Kissinger and Latin America

Intervention, Human Rights, and Diplomacy

Stephen G. Rabe

• Editorial: Cornell University Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501749469
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Human Rights

In Kissinger and Latin America, Stephen G. Rabe analyzes U.S. policies toward Latin America during a critical period of the Cold War. Except for the issue of Chile under Salvador Allende, historians have largely ignored inter-American relations during the presidencies of Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford. Rabe also offers a way of adding to and challenging the prevailing historiography on one of the most preeminent policymakers in the history of U.S. foreign relations. Scholarly studies on Henry Kissinger and his policies between 1969 and 1977 have tended to survey Kissinger's approach to the world, with an emphasis on initiatives toward the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China and the struggle to extricate the United States from the Vietnam conflict. Kissinger and Latin America offers something new—analyzing U.S. policies toward a distinct region of the world during Kissinger's career as national security adviser and secretary of state.

Rabe further challenges the notion that Henry Kissinger dismissed relations with the southern neighbors. The energetic Kissinger devoted more time and effort to Latin America than any of his predecessors—or successors—who served as the national security adviser or secretary of state during the Cold War era. He waged war against Salvador Allende and successfully destabilized a government in Bolivia. He resolved nettlesome issues with Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and Venezuela. He launched critical initiatives with Panama and Cuba. Kissinger also bolstered and coddled murderous military dictators who trampled on basic human rights. South American military dictators whom Kissinger favored committed international terrorism in Europe and the Western Hemisphere.

CHAPTER 1

Getting Started

A Year of Study

When it assumed office on 20 January 1969, the Nixon administration had the pressing task of extricating the United States from the debacle of the war in Vietnam. President Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, also wanted to build on the progress that had been made by the previous two presidential administrations on improving relations with the Soviet Union. The new administration seemingly would also embark on new initiatives with Latin America. President Nixon had more experience in inter-American affairs than any of his predecessors in the White House. He ordered Kissinger to conduct a systematic review of inter-American relations. He simultaneously dispatched Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York to conduct a fact-finding mission throughout the region and to present recommendations to him. As revealed in his only major address on inter-American affairs, however, Nixon decided against focusing on relations with Latin America. Only after the Bolivians and Chileans placed leaders in office who challenged U.S. global policies did the Nixon administration, led by Kissinger, demonstrate sustained interest in relations with Latin American nations.

The Alliance That Lost Its Way

In January 1969, in the middle of the Cold War, U.S. policymakers and citizens could have judged relations with the twenty Latin American nations as stable and satisfactory, both from strategic and economic perspectives. Except for Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Latin American nations continued to accept U.S. leadership in the confrontation with the Soviet Union. Latin American delegates at international fora such as the United Nations reliably backed U.S. positions on Cold War issues. Even Cuba no longer seemed much of a threat to U.S. hegemony in the region. Dependent on the Soviet Union’s economic largess, Castro had acceded to Soviet demands that he give up talk about promoting revolution in Latin America. The communist parties of Latin America similarly followed the cautious line dictated by Moscow.¹

U.S. traders and investors continued to profit in Latin America. The recovery of Western Europe and Japan under the Marshall Plan and the postwar promotion of global prosperity under the aegis of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the so-called Bretton Woods system, had diminished Latin America’s economic importance to the United States. In 1950, for example, trade with Latin America amounted to 29 percent of U.S. trade, and 38 percent of U.S. direct investments were in Latin America. Twenty years later, the global economy had grown enormously. Global trade had increased by more than 400 percent, and U.S. businesspeople conducted much of their trade and investment with the advanced industrial nations. Nonetheless, Latin America remained important to the United States. Trade with Latin America amounted to 13 percent of U.S. trade. U.S. citizens purchased coffee from Brazil and Colombia, raw materials from Mexico, and fuel oil from Venezuela. The United States had a healthy surplus of trade with Latin America, even as balance-of-trade deficits were increasingly characterizing U.S. trade with other regions of the world. The value of U.S. direct investments in Latin America nearly tripled from 1950 to 1970, although they now represented 16 percent of U.S. investments. U.S. companies had $2.6 billion invested in Venezuela, principally in oil production.²

