these provisions contained strong incentives for pact partners to provide adequate supplies of raw materials and to guard against radical subversion. Subsequent military programs also emphasized the training of Latin American officers in “counterinsurgency” techniques, proposing to use them as anticommunist bulwarks.³⁸

ANTICOMMUNISM UNDER IKE: TRADE, AID, AND INTERVENTION

During the 1950s, Cold War issues preoccupied the leaders of the Eisenhower administration in Latin America. Anticommunism, the hallmark of U.S. policy, required order, stability, and constant vigilance against radical subversion. At the same time, Latin American nationalists, reformers, and home-grown revolutionaries blurred distinctions by insisting upon state activity to instigate economic development. For the United States, how to sort them out from Soviet-style communists posed a real dilemma. Other issues also caused difficulties. A critical one centered on trade, or aid, as the best means of moving Latin America toward modernization. Another concerned the utility of intervention by the United States. A clandestine operation in Guatemala in 1954 toppled a popularly elected government that was perceived in Washington as communist-dominated. This short-term success led later to similar efforts against Fidel Castro in Cuba. Looked upon by the United States as a dangerous precedent, Castro’s revolutionary triumph symbolized a repudiation of U.S. tutelage and suggested to the remainder of Latin America the option of following Cuba’s lead.

As depicted by Eisenhower during the 1952 campaign, Truman’s policies in Latin America had gone dangerously wrong. According to Ike, the U.S. had “frantically wooed Latin America” during the Second World War but then “proceeded to forget these countries just as fast” after the peace. Consequently, a “terrible disillusionment set in,” and “Communist agents” who were standing ready “skillfully exploited” economic distress and political unrest for their own purposes. “Through drift and neglect,” the Truman administration had embraced what Ike called “a poor neighbor policy,” now very much in need of a change.⁴⁰

In the case of Latin America, Eisenhower moved quickly to institute corrective actions. Within two months of taking office, he approved a statement formulated by the National Security Council, “United States Objectives and Courses of Action with Respect to Latin America.” This document emphasized the necessity of “hemispheric solidarity” against international communism and called for the enlistment of Latin American support in the struggle against the Soviet Union, especially the threat of internal communist subversion. Recalling the requirements of the Kennan corollary, this approach encouraged the administration to embrace anticommunist leaders in Latin America—including repressive dictators—as allies.

Before becoming president, Eisenhower had had modest experience with Latin America. After graduating from the U.S. Military Academy in 1915, while serving at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, he went on hunting trips into Mexico and acquired a “romantic” if somewhat “patronizing attitude” toward Mexicans. In Panama in the early 1920s, he developed a dislike for the tropics and for the blatant forms of discrimination experienced by Panamanians in the Canal Zone. Early in the Second World War, he worked with Lend-Lease programs for Latin America and later paid official visits to Mexico, Panama, and Brazil. In the main, he thought that military aid to Latin America well served U.S. interests in national security.

Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, had a reputation as the Republican expert on foreign affairs. As a young man, he had attended the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 in a minor capacity. He built his professional career with the Wall Street law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, often working out of its Berlin and Paris offices on matters of international investment and finance. In Latin America, he represented U.S. corporations such as the United Fruit Company. Outspoken, acerbic, and assertive, Secretary Dulles played an influential role but never dominated Eisenhower. The “hidden-hand” president allowed subordinates to take credit or blame, depending on his needs, but always kept his own prerogatives intact.

Top Eisenhower leaders were united in the conviction that communism posed a worldwide danger. During his confirmation hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Dulles described the “threat” as “the gravest . . . that ever faced the United States,” indeed, “the gravest . . . that has ever faced what we call western civilization, or . . . any civilization which was dominated by a spiritual faith.” In Latin America, in Dulles’s view, communists had penetrated every country. Animated by “hatred of the Yankee,” they sought “to destroy the influence of the so-called Colossus of the North in Central and South America.” Distressed by what he regarded as a disturbing parallel, he claimed that “conditions in Latin America are somewhat comparable to conditions as they were in China in the mid-thirties when the Communist movement was getting started.” Therefore, “the time to deal with this rising menace in South America is now.”

