Recent Latin American Cold War historiography attempts to transcend scholarship in the 80s and 90s that tethered the region’s Cold War tribulations to panoramic causes like the sway of ideology or the whim of omnipotent states (the USSR and the US) looking to reify incompatible economic systems. Gilbert M. Joseph divides that scholarship into two camps: the “realists” concerned with geopolitical strategy, and the New Left or “revisionists,” who granted causal supremacy to the US and its wish to expand liberal capitalism.[1] That the older historiography can be so neatly divided is in itself an indictment of its capacity for elucidating the panoply of non-state actors, overlapping conflicts and multi-faceted movements that made up Latin America’s Cold War. There is an irony that pervades the New Left literature which, in pillorying US ventures into Latin America, and thereby hallowing the sovereignty of non-hegemonic states, actually manages to divest the region’s people of the very agency it seeks to defend, if only on a theoretical level. Hence Vani Pettiná’s assertion that the old historiography amounts to an “appendix” of US history.[2]
This essay will cross reference the new Latin American Cold War literature with the histories of two seminal events of the period: the 1954 Guatemalan coup and the 1973 Chilean coup. But such a division will prove specious: each resulted from developments long predating their occurrence, rendering the dates of 1954 and 1973 mere chronological conveniences. Furthermore, these developments were regional and transnational, so that isolated reference to Guatemala and Chile would have been inexhaustive. Indeed, the two events actually bled into each other as well as other timelines and territories. Section 1 will therefore be loosely centered on Guatemala in 1954 and section 2 will be loosely centered on Chile in 1970.
Section 1
Odd Arne Westad asks the question “Why did the United States intervene in the Third World as often as it did during the Cold War?”, endowing US officials, in his answer, with patronizing aspirations: out of responsibility for the capitalist model, a need to eradicate Communism, and a desire to make the Third World “more like America.”[3] Carlotta McAllister draws on “Modernization Theory” to attribute to US officials a hankering for the “theoretical space of the perfect market system” in the Third World.[4] If US officials felt a prime compulsion to spread its country’s economic model into Latin America, then, as McAllister notes, military intervention can be rationalized as a necessary evil. How to account, then, for the divergent policies undertaken against the 1952 Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) in Bolivia and the Jacobo Árbenz government in Guatemala?
In a historical review of covert actions against Árbenz (operations PBFORTUNE and PBSUCCESS), the CIA History Staff outlined its agency’s motivations: concern over growing Communist influence within the Guatemalan government, agrarian reform which redistributed the United Fruit Company’s (UFC) land to peasants and local workers, and the possibility that Guatemala could become a Soviet client state.[5] CIA concerns were encapsulated by Decree 900, introduced by Árbenz in 1952, which redistributed land in usufruct from landowners, of which the UCF was the largest, to tenant farmers, sharecroppers and agricultural laborers. Particularly concerning was José Manuel Fortuny, a member of the Communist-affiliated Guatemalan Worker’s Party to whom Árbenz had given a prominent role in writing the Decree.[6] By the fall of 1953, Árbenz had legalized the Guatemalan Communist Party, spurring US officials to authorize operation PBSUCCESS which, unlike its forerunner, PBFORTUNE, concluded with a successful coup in June 1954. Both operations were comprehensive and included providing arms to anti-Communist Guatemalan exiles led by officer Castillo Armas, psychological scare tactics like sending “death notice” cards to key Communists, and compiling hit lists of Guatemalan leaders to be assassinated by Castillo or Trujillo-led assassins, though no assassinations were carried out at the behest of the CIA.[7]
PBSUCCESS’ avowed goal was to “to remove covertly, and without bloodshed if possible, the menace of the present Communist-controlled government of Guatemala.”[8] It is remarkable that similar fears did not materialize among US officials over Víctor Paz’ presidency in Bolivia. Judging from the motivations for covert action against Árbenz, the Bolivian revolution of April 1952 would seem ripe for similar treatment. The MNR had ideological ties to Communism, garnering support from local Marxists and labour unions, promising particular reforms to the pro-Soviet Partido Comunista Boliviana in exchange for its support, and boasting of a president who had espoused an historical materialist outlook. Similarly to Decree 900, the MNR introduced widespread land reform and nationalized tin mines that threatened US business interests, leading the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) to drop out of contract negotiations for purchasing Bolivian tin in March 1953. Finally, there existed a palpable threat that the MNR could establish a working relationship with the Eastern Bloc as, on the heels of the RFC’s snub, Paz announced that his government would pursue a trade deal with Czechoslovakia.[9]
Prior to the MNR’s revolution, the US accounted for two-thirds of Bolivian exports and wielded a great influence over the global tin market, a fact well-known to Bolivians who had complained about the US’ manipulating markets to bring down global tin prices.[10] US officials therefore had the economic leverage to ail the Bolivian economy and, as US Ambassador to Guatemala Rudolph Schoenfeld wished to do to the Árbenz regime, bring the MNR “to a realization that they were dependent upon the United States and that if they expected assistance or consideration from the United States it behooved them to adjust their actions vis-à-vis the United States accordingly,” with the bonus of being able to do so without bloodshed.[11] Instead, the Eisenhower administration decided to extend aid to Bolivia and prevent economic instability.