In 1969, Latin Americans did not share the same favorable assessment of the state of relations within the Western Hemisphere. Latin Americans called for a new international economic order, pointing to sluggish economic growth and declining terms of trade. In May 1969, delegates at an inter–Latin American conclave, held at a seaside resort in Chile, produced the “Consensus of Viña del Mar.” Latin Americans called for “a fairer international division of labor that will favor the rapid economic and social development of the developing countries, instead of impeding it as has been the case hitherto.” Inherent in that language was the conviction among Latin Americans that the international economy worked against them. Their export-oriented economies depended on the sale of primary food products and raw materials. But throughout the 1960s, the prices they received for their coffee, cacao, lead, zinc, copper, and oil stagnated or even declined. The price of oil, for example, fell from $2.35 a barrel in 1957 to $1.81 in 1969.³ Latin American economies grew at a measly rate of less than 2 percent a year in the 1960s. The impoverished majority of the population in countries such as Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Paraguay lived outside of a cash economy. The relatively wealthy Latin American country of Argentina had a gross domestic product (GDP) per capita of $1,323 in 1969. By comparison, the GDP per capita in the United States was $4,803. Rapid population growth compounded the problems of poverty. The population of the twenty countries in Latin America rose from 218 million to 285 million in the 1960s. Brazil’s population rose from 70 million to 95 million, with the largest increase in the desperately poor northeastern region of the country.⁴

Latin Americans would not have been expressing dismay in 1969 if Latin America’s political and economic history had followed the plans of the Kennedy administration. On 13 March 1961, less than two months after his inauguration, President Kennedy announced a grandiose plan for Latin America’s socioeconomic development, the Alliance for Progress. The United States would replay the success of the past; it would now have a “Marshall Plan for Latin America.” The United States would provide $20 billion in economic aid to the region. Combined with an expected $80 billion in internal investment, Latin America would reach the “take-off” stage for self-sustaining growth, as outlined in Walt Whitman Rostow’s influential treatise The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960). The 1960s would be “the decade of development.” Kennedy administration officials opined that the region was “set for miracles.” U.S economic aid would spur an annual economic growth of 2.5 percent a year. Administration officials posted a readily attainable growth rate; they privately expected a much higher annual growth rate. Socioeconomic advancement would follow economic growth. Rural citizens would have access to potable water, and their children would attend school. In the words of Teodoro Moscoso, an administrator of the Alliance for Progress, the United States was determined to undermine the status quo “of a society made up of the few who have much and the many who have little.”⁵

In an article penned in 1967 in the establishment journal Foreign Affairs, President Eduardo Frei Montalva of Chile highlighted how the Alliance for Progress “lost its way.”⁶ Alliance planners had enumerated ninety-four goals to mark progress in Latin America. None were attained. The Alliance made imperceptible progress in achieving its objectives of adding five years to life expectancy, halving the infant mortality rate, eliminating adult illiteracy, and providing access to six years of primary education for every school-age child. During the 1960s, the number of unemployed Latin Americans actually rose from 18 million to 25 million, and agricultural production per person declined. More than half of the population of the region continued to live on an annual per capita income of $120. Only in three democratic countries—Colombia, Costa Rica, and Venezuela—could measurable socioeconomic progress be found.⁷

The Alliance failed for a myriad of reasons. Latin America had formidable obstacles to change. Elites resisted land reform, equitable tax systems, and social programs that changed the balance of power in communities. The declining terms of trade undercut socioeconomic progress. In Chile, for example, President Frei of the Christian Democratic Party used his Alliance money wisely, resettling 27,000 families on their own farms and building 400,000 homes for low-income Chileans. But Frei had counted on having more financial resources based on a rising Chilean economy. The price of copper, Chile’s major export, fluctuated wildly in the 1960s. Between 1966 and 1970, the Chilean economy grew at an annual rate of only 1.3 percent. The Marshall Plan experience also served as a poor guide to solving the problems of a region that was far different from Western Europe and Japan. Europeans and the Japanese had the requisite education, skills, and social order to operate a “modernized” society and economy. They needed U.S. money to “rebuild” after the devastation of World War II. In his last address on inter-American affairs, President Kennedy conceded that the Marshall Plan analogy did not work for Latin America. What was required in Latin America was “to create a basic new foundation, capable of re-shaping the centuries-old societies and economies of half of a hemisphere.”⁸

President Kennedy was sensitive to misery and injustice in Latin America. But the Alliance for Progress was rooted in national security concerns. Kennedy often dubbed the region as “the most dangerous area in the world.”⁹ The years between 1958 and 1964 were the crisis years in inter-American relations. U.S. leaders persuaded themselves that the Soviet Union’s master plan for global domination now included Latin America. Until 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower gave his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, primary responsibility for inter-American affairs. Dulles was content to bolster Latin American tyrants who professed to be anticommunist. The Eisenhower administration awarded the Legion of Merit, the nation’s highest award for foreign personages, to Manuel Odría of Peru (1948–1956) and Marcos Pérez Jiménez of Venezuela (1952–1958), two of the region’s most odious military dictators. President Eisenhower denied that the United States had given up on democracy and constitutionalism in Latin America. In 1955 at an NSC meeting, he rebuked Treasury Secretary George Humphrey for arguing that dictatorship in Latin America was in the best interests of the United States. Eisenhower pointed out to NSC members that he “firmly believed that if power lies with the people, then there will be no aggressive war.”¹⁰ Nonetheless, Eisenhower authorized the CIA to destabilize the constitutional president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. Eisenhower and Dulles judged that President Arbenz was a communist, soft on communism, or blind to the communist conspiracy. After President Arbenz fled the country in June 1954, U.S. intelligence agents scoured Guatemalan archives looking for evidence of a communist conspiracy. Secretary Dulles especially was disappointed to learn that no Guatemalan leader had any connection to Moscow. The CIA, on the other hand, was so proud of its subversion of Guatemalan constitutionalism that it produced a manual on the operation, which carried the code name “PBSUCCESS.”¹¹ The manual served as a guide for future operations against constitutional governments in British Guiana (Guyana), Brazil, and Salvador Allende’s Chile.

