Beyond the Eagle's Shadow: New Histories of Latin America's Cold War 1306077974, 9781306077972

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l atin a mer ic a

is a professor of history at the University of Texas. Her most recent book is Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala under General Efraín Ríos Montt, 1982–1983.

“Beyond the Eagle’s Shadow is an excellent

is an associate professor of history and a distinguished scholar at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas. His most recent book is The Vietnam War: A Concise International History.

paradigms; they open up new and exciting

v i rg i n i a g a r r a r d - bu r n e t t

m a r k at wo od l aw r e nc e

j u l io e . mor e no ,

associate professor of history at the University of San Francisco, is the author of Yankee Don’t Go Home!: Mexican Nationalism, American Business Culture, and the Shaping of Modern Mexico, 1920–1950.

BE YON D T HE E AGL E’S SH A DOW

history

contribution to the emerging literature on Latin America’s experience during the Cold War. The chapters challenge existing

avenues of inquiry; they show the promising directions in which the literature is likely to go in coming decades. This book belongs in the collection of anyone with an interest in Latin American history or U.S.–Latin American relations.”

—h a l b r a n d s , author of Latin America’s Cold War

BEYOND T H E E AGLE'S SH A DOW NEW HISTORIES OF LATIN AMERICA’S COLD WAR

of an ever-expanding group of scholars who rightly envision Latin America during the Cold War era as a region with both East-West concerns and internal and international concerns outside the traditional Cold War narrative.”

— c h r i s t oph e r m . w h i t e , author of Creating a Third World: Mexico, Cuba, and the United States during the Castro Era (UNM Press)

that the Cold War in Latin America

can be understood simply as a clash of the superpowers or of the political “left” and “right” that they sponsored in the region. In various ways, the essays disassemble the latter categories and explore the complexities of the Cold War in Latin America as it was experienced beneath the level of great-power relations. Contributors to this volume highlight the complexity of the Cold War. The dominant tradition in writing about U.S.–Latin American relations during this period views the United States as all-powerful. That perspective, represented in the metaphor “talons of the eagle” to which the title Beyond the Eagle’s

Garr ar d-Burnett, L awrence, and Moreno

“The contributors to this volume are part

T

his book ch allenges the ide a

Shadow refers, continues to influence much scholarly work down to the present day. The goal of this book is not to write the United States out of the picture but to explore the ways other governments, groups, companies, organizations, and individuals promoted their own interests and perspectives. The authors address three interrelated questions: How and to what extent did Latin American governments exercise initiative in shaping the Cold War in the Western Hemisphere? How did Latin Americans outside government experience the Cold War in their daily lives? And how well does the left-right, communist-capitalist dichotomy capture the reality of the Cold War

isbn 978-0-8263-5368-9

University of New Mexico Press unmpress.com 800-249-7737 Vector eagle ornaments: cr e atefir st Jacket design: lil a sa nchez

ISBN 978-0-8263-5368-9

9 780826 353689

90000

edited by virginia garrard-burnett, mark atwood lawrence, and julio e. moreno

as it was experienced by Latin Americans?

Beyond the Eagle’ s Shadow

Beyond the Eagle’ s Shadow New Histories of Latin America’s Cold War Edited by V i rgi n i a Ga r r a r d -Bu r n et t, M a r k At wo od L aw r ence , a n d J u l io E. Mor eno

University of New Mexico Press | Albuquerque

© 2013 by the University of New Mexico Press All rights reserved. Published 2013 Printed in the United States of America 18 17 16 15 14 13   1 2 3 4 5 6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Beyond the eagle’s shadow : new histories of Latin America’s cold war / edited by Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Mark Atwood Lawrence, and Julio E. Moreno. pages cm Includes index. isbn 978-0-8263-5368-9 (hardback) — isbn 978-0-8263-5369-6 (ebook) 1. Latin America—Politics and government—1948–1980. 2. Latin America—Politics and government—1980– 3. Cold War—Political aspects—Latin America. 4. Cold War—Social aspects—Latin America. I. Garrard-Burnett, Virginia, 1957– editor of compilation. II. Lawrence, Mark Atwood, editor of compilation. III. Moreno, Julio, 1970– author, editor of compilation. F1414.2.B46 2013 980.03—dc23 2013017211 book design Composed in 10.25/13.5 Minion Pro Regular Display type is Minion Pro

Contents

5 Preface vii

Introduction Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Mark Atwood Lawrence, and Julio E. Moreno 1 Chapter One · Julio E. Mor eno Coca-Cola, U.S. Diplomacy, and the Cold War in America’s Backyard 21 Chapter Two · Giovan ni Batz Military Factionalism and the Consolidation of Power in 1960s Guatemala 51 Chapter Thr ee · Ar agor n Stor m Miller Season of Storms: The United States and the Caribbean Contest for a New Political Order, 1958–1961 76 Chapter Four · Jonathan C. Brow n Counterrevolution in the Caribbean: The CIA and Cuban Commandos in the 1960s 103 Chapter Five · R enata K eller Don Lázaro Rises Again: Heated Rhetoric, Cold Warfare, and the 1961 Latin American Peace Conference 129

Chapter Six · Seth Gar field From Ploughshares to Politics: Transformations in Rural Brazil during the Cold War and Its Aftermath 150

Chapter Seven · Ja mes Jenk ins The Indian Wing: Nicaraguan Indians, Native American Activists, and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1979–1990 175

Chapter Eight · K. Cheasty A nderson Doctors Within Borders: Cuban Medical Diplomacy to Sandinista Nicaragua, 1979–1990 200

Chapter Nine · Jen nifer T. Hoyt The Other Dirty War: Cleaning Up Buenos Aires during the Last Dictatorship, 1976–1983 226

Chapter Ten · Bonar L. Her ná ndez “Restoring All Things in Christ”: Social Catholicism, Urban Workers, and the Cold War in Guatemala 251

Chapter Eleven · Michelle Denise R eeves The Evolution of “Narcoterrorism”: From the Cold War to the War on Drugs 281

Afterwor d · A lan McPherson The Paradox of Latin American Cold War Studies 307 Contributors 321 Index 325

Preface

5 One of the most exciting features of studying the history of

the Cold War is the abundant opportunity for collaboration. At some level, of course, collaborative work is imperative in order to understand the Cold War in all its complexity. The East-West conflict touched every part of the world, after all, and affected all dimensions of human existence—not just geopolitics and military affairs but also the ideological, social, and cultural realms. No single scholar could hope even to come close to mastering everything. But collaboration is useful for another reason, too: The sheer pleasure of working with peers, exchanging ideas, and building a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. We editors are grateful to our contributors as well as to numerous individuals who have helped in various ways over the years as this project grew from an idea to a book proposal to a published collection. In the UT–Austin Department of History, we particularly thank the Institute for Historical Studies and its energetic and generous director, Julie Hardwick, who provided crucial support that moved us beyond the idea stage. Thanks go as well to Courtney Meador, who helped in innumerable ways with her signature combination of efficiency and generosity. The department’s senior Latin Americanist, Jonathan Brown, also deserves a word of special gratitude for encouraging us to pursue this volume. Creighton Chandler provided invaluable help in the closing stages. We are indebted in innumerable ways to all of our colleagues at UT– Austin and the University of San Francisco and thank them for the encouragement they have shown for our work. Ginny Burnett wishes to acknowledge in particular her graduate students, without whose efforts and enthusiasm this project could not have been completed. Mark Lawrence wishes to thank the Stanley Kaplan Program in American Foreign Policy at Williams College, which provided a wonderful temporary home during the 2011–12 academic vii

viii

Preface

year, and especially the program’s director, James McAllister. Julio Moreno thanks the Faculty Development Fund at the University of San Francisco. He is particularly grateful to Julie Hardwick and Courtney Meador at UT– Austin’s Institute for Historical Studies for providing a supportive and intellectually stimulating environment in the 2009–2010 academic year. Finally, we all express our deepest thanks to W. Clark Whitehorn, editorin-chief for the University of New Mexico Press. Clark showed enthusiasm from the moment we first described the project and shepherded the book to completion with a wonderful blend of efficiency, expertise, and good cheer. Thanks go as well to two anonymous reviewers, whose comments made this a better book in innumerable ways.

Introduction 5 V i rgi n i a Ga r r a r d -Bu r n et t, M a r k At wo od L aw r e nce , a n d J u l io E. Mor eno

It all started with rebellious teenagers. On January 7, 1964,

American students ran the U.S. flag up a flagpole on the grounds of Balboa High School, near the western end of the Panama Canal Zone. The gesture was intensely provocative. The question of where the U.S. and Panamanian flags could be flown in the canal zone had stirred controversy for several years, reflecting growing tensions between Americans and Panamanians over sovereignty in the ten-mile-wide strip of territory that the United States had controlled for more than sixty years. In late 1963, the U.S. governor of the canal zone had tried to defuse the situation by declaring that neither flag would fly over schools or other civic buildings. But the ploy backfired. Outraged by what they considered a cave in to Panamanian pressure, the Balboa students, backed by many parents and other “Zonians,” took matters into their own hands. Predictably, Panamanian high schoolers quickly retaliated. On January 9, 150 students from the nearby Instituto Nacional marched to Balboa High and attempted to fly their flag alongside the stars and stripes. Scuffling ensued. The Panamanian flag was torn. Word of the incident spread and, by nightfall, rioting had broken out along the borders of the canal zone, where thousands of U.S. troops were mobilized to safeguard the waterway. When the unrest ended three days later, twenty-one Panamanians and four U.S. soldiers lay dead. Panamanian President Roberto Chiari severed relations with the United States, demanding that Washington agree to scrap the old treaties governing control over the canal and negotiate a new deal.1 1

2

Introduction

The violence and the diplomatic fallout deeply alarmed U.S. policymakers. President Lyndon Johnson and many of his advisers suspected communists of stirring up all the trouble. “Kids started it and the communists got into it,” Johnson complained.2 The Central Intelligence Agency fueled Johnson’s fears as the diplomatic standoff continued into February, asserting that the Panamanian communists were dictating “practically every idea” expressed by Chiari and that if the confrontation lasted another month “it is probable that Panama will be the second socialist country in America.”3 This assessment was, as U.S. leaders soon came to realize, wildly off the mark. While leftists no doubt sought to exploit the unrest, the Panamanian communist party remained small and ineffective. The rioting and the diplomatic confrontation that ensued resulted from deep anger across the Panamanian political spectrum about treaties viewed as a grotesque remnant of U.S. quasi-colonialism in the days of Teddy Roosevelt. Indeed, as negotiations opened to restore diplomatic relations and ultimately to rewrite the canal treaties, leftists played no important role outside of stirring fear among Americans. Rather, Chiari and his successor Marco Robles—both of them representative of the conservative, land-owning oligarchy that ruled Panama—joined in various ways with the repressive National Guard and corporate leaders such as the head of the local Coca-Cola Company to play the key roles in advancing Panamanian demands. When Washington agreed at the end of 1964 to renegotiate the canal treaties, the Panamanian foreign minister rejoiced that the concession, far from emboldening the left, would send the communists “al carajo”—to hell.4 The flag riots and their aftermath neatly illuminate the complexities of the Cold War in Latin America. Observers, especially in the United States, readily viewed the confrontation through the lens of the East-West struggle. They were not, of course, entirely wrong to do so. Although Panamanian, Cuban, and Soviet sources remain mostly inaccessible, it is not difficult to imagine that communists and Castroites inside and outside of Panama sought to exploit the clash to serve their larger goals. Yet the episode in Panama was no simple proxy confrontation between the democratic-capitalist West and the communist East. The crisis originated, after all, with teenagers acting on nationalist impulses rooted in grievances that long predated the Cold War. The mundane location of the flagpole confrontation suggests that hostilities sprang from tensions woven into everyday life for demonstrators on both sides of the issue, not from the dictates of distant superpowers. Perhaps the most striking feature of the crisis, however, was the extent to which Washington

Introduction

3

found itself sharply at odds with centrist and even right-wing elements in Panama, the very groups that shared U.S. anxiety about communism in Panama and the hemisphere more generally. Indeed, Johnson’s decision in December 1964 to open negotiations on new canal treaties—a watershed moment in U.S.–Latin American relations—reflected his ultimate judgment that the confrontation did not break down along simple Cold War lines. The United States stood to gain, Johnson concluded, by making concessions to conservative elements rather than standing firm and thereby risking the very leftist hostility that Americans so desperately feared. Scholars of the Cold War have made great strides in appreciating this kind of complexity in recent years. Although studies of high-level policymaking in Washington and Moscow unquestionably remain vital to understanding the East-West confrontation, many innovative historians have increasingly sought a fresh perspective by examining how less powerful countries, groups, businesses, and individuals—even high school students— experienced the Cold War and influenced its course. The results suggest that the United States, the Soviet Union, and to a lesser extent China, generally set the international agenda and constrained options open to governments and peoples around the world. New studies also demonstrate, however, that less powerful entities found innumerable opportunities to harness, reject, manipulate, or accentuate the Cold War in order to advance their particular agendas. People and institutions far beyond the leaders of the world’s most powerful nations, in short, exercised agency over the course, meaning, and outcome of the Cold War.5 The newer scholarship also makes clear that the Cold War was deeply woven into the fabric of routine existence for millions of people around the globe, affecting how they understood not only high politics but also the circumstances of their own lives and the nature of their own societies.6 In many instances, too, the newer scholarship calls into question the view of the Cold War as strictly a struggle between left and right, communists and democratic capitalists. In fact, divergent views and competing pressures within the two blocs often shaped the course of the Cold War, not least by constraining the leadership of Washington and Moscow.7 In this book, we aspire to build on all of these insights by presenting a series of essays that, in diverse ways, highlights the enormous complexity of the Cold War in the Western Hemisphere. In doing so, we aim to locate and explore a fertile middle ground between two types of analysis common in the study of the Cold War in Latin America. One strand, the dominant tradition in writing about U.S.–Latin American relations, views the United States as

4

Introduction

an all-powerful and (almost always) repressive hegemon that wielded practically unchallengeable political, economic, military, and cultural power in the hemisphere. This interpretation is neatly encapsulated in the metaphor “talons of the eagle,” enshrined in the title of Peter H. Smith’s classic study of U.S.–Latin American relations since the breakup of the Spanish empire in the New World.8 This perspective continues to influence much scholarly work down to the present day. Our goal is, in part, to question the totality of U.S. domination by exploring ways in which Latin Americans determined their own history by resisting U.S. influence or, more often, bending the Cold War to local purposes. Yet we have no intention to write Washington (or Moscow) out of the picture. In examining Latin American agency, one must be careful not to overstate the case. The differential in power between the United States and Latin American governments, as well as the obvious intention among U.S. officials to exploit that differential at many points during the Cold War, are simply too obvious to justify pushing Washington too far into the background. We therefore prefer the metaphor “the eagle’s shadow” in order to convey the point that the eagle certainly loomed large but that other governments as well as groups, companies, organizations, and individuals still had room for maneuver to promote their own interests and perspectives. Taking this generalization as a starting point, the essays in this collection address three interrelated questions. First, how and to what extent did those Latin American governments and other entities exercise initiative in shaping the Cold War in the hemisphere? On the grandest level, the Cold War centered on competing ideological systems that claimed universal applicability. In practice, however, the U.S., Soviet, and Cuban models of political and economic development were, at best, imperfect fits for other countries and often encountered strong resistance rooted in local aspirations, rivalries, and traditions. Sometimes, local actors simply opposed foreign influences. In other cases, local protagonists adapted or manipulated the broader currents of the Cold War for their particular purposes. Although none of this is terribly surprising, historians have only recently begun exploring in detail precisely how Latin Americans, like smaller powers and subnational groups in other parts of the world, went about exerting power and gaining a share of control over their own destinies. Pressing ahead with this work is no small matter if we hope to achieve a fuller understanding of the global Cold War, which increasingly appears less an all-encompassing bipolar struggle and more a multisided conflict in which power flowed in multiple directions, even

Introduction

5

if some powers wielded far more control than others. Appreciation of such complexity inevitably depends on a willingness to delve into the details of specific historical case studies since agency was exercised in different ways with different results at different times. The second question running through this collection is how Latin Americans outside of government experienced the Cold War in their everyday lives. For many years, of course, diplomatic historians have written about the East-West conflict as an episode in international relations. Yet, as scholars have increasingly observed in recent years, the Cold War was also lived experience for ordinary people around the world. It provided people with ideological commitments and group identities, rationalized the extension of state power into areas far removed from foreign policy, provoked anxieties that carried over into the personal realm, and provided a major theme in popular culture, media, and the arts. One of the most fertile lines of inquiry entails examining how Latin American governments sought to control everyday life and especially how ordinary people pushed back against their governments in both overt and subtle ways. In exploring these interactions, we can gain valuable insight into the meaning of the Cold War for millions of people who had little direct stake in the ideological or military clash between Washington and Moscow. Such people were far more likely to experience the Cold War through the behavior of their own governments than through concern with global affairs. The third question is how well the left-right, communist-capitalist dichotomy—so often the starting point for the study of the Cold War—maps onto the reality of the Cold War in Latin America. In posing this question, we do not deny in any way that the East-West conflict had enormous consequences for Latin America or that many disputes broke down clearly along left-right lines. Nor do we wish to downplay the brutalities committed by both right and left in pursuit of their doctrines. The following pages, like so much of the vast scholarship on the Cold War in Latin America, make that much abundantly clear. Yet, as some of the chapters in this volume demonstrate, the bipolar configuration of the global Cold War did not always correspond precisely to tensions that played out in specific instances in the hemisphere. The naked quest for power or profits sometimes trumped ideology in determining behavior. Sometimes, too, right or left acted in ways that defied expectations or stereotypes. Acknowledging such complexity helps establish exactly what role ideology played in the conduct of the Cold War and what other motivations, in what mixes, spurred action.

