XXIX

Battle for the Hemisphere

1962 HAD NOT BEEN A BAD YEAR: the Berlin crisis over, a settlement in Laos, aggression checked in Vietnam, the Congo straightening out, favorable developments in the rest of Africa, United States Steel chastened, expansion resuming in the American economy. But the problems of the western hemisphere remained acute. “I regard Latin America,” the President said early in 1963, “as the most critical area in the world today.” The Alliance for Progress, announced with such hope in the brisk March of 1961, had offered Latin America the possibility of a democratic revolution. But in many countries the practical foundations of the Alliance were shaky. Moreover, since the Alliance by its very existence warned Fidel Castro that he could no longer count on the Latin American states falling to Marxist revolution of their own weight, the Fidelistas and their communist allies were redoubling their efforts to disrupt the democratic effort and seize the energies of change for themselves. The struggle for the future of Latin America was well joined—and the outcome thus far indeterminate.

The President sought to place our hemisphere policy in the ablest possible hands. Adolf Berle as chairman of the Task Force on Latin America continued to recommend the creation of the post of Under Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs, controlling both political and economic lines of policy; but this was predictably opposed by the State Department on bureaucratic grounds. When Thomas Mann left Washington shortly before the Bay of Pigs to become ambassador to Mexico, Kennedy wanted to persuade some figure of public consequence to take his place as Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs. The search was frustrating and lost many valuable weeks. During this time the daily conduct of Latin American affairs remained in the hands of the permanent government—blasé officials in the State Department and the aid agency who believed that they alone understood the Latinos and dismissed the Alliance for Progress as a slogan left over from the presidential campaign.

They were decent and hard-working people. But their uncritical commitment to the conceptions of the fifties—to conservative regimes in politics and to private initiative and technical assistance in economics—hardly equipped them to compete with Fidel Castro for the allegiance of a continent in revolutionary ferment. And, as they began to realize that the new President meant business, they seemed to feel threatened by the new policy, as if they feared it would swallow up their own responsibilities and sense of significance. “To get democratic change in Latin America,” one of the few Kennedy appointees to the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs told me in June, “you must have people committed to democratic change. Among this group there is no joy, no purpose, no drive. “What’s the headache today?’ is their attitude. They form a sullen resistance to fresh approaches. They have no realization of the forces at work in Latin America today. They are uninterested in the intellectual community or the labor movement or the democratic left. All they do is sit around the table discussing things. When something comes up, they talk for hours and end up with ten reasons for doing it and twelve for not doing it. . . . We are striving for a new look in Latin America. But if our operating people exhibit the same old attitudes and use the same old clichés, we are going to look in Latin America like the same old crowd.”^*

1. THE CHARTER OF PUNTA DEL ESTE

The conviction among the bureaucrats that, if only they sat tight, the Alliance for Progress would go away left the initiative to the White House, to Berle’s Task Force, increasingly isolated within State, and to the Treasury Department, where Douglas Dillon’s long and enlightened interest in Latin America now had the able support of Assistant Secretary John Leddy. It was this situation which led in the spring to the stream of complaints from the State Department, respectfully reproduced in the New York Times, about ‘meddling’ in hemisphere policy. It can be flatly said that without such meddling there would have been no Alliance for Progress.

The Alliance rested on the premise that modernization in Latin America required not just injections of capital or technical assistance but the breaking of the bottlenecks of economic development through reform of the political and social structure. It was formally organized in August 1961 at an Inter-American Economic and Social Council conference held in Punta del Este, Uruguay. In his message to the conference Kennedy defined his conception of the occasion with great clarity. “We live in a hemisphere,” he said, “whose own revolution has given birth to the most powerful forces of the modern age—the search for the freedom and self-fulfillment of man. We meet to carry on that revolution to shape the future.” This meant “full recognition of the right of all the people to share fully in our progress. For there is no place in democratic life for institutions which benefit the few while denying the needs of the many, even though the elimination of such institutions may require far-reaching and difficult changes such as land reform and tax reform and a vastly increased emphasis on education and health and housing. Without these changes our common effort cannot succeed.” No President of the United States had ever spoken such words to Latin America before. He concluded with an appeal for the participation “of workers and farmers, businessmen and intellectuals and, above all, of the young people of the Americas.”

Douglas Dillon, the head of the United States delegation, struck the same note. “This is a revolutionary task,” he told the Latin Americans, “but we are no strangers to revolution. . . . The fruits of the American revolution have not yet been extended to all our people. Throughout the hemisphere millions still live with hunger, poverty and despair. They have been denied access to the benefits of modern knowledge and technology. And they now demand those benefits for themselves and for their children. We cannot rest content until these just demands are met.”

Che Guevara was there too, smoothly arguing the case for the competing revolution. Some Latin Americans, indeed, wanted to include Cuba in the Alliance. But others, led by Pedro Beltrán of Peru, the conference’s chairman, countered the Cubans with a Declaration to the Peoples of America placing the principles of the Alliance in a firm context of representative democracy and political freedom. Richard Goodwin, who had helped Dillon and Leddy organize the United States position, collaborated in writing the Declaration; and Beltrán, working with Arturo Morales-Carrión and Lincoln Gordon of the United States delegation, marshaled an overwhelming vote in its favor. In the meantime, Leddy negotiated the economic provisions of the Charter with the Latin Americans, and Philip Coombs, whom Kennedy had brought from the Ford Foundation to become Assistant Secretary of State for Cultural Affairs, worked hard in pushing through a crucial resolution on a ten-year education plan. Word soon went round the conference that there were only “two left-wing governments present—Cuba and the United States,” and the confrontation between Guevara and Dillon in the last session gave the meeting its moment of drama. Guevara told the Latin Americans that they had Castro to thank for this sudden offer of massive United States aid. Observing that Cuba was in sympathy with many of the Alliance’s objectives, he said that, as the instrument of imperialism, the Alliance was bound to fail; Cuba would therefore abstain. Guevara’s moderation was itself striking evidence of the Alliance’s initial appeal. Dillon was cool and effective in rebuttal. Then twenty American republics pledged themselves to a series of quite startling goals:

 

To improve and strengthen democratic institutions through application of the principle of self-determination by the people.

To accelerate economic and social development. . . .

To carry out urban and rural housing programs to provide decent homes for all our people.

To encourage . . . programs of comprehensive agrarian reform, leading to the effective transformation, where required, of unjust structures and systems of land tenure and use; with a view to replacing latifundia and dwarf holdings by an equitable system of property. . . .

To assure fair wages and satisfactory working conditions to all our workers. . . .

To wipe out illiteracy. . . .

To press forward with programs of health and sanitation. . . .

To reform tax laws, demanding more from those who have most, to punish tax evasion severely, and to redistribute the national income in order to benefit those who are most in need, while, at the same time, promoting savings and investment and reinvestment of capital. . . .

To maintain monetary and fiscal policies which . . . will protect the purchasing power of the many, guarantee the greatest possible price stability, and form an adequate basis for economic development.

To stimulate private enterprise. . . .

To find a quick and lasting solution to the grave problem created by excessive price fluctuations in the basic exports. . . .

To accelerate the integration of Latin America. . . .

To this end the United States will provide a major part of the minimum of 20 billion dollars, principally in public funds, which Latin America will require over the next ten years from all external sources in order to supplement its own efforts. . . .

For their part, as a contribution to the Alliance for Progress, each of the countries of Latin America will formulate a comprehensive and well-conceived national program for the development of its own economy.

