Various dates are used to mark the beginning of the Cold War.
President Harry Truman used the term in his message to Congress, March
12, 1947, asking for support to send money and arms to the Greek government
to fend off threats of a communist coup. More famous is the stark
statement by Winston Churchill a year earlier on March 5, 1946, in a commencement
address, “The Sinews of Peace,” in Westminster College in
Fulton, Missouri.1
As far as the US government was concerned, the struggle
against subversion in the Western Hemisphere by agents of the Soviet
Union began even earlier, with consequences for the modalities of US
hegemonic pretensions during the Cold War.
The period of the Cold War was characterized by an increasingly
Manichean approach by the United States to protection of its security in
the hemisphere. Whereas instability in Latin America had been considered
an indirect threat to the United States in the possibility of inviting intervention
from outside the hemisphere, during the world war, the focus on US
security had tightened to a fear of attack by belligerents. At the same time,
however, the concept took root that US security also could be threatened
by agents of enemies who might operate within a Latin American country
and subvert that country’s government in the interests of a foreign power.
As the Cold War intensified, the concept of subversion assumed increasing
salience in the evaluation on both sides of the relationship between Latin
American nations and the United States. Who had the right or power to determine
who was subversive of which government and of how that supposed
subversion might become a threat to the United States? The hunt for
subversives corroded the moral fiber of politics and society within the
81
5
Cold War
in the Hemisphere
United States during the Cold War. It damaged hemispheric relations for
much longer.
The indifference to or tolerance of the Communist Party or known
agents of the Communist International (Comintern) in Latin America had
been a subject of concern in the US government as far back as Secretary
of State Frank Kellogg’s complaint about such agents operating with the
forces of Augusto Sandino in Nicaragua. Kellogg was also unhappy about
Mexican influence in the civil conflict in Nicaragua, confessing to Congress
that it was not clear whether the government of Mexico, which called
itself the Movement for National Revolution, was an independent actor or
the puppet of the Soviet Union in fomenting discord in the hemisphere.2
There was very little follow-up on Kellogg’s warnings, mainly because
subversion simply was too vague and subjective for a State Department
that was trying to end interventions in the region and reduce the
scope of US meddling. Subversion had none of the concrete quality of a
foreign warship or troops. Furthermore, the Soviet Union was not a declared
enemy of the United States, so its influence or potential influence
could not be fit easily into the Monroe Doctrine framework of strategic
thinking. Despite the hesitation by the State Department in peacetime, during
both world wars, the US government had no difficulty identifying
agents of belligerent powers and attacking subversion wherever they
thought it might be lurking, no matter how resistant the host government
might be.
The concept of subversion during both wars became an open invitation
to some officials of the US government to intervene in the internal affairs
of nations throughout the hemisphere. During the Cold War, a concern
for subversion was like removing all inhibitions against hegemonic
penetration in terms of geography or possible cause. Subversion was in the
eye of the beholder and could be denounced even before there had been actions
that might be verified. As the Cold War extended its grip over US
politics and strategic thinking, tensions with the nations in Latin America
grew exponentially and undermined whatever community feeling of goodwill
had resulted from the good neighbor policy and the common battle
against the Axis.
During the Cold War, subversion took on an ideological dimension
that it had lacked during the world wars. The struggle against the Soviet
Union was systemic. Anticommunism became the core of US hegemonic
pretensions, overpowering other factors such as concern for democratic
governance, economic development, or what had been considered the core
values that tied together the nations of the hemispheric community. Just as
there had been debate between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in
the nineteenth century and between Wilsonians and strict constructionists
82 Latin America in International Politics
before World War I, during the Cold War there was debate between those
who believed that US strength was in sharing its core values—its soft
power, respect for human rights, and democracy—and those who insisted
that the threat of communist subversion was so dire that respect for North
American values could not be used as an excuse to allow evil to triumph
anywhere in the hemisphere or, for that matter, anywhere in the world. It
was not enough for Latin Americans to assert that they were democratic.
They had to prove that they were sufficiently anticommunist and sufficiently
resolute to protect themselves—and by extension the United
States—from communist subversion. There were democratic forces in the
hemisphere throughout the Cold War, but almost always their voices were
drowned out by those who brandished lists of subversives. There were
democracy-strengthening programs in the US arsenal of weapons against
communism, but almost always they were shunted aside by military training
programs or programs training local police how to root out
subversion.3
The confidence of those who insisted on the prerogatives of US hegemony
in the hemisphere was buttressed by the fact that at the end of World
War II, the United States had the most powerful armed forces in the world,
its gross national product was half that of the world’s total production, and
the dollar had become the world’s principal medium of exchange. What
distinguishes the period of the Cold War from what came before and after
is the zero-sum, Manichean calculation by the US government of its interests
in the hemisphere and its imposition on the nations in the region of this
rigid straitjacket of ideological calculus of security. Except for brief
episodes, it made a second-order priority of all conversations about development,
democratic governance, and human rights. Where subversion was
seen to exist or where it was considered to be a threat, democratic governance,
human rights, civil rights, and political contestation, as well as economic
development and social progress, were to be sacrificed in US policymaking
over and over again, precisely at the time when all of these
issues were becoming more important to people in Latin America.
It is impossible to exaggerate the damage done by this myopic, ideological
calculus of US national security interests to the people in the hemisphere
and to relations between Latin America and the United States. The
armed forces in a dozen of the countries in the region wrapped themselves
in the ideology of anticommunism, created national security states, and
killed tens of thousands of their own citizens to extirpate subversion. The
advance of democratic governance and the rule of law was set back
decades. Many in the region who had been sympathetic to the United
States and had taken its core values as a model for their own countries
came to see the government in Washington as the enemy of their quest for
Cold War in the Hemisphere 83
democracy, development, and social progress. In Central America, where
the military did not take over the government, it was used by civilian oligarchies
to war against their own populations, again on the grounds of
communist subversion, creating a virtual civil war in Guatemala in which
over 200,000 indigenous people were killed and precipitating civil conflict
in El Salvador and Nicaragua. This was the Bolivarian dream turned into
a nightmare.
The end of World War II had been a period of optimism with regard to
the evolution of the hemispheric community. Many in Latin America saw
the preeminence of the United States in the world as an opportunity to consolidate
their own fragile democracies and work with the United States to
achieve further development of their economies, which had suffered grievous
deterioration. At Chapultepec and later in San Francisco at the meeting
that organized the United Nations, Latin American leaders successfully inserted
into the UN charter privileged recognition of regional organizations.
That meant that the Pan American Union had to be strengthened and expanded.
Latin Americans wanted to add economic issues to the agenda of
the hemispheric system. The new United Nations would have a special
Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), headed by Raúl Prebisch,
one of their own, and they wanted their organization to deal with the
same issues. Whether they saw no other option or they were truly committed
to this form of hemispheric community, the vast majority of hemispheric
leaders turned to the new Organization of American States (OAS)
as their mechanism for achieving community and national goals. It was the
only mechanism of collective pressure against the United States that they
had. During the Cold War, in pursuing its anticommunist campaign, the
United States emasculated the OAS and undermined its utility as an instrument
of Latin American agency and rendered the OAS suspect in Latin
American eyes after the Cold War had ended.
Before the Pan American Union could be reorganized, the United
States insisted on a regional security treaty against communist aggression.