Both policies shared the goal of stunting Communist influence, only in Bolivia’s case US officials reached the more benign conclusion that the MNR’s revolutionary fervor had been fostered by “the rapid degeneration of the Bolivian economy,”[12] and that helping the Bolivian economy was the best course. US officials displayed a willingness to compromise with a revolutionary government and to prop up a potentially Soviet client state, harming the generality of attributions of a capitalist, missionary zeal.
Kenneth Lehman claims that the difference was due to US officials’ interpreting the Bolivian case through a situational lens and the Guatemalan case through a dispositional one. Whereas the strongly anti-American rhetoric employed by Guatemalan officials to rationalize redistributing UFC lands were deemed a threat to US hegemony, president Paz’ willingness to negotiate and the lack of a similarly antagonistic voice behind Bolivian policy allowed US officials to more objectively understand that country’s material circumstances.[13] Yet this argument is too unidirectional, analyzing US relations with each country in isolation, and therefore endowing the US with an exaggerated omnipotence. In fact, the decision to invade Guatemala had a lot to do with situational factors that presented themselves independently of US actions, as evidenced by Aaron Coy Moulton’s work on transnational Caribbean networks in the lead up to the 1954 coup.
In the 1940s, dictators Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Tiburcio Carías in Honduras, and Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic took note of a transnational chain of Guatemalan and Venezuelan exiles, students, journalists and politicians who lobbied against and wrote condemnatorily about the so-called “remaining” fascist Caribbean dictators, having been emboldened by the Guatemalan Revolution that overthrew General Jorge Ubico in 1944. Somoza, Carías and Trujillo responded in kind, undertaking a conspiratorial, anti-Communist propaganda campaign and supporting militant exiles associated with the deposed regimes of Ubico and Eleazor López Contreras in Venezuela.[14] That the anti-Communist network was organized under US noses is exemplified by Somoza and Carías falsely denying to US officials that they were funding exiles to conspire against Juan José Arevalo in Guatemala and Rómulo Betancourt in Venezuela. When US officials urged Somoza to cease participating in the Costa Rican Civil War of March 1948, Somoza explained that he had to remain loyal to Trujillo and Carías in their fight against Communism, prioritizing the network’s interests over those of the US.[15]
By the time US interests aligned with those of Somoza, Trujillo and Carías in wanting to overthrow Árbenz, the counter-revolutionaries had already laid the framework that allowed the CIA to initiate PBFORTUNE, setting up an intelligence- and arms-sharing network to which the CIA could provide further arms and funds. That situational factors were set up for a US-sponsored coup is symbolically epitomized by the fact that PBFORTUNE began after Somoza approached the Truman administration in 1952.[16] The network’s independence was begrudgingly apparent to US officials at the time, as the CIA’s intended discretion was superseded by the network’s history of knowledge sharing, which led to widespread dissemination of the US’ intent to overthrow Árbenz and coordination among militant groups in preparation for the event. About half a year after the Guatemalan coup, Calderonista rebels invaded Costa Rica with the help of Somoza, Trujillo and Castillo Armas’ militias against US officials’ wishes, doing so with the very weapons provided by the CIA for the Guatemalan coup.[17]
The Guatemalan coup would have consequences for US-Chilean relations that went beyond US intentions. While operation PBSUCCESS was functioning in the background, US representatives at a meeting of the Organization of American States (OAS) in March 1954 worked to rally other member nations into ratifying anti-Communist codifications. The proposed resolution called for OAS members to intervene militarily should any American state cede its political institutions to Communism.[18] Despite the country’s affirmative vote, backlash to the resolution in Chile was extensive, drawing Socialist members of Chile’s Chamber of Deputies, who grouped themselves into the “Friends of Guatemala,” and future president and Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei. But the most noteworthy opposition came from then-Senator Salvador Allende, who became one of the principal targets of a hitherto dormant fear of Communism in Chile on the part of US officials.