 

The Charter of Punta del Este was a summons to a democratic revolution—nor was revolution a word feared by the architects of the Alliance, even though it continued to dismay the Department of State. Of course most of the governments endorsing this summons were far from revolutionary. Some no doubt joined because they considered American aid worth a signature; others because, as President Alberto Lleras Camargo of Colombia once put it, “In Latin America, perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, political leaders have the habit of carrying revolutionary statements beyond the point to which they are really prepared to go.” The American negotiators had no illusions about the mixture of motives, nor did they suppose that setting fine words down on parchment would have magical effects. But they knew that the commitment of twenty governments to this unprecedented set of goals strengthened those in each country who sought democratic progress.

This included the government in Washington. The trip to Vienna, the Berlin crisis, the debate over nuclear test resumption, the reform of the aid program—all the problems of the summer of 1961 had further slowed the reorganization of our own Latin American management. Failing to find an outsider of sufficient stature as Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs, the President in July appointed Robert F. Woodward, an intelligent and liberal-minded career officer, wholeheartedly devoted to the Alliance, then serving as ambassador to Chile. Berle, his assignment valuably completed, resigned. In the fall Kennedy sent Richard Goodwin over to serve as Woodward’s deputy. In the White House the President himself, with some help, after Goodwin’s departure, from Ralph Dungan and me, continued to keep an exceedingly vigilant eye on hemisphere developments.

The search for a man to run the United States contribution to the Alliance took an even longer time. It was universally assumed that the effort would be set up within the Agency for International Development. In retrospect, this was very probably a mistake. If the Alliance had been established, like the Peace Corps, as a separate agency, the resulting status and independence would, I believe, have increased its effectiveness. But the proponents of bureaucratic tidiness won out. Finally in November, Kennedy appointed as AID Deputy for Latin America Teodoro Moscoso, who had been Economic Development Administrator under Governor Luis Muñoz Marin in Puerto Rico and was now ambassador to Venezuela.

He could have found no one more deeply dedicated to the spirit of Punta del Este. The Puerto Rican experience, indeed, was an important source of the ideas behind the Alliance. Puerto Rico had been the last triumph of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Rexford G. Tugwell, whom Roosevelt sent down as governor in the years when Dr. New Deal was giving way to Dr. Win-the-War in the United States, had lent strong and imaginative support to Luis Muñoz Marín, the statesman of ability and vision who in 1940 led a peaceful democratic revolution in Puerto Rico. From a “stricken land,” as Tugwell used to call it, Puerto Rico was being transformed into a thriving community. During the fifties it provided both a refuge and something of an inspiration for democratic Latin Americans exiled by their own countries. Muñoz, convinced that these progressive leaders offered the best hope for the continent, now argued forthrightly that in the long run only the democratic left could make the Alliance work. They constituted the one group “which wants it to succeed in its entirety . . . the group which seeks social advances and higher living standards for all the people in a framework of freedom and consent . . . the only non-totalitarian element which understands the depths of the revolutionary ferment in Latin America and which can provide responsible leadership to shape this revolution into constructive channels.” The “well-meaning democratic conservatives,” Muñoz added, “men whom we can often respect, have no real grasp of this revolutionary surge, and are therefore powerless to compete with the totalitarians.” This was Moscoso’s judgment too, and within the State Department Arturo Morales-Carrión, an historian who had been Muñoz’s Undersecretary of State in Puerto Rico and was now a Deputy Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs, expounded the same viewpoint with discriminating wisdom.

2. THE DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION

Muñoz’s formulation was a succinct statement of the philosophy implicit in the Punta del Este Charter. Though the Alliance included dictatorial regimes like those of Stroessner in Paraguay and Duvalier in Haiti, its principles were progressive democratic principles and its affinities were with progressive democratic governments. Adolf Berle made the point in his final report as chairman of the Task Force:

 

The present struggle will not be won, and can be lost, by opportunist support of transitory power-holders or forces whose objectives are basically hostile to the peoples they dominate. Success of the American effort in Latin America requires that at all times its policy be based on clear, consistent, moral democratic principles. I do not see that any other policy can be accepted or indeed stands any real chance of ultimate success. The forces sweeping Latin America today demand progress, and a better life for the masses of their people, through evolution if possible, or through revolution if that price must be paid. A preponderance of these forces want the resulting forms to provide liberty, rejecting tyranny whether from the right or from the left.

 

In Latin America the democratic left comprised two major strains: the partidos populares, which had battled for social democracy in various countries of Central and South America since the Second World War under far-sighted men like Rómulo Betancourt of Venezuela and José Figueres of Costa Rica but which now was becoming a little the movement of an older generation; and the Christian Democrats, emerging as a significant force in Chile and Venezuela and appealing to younger people in other countries. In Venezuela the two strains combined in support of the Betancourt government. For this and other reasons, some of us in Washington saw Venezuela as a model for Latin American progressive democracy (remembering always that its oil revenues gave it a margin of wealth the other republics lacked). Betancourt, who had spent a good share of his exile in Puerto Rico, had brought back to Venezuela plans and institutions derived from the Puerto Rican experience. A rugged fighter for democracy, he was hated by both right and left: Trujillo’s assassins had tried to kill him, and Castro’s terrorists were seeking now to destroy his government. For Betancourt the Alliance exactly filled the continent’s need. “The communist threat to Latin America,” he used to say, “is very serious. What makes it so is the economic plight of the vast majority of the 200 million persons who live below the Rio Grande.” The communists, he added, naturally detested his own regime “because we are carrying out the type of social action that strips the communists of support and followers.” The reactionaries disliked his type of social action for opposite reasons; and, as Betancourt wrote Kennedy in the spring of 1962, “We are hitting both groups, reactionaries and Communists, in earnest and in depth, in conformity with the constitution and the law. . . . The impatient ones would like us to go beyond the written law—and even beyond the unwritten but overriding law of respect for human dignity. I will not, however, deviate from the course laid down for me by the fundamental law of Venezuela and by my own conscience.”

No one in Washington understood this course better than the President. He wholly accepted the thesis of the democratic revolution and therefore on his first presidential trip to Latin America in December 1961 chose to visit two presidents notable for their commitment to progressive reform—Betancourt in Caracas and Alberto Lleras Camargo in Bogotá. A good deal of anxious consideration preceded this journey. People in the State Department, recalling the Nixon tour three years before, wondered whether Kennedy might not be inviting unnecessary risks. Goodwin and Morales-Carrión, however, argued strongly for the trip, and Kennedy himself characteristically shrugged and decided to go ahead. Jacqueline, tuning up her Spanish for the occasion, went with him. When the presidential plane flew into Caracas, Kennedy, remembering Goodwin’s assurances, said drily, “Well, Dick, if this doesn’t work out, you might as well keep going south.”

No one need have worried. Wildly enthusiastic crowds lined the streets in Caracas and the next day in Bogotá. “Do you know why those workers and campesinos are cheering you like that?” Lleras Camargo asked Kennedy. “It’s because they believe you are on their side.” That night at the San Carlos Palace the American President set forth the promise of the Alliance. “We in the United States,” he said, “have made many mistakes in our relations with Latin America. We have not always understood the magnitude of your problems, or accepted our share of responsibility for the welfare of the hemisphere. But we are committed in the United States—our will and our energy—to an untiring pursuit of that welfare and I have come to this country to reaffirm that dedication.” Then he said, “The leaders of Latin America, the industrialists and the landowners, are, I am sure, also ready to admit past mistakes and accept new responsibilities.”