That was accomplished in Rio de Janeiro in 1947 in a treaty known as
TIAR, or the Rio Treaty. The following year, the community met in Bogotá
and created the OAS, which was empowered to take up social and economic
questions as well as the usual political and security matters. While
they met in April 1948, the charismatic, populist leader of the Liberal Party
in Colombia, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, was assassinated. Gaitán was demanding
precisely the sort of social and economic reform that the new OAS was
supposed to consider to forestall violent uprisings. His murder precipitated
massive riots in Bogotá, known as El Bogotazo. These riots soon led to the
formation of a guerrilla group, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
(FARC), which took to the jungle to seek the changes that Gaitán had
sought. In the decade following the El Bogotazo, more than 250,000
84 Latin America in International Politics
Colombians were killed in what is known as La Violencia.4
More than fifty
years later, FARC continues to fight from the countryside, although in
2012 they began peace talks in Havana with the Colombian government.
Those talks appeared in 2015 to be heading toward a successful conclusion.
It is said that Fidel Castro was in Bogotá during this period of riots
and upheaval, although there is no proof of that. Even so, the myth provides
a symbolic link between the popular uprising in Bogotá and the revolution
in Cuba in 1959, which was then and remains the ultimate struggle
for social change and defiance of US hegemony.
The most significant episode that produced a left-leaning regime was
the election in 1945 of Juan José Arévalo in Guatemala to replace the longtime
dictator Jorge Ubico. Supported by a growing labor movement that
channeled long-standing grievances against the foreign-owned banana
companies together with a growing urban middle class, the new government
promised land reform and recognition of the rights of the country’s
indigenous and mestizo majority. But Arévalo was a timid reformer. He
was succeeded in 1950 by Jacobo Árbenz, who had led the military in
1944–1945 against those who wanted to install a new dictator to replace
Ubico. As president, Árbenz brought some communists into the government
and moved against the United Fruit Company, which had dominated
the economy for half a century.5
The Dwight Eisenhower administration
moved aggressively against the Árbenz government and, in 1954, the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) brought Coronel Carlos Castillo Armas out
of retirement to lead a coup that overthrew Árbenz.
The Guatemala episode is memorable because it led the United States
to abuse the still relatively new OAS to such an extent as to make it virtually
impossible for that organization to function in an effective manner for
decades. It is memorable also because it demonstrated that all progressive
reformers in the region were vulnerable to attack from the right on the
grounds that they were nothing but stalking horses for communist subversion
or could so weaken the political system as to make it easier for the
communists to take control. The episode demonstrates how intolerant the
United States had become of homegrown efforts to reform unequal and unfree
societies. The symbolism of the Guatemalan episode became—and
continues to be—a powerful argument against trusting the United States to
protect the core values of democracy and human rights.
The social democratic option had seemed at the end of the war, for the
first time, to be a valid alternative to reactionary, oligarchic regimes. Given
hope and example by the New Deal in the United States, reformers throughout
the region came together in what came to be called the Caribbean Legion
to offer a progressive agenda for the future. They were helped as well
by the Spanish republicans who came to Latin America when Francisco
Franco came to power. These republicans were a key element in the Popular
Cold War in the Hemisphere 85
Front government in Chile (1938–1941), an important factor in the evolution
of the Argentine labor movement, a strong buttress to the Lázaro Cárdenas
regime in Mexico (1934–1940), and a voice of opposition to the
Rafael Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic.6
A bridge between
the New Deal and the Caribbean Basin was built by Rexford Tugwell, one
of FDR’s original “Brains Trust,” who was appointed governor of Puerto
Rico in 1941 and worked closely with Luis Muñoz Marín, then president of
the island’s senate, to create viable social programs on the island. Arévalo
was one of the founding members of the Caribbean Legion, along with Rómulo
Betancourt, then in exile from Venezuela, and Juan Bosch, in exile
from the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. They were joined
a few years later by José Figueres Ferrer, who led an armed revolt against
the military in Costa Rica and became president in 1949. All of them took
as a reference point the Cuban constitution of 1940, drafted with the cognizance
of Roosevelt’s representatives. The efforts of these reformers were
buttressed by programs in support of labor unions and social democracy coordinated
by the State Department and the US Agency for International Development
after World War II.7
In the decade following the creation of the OAS, Latin Americans
never felt that the United States paid attention to their interests or needs,
while it pushed them time and time again to support hemispheric defense
against subversion. The violent response to the May 1958 visit of Vice
President Richard M. Nixon to Venezuela, one of the countries closest to
the United States and led by a social democrat who was a supporter of US
soft power, provided a wake-up call to the United States. In an extraordinary
joint effort of agency, the presidents of Colombia, Alberto Lleras Camargo,
and Brazil, Juscelino Kubitschek, put together a framework of social
progress, with a little help from some friendly academics in the United
States, which they presented to the US government. By the time President
Eisenhower left office in 1961, he had managed to get his bureaucracy to
produce a massive economic aid program, the Social Progress Trust Fund
(SPTF), which was intended to quiet Latin American grumbling that they
had never received a Marshall Plan after the war. The SPTF morphed into
the Inter-American Development Bank, as well as a congressional appropriation
for a significant aid program, which became the Alliance for
Progress in the administration of John F. Kennedy.8
These steps were a new effort by the United States to achieve its security
goals through a combination of the democracy promotion of the
Wilsonian sort with an updated version of dollar diplomacy in which the
state provided most of the capital, not private banks or investors, and in
which local leaders were called upon to define their nation’s development
goals and negotiate rules for spending the development aid. Even with
these efforts at reform, the central tendency in the hemisphere in the early
86 Latin America in International Politics
decades of the Cold War was toward a more suffocating, comprehensive
definition of security. The debate over the Alliance for Progress included
the notion that hunger and underdevelopment created social unrest and led
to communism, whereas economic development would strengthen the capacity
of states to withstand the pressures of subversion. The inability or
unwillingness of US officials to recognize the difference between social
reformers and subversive radicals, with some important exceptions,
handed to the conservative oligarchies a gift that kept on giving. US leadership
provided a perverse form of legitimacy for governments to reduce
the political space accorded to contestation, repress organizations that demanded
social justice, and shutter institutions that might enable discussion
or dissension. Politics throughout the hemisphere in the first three decades
of the Cold War were unstable and polarizing, with a strong tendency toward
the erosion of democracy. Where the armed forces had achieved institutional
status, this trend culminated in something called bureaucratic
authoritarianism and the national security state, in which the armed forces
and their civilian allies assumed power in the name of the nation, security,
and anticommunism.9
The desire for economic development, not ideology, drove the worldview
of most of the countries in Latin America during the Cold War. The
economic collapse of the Great Depression put many of the regimes there
under great stress. Political and economic contestation became more acrimonious,
and episodes of social violence became more frequent. What we
might consider prerevolutionary episodes occurred in El Salvador, Cuba,
Honduras, Brazil, Argentina, and Peru. The military in several countries
were called in to restore order and in some cases reorganize the national
order. In most cases this produced right-wing authoritarian regimes, with
or without military buttress. Even here, European models were studied.
