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THE UNITED STATESAND LA IN AMERICA
IN THE 1960s*
byJOSEPH S. TULCHIN
INTRODUCTION
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TULCHIN: THE U.S. AND LATIN AMERICA IN THE 1960s 3
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
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tion of the Monroe Doctrine, it is clear that the desire to keep Latin
America free of European influence was an intimate part of the
more general or global concerns of the US government. Toward
the end of the century, as the writings of Alfred Thayer Mahan
came to have increasing influence over policy planning, the
elaborate proposals for coaling stations, an isthmian canal and
protection of shipping lanes in the Caribbean Basin were part of
Mahan's global project for the United States as a great power.
As the succeeding administrations put Mahan's national
security theories into practice, the anxiety over European inter-
vention was focused almost exclusively within the Caribbean area.
There, the United States came to believe that bad government and
fiscal irresponsibility - the two were virtually interchangeable in
US thinking - led to instability, and that it was instability that
created the conditions for external intervention that would
threaten the security of the United States.
The process culminated in the confident assertion by Presiden
Woodrow Wilson that the United States, with its democratic
government and its liberal capitalist economy, was the ideal mod
for all the nations of the world. Although the intensity of his me
sianic zeal fluctuated over time, Wilson considered it the respon-
sibility of the more advanced nations of the world to teach the le
fortunate peoples of the world how to enjoy the benefits of t
economic and political system that had evolved in the Unite
States. That conviction, that arrogance, never has been absent en
tirely from US policy in this hemisphere.
At the end of World War I, the threat of direct intervention b
European powers in the Caribbean seemed to have disappear
This, together with the profound disillusionment with the W
sonian project of exporting democracy which overcame t
United States following the war, provoked a significant retr
from the interventionist policies followed since the days of Wil-
liam McKinley. The definition of United States strategic concern
was expanded to include specific commodities and services wh
the war had demonstrated to be vital to the national security. At
the same time, however, the protection of adequate supplies
petroleum, open channels of communication, and the free fl
of financial capital in Latin America and elsewhere no longe
seemed to require direct intervention in the internal affairs
weaker nations in the hemisphere. Through the decade of t
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TULCHIN: THE U.S. AND LATIN AMERICA IN THE 1960s 5
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TULCHIN: THE U.S. AND LATIN AMERICA IN THE 1960s 7
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TULCHIN: THE U.S. AND LATIN AMERICA IN THE 1960s 9
was nothing new. What was new was that, in the early 1950s, this
was not seen as a problem in Washington. In fact, the use of US
force in 1954, through manipulation of a military puppet to oust
the reformist democratic government of Guatemala, was con-
sidered one of the great successes of the administration. Lamen-
tably, it was held up as a model for future operations in Latin
America and elsewhere. It was considered the ultimate success in
counterinsurgency.5 At the time, Latin American outrage, ex-
pressed at the Caracas meeting of the Organization of American
States (OAS) and after, was either ignored or not heard.
During this decade, when as many as 13 out of 20 Latin
American states were ruled by dictators, the Eisenhower ad-
ministration changed its view and came to see the lack of
democratic governments in Latin America as a serious policy
problem. Anti-democratic or non-democratic regimes were con-
sidered to be unsympathetic to the problems of underdevelop-
ment and to the misery of the populations in the area. Therefore,
they were considered to be inherently unpopular, hence poten-
tially unstable. Since it was instability that, along with misery, was
considered to provoke subversion, policy planners concerned
with Latin America during the second Eisenhower administration
increasingly came to the conviction that anti-democratic regimes
in the hemisphere were a liability and that the United States should
do something about them.6
Within the government in Washington, the thinking came to
focus on the linkage between development and democracy
through a series of events and the concurrent public debate over
them. First the president's brother, Milton Eisenhower, made
several trips through Latin America, reporting directly to the presi-
dent concerning conditions in the hemisphere. It was Milton
Eisenhower's belief, from the first trip through the last, that
development and democracy were inextricably linked and the ab-
sence of both were a liability for United States national security.