Each year he made a Latin American trip, with the democratic revolution his constant theme. On his arrival in Mexico City in June 1962 he saluted the Mexican Revolution and added that “the revolution of this hemisphere” would be incomplete “until every child has a meal and every student has an opportunity to study, and everyone who wishes to work can find a job, and everyone who wishes a home can find one, and everyone who is old can have security.” Then he and Jacqueline rode into the city amidst unending cries of “Viva Kennedy” and a pink snowstorm of confetti. The following spring he carried the message to a meeting of the Central American Presidents in Costa Rica. Speaking at the University of Costa Rica (he began his remarks: “It is a great pleasure to leave Washington, where I am lectured to by professors, to come to Costa Rica where I can speak to students”), he reminded his audience of the changes Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal had wrought in the United States and then affirmed a continent-wide “right to social justice,” which meant “land for the landless, and education for those who are denied education . . . [and the end of] ancient institutions which perpetuate privilege.”

He often wondered how he could strengthen the governments most deeply pledged to these objectives. For a time he even mused about the possibility of a ‘club’ of democratic presidents—Betancourt, Lleras, Jorge Alessandri of Chile, José Orlich Balmarcich of Costa Rica, José Rivera of El Salvador—which might meet regularly in Palm Beach or Puerto Rico, hoping that this might be an incentive for other chiefs of state to commit themselves to the struggle for democracy; but this idea presented obvious problems, and nothing came of it. In the meantime, he seized every opportunity to signify his respect for men like Betancourt and Lleras. When Betancourt came to Washington in February 1963, Kennedy welcomed him as representing “all that we admire in a political leader.”

 

Your liberal leadership of your own country, your persistent determination to make a better life for your people, your long fight for democratic leadership not only in your own country but in the entire area of the Caribbean, your companionship with other liberal progressive leaders of this hemisphere, all these have made you, for us, a symbol of what we wish for our own country and for our sister republics.

3. THE SHOWCASE THAT FAILED

The President’s emphasis was absolutely correct. Democratic leadership in the Latin countries was fundamental to the success of the Alliance. Without it United States aid and exhortation could do little. If anyone had doubted this proposition, it received full verification in the tribulations of the Dominican Republic. Since 1930 Rafael Trujillo had operated a cruel and efficient dictatorship on the eastern half of the lovely but tragic old Spanish island of Hispaniola. His oppression of his own people was considered beyond the reach of the Organization of American States; but, when he sent his agents to Caracas to kill Betancourt, the OAS rallied and in August 1960 recommended that its members break ambassadorial relations with Trujillo and embargo the import of arms and petroleum. In early 1961 Washington began to hear increasing reports of unrest on the island. In February Adolf Berle predicted a blow-up of some sort within three months. He was astonishingly prescient. On May 30 a group of disgruntled army officers stopped Trujillo’s car late one night and shot him down.

The assassination took Washington by surprise. The President, who was then in Paris on his visit to de Gaulle, was confronted on his return by a Dominican regime under Joaquín Balaguer, who had been the nominal president under Trujillo, with Trujillo’s son Ramfis still in charge of the armed forces. Kennedy examined the situation realistically. “There are three possibilities,” he said, “in descending order of preference: a decent democratic regime, a continuation of the Trujillo regime or a Castro regime. We ought to-aim at the first, but we really can’t renounce the second until we are sure that we can avoid the third.”

The problem was whether a country where potential political leadership had been Suppressed, murdered or exiled for more than a generation could easily acquire the instincts and skills of selfgovernment. For the next three months the President endeavored to assess the democratic prospects. He sent Robert Murphy, one of the most experienced of American diplomats, and John Bartlow Martin, one of the best of American reporters, on quiet trips to Santo Domingo. Martin came back with a 115-page report so enthralling that Kennedy read it all with relish one autumn afternoon as he listened to the World Series. The accumulating information suggested that Balaguer was making an honest attempt to bring about a transition to democracy. The presence of young Trujillo remained troubling, however; and his control of the army presumably limited our capacity to do anything about him. Toward the end of August the State Department proposed that we try to induce the army, Balaguer, Ramfis Trujillo and the moderate opposition to stick together in order to lay the foundations for movement toward self-government. Kennedy agreed. “Balaguer is our only tool,” he said. “The anti-communist liberals aren’t strong enough. We must use our influence to take Balaguer along the road to democracy.”

Others at the meeting in the Cabinet Room supported this policy, some in terms that suggested a certain scorn for the democratic opposition. One described the intricate factional differences within the opposition in such vivid language that the Attorney General passed me a note, “This is as bad as New York City.” Finally Morales-Carrión, evidently distressed over this part of the discussion, spoke up with sober eloquence. “The democratic opposition,” he said, “are the people who represent the only possibility of democratic government in the Dominican Republic. They are the counterparts of the people who made democracy effective in Puerto Rico and Venezuela. Naturally they are not too well disciplined at the moment. They have lived under tyranny for thirty years. Now the lid is off, political life has revived and it is not always under control. But we must understand them and their position and their hopes. Otherwise we will lose all chance of bringing democracy to the Dominican Republic.”

The President listened with a mixture of sympathy and doubt. Finally he said, “Yes, yes, but the whole key in all those countries is the emergence of a leader—a liberal figure who can command popular support as against the military and who will carry out social and economic reform—a Nehru or a Munoz. No such figure has emerged. We don’t know who he will be. The great danger in the next six months is a take-over by the army, which could lead straight to Castro. That is the situation we have to deal with now—that is why we must get a modus vivendi among all the forces prepared to commit themselves to democracy, instead of letting them tear themselves apart and let in the far right or the far left. The eventual problem is to find someone who will symbolize the future for the island.”

In the Dominican Republic the democratic opposition insisted on the expulsion of Ramfis Trujillo as the condition for any rapprochement with Balaguer. Washington instructed its representatives there to support this view. Finally in mid-November Ramfis agreed to leave the country. But the next day two of his uncles made an unexpected return to the island, Ramfis canceled his departure and the developments seemed to portend a military coup to restore the Trujillo family to power. Washington read the cables with rising concern. The President directed the Secretary of State to put out a statement saying that the United States would not remain indifferent if the Trujillos attempted to “reassert dictatorial domination.” Then Kennedy decided on a bold stroke: the dispatch of eight American ships, with 1800 Marines on board, to steam visibly off Santo Domingo just outside the three-mile limit, ready to go in if the Balaguer government asked for them. Given the ingrained Latin American hatred of gunboat diplomacy, this course involved obvious risks. On the other hand, it would be, for once, Yankee intervention to sustain a democratic movement rather than to destroy it, and the President was prepared to take his chance.

We waited with some apprehension until surprising and heartening word came in from Santo Domingo. It must have been a unique moment in Latin American history: the people dancing in the streets, cheering the United States fleet and shouting enthusiastic vivas for the gringos. The presence of the fleet encouraged General Pedro Rodríguez Echavarría of the air force to rise against Ramfis. The Trujillos quickly fled, this time for good; and Kennedy’s action won commendation throughout Latin America. Only Fidel Castro objected. The incident provided striking evidence of the change in Latin American attitudes Kennedy had wrought in the seven months since the Bay of Pigs.

But the ordeal of Dominican democracy was just beginning.^* As Washington saw the problem, transition to democracy required the broadening of the Balaguer government by the incorporation of representatives of the democratic groups opposed to Trujillismo. These groups were the Unión Cívica, a miscellaneous collection of factions, under the leadership of Viriato Fiallo, which had steadfastly opposed Trujillo and now enjoyed wide popular support; the 14th of June movement, which had moderate and leftist wings and strongly appealed to Dominican youth; and the Partido Revolucionario Dominicano, under Juan Bosch, with more experienced leadership but as yet incapable of mass action.