General Juan Carlos Onganía, who took power in Argentina in 1966, is
said to have declared to his first cabinet meeting that his friend Francisco
Franco (the Spanish dictator) had taught him that “things” had to be “tied
down and well secured.”10
The economic experience of the Depression and World War II had
made it brutally clear that the central dilemma of less developed countries
was their lack of capital. If in the nineteenth century, the international division
of labor had promised a supply of capital in return for primary products,
that promise had turned to dross. Following Raúl Prebisch and other
critics of what came to be called “unequal exchange,” leaders in the region
now emphasized the need for greater control over national resources and a
need for some domestic production that would reduce the vulnerability of
the country to an international market over which they had little or no control.
This produced a set of policies that were followed by civilian and military
governments, by governments that professed progressive views or by
Cold War in the Hemisphere 87
conservative ones. The common elements of these policies were nationalism
and a privileged role for the state.
One the of the most significant accomplishments of social democrats
in Venezuela was creating OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting
Countries), a cartel to wrest control of the international price of oil
from the large multinational companies that dominated the market. The
key figure in this episode was Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso, Betancourt’s minister
of Mines and Hydrocarbons and a founding member of their social
democratic party, Acción Democrática (Democratic Action), who got Iran,
Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia to join together in Baghdad. Founded in
1960, precisely the year Dwight Eisenhower set up the Social Progress
Trust Fund, OPEC was the first successful effort by any Latin American
country to influence the price of its principal export.11
Its original goal was
“the inalienable right of all countries to exercise permanent sovereignty
over their natural resources in the interest of their national development.”
The OPEC experience led the Venezuelan government to create the national
petroleum company, PDVSA, which brought Venezuela in line with
Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, and Mexico in attempting to exert national control
over the extraction, production, and export of their petroleum.12
This
was a significant step in the creation of Venezuela’s agency in the international
system in that it extended beyond the hemisphere and provided a
new lever for developing countries to take control of their economic destiny.
The Betancourt government in Venezuela, combining OPEC with its
democracy, enjoyed unprecedented agency in hemispheric affairs, an
agency the nation maintained for decades.
There was one case of a progressive military regime, in Peru, led by
General Juan Francisco Velasco Alvarado (1968–1975), which combined
national development policies with an effort to improve the lot of the nation’s
indigenous and mestizo majority. The government’s expropriation of
a petroleum company owned by a subsidiary of Standard Oil (now ExxonMobil)
got the regime in trouble with the United States. Its efforts to include
rural indigenous groups in the political process created great friction
within the military and the civilian elites. Velasco Alvarado was replaced
by a more conservative general in 1975.13
Peru was not that exceptional. The military in all of the countries had
their developmentalist factions, some more prominent in the policy
process than others. In several countries, military leaders introduced strategic
studies to the curriculum of the military academies. In South America,
the military felt it had a major role to play in this effort and in justifying
their forward posture in the policy debate referred to the success of General
Gamal Nasser in Egypt. Some in the military referred to themselves as
Nasserists, by which they meant that they would intervene in the policy
88 Latin America in International Politics
process to use the state in a disciplined manner to protect national interests,
particularly national resource endowments, which they believed should be
used for national advantage and not simply poured onto the international
marketplace. The military in Brazil did their best to remain an actor in Lusophone
Africa and spent a great deal of energy maintaining their presence
in the South Atlantic. They were guided by their own strategist, General
Golbery do Couto e Silva, who insisted the country could maximize its
agency through its geographic influence.14
Golbery adapted traditional European
geopolitical schemes to the Brazilian experience and urged the military
and the government to focus on the Brazilian landmass. Brasília was
one of his favorite projects. As chief of the military household of the military
president in 1964, he urged a set of policies to promote national de-
velopment.
Golbery spawned imitators among the military in Argentina where
General Juan E. Guglialmelli founded a journal called Estrategia, which
he edited from 1969 to his death in 1983. Guglialmelli used the journal to
warn Argentines about Brazilian hegemonic pretensions in South America
and joined forces with civilian politicians to encourage Argentine governments
to promote infrastructure policies, such as roads, dams, and the exploitation
of the country’s natural energy resources to establish an appropriate
rejection of Brazilian hegemony in South America.
Except for Brazil and Argentina in the 1970s, these national security
states abandoned the pretense of seeking an autonomous foreign policy.
Their principal purpose was the consolidation of power in open alliance
with the United States and the elimination of domestic subversion, real or
imagined. Democratic institutions, rarely robust in the first place, were
weakened, undermined, or simply eliminated. Freedom of the press was
out of the question. Development policy, if that implied diversification and
social mobility, was pushed aside. The Argentines were content to toe the
anticommunist, anti-Soviet line until the Jimmy Carter administration indicated
its displeasure with the generals’ human rights record. This drove
the Argentines to display a sudden interest in economic and diplomatic relations
with the Soviet Union. The Chilean dictatorship under General Augusto
Pinochet combined a developmentalist approach in turning over control
of exploitation of the nation’s natural resources to the military and the
state with a fundamentalist neoliberal (that is, conservative) free market
macroeconomic policy.
On balance, the conservative approach that privileged concern for national
security interests dominated discussion in the United States. When
the CIA led the coup against Árbenz in Guatemala, Secretary of State John
F. Dulles was persuaded to attend the scheduled meeting of the OAS in
Caracas in 1954. Dulles showed up for the plenary and gave a short speech
Cold War in the Hemisphere 89
justifying the intervention in Guatemala and then left Caracas before any
of the issues on the agenda of concern to the other member states could be
considered. His behavior undercut the value of the OAS and stained it forever
as a puppet of the United States and of little value to the United States
except to cover its unilateral actions in the hemisphere with a patina of collective
legitimacy. But until the end of the Cold War, no alternative to the
OAS could be sustained, so it continued, limited but active, as the member
states sought ways to make the organization useful. After the Cold War,
Latin Americans looked to create regional organizations of their own. One
early expression of regional community and for intellectual support for the
reform movements in the region was the creation in 1957 of the Facultad
Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) an intergovernmental
organization affiliated with UNESCO, which continues to be an expression
of intellectual solidarity and Latin American identity.
Although the conservative option dominated US policy in the region,
internal debate continued and the liberal or progressive alternative
was not silent until, in the 1980s, it reasserted itself and the argument
for democracy preservation again took prominence in US foreign policy
in the region. Until then, in the years following the CIA-sponsored coup
in Guatemala, the United States paid special attention to Guatemala and
offered a wide variety of programs to support the military and the government.
In one discussion, the State Department objected to the fact
that the US police and military sent to Guatemala to train the local police
in counterinsurgency were encouraging indiscriminate and brutal
tactics. The State Department representative Viron “Pete” Vaky, asked,
“Is it conceivable that we are so obsessed with insurgency that we are
prepared to rationalize murder [and torture] as an acceptable counterinsurgency
weapon?”15
The answer in this meeting, as in many others, was
“yes.”16
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and President Richard Nixon used
the CIA to encourage the military to carry out a coup against Chilean president
Salvador Allende in 1973 and appeared sympathetic to the killing
and torture that followed.17
A few years later, when the Argentine military
overthrew the government of Isabel Martinez de Perón, Juan Perón’s
widow, the junta sent a representative to Washington to coordinate their
policy with the Nixon administration. Kissinger was quoted as telling the
visiting general to “get the killing done quickly.” In the face of this clear
signal, the ongoing debate over democracy and values still left enough
space within the bureaucracy to allow activities by foreign service officers
in Argentina to openly defy the generals and save lives, lots of them.18
Imagine the confusion and anger in Buenos Aires, just two years later, with
90 Latin America in International Politics
Jimmy Carter in the White House and Patricia Derian the top official in the
State Department dealing with Latin America, when the United States
made it clear that human rights violations by the military regime were a serious
matter and cut off military cooperation with Argentina!19
Of all the progressives in Latin America, Figueres seems to have understood
the need to win support in the United States if he was to continue
in power in Costa Rica and that the categories of debate in Costa Rica
would have to hew at least to some degree to the terms of US strategic concerns.