Such rhetoric aptly reflected the administration’s apprehensions. Sometimes Eisenhower and his aides used this kind of language for political effect to rally anticommunists in the Republican party, but in the Latin American case “the private discussions and classified policy statements of administration officials differed little from their public positions.” For example, the president worried about the consequences of surging nationalism in the Third World, identifying it as a cause of instability and a potential vehicle of communist expansion. For Ike, nationalism “on the move” required special wariness. In his diary, attempting to describe “actually what is going on,” he wrote that “communists are hoping to take advantage of the confusion resulting from the destruction of existing relationships and uncertainties of disrupted trade, security, and understanding.” He feared that communists would capitalize on nationalist agitation “to further the aims of world revolution and the Kremlin’s domination of all people.”⁴³

Ike’s critics have suggested that such anxieties, however overdrawn, should have elicited more imaginative reactions. Specifically, the Eisenhower administration should have tried to neutralize communist appeals by mobilizing pro-U.S. nationalist elements with positive incentives. As it turned out, the leaders never attained such creative levels. Their error resided in apprehending third-world nationalism so exclusively in Cold War terms. As a consequence, the historian Robert J. McMahon argues, the Eisenhower administration “grievously misunderstood and underestimated the most significant historical development of the mid-twentieth century.”⁴⁴

The Guatemalan intervention in 1954 destroyed whatever remained of the Good Neighbor policy. In conformance with the Kennan corollary, Eisenhower officials aided in the overthrow of a government perceived as procommunist. Whether they overreacted or not has occasioned some debate. Most historians have taken a critical stance. Some have emphasized the importance of confusion and misperception: Typically, Eisenhower and his advisers had trouble distinguishing between nationalist reform and communist subversion. Others have perceived a conscious design: To safeguard capitalist interests against radical threats, the United States reverted to interventionist techniques.⁴⁶

Ubico fled the country late in 1944 following an urban-based uprising among middle-class elements: disenchanted schoolteachers, shopkeepers, students, lawyers, and junior military officers. Inspired by Allied ideals during the Second World War and the Mexican example under Lázaro Cárdenas, they joined in marches, demonstrations, and strikes to demand democracy and modernization. An honest election in 1945, probably the first in the country’s history, resulted in the victory of Juan José Arévalo, who won 85 percent of the votes cast by literate adult males. A professor of literature and philosophy and a longtime enemy of Ubico, Arévalo had fled into exile in Argentina in 1935. Back in Guatemala after a decade, he found appalling conditions. The majority of people, mainly agricultural workers, earned less than $100 a year; 2 percent of the population owned 70 percent of the land. Backwardness pervaded the rural regions. Hardly any industry existed at all. More than half of the people were illiterate, including almost all the native peoples.

During a six-year term in office, Arévalo fashioned for Guatemala a reformist program reminiscent of the New Deal in the United States. Among other things, it extended voting rights to all adults, abolished forced labor, instituted minimum wages and collective bargaining for workers, redistributed small amounts of land confiscated from Germans during the war, established a social security agency, and launched a literacy campaign. Predictably, members of the privileged elite opposed these changes. In the course of his presidency, Arévalo survived more than twenty attempts to overthrow him.

Much as expected, Eisenhower officials responded sympathetically. Indeed, similar suspicions had percolated through the State Department for some time. In 1949, the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, Edward G. Miller, Jr., had warned of bad effects if Guatemala threatened the properties of United Fruit. In the same year, U.S. ambassador to Guatemala Richard Patterson pledged his personal opposition to the “cancerous doctrine” of the communists. With “undivided attention,” he would protect “American interests.” He also advised company leaders to employ “an all-out barrage” to win support in the U.S. Senate. Gaddis Smith describes Patterson as a “hysterical, paranoic anti-Communist.” Guatemalan officials regarded his undiplomatic behavior in their country as a form of intervention. In response, Patterson quit his job in the spring of 1950, claiming that communists planned to kill him.

The Iranian venture reinforced fundamental assumptions within the administration. In the Guatemalan case, Ike and Dulles invested more faith in the workability of the Kennan corollary than in the principle of nonintervention. Republican leaders also regarded the Democratic version of the containment policy as too passive. During the 1952 campaign the Republicans supported a “New Look” in foreign affairs, advocating a more active approach. By seizing the initiative, they would roll back the communist tide and win victories in the Cold War. Otherwise, Dulles feared, “we might well wake up ten years from now to find that our friends in Latin America had become our enemies.”

Covert action in this instance brought about the overthrow of the Árbenz regime and the establishment of the kind of government anticipated by Kennan: harsh, repressive, and undemocratic. As Gaddis Smith explains, this undertaking, “one of the most minutely studied in the history of U.S.-Latin American relations,” followed three tracks: economic pressure, collective action through the Organization of American States, and a clandestine operation using anti-Árbenz rebels organized by the CIA in Honduras. Historians’ interpretations have established different points of emphasis: a determination to defend U.S. corporate interests, the influence of anticommunism, the role of misperception, and the presumed necessity of standing strong in the Cold War struggle. But all agree on the effects. The Guatemalan intervention in 1954 closed down Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy for keeps.⁵¹

As Stephen G. Rabe shows, Latin American leaders in the 1950s typically looked upon the inter-American system less as an anticommunist alliance than as “a mechanism for economic cooperation.”⁵⁴ They wanted programs of economic assistance from the United States and ultimately compelled the Eisenhower administration to grapple with tough questions of trade or aid. During Ike’s first term, U.S. officials expressed preferences for trade over aid as the primary engine of economic progress but shifted ground grudgingly during his second term, thereby allowing for a possibility of discussing both.

