Itineraries of Expertise

Science, Technology, and the Environment in Latin America's Long Cold War

Andra Chastain, Timothy Lorek, Andra B. Chastain, Timothy W. Lorek

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780822987321
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

Itineraries of Expertise contends that experts and expertise played fundamental roles in the Latin American Cold War. While traditional Cold War histories of the region have examined diplomatic, intelligence, and military operations and more recent studies have probed the cultural dimensions of the conflict, the experts who constitute the focus of this volume escaped these categories. Although they often portrayed themselves as removed from politics, their work contributed to the key geopolitical agendas of the day. The paths traveled by the experts in this volume not only traversed Latin America and connected Latin America to the Global North, they also stretch traditional chronologies of the Latin American Cold War to show how local experts in the early twentieth century laid the foundation for post–World War II development projects, and how Cold War knowledge of science, technology, and the environment continues to impact our world today. These essays unite environmental history and the history of science and technology to argue for the importance of expertise in the Latin American Cold War.

1

BORDER CROSSINGS AND THE REMAKING OF LATIN AMERICAN COLD WAR STUDIES

Gilbert M. Joseph

Few periods in Latin America’s history have been as violent and turbulent, and some would argue, transformative, as the half century that ran roughly from the end of World War II through the early 1990s and constituted the Cold War. This is because, as in other regions of the Global South, Latin America’s Cold War was rarely cold. In fact, you would have to go back to the early nineteenth-century Wars of Independence to find the same level of mass mobilization, revolutionary upheaval, and counterrevolutionary repression. Yet the international connections, organizational capacities, and technologies of death and surveillance at work in the late twentieth-century Cold War render that earlier cycle of violence almost quaint by comparison. Latin America’s great novelist Gabriel García Márquez graphically evoked this “outsized” and “unbridled reality” in his 1982 Nobel acceptance speech. Conjuring up a litany of grisly and apocalyptic events—the dirty wars, disappearances, and displacements of the 1970s and early 1980s that had turned Central America and South America’s Southern Cone into killing fields and barrios—he told his Nobel audience that he had been obliged to develop a new literary genre, “magical realism,” to assimilate the period’s mind-boggling occurrences and, as he put it, “render our lives believable.”¹

How do we account for such cataclysmic violence? To be sure, Latin America’s past is characterized by alternating cycles of social reform and intense conservative reaction, in which the influence, aid, and intervention of imperial powers have figured prominently. Even so, the dynamics of the Latin American Cold War are embedded in a particularly ferocious dialectic linking reformist and revolutionary projects for social change and national development, with the excessive counterrevolutionary responses they triggered, in the decades after World War II. This dialectic, which shaped Latin American life in the late twentieth century and carried legacies into the new millennium, played out in intertwined domestic and international arenas of political, social, and cultural power. At a macro level the Cold War was a struggle between superpowers—the United States and the Soviet Union—over shifting geopolitical stakes and ideological visions of how the world should be organized.² But what ultimately gave the Latin American Cold War its “heat”—what Greg Grandin terms its “transcendental force”—were the politicization and internationalization of everyday life. On a variety of fronts across several decades, Latin American elites and newly expanded and empowered popular classes participated in local and national political contests over land, labor, and the control of markets and natural resources—contests that rarely escaped the powerful undertow of the larger superpower conflict.³

This chapter seeks to provide a broad orientation to the global Cold War and especially to its distinctive Latin American variant. It also focuses attention on two of the more fertile veins in a burgeoning historiography: first, the notion that the region’s Cold War should be placed in a broader historical context, which scholars are increasingly referring to as Latin America’s “long Cold War,” and second, an analysis of the long Cold War’s multivalent cultural dimension. If study of the Latin American Cold War has become something of a growth industry in the past fifteen years, its leading edge may well be efforts to tease out the complex, power-laden cultural processes, relationships, exchanges, and institutional forms that antedated and shaped Latin America’s Cold War proper (ca. 1947 to the early 1990s), and had legacies beyond the conflict’s denouement. Itineraries of Expertise is certain to advance these discussions, insisting as it does that although foreign diplomats and grand strategists, military juntas and intelligence apparatuses, leftist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitary forces, CIA-backed coups and covert operations have remained at the center of traditional accounts of the Cold War in Latin America, beneath or in the wake of the conflicts they orchestrated, the Latin American Cold War was waged by technocrats and experts. Thus, according to Andra Chastain and Timothy Lorek, “scientists and engineers, doctors and social workers, agronomists and architects—as well as the webs of expertise they wove—made material the political ideologies of the era.” This volume argues that the appeal of the mass utopias of the superpowers was predicated on “intertwined dreams of development and modernization” that underwrote a political and cultural struggle likely just as consequential as the paroxysms of insurgent and counterinsurgent violence the period witnessed. And this political, cultural, and technological struggle “relied on an army of highly specialized experts” whose role in the conflict has not yet been well apprehended.⁴