This is not to suggest that he began his career as a student of international
relations theory. It does suggest that Figueres, who came by his
anticommunism honestly, saw stability in Costa Rica as possible only if
the nation’s strategic objectives were realistic in a bipolar world in which
the United States dominated the Western Hemisphere. It also suggests that
Figueres came to understand that the space Costa Rica could occupy in the
international system—its agency—was a function of his ability to create a
comfortable juxtaposition between Costa Rican interests and those of the
United States. Within a decade of coming to power, Figueres formulated a
foreign policy for Costa Rica that maximized its autonomy in the international
system broadly by simultaneously separating itself from the stifling
oligarchic pressures and dangerous instability of the other countries in the
subregion while maintaining its anticommunist credentials with the United
States. For this he laid the foundation for a strategic culture that emphasized
a progressive agenda, democratic stability, and a Swiss-like neutrality
in regional conflicts. The consistency of this strategic culture over time
became the essence of Costa Rican agency through the remainder of the
Cold War and to the present day, making it a country that enjoys hemispheric
and global influence far beyond its size and economic power.
Doing without a military is one of the central features of this agency in
world affairs. This singular success warrants some discussion of how
Costa Rican strategic culture was established.
To appreciate the Costa Rican drive for agency in international affairs,
we must take into account several factors that are not often taken seriously
by theorists of international relations. First is the concept of a nation’s
nightmares and how they contribute to consensus on foreign policy and the
continuity of that policy over time, what is known as strategic culture. Second
is the role of individual leadership in creating the basis for a nation’s
foreign policy. Third is the notion that agency can be achieved through a
deliberate compromise of autonomy in the world community by accommodating
the pressure of US hegemony in the hemisphere. The three cases
of success in achieving agency in the face of US hegemony—Chile, Costa
Rica, and Cuba—offer different approaches with similar outcomes. All
Cold War in the Hemisphere 91
three support the existence of a rules-based international community, in
which traditional variables of a realist approach are given weight but made
subordinate to other variables, such as soft power, the role of international
civil society, and the need to express resistance to US hegemony. That success
is crucial in understanding the evolution of opposition to US control
and the capacity of nations in Latin America to achieve some form of regional
identity.
The strategic culture of Costa Rica is based on the widespread belief
that the nation is fundamentally different from the rest of the countries on
the isthmus. Their pre-Columbian experience was different; their colonial
experience under the Spanish was different, and their national history has
been different. Of course, it is possible to argue that these differences are
minor, even trivial, and did not prevent Costa Rica from developing a coffee-export
economy that has the same essential features as the economies
developed by liberal elites in the nineteenth century in the other countries
of the region. Those who focus on economic structures tend to favor the
basically similar argument, as do those who focus on the structure of social
power, even though it is certainly true that Costa Rica does not have the
same percentages of indigenous or Afro-Caribbean peoples as do the other
countries. There is a hierarchy, there is an elite, and coffee along with the
financial and merchant activities tied to it are central to the formation of
the elite and the distribution of power.
This once dominant explanation for Costa Rica’s distinctiveness is
now being attacked and revised, particularly by a new generation of scholars
who were drawn to Central America to study the civil violence of the
1970s and 1980s. For these scholars, the presence of Afro-Caribbean people
on the Caribbean coast is an important phenomenon that has been overlooked.
At the same time, a coffee economy is a coffee economy. As if that
were proof, the Costa Rican elite is considered by this new generation as
every bit as cohesive, every bit as exclusive as its counterparts in the other
countries of Central America. The revisionists have some good points to
make. Nevertheless, there remains a broad consensus within Costa Rica as
to the nation’s security and what the foreign policy should be to protect
that security. In other words, there is a clear strategic culture in Costa Rica,
and it has an obvious set of keepers.
The consensus on the nation’s strategic culture is built on three traumatic
events in the twentieth century. The nation’s strategic culture and the
axiomatic bases of its foreign policy may be understood as the gradual
evolution of a collective response to these nightmares. The first was the
only military rebellion against a civilian government, led by Joaquín and
Federico Tinoco Granados in the years before World War I. The Tinoco
brothers had grown tired of the fractious manner of the oligarchy and were
92 Latin America in International Politics
particularly concerned about a group that sided with the Germans. Federico
Tinoco took power in January 1917 and declared that his government
would support the cause of the Allies in the war. Despite this declaration,
President Woodrow Wilson decided that he would not recognize Tinoco’s
government and persisted in his opposition long after the war had ended.
On August 11, 1919, Joaquín Tinoco, head of the army, was assassinated
on the streets of San José. Federico fled the country the next day. A new
“legitimate” government was elected in December and only Wilson’s illness
delayed US recognition of this government until August 1920.
One of the elements in the confusion over how to deal with Federico
Tinoco was that Emiliano Chamorro, from Nicaragua, with his close connections
to the US State Department, gave safe haven to opponents of the
government and allowed them to mount expeditions into Costa Rica. The
weakness produced by this internecine conflict left its mark on the Costa
Rican elite, especially in how such unresolved disputes left the country
vulnerable to attack from Nicaragua.20
The second episode is also the result of an armed insurrection: a revolution
from the right, led by a group of reformers who feared that the government
was shifting to the left and would undermine the nation’s democratic
way of life and expose it to intervention from the United States. It
was led by a coffee grower, José Figueres Ferrer, who was one of the
founders of the Partido Liberación Nacional.21
Figueres’s ascension was
notable for establishing new precedents, such as abolishing the army.
It is important to underline the irony of making a revolution to prevent
radical change and the absolutely clear sense of agency that “Don Pepe”
(Figueres) had.22
Although the phrase had not been coined at that time, he
wanted to use Costa Rica’s soft power. Figueres saw that in the struggle
against antidemocracy, whether it was the Soviet Union and the Communist
Party on the left or autocratic dictators on the right, a close alliance
with the United States was indispensable. He worked constantly to build
ties to leaders in the United States who understood the nationalist reformist
urge in Latin America. He was a critical figure in organizing the Caribbean
Legion, which had opposed dictatorships in the region, and he got his
friends in the United States to support their work.23
The third and final episode that contributed to the strategic culture of
Costa Rica is the experience of the civil conflicts in Guatemala, Nicaragua,
El Salvador, and Honduras during the 1970s and 1980s and the militarization
of the region, which began to spill over into Costa Rican territory. This
led the government of Costa Rica to seek help to resolve the conflicts, reduce
US intervention, and reduce the power of the military. Going it alone
would not work. It was clear to those who governed Costa Rica that its
sense of separation from the rest of Central America would continue to
Cold War in the Hemisphere 93
erode and that the distinctiveness of Costa Rica mattered less than the
threat of revolution or subversion in the region to the United States during
Ronald Reagan’s presidency. The challenge was to find a way to resolve
the civil conflicts in the region without provoking further militarization of
the conflicts by US intervention. The response was collective action. In
building collective action, we have the first concrete, successful manifestation
of collective agency in the region. It proved to be an integral part of
the transition to the post–Cold War world.
