Latin America has long been an immediate and important sphere of influence for the United States, but during the COLD war, tensions between countries grew increasingly hostile as the influence of Soviet COMMUNISM made its way into the Southern Hemisphere.
During the post-World War II era, Latin America suffered from economic and social problems, including stagnant economic growth, poverty, illiteracy, inadequate health care, and a population boom. The United States hoped to see gradual, peaceful modernization led by a moderate political center, but the sharp divide between the rich and the poor left little room for moderation. Nationalist movements gained support and took on an anti-American character. The U. S. government feared that revolutionary nationalism would invite Soviet influence into this critical region. It sought to protect American investments, the market for U. S. exports, the strategic value of the Panama Canal, Caribbean naval bases, and reserves of oil and copper. In the process, Latin America became a cold war battleground.
The administration of Harry S. Truman launched two programs designed to transform the Monroe Doctrine into a more collective, multilateral effort. The 1947 Rio Pact was a defensive military alliance that promised reciprocal assistance if Soviet intervention threatened any country in the Western Hemisphere. The Organization of American States (OAS) was formed in 1948 to settle interAmerican disputes. Article 15 of the OAS charter, inserted against American wishes, stated that member states did not have the right to intervene in the affairs of other member states.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Latin America witnessed political instability that included a series of military coups, which were sometimes supported or organized by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). For example, the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower spearheaded a coup against the elected leader of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, in 1954. Foreigners, led by the United Fruit Company (UFCO), owned most of the big plantations that produced bananas and coffee for export in Guatemala. Arbenz sympathized with workers’ strikes and expropriated and redistributed large amounts of UFCO land that lay fallow. In compensation he paid the company the low value it had set on the land for taxation purposes. The Eisenhower administration did not want this land redistribution to set a bad precedent throughout Latin America, and the administration became convinced that Guatemala had come under communist influence. Alarmed, Arbenz signed an arms deal with the Soviet Union. In response, the CIA planned a coup, selecting General Carlos Castillo Armas to lead an invasion of 150 troops and a few minor air raids from Honduras. The CIA-run radio station broadcast threats of a huge invasion force, and Arbenz, who commanded a disloyal army, panicked and fled Guatemala. Castillo took power, executing hundreds of Arbenz supporters in the process, and though he was assassinated in 1957, a long line of military dictators followed him.
The late 1950s marked a low point in inter-American relations. When Vice President Richard M. Nixon toured South America in 1958, he was met everywhere by angry anti-American demonstrations protesting U. S. support of armed strongmen in Venezuela and Cuba and interventions such as the Guatemala incident. An angry mob almost killed Nixon in Caracas, Venezuela. During the following year, Panamanians rioted in protest of continued American control of the Canal Zone, and Fidel Castro’s rebels seized power in Cuba. The Castro government launched an ambitious reform program and expropriated U. S.-owned oil companies and other privately owned firms. Many attributed these developments to an international communist conspiracy.
Worried about its global image and Soviet encroachment, the American government sought to improve relations with Latin America and to bring about rapid social and political improvements in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Initiatives such as the Inter-American Development Bank and the Alliance eor Progress that sought to promote economic and social development, however, were largely unsuccessful at combating the poverty and inequity of many Latin American societies. Furthermore, anticommunism and the desire for stability continued to trump any intentions of altruism.
This pattern held during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson. The United States tacitly supported a military takeover in Brazil in 1964 after Joao Goulart, facing serious economic trouble, began to seize U. S. properties. The Brazilian military took power and began a 20-year dictatorship, while Johnson ordered an American naval fleet to stand off the coast of Brazil in case it was needed. In 1965, Johnson sent 20,000 American troops to the Dominican Republic to intervene in a civil war between the military regime and forces supporting Juan Bosch, an elected radical reformer. This intervention lasted for one year and helped put in power Joaquin Balaguer, a pro-American military man. Order was eventually restored and elections were held in 1966. The crisis in the Dominican Republic produced the Johnson Doctrine, which stated that an American president could use military force whenever he felt communism threatened the Western Hemisphere.
Further reading: Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revol-u-tions: The United States in Central America, 2d ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993); Stephen G. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of Anticommunism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1988);-, The Most Dangerous Area in the World:
John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
—Jennifer Walton
World History