To date, most studies of the region’s cultural Cold War have focused on the usual subjects of cultural history—the intellectuals, students, artists, writers, and social thinkers who aspired to a higher profile in the conflict.⁵ Similarly, several studies of certain signature projects of “development,” and critiques of the vexed concept itself, have emerged and narrowed the gap between Latin Americanist scholarship and more robust interdisciplinary work on this theme for other areas of the Global South.⁶ But what this volume’s contributors argue so compellingly is that the experts and technocrats, the cultural and political intermediaries behind these projects, have routinely been elided and deserve attention in their own right. In fact, it is only by examining their role in various infrastructural and environmental projects, educational and housing missions, biological research and agricultural experiment stations—in short, their concrete plans, movements, networks of collaboration, and the manner in which they negotiated their work at both higher levels and at the grassroots (with national leaders, US agencies, transnational foundations and think tanks, and, not least, with the local populations they studied and served)—that we can develop a more nuanced history of Cold War Latin America. Such fine-grained analysis over decades of experts who were both peripatetic and locally situated, who often presented themselves as removed from politics, even as their work fed directly or indirectly into prevailing geopolitical agendas, contributes to a Cold War history that is multi-stranded, attentive to history’s contingencies, and capable of transcending frayed, dichotomizing paradigms of interpretation. These essays showcase how traveling experts traversed a variety of boundaries: between the city and the countryside, between northern and southern countries, and albeit less frequently, between southern and eastern bloc destinations and within the Global South. They demonstrate how experts’ itineraries and collaborations tended to strengthen, but occasionally undermined and complicated the imperatives dictated by Cold War geopolitics. In the process, the volume’s contributors force us to reconsider other binaries in conventional Cold War studies: between “developed” and “developing” nations, the First World and the Third World, and the Global North and Global South. Congruent with recent turns in transnational studies, by highlighting multiple agents, sites, and scales of expertise during the Cold War, the contributors accentuate a blurring of the “local” and the “foreign,” especially where the production of knowledge is concerned.

These essays and the new cultural history of Cold War Latin America that the volume advances underscore an ascendant “expansionist” sensibility where cultural history is concerned: a recognition that cultural phenomena are inextricably bound up with political and social forces.⁷ Thus, as Chastain and Lorek observe in the introduction to this volume:

[The] Cold War raised the stakes of expert knowledge in concrete ways. From iconic Cold War technologies such as atomic bombs and satellites to social scientific knowledge about strategic peoples and places, experts seemed to hold the secrets to state security and prosperity. The United States sought to prevent the spread of communism in Latin America through the deployment of experts and funding tied to technical aid missions, including those in Truman’s Point Four program and, later, Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress. Many Latin American leaders, for their part, embraced the promise of the expert—first through efforts at import-substitution industrialization and state planning, and later through authoritarian, technocratic projects to dismantle the state’s role in the economy. The thorniest sociocultural problems posed by the Cold War—such as how to feed, shelter, and educate a rapidly growing population—seemed to offer a carte blanche for the intervention of a host of experts. The embrace of technical solutions to solve complex sociocultural challenges was a hallmark of [the] Cold War.

In from the Cold: Toward a New Historiography of the Latin American Cold War

Itineraries of Expertise reflects the kind of intellectual border crossings that have remade the historiography of the Latin American Cold War. It promotes a unique discursive community that brings historians of science and technology, environmental historians, and students of the Cold War into conversation with one another. Over the past fifteen years or so, our understanding of Latin America’s distinctive variant of the Cold War has repeatedly benefited from similar attempts to talk across fields and disciplines. Because the literature is vast, the following review must paint in broad strokes, focusing on what I regard to be pivotal themes and watersheds.⁸