If the goal was to stunt Communism in Latin America, then US intervention in Guatemala proved counterintuitive, as least as regards US officials’ perceptions. As Mark T. Hove notes, US fears in Chile before the OAS meeting were directed at President Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, who had ruled dictatorially in 1927-1931 and stylized himself as a Peronist populist during his successful 1952 bid. At the time, US officials welcomed Allende as a stopgap to Ibáñez and as a candidate who could take away the communist vote while remaining, nonetheless, an “uncompromising foe of communism.”[19] But the tone changed when Allende avowed himself defender of Guatemalan sovereignty, participating in protests that reached their crescendo on 20 June 1954, three days after the Guatemalan coup, when Chilean protesters burned a US flag and an effigy of Eisenhower.[20] According to US Embassy officers in Chile, the Guatemalan coup “provided the [Chilean] communists with an issue,” which in turn gave US officials reason to fear that Chile might become the next Guatemala.[21]
Section 2
William A. Booth has written about the overlapping conflicts that defined Latin America’s Cold War and how the US-USSR dynamic is just one in a set of six dyads that also includes conflicts between peasants and landowners, states and citizens, US hegemony and national sovereignty, capital and labour, and capitalism and socialism.[22] Because many of these conflicts precede the usual dating of the global Cold War (i.e. the end of World War 2), US-USSR Manicheanism is said to have latched itself onto, and often exacerbated, longstanding conflicts in the region. Perhaps the most extreme expression of this historiographical position comes from Tanya Harmer, who insists that Latin America’s Cold War truly began “somewhere between the Mexican Revolution and World War II.”[23]
The OAS episode in Chile follows a similar, overlapping pattern. Chilean-US relations had been strained well before 1954 as by 1929, when US investment in Chile first surpassed UK investment, there arose in Chile a form of nationalism that called for chilenidad (“Chileanness”). This movement was highly critical of the influx of US investment and claimed itself to represent the Chilean cowboy (huaso), campesino, miner, worker and the lower classes against foreign capital, lumping its adherents into los rotos or “the broken ones.”[24] Along Booth’s lines, this early conflict between US capital and Chilean labour can be seen as a precursor to a later conflict that, from the US government’s perspective, was another episode in its global struggle against Soviet influence, and that, from the Chilean left’s perspective, was a struggle between US hegemony and Guatemalan sovereignty.
Yet the Chilean case presents a novel element to Booth’s notion of overlapping and exacerbated conflicts as the OAS resolution served also to rekindle prior US-Chilean antagonism that had died down during the 40s. By 1953, Chilenidad had petered into cordiality with Claude G. Bowers, US Ambassador to Chile (1939-1953), saying to Harry S. Truman that Chile was the “most inherent real democracy” in South America.[25] Reciprocally, Allende proclaimed in 1945 that “the United States of today is not the United States of yesterday,” praising the northern colossus for its Good Neighbor Policy and its fight against fascism.[26] Hence, US fears of Chilean communism and Chilean opposition to US hegemony both rekindled and exacerbated a prior antagonism which, in 1954, was no longer restricted to US capital and Chilean labour, but encompassed also US military action in a small country 3,500 miles north of Chile.
Following newly arisen concern over the Chilean left, the CIA initiated covert action in Chile designed first to hurt Allende’s chances of becoming president and then to support the Chilean military’s efforts to orchestrate a coup against the Allende government. The CIA spent $3 million on Chilean elections in 1964 and $8 million from 1970 to 1973.[27]
As mentioned earlier, and as noted by Gilbert M. Joseph, one of the problems with the old Latin American Cold War literature is that it “assessed the conflict almost exclusively in terms of national interest, state policy, and the broad imperatives of the international economy.”[28] On top of state officials and intellectuals, a truly historical account must partition roles for women, the lower and middle classes, peasants, workers, students, religious actors, indigenous and ethnic groups, exiles, etc. US covert operations before the 1964 Chilean election reveal that even a focus on state policy is inexhaustive without consideration of Chilean women, if only because US officials themselves understood how crucial they were to their goal of combatting Allende.
After losing his second bid for the presidency in 1958 to Jorge Alessandri by a mere 33,416 votes, US officials worried over Allende’s highly improved vote count from the 5.4% he got in 1952. Surveying electoral statistic reveals that 34% of Chilean women had voted for Jorge Alessandri against 22% for Allende, an important margin in light of the close overall result.[29] This split between the female voters came on the back of a growth in female electoral participation, a growth which the CIA sought to maintain in the lead up to the next election.