For many Latin Americans, the impact of traditional trade and investment practices helped account for the poor performance of their economies. The statistics were disheartening. In the early 1950s, annual per capita income in Latin America amounted to $250; life expectancy was forty-three years; and an expanding population eroded whatever gains might come about in productivity. Structural considerations contributing to the difficulties included unresponsive and unstable political systems, a maldistribution of wealth and land, insufficient economic infrastructure, inadequate educational systems, and indifference among the ruling elites.

The dimensions of the problem became clearer in a series of studies by the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), a UN agency headed by Prebisch. These reports described shortages of investment capital for economic development as the chief deficiency and accounted for them by tracking the flow of money in and out of Latin America. According to Prebisch, the economic outlays in Latin America—that is, interest payments and profit remittances on public loans and private investments—exceeded the inputs. In other words, the advanced countries took more money out than they put in. As a consequence, economic growth was calculated at 1 percent a year. To enhance it, ECLA economists estimated that Latin America needed $1 billion a year for ten years, most of which would have to come from international lending institutions and the United States.

After the Korean armistice on July 27, 1953, the United States enjoyed a period of peace and prosperity. Eisenhower won reelection in 1956, following a campaign in which Latin America figured hardly at all. The main policy tenets—anticommunism, free trade, and private investment—persisted into the second term, as did the practice of supporting military dictators. Though privately a bit ambivalent about the matter, Eisenhower usually evaded questions concerned with civil liberties and human rights. In all likelihood the president would have preferred the existence of more democratic regimes and on occasion may have maneuvered behind the scenes to curb abuses. When Juan Perón fell from power in 1955, Ike expressed his approval. At the same time, he embraced military strongmen as necessary allies in the anti-communist struggle. By the mid-1950s, military aid in Latin America was one of the costliest budget items in the region. Ike understood that Latin American forces possessed scant fighting ability. Yet he wanted not only “to preserve . . . the good will of the Latin American Republics” but also “to assure their internal security, without which their good will would be useless to us.” As Rabe concludes, “The transfer of arms and the training of Latin American officers and soldiers continued, because the administration wanted powerful, anti-Communist friends in Latin America.”

These events produced modest changes in Latin American policy. Notably, while retaining the emphasis on military assistance, the administration displayed somewhat more readiness to support political democracy and human rights. To an extent, this shift made a virtue of necessity. Between 1956 and 1960, ten military dictatorships in Latin America tumbled from power. Corrupt and incompetent, they had provided neither political stability nor economic growth. Tad Szulc, a journalist, referred to the process as “the twilight of the tyrants.” Eisenhower leaders, although they responded with more enthusiastic defenses of representative government, still regarded military establishments as valuable anticommunist allies. In 1959–1960, assistance programs in Latin America expanded, providing more than $160 million in military aid.⁶⁰

The administration also accepted modest changes in economic policy. In part because of Nixon’s misadventure, in-house critics became more persuasive, especially those who feared that collapsing dictatorships might precipitate revolutions. Such critics included the president’s brother Milton and State Department officials Rubottom, Thomas Mann, and C. Douglas Dillon. Among the Latin American leaders, Juscelino Kubitschek, a former state governor of Minas Gerais and president of Brazil from 1956 until 1961, pressed especially hard. Embracing the slogan “Fifty years of progress in five” and seeking dramatic results, he intended to stimulate economic growth by the unorthodox means of government action based on deficit spending. He also instituted a national development program for building infrastructure, roads and railroads, and created new state enterprises such as an automobile industry. Most spectacularly, he built a new capital city, opening up the interior and symbolizing the advance of progress. Brasília, a showplace, attracted world attention because of its advanced architectural conceptions. But the high costs of such endeavors also had negative consequences, notably, high levels of debilitating inflation.

