FRESH LOOK
The Alliance for Progress failed
to achieve the rapid changes in eco-
nomic and social structures that the
both Left and Right fed on and fueled
one another.”
The book divides the region’s Cold
War into a number of periods which,
as the author appears to recognize,
tend to bleed into each other rather
than be clearly demarcated. In the
1950s, widespread nationalist resent-
ment intensified in response to the
United States’ unembarrassed as-
sumption of hegemony in the hemi-
sphere. Politicians took advantage of
this sentiment to project onto the U. S.
the widespread popular frustration
with political instability, economic
stagnation and extreme inequality.
Kennedy Administration hoped for;
in fact, Brands argues, it aggravated
social tensions by facilitating an increase in large-scale commercial agriculture at the expense of already
poor tenant farmers. This added to
the countryside’s combustiblility just
as the military focus was helping to
extinguish the Cuban-supported rural insurgencies launched by romantic and deluded urban middle-class
revolutionaries.
The U.S.’s cynical amiability in relations with dictators like Fulgencio
Batista in Cuba, Rafael Trujillo in
the Dominican Republic and Marcos Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela and,
in particular, with the semi-clan-destine armed intervention in Guatemala to assist local reactionaries
in overthrowing a nationalist-re-formist government, fueled popular
anti-Americanism. Its most notable
manifestation was the riotous assault on then-Vice President Richard
Nixon’s motorcade when he visited
Caracas in 1958.
For Brands, the first phase con-
cludes with Fidel Castro’s triumph in
Cuba. The Cuban revolution then in-
augurates phase two, characterized by
a flowering of rural insurgencies and,
in the early 1960s, a two-pronged U.S.
response. On the one hand, there was
an effort (the Alliance for Progress) to
catalyze reform and transform societ-
ies in order to reduce extreme poverty
and improve economic opportunities
for the working and middle classes.
Here, the goal was to preempt the ap-
peal of Castroite revolutions. On the
other hand, the U.S. focused on equip-
ping, training and educating armies
so that they could become relatively
effective instruments of counter-in-
surgency. When local forces proved
insufficient or unreliable, the U.S.
directly intervened “to prevent an-
other Cuba.”
Tung, and in South Korea, following
the Korean War, U. S. pressure helped
persuade very conservative regimes to
carry out major land reforms designed
to coopt potential rural support for
their Communist antagonists. All
cases being unique when described
in detail, Brands could no doubt have
found important distinctions be-
tween the Latin American cases and
these instances where, without total
control (as it had in post-war Japan),
the U.S. did achieve its reformist re-
distributive goals.
Reform failed, according to Brands,
for a number of reasons. These in-
cluded: the simplistic theory of
economic development (“modern-
ization”) that guided it; the lack of
talented, multilingual experts and ad-
ministrators to execute it in the field,
and the obduracy of the region’s rul-
ing classes in response to demands
that they yield some piece of social,
political and economic power. Hos-
tility within the U.S. political estab-
lishment, particularly in Congress,
to social—or as some saw it, socialis-
tic—engineering, particularly in the
case of land reform, also burdened the
Alliance. In evaluating the causes of
failure, Brands appears to give preem-
inence to a supposed U. S. inability to
overcome elite resistance to reform.
But was this lack of leverage beyond
In any event, reform proved unnec-
essary. It turned out that the Latin
American countryside, though rid-
dled with injustice, was not ready
to burst into revolutionary flame.
Campesinos did not flock to the
banners planted in their midst by
starry-eyed, middle-class, urban rev-
olutionaries. Lacking a popular base,
they were quickly liquidated by na-
tional military forces assisted by the
United States.
This second phase of the region’s
Cold War was characterized by a new
cohort of men and women who, despairing of nonviolent means for redistributing wealth and opportunity,
turned to urban guerrilla warfare.
Most notably in Argentina and Uruguay, they succeeded in triggering a
devastating response from radical-ized military establishments ready
to wage pitiless war against not just
the armed militants but against reformers of every stripe, even if they
spoke in the idiom of human rights
rather than Karl Marx.
U.S. control?
While Brands does speak of con-
tradictions in U.S. policy, he insuffi-
ciently emphasizes the fundamental
contradiction between pressing for
major reform while simultaneously
guaranteeing the status quo in each
country against revolutionary change.
One could argue, in other words, that
the U.S. de-leveraged itself. After all,
in Taiwan, after it became the last
fortress of the U. S.-backed right-wing
nationalists driven off the mainland
by the communist armies of Mao Tse
Phase three of the conflict saw a
geographic shift of emphasis from
the Southern Cone to Central Amer-
ica. Beginning in the late 1970s, rev-
olutionary movements of varying
strength challenged the governments
of El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicara-
gua. The results are well known. An
initially successful seizure of power
in Nicaragua ultimately wilted in
the face of a U.S.-armed and directed
counterrevolutionary assault that cul-
minated with the election victory in
1990 of a moderate anticommunist, Vi-
oleta Chamorro, over now-President
Daniel Ortega, then a leading Sand-
inista commandante.
The Salvadoran regime, heavily
backed by the U.S., and responsible
for massacres on a scale exceeded
only by its counterpart in Guate-