Strenuous efforts were made after the Trujillos’ downfall to bring these disparate elements together. The American Consul General, John Hill, was reinforced by Morales-Carrión, who for several years had been in touch with the anti-Trujillista movement and had friends in all camps. For several weeks, Hill and Morales-Carrión worked hard at getting a consensus among the Dominicans. But the animosities and suspicions engendered by the Trujillista period made mediation a thankless task. On December 15 President Kennedy stopped in Puerto Rico on his way to Venezuela. That evening the President, Goodwin, Woodward, Bowles, Hill and Morales-Carrión met at La Fortaleza, the governor’s mansion. After carefully considering the situation, President Kennedy decided on a personal appeal to Balaguer and Rodríguez Echavarría. His intervention was the catalyst that made possible the establishment of a Council of State, committed to a program of political democracy and the preparation of elections. When Rodríguez Echavarría, who hated the Unión Cívica, then attempted a coup, the popular reaction defeated him.

The Council, under its chairman, Rafael Bonnelly, was never a strong government; but it brought peace and personal freedom to the Dominican Republic and in December 1962, with the technical assistance of the OAS, it held the only democratic election that the people had known in generations. The election resulted in the victory of Bosch, who had returned the year before from twenty years of exile. An old friend of Muñoz, Figueres and Betancourt, Bosch was strongly in the progressive democratic tradition. “The Alliance for Progress,” he said after the election, “is a political and economic ideal for which we, the democratic, revolutionary leaders of Latin America, have been fighting for a long time.” Kennedy instructed our government to give Bosch full support, hoping that the Dominican Republic might become a democratic showcase in the Caribbean.

But Bosch was essentially a literary figure, better as short story writer than as statesman. In spite of the invasion of the islands by swarms of Washington economists and engineers, of foundation experts and private consultants, in spite of grants and loans and blueprints, the Bosch government was not able in 1963 to reduce unemployment or prepare a national development program. In the meantime, Bosch alienated the upper classes by his words without winning over the lower by his deeds, while his faith in civil liberties allowed his foes, especially in the army, to stigmatize him most unjustly as pro-communist. But one cannot blame Bosch too much. Even had he been a Nehru or a Muñoz he would have confronted problems of overwhelming difficulty: a nation without democratic tradition or experience, a government without trained administrators, an army dominated by Trujillistas and an economy burdened by a staggering inheritance of foreign debt leaving him, he thought, no choice but to pursue orthodox monetary policies.

Kennedy watched the Dominican troubles with disappointment but not with much surprise. It confirmed his sense both of the limited capacity of the United States to work unilateral miracles and of the dependence of the Alliance on Latin American leadership.

4. COMMUNISM IN THE WINGS

The Alliance for Progress represented the affirmative side of Kennedy’s policy. The other side was his absolute determination to prevent any new state from going down the Castro road and so giving the Soviet Union a second bridgehead in the hemisphere.

It was idle to suppose that communism in Latin America was no more than the expression of an indigenous desire for social reform. Latin America had long occupied an honored place in Leninist meditations about the future of world politics. Not only were Marxist ideas far more relevant to Latin American feudalism than they were, for example, to African tribalism, but communist success in Latin America would deal a much harder blow to the power and influence of the United States. Communist parties had existed for forty years in the major countries. Latin Americans, regularly summoned to training schools in Moscow or Prague, learning everything from political doctrine to paramilitary warfare, carried their lessons back to their homelands. Khrushchev himself made no secret of his hopes for the western hemisphere. “Latin America,” he said in 1960, “reminds one of an active volcano.” And, while the Alliance was the best way of attacking the long-run sources of communist appeal, it could not by itself ward off short-run attempts at disruption and subversion: if I may borrow back a line I once contributed to a speech of Dean Rusk’s, “Vitamin tablets will not save a man set upon by hoodlums in an alley.”

Communism had both targets of priority and targets of convenience in Latin America. Venezuela and Brazil, for example, seemed to be the chief targets of priority. The main target of convenience in 1961—that is, one which became attractive less for intrinsic desirability than because it was there—was a small country, still an English colony, British Guiana.

British Guiana had a population of about 600,000, almost evenly divided between the Negroes of the towns and the East Indians of the countryside. The people enjoyed a considerable measure of self-government and, if things went according to schedule, were due for full independence in another year or two. An election in September 1961 brought the Indian party, the People’s Progressive Party, and its leader Dr. Cheddi Jagan into office. Jagan was unquestionably some sort of Marxist. His wife, an American girl whom he had met while studying dentistry in Chicago, had once been a member of the Young Communist League. His party lived by the clichés of an impassioned, quasi-Marxist, anti-colonialist socialism.

Jagan was plainly the most popular leader in British Guiana. The question was whether he was recoverable for democracy. Senator Dodd of Connecticut had pronounced him a communist agent, but then he had said the same thing about Sékou Touré. The British, on the other hand, were not unsympathetic toward Jagan. Though they had earlier imprisoned him more than once, they now claimed it was possible to work with him and that he was more responsible than his rival, the Negro leader Forbes Burnham. Their view, as communicated at the highest level, was that if Jagan’s party were the choice of the people, London and Washington should do their best to keep him on the side of the west by cooperating fully with him and giving his regime economic support. Otherwise he would turn to the communist bloc, which would only guarantee Soviet influence in an independent British Guiana.

This was the situation when Jagan, after his election, expressed a desire to come to Washington and talk about assistance for his development program. At that point the State Department saw no real alternative to the British policy. The aid budget made tentative provision for assistance in the magnitude of $5 million. Then in late October 1961 Jagan arrived. He made his American debut, like so many other visiting statesmen, on Meet the Press, where he resolutely declined to say anything critical of the Soviet Union and left an impression of either wooliness or fellow-traveling. This appearance instantly diminished the enthusiasm for helping his government. The President, who caught the last half of the show, called for a re-examination of all aspects of the problem, saying he wanted no commitments made until he had seen Jagan himself.

Jagan talked with the President on the morning of October 25. He turned out to be a personable and fluent East Indian but endowed, it seemed to those of us present, with an unconquerable romanticism or naïveté. He began by outlining the economic circumstances of British Guiana and his own development plans. When he explained that, as a socialist, he felt that only state planning could break the bottlenecks, Kennedy said, ‘‘I want to make one thing perfectly clear. We are not engaged in a crusade to force private enterprise on parts of the world where it is not relevant. If we are engaged in a crusade for anything, it is national independence. That is the primary purpose of our aid. The secondary purpose is to encourage individual freedom and political freedom. But we can’t always get that; and we have often helped countries which have little personal freedom, like Yugoslavia, if they maintain their national independence. This is the basic thing. So long as you do that, we don’t care whether you are socialist, capitalist, pragmatist or whatever. We regard ourselves as pragmatists.” As for nationalization, the President said that we would, of course, expect compensation, but that we had lived with countries like Mexico and Bolivia which had carried out nationalization programs.

He then began to draw out his visitor’s political ideas. Recalling Jagan’s words of admiration for Harold Laski on Meet the Press, Kennedy observed that he himself had studied for a term under Laski at the London School of Economics and that his older brother had visited the Soviet Union with him. Jagan replied that the first book of Laski’s he had read was The American Presidency; he considered himself, he added, a Bevanite. We all responded agreeably to this, citing Bevan’s faith in personal freedom and recalling his belief that the struggle of the future would be between democratic socialism and communism. Jagan, after avowing his commitment to parliamentary government, went on to say that he also admired the Monthly Review and the rather pro-communist writings of Paul Sweezy, Leo Huberman and Paul Baran. George Ball and I pressed him on this point, declaring there was a large difference between Bevan and the Sweezy group. Jagan finally said, “Well, Bevanism, Sweezyism, Hubermanism, Baranism—I really don’t get those ideological subtleties.” Kennedy observed later that this was the one time when his exposition rang false.

