Neighborly Adversaries by LaRosa Michael Mora Frank O. & Frank O. Mora

Author:LaRosa, Michael,Mora, Frank O. & Frank O. Mora [LaRosa, Michael J. & Mora, Frank O.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
Published: 2015-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

V

Conflicting Aims in U.S.–Latin American Relations

The Late 20th Century

Well before the Cuban Revolution, U.S. policy documents and actions demonstrated that the United States placed Latin America within the prism of the East-West conflict. Security took precedence over all considerations, including democracy and development, the latter being at the top of Latin America’s agenda in the relationship with its northern neighbor. As the Guatemalan case demonstrates, democracy became the first fatality of U.S. Cold War policy in Latin America as the objective in Washington turned to blocking communist expansion. As George Kennan’s 1950s memo (discussed in the previous section) indicated, political stability, even if it meant supporting dictators, had to take precedence over democracy and development.

In the area of development, the message of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations was disappointing to Latin Americans. In the late 1940s Latin America was in the throes of tremendous social, political, and economic change. Many reformist regimes sought to address the historical socioeconomic problems of the region such as poverty, income inequality, maldistribution of land, and social injustice. Latin America turned to the United States for help but that country had other, more pressing areas in which it wanted to spend its foreign aid. At the Bogotá Conference that created the Organization of American States in 1948, Latin Americans failed to receive a U.S. commitment for an economic assistance program akin to the European Marshall Plan. U.S. representatives at the meeting stated that, rather than expecting U.S. aid, Latin America should open its economies to trade and investments to generate growth and development. No massive aid program was in the works for Latin America.

When John F. Kennedy became president in 1961, the administration changed course and designed a multi-billion-dollar assistance program that combined U.S. foreign aid with support for democratic reform. The Kennedy administration believed there was a direct link between poverty and revolution. The principal objective was to prevent future revolutions, such as the one in Cuba, by assisting Latin America with its development needs. Although it was heralded as a dramatic shift in U.S. policy, the Alliance for Progress was nothing more than the administration’s own approach to meeting the principal U.S. Cold War concerns—hemispheric security and anticommunism.

Jerome Levinson and Juan de Onís’s book The Alliance That Lost Its Way: A Critical Report on the Alliance for Progress addresses some of the weaknesses and failures of the assistance program. The excerpt included here criticizes the “arrogance” of a Kennedy administration that believed the United States could resolve Latin America’s historically entrenched socioeconomic problems by designing and implementing an assistance program. Moreover, the authors note the extent to which the United States misunderstood the roots of Latin America’s development problems. In the end, rather than stabilizing the region, the Alliance for Progress accelerated a process of modernization that, as Samuel Huntington described in his classic 1968 work Political Order in Changing Societies, contributed to social chaos and instability. The absence or weakness of institutions and the inability of the state to adjust

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