The first major attempt at cross-fertilization sought to bring students of Latin America’s tumultuous twentieth century, particularly its political and social movements, into conversation with foreign relations scholars. Thus, Latin Americanists who studied the Cold War from the inside out and often “from below,” using tools and concepts from area studies, social and cultural history, anthropology, political science, and cultural studies, hoped to foment a more sustained engagement with diplomatic historians and international relations scholars of the Cold War. The latter had largely been preoccupied with grand strategy and US policy, drawing mostly on US archives. Sadly, although foreign relations scholars and Latin Americanists should share fraternal relations, they have more often remained, in the words of the foreign relations scholar Max Paul Friedman, “polyglot distant cousin[s].”⁹ But beginning roughly with the new millennium, through a series of international conferences, volumes, debates, and exchanges, a widening network of Latin American specialists have identified kindred foreign relations scholars who work across the methodological, interpretive, and linguistic divides that previously had separated their respective fields, in an effort to encourage a more vital cross talk between them. These collaborations, galvanized initially by historians based at Yale University, New York University, CIESAS-Mexico City, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars’ Cold War History Project, have reverberated internationally in the decade and a half since, triggering new rounds of specialized conferences, high-profile publications, and research clusters at the London School of Economics, the Woodrow Wilson Center, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the University of Texas, Austin, the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the University of Bergamo in Italy, the Universidad de Puerto Rico, and the Pontificia Universidad Católica in Santiago, Chile, to name but a few.¹⁰

This first major effort of Latin American specialists to engage foreign relations scholars about their mutual research interest in the Cold War was certainly overdue. No field of foreign relations history was as well studied as the Cold War, and interest in the global conflict showed no signs of abating. A broad consensus had emerged regarding the global Cold War within the foreign relations literature by the late 1990s.¹¹ Scholars generally concurred that in global terms the conflict was a complex phenomenon that turned on the rivalry of two powerful states, each a “rookie superpower” possessing a universalizing ideology and a distinct system of political economy. The rivalry between them led to the division of Germany and Europe, an intense, often violent competition in the southern peripheries, and a strategic arms race. Although the superpower belligerents were careful not to engage in direct hostilities with each other, they consistently eschewed serious negotiation of their disputes—in effect seeking a diplomacy based on their own terms. The conflict took place in the wake of World War II, when an unsettled international system posed unprecedented threats and opportunities for many leaders, but especially those of the United States and the Soviet Union. As the leading foreign relations historian Melvyn Leffler has put it: “Interpreting those threats and opportunities through ideological lenses, cultural traditions, and cognitive habits of mind, American and Russian officials had the incentive and power to pursue their strategic and economic goals in ways that accorded with their understanding of national interest and ideological predilections. Their actions triggered reactions in a spiraling model of distrust and recrimination. Meanwhile, other governments (and parties and groups within those nations) sought to exploit the rivalry to enhance their own interests.”¹²

Finally, the consensus held, one of the belligerents, the United States, was far more powerful and wealthy throughout and enjoyed a political-economic system that was vastly more productive, flexible, and technologically responsive. “The wonder,” Leffler observed, is that the other side imploded without precipitating a major conflict.”¹³

Intellectual historians of foreign relations had contributed important insights into the intensely ideological character of this “abnormal war.” This was no ordinary state conflict, and geopolitical analysis does not suffice to explain the cruel and brutal form it took, especially in the Global South. Indeed, geopolitics may enrich our understanding of the military-political domain of the global conflict, but it has little to say about the ideological-cultural realm. The irony of the Cold War was that it represented, in the words of Anders Stephanson, “an extreme polarity organized around the total annihilation of the opponent in a period of ostensible peace.”¹⁴ Before 1963 and the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, annihilation literally seemed a distinct possibility. Thereafter, neither side appeared to require or seriously risk the actual destruction of the other. In theory, each could have gone on indefinitely without having to change its system as a result of the other’s existence (hence, the rather Eurocentric notion of a “long peace,” as John Lewis Gaddis has termed it), since open conflict was deterred by the nuclear reality of “mutually assured destruction,” and displaced and managed on the so-called Third World periphery.¹⁵ Yet in another sense, the Cold War remained systemic and total. It was waged in fiercely doctrinal terms as an “invasion” or delegitimization of the other’s social order, replete with a demonology of the other and a mythology of one’s own eternal virtues. No doubt, argues Stephanson, the rigid territorialization of systems, beginning in 1947 in Europe, only intensified the mutually exclusive ideological aspect of the war, propelling it into its most primitive forms. The intensification of ideology assisted in securing, in different ways and contexts, each side’s socioeconomic systems in the two halves of Europe and in spheres of influence such as Latin America.¹⁶ Yet, in whatever context, the domestic social order could never be taken for granted; repression of internal dissent was axiomatic: red-baiting and worse in the United States and Mexico; wholesale purges in the Soviet Union; ethnocide in the weste...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Map of Latin America and Featured Sites of Expertise
• Introduction
• 1. Border Crossings and the Remaking of Latin American Cold War Studies
• I. Agrarian Antecedents and Rural Development
• II. Cold War Scientific Exchanges
• III. Infrastructures of the Built Environment
• IV. Toward New Regimes of Expertise
• Conclusion. New Narratives of Technology, Expertise, and Environment in Latin America: The Cold War and Beyond
• Contributors
• Index