For the rest Jagan spoke as a nationalist committed to parliamentary methods. When Kennedy asked how he conceived his relations with the communist bloc, Jagan inquired whether the United States would regard a trade agreement with the Soviet Union as an unfriendly act. Kennedy responded that a simple trading relationship was one thing; a relationship which brought a country into a condition of economic dependence was another. Ball described the case of Sékou Touré, who in order to recover his independence was now disengaging himself from the Soviet embrace.

The President avoided any discussion of aid figures. There were special problems here because Jagan was requesting $40 million—a figure all out of proportion to the size of his country, especially in relation to the competing needs of Latin American nations with much larger populations and closer bonds to the United States. For this and other reasons, it was decided after the meeting that no concrete commitments could be made to Jagan and that each project would have to be examined on its merits. Jagan was considerably upset on learning this and asked to see the President again. Taking advantage of the President’s usual free half-hour before luncheon, I reported these developments. Kennedy wholly agreed with the staff’s recommendation that he not receive Jagan a second time but instructed me to see him myself in view of the great British concern that Jagan not return disgruntled to British Guiana; perhaps a statement could be worked out which would give Jagan something to take home and satisfy the British without committing us to immediate action. Sitting down at his desk, he dashed off a longhand letter to Jagan, explaining that I came with his confidence, and asked Evelyn Lincoln to type it. When he looked at it again, he decided that it was a little cold, told me to “warm it up” and signed the warmed-up letter.

The President went on to express doubt whether Jagan would be able to sustain his position as a parliamentary democrat. “I have a feeling,” he said, “that in a couple of years he will find ways to suspend his constitutional provisions and will cut his opposition off at the knees. . . . Parliamentary democracy is going to be damn difficult in a country at this stage of development. With all the political jockeying and all the racial tensions, it’s going to be almost impossible for Jagan to concentrate the energies of his country on development through a parliamentary system.”

With William Burdett, a careful and intelligent Foreign Service officer, I saw Jagan that afternoon at the Dupont Plaza. He was in a desperate mood at the thought of going home empty-handed but brightened at the prospect of a statement. The final text, worked out after complicated negotiation in the next twenty-four hours, committed Jagan “to uphold the political freedoms and defend the parliamentary democracy which is his country’s fundamental heritage” and the United States to send a mission to determine what economic assistance we could give in support of the British Guiana development plan.

The problem was genuinely difficult. Assuming that Jagan would be the leader of an independent British Guiana, we estimated that, if we gave aid, there would be a 50 per cent chance of his going communist, that, if we didn’t, there would be a 90 per cent chance, and that we would all catch hell whatever we did. The State Department at first thought we should make the try; then Rusk personally reversed this policy in a stiff letter to the British early in 1962. AID was fearful from the start that assistance to British Guiana would cause congressional criticism and injure the whole aid program. The President, after meeting Jagan, had grown increasingly skeptical, but he was impressed by the British contention that there was no alternative. The British advanced this argument at every opportunity, though one always suspected that their main desire was to get out of British Guiana as quickly as possible and dump the whole problem on us (nor could one begrudge the Colonial Office its sarcasm when Americans, after bringing self-righteous pressure on London to advance the independence timetable in Africa, now kept urging delay in this case). Inside British Guiana the situation continued to disintegrate. In February 1962 frightening race riots broke out in Georgetown. Jagan, forgetting his objection to imperialism, requested British troops to help maintain order.

Thus far our policy had been based on the assumption that Forbes Burnham was, as the British described him, an opportunist, racist and demagogue intent only on personal power. One wondered about this, though, because the AFL-CIO people in British Guiana thought well of him; and Hugh Gaitskell told me that Burnham had impressed him more than Jagan when the two visited Labour party leaders in London. Then in May 1962 Burnham came to Washington. He appeared an intelligent, self-possessed, reasonable man, insisting quite firmly on his ‘socialism’ and ‘neutralism’ but stoutly anti-communist. He also seemed well aware that British Guiana had no future at all unless its political leaders tried to temper the racial animosities and unless he in particular gave his party, now predominantly African, a bi-racial flavor. In the meantime, events had convinced us that Jagan, though perhaps not a disciplined communist, had that kind of deep procommunist emotion which only sustained experience with communism could cure; and the United States could not afford the Sékou Touré therapy when it involved a quasi-communist regime on the mainland of Latin America. Burnham’s visit left the feeling, as I reported to the President, that ‘‘an independent British Guiana under Burnham (if Burnham will commit himself to a multi-racial policy) would cause us many fewer problems than an independent British Guiana under Jagan.” And the way was open to bring it about, because Jagan’s parliamentary strength was larger than his popular strength: he had won 57 per cent of the seats on the basis of 42.7 per cent of the vote. An obvious solution would be to establish a system of proportional representation.

This, after prolonged discussion, the British government finally did in October 1963; and elections held finally at the end of 1964 produced a coalition government under Burnham. With much unhappiness and turbulence, British Guiana seemed to have passed safely out of the communist orbit.

5. THE SECOND PUNTA DEL ESTE

British Guiana, however, was a marginal problem. The central threat remained Fidel Castro, whose broadcasters were now inveighing daily and agents conspiring nightly against the democratic regimes of Latin America. “The duty of every revolutionary,” as Castro’s Second Declaration of Havana put it in February 1962, “is to make revolution.” Fidel himself, who had talked wistfully in 1960 about converting the Andes into “the Sierra Maestra of the American continent,” now predicted in 1962 on the first anniversary of the Bay of Pigs that Betancourt and his regime would be overthrown in a year. Nor were such statements merely exercises in abstract prophecy—as the Venezuelan government learned when it found a great cache of weapons, unquestionably Cuban in origin and provenance, secreted for terrorists at a point along the Caribbean coast.

The Organization of American States had handled all this in 1960 and 1961 in somewhat gingerly fashion. The United States favored some form of collective action, or at least exhortation, against Castro; but when this was proposed at a meeting of foreign ministers at San José, Costa Rica, in August 1960, most of the American republics demurred. Some, like Mexico and Argentina, cherished the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of their fellow republics; others, like Bolivia, feared the domestic political repercussions of an anti-Castro stand; still others did not want to antagonize Castro or make him further dependent on the Soviet Union. In some cases, no doubt, there was a furtive sympathy for David against Goliath, especially when Goliath seemed primarily agitated about economic properties he had previously appropriated himself. The tendency was to regard the Cuban matter as a private quarrel between Washington and Havana rather than as an inter-American responsibility. The resolution finally adopted at San José condemned interference by extra-continental powers in the hemisphere but said nothing about Cuba.

Castro’s growing fierceness during 1961, however, began to disturb his Caribbean neighbors. Venezuela and Colombia broke off diplomatic relations, and Lleras Camargo, increasingly concerned, called for a new meeting of foreign ministers to consider the Cuban problem. By a vote of 14 to 2, with five nations abstaining, the OAS Council resolved in December to hold such a session in January 1962. Again the resolution did not mention Cuba by name, and the split vote—the fact that such significant nations as Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico all either abstained or were opposed—showed the division in the hemisphere. While Lleras Camargo sought mandatory diplomatic and economic sanctions against Cuba, President Arturo Frondizi of Argentina came to Palm Beach at the end of the month in order to tell Kennedy, in effect, that the Castro problem could not be met head-on, that Washington was obsessed with Cuba at the expense of the long-run needs of the hemisphere and that a public OAS fight over Cuba would only strengthen Castro.