6

Introduction

The following chapters cover, of course, only a small sample of topics, which deal in depth with only a few countries. Guatemala and Nicaragua are especially well represented, while other pivotal nations such as Chile, Colombia, Cuba, and El Salvador receive less attention. Moreover, the chapters concentrate disproportionately on the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, leaving the early and final Cold War years mostly to the side. This distribution of topics and chronological coverage reflects in part the book’s origins in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin, a leading institution for the study of Latin America. Inevitably, students, faculty, and fellows cluster around certain countries and research problems. The range of topics in this collection also stems from our sense that the years after the Cuban Missile Crisis remain less thoroughly studied by scholars than the earlier phases of the Cold War. The book aspires to push further into the latter stages of the Cold War than similar volumes have attempted to do thus far. Additionally, the topics examined in this collection reflect our priority to put chapters dealing with high-level international relations alongside chapters focusing on interactions between Latin American governments and ordinary people. In this way, we aim to promote thinking about the interrelationship between the Cold War as a geopolitical phenomenon and the Cold War as quotidian experience. We offer the following chapters not as any kind of exhaustive overview of the Cold War in Latin America but as good scholarship that might contribute to a fuller picture of the Cold War in the hemisphere and, perhaps most important, inspire further research. Despite the large amount of writing on the Cold War in Latin America, after all, opportunities for fresh research abound, and the circumstances are becoming more favorable all the time for ambitious scholars. New archival material is becoming available at a rapid pace, especially in Latin American countries but also in the United States, where previously unobtainable documents on the 1970s and 1980s began to open up in the early twenty-first century. Meanwhile, Russian archives and repositories in other nations of the former Eastern Bloc promise to be increasingly important to scholars of Latin America’s Cold War. The passage of time since the end of the Cold War helps in another way too. A rising generation of scholars, lacking direct experience of the Cold War, can approach the subject with fresh eyes, relatively free of the passions that once swirled around their subject. To approach the topic dispassionately does not, of course, mean losing the ability or willingness to make judgments, even stark ones. Rather, it means that those judgments will be rooted in greater awareness of complexity and carry greater authority.

Introduction

7

Historiography The greater awareness of complexity that informs our inquiry results in no small part from outstanding recent scholarship on the Cold War in Latin America. Much of the richness of these studies flows from scholars’ determination to grapple with agency and to reexamine the connection between local conflicts and the global Cold War. The questions of how Latin Americans shaped their destinies and how their lives connected to national or transnational trends are, of course, not wholly new in recent years. There is, however, something fresh in the way scholars have conceptualized and answered these questions since such matters gained popularity among cultural and diplomatic historians in the 1990s. In this section, we review these recent trends in order to acknowledge our intellectual debts and further explore some of the interpretive questions at the heart of the essays in the collection. Prior to the 1990s, commentary on the Cold War in Latin America tended to mirror the ideological polarity that characterized the conflict itself. This polarization was understandable considering that U.S. policy in the region triggered passionate responses from the right and the left. Scholarship on the right mirrored the political milieu of the era, emphasizing Soviet influence in Latin America and viewing social unrest as proof that the Western Hemisphere faced a communist threat. It depicted counter-insurgent measures of rightwing governments and the alliances that the United States formed with some of those regimes as appropriate responses to imminent threats. The left, on the other hand, condemned hawkish cold warriors in the United States for aiding oppressive regimes and defending a system that kept millions of people in poverty. Moreover, left-leaning scholars read violent civil conflicts in Latin America as products of U.S. foreign policy and voiced moral opposition to U.S. behavior in the region. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, left-leaning scholars typically viewed social conflict and revolutionary mobilization in Latin America as a direct expression of the Cold War. Their studies often recognized the agency of Latin American workers, activists, and government leaders but typically ended with the defeat of Latin American popular movements at the hands of repressive forces supported by the United States.9 They acknowledged the actions of those who advocated social change at the local and national level but concluded that those actions, with the notable exception of the Cuban revolution, usually succumbed to the power of conservative forces. Their explanations of U.S. and rightwing oppression typically focused criticism on Latin America’s elite, U.S. imperialism, capitalist greed, and the naked thirst for power.10

8

Introduction

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the end of hostilities in Central America with the signing of peace accords, and the resumption of civilian government throughout most of Latin America in the early 1990s briefly diminished scholarly interest in the Cold War. Yet the peace process demanded coming to terms with nations’ traumatic recent pasts and led scholars to seek a more complex and nuanced understanding of the Cold War that took into account the human legacy of these struggles. Instead of asking how the United States and conservative Latin American elites shaped lives in the hemisphere, the newer scholarship has focused on explaining how individuals and organizations on the ground limited the power previously attributed to national or foreign authorities. Concern with such peripheral actors was not new; this line of inquiry was not much different from doing history from the bottom up. However, the focus on power relations, at a time when the historical profession turned toward cultural history, helped develop a deeper understanding of how various sectors of society, even those that appeared powerless, had some say in shaping their histories.11 Centering their research on the study of power relations, cultural historians made local agency in Latin America central to interpretations of U.S.– Latin American relations in the 1990s. Since then, Gilbert Joseph and Emily Rosenberg have led the way in this endeavor with their series, American Encounters/Global Interactions, published by Duke University.12 The number of books in this series is immense, diverse, and impressive. These studies connect fragments of Latin American society and culture to the Cold War and to the general dynamics of U.S.–Latin American relations. Building historical narratives around these fragments, they center research on units of analysis such as film or birth control pills that, at the surface, appear unrelated to the study of war or international affairs.13 Using these units as points of entry into broader themes, they demonstrate how individuals, organizations, or entities at the local level interacted with the national or the global, how that interaction ascribed meaning to daily life, and how individuals responded to efforts by others to shape their values, beliefs, or practices. The emphasis on how local populations responded to outside influences gives agency to actors previously seen as passive and significantly empowers individuals or entities previously portrayed as secondary players in the study of U.S.–Latin American relations. Parallel to the work of scholars in cultural history, many diplomatic historians sought to de-center the way they conceptualized the Cold War, but they understandably took geopolitics, instead of social or cultural history,

Introduction

9

as a starting point. Prior to the late 1980s, scholars of diplomacy generally placed their studies of the Cold War within the broader geopolitical context of the East-West conflict and examined the Cold War from the vantage point of the superpowers. Because their interests centered largely on how the U.S.Soviet conflict was waged in the periphery, case studies often presented Latin American nations as laboratories that either tested or mimicked the broader nature of the global Cold War. Not surprisingly, these studies usually focused on countries that served as arenas of conflict and time periods that marked specific turning points in the conflict. Within Latin America, historians often concentrated on Guatemala in 1954, Cuba in the years following Castro’s revolution, Chile in the 1970s, and Central America in the 1980s.14 As a whole, these studies explained how the United States stifled reform, overthrew governments, and armed, trained, and encouraged Latin American militaries to resist communism. In this framework, Latin Americans often appeared passive, devoid of agency, and subject to the dictates of Washington or, in the case of Cuba, of Moscow. Studies that focused on U.S.–Latin American relations understandably criticized U.S. foreign policy and generally pointed to U.S. geopolitical interests, prejudice, and racism, and the search for either profit or power as the motive for actions in Latin America.15 Despite the tendency to view the United States as a hegemonic entity, some scholars, particularly those concerned with U.S.-Mexican relations, began to question this approach in the 1980s. Looking from Mexico toward the United States and Europe, Friedrich Katz explained how “Mexicans attempted to use the rivalries of the great powers for their own ends” in his landmark 1981 study of the 1910 Mexican Revolution.16 Similar to Katz, Lorenzo Meyer examined how the aftermath of the 1910 Mexican Revolution shaped the context in which U.S. companies were nationalized and gave Mexicans the upper hand in transnational relations in the early twentieth century.17 Praised by scholars of Mexico but largely unnoticed by diplomatic historians who looked from the United States toward Latin America, these studies essentially gave agency to Mexicans in their relationship with the United States. How much agency scholars ascribed to Latin Americans and how such agency shaped interpretations of the United States as a key actor of the Cold War varied from study to study, but diplomatic historians began to grapple with these questions around the time the Cold War ended. This trend started with Stephen G. Rabe’s 1988 study of Dwight Eisenhower’s anticommunism in Latin America. Rabe acknowledged that Latin American dictators such as Rafael Leonidas Trujillo often acted either independently of the United

10

Introduction

States or against U.S. interests in the region.18 Rabe did not question U.S. hegemony over the Dominican Republic but showed how Trujillo adeptly circumvented U.S. domination to promote his own brand of authoritarianism. Following Rabe, Michael W. Weis provided a similar interpretation of U.S.-Brazil relations. Weis spoke of President Juscelino Kubitschek actively trying “to take advantage of the North American preoccupation with communism” as a diplomatic strategy to advance Brazil’s industrial capitalist development in the 1950s.19 Finally, in his study of U.S. policymaking toward Central America in the late Cold War, William M. LeoGrande concluded that U.S. policies under Ronald Reagan ultimately failed to bring down the left because local leaders, even those who sided with the administration, either refused to cooperate or proposed specific agendas that differed from Reagan’s plan to dismantle the left in Central America.20 These scholars ultimately gave only limited agency to Latin Americans, but they all hinted strongly at the constraints on U.S. dominance.21 In the first decade of the twenty-first century, diplomatic historians have gone further in questioning the notion that the United States and the Soviet Union were the dominant actors in every Cold War episode in the developing world, arguing instead that players in Asia, Africa, and Latin America actively shaped the Cold War, influencing both policy and everyday implementation to suit local and parochial interests. This view significantly expands and complicates earlier interpretations that saw either Washington or Moscow as the sole protagonists in the global conflict. Eloquently pioneering the new perspective, Piero Gleijeses argued in Conflicting Missions that Fidel Castro was no puppet of the Soviet Union. Instead, he presented Castro as an independent revolutionary leader and clever strategist who decided to help revolutionary movements in Africa in order to avert a frontal attack from Washington, which Castro knew Cuba could never defeat.22 Similarly, Daniela Spenser suggested in a 2007 essay that Moscow’s dependence on Cuba as a showcase for the communist bloc gave Havana a good deal of influence in Soviet-Cuban relations in the Cold War more generally.23 A second recent trend in diplomatic history draws on the questions and methods of cultural history. This trend also accelerated in the 1990s with general studies of U.S.–Latin American relations by Emily Rosenberg, Thomas O’Brien, and other scholars who looked at the spread of U.S. cultural norms through diplomatic or business ventures and examined how Latin Americans responded.24 Similar to Rosenberg and O’Brien, Alan McPherson began to bridge cultural and diplomatic history in studies that dealt specifically

Introduction

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with the Cold War era. McPherson looked at how various leaders in Central America and the Caribbean used anti-Americanism to advance their own interests, with varying degrees of success. Unlike others who had looked at antiAmericanism as a mere response to U.S. hegemony or geopolitical interests in the region, McPherson carefully demonstrated that anti-American sentiments unfolded throughout the region with different results and implications.25 His work stood in sharp contrast to earlier studies that viewed anti-Americanism as a form of resistance that either succeeded, as in Cuba, or was ultimately defeated. The works of Rosenberg, O’Brien, and McPherson reflected the growing dialogue in the 1990s between diplomatic historians and scholars of cultural history. Joseph, Catherine C. Legrand, and Ricardo D. Salvatore advanced this interaction in Close Encounters of Empire.26 In this collection of essays, the editors introduced the concept of “contact zones,” interactions in which local populations exercise agency and negotiate power.27 Bringing similar concerns to their studies of U.S.–Latin American relations, Louis A. Pérez’s Cuba in the American Imagination and Dennis Merrill’s Negotiating Paradise both probe questions of cultural representation and social interaction as they ascribe agency to Latin Americans in their relationships to the United States and connect their studies to U.S. foreign policy in Mexico and the Caribbean.28 The dialogue between scholars in diplomatic and cultural history has recently brought new insights to the study of the Cold War in Latin America and opened new lines of inquiry. Volumes edited by Joseph, Spenser, and Greg Grandin advanced this research with contributions by scholars in both subfields.29 These collections expanded the geographical focus of the Cold War and made Mexico, long understudied by historians of the Cold War, a vibrant field of research. The focus on Mexico came in part as a result of contributions by Seth Fein and Eric Zolov, whose works uncovered the significance of film, music, and other cultural forms to the study of the Cold War. They showed that while Mexico’s history guaranteed that it was not a typical theater of the Cold War, it was not immune to international pressures, particularly due to its proximity to both the United States and to Cuba.30 The opening of long-closed archives in the first decade of the twenty first century—declassified CIA documents, national police archives, “terror” archives, and the like—has made the reexamination of the Cold War in the region not only a possibility but a necessity. New archival material on the triangular relationship between Mexico, Cuba, and the United States calls

12

Introduction

for more work on how the Mexican government fought the Cold War. Kate Doyle’s research, like Renata Keller’s contribution in this collection, puts Mexico’s presumed autonomy from U.S. Cold War policies to the test. Declassified documents obtained by the National Security Archive show that while the Mexican government refused to publicly follow U.S. Cold War policy and maintained diplomatic relations with Cuba despite public opposition from the United States, this display of animosity depended on “a secret and highly sensitive compact made between Mexican heads of state and their counterparts in Washington.”31 Doyle’s findings complement broader studies of U.S.-Mexican relations by Sergio Aguayo-Quezada, Julio Moreno, and others. These studies show that effective governance after the 1910 Mexican Revolution required creating an impression of autonomy from the United States. Public expressions of this autonomy often included theatrical displays of anti-American revolutionary rhetoric while diplomatic, commercial, and cultural relations between the two countries solidified.32 They show that politicians and others in Mexico gained leverage from the display of antiAmerican sentiments in order to advance interests that often aligned with those of the United States. Despite the richness that recent scholarship has brought to the study of the Cold War in Latin America, the legacy of old polarities still colors the way in which history is understood and taught. This persistence stems, in part, from the difficulty that scholars face in locating the proper balance between the power of Latin Americans and that of the United States. Within diplomatic history, scholars generally acknowledge the value of attempting to strike a balance.33 In practice, however, their studies typically lean strongly to one side. For example, Hal Brands and Stephen Rabe both note the value of balancing Latin American agency and U.S. hegemony, but their studies end up falling on different sides of the line. Brands’s pioneering Latin America’s Cold War demonstrates the way Latin Americans shaped the Cold War and downplays the U.S. role, exposing him to criticism for going too far in this direction. Rabe’s Killing Zone, on the other hand, argues that Latin Americans influenced the Cold War but cautions that this influence was secondary to U.S. hegemony.34 The difficulty of striking a balance between Latin American agency and U.S. hegemony does not necessarily lessen the contributions of these studies, but a tendency to read such works through old Cold War lenses might have that effect. Explaining the Cold War with a focus on either Latin American agency or U.S. hegemony has also presented a dilemma for cultural historians. The

Introduction

13

root of this quandary, however, is different from the one facing diplomatic historians. Most cultural historians frame their work within a left-leaning critique of U.S. foreign policy and represent the thinking of social historians who made the turn to cultural history in the 1990s. As a result, they look at U.S.–Latin American relations as a product of either social interaction or cultural representation. Studies that focus on social interaction look at how individuals, organizations, or entities interact against the backdrop of broader hegemonic processes like the Cold War, U.S. imperialism, or neoliberalism. These studies rarely unpack the complexity of hegemonic entities. They therefore tell stories of how local and national populations exercised agency but only within the confines of a dominant force. Studies focusing on cultural representation typically explore language as a tool of hegemony. This approach inevitably filters cultural representation, values, beliefs, and practices—the entire social and cultural complexity of daily life—through the politically charged context of the Cold War. It magnifies the political sphere and ascribes a type of power to the Cold War that, at the very least, merits more research. After all, in spite of the Cold War, the daily lives of Latin Americans continued, as they had in the past, to be influenced by factors that did not relate to the conflict.

Overview Mindful of these problems but hopeful of offering illuminating studies, this book proceeds not chronologically or geographically but according to a loose thematic progression. The first chapter complicates the left-right, capitalistcommunist dichotomy that often defines the Cold War. This is Julio Moreno’s piece on Coca-Cola in Latin America, a corporation and product that to many people around the world are synonymous with U.S. culture and capitalism writ large. Yet Moreno’s nuanced discussion offers a portrait of a corporation often at odds with its local producers and with corporate and U.S. goals. The embodiment of this complexity is John Trotter, a U.S.-born and virulently anti-communist businessman who managed a Coca-Cola bottling plant in 1970s Guatemala. Trotter’s refusal to recognize workers’ rights, despite calls for restraint and negotiation from the corporate headquarters in Atlanta and warnings from the U.S. State Department, resulted in the kidnapping and murder of local union leaders. By embracing right-wing Guatemalan interests, Trotter openly and successfully defied both the interests of the corporation and U.S. government policy for his personal economic advantage.