Between June and September 1964, the CIA funded radio stations, news broadcasts, cartoons, press advertisements and distribution of posters, many of which displayed a keen understanding of the prototypical Chilean woman; at the time only 22% of women worked outside of their homes, mostly as servants in richer households, while 70% were housewives.[30] CIA-funded propaganda therefore appealed heavily to entrenched gender norms, portraying a hypothetical Allende presidency as a threat to the Chilean household and drawing analogues to other Marxist governments. One poster claimed that Fidel Castro had sent 15,000 children to Russia, wresting them from their mothers’ arms.[31] Radio broadcasts, especially effective on women who spent most of their time at home, claimed that women under communist society had lost their compassionate femininity and were forced into labor “which no civilized country makes people of their sex perform.”[32]
By the CIA’s own account, its propaganda tactics “probably” succeeded in swaying Chilean public opinion.[33]However, despite US officials favoring the results of the Pinochet coup on 11 September 1973, it would again be a mistake to attribute omnipotence to the US by giving it full credit for deposing Allende. For one, the CIA admits that its reported links to the Christian Democratic party in the 1964 elections gave Allende a significant number of additional votes that contributed to his victory in 1970, rendering the CIA’s own tactics self-defeating.[34] Furthermore, despite the CIA’s transition into its “Track II” program after Allende’s victory, which instructed the CIA “to play a direct role in organizing a military coup d'etat in Chile” in collaboration with the Departments of State and Defense, the decision to overthrow Allende was ultimately taken independently of US intervention.[35]
Even the very circumstances that allowed for a coup, as was the case in Guatemala, came about independently of US actions. By May 1973, the CIA was aware that members of the Chilean military were plotting a coup, but the CIA was hesitant to pursue this plot over concern that the attempt would be blocked by General Carlos Prats. These concerns were vindicated when, on June 29th, Chile’s Second Armored Regiment attempted an overthrow known as the Tanquetazo, and were rebuffed by General Prats and sectors of the military loyal to the government.[36] If General Prats was the biggest preventative factor, then it was through the initiative of opposition groups that the groundwork for a coup arose, as right wing media, politicians and wives of soldiers initiated a campaign against Prats for refusing to stage a coup, eventually forcing him to resign.[37]
Yet even with Prats gone, US officials remained hesitant, with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) referring to his replacement, Pinochet, as a man “unlikely to wield…authority and control.”[38] US officials argued over providing support to right-wing paramilitary forces, eventually compromising with the 40 Committee’s allocating $1 million to the effort, a fund that never reached Chile. Even with the decisive moment a day away on 10 September 1973, when a “key officer” of the Chilean army asked Washington officials for military support if difficulties arose during the next day’s coup attempt, the contacted officials were unwilling to commit.[39]
Whereas the CIA failed to provide its $1 million, investors in Brazil, Argentina and Bolivia readily provided funds to the fascist paramilitary group Patria y Libertad that would fight against Allende’s forces on September 11th.[40]Additionally, the Brazilian military provided intelligence that proved to be crucial for the mutinous members of the Chilean military. Concerned that the Peruvian military would take advantage of an attempted coup in Chile to seize disputed territory on the Chilean-Peruvian border, retired Chilean admiral Roberto Kelly was sent to Brasilia in mid-August to exchange information with Brazilian officers.[41] As Kelly informed the Brazilian military of the Chilean conspirators’ plan, he received in exchange reliable intelligence on Lima’s intentions not to blindside the Chileans. It was the “green light” the Chilean dissenters were hoping for and that it was provided by a fellow Latin American military is proof against US omnipotence. Pinochet gave the order to depose Allende half a month later.
Conclusion
That US governmental decisions were not an end-all-be-all causal factor in Latin American Cold War relations is attested to by the diverse results of the policies it did or, even, did not undertake. Its participation in the invasion of Guatemala contributed to an undesired chain of events that led to a coup in Chile almost two decades later. Ironically, and despite early efforts to support Chilean coup plotters, the US government’s hesitancy to co-conspire with those very plotters at crucial junctures ended with, from US officials’ perspective, the serendipitous deposition of a Marxist leader. In the Guatemalan case, in which US policy did play a direct hand, the circumstances allowing for the CIA’s support were set up by a transnational, counter-revolutionary network of exiles and militants led by a trio of dictators who often acted outside the bounds of US desires. In Chile, it was non-US actors like investors from other Latin American countries and Brazilian military officers who provided the funds and intelligence needed for Pinochet to confidently overthrow Allende.