His first report, in 1954, was filed without comment. By 1957 and
1958, however, successive reports were finding an increased echo
within the foreign policy establishment and among the informed
public. They were having more echo because of events contem-
poraneous with them, and because a growing consensus among
academics and policy advisers confirmed their conclusions.7
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TULCHIN: THE U.S. AND LATIN AMERICA IN THE 1960s 13
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TULCHIN: THE U.S. AND LATIN AMERICA IN THE 1960s 17
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The Alliance virtually did not get off the ground. The United
States fulfilled its commitment to the Social Progress Trust Fund
and $400 million dollars was committed by Congress at the end
of 1961 to the Inter-American Development Bank. By 1965, $2 bil-
lion in public monies had been committed to public aid programs.
However, this represented only a fifth of what the US government
had pledged itself to provide at the meetings at Punta Del Este.
For their part, the Latins, who were supposed to put up four dol-
lars for every one provided by the United States, had come through
on the order of approximately 10 cents on the dollar. They had
not met their commitments any more than had the United States.
There were a number of controversial issues raised by the Al-
liance, several of which continue to have an impact on policy.
First, essential to the Alliance was the concept of government in-
volvement in the development process. Prior to that date, the
United States had explicitly rejected the idea of government-to-
government aid in Latin America. The official policy had called for
making the region safe for private investment, as the appropriate
means toward the goal of self-sustaining growth. With the Al-
liance, government intervention became a central element in
hemispheric dialogue and remains so to this day. Closely related
to the issue of statism was the concept of centralized planning.
The notion that the United States encouraged, indeed demanded,
centralized planning from free enterprise, democratic societies,
was a subject that caused considerable discussion. The US Con-
gress, for example, debated for three months in 1962 as to whether
such planning was democratic or not. Significant elements of the
Congress considered such planning, and the commitments it rep-
resented, to be the essence of socialism. Consequently, broad ele-
ments in the Congress opposed such planning, despite the fact
that the United States, along with the other countries in the hemi-
sphere, had been signatories to the Declaration of Punta del Este,
in which centralized planning was stipulated in virtually every
major clause.
The linkage between democracy and development, and the
relationship of both to national security, became a bone of con-
tention among the nations of the hemisphere from the very first
declaration of the Alliance, and it continues to complicate US
policy to this day. Indeed, it had been a problem in the last months
of the Eisenhower administration, but the implications of the
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TULCHIN: THE U.S. AND LATIN AMERICA IN THE 1960s 21
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TULCHIN: THE U.S. AND LATIN AMERICA IN THE 1960s 23
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TULCHIN: THE U.S. AND LATIN AMERICA IN THE 1960s 25
America. The president was convinced that the Latins were not
with him. He was supposed to be the leader of a multilateral ef-
fort to defend democracy, but he found that most of the Latin
leaders who had encouraged his activitism would not back US ac-
tions in the hemisphere designed to support democracy. The
United States, through its policy of non-recognition and its policy
of political intervention in support of democracy, found itself iso-
lated in the hemisphere and subject to increasing criticism. Fur-
thermore, Kennedy was not convinced, nor were his advisers, that
the activist policy in support of democracy contributed to stability
in the hemisphere. There was a rising tide of comment that sug-
gested that it was undermining stability, and stability, he was con-
vinced, was the root cause of subversion. The belief in diversity
had all but disappeared.
At the same time, there were events elsewhere which were
throwing Kennedy's hemispheric policy into doubt. There were
the quickening events in Southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam and
Laos. The Soviet Union took a particularly hard line in its confron-
tations with the United States in 1961 and 1962, as if to test the
new president. The high point of this pressure came in October
with the Cuban missile crisis. There was significant and wide
debate within the United States concerning national security
doctrine, which had its echo in hemispheric policy, in the in-
creased concern over political stability. In the Congress as well,
there was an ever more insistent questioning of public aid as an
instrument of foreign policy.