14

Introduction

A second case that presses the point about the limits of U.S. political and economic influence even during the very heart of the Cold War is Giovanni Batz’s study of the Méndez Montenegro regime in late 1960s Guatemala. Batz shows how the nation’s brief “return to democracy,” through the election of a civilian president, though officially supported and much touted by the United States, was almost immediately undermined by the Guatemalan military. The military, which had ruled the country since the late 1950s, was able to capitalize on a relatively small guerrilla movement’s presence in the eastern part of the country to justify the launch of a large-scale counterinsurgency campaign, the suspension of basic civil rights, and a return to full military rule only four years later. This successful maneuver, the first of many in which the Guatemalan military openly defied official U.S. “support for democracy” while still fulfilling the larger objective of “defeating communism,” proved to be such a useful strategy for the prosecution of counterinsurgency campaigns that it became known in Latin American military circles as “the Guatemalan solution.” By the same token, while much has been made of the “balance of power” between the two superpowers during the Cold War, power in Latin America during that era was anything but balanced. Cuba, though looming large in the Cold War imaginary, was the Soviet Union’s only proxy in the hemisphere and, as Gleijeses has made clear, it was an unreliable one at best.35 The asymmetry between U.S.-supported military governments and right-wing dictatorships and the often idealistic but usually small and poorly equipped guerrilla groups (often made up of students, peasants, and other nonprofessional militants), through the lens of retrospection, now seems woefully improbable. That only one such rebel group—Nicaragua’s Sandinistas—gained sufficient traction to overthrow the powerful and fiercely anticommunist Somoza regime may reflect as much on the U.S. distraction and weariness with Latin America as on the left’s enduring vigor by the late 1970s. Nevertheless, this fact takes us back to the question of local agency, as we examine precisely how and why local governments reacted and often overreacted to the challenges that small guerrilla groups, even those actually trained or armed by Cuba (including those expressly dedicated to the overthrow of the state and the imposition of a Marxist system), genuinely posed to their regimes. If, as Robert McNamara and many others have proposed, proportionality is a key tenet of war, then the disproportionality of the response to the “red threat” in Latin America during the Cold War still remains inexplicable, if hegemony and polarity are the only categories used to understand the imbalance.

Introduction

15

Given these imbalances, several of the chapters of this book complicate our understanding of the limits of superpower, generally North American, hegemony in the region. Storm Miller’s chapter chronicles the strange and shifting Caribbean-basin alliances of the early 1960s. Here, with Cuba’s Fidel Castro at one end of the axis and the Dominican Republic’s mercurial anticommunist dictator Rafael Trujillo at the other, the United States risked an uneasy courtship with centrist Venezuelan leader Romulo Betancourt, only to have it undermined by personal animosities and grandiosities, backroom deals, and shifting alliances among the Caribbean leaders themselves. In chapter 4, Jonathan Brown further develops our understanding of the limitations of hegemony and of Cold War realpolitik in his study of the continued support of Cuban commandos by U.S. covert agencies after the Cuban Missile Crisis, in direct violation of the agreement for missile withdrawal and against a rising tide of anti-U.S. public opinion in Latin America. Brown describes how the United States—risking charges of overt imperialism and international meddling in Latin America—continued to support freelance anti-Castro Cuban commandos for a time after the humiliation of the Bay of Pigs invasion, only to pragmatically drop them when it became apparent that they could not mount a successful takeover of the island. Renata Keller, by contrast, demonstrates in chapter 5 how Mexico defied the “colossus of the North” by forging a separate foreign policy with Cuba in the 1960s. Yet Keller argues that the Mexican government wavered in its support of leftists causes and kept strict surveillance of prominent Mexican leftists, including former president and champion of the reforms of the Mexican Revolution, Lázaro Cárdenas. Here, as elsewhere in the volume, we see the lines of demarcation and anticipated polarities of the Cold War are faint and shakily drawn, framed as much by domestic concerns and everyday realities as by firm geopolitical convictions and ideologies. Perhaps even more unexpectedly, we see unlikely and complicated alliances emerging in James Jenkins’s piece on the American Indian Movement (AIM)’s support for the Miskitu Indians in Nicaragua in the 1980s, thus pitting them not only against the Sandinistas, who had supported AIM’s occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973, but also creating a de facto alliance with AIM’s sworn enemy, the U.S. government. On the other side of the spectrum, K. Cheasty Anderson explores how Cuban health workers contributed to the success of the Sandinista health care campaign, a large-scale social reform and such a singular achievement for the leftist Sandinistas that Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, George Schultz, called it a “cancer in our

16

Introduction

backyard.” But if the United States saw the Cuban medical presence as clear evidence of Nicaragua’s hard turn to Leninism, the Cubans themselves did not. Instead, the Cuban government closely monitored its own workers to keep them from fraternizing too closely with Nicaraguans and to avoid potential defections to Nicaragua, a state it deemed to be too unorthodox and bourgeoisie to be regarded as a trustworthy communist ally. One of the themes that runs through this book is the way in which Latin Americans experienced the Cold War in their everyday lives, not only through conventional apparatus (state repression, for example, or violence) but also, sometimes, through the very normality of the situation. We see this very clearly in Seth Garfield’s chapter, which demonstrates how the Brazilian military government used the countryside as one of its key battlegrounds, exploiting the Cold War and the repression of labor unionists, activists in agrarian reform, and other “radicals” to advance its own economic and political agenda. Garfield shows how, under the veil of Cold War rhetoric, the Brazilian government deftly capitalized on local and longstanding conflicts over economic and political power. It successfully sought to squelch land reform and to “remake” the countryside by vastly expanding the national security state in rural areas and by strongly encouraging the mass migration of Brazilians into the cities, where social controls were more easily enforced. Jennifer Hoyt’s chapter reminds us that the Argentine military’s Proceso did not originate as a “Dirty War” but as an actual process through which the nation was supposed to be cleansed and reformed and thereby inured to the siren calls of communism. Hoyt’s case study of the city planners for the city of Buenos Aires demonstrates the ideals of the new society through improved garbage collection and new visions of city planning, including the use of green spaces and early environmental planning. Her reading challenges our popular understandings of the basic venality of the regime. Bonar Hernández’s chapter on Guatemala describes how efforts at reform within the system were subverted and reconfigured by local actors, to very different effect. His study of Catholic workers (Jocistas) describes how young people became involved in a moderate workers’ forum designed to insulate Catholics from the twin perils of communism and liberal capitalism. By the 1960s, the Jocistas—many of them urban college students from working and middle class families—had begun to transform the organization from a conservative entity to one that began to push for reform and justice. While still maintaining a “positively anticommunist” position that prevented the Jocistas from embracing the armed left, by the middle of that decade, Jocistas, too, became victims of state-sponsored repression.

Introduction

17

The final chapter examines how, as the Cold War at long last began to play out with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reintegration of the Iron Curtain countries back into Mitteleuropa, the power, money, resources, and geopolitical attention that had once been focused on the East-West conflict began to be reallocated within Latin America. In her essay on the emergence of the “war on drugs” in the Andes, Michelle Reeves points out that the exigencies of the Cold War during the Reagan years conflicted with and preempted concerns about the rise of what would soon be called “narcoterrorism.” By the early 1990s, the war on drugs neatly replaced the Cold War, at least in South America, allowing for a redirection of defense funds and strategic alliances between the governments of key Andean nations like Colombia and the United States. As the Cold War—the defining struggle of the second half of the twentieth century—receded, the war on drugs became the new paradigm for U.S. involvement in the hemisphere at the dawn of the millennium, at least until 2001, when the new “war on terror” knocked Latin America almost entirely from Washington’s hierarchy of strategic concerns. notes 1. Superb accounts of these events may be found in Alan McPherson, Yankee No!: AntiAmericanism in U.S.–Latin American Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 88–99, and Clara Nieto, Masters of War: Latin America and the U.S. Aggression from the Cuban Revolution Through the Clinton Years (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), 99. 2. Johnson telephone conversation with Mike Mansfield, Jan. 10, 1964, WH6401.11, PNO 12, Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library (hereafter LBJL). 3. CIA cable, “Communist Exploitation of the Current Situation,” 5 Feb. 1964, National Security File, Country File, LBJL. 4. Ambassador Jack Vaughn to State Department, 18 Dec. 1964, box 67, NSF, CF, LBJL. 5. For agency exerted by Latin American governments, see especially Hal Brands, Latin America’s Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), and Max Paul Friedman, “Retiring the Puppets, Bringing Latin America Back In: Recent Scholarship on United States–Latin American Relations,” Diplomatic History 27, no. 5 (November 2003): 569–97. 6. See, for example, Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War, updated ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), and numerous essays in Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniela Spenser, eds., In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 7. See Brands, Latin America’s Cold War, and Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). The theme has been developed more fully in connection with other parts of the world. For an all-encompassing view, see Tony Smith, “New Wine for New Bottles: A ‘Pericentric Paradigm’ for the Study of the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 24, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 567–95.

18

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8. Peter H. Smith, Talons of the Eagle: Latin America, the United States, and the World, 3rd. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 9. Peter Winn, Weavers of Revolution: The Yarur Workers and Chile’s Road to Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 10. André Gunder Frank, Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution: Essays on the Development of Underdevelopment and the Immediate Enemy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), and Marjory Mattingly Urquidi, Dependency and Development in Latin America, trans. Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). 11. For wider discussions on cultural history, see David Chaney, The Cultural Turn: SceneSetting Essays on Contemporary Cultural History (London: Routledge, 1994); Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 12. For example, see Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994); Gilbert Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand, and Ricardo Salvatore, eds., Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.–Latin American Relations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). 13. For example, see Victoria Langland, “Birth Control Pills and Molotov Cocktails: Reading Sex and Revolution in 1968 Brazil,” in In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniela Spenser, 308–49 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 14. F. Parkinson, Latin America, the Cold War, and the World Powers, 1945–1975 (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1974); Thomas J. Watson Fr. Institute for International Studies, In the Shadow of the Cold War: The Caribbean and Central America in U.S. Foreign Policy (Providence, RI: Brown University Choices for the 21st Century Series, 1995). 15. Fredrick B. Pike, The United States and Latin America: Myths and Stereotypes of Civilization and Nature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992); Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (Austin: University of Texas, 1992); Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy Toward Latin America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 16. Friedrich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), vi. 17. Lorenzo Meyer, México y los Estados Unidos en el conflicto petrolero, 1917–1942 (México: El Colegio de México, 1981). 18. Stephen G. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of Anti-Communism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 153–58. 19. W. Michael Weis, Cold Warriors and Coups D’État: Brazilian-American Relations, 1945– 1964 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 97. 20. William M. LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977– 1992 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 198 and 526–48. This claim is based on the refusal of the Salvadoran right to initiate the social reform that would have diminished domestic opposition to Reagan’s policy and secure greater congressional funding. It also refers to Costa Rican President Oscar Arias proposing a peace agreement that differed from Reagan’s diplomatic agenda during his last two years in office.

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19

21. Many scholars of Mexico gave agency to Mexicans in their studies of U.S.-Mexican relations in the 1990s, expanding earlier studies by Katz and Meyer. See Daniela Spenser, The Impossible Triangle: Mexico, Soviet Russia, and the United States in the 1920s (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Friedrich E. Schuler, Mexico Between Hitler and Roosevelt: Mexican Foreign Relations in the Age of Lázaro Cárdenas, 1934–1940 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998); María Elena Paz, War, Security, and Spies: Mexico and the U.S. as Allies in World War II (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997); Sergio Aguayo Quezada, El panteon de los mitos: Estados Unidos y el nacionalismo mexicano (México: Editorial Grijalbo, S.A. de C.V., 1998); and Enrique Florescano and Ricardo Perez Montfort, eds. Historiadores de Mexico en el siglo II (México: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1995). 22. Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, 374–76, and Gleijeses, “The View From Havana: Lessons from Cuba’s African Journey, 1959–1976,” in Joseph and Spenser, In from the Cold, 112–33. 23. Daniela Spenser, “Revolutions and Revolutionaries in Latin America Under the Cold War,” Latin American Research Review 40, no. 3 (October 2005): 378–89, and Spenser, “The Caribbean Crisis: Catalyst for Soviet Projection in Latin America,” in Joseph and Spenser, In from the Cold, 77–111. 24. Emily Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982); Thomas O’Brien, The Revolutionary Mission: American Enterprise in Latin America, 1900–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); O’Brien, The Century of U.S. Capitalism in Latin America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999). 25. McPherson, Yankee No!, and Alan McPherson, ed., Anti-Americanism in Latin America and the Caribbean (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006). For studies on earlier periods that look at the complexity of local responses to anti-American nationalism in specific countries, see Michael Gobat, Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua Under U.S. Imperial Rule (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), and Julio Moreno’s Yankee Don’t Go Home!: Mexican Nationalism, American Business Culture, and the Shaping of Modern Mexico, 1920–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), among others. 26. See their edited volume, Close Encounters of Empire. 27. Joseph and others borrowed this concept from anthropologist Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992). 28. See Lois A. Pérez Jr., Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), and Dennis Merrill, Negotiating Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Twentieth-Century Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). The list of other scholars with similar lines of inquiry in their research is extensive and, among others, includes Moreno, Yankee Don’t Go Home!; Gobat, Confronting the American Dream; and Thomas O’Brien, Making the Americas: The United States and Latin America from the Age of Revolutions to the Era of Globalization (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007). 29. Joseph and Spenser, In from the Cold, and Greg Grandin and Gilbert Joseph, A Century

20

30.

31.

3 2. 33.

3 4. 35.

Introduction

of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America’s Long Cold War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). See Seth Fein, “Producing the Cold War in Mexico: The Public Limits of Covert Communications,” in In from the Cold, 171–213, and Eric Zolov, “Cuba sí, Yanquis no! The Sacking of the Instituto Cultural México-Norteamericano in Morelia, Michoacán, 1961,” in In from the Cold, 214–52, and Zolov, Refried Elvis: The Rise of Mexican Counterculture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). This is based on Kate Doyle’s “Double Dealing: Mexico’s Foreign Policy Toward Cuba,” an electronic briefing book on relations between Mexico, Cuba, and the United States in collaboration between Mexico’s Proceso Magazine and the National Security Archives, March 2, 2003, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB83/index.htm#article. Aguayo-Quezada, El panteón de los mitos, and Moreno, Yankee Don’t Go Home! Joseph and Spencer’s In from the Cold, Brand’s Latin America’s Cold War, and Stephen G. Rabe, The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) all acknowledge the need to focus on local agency. Rabe, Killing Zone. Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions.

· Ch a p t er On e ·

Coca-Cola, U.S. Diplomacy, and the Cold War in America’s Backyard 5 J u l io E. Mor e no

After secretly meeting Fidel Castro, Coca-Cola CEO Paul Austin

briefed President Jimmy Carter at the White House in March 1977.1 A friend and long-time supporter of Carter, Austin hoped the president would adopt policies that would allow his company to return to Cuba. His bid followed earlier company efforts to reenter the island after Castro’s 1960 nationalization of $1.6 billion in property owned by Americans, including $27.5 million by the Atlanta-based company.2 The U.S. embargo and tense bilateral relations confined Coca-Cola’s activities thereafter to a repayment claim the company filed before the U.S. Foreign Claims Commission, but this changed in the 1970s when Coca-Cola expressed a willingness to forgo repayment in exchange for permission to return to Cuba. By the mid-1970s, Castro welcomed the idea of America’s soft drink maker indirectly returning to Cuba through its Mexico division. To make this happen, company executives held a five-day meeting with Cuba’s Food Ministry in October 1975 and agreed to open three bottling plants within five years. Because of Cuba’s lack of hard currency, the two parties agreed on a barter system. Cuba would pay Coca-Cola with rum for concentrate and bottlingplant equipment. The company would then sell rum in other countries in order to convert Cuba’s payment into hard currency. Castro’s deployment of troops 21

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to Angola in November 1975, however, placed the agreement on hold. Waiting for tensions to ease, the company deferred a January 1976 meeting with Cuban authorities. Austin’s March 1977 Havana trip ended the wait.3 With Castro willing and Carter in the White House, a 1977 return to Cuba seemed feasible, but this rapprochement did not materialize and ended in 1981 when Coca-Cola named Roberto Goizueta, a Cuban exile, the company’s CEO.4 Though Goizueta abandoned Coca-Cola’s interest in Castro’s Cuba, he did not object to doing business in communist countries. On the contrary, the company entered the Soviet Union in the 1970s and continued expansion to China and Eastern Europe in the 1980s under Goizueta’s leadership.5 Extending this approach to Latin America, Coca-Cola showed no objection to operating in countries with leftist governments. In fact, the manager of Santiago’s bottling plant in early 1970s Chile was a member of the communist party.6 Coca-Cola’s willingness to operate in either socialist or communist Latin American states during the Cold War made sense given that U.S. policymakers accepted corporate expansion to communist countries elsewhere. However, U.S. Cold War policies differed across regions. While U.S. policymakers saw commercial expansion to China and Eastern Europe as strategies to undermine the pillars of communism, they viewed business expansion to Cuba as supportive of the communist regime and a violation of the U.S. trade embargo. In other parts of the Caribbean and Central America, U.S. foreign policy strengthened militant anticommunist factions. There, U.S. foreign policy and the militant right turned local disputes and national conflicts into ideological battles that violently polarized civil society. This ideological polarization clashed with Coca-Cola’s market-driven corporate strategy, as it limited market potential and therefore undermined the company’s business.7 Centered on Cuba and Guatemala, this chapter looks at how U.S. corporate interests conflicted with America’s Cold War foreign policy and the militant right in the Caribbean and Central America. This conflict of interests disrupted Coca-Cola’s corporate growth and even threatened the company’s global business. Its impact, however, depended on how the company expanded to this region, on how the United States and local right-wing factions fought the Cold War in each country, and on the ability of independent franchise bottlers and transnational activists to strategically engage the Atlantabased company in highly polarized ideological battles. Coca-Cola expanded into the Caribbean and Central America in the early 1900s through a corporate model that made the company dependent on