Mexico and Colombia, the geographical bookends to the isthmus,
were as anxious about the combustible situation in Central America as
were the Costa Ricans. With support from Brazil, which acted as an observer,
and the encouragement of the social democratic governments in
Spain, Germany, and France, the government of Mexico convened a meeting
in January 1983 on the Contadora Island with participation by Colombia,
Panama, and Venezuela. The first step was to send an observer mission
to the border between Costa Rica and Nicaragua. The next was to convene
a summit meeting of government leaders in Cancún, Mexico, in July. By
this point, the nations in South America, no longer ruled by the military except
in Chile, saw the virtue of this approach and formed the Lima Group,
with Peru, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, to offer support to the Central
Americans seeking peaceful solutions to their civil conflicts.24
This was
unprecedented community agency.
The United States was caught in a bind. At first, the Reagan administration
was irritated, but it could not publicly reject peace or the possibility
of ending the conflicts. The first response to Contadora from Washington
was to demand a higher level of verification in the peace process and appoint
the Kissinger Commission to report on the situation. Although the
sense that time was against them had driven the Central Americans and
their allies in the region to work together, now time was on their side. As
the civil conflicts in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala dragged on
with no side able to defeat the other, the Reagan administration, as it entered
its second term in office, began to appreciate the shift in its favor in
the bipolar struggle with the Soviet Union, which brought democracy support
back into prominence along with public declarations of support for
human and civil rights. The political opposition in Congress also came together,
making executive, unilateral action more difficult. This made the
hardline militarization wing of the administration step back as the government
looked to shore up its relations with European allies, burnish its reputation
as the defender of moral values against the evil empire, and restore
the tattered relations with nations in the hemisphere.25
Time also had changed the political and strategic landscape in Latin
America. The Cold War security framework actually reduced the scope of
94 Latin America in International Politics
foreign policy autonomy in most of the countries. In South America, the
military dictatorships, with their focus on the national security state, could
defend their legitimacy only by declaring their allegiance to the United
States and to the struggle against communism. If there were differences
between them and the United States, as there were in the case of Argentina
during the administration of Jimmy Carter (1976–1980), it drove the military
to domestic policies of extreme nationalism to retain their legitimacy
at home. The Argentine generals even attempted to get even with the
United States during the Carter administration and restore their autonomy
by cozying up to Cuba and the Soviet Union. In their desperation to restore
their legitimacy, the Argentine military invaded the Malvinas (Falkland)
Islands, insisting after the fact that they were led to believe that the United
States would support them and that they were convinced they would be
beneficiaries of the worldwide anticolonialism sentiment. They were tragically
wrong on both counts.26
After Argentina’s disastrous war with Great Britain over the Falklands/Malvinas
in 1982, the military retreated from power and conducted
elections, which were won by Raúl Alfonsín, a powerful advocate of
human rights and democracy as universal core values, who had a wide following
throughout Europe and the Non-Aligned Movement and reached
out to the US government in his first trip abroad after the election. As Alfonsín
took office in Argentina, the Brazilians were going through their
own transition to democracy along with Uruguay. That left the military
dictatorship in Chile alone in the region, and it quickly took on the status
of pariah, the status Argentina had suffered after the invasion of the Malv-
inas/Falklands.27
As the evidence mounted that the Soviet Union would back away from
confrontation with the United States, and that there was little or no threat
to US security to be expected from Latin America, the Reagan administration
turned its back on Pinochet and even went so far as to finance the political
campaign against him that led to the plebiscite won by the forces of
democracy in 1988. The US ambassador to Chile, Harry Barnes, made it
clear to Pinochet that there would be active opposition to him in Washington
if he were to decide to contest the results of the popular vote. The policy
shift was marked with great emphasis in a formal “Statement on Support
for Democracy in Chile” that was issued in December 17, 1987. This
statement was drafted originally in November by the Chile Desk Officer of
the State Department and approved all the way up the line to Secretary
George Schultz. By way of emphasis, Assistant Secretary Elliott Abrams,
who had been a powerful advocate of the anticommunist hard line in the
Reagan administration, provided Schultz with a memo justifying the statement
to accompany it when he transmitted the draft to the president for his
Cold War in the Hemisphere 95
approval.28
That approval, when it came a short time later, was explicitly
included in the press release accompanying the statement. As if to show
Pinochet that this was not a trivial or ceremonial statement, the State Department
transferred $1.2 million that had already been granted to the Centro
de Asesoría y Promoción Electoral in Costa Rica to the Crusade for
Civic Participation in Santiago. The money was crucial in the campaign
leading up to the plebiscite, especially in adding more than a million registered
voters to the rolls.29
The US House of Representatives followed the
State Department action with a resolution supporting the statement. How
different the political debate over democracy in Chile was from the debate
twenty years earlier over teaching the Guatemalan police how to torture
their fellow citizens.
In Chile and elsewhere in the region, the transition to democracy
placed the new civilian democratic governments in something of a
quandary. By virtue of their declaration of support for human and civil
rights, they were siding with their more than slightly tarnished model, the
United States. At the same time, they tried to use their soft power to extend
their autonomy from the United States. In a sense, they were identifying
with the United States as it assumed the role of victor in the Cold War, a
victory trumpeted as having been won as much through soft power and the
virtues of its economic system as through its superior military might. The
United States insisted that it was not a victory achieved through military
conquest, although the Reagan administration had increased military
spending so much that it virtually bankrupted the Soviet Union as it tried
to keep up, and came close to bringing the US economy to its knees, but
the embrace of the United States became uncomfortable in Latin America
in short order.
In Central America, the drive to take agency in the peace process was
spurred by the leadership of the new president of Costa Rica, Óscar Arias,
who brought both the UN and the OAS into the discussion, so that the Soviet
Union and Cuba would have their interests represented. In the 1970s,
he worked for Figueres, who returned to the presidency of Costa Rica in
1972. Arias was elected president for the term 1986–1990. He took the
peace plan presented by the Contadora group and altered it so that it better
suited the interests of several actors in the region’s civil wars and called together
the presidents of the four countries and began what came to be
called the Esquipulas Process.