Within the United States government, deLesseps Morrison, our ambassador to the OAS, urged economic and diplomatic sanctions even at the risk of splitting the OAS. He argued that, if we brought enough pressure on the Latin-American countries, they would come along anyway, no matter how unwillingly. The President was less sure. The point, he told Morrison at a White House meeting early in January, was to isolate Castro, not ourselves. The day before the delegation left for Punta del Este, Kennedy held a final strategy meeting with Rusk, Goodwin and me. Rusk was enigmatic about the course we could pursue. Goodwin contended cogently that we should aim for the hardest result consistent with the best possible consensus, but not sacrifice substantial consensus to symbolic hardness. Kennedy agreed. With his appreciation of internal political problems in other countries, he said that he did not want a hard line at Punta del Este to set off a chain reaction of government crises across the continent. Also he expressed concern that the voting of sanctions by a narrow margin made up of small states representing a minority of the population of Latin America would be regarded as a victory for Castro.

And so we flew south through the equatorial night, arriving in Montevideo on January 21. A motorcade took us on to Punta del Este, a placid town dotted with palm trees meandering amiably along a wind-swept beach. In a few hours the tactical problem began to fall into shape. The Central American foreign ministers were committed to a hard line; some were under instruction to walk out if sanctions were not voted. Argentina, Brazil and Mexico were passionately opposed to sanctions. Within the United States delegation, Morrison, Senator Bourke B. Hickenlooper and Congressman Armistead Selden favored an all-out effort for sanctions. Speaking with a certain sour force at the first delegation meeting, Hickenlooper said he saw no point in his trying to talk to delegates from other countries because he did not know what our policy was. “I don’t even know that we have a policy. It seems to be like the father who told his son, ‘Sell the cow for $25 if you can; but, if you can’t sell it for 25, accept 15.’ That is no policy. I still don’t understand why we can’t go all out for sanctions.” He later said, “The Washington bureaucracy doesn’t understand the depth of public feeling on this matter. But Congress knows how deeply people care. If we do not come back with very strong action against Castro, the whole Alliance for Progress will be in trouble.” Rusk suggested that fourteen votes—the bare two-thirds necessary—for sanctions might not be enough but, if we could get sixteen, it would be different. Goodwin observed that the meeting had two objectives—to get an immediate condemnation of Castro and to strengthen the future capacity of the OAS to deal with Castro; if we pushed the first objective too far, we might lose the second.

The conference displayed Rusk at his best. Here all his qualities—his intelligence, command of detail, inexhaustible patience and effortless inscrutability—precisely fitted the requirements of the occasion. With members of Congress and the Caribbean foreign ministers harassing him on one side and representatives of the most important South American states harassing him on the other, he strove coolly to work out the best possible combination of condemnation and consensus. There were twelve sure votes for a hard policy; but among the dissenters were the largest countries of the hemisphere—Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Chile—as well as Bolivia and Ecuador. Uruguay and Haiti hung uncertainly in the middle. The foreign minister of Haiti, recognizing the value of his vote, calmly remarked to Rusk that he came from a poor country in desperate need of aid; obviously this need would affect his vote. If the United States, which had been disengaging from aid to Haiti because of the Duvalier dictatorship, would agree to finance particular projects. . . . Rusk turned away and later sent him a message saying that, while the United States as a matter of policy did not associate economic aid and political performance, now that Haiti itself had made the link, it had to understand that any future aid would be scrutinized in the light of its role at Punta del Este.

In the meantime a new idea was emerging out of the incessant buzz of talk in the lobbies and corridors of the San Rafael Hotel—that the government of Cuba be excluded from the inter-American system. This idea had been informally advanced by Argentines seeking an alternative to mandatory sanctions. It could be done at once at this meeting; it would therefore spare wobbly governments the pain of taking something home which their parliaments would have to debate and ratify. Moreover, if the Argentines liked it, it might appeal to the Brazilians too. This proposition, along with partial economic sanctions and the establishment of a special security committee, now became the heart of the United States resolution. The congressional delegation, after 48 hours’ exposure to the atmosphere of the conference, agreed that this was the best we could get and said they would defend it in Washington.

My own particular assignment was to prepare, with Walt Rostow and Goodwin, Rusk’s address to the conference. The Secretary’s speech, with its social and economic emphasis, provided a relief, welcome even to the Latin Americans, from the juridical disquisitions standard for such gatherings; and it went over very well. Rusk concluded by asking the foreign ministers to recognize that Cuba’s alignment with “the Sino-Soviet bloc” was “incompatible” with the inter-American system, to exclude the Castro regime from the organs and bodies of that system, to end trade, especially in arms, between Cuba and the rest of the hemisphere and to seek means to defend the Americas against Castro’s indirect aggression.

The problem now was to find the missing votes for the resolution. Uruguay boggled at the proposal that the OAS exclude Cuba since the OAS Charter made no provision for expulsion; then Assistant Secretary Woodward solved these juridical scruples by arguing ingeniously that the declaration of incompatibility would exclude Cuba automatically. As for Haiti, we finally yielded to blackmail and agreed to resume our aid to the airport at Port au Prince.^* There remained the Caribbean states which still wanted mandatory sanctions; but Kennedy in Washington called Lleras Camargo in Bogotá and asked him to instruct his representative to retreat from the original insistence. The other Caribbean foreign ministers followed Colombia’s example.

The result was a substantial success. Though only fourteen nations voted explicitly to exclude Cuba from the inter-American system, all twenty republics—the whole hemisphere except for Cuba itself—supported the declaration of incompatibility and the exclusion of the Castro government from the Inter-American Defense Board; nineteen voted to create a Special Consultative Committee of Experts on Security Matters to combat Cuban subversive activities; seventeen voted to suspend arms traffic with Cuba; and sixteen voted to follow this up with study looking toward further extensions of the trade embargo. The resolution on security, calling on the OAS to take all appropriate steps for “individual or collective self-defense” against “the continued intervention in this hemisphere of Sino-Soviet powers,” turned out to be of particular importance. Much more progress was made toward the isolation of Cuba within the hemisphere than could have been anticipated a few months before.

6. THE RETURN OF THE MILITARY COUP

Punta del Este I had set in motion the grand project for the democratic modernization of Latin America; Punta del Este II now launched the indispensable supporting policy for the containment of Castro. But the meeting did not avert a political chain reaction. The Frondizi government, after originally floating the idea of excluding Castro from the OAS, had mysteriously glided away from its own formula and finally voted against it. One wondered later whether Frondizi, the artful dodger, may not have thrown out the idea in order to lure us away from sanctions without ever intending to support it himself. So far as his own military were concerned, it was almost the last knot in an overtwisted rope. When the Peronistas made impressive gains in the March election, the rope was at the end. The military now arrested Frondizi and installed the president of the senate, the next man in the line of constitutional succession, as the new President of Argentina.

By the usual criteria—literacy, per capita income, racial homogeneity—Argentina should have been the most stable democracy in Latin America. But the landed oligarchy had stunted the country’s democratic development for generations; and then after the war Perón, while breaking the grip of the oligarchy, also wrecked Argentina’s economy, debauched its politics and corrupted its administration. The military, having first installed and then ejected Perón, had acquired the habit of intervention in civil politics’; and their action now confronted Washington with a difficult decision. In the meantime, we had acquired a new Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs. His superiors in the Department had come to feel that Robert Woodward’s temperate personality was better suited to an embassy than to the rigors of the Department in Washington. As one denizen of the seventh floor put it to me, “We need someone down there to clip Dick Goodwin’s wings and keep him in channels.” Early in March 1962 Woodward was told to prepare himself for an overseas assignment (he soon became ambassador to Spain, where he did his usual thoughtful job), and Edwin M. Martin, the Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, was appointed in his place.