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23

U.S. capital and franchise bottlers that became a liability during the Cold War. It entered Cuba in 1906 with full ownership of a bottling business that did not show significant corporate growth until the 1950s and ended abruptly in 1960 with Cuba’s nationalization of U.S. companies. Except for Cuba, the company’s worldwide business operated through franchise bottlers. Franchises gave Coca-Cola the opportunity to expand with someone else’s capital, limited corporate risk, and allowed the company in Atlanta to focus on trademark and sales—leaving the bottling business to others. Relying on this model, Coca-Cola entered Guatemala in the 1910s with U.S. bottling franchises that failed to generate significant business until the 1940s and ended in the hands of a U.S. franchise holder that sided with the country’s militant right during the Cold War. Headed by John Trotter, this bottler ordered the violent repression of union leaders and spoke of it as a heroic stand against communism. His actions mobilized Guatemalan workers, U.S. religious and human rights organizations, and international labor unions in a movement that turned the local labor conflict into a global management crisis for CocaCola headquarters in Atlanta. Though the interests of those who mobilized against Coca-Cola differed, one of these organizations, the International Union of Food and Allied Workers (IUF), used the local conflict to advance the status of international labor. The way U.S. diplomacy, Trotter, and the IUF drew Coca-Cola Atlanta into full-blown Cold War conflicts brings into question the power scholars typically attribute to Coca-Cola. At the surface, Coca-Cola’s global presence and status as an icon of U.S. capitalism make the portrayal of its economic and cultural dominance abroad understandable. However, this portrayal attributes a type of power the soft drink maker did not have in the Caribbean and Central America.8 The company’s corporate expansion strategy, the nature of Cold War conflicts, and the influence of individuals and organizations all limited its power and business in this region. Coca-Cola, therefore, did not act as a bulldozer spreading abroad unopposed and in sync with the U.S. government, as some scholars interpret the expansion of U.S. companies overseas.9 Instead, Coca-Cola’s ability to advance its corporate interests depended on negotiation with the various entities that had an impact on the business and with how much power those entities exercised. By focusing on how the company and others attempted to advance their own interests, this chapter is in line with studies of agency and hegemony, but it unpacks these concepts and disentangles the conflict between the U.S. corporate sector and anticommunist Cold Warriors.10 It makes agency, or the ability of those who

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gained enough leverage to influence the soft drink maker, subject to an analysis of how the terms and conditions for successful business operations and their evolution either empowered or disempowered the various parties that interacted with Coca-Cola. In other words, it looks at U.S. hegemony in relationship to local agency as a possibility but not a pre-determined condition. This view of U.S. hegemony and its relationship to local agency explains why U.S. foreign policy would energize Coca-Cola’s expansion to the Caribbean and Central America in the early twentieth century but undermine its corporate interests during the Cold War.

The Dilemma of Expanding to America’s Backyard The presence of Americans in the Caribbean and Central America triggered Coca-Cola’s expansion into this region in the early 1900s. In Cuba, U.S. presence in the 1890s had a direct connection to Coca-Cola and to U.S. missionary work. Asa G. Candler, who had purchased Coca-Cola in the 1880s and turned the small Southern company into a national icon in the 1890s, initially became familiar with Cuba through his brother Warren. A Baptist missionary in Cuba and founder of Candler College in Havana, Warren often counseled Candler on personal and business matters. In fact, Candler gave Warren some company stock and often asked him for marketing assistance when the Baptist minister traveled throughout the United States.11 Warren represented an increasing number of Americans who, after the Spanish-American War, were either stationed in Cuba or visited the island and provided a pool of consumers already familiar with Coca-Cola. The company, therefore, expanded into the Caribbean and Central America to cater to U.S. citizens. This focus on U.S. consumers suggests that domestic underconsumption in 1890s America, as some scholars suggest, did not power Coca-Cola’s initial expansion into this region. Rather, U.S. foreign policy, which supported an increasing flow of U.S. citizens into this region, had this effect.12 Besides catering to Americans in Cuba, Coca-Cola hoped to capitalize on a sector of Cuban society that associated independence from Spain, modernity, and material progress with consumption of U.S. goods.13 To tap into this market, Candler deployed a salesman to Havana in 1899.14 Encouraged by the sale of 128,000 drinks that year, he started shipping syrup to Jose M. Parejo, a Spanish wine merchant who decided to enter the soft drink business with Coca-Cola.15 Parejo’s business depended on the sale of Coca-Cola syrup

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to local Havana cafes and bars. These outlets, which catered to Americans and were booming after the Spanish-American War, kept Parejo busy, as restaurants and bars in Havana served U.S. food and drinks at any hour.16 The business grew enough to justify the opening of a Havana bottling plant by 1906.17 Because Coca-Cola Atlanta had recently developed a subsidiary in Canada, its first and at that time only corporate entity overseas, the company decided to connect its Cuban bottling business to Canada. Through this corporate model, the Atlanta-based company became the indirect owner of Coca-Cola’s bottling business in Cuba. Coca-Cola’s entrance to Cuba was inseparable from U.S. imperialism, but this link did not give the company much clout. The company initially expressed interest in foreign markets in 1896 when Candler declared CocaCola would not lag behind in expanding abroad.18 Candler allocated enough corporate resources to introduce Coca-Cola to Hawaii, Canada, Cuba, Panama, and Puerto Rico by 1910. He also launched efforts to register the CocaCola trademark throughout Latin America. These initiatives, however, had no real corporate muscle. The company planned to enter Mexico in 1898 and Rio de Janeiro in 1906, but it was unable to move forward with these plans.19 It registered the trademark in Mexico by 1904, but it did not open business in the country until the late 1920s. Most important, the company failed to secure trademark rights in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. Such oversight delayed entrance to three of Latin America’s largest markets until the 1940s, and it stirred Coca-Cola’s expansion toward the Caribbean and Central America, a region where the socioeconomic status of the local population limited soft drink consumption and kept the company largely dependent on the presence of Americans there. Coca-Cola launched a second wave of expansion in the 1920s that established a successful business model in Mexico but failed elsewhere in Latin America. The company’s success in Mexico depended on alliances with local entrepreneurs, whereas the bottling business in the Caribbean and Central America operated through U.S.-owned franchise holders. Mexican entrepreneurs secured franchise contracts from Atlanta in the 1920s and turned Mexico into a model business by the 1930s. By contrast, only one of six bottling plants Coca-Cola opened in the Caribbean in the 1920s was successful by 1936. In Central America, Coca-Cola entered Panama in 1906 to cater to Americans working on the canal. Following entrance to Panama, the company gave Edward W. Hunt and A. D. Baird of Alabama franchise rights for Guatemala in 1914, but this bottler failed.20 As a result, Coca-Cola gave A. C. King, the

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contract bottler from Panama, the rights to also cover Guatemala and El Salvador by the early 1920s.21 The presence of Americans in Panama and the flow of people through the canal made King’s business successful, but he was not able to transfer that success elsewhere. As King retreated from his Central America business in the late 1920s, the United Fruit Company (UFC) built a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Guatemala’s Bananera region, but the company reported its bottling business showed no progress by 1937. For firms like UFC, bottling investments were designed to support the communities they established as enclaves and did not represent a business priority. Because these firms had already established a presence in the region, they offered Coca-Cola a quick and relatively simple venue for expansion abroad. However, the focus on enclave markets kept Coca-Cola largely insulated from the local population and stood in stark contrast to Mexico, where highly motivated Mexican entrepreneurs learned their affiliation with the company rapidly increased preexisting bottling operations and considered Coca-Cola crucial to their businesses.22 Illustrating the focus on UFC enclave markets in Guatemala, Coca-Cola sent 13,000 gallons of concentrate to Bananera from 1927–1936 but fewer than three hundred gallons to the rest of the country. With such regional disparity, it is not surprising that Ramiro Fernández, Coca-Cola’s legal counsel, reported that most Guatemalans considered Coca-Cola a new product by 1941.23 Coca-Cola prioritized the development of local markets in the Caribbean and Central America by the 1940s, but it continued to rely on a corporate model that, engrossed in imperialist projects since the 1890s, made the company vulnerable to nationalist and social reform movements. This corporate model consisted of either direct investment or franchise contracts with U.S. entrepreneurs who already had business interests in the region. It also proposed bottling plants in areas with U.S. citizens, hoping to use the presence of U.S. consumers as a stepping-stone into the local market. This model worked relatively well in Cuba and Panama, but it failed in other parts of the Caribbean and Central America where only one of nine bottling plants that opened in the 1920s was deemed successful by 1936. While the business in this region inevitably connected Coca-Cola to imperialist projects, the advantages of such connection did not translate into much power, as the company did not have enough clout to develop a local market independently from U.S. citizens. Such lack of power suggest that, far from being a dominant imperialist company as some scholars contend, Coca-Cola’s presence within the local population was, for all practical purposes, “soft,” and reduced to an iconic representation of the American way of life.24

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Further limiting Coca-Cola’s clout, the company’s dependence on U.S. franchise bottlers often competed with national and local business interests. Reliance on U.S. bottlers stemmed partly from a lack of capital in the Caribbean and Central America but also from the existence of U.S. networks in this area. The initial focus on U.S. consumers put company executives in contact with individuals, organizations, and networks that led to the granting of franchise contracts to U.S. citizens. At first, these networks offered a convenient corporate expansion venue with little or no direct investment. However, once entrenched on this corporate path, dependence on U.S. franchise networks proved difficult to shed. Despite gradual change in ownership after the 1950s, the business in the Caribbean and Central America continued to stand in sharp contrast to other parts of Latin America, where national capital and local entrepreneurs owned significant portions of the bottling business. As nationalism and social tensions escalated in the 1960s, local franchise holders proved more effective in advancing corporate interests and controlling the impact of local conflicts than U.S. investors. In other words, the advantages dependence on U.S. capital and U.S. franchises gave Coca-Cola in the early 1900s had become a liability the Cold War exacerbated. No countries illustrated this better than Cuba and Guatemala.

Coca-Cola in Cuba: A Casualty of Diplomatic Relations Coca-Cola’s business was finally booming in 1950s Cuba before conflicts with the United States triggered Castro’s nationalization of U.S. companies and moved both nations into rigid Cold War ideologies that kept the soft drink maker out of Cuba after 1960.25 Company sales reached a 14 percent annual growth rate by 1953 and 18 percent by 1957.26 The construction of new bottling plants paralleled sales growth. The company built a bottling plant in Santiago in 1911 after entering Havana in 1906 but did not open another one until the 1948 Santa Clara bottling plant. A 1953 bottling plant followed in Piñar del Rio, and a fifth facility was built in Camaguey by 1956. Growth continued with a second Havana bottling plant. This plant, originally scheduled for 1957, opened late as Coca-Cola tried to avoid capturing national headlines at a time when social and political tensions escalated throughout the country.27 Grand opening festivities typically included the presence of political leaders, and opposition to Fulgencio Batista made association with his government counterproductive by 1957. Efforts to shun association to politics, however, did not extend to the commercial and cultural sphere. Despite its subdued

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1958 opening, the new Havana bottling plant attracted such wide interest from local residents and U.S. tourists that the company organized guided hourly tours of the plant in Spanish and English.28 Confident that the political environment would not threaten the company’s business, Coca-Cola extended its corporate functions in late 1950s Cuba.29 It turned Havana into a regional headquarters for the Caribbean by summer of 1958. The company’s confidence in Cuba continued after the overthrow of Batista despite some concerns of increasing labor unrest and the country’s economy in the spring of 1959. In fact, the company classified the 1959 political transition as a product of social democratic movements that had legitimately called for reform in Latin America since the 1940s and even printed a picture of Castro drinking Coca-Cola in a 1959 issue of its global company magazine, Coca-Cola Overseas. The original picture, which CocaCola Atlanta received from the Caribbean headquarters in Havana, best illustrated the company’s overall outlook in 1959, noting that Castro liked to show his democratic spirit by drinking Coca-Cola.30 Coca-Cola’s 1950s boom represented a long-awaited upswing in a rollercoaster ride that had historically characterized the business in Cuba. Starting in the 1890s with U.S. syrup exports to Cuba, Coca-Cola’s first growth cycle ended in 1907 as a result of a ban triggered by legal battles over ingredients in the United States. Though U.S. courts ruled in favor of Coca-Cola, local bottlers in Havana presented the ban as proof that the soft drink was poison and warned people to avoid it.31 Severely affected by negative publicity, the company’s business went from a profitable 1906 to a gloomy outlook that left the Cuban branch in a $35,000 debt to the home office in Atlanta.32 Company sales recovered enough to allow the opening of a 1911 Santiago bottling plant, and business growth continued as the rise of sugar exports during World War I increased commercial and economic activity throughout the country.33 By 1919, which Coca-Cola considered its banner year, annual sales exceeded 12 million drinks.34 Unfortunately for Coca-Cola, major disruptions in the sugar industry, which dictated the health of the Cuban economy, forced a dramatic drop in sales by 1920. Though the company eventually recovered from this drop, corporate growth remained sluggish until the 1950s business upswing. Coca-Cola’s business model and its inability to establish independent franchise bottlers exacerbated the long corporate stalemate that characterized the company in Cuba after 1919. Because ownership of bottling made corporate growth in Cuba dependent on investment from Atlanta, the

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business in this country cut directly into the company’s cash reserves. Aware of this limitation to corporate growth, Coca-Cola tried expanding through franchise contracts. The 1911 bottling plant in Santiago initially opened as an independent franchise, but its failure prompted Atlanta to officially step in as the new bottler in 1913.35 Continuing efforts to establish an independent franchise system, Coca-Cola gave Francisco Calvet a franchise contract in 1926 that hinged on Calvet building a bottling plant in Santa Clara.36 Calvet did not build such plant, but the company continued to look for other franchise holders. It granted two additional bottling contracts for the region of Cienfuegos and Santa Clara in the 1920s: One of them went to Pedro Pablo Valdez and the other to Arturo Villafanes and Benito Larsen Villafanes.37 All of these contracts failed to establish new bottling plants and were cancelled by 1930. Unable to extend business operations through franchises, Coca-Cola pursued expansion with its own capital in the 1930s, but these plans did not materialize until 1948. The company considered opening bottling plants in Santa Clara, Camagüey, and Cienfuegos, but local conditions stopped these plans. In Santa Clara, the main problem centered on access to clean water, which was scarce and “looked like thick iced tea,” according to company executives.38 The concern for water in Santa Clara made sense and spoke of the company’s experience in Santiago, where water supply limited production capacity throughout the 1930s.39 As an alternative to Santa Clara, Coca-Cola considered Cienfuegos a location that offered reliable water supplies and the possibility of also reaching the Santa Clara market. However, cost considerations led the company instead to develop a franchise contract with a local bottling company owned by the Rada Family.40 This bottler offered CocaCola the best local bottling facility, but supplying the Santa Clara market from Cienfuegos proved too costly and impractical, even through a franchise.41 As a result, this contract, like those of the 1920s, was short-lived.42 As Coca-Cola’s experience in Cienfuegos showed, Cuba’s infrastructure and local market conditions hindered the company’s ability to expand. While promises of adequate water supply in 1930s Santa Clara did not materialize, poor transportation throughout the country made freight rates expensive and business impractical.43 From the company’s standpoint, Cuba’s infrastructure called for the building of multiple bottling plants that would theoretically reduce transportation distance and freight cost.44 However, the absence of reliable roads forced shipment of goods, even to small segments of the population, through rail. Rail raised transportation cost and limited

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the benefit of building multiple plants. Besides expensive shipment cost, the absence of plant equipment in Cuba required importing expensive bottling machinery to areas where the size of the market did not support these expenses.45 As a business that focused largely on marketing, publicity costs also hindered corporate performance. This, according to company executives, became a problem by the 1930s when the cost of outdoor advertising increased.46 In other countries, corporate headquarters in Atlanta absorbed only a fraction of these expenses, as it typically split publicity cost with franchise bottlers. This was not the case in Cuba where the company was responsible for all business expenses. Full ownership of the Cuban business also made Coca-Cola subject to the power of organized labor. Cuban workers gained significant leverage in collectively bargaining as a result of the social and political unrest that led to the overthrow of Gerardo Machado in 1933.47 This labor unrest included a series of strikes that paralyzed shipping and commercial activities in the summer of 1933. Fearing these strikes would spill into its bottling facilities, Coca-Cola closed business operations for nearly two weeks.48 Its strategy effectively weathered the social and political storm at the time. Most important, it averted labor conflicts by preemptively negotiating a salary increase with workers. The company also agreed to a salary increase and a shift to the commission-based payment the Havana salesmen’s union requested.49 CocaCola’s preemptive labor negotiation showed the power of organized labor in 1930s Cuba. That power increased as a result of the 1940 constitution, which officially recognized collective bargaining.50 Empowered with a constitutional mandate and with the reemergence of a national labor movement, workers at Coca-Cola actively pressed for higher salaries by the mid-1940s. Putting the 1940 constitution into practice, they requested the assistance of government officials as they pursued a 40 percent salary increase in 1944. The request came after they rejected an 11 percent raise the company had previously offered. In an effort to flex its muscle, the union accompanied the request with a strategic slowdown of labor operations and a strike ultimatum. As union leaders threatened to strike, company executives announced they would shut down the business if necessary, but both sides continued to negotiate. Hoping to strengthen their bargaining position, union leaders brought the country’s Ministry of Labor into the negotiation, but this strategy backfired, as the ministry recommended a 14 percent salary increase. Workers ultimately pressed Coca-Cola into a 23 percent salary increase, but they filed a complaint with the Cuban Government, arguing that