At this stage, even the reactionary, oligarchical regimes in Central
America began to come to terms with the inevitability of the peace process
and that the process would involve major roles for external actors in addition
to the United States, such as the UN, the OAS, and the growing international
civil society led by major human rights organizations. Although
96 Latin America in International Politics
these conservatives always had operated with one eye on the United States,
they came to understand in the 1980s that the unilateral interventionism
exercised by the Reagan administration would destroy them as well in its
obsession with militarizing the effort to eliminate those the US government
considered communist subversives. This led the rulers of Guatemala,
El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua to accept the peace process, even if
grudgingly, and the role of outside actors. The final element in the shift in
US policy was the growing power of the congressional opposition to the
Reagan administration. Within this new framework, the United States retained
its voice, but its capacity for action was seriously constrained. By
bringing all the actors to the table, the peace process opened the possibility
of achieving major reforms in the region without armed conflict. For Costa
Rica, a nation without an army, the militarization of conflict in the region
had been a threat to its existence. For his efforts, Arias was awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize in 1987.30
The Esquipulas Process was a remarkable success. The structure of the
negotiations and the results—the peace processes in El Salvador,
Guatemala, and Nicaragua—may be considered a major part of the transition
from the Cold War, which actually came to an end during the peace
talks. The end of the Cold War removed the rigid, zero-sum framework of
the national security state and created a more fluid security environment in
the region in which the nations of Latin America could begin to seek their
own agency and attempt to reformulate their relationship with the United
States, which remained the most influential outside actor in the hemisphere
but no longer pretended to exercise the type of hegemony that had been
part of inter-American relations for a century. As the Cold War wound
down, the United States began to experience difficulty in defining its security
interests in the region. Marginalizing the United States in the Esquipulas
Process complicated the challenges confronting the Central
American countries, and at the same time opened new space for their autonomous
action. In the years following Esquipulas, the more effective the
peace process, the more active the resulting governments would be. Aside
from Costa Rica, the most active in world affairs after the Cold War have
been El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Panama. Guatemala and Honduras have
retreated to their older pattern of inward-looking oligarchical governments
with little space for political contestation and very high levels of internal
violence.
During the Cold War, the nations of Latin America tried a variety of
policies or mechanisms to free themselves from the straitjacket of the
bipolar geopolitical struggle in which they had little room for autonomous
maneuver. The linkage between aggressive interventionism by
the United States and restrictions on individual freedom imposed by milCold
War in the Hemisphere 97
itary dictatorships provoked widespread anger and anti-Americanism
throughout the region. Especially among progressive groups, the United
States lost its allure as a democracy with progressive values, and among
groups on the right, it lost its cachet as a modernizing economy capable
of increasing the wealth and well-being of their population. Those concerned
with economic development and social equity also grew impatient
with the United States, especially during the Reagan administration,
with its insistence on market solutions to all problems and its dominance
over the so-called Bretton Woods institutions, which the Latin Americans
once thought would be allies in their efforts to grow and shuck off their
economic dependence. Anti-Americanism expanded across the region
and across the political spectrum.31
Historical memory had a great deal to do with the spread of antiAmericanism
and with its persistence to this day. Who in Nicaragua does
not remember that the United States put Somoza in power and sustained
him and his family for two generations? Who throughout the Caribbean
does not remember that the United States took over the Dominican Republic
for twenty years and then left behind Rafael Trujillo? The coup in
Guatemala engineered by the CIA in 1954 is still fresh in memory. There
are those in Chile and Brazil who will not forgive the United States for
provoking and supporting the military coups that ended democracy in their
countries. Many throughout Latin America remember that the United
States contributed to the rise of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba and the frustration
of the reforms promised by the constitution of 1940 and that it took an
armed revolt by Cubans to be rid of him.
The Cuban revolution continues to be the symbol of everyone’s desire
to blunt the hegemony of the United States. Their revolution represents
the most successful example of Latin American rejection of US
hegemony and the exercise of agency in world politics.32
For that reason,
nearly every country in the region has offered some gesture in support of
the Castro regime and expressed its opposition to the US policy of embargo,
known in Cuba and throughout Latin America as the Blockade.
Most notably, the majority of the countries in Latin America have voted
against the United States and for Cuba in the United Nations. Until the
end of the Cold War, Mexico made support for Cuba against the United
States one of the elements of its policy of nonintervention. During the
brief return to power by Juan Perón in Argentina (1973–1974), his minister
of economics, José Ber Gelbard, attempted to extend the life of import
substitution industrialization by exporting cars to Cuba in exchange
for sugar. The Argentine military tried to do business with Castro when
Carter turned nasty. Raúl Alfonsín, the paladin of human rights, stopped
off in Havana on the return leg of his first trip to Europe in 1983, where
98 Latin America in International Politics
he had been lionized by all the social democrats on the continent. When
asked why he had picked Havana to stop, he made it clear that it was important
to bring Cuba back into the hemispheric community and demonstrate
to the United States that fellowship with Cuba could not be prevented
by unilateral policy in Washington.33
The problem with these efforts to express independence from the
United States through defiance of its policy toward Cuba was that to the
extent that foreign policy was determined by opposition to the United
States or by focus on the need to express defiance of the United States, that
focus distorted efforts to achieve autonomy and reduced its agency outside
the hemisphere. Cuba could win agency in the world community through
its defiance of the United States. Supporting Cuba, without taking a similar
posture in support of the Soviet Union in the Cold War, did not automatically
create more autonomy for the rest of Latin America unless they could
create some alternate form of identity for the region as a whole. They were
not able to do that for more than twenty years after the end of the Cold War.
Without that regional identity, defiance of the United States as a goal of
foreign policy had the perverse result of tying the nations of the region
closer to the United States and reinforcing the control the hegemonic
power exercised over those nations that consider themselves weaker. This
became clear in the new century and led to efforts to create a regional organization
that would be free of US control.
The drive in Central America for collective protective action against
US unilateralism run amok should be taken as an early sign of the transition
to a world after the Cold War. So, too, may we understand the impact
of the transition to democracy in the region. As country after country made
its way back to some form of democratic governance and tried to put behind
it forever the experience of the national security state or the violent
civil conflicts that were associated with the Cold War, they began to see
themselves increasingly as part of the new world order. A crucial role in
the transition to democracy and in reaching an understanding of the world
that might follow the Cold War was played by a generation of students of
foreign affairs who in the 1970s began to study international relations and,
more specifically the United States, as a means of coming to terms with the
strategic environment of the Cold War. They felt the corrosive effect the
US obsession with security was having on well-being in the region.
Through their studies, they sought to find more space in world politics for
the nations of Latin America than allowed by the straitjacket the United
States tried to impose on their countries.
As the Cold War came to an end, many of the nations in Latin America
suffered another economic blow in a series of sovereign debt failures. It
was the final blow to the ISI model and rendered most of the economies
Cold War in the Hemisphere 99
vulnerable to outside influence. The international agencies with power to
aid stricken economies—the US Treasury, the International Monetary
Fund, and the World Bank—pushed the debtors to adopt severe austerity
programs that would make it virtually impossible for them to continue developmentalist
programs. In most cases, the Latin Americans avoided the
most severe austerity programs, but they all were forced to adopt some
measure of neoliberal policies that made it difficult for them to realize their
hopes for development. In response, several countries mounted fierce campaigns
against the programs the international agencies tried to shove down
their throats. The results of their bargaining were partially successful.
Their efforts to defend themselves represent new levels of agency in the
sense that the governments recognized their capacity for autonomous action
in the multilateral world of finance and economics.34
Those interested in international relations came together under the
leadership of Luciano Tomassini, a Chilean political scientist who had
worked at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington and at the
Institute for Latin American Integration in Buenos Aires before returning
to Santiago, where he worked at ECLA/CEPAL until his death in 2010.
Using the FLACSO model of an epistemological community, Tomassini
called on colleagues throughout the region to join the Latin American Network
for International Relations (RIAL) and managed to raise the funds,
especially from the Ford Foundation, to begin annual meetings in 1977.