Martin, who had been in government since the New Deal and in the State Department since 1945, was an administrator of toughness and ability. Rather liberal in his political views, rather conservative in his economic views, he was determined above all to run his own show. Though he believed deeply in the Alliance, he now allowed himself for bureaucratic reasons to be separated from his natural allies, clipping Goodwin’s wings, for example, all too effectively in the next months. Dick bore his situation with quiet dignity, complaining neither to the press nor to the White House; in time he moved on to the Peace Corps. The incident reminded one again of the limits of presidential power because, though Kennedy retained his fondness for Goodwin and often called on him for special jobs, he could not, without cost to other objectives, preserve Goodwin’s usefulness in a department which did not want to use him. The government lost, however, the imagination, drive and purpose Goodwin had given so abundantly to the Alliance.

The Argentine coup was Martin’s first major crisis. He quickly recommended that the President issue a public condemnation. DeLesseps Morrison opposed this, however, and, unable to persuade the Department, stimulated Senators Hickenlooper and Morse to ask the President to delay comment.^* (There were other free wheelers than Goodwin in Latin American affairs.) The senatorial intervention worked. Our embassy in Buenos Aires then recommended that we accept the new regime as the constitutional continuation of the Frondizi government. Kennedy, despite his distaste for military coups, had a realist’s concern not to place himself in positions from which he could neither advance nor retreat. Since Frondizi’s overthrow had been greeted with vast apathy by the Argentine people, the prudent policy seemed to be to accept the constitutional argument, however tenuous. This in due course he did.

Soon, however, a problem at once clearer and harder arose in Peru. Unlike Argentina, Peru, with its high degree of illiteracy, its low per capita income, its unassimilated Indian population and its feudal system of land tenure, seemed destined for upheaval. In Haya de la Torre’s APRA party, it had the first of the partido populares of Latin America; but, though the Apristas were deeply anti-communist, their violent clashes thirty years before with the military had given each an enduring hatred of the other. Moreover, APRA was losing its hold on the young, some of whom were moving toward Fernando Belaunde Terry and his Acción Popular party, others of whom were tempted by Marxism. James Loeb, our ambassador to Lima, had been so shocked by the failure of the Peruvian academic community to protest the Soviet resumption of nuclear testing that he had addressed an open letter to the Rector of the Faculty of Engineering at the National University, suggesting that the silence was “as deafening, I believe, and as dangerous as the explosions which are being unleashed on the civilized world.” In the meantime, an intelligent and well-intentioned but hopelessly orthodox conservative government under Prime Minister Pedro Beltrin was making little progress in meeting the bitter problems of the country.

The next presidential election was scheduled for June 1962. In a series of brilliant and pessimistic dispatches, beginning in December 1961, Loeb predicted that the historic feuds which divided the APRA both from the military and from Belaunde’s new party of the democratic left would lead to political impasse. When I saw Loeb in Lima after Punta del Este, he spoke somberly about Peru’s political future. APRA, he said, was the strongest anticommunist force and the best means of keeping the working class from communism; but he was disturbed both by the intensity of its internal discipline and by the fancifulness of its economic planning. Nor did he believe that the military would accept an APRA victory. He thought he ought to return to Washington to discuss our policy in the face of various predictable contingencies.

In March, Loeb, coming to Washington, worked out his contingency planning with Edwin Martin and then with the President. At a time when the State Department was constantly being overtaken by events, Loeb’s foresight gave us a valuable head start. In a number of ways in the next months the United States sought to convey to the Peruvian army and navy that we could not expect to maintain the principles of the Alliance for Progress and at the same time condone military action against a freely elected, progressive anti-communist regime. But the sequel once again suggested the limitations on American power. Haya de la Torre, while narrowly winning the election, polled only a third of the popular vote. The military, echoing Belaunde’s cries of fraud, went into action. In July officers trained in the United States, commanding tanks built in the United States, knocked down the iron gates of the Presidential Palace, arrested President Manuel Prado and set up a military junta.

Washington, in accordance with previous planning, now suspended diplomatic relations. The President issued a strong statement explaining that the military coup had contravened the purposes of the inter-American system. In a second statement the State Department announced the suspension of various assistance programs. A few days later at his press conference, the President said, “We are anxious to see a return to constitutional forms in Peru. . . . We feel that this hemisphere can only be secure and free with democratic governments.” Within Peru conditions remained tense. President Prado was in prison, and the APRA leaders in hiding. On July 23 Haya de la Torre called a general strike; its failure implied popular acquiescence in the military regime. Behind the scenes Loeb in Lima and Martin in Washington brought pressure on the junta to return to constitutionalism. Responding to this pressure, the junta guaranteed freedom of the press and of political opposition, even for the Apristas, promised free elections for June 9, 1963, and soon released most of those arrested at the time of the coup, including President Prado.

On August 1 I said to President Kennedy that I hoped he had not regretted his statement against the coup. He replied, “Certainly not.” But, he added, neither the Latin American governments, most of whom were now preparing to recognize the junta (the Chilean foreign minister had already warned the United States against being more royalist than the king), nor the Peruvian people themselves, as shown by the collapse of the general strike, had given us the support for which we had hoped. His concern, he said, was that we might have staked our prestige on reversing a situation which could not be reversed—and that, when we accepted the situation, as eventually we must, we might seem to be suffering a defeat. The problem now, he said, was to demonstrate that our condemnation had caused the junta to make enough changes in its policy to render the resumption of relations possible.

This demonstration came when representatives of the junta appeared before the Council of the OAS, formally set forth the steps taken to restore civil liberties and promised solemnly to hold free elections within a year and abide by the results. On the basis of these assurances, we soon resumed relations with the Peruvian government. Though Kennedy was criticized at the time for seeming to begin one policy—non-recognition—and then to go back on it, the fact was that the suspension of relations produced exactly the desired result. There were no reprisals, civil freedom was restored, free elections were guaranteed. While most American businessmen in Peru wanted unconditional recognition of the regime, the United States government showed its independence of business pressure and its opposition to military dictatorship. The action further consolidated the confidence of democratic Latin Americans in the progressive purpose of the American President. And the Peruvian election was held, as pledged, in June 1963. This time Belaunde won a clear victory and began to give his country the programs of social reform it had so long needed.

7. TROUBLES OF THE ALLIANCE

On March 12, 1962, the anniversary of his first proposal of the Alliance for Progress, the President spoke again to the Latin American diplomats assembled at the White House.

Our “most impressive accomplishment” in the seven months since Punta del Este, he said, had been the “dramatic shift in thinking and attitude” through the hemisphere. The Charter of Punta del Este had posed the challenge of development in a way that could no longer be ignored, and had laid down the principle of “collective responsibility for the welfare of the people of the Americas.” A second accomplishment was the creation of the institutional framework within which development would take place. The United States, moreover, had committed its pledged billion dollars to the first year of the Alliance. But the “ultimate responsibility for success,” Kennedy declared with emphasis, “lies with the developing nation itself.”

 

For only you can mobilize the resources, make the reforms, set the goals and provide the energies which will transform our external assistance into an effective contribution to the progress of our continent. Only you can create the economic confidence which will encourage the free flow of capital. . . . Only you can eliminate the evils of destructive inflation, chronic trade imbalances and widespread unemployment.

 

The men of wealth and power in poor nations, the President continued, “must lead the fight for those basic reforms which alone can preserve the fabric of their own societies. Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. These social reforms are at the heart of the Alliance for Progress.”