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they could have negotiated a higher salary had the ministry made a better recommendation.51 As pressure mounted, Coca-Cola blamed the cost of living for labor unrest and worker demands the company could not meet.52 Capturing the impact of this pressure, the company reported that Havana plant workers had requested a salary increase in 1948, only two months after it had given them a raise.53 Acknowledging that worker mobilization threatened its corporate growth, Coca-Cola launched labor policies and corporate initiatives that powered its 1950s business upswing. Company executives had warned since the 1940s that organized labor harbored “a lingering antibusiness environment where workers were told that all companies were enemies regardless of evidence to the contrary.”54 This sentiment, according to Coca-Cola, made labor negotiation in Cuba one of the toughest in the Americas and was further exacerbated by a wave of worldwide nationalism. Coca-Cola’s assessment accurately described the power of labor in Cuba, as others confirmed Cuba ranked as one of three countries with the largest unionized workforce and the highest real wages in Latin America by the 1950s.55 To reverse this trend, the company strengthened labor management and boasted worker morale under the leadership of Monte Thomas. Coca-Cola initially appointed Thomas president of the Cuban business in 1946 and promoted him to management of the Caribbean Region by the late 1950s. Thomas considered paying higher salaries than other employers, offering lucrative fringe benefits, and establishing favorable working conditions good business practices. He enacted policies requiring management to praise union leadership, publicly express employee appreciation, and inform workers of key company decisions at the planning, instead of the implementation stage. He also required managers to personally acknowledge significant events in the lives of company employees. These acknowledgments consisted of flowers, letters, or personal calls after births, deaths, or a severe sickness in the family of company employees. Under Thomas’s leadership, Coca-Cola also developed similar corporate initiatives to boost the morale of those indirectly affiliated with the company through a Dealers Relations Department. This department worked with Cuba’s powerful National Dealers Association, which represented every organization or individual that delivered or served Coca-Cola throughout the country. As a whole, the corporate initiatives Coca-Cola introduced in 1950s Cuba, according to Thomas, boosted morale and made workers and those affiliated with the company sales minded.56

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Coca-Cola attributed much of the upswing in 1950s Cuba to policies enacted by Thomas. It presented his work as an example of how to do business in environments shaped by strong organized labor and nationalism. Thomas spoke on this subject at worldwide meetings and instructed company executives to consider how nationalism exacerbated demands for legitimate labor reform in their corporate planning. Nationalism and demands for social reform, according to Thomas, inevitably impacted Coca-Cola because of the company’s reputation as an icon of U.S. capitalism, but he insisted the company could successfully operate in this environment.57 Thomas’s view explains why, instead of limiting them, Coca-Cola increased investments and corporate functions in the midst of the bitter conflict that characterized late 1950s Cuba. As social and political tensions escalated, the company heightened public relations and trumpeted its exemplary relationship with Cuban workers. Capturing this tone, the company’s newsletter, Coca-Cola Cuba, published worker accounts that credited Coca-Cola for lifting workers and their families out of poverty. In one of these accounts, Daniel Rubio reported he was born to a poor Holguín family and that Coca-Cola had given him the opportunity to build a good family, to honorably support and educate his children, and to reach a stage in his life that offered personal satisfaction and hope.58 In a separate story, the newsletter explained the life of Antonio Busto Gonzalez, who had worked at the Havana bottling plant for forty-two years, captured the evolution of Coca-Cola in Cuba, and the satisfaction that characterized working for a company that always had a great relationship with workers.59 Unfortunately for Coca-Cola, what Thomas had accurately read as a nationalist social reform movement spiraled out of control by 1960, as U.S. opposition to the Castro regime strained U.S.-Cuban relations and triggered the nationalization of U.S. companies. With the nationalization of U.S. companies, the lingering anti-Americanism that served as a valuable political tool for Castro in the late 1950s, as Alan McPherson argues, became a full blown ideological campaign that moved the new government in early 1960s Cuba closer to the Soviet Union.60 With this move and with America’s Cold War policy toward Cuba, no public relations or corporate policy could reverse Coca-Cola’s fate in this Caribbean island.61 Once bilateral relations reached a breaking point, Coca-Cola’s business in Cuba was subject to the ideological conflict that divided the two nations and those affiliated with the company. No two individuals illustrate this division better than Roberto Goizueta and Mirta Muñiz. Born in Cuba and employed by the country’s Coca-Cola division in 1954, Goizueta left Cuba

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after 1959 and climbed the company’s corporate ladder in the United States— serving as the company’s CEO from 1981 to the mid-1990s. Muñiz, on the other hand, went from a position as a prominent Coca-Cola advertising executive at McCann Erickson in 1950s Cuba to the directorship of publicity and information for the People’s Power Institute and served as a delegate to Cuba’s national legislative body. Prior to serving in the country’s National Assembly and heading publicity and information for Castro’s government, Muñiz joined the underground movement against Batista in Havana. She was actively involved in the takeover of the country’s main TV station and the Havana Hilton, which served as a temporary base for the new government in the early days of the revolution.62 Because the break in diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States placed Cold War ideologies at the forefront of 1960s Latin America, the global struggle between communism and capitalism ultimately charted the path of individuals like Goizueta and Muñiz. Most important, it dragged Coca-Cola into the conflict, despite company efforts to remain neutral. CocaCola’s preference for corporate neutrality made sense, as its business depended on marketing a simple product that required mass volume and repeat sales. This made preserving a positive corporate image among consumers crucial to the company’s business. In this context, engaging in the ideological conflicts that characterized the Cold War directly undermined Coca-Cola’s core corporate principles.

Guatemala: From Local Conflict to Global Crisis While the break of U.S.-Cuban relations inevitably dragged Coca-Cola into Cold War Cuba, a Houston-owned franchise bottler placed the Atlantabased company in the middle of a violent conflict that characterized the Cold War in 1980s Guatemala. Unlike Coca-Cola’s experience in Cuba, which translated into mainly monetary loss and disruptions in the sugar market, local conditions in Guatemala spiraled into a full-blown international crisis that centered on the company’s image. Starting as a local labor dispute between workers and the franchise bottler, this conflict became so politicized by the left and the right that the bottler’s persecution of union leaders led international organizations to launch one of the most serious boycotts CocaCola ever faced. Confronted with this crisis, Coca-Cola Atlanta entered into negotiations with the IUF, the international labor union in Geneva that had stepped into the labor dispute on behalf of the worker’s union in Guatemala.

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The transnational labor negotiation in Guatemala was unprecedented for Coca-Cola and the corporate sector. Coca-Cola typically avoided interference in franchise management, as it believed it seriously jeopardized its global bottling network. However, the repression of union leaders by the Guatemalan bottler and the international attention it received left Atlanta no other option. Most important, the conflict gave pro-worker advocates significant moral ground they used as leverage in labor negotiations, and no other organization exploited this better than the IUF. In fact, the IUF used the Guatemalan conflict as an opportunity to place its international labor struggle within the context of the Cold War and in opposition to a company that had long been an icon of U.S. capitalism. In this context, the IUF and the franchise bottler, which filtered the labor conflict through right-wing Cold War ideology in order to legitimize brutal violence against union leaders, both used the labor dispute to advance their own agendas. Their ability to capitalize on a local labor dispute, however, depended on Coca-Cola’s reliance on U.S. franchises as the engine for corporate expansion and on the nature of the country’s Cold War. Expansion through U.S. franchises prevented an alliance with national entrepreneurs that avoided the type of conflict Coca-Cola Atlanta faced in Guatemala during the Cold War. One of the country’s most prominent families in beer bottling, the Castillo family, entered the soft drink industry by the late 1930s, just as Coca-Cola attempted to reenergize its business there. Instead of pursuing an alliance with the Castillo family, Coca-Cola continued to rely on U.S. investors. Initially, this decision made sense in light of Coca-Cola’s experience in 1930s Colombia, where efforts to expand through eight franchise bottling contracts with the nation’s most prominent bottler, Postobón, failed. The company later learned that Postobón had no interest in Coca-Cola; instead, the Colombian bottler had pursued the bottling contract with Atlanta as a strategy to protect its preexisting soft drink business. This experience made reliance on U.S. bottlers in Guatemala a safe move. However, it turned the Castillo family into a rival of Coca-Cola by the early 1940s. This family had initially entered the brewery business with the opening of Cervecería Centroamericana in 1886 and had gained control of this industry with the manufacturing and marketing of the two national beer brands, Gallo and Monte Carlo.63 Pursuing entrance into the cola side of the soft drink business, Enrique Castillo tried to register Casti-Cola in 1940. The request was rejected on the grounds that Casti-Cola gave rise to confusion with other registered

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trademarks, namely Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola. Castillo appealed the decision, claiming “cola” was a generic descriptive term U.S. soft drink makers used in Guatemala. His appeal earned Casti-Cola trademark registration, but it also triggered legal opposition from Coca-Cola. The company argued Casti-Cola infringed on its 1910s Guatemalan trademark registration and its U.S. trademark, which the company deemed protected under the 1929 Pan American Washington Convention. As a party to this convention, the Guatemalan government recognized the registration of trademarks in signatory countries, and this proved critical to Atlanta’s victory over Casti-Cola. Coca-Cola claimed the legal principles in the 1929 Pan American Washington Convention that allowed Pepsi-Cola’s registration in Guatemala did not extend to Casti-Cola or other domestic companies. The Guatemalan government accepted this legal argument, but this was hardly a victory for Coca-Cola Atlanta, as it meant that the government also accepted registration of all cola trademarks in countries that had signed the 1929 Washington Convention.64 Casti-Cola’s legal defeat did not stop the Castillos from dominating Guatemala’s soft drink industry. They responded to the government’s ruling on Casti-Cola, which prohibited the use of this trademark, by marketing the same drink as C-C-Cola. This led Coca-Cola Atlanta to pursue a second trademark litigation process that ultimately took C-C-Cola off the market by 1942. After discontinuing C-C-Cola, however, the Castillos turned to two of the many types of colas that could legitimately be registered in Guatemala based on the 1929 Washington Convention. They signed a contract with Canada Dry to sell Spur la Super Cola.65 Though this soft drink failed to generate lucrative business, the partnership with Canada Dry also allowed the family to branch into the distilled water industry. Instead of surrendering the cola side of business to Coca-Cola, the Castillos signed a franchise contract with Pepsi through its Mariposa bottling firm, which the family had initially created in 1893. Partnership with Pepsi and new investments in marketing and distribution allowed this family to become a powerful player in Guatemala’s soft drink industry by the 1960s. The Castillos gained a greater share of the soft drink market by the 1970s, and this growth continued into the 1980s. In reference to Mariposa’s dominance in the bottling business, Beverage World reported in 2004 this Pepsi bottler had dominated the soft drink market in Guatemala since the 1960s.66 The company’s dominance translated into lucrative profits. By 1985, the Castillos had an estimated annual income of $67 million, a figure equivalent to nearly one-third of the country’s national budget. To make things worse for

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Atlanta, Coca-Cola could not win the public relations battle with Pepsi, as the antilabor actions of its bottler stood in sharp contrast to labor policies adopted by the Castillos. While Coca-Cola’s Houston-based bottler violently clashed with organized labor in Guatemala, the Castillos had a reputation of paying workers high salaries and providing lucrative benefits that extended to health care, education, and housing.67 Ironically, Coca-Cola’s reputation elsewhere was equivalent to the one the Castillos developed in Guatemala. CocaCola instructed franchise bottlers to adopt labor policies equivalent to those introduced in 1950s Cuba, but it did not officially stipulate labor policies to franchise contracts. Though most Latin American bottlers generally accepted the company’s labor recommendations, the Guatemalan bottler did not. Despite Castillo’s dominance over Guatemala’s bottling business, CocaCola’s share of the market looked promising up to the 1970s. Expansion through U.S. franchises led to substantial Coca-Cola growth in Guatemala after the 1940s. In fact, it was precisely this growth that discouraged a shift to national franchises, as was the case in 1950s Panama and southern Brazil where poor business performance of U.S. franchises turned Coca-Cola’s bottling business over to local entrepreneurs. In Guatemala, Coca-Cola’s bottling business ended up largely in the hands of Mutt Fleming, a former Pan American Airlines pilot who traced his wealth to Fleming Oil in Houston, Texas. After Mutt’s death in 1956, his widow, Mary Fleming remained the official owner of Coca-Cola’s franchise bottler in Guatemala City, Embotelladora Guatemanteca, S.A., or EGSA. With no intention of ever participating in the day-to-day management of the Guatemalan business, the widow hired John C. Trotter to manage the Guatemalan bottler shortly after her husband’s death.68 As incentive, Fleming gave Trotter minority holdings of the franchise and full management oversight, including power of attorney. A politically conservative attorney and Houston resident, Trotter managed the business from the United States, though he traveled to Guatemala on a weekly basis. To extend his influence throughout the bottling plant, he relied on personnel that embraced his political and management style, including militant anticommunist members of the Guatemalan military. From Trotter’s view, reliance on the country’s militant right for business management made sense, as he considered union organizing synonymous to communism and a threat to his bottling business. Initially, Trotter’s management style delivered noticeable business growth. Under his management, the franchise bottler sold an estimated 60 million bottles a year throughout the 1960s.69 This represented an average 1965 per capita consumption of fourteen

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drinks, a figure that was far below other markets but represented important gain in Guatemala. Business, however, started to decline by the mid-1970s as the labor conf lict between Trotter and union leaders spiraled out of control. Violent confrontation between the bottler and workers started in the 1960s when César Barrillas was killed for trying to unionize workers at the Coca-Cola bottling plant.70 Barrillas’s killing was part of a broader assault against activists and labor leaders launched by the state as part of its counterinsurgency measures in the late 1960s. These measures led to the killing and disappearance (people who were captured and never found) of up to eight thousand people from 1966 to 1968.71 As Guatemala’s civil war dragged into its second decade and right-wing repression of political opponents intensified, Trotter began to openly display his bitter antiunion stand as part of the country’s overall crusade against communism. Such display became clear in 1975, when workers at the bottling plant attempted, for the second time, to form a union. First, he tried bribing labor organizers, offering union leaders $15,000 and residence in the United States if they stopped organizing. After bribe attempts failed, he resorted to intimidation and threats. This included openly displaying close affiliation with powerful right-wing groups, declaring he would never allow a union in his factory and labeling pro-union workers communists. As the labor conflict escalated, Trotter adopted bolder forms of intimidation. He hired Juan Francisco Rodas, Edgar Daniel Castro, and Julio Garcia as managers of the bottling plant. These hires were former lieutenants from Guatemala’s Rio Hondo Military Base. Rodas, the manager of personnel, had trained at the School of the Americas. Alcoholism had cost Rodas military dismissal, but he remained an active member of the Secret Anti-Communist Army (ESA)—a paramilitary death squad unit that published the names of people it condemned to death prior to their execution.72 Instead of discouraging labor mobilization in the mid-1970s, threats and intimidation served as a catalyst for union recognition. The first major confrontation began in the spring of 1976, when workers occupied the plant after 150 employees had been fired for demanding union recognition and a collective bargaining agreement. Totter ultimately ordered the antiriot police unit Pelotón Modelo to deal with the standoff, but his actions galvanized unions affiliated with Guatemala’s National Confederation of Workers.73 Nearly fifty unions threatened to go on strike if Trotter did not recognize the union and a collective bargaining agreement. In response to union pressure, the nation’s Ministry of Labor ordered Trotter to settle the labor dispute.74

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Faced with this mandate, Trotter started negotiations, but he also pursued a corporate process to get around it. He split the franchise business into thirteen separate corporate entities to undercut the collective bargaining power of workers by artificially placing them into different corporations.75 His strategy failed when union attorneys, Martha and Enrique Torres, redesigned the union as a collective bargaining organization that encompassed the multiple corporate entities Trotter had created. They named this new entity Trade Union of Workers in the Guatemala Bottling and Associated Companies (STEGAC) and forced Trotter into a collective bargaining agreement. Legally obligated to recognize STEGAC, Trotter quickly moved to break the union. He capitalized on the catastrophic February 1976 earthquake to offer thirty workers loans to rebuild their homes, with the condition that they submit to the labor court different demands from STEGAC.76 He offered nonunion workers better salaries and formed a company association that rewarded non-STEGAC members. Parallel to these rewards, Trotter heightened intimidation and began indirect assault on and murder of union leaders. This explains why paramilitary groups assaulted Israel Márquez, hitting his van with multiple gun shots, and gunned down STEGAC’s secretary, Pedro Quevedo, at a commercial center in broad daylight.77 The assault on Marquez and Quevedo’s killing signaled a shift toward the most repressive three years STEGAC leaders endured. This shift paralleled the arrival of right-wing general Fernando Romeo Lucas García to the presidency in 1978. Lucas García energized Trotter’s handling of labor conflicts and the overall persecution of union leaders across the country. He denounced labor unions as subversive communist organizations and ordered the National Police to meet with right-wing businessmen, including Trotter and his plant managers, shortly after his election. Lucas García’s legacy, however, is better known for his violation of diplomatic protocol and ruthless use of force. He earned this reputation for authorizing the National Police to storm into the Spanish Embassy in pursuit of protestors who had entered the diplomatic site to denounce Guatemalan state terror. This January 1980 incident led to the death of over thirty people. García single handedly opted for this resolution to the standoff despite objections from the Spanish ambassador. In essence, Lucas García’s ideological pedigree and ruthless use of force allowed Trotter to indiscriminately pursue brutal repression of STEGAC members. By 1978, every individual who stepped into STEGAC’s leadership was forced to resign, driven into exile, or brutally killed by ESA. As head of