These meetings took place until 1992, at which time academic institutions
in many of the countries took up the challenge of studying the global community
and how their nations might fit into it.35
RIAL was a strong combination of progressive fraternity, a lobby for
academic freedom, and a laboratory for the study of international affairs.
It was a true epistemological community. Future foreign ministers and cabinet
members such as Celso Lafer (Brazil), Rodrigo Pardo (Colombia),
Dante Caputo (Argentina), Rosario Green (Mexico), and José Miguel Insulza,
Luis Maira, Heraldo Muñoz, Juan Gabriel Valdés, and Carlos Ominami
(Chile) came together to discuss how their nations could use international
relations to speed the transition to democracy and how, once
returned to democratic governance, they could create constructive roles
within the international community. RIAL was an intellectual testing
ground for the expression of agency in Latin American foreign policy.36
One of the early participants in RIAL, Luis Maira, spent his years in
exile in Mexico, where he helped create the first academic center in Latin
America outside Cuba for the study of the United States.37
Together with
Carlos Rico, a Mexican political scientist, and Roberto Bouzas, an Argentine
economist, they founded the Centro de Investigación y Docencia
Económicas (CIDE) in Mexico City. For ten years they published the
100 Latin America in International Politics
Cuadernos Semestrales de Los Estados Unidos, from 1977 to 1988, which
were rigorous studies of US public opinion, the Congress, and the political
currents in the United States that might help explain the twists and turns of
US foreign policy.38
The group at CIDE also organized seminars with
scholars from the rest of Latin America as well as from the United States,
and published one of the first studies drawing attention to the dangers of
militarizing the conflicts in Central America.39
The political commitment of the academics who participated in RIAL
is an important facet of the transition to democracy in Latin America and
of the transition to the post–Cold War world. Many of those who met in
the 1980s to discuss how Latin America might escape the suffocating dominance
of the United States and its own military dictatorships not only
pushed the framework of the formal study of international relations by
adding a Latin American perspective to a field of study generally dominated
by positivist scholars in the United States and Europe, they also put
themselves on the line by entering government and putting their policy
proposals into effect, or at least attempting to push them through the complex
decisionmaking processes of democratic governance. The way members
of RIAL participated in the policy process radically changed the culture
of how academic debate could permeate the policy process in Latin
America. Although the Chilean case is the most obvious and most significant,
there are other examples in the hemisphere, such as Argentina, Brazil,
and Mexico, in which public debate among academics and intellectuals became
part of the decisionmaking process and policy planning. In many
countries, with the transition to democracy, the diplomatic training experience
came to include rigorous academic study for the first time.
As the Berlin Wall was torn down and the Cold War came to an end,
the nations of Latin America and the United States were faced with challenges
that were mirror images of one another. In Latin America, the challenge
was how to achieve agency in a post–Cold War world in a manner
that would not simply be an expression of hostility to the United States or
in which foreign policy would be a symbolic rejection of the United States,
but rather part of a policy that would seek to maximize the nation’s interest
and objectives. On the other hand, for the United States, the challenge
would be how to establish a relationship with nations that with the exception
of Cuba, were governed now by civilian, democratic governments, selected
in regular free and fair elections, in a way that would be respectful
of their new roles as agents in the global community. In the absence of any
threat to its interests from outside the hemisphere, would it be possible for
the United States to create relations with the nations of the region that were
not based on the assumption of US hegemony? Given historical memory
in Latin America, would it be possible to establish collegial relations of
Cold War in the Hemisphere 101
confidence with the United States while their nations sought to establish
roles for themselves in a globalizing world? This dual dilemma is the subject
of the final chapters. For the Latin Americans, the Cold War could not
end soon enough.
Notes
1. The speech and its background can be found in Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A
Life (New York: Holt, 1992).
2. Elting E. Morison, Turmoil and Tradition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960);
Robert H. Ferrell, Peace in Their Time (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952);
Daniela Spenser, “Forjando una nación posrevolucionaria,” in Jorge Schiavon, D.
Spenser, and M. Vazques Olivera, eds., En busca de una nación soberana (Mexico:
CIDE, 2006). For the most part, the Communist Party operated without repression in
most of the countries of the region throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Communists had
little impact on the political process in Latin America, except in forming part of the
Popular Front in Chile and splitting the socialists in Argentina into two different factions.
On the other hand, where there was organization of the working class, they
played an important role in the labor movements. Once the United States entered the
war in Europe, communists were considered allies, although conservatives still considered
them nasty people and the US government sent agents into the field to monitor
their activities.
3. This point is made in Lars Schoultz, Human Rights and United States Policy toward
Latin America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981) and National Security
and United States Policy toward Latin America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1987).
4. German Gúzman, Orlando Fals Borda, and Eduardo Umaña Luna, La violencia
en Colombia, 2 vols. (Bogotá: Ed Tercer Mundo, 1962). The rate of killing in the countryside
subsided for about two decades and then soared again as drug traffickers and
then paramilitary bands combined with the guerrillas to kill over 300,000 people and
displace more than 5 million from 1980 to 2010.
5. Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United
States, 1944–1954 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Stephen
Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit (New York: Doubleday, 1982). The
process by which first Arévalo and then Árbenz fell from grace in Washington is debated
at length in the National Security Council reports beginning with NSC144
(March 4, 1953) through NSC 5902/1 (February 16, 1959), which are available through
the collection of the George Washington University National Security Archives web-
site.
6. Accepting marginal refugees was a policy Trujillo followed again after the
Evian conference in 1939, when the Dominican Republic accepted several boatloads of
Jewish émigrés, at the urging of President Franklin D. Roosevelt; Allen Wells, Tropical
Zion (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).
7. Martha F. Riche, “The American Institute for Free Labor Development,”
Monthly Labor Review 88.9 (September 1975). The AIFLD soon came under the influence
of the CIA and lost its credibility in Latin America. See Hobart A. Spalding Jr.,
Organized Labor in Latin America (New York: Harper, 1979). For a more general treatment
of the period, see David Rock, ed., Latin America in the 1940s (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1994).
102 Latin America in International Politics
8. Joseph S. Tulchin, “The United States and Latin America in the 1960s,” Journal
of Inter-American Studies 30.1 (1988): 1–36.
9. Guillermo O’Donnell, “Reflections on the Patterns of Change in the Bureaucratic-Authoritarian
State,” Latin American Research Review 12.1 (1978): 3–38.
10. In Spanish, las cosas tienen que estar atadas y bien atadas.
11. Earlier in the century, Brazil had tried several times, without success, to seize
control over the international price of coffee.
12. Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso, Petróleo: Jugo de la tierra (Caracas: Editorial Arte,
1961). Pérez Alfonso was profoundly conflicted about the proper use of oil in
Venezuela’s development. He expressed concern for the country’s dependence on one
product and once referred to oil as “the devil’s excrement.”
13. Richard L. Clinton, “The Modernizing Military: The Case of Peru,” InterAmerican
Economic Affairs 24.4 (1971); David Scott Palmer, Peru: The Authoritarian
Tradition (New York: Praeger, 1980); Alfred C. Stepan, The State and Society: Peru in
Comparative Perspective (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978); Cynthia
McClintock, Self-Management and Political Participation in Peru, 1969–1975: The
Corporatist Illusion (London: Sage, 1977); Luigi Einaudi, “Revolution from Within?