But to say that US officials were entirely unaware of the role played by non-state actors and wholly naïve to the consequences of their own actions would be a mistake. In reference to the new literature, Max Paul Friedman attributes the turn to the “neglected half” of the Latin American Cold War in part to the use of Spanish- and Portuguese-language sources.[42] Yet some of the sources used in this essay were drawn up by US governmental organizations, and reveal an attention to non-state actors like Chilean women in the 1960s and admit to the self-defeating results of policies like the anti-Allende propaganda campaign that contributed to his eventual presidency. It is a testament to Latin American Cold War complexity that, despite carefully monitoring these different factors in the region, the US government was unable to live up to the role of puppet master attributed to it by the old historiography.
Leandro Vargas Llosa has just completed an MA in European History at University College London (this essay was written during his time at the university).
Full title when assigned: What can the new Latin American Cold War Historiography tell us about the Coups of Guatemala in 1954 and Chile in 1973?
[1] Gilbert M. Joseph, ‘Border Crossings and the Remaking of Latin American Cold War Studies,’ Cold War History, 19 (2019), pp. 146-147.
[2] Vani Pettiná, Vanni, Historia Mínima de la Guerra Fría en América Latina, 1st edition (Mexico City, 2018), p. 23.
[3] Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War, 1st edition (Cambridge, 2005), p. 111.
[4] Carlotta McAllister, ‘Rural Markets, Revolutionary Souls, and Rebellious Women in Cold War Guatemala,’ in A Century of Revolution, ed. by G. Grandin and G. Joseph (Duke, 2010), pp. 351.
[5] Gerald K. Haines, CIA and Guatemala Assassination Proposals, 1952-4, CIA Historical Review Program, 1995, pp. 1-2.
[6] Carlotta McAllister, p. 355.
[7] Haines, pp. 5-8.
[8] Ibid., p. 4.
[9] Kenneth Lehman, ‘Revolutions and Attributions: Making Sense of the Eisenhower Administration Policies in Bolivia and Guatemala,’ Diplomatic History, 21 (1997), pp. 192-193.
[10] Ibid., p. 199.
[11] As cited in Lehman, p. 195.
[12] Edward Sparks as cited in Lehman, p. 193.
[13] Lehman, pp. 194-195.
[14] Aaron Coy Moulton, ‘Building their Own Cold War in their Own Backyard: The Transnational, International Conflicts in the Greater Caribbean Basin, 1944-1954,’ Cold War History, 15 (2015), p. 140.
[15] Moulton, p. 142.
[16] Lehman, p. 2.
[17] Moulton, p. 152.
[18] Mark T. Hove ‘The Arbenz Factor: Salvador Allende, U.S.-Chilean Relations, and the 1954 U.S. Intervention in Guatemala,’ Diplomatic History, 31 (2007), p. 630.
[19] Ibid., p. 633.
[20] Ibid., p. 637.
[21] Ibid., p. 655.
[22] William A. Booth, ‘Historiographical Review: Rethinking Latin America’s Cold War,’ The Historical Journal, (2020), p. 10.
[23] Tanya Harmer, ‘The Cold War in Latin America,’ in The Routledge handbook of the Cold War, ed. by A. Kalinovsky and C. Daigle (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), p. 137.
[24] Hove, p. 648-649.
[25] As cited in Hove, p. 625.
[26] As cited in Hove, p. 651.
[27] U.S. Congress, Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Covert Action in Chile, 1963-1973, Staff Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, 94th Cong., 1st sess., 18 December 1975, Washington D.C., p. 1.
[28] Joseph, p. 148.
[29] Margaret Power, ‘The Engendering of Anticommunism and Fear in Chile’s 1964 Presidential Election,’ Diplomatic History, 32 (2008), pp. 932-933.
[30] Power, p. 942.
[31] Power, p. 939.
[32] As cited in Power, pp. 940-941.
[33] U.S. Congress, Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, p. 19.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Ibid., p. 26.
[36] Tanya Harmer, Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War, (North Carolina, 2011), p. 225.
[37] Ibid., p. 227.
[38] As cited in Harmer, p. 227.
[39] Harmer, p. 239.
[40] Ibid., p. 242.
[41] Ibid., p. 220.
[42] Max Paul Friedman, ‘Retiring the Puppets, Bringing Latin America Back in: Recent Scholarship on United States–Latin American Relations’, Diplomatic History, 27 (2003), p. 625.
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