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personnel for the bottling plant, Rodas often summoned union leaders to his office to discuss labor issues. With active ESA membership in his resume and with Lucas García in the presidency, he often felt comfortable enough to pull out his gun and place it on the desk as he carried out these conversations. Besides tasteless, such disregard for professional business management was a direct threat to union leaders in light of the onslaught against STEGAC leadership. This included the murder of Manuel López Balam, who was gunned down while making his daily soft drink deliveries and the killing of Marlon Mendizabal right outside the bottling plant. The killing also extended to general union members, as five workers were killed for their affiliation with STEGAC. It also targeted the families of those affiliated with the union. After deciding to step in as an attorney for STEGAC, Yolanda Urizar’s sixteen-year-old daughter was beaten, raped, and tortured.78 Faced with this brutal repression but determined to not give in to Trotter’s ruthless labor resolution tactics, STEGAC turned to the international community. STEGAC’s turn to the international community established critical alliances with organizations that pressured Coca-Cola Atlanta into ending the conflict. STEGAC first linked its labor struggle with organizations in the United States through Sisters of the Providence, the National Council of Churches, and the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. Moved by Trotter’s onslaught of Guatemalan workers, Sister Dorothy Gartland and Father Charles Duhn turned to Coca-Cola Atlanta for a solution to the conflict. Using the two hundred shares of Coca-Cola that Sisters of the Providence owned, they introduced a stockholder resolution requiring the company to enact labor standards among bottlers worldwide. Coca-Cola did not adopt this resolution, but it engaged Gartland and Duhn in search of a solution to the conflict. Headquarters summoned Trotter to Atlanta and called a subsequent meeting that included Gartland, Duhn, Trotter, and company executives. Trotter agreed to end the conflict, but he was deceitful and, with Guatemala’s political climate turning further in his favor by 1978, decided to heighten repression instead. His actions drove Marquez and his family to seek political asylum at the Venezuelan Embassy after his name appeared in ESA’s death list.79 Outraged at Trotter’s actions, Gartland brought Marquez to the United States and used her organization’s ownership of Coca-Cola stocks, once again, to have him speak at the company’s May 7, 1979, stockholder meeting. Speaking before an international audience, Marquez denounced Trotter’s actions as he declared that “the image of Coca-Cola in Guatemala couldn’t be worse. . . . It

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is the most repressive company operating in the country.”80 Marquez’s statement bolstered U.S. solidarity with STEGAC, and solidarity extended beyond organizations with religious denominations. Similar to the Sisters of the Providence, Amnesty International exposed human rights violations at the Guatemalan franchise and pressured Coca-Cola Atlanta to resolve the situation. Their approach, however, differed from other organizations. Speaking on the difference in strategies to resolve the conflict, Amnesty International’s Bob Maurer declared his organization “always regarded Coca-Cola Atlanta as an ally” while organizations like the IUF did not.81 Bringing its international pro-labor credentials into the Guatemalan conflict, IUF stepped into the labor dispute on behalf of STEGAC—turning the local labor confrontation into a global struggle against worker exploitation and repression by America’s soft drink maker. Headed by Daniel Gallin in Switzerland, this organization launched a global campaign against CocaCola that made no distinction between the Atlanta-based company, which owned the trademark and sold the soft drink concentrate (excluding sugar), and the independent franchise bottling business Trotter represented. Unlike Amnesty International, IUF made Coca-Cola Atlanta fully responsible for actions of the Guatemalan bottler. IUF’s portrayal of Coca-Cola as a murderer of workers did not make sense from a corporate standpoint, as Coca-Cola Atlanta was a separate company from the Guatemalan bottler and never endorsed Trotter’s actions. From IUF’s strategic point of view, however, it made for a perfect David and Goliath story that garnered solidarity for Guatemalan workers worldwide. Trotter’s brutal repression and Coca-Cola’s status as an icon of U.S. capitalism made this labor conflict an ideal venue for IUF to advance its international labor rights agenda. Most important, Coca-Cola’s dependence on its brand name image, according to Gallin, made the company “more vulnerable to international union pressure than most corporations.”82 To turn the local conflict into an international anti–Coca-Cola campaign, Gallin convinced IUF unions in different countries to periodically stop production in solidarity with Guatemalan workers. At IUF’s request, workers in Finland, New Zealand, and Sweden agreed to periodically halt production as an effort to disrupt Coca-Cola’s business and pressure Atlanta to buy the Guatemalan franchise. IUF affiliates in Europe and North America also threatened to join the global efforts to disrupt Coca-Cola production. The global campaign, however, went beyond production sites. It included a consumer boycott that effectively turned Coca-Cola’s very own marketing success against the company, changing publicity slogans like the sparkle of

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life, or “la chispa de la vida,” to the sparkle of death or “la chispa de la muerte.” These altered slogans appeared on stickers and posters that showed distorted images of the company’s trademark with dramatic illustrations of workers in chains or Coca-Cola bottles dripping blood.83 As workers disrupted production and negative publicity powered an international consumer boycott, Coca-Cola allowed IUF’s Gallin to become a party to negotiations. This triggered a storm of criticism from the U.S. corporate sector, which criticized Coca-Cola for violating “the cardinal rule of not letting unions gain enough leverage to negotiate across nations.”84 Despite the criticism, Coca-Cola’s decision was in line with its overall approach to resolving the Trotter-STEGAC conflict. The company tried pragmatic solutions to the labor dispute from the start, but it lacked the necessary leverage to settle the conflict. Trotter’s personality, his affiliation with Guatemala’s militant right, and the legal aspects of the franchise contract all limited CocaCola’s leverage and its ability to prevent the labor dispute from spilling into a full-blown Cold War conflict. Prior to 1978, the company attempted to solve the conflict with labor measures it had successfully established elsewhere, getting Trotter to recognize the union and instructing him to adopt many of the labor management strategies Thomas had introduced in 1950s Cuba. These strategies had worked in Panama, where the local political context was less polarized and the local bottler endorsed Coca-Cola’s pragmatic approach toward labor negotiation, but they did not work in Guatemala. Coca-Cola continued to look for pragmatic solutions as Trotter heightened violence against STEGAC and IUF demanded that Coca-Cola terminate the franchise contract. Ending the franchise contract in Guatemala, however, threatened the sanctity of contractual agreements with bottlers worldwide. It created an uncertainty that directly undermined the company’s global franchise network. Coca-Cola also considered the request to revoke the franchise contract impractical, as it expected Trotter to take the company to court and stall the legal process for years. Claiming the company had no other option than to operate within the local institutional and legal environment, the company proposed allowing the contract to expire in 1981.85 Like Coca-Cola Atlanta, the U.S. government under President Carter shared the same frustration with Trotter in pursuit of a solution to the violence in late 1970s Guatemala. In response to international pressure on Coca-Cola, Ohio Congressman Donald Pease asked President Carter to look into this matter. The rise of killings by right-wing paramilitary groups and accounts of Trotter’s involvement in some of these killings stood in stark contrast to

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Carter’s concern for human rights violations in Central America. As Carter looked into Congressman’s Pease’s request, the State Department classified Trotter as an embarrassment but admitted it could not point the finger at Trotter without a conviction from a court of law. In other words, neither CocaCola nor the U.S. government could do much against Trotter outside the legal system. The dislike between Trotter and the Carter administration was mutual and resembled the same split between Trotter and Coca-Cola Atlanta. Like he had done with Coca-Cola executives, Trotter accused Carter and the State Department of promoting communism and actively supported Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign.86 An increase in violence against STEGAC, Gallin’s international boycott, and mounting pressure in the United States prompted Coca-Cola Atlanta to pursue a different solution to the crisis by 1980. Ted Circuit, who headed the Coca-Cola business in Guatemala from Mexico, met Mary Fleming in Houston to pursue the sale of the franchise to another owner before the contract expired. Fleming had the audacity to call Circuit a communist, but she ultimately agreed to sell the business.87 Furious that Circuit had directly negotiated a sales agreement with Fleming, Trotter heightened violence to sabotage the agreement and increase the sales price when he realized the commercial transaction was irreversible. Trotter had STEGAC’s Efraín Zamora killed just as John Kirby, a franchise owner in Mexico, and Circuit met in Guatemala to finalize the sale. Upon news of the murder, Kirby decided not to move forward with the purchase. After derailing the first sales attempt, Trotter informed Circuit of a potential buyer in Panama. Upon traveling to Panama, Circuit learned the buyer was Trotter. Trotter was mockingly proposing to buy the rest of the business from Fleming.88 As Trotter’s assault on STEGAC increased in 1980, Circuit asked Gallin to suspend the boycott while the company looked for a buyer.89 He explained Zamora’s death was a strategic move by Trotter and that continuing the boycott only strengthened Trotter’s sabotage. Fully aware of IUF leverage, Gallin did not budge despite evidence that Coca-Cola’s inability to find a buyer continued to jeopardize the lives of STEGAC members. Violence in 1980 escalated to a point where even Coca-Cola executives, including Circuit, feared for their lives. To avoid retaliation for talking to STEGAC members, Circuit met union leaders at a Guatemala City hotel in disguise, “wearing a wig, false mustache, and dark glasses as he talked to them side by side at the pool.”90 In this state of fear and with no sign of violence diminishing, Coca-Cola desperately looked for an entrepreneur with enough capital to buy the franchise. After

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failing to find such buyer and with Gallin refusing to halt the boycott, the company arranged for the sale of the franchise to Antonio Zash and Roberto Méndez.91 Zash and Méndez were willing to buy the business and had bottling experience, but they had no capital. After negotiating a $10.5 million sale, a figure company executives considered well above the bottler’s real $5 million value, Coca-Cola agreed to largely finance the purchase with the condition that Zash and Méndez pay the debt within five years.92 For Coca-Cola, the financing of this purchase made sense. Direct ownership of this highly controversial bottler went against company norms and set a precedence the company had wanted to avoid: the purchase of franchise bottlers that faced similar problems. The sale of the Guatemalan franchise ended labor tensions and CocaCola’s international crisis by November 1980, but this changed in 1983 when Zash and Méndez started to fall behind on loan payments.93 The bottler’s inability to comply with payment obligations prompted Coca-Cola to close the plant down. As news of the closure surfaced in February 1984, IUF launched an accounting review to verify Coca-Cola’s claim of financial difficulties as the reason for closing. The review showed Zash and Méndez had implemented accounting procedures to essentially undercharged distributors they owned independently from the franchise. Because Coca-Cola typically determined concentrate price based on the economic status of each bottler, the grim financial status painted by Zash and Méndez essentially lowered their concentrate price. In other words, by undercharging distributors they personally owned, Zash and Méndez showed a grim financial picture of their franchise, and that picture, in turn, triggered lower concentrate prices from Coca-Cola Atlanta and justified delays on loan payments. Lower concentrate prices, therefore, indirectly led to higher profit gains, but these gains showed on the distributors’ books that Zash and Méndez owned independently from Coca-Cola, not on the franchise’s books. Delays in loan payments, according to IUF reports, also cost Coca-Cola Atlanta $500,000 in losses.94 This loss, IUF claimed, justified revoking Zash and Méndez’s franchise contract, but the international labor organization wanted CocaCola to purchase the bottling facility. As Coca-Cola Atlanta refused to purchase the bottling plant and moved to close EGSA down, IUF launched a second international boycott in April of 1984. Coca-Cola settled the dispute the following month directly with plant workers, leaving IUF out of contract negotiations.95 IUF’s exclusion from 1984 labor negotiations showed the organization’s

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clout had declined significantly from 1980 when Gallin boasted about his organization’s bargaining position with Coca-Cola, stating, “IUF objectives were exactly what we got.”96 The decline made sense, as the dynamics for solving the labor dispute had changed in favor of Coca-Cola by the mid-1980s. Much of the change depended on the relationship Coca-Cola and the bottler established with workers after 1980. Zash and Méndez, as IUF confirmed, drove the franchise to financial ruin with accounting gimmicks for their own personal gain, but they maintained a good relationship with workers accepting STEGAC’s collective bargaining agreement and extending pension payments for families of workers that had died under Trotter. In the absence of violent worker-bottler relations, 1984 did not trigger the same global outrage and support for the IUF boycott as Trotter’s repression of union leaders did in 1980. Most important, plant workers in 1984 liked the collective bargaining agreement they had previously signed and therefore focused on preserving the existing labor contract. This gave them the platform to negotiate with Coca-Cola, which in 1984 did not face the international pressure or the contract limitations that characterized 1980 labor negotiations. Further strengthening Coca-Cola in 1984, a financially solvent consortium of Central American investors wanted to purchase the franchise and agreed to honor the collective bargaining agreement STEGAC had previously reached with Zash and Méndez.97 In this context, Coca-Cola gained enough leverage to set the terms and conditions to settle the mid-1980s labor dispute and keep IUF out of contract negotiations. This leverage, however, depended on the turn of events that happened by 1984 and did not give the company control of the market. It merely placed the company in a position where relations with either the franchise or organized labor no longer hindered corporate growth. By the mid-1980s, those relations operated in an environment where market forces, instead of Cold War ideologies, gradually gained greater significance as the decade progressed.98

Conclusion Cold War ideologies shaped the history of Coca-Cola in the Caribbean and Central America. In Cuba, the break of diplomatic relations with the United States placed the Atlanta-based company in the middle of a cold war conflict that ended the company’s business with Castro’s nationalization of U.S. companies in 1960 and then prevented Coca-Cola from reentering Cuba in the

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1970s. The company’s inability to return to Cuba stood in stark contrast to its expansion to communist countries elsewhere. It also spoke of a direct contradiction between the logic of U.S. corporate expansion as defined by CocaCola and the ideological principles that drove U.S. foreign policy in Cuba after 1959. That contradiction also characterized the company’s experience in Guatemala, where its interest conflicted with those of its franchise bottler and the country’s militant right. Coca-Cola’s conflict of interests with U.S. diplomacy and the militant right in the Caribbean and Central America during the Cold War demonstrates the need to disentangle entities scholars have typically lumped together. It also brings into question the view of U.S. companies as synonymous with U.S. foreign policy and hegemons that spread through the region. I have attempted this separation here by focusing on how individuals, organizations, and other entities, including the company in Atlanta, interacted and tried to advance their own interests around the presence of Coca-Cola in this region. Because the ability to advance their interests depended on a variety of factors that changed over time, the leverage or agency that each of these entities exercised evolved and depended on complex sets of relationships that shaped U.S. business and diplomacy, which also changed based on the way individuals, organizations, and entities behaved during the Cold War.

notes 1. Rogers DeWitt and Maurice Fliess, “Secret Mission: Coke’s Austin, Castro Meet,” Atlanta Journal Constitution, March 10, 1977, box 47, Coca-Cola Collection (CCC), Robert W. Woodruff Library (RWL), Emory University (EU). 2. “In Business this Week, Coca-Cola and Cuba,” Business Week (June 27, 1977): 36, Cuba, box 1, Coca-Cola Company Corporate Archives (CCCCA). 3. “Report on Cuba,” n.p., January 20, 1976, Zone Manager Meeting, Atlanta, Speeches and Meetings, CCCCA and Robert W. Woodruff to Fidel Castro Ruz, June 17, 1977, folder 9, box 47, CCC, RWL, EU. 4. Rogers DeWitt, “Reimbursement Hopes Fade; Cuba Trade Snag Dissolving,” Atlanta Journal Constitution, October 23, 1977, Cuba, box 2, CCCCA; “In Business this Week, CocaCola and Cuba”; and DeWitt and Fliess, “Secret Mission: Coke’s Austin, Castro Meet.” 5. Stephen Hesse, “China Win Evens Coke-Pepsi Bout,” no date, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, folder: “China, 1978–1979, 1981,” box 10, CCC, RWL, EU; no author, “Soda Pop Diplomacy: After Shunning the West for Decades, China Reaches for a Coke,” Atlantic Weekly (June 28, 1981): 12–24, folder: “China, 1978–1979, 1981,” box 10, CCC, RWL, EU; and no author, “Coke Becomes World Trader,” The Atlanta Journal Constitution (February 19, 1978), folder: “Ventures, 1978,” box 10, CCC, RWL, EU.