Military Rule in Peru since 1968,” Studies in Comparative International Development
8.1 (1973); Jorge Rodriguez Beruff, Los militares y el poder (Lima: Mosca Azul,
1983).
14. Golbery do Couto e Silva, Planejamento estratégico (Rio de Janeiro: Biblioteca
de Exercito, Rio, 1955) and Geopolitico do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Jose Olympio,
1967); Alfred Stepan, The Military in Politics: Changing Patterns in Brazil
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971).
15. This debate and others are found in Kirsten Weld, Paper Cadavers: The
Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014),
p. 110.
16. The values perspective never is absent. Sometimes it is more salient than at
others. For a comparison of the Carter and Reagan human rights policies, see Vanessa
Walker, “Ambivalent Allies: Advocates, Diplomats, and the Struggle for an ‘American’
Human Rights Policy,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 2011; and, “At the
End of Influence: The Letelier Assassination, Human Rights and Rethinking Intervention
in US-Latin American Relations,” Journal of Contemporary History, 46:1 (2011).
17. These episodes are recounted in Cynthia J. Arnson and Tamara Taraciuk, eds.,
Argentina-United States Bilateral Relations, Woodrow Wilson Center Reports on the
Americas no. 8 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center, 2003); Heraldo Muñoz,
The Dictator’s Shadow: Life Under Augusto Pinochet (New York: Basic Books, 2008).
18. Arnson and Taraciuk, Argentina–United States Bilateral Relations, chapter 4
recounts the activities of Tex Harris during the dictatorship. Another discussion of the
US-Argentine relationship is Ariel C. Armony, Hector Schamis, and Giselle Cohen,
Repensando la Argentina: Antes de diciembre de 2001 y más allá de mayo de 2003,
Woodrow Wilson Center Report on the Americas no. 7 (Washington, DC: Woodrow
Wilson Center, 2003).
19. On the shifting use of human rights policy, I refer to Vanessa Walker, “A Tale
of Two Policies: Carter, Reagan, and Human Rights in the Western Hemisphere,” unpublished
manuscript in possession of the author; Andrew J. Kirkendall, “Liberal Democrats,
Latin America, and the Cold War Consensus from Eisenhower to Nixon,” unpublished
manuscript in possession of the author.
20. Joseph S. Tulchin, The Aftermath of War (New York: New York University
Press, 1971), pp. 66–70. More detail is in Dana G. Munro, Intervention and Dollar
Diplomacy in the Caribbean, 1900–1921 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1964).
Cold War in the Hemisphere 103
21. Kyle Longley, The Sparrow and the Hawk: Costa Rica and the United States
during the Rise of José Figueres (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997).
22. In this case, I can add some personal reflections to the narrative because I
worked for Figueres as his teaching assistant when he was a visiting professor at Harvard
University in 1963.
23. After 1959, the litmus test of acceptable progressive positions for those in the
United States was how the regime in the hemisphere viewed the Castro regime in Cuba,
and Figueres always was a staunch anticommunist.
24. Jack Child, The Central American Peace Process, 1983–1991 (Boulder, CO:
Lynne Rienner, 1992); Cristina Eguizabal, ed., America Latina y la crisis centro-americana:
En busca de una solución regional (Buenos Aires: GEL, 1989); Francisco Rojas
Aravena and Luis Guillermo Solís, ¿Súbditos o Aliados? (San José, Costa Rica:
FLACSO, 1998); Jeffery Paige, Coffee and Power: Revolution and the Rise of Democracy
in Central America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); James
Mahoney, The Legacies of Liberalism: Path Dependence and Political Regimes in
Central America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Charles D.
Brockett, Political Movements and Violence in Central America (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2005).
25. Thomas Carothers, In the Name of Democracy (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1991). The shift by the Reagan administration was by no means complete.
At this time, Oliver North in the National Security Council was organizing the funding
of the armed opposition to the elected government in Nicaragua, the so-called contras,
despite specific prohibition of such funding by the Congress, through the sale of arms
to Iran, the proceeds from which were funneled to the contras.
26. Joseph S. Tulchin, “The Malvinas War of 1982,” Latin American Research Review,
22.3 (1987): 123–41.
27. Carlos Escudé, La Argentina ¿Paria internacional? (Buenos Aires: Editorial
Belgrano, 1984).
28. All of these documents, including the notations that indicate who was involved,
can be found on the State Department’s Virtual Reading Room, available at
https://foia.state.gov/Search/Search.aspx.
29. Both Carothers, In the Name of Democracy, p. 157, and Paul Sigmund, The
United States and Democracy in Chile (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1993), p.
168 indicate their recognition of the significance of this episode. Genaro Arriagada,
who played an important role in the campaign, thinks this episode was crucial to their
success. Arriagada, interview with the author, September 24, 1994.
30. Arias returned to the presidency in 2006–2010 and attempted to exercise leadership
for Costa Rica in Central America, but with less success. One of his young aides
during his first presidency was Luis Guillermo Solís, who, after a career in politics including
several appointments as Costa Rican representation to regional organizations,
was elected president in April 2014.
31. Hal Brands, Latin America’s Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2010).
32. The literature on the Cuban experience is vast. See Jorge I. Domínguez, To
Make a World Safe for Revolution: Cuba’s Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1987) and Cuba: Order and Revolution (Cambridge, Harvard University
Press, 2009).
33. When asked why he had insisted on visiting Castro and by doing so to legitimating
the least democratic regime in the hemisphere, Alfonsín made two points. The
first was that he had told the State Department that he was making the stop, so it was
not an anti-US gesture; second, it was important to strengthen the bonds among Latin
American nations, irrespective of their political nature. When pressed, he confessed
104 Latin America in International Politics
that the arrogance of the United States in imposing its embargo on Cuba irritated him
and that it would buttress his government’s autonomy by showing his independence of
the United States. Alfonsín, interview with the author, October 17, 1992.
34. These episodes are treated by Mark E. Williams, Understanding US–Latin
American Relations (New York: Routledge, 2012), chapters 8 and 9; Vinod K. Aggarwal,
“International Debt Threat: Bargaining among Creditors and Debtors in the
1980s,” Policy Papers in International Affairs 29 (1987).
35. RIAL was given new life in 2014, with Latin American funding, under the
leadership of Ricardo Lagos, former president of Chile, and Luis Maira, who had been
active in RIAL in its earlier incarnation.
36. The annual volumes produced by RIAL are a record of how the expanding
group of IR specialists in the region viewed the world. These volumes also are a record
of their unfailing optimism about the transition to democracy in the region and their
faith in the growth of Latin American agency. I was privileged to participate in many
of these meetings in the 1980s and early 1990s.
37. This does not include the Center for the Study of the United States, which was
part of the Cuban Foreign Ministry.
38. Rico went on to become a diplomat and was instrumental in formulating Mexican
policy toward the United States in the years after NAFTA that contributed to the
growing partnership between the nations. Cuadernos Semestrales was published from
1977 to 1988. CIDE was created in 1974. In 2014, Maira joined with Carlos Heredia
to refound the center within CIDE. Maira now is director of RIAL in its new existence
as the Council on International Relations of Latin America and the Caribbean.
39. Luis Maira et al., Centroamérica, crisis y política internacional (Mexico:
Siglo XXI, 1982).
Cold War in the Hemisphere 105