While he spoke, criticism of the Alliance was already rising on the ground that results thus far had been disappointing both in reform and in development. No doubt the rhetoric which accompanied the birth of the Alliance had excited undue anticipations. But without the rhetoric the Alliance would have been stillborn; and the criticism of 1962 simply overlooked the realities of the situation in Latin America.

In the case of reform, it was unrealistic to expect Latin American governments to enact overnight land and tax reforms revising the basic structure of power in their societies when in our own country, for example, it had taken a strong government several years of savage political fighting to pass the relatively innocuous reforms of the New Deal. As for development, a long period was inevitable before plans and projects, separately initiated in a score of nations, proceeding in different sectors and at different paces, could generate cumulative momentum. The Marshall Plan, with all its resources of experienced entrepreneurs, veteran public administrators and skilled labor, had not wrought miracles in its first few months. P. N. Rosenstein-Rodan, now one of the OAS Panel of Experts, recalled that as late as the third year of the Marshall Plan, when the Organization for European Economic Cooperation asked its member governments to consider the consequences of a 5 per cent growth rate, practical men regarded the projection as absurd; yet all the Common Market countries achieved that rate almost at once. Given the most favorable circumstances, the seeds planted by the Alliance in 1961 and 1962 could not hope to bear visible fruit before 1964 or 1965.

Nor was the Alliance given the most favorable circumstances. In addition to the problems created by the communist threat, by rapid population growth and by internal political instability, the effort was beginning at a time of decline in world commodity prices—and in a continent where most nations depended excessively on one or two commodities as a means of earning foreign exchange. After 1953 Latin American exports (other than oil) had increased in quantity by nearly one-third but were bringing in only about 4 per cent more foreign exchange. By 1961 the price of coffee had fallen to about 60 per cent of the 1953 level. The consequent pressure on the balance of payments meant that some 40 per cent of the Alliance for Progress funds in the first year had to go for direct or indirect balance of payments loans. If, on the other hand, commodity prices had stayed at the 1953 level, Latin American export earnings would have been greater than the billion dollars committed by the United States in 1961. In an attempt to deal with a major part of this problem, the United States in 1962 took the lead in stabilizing coffee prices through a five-year international agreement including both producing and consuming countries.

In these early years, moreover, only Venezuela and Colombia (at least through Lleras’s presidential term) and some Central American states, notably Costa Rica and El Salvador, had governments fully responsive to the aims of the Alliance. Brazil, the nation in Latin America with the greatest potentiality, was the one on which we expended most money and concern; but, after the odd departure of Quadros in 1961, the government had fallen into the hands of his vice-president, João Goulart, a weak and erratic demagogue; and it required all the persuasion of two brillant ambassadors, Lincoln Gordon in Rio and Roberto Campos in Washington, to preserve any rationality in Brazilian-American relations. Argentina, the second largest nation, remained in melancholy stagnation and disarray.

There were problems too in Washington. Moscoso was unexcelled in communicating the political and social idealism of the Alliance—to the Latin Americans, who had great faith in him, to Congress, where he was well respected, and to his own staff. He deeply believed that the Alliance could succeed only as a revolution and a crusade. But the aid bureaucracy was not accustomed to running revolutions and crusades; and Moscoso, always a little at sea in Washington, was hard put to reconcile the conflicting pressures swirling around him. Though he committed the billion dollars each year in program and project loans, the stipulations and rigidities in the aid legislation held up actual disbursement. Even with successive deputies of unusual ability and devotion to the program, Graham Martin and William Rogers, it was difficult to break the bureaucratic threads tying the effort to the ground. “I would rather,” Moscoso once said, “have a warm amateur than a cold professional.” Warm professionals were not easy to come by. And the Latins themselves, who were often slow to produce good projects and effective development programs, excused their own delinquencies by blaming everything on the Washington bureaucracy.

Moreover, the North American business community had not been, with notable exceptions, enthusiastic about the Alliance. As foreign private investment in Latin America diminished in 1961 and as Latin America’s own private capital continued to flow out of the hemisphere into Swiss banks, the Alliance in Washington was under growing pressure from United States companies doing Latin American business to talk less about social reform and more about private investment. They had a point, since the Alliance’s capital requirements presupposed an annual flow of $300 million of United States private funds to Latin America. But the effect was further to belittle the crusade, to attenuate the mystique and zeal of Punta del Este and to lead Latin Americans to see the Alliance, despite its Latin origins, not as a great adventure of their own, but as a bilateral money lending operation, ‘made in the U.S.A’., to serve the interests of North American business. “No money-lender in history has ever evoked great enthusiasm,” wrote Morales-Carrión in a memorandum to the President after a Latin American trip in April 1962, adding in a sentence which delighted Kennedy, “We have yet to see a charismatic banker.”

As a consequence, the Alliance sometimes seemed bureaucratic and incomprehensible south of the border. “The present lingo of economic technocracy,” wrote Morales-Carrión, “simply does not reach the average Latin American. His slogans come from the world of nationalism, not the world of technocracy.” The biggest obstacle the Alliance faced was “that it had not been wedded to Latin American nationalism, the single most powerful psychological force now operating in Latin America. . . . Unless the Alliance is able to ally itself with nationalism, to influence it in a constructive direction, to translate its abstract terminology into familiar concepts related to nation-building, the Alliance will be pouring money into a psychological void.”

One sometimes felt that the communists, operating on a shoestring in city universities or back-country villages, were reaching the people who mattered for the future—the students, the intellectuals, the labor leaders, the nationalist militants—while our billions were bringing us into contact only with governments of doubtful good faith and questionable life expectancy. Latin American democratic leaders themselves began to express increasing concern about the “degeneration” of the Alliance into a bilateral and technical program without political drive or continental vision. In October 1962 the Inter-American Economic and Social Council proposed that leading Latin American statesmen review the Alliance in the hope of promoting its multilateralization and Latin-Americanization and giving it a vital political base in the hemisphere.

Yet in our gloom we underestimate the extent to which things were already stirring underneath the surface. For imperceptibly the Charter of Punta del Este was transforming the politics of Latin America, imprinting the issues of modernization on the consciousness of the political and intellectual community and channeling the energies of both public and private agencies as never before. All the time, things were happening: development plans submitted, reform laws passed, teachers trained, schoolbooks circulated, roads and houses built, water supplies purified, land redistributed, savings and loan associations organized, economic integration among blocs of countries advanced, embers of hope kindled—never enough but a beginning. The shadows of communism, military adventurism and ancient privilege still obscured a gathering consensus which might in time bring the goals of the Alliance into reach.

Moreover, the President himself was winning in Latin America a faith and affection enjoyed by no other North American leader except Franklin Roosevelt in the long history of the Americas. His policies at home were validating his efforts in the hemisphere. Professor Albert O. Hirschman of Harvard, the expert on Latin American economic development, reported, for example, that his clash with United States Steel made a strong impression south of the border; “if Kennedy took on a real fight with a major segment of the U.S. business community, perhaps he meant what he said when he proposed social reforms for Latin America?” Moreover, the President, with his understanding of the crucial role of the Latin American intellectuals, seized opportunities to meet with academic and artistic groups at the White House—Chilean rectors and deans, Brazilian students, the writers, painters and architects assembled at the annual meetings of Robert Wool’s Inter-American Committee for the arts.

In 1900 the Uruguayan writer José Enrique Rodô in his essay Ariel had articulated a favorite South American view of the United States: “Titanic in its concentration of will, with unprecedented triumphs in all spheres of material aggrandizement, its civilization yet produces as a whole a singular impression of insufficiency, of emptiness.” Now for a moment the United States appeared no longer in the guise of Caliban but as a culture worthy in its own right of the leadership of the Americas.