46 6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

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William O. Solms to Woodruff, August 18, 1972, folder: “William Solms Correspondence, 1971–84,” box 256, Robert Woodrow Papers (RWP), RWL, EU. Scholars like Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 4, 398–99, credit ideology for driving U.S. and Soviet foreign policy in the Third World. Many scholars speak of Coca-Cola as a dominant imperialist entity and use the term “Coca-Colonization,” which emerged as a leftist European critique of U.S. cultural dominance in the 1960s—a synonym of U.S. imperialism. See Rob Kroes, “American Mass Culture and European Youth Culture,” in Between Mark and Coca-Cola: Youth Cultures in Changing European Societies, 1960–1980, ed. Axel Schildt and Detlef Siegfried, 82–105 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006); Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Richard F. Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Roberto Drummond, Sangue de Coca-Cola (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira, 1985); and Humphrey McQueen, The Essence of Capitalism: The Origins of Our Future (New York: Black Rose Books, 2003). The view of companies expanding to Latin America as overpowering entities is extensive among scholars influenced by the dependency theory. See Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Dependency and Development in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Manuel Thinker Salas, The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997); Thomas F. O’Brien, Making the Americas: The United States and Latin America from the Age of Revolutions to the Era of Globalization (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007); and Peter Chapman, Jungle Capitalists: Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World (Edinburg: Canongate, 2007). While this view accurately assess the power of many U.S. companies in Latin America, especially those in extractive industries, scholars of U.S. business abroad must look closely at how much power specific companies exercised in a particular region and industry. Many explain U.S.–Latin American relations through an analysis of agency and its relationship to hegemony, typically praising the triumph of either agency or hegemony. See O’Brien, Making the Americas; O’Brien, The Century of U.S. Capitalism in Latin America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999); O’Brien, Revolutionary Mission: American Enterprise in Latin America, 1900–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Dennis Merrill, Negotiating Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in TwentiethCentury Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Gilbert Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand, and Ricardo D. Salvatore, eds., Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.–Latin American Relations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniela Spenser, In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); and Michael Gobat, Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua Under U.S. Imperial Rule (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). Jim Watson to Harrison Jones, December 18, 1929, “History of Coca-Cola in Cuba, 1900–1909,” Cuba, box 1, CCCCA.

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12. This challenges the underconsumption thesis, which suggests that U.S. domestic underconsumption in the early 1890s triggered U.S. corporate expansion abroad. See Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963). 13. Lois A. Pérez Fr., On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 23–36, 109–41. 14. “Eighth Annual Report of the President to Stockholders,” January 11, 1900, n.p., The Minutes of the Coca-Cola Company: A Georgia Corporation, 1892–1910, vol. 1, CCCCA. 15. “The Coca-Cola Corporation: An Illustrated Profile,” 1974, Coca-Cola Company, p. 40, box 5, RWP, RWL, EU. 16. Perez, Becoming Cuban, 23, 126. 17. H. F. Bray Report, January 16, 1930, “Cuba: History, 1900–1924,” Cuba, box 1, CCCCA. 18. “Fourth Annual Report of the President to Stockholders,” December 9, 1896, n.p., The Minutes of the Coca-Cola Company: A Georgia Corporation, 1892–1910, vol. 1. 19. “History of Coke,” vol. 2, n.d., n.p., CCCCA; “Sixth Annual Report of the President to Stockholders,” January 13, 1898, n.p., The Minutes of the Coca-Cola Company: A Georgia Corporation, 1892–1910, vol. 1; and Secretary’s Report for the Year 1906,” March 23, 1907, n.p., The Minutes of the Coca-Cola Company, 1892–1910, vol. 1, CCCCA. 20. Roy Stubbs, “Guatemala: A Compilation for the Coca-Cola Company,” n.d., p. 81, CCCCA. 21. Ibid., 82. 22. The impact of enclaves, as Catherine LeGrand argues, reached far beyond their geographical sites. See LeGrand, “Living in Macondo: Economy and Culture in a United Fruit Company Banana Enclave in Colombia,” in Close Encounters of Empire, Joseph, LeGrand, and Salvatore, eds., 333–68. Coca-Cola’s impact in Guatemala before 1940, however, did not seem to reach far beyond enclaves. 23. Stubbs, “Guatemala,” 30. 24. This does not necessarily challenge Joseph S. Nye’s concept of soft power. Instead, it should advance research on questions of how, why, or when does soft power give the United States greater diplomatic or, in this case, corporate leverage. See Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), and Watanabe Yasushi and David L. McConnell, eds., Soft Power Superpowers: Cultural and National Assets of Japan and the United States (London: M. E. Sharpe, 2008). 25. Joseph H. McLure Jr. to Franklin Garret, “Report on Cuban Seizure Claim,” July 14, 1967, n.p., Cuba, box 1, CCCCA. 26. Monte Thomas, “Handling Labor and Dealer Relations,” section XIC, pp. 443–45, The Homecoming Meeting of the Overseas Vice-Presidents of the Worldwide Coca-Cola Business, Atlanta, October 1957, Speeches, CCCCA. 27. McLure Jr. to Garret, “Report on Cuban Seizure Claim,” n.p., July 14, 1967, n.p., Cuba, box 1, CCCCA; and Monte Thomas to Robert W. Woodruff, December 4, 1957, folder: “R. M. Thomas-Cuba,” box 272, RWP, RWL, EU. 28. “Report of the Opening of a New Bottling Plant in Havana,” Coca-Cola Overseas (April 1958): n.p., CCCCA. 29. “Monty Thomas, President of the Cuban Company Named Head of the Antilles Area,” The Coca-Cola Bottler (June 1958): 24, Cuba, box 2, CCCCA, and Monte Thomas to

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30. 3 1. 32. 33.

3 4. 35. 36. 3 7. 38.

39. 40. 41. 4 2. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 4 8. 49. 50. 51. 5 2. 53.

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Robert W. Woodruff, July 10, 1961, folder: “R.M. Thomas-Latin America,” box 272, RWP, RWL, EU. Monte Thomas to Robert W. Woodruff, March 23, 1959, folder: “R.M. Thomas-Latin America,” box 272, RWP, RWL, EU. H. F. Bray Report, January 16, 1930, p. 1, “Cuba: History, 1900–1924,” Cuba, box 1, CCCCA. Ibid., 2. “Fifteenth Annual Report of the President to Stockholders,” January 24, 1907, n.p., The Minutes of the Coca-Cola Company: A Georgia Corporation, 1892–1910, vol. 1; “Secretary’s Report for the Year 1908,” January 28, 1909, n.p., The Minutes of the Coca-Cola Company, A Georgia Corporation, 1892–1910, vol. 1, CCCCA; and “Secretary’s Report for the year 1909,” January 27, 1910, n.p., The Minutes of the Coca-Cola Company, A Georgia Corporation, 1892–1910, vol. 1, CCCCA. H. F. Bray Report, 3–4. McLure Jr. to Garret, “Report on Cuban Seizure Claim,” n.p. Roy D. Stubbs, “Cuba: A Compilation for the Coca-Cola Company,” p. 301, April 1954, CCCCA. Ibid., 300. Thomas to Woodruff, March 23, 1959, folder: “R.M. Thomas-Latin America,” box 272, RWP, RWL, EU. Eugene Kelly to H. B. Nicholson, February 11, 1946, folder: “Eugene Kelly, Cuba, 1946,” box 175, RWP, RWL, EU. Eugene Kelly to Woodruff, January 10, 1935, folder: “Kelly, Eugene,” box 175, RWP, RWL, EU. H. B. Nicholson to Kelly, February 4, 1946, folder: “Eugene Kelly, Cuba, 1946,” box 175, RWP, RWL, EU. Kelly to Nicholson, February 11, 1946, folder: “Eugene Kelly, Cuba, 1946,” box 175, RWP, RWL, EU. Stubs, Cuba, 47. Kelly to Nicholson, February 11, 1946, folder: “Eugene Kelly, Cuba, 1946,” box 175, RWP, RWL, EU. Nicholson to Kelly, February 4, 1946, folder: “Eugene Kelly, Cuba, 1946,” box 175, RWP, RWL, EU. Kelly to Nicholson, February 11, 1946, folder: “Eugene Kelly, Cuba, 1946,” box 175, RWP, RWL, EU. Kelly to Woodruff, September 17, 1934, folder: “Kelly, Eugene, Coca-Cola Company, Canada, 1926–1946,” box 175, RWP, RWL, EU. Kelly to Woodruff, August 22, 1933, folder: “Eugene Kelly, Coca-Cola Canada, 1926– 1946,” box 175, RWP, RWL, EU. Ibid. Kelly to Woodruff, October 2, 1933, folder: “Eugene Kelly, Coca-Cola Canada, 1926–1946,” box 175, RWP, RWL, EU. “Cuban Constitution of 1940,” title VI, “Concerning Labor and Property,” http://www .latinamericanstudies.org/constitution-1940.htm (accessed August 13, 2011). Kelly to Nicholson, n.d., “Third Quarter Report of Compañia Embotelladora Coca-Cola, S.A., Cuban Company,” folder: “Nicholson, H. B. 1942–1946,” box 212, RWP, RWL, EU. Ibid. No official article title, Philadelphia News, (September 1, 1948): n.p., Cuba, box 2, CCCCA.

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54. Kelly to Nicholson, n.d., “Third Quarter Report of Compañia Embotelladora Coca-Cola, S.A., Cuban Company,” folder: “Nicholson, H. B. 1942–46,” box 212, RWP, RWL, EU. 55. Eric N. Baklanoff, Expropriation of U.S. Investments in Cuba, Mexico, and Chile (New York: Praeger, 1975), 20–21. 56. Thomas, “Handling Labor and Dealer Relations,” section XIC, pp. 444–71, The Homecoming Meeting of the Overseas Vice-Presidents of the Worldwide Coca-Cola Business, Atlanta, October 1957, Speeches, CCCCA. 57. Ibid., 445 58. Rene Rubio, “Mis impresiones sobre el territorio de Holguin,” Coca-Cola Cuba (June– July, 1960), p. 2, Cuba, box 2, CCCCA. 59. Rafael Barroso, “42 Años: Antonio Busto Gonzalez,” Coca-Cola Cuba (June–July, 1960), p. 7, Cuba, box 2, CCCCA. 60. Alan McPherson, Yankee No!: Anti-Americanism in U.S.–Latin American Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 49–68. 61. Companies like Hilton Hotels International also showed a willingness to continue operating in Cuba under the new revolutionary government from 1959–1960. See Dennis Merrill, Negotiating Paradise, 141–76. 62. Chris Barclay, “When Coke Lost Its Fizz in Cuba,” The Christian Church Star (November 17, 1987): n.p., Cuba, box 2, CCCCA. 63. Rick Rockwell and Noreene Janus, Media Power in Central America (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 103. 64. Stubbs, “Guatemala,” 42–57. 65. Stubbs, “Guatemala,” 60–67. 66. Jose Raul Gonzalez, “Guatemala Continues to See Blue,” Beverage World (February 2004): http://www.beverageworld.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article& id=29435:guatemala-continues-to-see-blue&catid=65. 67. Rockwell and Janus, Media Power in Central America, 103. 68. Henry J. Frundt, Refreshing Pauses: Coca-Cola and Human Rights in Guatemala (New York: Praeger, 1987), 4. 69. J. C. Louis and Harvey Z. Yazijian, The Cola Wars (New York: Everest House, 1980), 185. 70. Mike Gatehouse and Miguel Angel Reyes, “Soft Drink, Hard Labour: Guatemalan Workers Take on Coca-Cola,” pamphlet of the Latin American Bureau of Transport (London: General Workers Union, 1978), 6. 71. Patrick Ball, Paul Kobrack, and Hervet F. Spirer, State Violence in Guatemala, 1960–1996: A Quantitative Reflection, a report from the Centro Internacional Para Investigaciones en Derechos Humanos (New York: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1996), available at http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ciidh/qr/english/en_qr.pdf. 72. Frundt, Refreshing Pauses, 3–15, 61–66. 73. Gatehouse and Reyes, “Soft drink, Hard Labour,” 6–8; and Louis and Yazijian, Cola Wars, 185. 74. Robert J. Alexander, A History of Organized Labor in Panama and Central America (London: Praeger, 2008), 259. 75. Louis and Yazijian, The Cola Wars, 186. 76. Alexander, History of Organized Labor in Panama, 259. 77. Gatehouse and Reyes, “Soft Drink, Hard Labour,” 8–14, and Frundt, Refreshing Pauses, 64–65.

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7 8. Gatehouse and Reyes, “Soft Drink, Hard Labour,” 12. 79. Frunt, Refreshing Pauses, 28–49, 66–71. 80. No author, “4 Slain in Guatemala Labor Dispute: Coca-Cola Caught in Latin Storm,” June 8, 1980, Atlanta Journal Constitution, 35A, folder: “Latin America, 1980,” box 10, CCC, RWL, EU. 81. Frunt, Refreshing Pauses, 100. 82. Gatehouse and Reyes, “Soft Drink, Hard Labour,”14–18. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid., 21. 85. Frunt, Refreshing Pauses, 88. 86. Ibid., 98–99. For a broader discussion of President Carter and human rights policies in Central America and how those policies changed with the arrival of President Ronald Reagan, see William M. LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977–1992 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 3–148. 87. No author, “4 Slain in Guatemala Labor Dispute.” 88. Frunt, Refreshing Pauses, 130–48. 89. No author, “4 Slain in Guatemala Labor Dispute.” 90. Frunt, Refreshing Pauses, 158. 91. Clifford Krauss, “Defusing Guatemala’s Cola War: Bottling Plant’s New Owners Bid to End Battles with Union,” November 5, 1980, Atlanta Journal Constitution, p. 20A, folder: “Latin America, 1980,” box 10, CCC, RWL, EU. 92. Frunt, Refreshing Pauses, 163–68. 93. Clifford Krauss, “Defusing Guatemala’s Cola War.” 94. Gatehouse and Reyes, “Soft Drink, Hard Labour,” 23–24. 95. Ibid., 31. 96. Ibid., 21. 97. Frunt, Refreshing Pauses, 194–210. 98. Scholars generally agree Latin American nations began to give greater significance to free market doctrine as the global Cold War waned and neoliberalism gained greater significance toward the late 1980s. See Judith A. Teichman, The Politics of Freeing Markets in Latin America: Chile, Argentina, and Mexico (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

· Ch a p t er T wo ·

Military Factionalism and the Consolidation of Power in 1960s Guatemala 5 Giova n n i Batz

The 1966 tr ansition of the Guatemalan presidency from the

right-wing military regime under Colonel Enrique Peralta Azurdia (1963–66) to the center-left civilian Julio César Méndez Montenegro (1966–70) signaled a reduction of military power within the electoral process and the growing potential for reform. Méndez’s victory in a relatively free and fair election was a result of division among the armed forces and conservatives that split these groups into two political parties, the ultra-rightist Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (MLN) and the somewhat more moderate Partido Institucional Democrático (PID). With the support of the United States to curb electoral fraud and discourage coup attempts from the right, Méndez became the second Guatemalan president in history to complete a full term in office.1 The United States and Guatemalan leftists hoped that the new administration would reduce military influence in the country and adopt much needed social and economic reforms in accordance with the U.S. Alliance for Progress. Ironically, it was under Méndez’s U.S.-backed administration that Guatemala witnessed the expansion and consolidation of the armed forces, increased repression of all opposition, and virtually no reform. How did the Guatemalan military subvert the U.S.-supported civilian government and 51

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the objectives of the Alliance for Progress and unite to become the dominant force within government by the 1970s? This chapter argues that the Guatemalan military was able to undermine civilian rule and consolidate power within the political system by utilizing the presence of a guerrilla movement to justify a counterinsurgency campaign that allowed it to repress oppositional forces through violence and terror in order to limit political participation and prevent future losses of power. The 1960s marked a turning point in Guatemalan history, bringing about the institutionalization of the military as an active participant in the political process and the adoption of counterinsurgency tactics to combat the guerrillas. By the time Méndez took office, the military was ideologically united under the banner of anticommunism following the 1954 CIA-backed coup that overthrew leftist President Jacobo Arbenz (1950–54) and ended a ten-year revolutionary government. Yet the armed forces remained characterized by factionalization that stemmed from the 1954 coup as well as institutional and personal indifference that had plagued the institution since its establishment in 1871. The lack of professionalization and division within the military led to two separate military rebellions in 1960 and 1962 against President Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes (1958–63) as well as the founding of the guerrilla movement by disaffected military officers involved in the failed 1960 rebellion. These tensions within the military would eventually lead Ydigoras to be overthrown by Peralta, his Minister of Defense, in 1963. During the 1966 elections, tensions erupted between segments of the moderate branch of the military (led by the PID) that agreed to allow Méndez to ascend to power and the radical right (under the guidance of the MLN), which constantly plotted coups against both Peralta and Méndez. The tense atmosphere was exacerbated by the guerrillas, who increasingly assassinated, kidnapped, and ransomed prominent Guatemalans, leading to an increase in elite support for the MLN’s desire to overthrow the civilian government and return the military to power. The Guatemalan military and U.S. diplomats feared that if these conditions continued, civil war and the disintegration of the armed forces were inevitable. In addition, the right and the military were shaken by Mendez’s victory since many viewed him as a “communist,” due to his reformist agenda. Thus, the armed forces needed to resolve their differences in order to avoid civil war among themselves and the disintegration of their institution as well as to prevent future “leftists” such as Méndez from coming to power. Within the context of the Cold War, U.S. pressure to conduct internal

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security under the Alliance for Progress and the constant threat of a coup against Méndez, based on the guerrilla problem, forced the Guatemalan government to intensify its efforts against the guerrillas. Counterinsurgency provided a channel for the armed forces to put aside their differences and unite behind the common objective of eliminating the guerrilla threat. Consequently, the presence of the guerrillas allowed the military to justify their impunity from civilian rule, adopt repressive counterinsurgency strategies that included the creation of death squads, and resist progressive reforms promoted by the Alliance for Progress and Méndez’s Revolutionary Party (PR).2 By the end of the 1960s, the armed forces formed an MLN/PID alliance to regain the presidency in 1970 against a weakened PR. The military would not relinquish formal power to a civilian president until 1985. This chapter argues that the military overcame factionalization in the 1960s through the armed forces’ fight against the guerillas, which led to their consolidation of power in the political system during the Méndez administration through a violent counterinsurgency campaign. This chapter also demonstrates that the Guatemalan counterinsurgency campaign in the 1960s was not the sole product of an East-West Cold War struggle controlled by the United States, but strongly influenced, designed, and employed by local agents in Guatemala such as the military and rightist groups such as the MLN. In order to understand the root causes of fragmentation within the armed forces, institutional deficiencies and internal division during the 1960s will first be analyzed. Second, the role of the United States in promoting both internal security and the Alliance for Progress will be examined to understand its impact in equipping and expanding the capabilities of the military to carry out counterinsurgency operations. Third, the adoption of counterinsurgency strategies and the defeat of the left will be assessed to analyze the success of the armed forces in utilizing political violence and fear to consolidate their power in the political arena. Research on the Guatemalan military in the 1960s has focused on the repressive measures taken by the military, such as its persecution of leftists, its counterinsurgency strategies, and the expansion of its roles thanks to U.S. financial and technical assistance, as well as the close-knit relationship between the Guatemalan military and far-rightwing political groups and oligarchs. But, many of these studies do not examine the internal divisions between the armed forces and conservatives.3 Although some scholars note the existence of factionalization in the military, most studies were conducted before the end of the civil war in 1996 and lack up-to-date sources such as

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declassified documents from U.S. agencies that have recorded the development of the armed forces in Guatemala.4 This chapter seeks to contribute to this literature by using recently declassified documents from various U.S. agencies such as the CIA, Department of State, Department of Defense, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). These documents provide an in-depth perspective on internal military relations and the role of the United States in expanding the armed forces. Moreover, secondary sources and periodicals are used to provide further insight on the political situation in the 1960s.