The public dismay that followed Vice President Nixon’s tumultuous tour of South America in the spring of 1958 led Eisenhower to reassess U.S. policies. South Americans jeered, spit, threw rocks, and attacked Nixon’s limousine in the streets of Caracas, because they were furious about the state of inter-American affairs. The United States had reneged on promises made to Latin American allies during World War II to assist their postwar development. The minuscule nations of Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands received more economic aid from the United States from 1946 to 1958 than did Latin America. That crowds assembled to confront Nixon was a sign of remarkable change within the region. Between 1956 and 1960, ten dictators fell from power in a process journalist Tad Szulc dubbed the “twilight of the tyrants.”¹² The protestors knew that the United States had proffered medals and military support to these dictators. In 1955 during a tour of the Caribbean and Central America, the vice president had been photographed embracing Rafael Trujillo (1930–1961), the murderous strongman of the Dominican Republic, and, in a toast in Havana, he compared Fulgencio Batista (1952–1958) to Abraham Lincoln. Once he returned safely back to Washington, Nixon adjusted to the new inter-American realities, proposing a new policy on hugging. Nixon told the public the U.S. approach should hereafter be “a formal handshake for dictators; an embraso [sic] for leaders in freedom.” Eisenhower accepted Nixon’s idea, overruling Dulles who warned Eisenhower that Latin Americans were not prepared for popular rule. The president openly backed the new Venezuelan president, Rómulo Betancourt (1958–1964), and condemned Trujillo for interfering in Venezuelan affairs and attacking Betancourt. The president also persuaded the U.S. Congress in 1960 to put $500 million into the Social Progress Trust Fund to assist socioeconomic development in Latin America.¹³

The catalyst for meaningful change was not, however, unhappy Latin Americans hurling rocks at U.S. officials. The Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro would prove to be the momentous event in the history of the Cold War in Latin America. The triumph of Castro’s guerrilla army at the beginning of 1959, Castro’s increasingly anti-American stance through 1959, his economic opening to the Soviet Union in February 1960, his diplomatic break with the United States in early January 1961, and his pledge at the end of 1961 to follow the dictates of Marxism-Leninism until the day he died created a sense of mounting crisis about inter-American relations. Latin America now seemed ripe for revolution, because the United States had “neglected” the region since 1945. The United States also had pursued the shortsighted policy of supporting despots. Desperate, impoverished, alienated Latin Americans would now entertain the false promises of radical leftists. “Castro-communism” might sweep through the region, tilting the global balance of power toward the Soviet Union. President Eisenhower responded by authorizing in March 1960 a project to overthrow Castro. This planning culminated in the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 under President Kennedy. Eisenhower had previously told the president-elect that the United States could not live with Castro. Eisenhower simultaneously imbibed in the new wisdom that support for dictators was counterproductive, for it pushed Latin Americans toward extremism. When Trujillo ignored U.S. demands to retreat into exile, the CIA launched plots to assassinate him. On 30 May 1961, Dominican dissidents, who carried weapons supplied by the CIA, ambushed and assassinated Trujillo. Both Eisenhower and Kennedy had a general understanding of the plot.¹⁴

The Alliance for Progress aimed to undercut the appeals of Castro and communism through socioeconomic development within the framework of democracy. As presidential aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr. put it, the Alliance represented “enlightened anticommunism.”¹⁵ President Kennedy accepted the insight that promoting “decent democrats” who carried out land and tax reforms was the most effective way to respond to Fidel Castro. Under the aegis of the Alliance for Progress, between 1961 and 1965 the United States provided Betancourt’s Venezuela $340 million in loans and credits to underwrite projects such as building homes for the urban poor. Kennedy also sharply criticized Jorge Alessandri (1958–1964), the conservative, constitutional president of Chile, for ignoring the needs of Chile’s poor. Kennedy made no secret of his hope that Eduardo Frei would win Chile’s 1964 p...