Two weeks after the anti-Nixon riot in Caracas, Kubitschek called for a “thorough revision” of U.S. programs. Cleverly linking economic development with presumed Cold War imperatives, Kubitschek wanted a solution to “the problem of underdevelopment” so that Latin American nations could “more effectively resist subversion and serve the Western cause.” Specifically, he suggested a pledge of $40 billion from the United States to aid Latin America during the next twenty years. Called Operation Pan America, Kubitschek’s plan, if accepted, would have established an equivalent of the Marshall Plan.

There remained deep divisions over basic issues. For U.S. leaders the inter-American system served national security interests as an anticommunist alliance in defense of order, stability, and the Monroe Doctrine. For the Latin Americans the main rationale took other forms. They wanted regional devices to contain U.S. intervention and to facilitate economic aid and assistance. The absence of a Marshall Plan for the Western Hemisphere disenchanted Latin American leaders, widened the political fissures, and undermined the security apparatus. The shifts that developed during Ike’s last two years never had much impact and, in the U.S. view, the circumstances worsened significantly when Fidel Castro took over in Cuba. This event marked the most significant change in the Americas since the Mexican Revolution and established the foremost issues of the next thirty years.

NOTES

1. Irwin F. Gellman, Good Neighbor Diplomacy: United States Policies in Latin America, 1933–1945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 179; Gellman, Secret Affairs: Franklin Roosevelt, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Welles (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), chaps. 13–14.

2. Enthusiasts include J. Lloyd Mecham, The United States and Inter-American Security, 1889–1960 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1961), chaps. 9–10; Gordon Connell-Smith, The Inter-American System (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), chaps. 6–7; and Robert Freeman Smith, “U.S. Policy-Making for Latin America Under Truman,” Continuity: A Journal of History 16 (Fall 1992): 87–111. Critics include Lloyd C. Gardner, Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), chap. 10; and David Green, The Containment of Latin America: A History of the Myths and Realities of the Good Neighbor Policy (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971), chaps. 7–9.

3. Gellman, Good Neighbor Diplomacy, 191–93; R. A. Humphreys, Latin America and the Second World War, 2 vols. (London: University of London Athlone Press, 1982), 2, chap. 6; Randall Bennett Woods, The Roosevelt Foreign-Policy Establishment and the “Good Neighbor”: The United States and Argentina, 1941–1945 (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1979), chaps. 1–3.

4. Gellman, Good Neighbor Diplomacy, 196–97.

5. Gellman, Good Neighbor Diplomacy, chap. 14; Gaddis Smith, The Last Years of the Monroe Doctrine, 1945–1993 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994), 44.

6. Stephen G. Rabe, “The Elusive Conference: United States Economic Relations with Latin America, 1945–1952,” Diplomatic History 2 (Summer 1978): 279; Humphreys, Latin America, 2, chap. 8.

7. Humphreys, Latin America, 215, chap. 2.

8. Rabe, “Elusive Conference,” 281–82.

9. Humphreys, Latin America, 216–17, chap. 2.

10. Smith, Last Years, 43, 48–49, 55; Humphreys, Latin America, 220–21, chap. 2.

11. Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–1992, 7th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), chap. 1; Howard Jones and Randall B. Woods, “Origins of the Cold War in Europe and the New East: Recent Historiography and the National Security Imperative,” in America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941, ed. Michael J. Hogan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), chap. 9.

12. Smith, Last Years, 56.

13. Thomas G. Paterson and Dennis Merrill, eds., Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, 2 vols., 4th ed. (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1995), 259–61, chap. 2.

14. Smith, Last Years, 56.

15. Roger R. Trask, “The Impact of the Cold War on United States-Latin American Relations, 1945–1949,” Diplomatic History 1 (Summer 1977): 277.

16. Trask, “The Impact of the Cold War,” 274; Trask, “Spruille Braden versus George Messersmith: World War II, the Cold War, and Argentine Policy, 1945–1947,” Journal of Inter-American Studies and World Affairs 26 (February 1984): 69–95; Jesse H. Stiller, George S. Messersmith: Diplomat of Democracy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), chap. 7.

17. Trask, “Impact of the Cold War,” 277–79; Smith, Last Years, 58–59.

18. Trask, “Impact of the Cold War,” 277–78; Rabe, “Elusive Conference,” 285.

19. Smith, Last Years, 62.

20. Trask, “Impact of the Cold War,” 279–80.

21. Stephen J. Randall, Colombia and the United States: Hegemony and Interdependence (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 192–94; Trask, “Impact of the Cold War,” 281–82. See also Herbert Braun, The Assassination of Gaitán: Public Life and Urban Violence in Colombia. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986).

22. Trask, “Impact of the Cold War,” 281–82.

23. O. Carlos Stoetzer, The Organization of American States, 2d ed. (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993), 35.

24. Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough, “Latin America between the Second World War and the Cold War: Some Reflections on the 1945–8 Conjuncture,” Journal of Latin American Studies 20 (May 1988): 167–89.

25. Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough, eds., Latin America between the Second World War and the Cold War: Crisis and Containment, 1944–1948 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1–2.

26. Bethell and Roxborough, eds., Latin America, 1–7, 10–20, 22–23, 26–28.

27. LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 96.

28. Smith, Last Years, 66; LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 96–97; Ernest R. May, ed., American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC 68 (Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 1993).

29. Smith, Last Years, 61, 67–68.

30. Roger R. Trask, “George F. Kennan’s Report on Latin America (1950),” Diplomatic History 2 (Summer 1978): 307–11.

31. Smith, Last Years, 69–71.

32. Bruce Cummings, The Origins of the Korean War, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981, 1990) states a revisionist case. Burton I. Kaufman, The Korean War: Challenges in Crisis, Credibility, and Command (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986); and William W. Stueck, The Korean War: An International History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), take more traditional approaches.

33. Stueck, Korean War, 194.

34. Gordon Connell-Smith, The United States and Latin America: An Historical Analysis of Inter-American Relations (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1974).

35. Randall, Colombia and the United States, 199. See also Bradley Coleman, Colombia and the United States: The Making of an Inter-American Alliance, 1939-1960 (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press), 2008.

36. Stueck, Korean War, 198.

37. Connell-Smith, United States and Latin America, 207.

38. Connell-Smith, United States and Latin America, 207; Edwin Lieuwen, Arms and Politics in Latin America, rev. ed. (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1961), 198–202.

39. LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 136.

40. Stephen G. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of Anticommunism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 6.

41. Stephen G. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America, 1–5, 26; Mary S. McAulliffe, “Commentary: Eisenhower, the President,” Journal of American History 68 (December 1981): 625–32; Fred I. Greenstein, The Hidden-Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader (New York: Basic Books, 1982); Mark T. Gilderhus, “An Emerging Synthesis? U.S.-Latin American Relations since 1945,” in Hogan, America in the World, 445–50. See also Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (New York: Times Books), 2013.

42. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America, 26–29; H. W. Brands, Jr., “Milton Eisenhower and the Coming Revolution in Latin America,” in Brands, Cold Warriors: Eisenhower’s Generation and American Foreign Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Milton S. Eisenhower, The Wine Is Bitter: The United States and Latin America (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963), chap. 2.

43. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America, 29–30.

44. Robert J. McMahon, “Eisenhower and Third World Nationalism: A Critique of the Revisionists,” Political Science Review 101 (Fall 1986): 457.

45. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America, 30–36; Chester J. Pach, Jr., Arming the Free World: The Origins of the United States Military Assistance Program, 1945–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), chap. 2; Lieuwen, Arms and Politics, chaps. 8–9.

46. Gilderhus, “An Emerging Synthesis?” 444; Bryce Wood, The Dismantling of the Good Neighbor Policy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), chap. 9; Richard H. Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982); Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

47. Kenneth J. Grieb, Guatemalan Caudillo: The Regime of Jorge Ubico, Guatemala, 1931–1944 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1979), 18, 21.

48. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America, 43–47.

49. Smith, Last Years, 75–78.

50. Stephen E. Ambrose and Richard H. Immerman, Ike’s Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981); John Prados, Presidents’ Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations since World War II (New York: William Morrow, 1986); Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, The CIA and American Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Charles D. Ameringer, U.S. Foreign Intelligence: The Secret Side of American History (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1990).

51. Smith, Last Years, 70, 78; Wood, Dismantling of the Good Neighbor Policy; Immerman, CIA in Guatemala; Gleijeses, Shattered Hope.

52. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America, 49–56.

53. Smith, Last Years, 82–86; Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America, 56.

54. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America, 64; Burton I. Kaufman, Trade and Aid: Eisenhower’s Foreign Economic Policy, 1953–1961 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).

55. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America, 64–75.

56. Victor Bulmer-Thomas, The Economic History of Latin America since Independence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), chaps. 8–9.

57. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America, 75–77. For consideration of an anomaly, see Kenneth Lehman, “Revolutions and Attributions: Making Sense of Eisenhower Administration Policies in Bolivia and Guatemala,” Diplomatic History 21 (Spring 1997): 185–213.

58. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America, 86, 89–90, 92, 102, chap. 6; Richard M. Nixon, Six Crises (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962), chap. 4.

59. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America, 114.

60. Tad Szulc, Twilight of the Tyrants (New York: W. W. Holt, 1959); Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America, 107.

61. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America, 96–97, 110–14.