The commitment to democracy, ambivalent from the start, was
undermined fatally by Washington's profound, persistent faith in
counterinsurgency. This faith formed part of the broad rejection
of nuclear deterrence strategy, dominant during the Eisenhower
administration. Kennedy, as a member of the Senate Foreign Rela-
tions Committee, had cited the limitations of massive retaliation
for dealing with "brush-fire wars" which were "nibbling away at
the fringe of the Free World's territory and strength, until our
security has been steadily eroded in piecemeal fashion" (Ken-
nedy, 1960). He adopted with enthusiasm the flexible response
approach of Maxwell Taylor, which shifted some of the burden of
defending the country away from nuclear weapons and onto con-
ventional forces. An important component of Taylor's formula for
defense was the concept of counterinsurgency, which advanced
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TULCHIN: THE U.S. AND LATIN AMERICA IN THE 1960s 29
CONCLUSION
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TULCHIN: THE U.S. AND LATIN AMERICA IN THE 1960s 31
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NOTES
1. For a description of the foreign policies of various Latin America
nations in the 1970s, see Mufioz and Tulchin (1984).
2. This process is described in great detail in Tulchin (1971).
3. This episode is dealt with in great detail in Tulchin (forthcoming)
and it is also the subject of the volume edited by DiTella and Watt (198
4. There had been concern with Bolshevism earlier, shown b
Secretary of State Kellogg in Mexico and Central America, in 1926-1928
and by Secretary of State Hull in Cuba in 1933, but neither seriously an
ticipated that the Soviet Union would enter the Caribbean through such
means. They were concerned with instability and the threat to US prope
ty and US hegemony.
5. On the Guatemala episode, see the summary discussion and sou
ces cited in Rabe (1988).
6. For a general discussion of these issues, see Packenham (1971).
7. In an early review of policy, a listing of US objectives in Lati
America indicated that all of these were of concern, but, at that point,
the precise relationship among them was not specified (NSC, 1953).
8. These initiatives are recounted in Parkinson (1974). For another
perspective, see Baily (1976).
9. Quotation originally appeared in The Department of State Bulletin
54, 6 June 1966, and was quoted by Shafer in his book.
10. For the critical liberal arguments that influenced policy, see
Bowles (1956), Hertzberg (1954), Schlesinger (1960), and Niebuhr
(1961). For a recent analysis of the relationship between national security
and foreign policy, see Schoultz (1987).
11. This is the same argument that would be used to justify training
Latin American military leaders in the US. It remains in use to this day,
although there is considerable public debate as to its validity.
12. For a convenient summary of the Alliance, see Levinson and de
Onis (1970) and IESC (1973). The social science literature that gropes
toward this linkage is vast; for an example, see Almond and Coleman
(1961).
13. For Latin American disagreements, see Hispanic-American Report
(1962).
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TULCHIN: THE U.S. AND LATIN AMERICA IN THE 1960s 33
REFERENCES
ALMOND, G., andJ. COLEMAN (1961) Politics of the Developing
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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CONKIN, P. (1987) Big Daddy from the Pedernales. Boston, MA: Twayne
Publishers.
DI TELLA, G., and D. WATT (eds.) (1988) Argentina between the Great
Powers. London, England: Macmillan Publishers.
DIVINE, R. (ed.) (1981) Exploring theJohnson Years. Austin, TX: Univer-
sity of Texas Press.
HALBERSTAM, D. (1972) The Best and the Brightest. New York, NY:
Random House.
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TULCHIN: THE U.S. AND LATIN AMERICA IN THE 1960s 3 5
PARKER, P. (1979) Brazil and the Quiet Intervention, 1964. Austin, TX:
University of Texas Press.
PARKINSON, F. (1974) Latin America, the Cold War, and the World
Powers: 1945-1973. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications.
Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, 1962. (1962)
Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office.
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