Military Division in the 1960s On March 30, 1963, Minister of Defense Peralta overthrew President Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes, marking the emergence of Guatemala’s first genuine military regime. Although previous military officers such as General Justo Rufino Barrios (1873–85) and General Jorge Ubico (1931–44) ruled Guatemala by utilizing the armed forces to secure and maintain power, these regimes did not constitute military governments.5 Instead, officers were discouraged by these rulers from engaging in politics in order to prevent a challenge to their authority. Despite these efforts, the military was the traditional arbitrator of political power and removed presidents who lost support of the elites and the small middle class that existed in Guatemala. These conditions provided the justification for the military to overthrow Ubico in 1944 following a series of protests and civil unrest from the urban middle class, students, and teachers against the dictatorship. Colonel Enrique Peralta Azurdia’s establishment of the military state in 1963 ushered in an era when the military transitioned from political broker and protector of the elites “to the permanent, institutional wielder of power of the state.”6 However, factionalization and the lack of professionalization in the military led many military officers to become increasingly active in politics and compete for administrative and political positions, thus intensifying internal competition and threatening the stability of the armed forces in the 1960s.7 Since the establishment of the Guatemalan military in 1871, institutional deficiencies hampered professionalization, specifically low pay, which fostered factions to manifest. In the early 1960s, a second lieutenant in Guatemala was paid $75 a month and received a pay increase of $25 with every promotion, which on average occurred every three years. Members of the army complained that their salaries were insufficient to support themselves and their

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families.8 As a result, officers usually adopted one of two alternatives to supplement their income: acquiring scarce military posts within government that provided an additional stipend or engaging in almost any kind of private enterprise. Both options required many to get involved in politics to succeed.9 In the late 1960s, Richard N. Adams noted the dilemma these circumstances caused, asserting: Both avenues [often used together rather than separately] may lead to conflicts with professionalism. The individual seeking politically powerful positions must inevitably compromise his professional attitudes; and the individual engaging in private enterprise obviously will have demands on his time and privileges that conflict with military responsibilities.10 Furthermore, low pay stimulated corruption, which harmed the armed forces. Most notably, officers often illicitly sold arms to the guerrillas in the early 1960s for extra income.11 Adams states that “the major rewards of power and income” and the limited amount of promotions gave way to “a significant amount of internal competition” and factionalism based on various characteristics such as ideology, age, ethnicity, and military branch.12 Moreover, factions stimulated further division between officers that often became the basis for rebellions, particularly when promotions were exclusively distributed to certain factions. For example, an army uprising on November 13, 1960, was due in part to Ydigoras’s bias in promoting older officers and allies from the Ubico era, a practice that irritated younger officers.13 Thus, institutional deficiencies such as poor pay fostered individual ambition for personal gain, hampering professionalization and damaging internal cohesion within the armed forces evident in the 1960s. In preparing to return Guatemala to constitutional government, Peralta sought to institutionalize the military as the dominant force within the political system and eliminate all leftist elements through undemocratic means. Upon taking power, Peralta shut down congress, nullified the constitution, and repressed all opposition. But unlike his predecessors, then U.S. Ambassador John O. Bell believed that Peralta did not plan “to become a dictator” or stay in power for long.14 Instead, he intended to consolidate the power of the military in the electoral process by creating the PID to lead a coalition of political parties with the goal of establishing a one-party system modeled after the Mexican government.15 To achieve these goals, Peralta limited political

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participation by requiring new political parties to submit lists of 50,000 members to be approved by the government, thereby preventing leftist and opposition groups from gaining legality and registering for elections. As a result, the only political parties allowed to participate in the 1964 elections for the Constituent Assembly, which was to draft a new constitution, were the Revolutionary Party (PR) and the MLN.16 The latter was an extreme-right party founded by ardent anticommunists under the leadership of Mario Sandoval Alarcón, and included many rightist officers and former supporters of Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, who had led the 1954 coup.17 The PID-MLN-PR coalition began negotiations in 1965 to nominate an official presidential candidate for the March 1966 elections, but disagreement due to internal competition among military factions led to its breakdown. According to the U.S. Department of State, division resulted from “personal ambitions of several high ranking officers and opposition by various sectors of the armed forces to all of the potential candidates” both military and civil.18 The MLN opposed the PID’s choice of Colonel Juan de Dios Aguilar, leading to its nomination of the then chief of staff of the armed forces, Miguel Angel Ponciano Samayoa, who was reportedly disliked and overlooked as the official nominee by Peralta for “personal and professional reasons.”19 Likewise, the PR nominated Julio Méndez, who was the respected dean of the law school at the University of San Carlos.20 Although Peralta limited political participation in order to establish military and conservative supremacy over the electoral process, he failed to secure a coalition to institutionalize the military as the dominant force in the political system. Instead, the military and the right were split between the PID and the MLN, leaving the PR to represent the only civilian opposition to the right and military state. Throughout Peralta’s administration opposition from MLN members of the military was prevalent and increased during the 1966 presidential elections. Rightist members of the military were particularly upset at Peralta for his decision to return formal power to a democratically elected government under a new constitution. For example, in 1964, ninety officers (many who were former associates of Castillo Armas), the Mariscal Zavala Brigade based in Guatemala City, and the air force planned to overthrow Peralta before the 1964 elections for the Constituent Assembly.21 Peralta was able to survive these challenges through the support of elites, the U.S. government, and the majority of the armed forces. His base weakened in 1965 with an upsurge of guerrilla activity, which included the kidnapping and ransoming of prominent Guatemalan citizens.22 By the end of 1966, $2 million in ransom had

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been paid to the guerrillas by rich Guatemala City families.23 Many of the kidnapped refused to cooperate with the police since they perceived the government to be incapable of protecting them from the subversives. These conditions created an atmosphere of fear and insecurity that delegitimized Peralta’s government. As a result, the upper-class business community and rightist officers began to support the MLN and Ponciano, who campaigned on anticommunism, security, and order.24 Moreover, the MLN believed it had a slim chance to win the elections and exploited the insurgent threat to begin to justify a coup against Peralta to gain power.25 Consequently, the guerrilla threat and the MLN’s belief that Ponciano would lose the elections spurred plots to overthrow Peralta. The military’s split between the PID and the MLN and the potential for conflict by late 1965 led the U.S. government to intervene to prevent violence within the armed forces. The PID was centered on Peralta, who was backed by the moderates and those loyal to him in the military. In contrast, Ponciano received allegiance from influential members of the armed forces such as the commander of the Guatemalan Military Zone and the commander of the Guardia de Honor.26 These developments alarmed the U.S. government, which intervened to avert a rebellion led by the MLN and Ponciano set for late December 1965. By then, the U.S. embassy was still incapable of determining the extent of Ponciano’s military backing and expressed fear about the potential destruction he posed, noting: [The] extent of Ponciano support from army elements is still unclear. . . . In any case, army is currently divided in its loyalties, which means an attempted coup at this time would . . . not be bloodless or quickly decisive and in our opinion could therefore result in a chaotic situation.27 In response, Washington intervened and directly warned Ponciano and the MLN that it would not support or recognize a government resulting from a coup and urged adherence to scheduled elections.28 Subsequently, antigovernment plotting stopped for the time being and free and fair elections were held.29 Thus, U.S. support was crucial in sustaining Guatemalan political stability in an atmosphere of growing polarization within the armed forces. Unfortunately, anxiety among military officers heightened after they allowed power to slip to Méndez, who many viewed as a communist sympathizer.

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Méndez’s victory again split the military between the moderates (PID) and the extreme right (MLN), who feared that the new president would be “soft on communism” and deter military influence within government. In part due to Peralta’s decision to transfer power with the backing of the United States, Méndez was able to ascend to the presidency. But before Méndez took office, Peralta required him to submit to a secret pact guaranteeing military autonomy and to appoint Colonel Rafael Arriaga as Minister of Defense.30 Once in office, Méndez’s main objective was to survive his full term, leading him to abandon his campaign promises to adopt much-needed social and economic reforms. Instead, one of the president’s first acts was to visit military bases throughout Guatemala and appeal for their support.31 Although Peralta was able to transfer power to a constitutionally elected civilian and secure military sovereignty from government, he was unable to end military division and the MLN’s quest for power. As in the 1966 elections, an upsurge in guerrilla activity provided the MLN with the justification for a coup. Right-wing concern about Méndez’s tolerance for communism became exacerbated after the president offered amnesty to the guerrillas (who rejected it) and appointed “communist” Miguel Ángel Asturias as ambassador to France.32 A secret CIA memorandum in September 1966, entitled “The Danger of a Military Coup in Guatemala,” warned of a possible coup due to Méndez’s failure to make substantial gains in his first three months in office against the guerrillas.33 The CIA cautioned: We think that many of the Guatemalan military leaders are approaching the point of no return with the Méndez administration. Plotting between them and civilian rightists seems to be reaching an advanced stage. Unless Méndez takes steps to reassure these elements . . . they are likely to move soon to displace him.34 In early October the CIA cautioned that “any significant increase in guerrilla terrorism [would] unite the military into action against Méndez” and “lead to bloodshed and perhaps civil war.”35 By October, the MLN had recruited and armed four hundred mercenaries on the Honduran border ready to invade Guatemala under the leadership of an ex-U.S. Army soldier to overthrow Méndez.36 Furthermore, the MLN secured the allegiance of an army brigade in Quetzaltenango and the Air Force Security Guard and offered “substantial sums of money” to any officers willing to join the movement.37 Then, following a guerrilla attack on November 2, 1966, at a generating plant, Méndez declared

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a state of siege in order to deal with the violence from leftist guerrillas and the threat from rightist groups. As a result, at least nine MLN leaders were arrested, including the former Vice President of Congress Manuel Villacorta Vielmann.38 On November 12, 1966, three Army officers, including the vice-minister of defense, were arrested and exiled for their involvement in antigovernment plotting.39 Despite these efforts, Sandoval, the MLN, and the extreme-rightist officers continued to conspire. Therefore, the armed forces under the leadership of the new Minister of Defense decided to confront the guerrilla problem and engage an effective counterinsurgency campaign in order to prevent further coup plotting and, more important, to sustain military unity.

The United States and the Guatemalan Military The intensification of the Cold War in Latin America during the 1960s prompted the United States to design and enact the Alliance for Progress to prevent revolutionary movements in the hemisphere. Previously, the United States promoted hemispheric security to confront the Soviet threat in Latin America, but altered its foreign policy to concentrate on internal security to combat communism following the 1959 Cuban Revolution. The Alliance for Progress, a Kennedy-era initiative that played out mainly during the Johnson administration, promoted economic and social reforms to reduce poverty and other factors contributing to social unrest as well as military assistance to eliminate insurgents.40 In Guatemala, these measures enhanced the capabilities of the military to secure power in government but failed to improve the living standards of its citizenry. The United States in the 1960s suffered from nationalistic resentment among high-ranking members of the Guatemalan military, such as Peralta, due to their strong involvement in the 1954 coup.41 These sentiments were exacerbated when Ydigoras allowed the CIA to train Cuban exiles for the Bay of Pigs invasion in Guatemalan territory without seeking the consent of the armed forces and were a factor that contributed to the November 1960 revolt.42 As a result, the U.S. government was unable to fully influence the army under Ydigoras and Peralta. Most notably, the Guatemalan army refused training from the Green Berets until Méndez became president.43 Despite these circumstances, the armed forces accepted the guidelines of the Alliance for Progress in order to qualify for U.S. financial assistance. Although some officers remained bitter about the United States, many were willing to accept U.S. aid to develop the military.

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The presence of the Marxist, Cuban-trained guerrillas in Guatemala provoked concern in Washington.44 The trigger for the revolutionary movement lay in the failed 1960 rebellion by disgruntled officers who had fled into exile to regroup. Among these leaders were Lieutenants Marco Antonio Yon Sosa and Luis Augusto Turcios Lima, two officers who had received U.S. training in counterinsurgency at Fort Gulick, Panama Canal Zone, and Fort Benning, Georgia, respectively.45 Yon Sosa and Turcios Lima joined other officers from the rebellion to create the Revolutionary Movement of November 13th (MR13). The MR-13 later collaborated with the Guatemalan Labor Party to form the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR) in 1962. The guerrillas during this period never numbered more than three hundred at one time and operated in the eastern countryside among ladino peasants in the departments of Zacapa and Izabal. Diplomats at the United States Embassy in Guatemala maintained good intelligence on the guerrillas in Guatemala and never perceived them as a serious threat in overthrowing the government.46 On the other hand, officials in Washington overestimated the guerrilla problem and lacked understanding of the local situation in Guatemala. These differences between the United States Embassy and officials in Washington were evident in 1965 when the U.S. Department of State received distressing reports concerning the FAR’s plan to attack U.S. citizens and personnel in Guatemala; officials advised the embassy to take swift action in protecting U.S. civilians. In response to these requests, then Ambassador John O. Bell complained to the assistant secretary of state: I must express my dismay and irritation at Dept’s reaction every time raw report is received suggesting terrorist action. Dept appears either [to] have little confidence in my judgment or . . . are writing for record should something eventually happen. If first is true, Department should replace me now. If second case, this [is] not helpful and I suggest desist.47 Less than two weeks later, the State Department announced the appointment of John G. Mein to replace Bell as ambassador, demonstrating Washington’s seriousness about the security situation in Guatemala.48 Despite U.S. concern, the Guatemalan army and government before 1966 viewed the guerrillas more as a nuisance than a serious threat.49 Instead, much of the collaboration between the United States and the military in the early 1960s focused on civic

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action programs and the improvement of the armed forces’ counterinsurgency capabilities. The Kennedy administration initiated civic action programs in Latin America to enhance security and development to achieve the goals of the Alliance for Progress. The United States designed Guatemala’s civic action program in 1961 with the objective “to attack the sources of popular discontent which [gave] rise to social and political instability” and to help improve civilian-military relations in the countryside, particularly in the guerrilla strongholds of Zacapa and Izabal.50 Between 1963 and 1966, the United States contributed over $2.4 million to civic action programs such as well drilling, hot-lunch programs, a literacy campaign, and health care.51 One of the most common themes that appeared in the army’s periodical, El Ejercito, was the growth and activities of the civic action programs, especially in Zacapa and Izabal.52 But by the end of the Alliance for Progress, civic action was deemed a failure in improving the living standards of the peasantry.53 Instead, the military’s constant contact with the peasantry through these civic action programs became a key vehicle for intelligence gathering. Thus, the true beneficiaries of the civic action programs were the armed forces that were able to increase their surveillance and presence in the countryside. This would prove crucial in the counterinsurgency campaign launched under Méndez in 1966. The Alliance for Progress stressed the necessity for the increase of internal security through the professionalization and expansion of the security system in order to adequately combat insurgents within Guatemala. Under Ydigoras and Peralta, the United States funded the armed forces through the Military Assistance Program (MAP) to strengthen existing core units and equip the regular army to specialize in counterinsurgency. U.S. aid to Guatemala through MAP grew from $1,796,000 for 1956–61 to $10,719,249 for 1962–67.54 Furthermore, total military assistance to Guatemala averaged less than $200,000 per year from 1956–60 but increased to an average of $1.8 million annually from 1961–68. In 1962, MAP began to support four army battalions in which three of the four were fully, or almost fully, equipped by the time Méndez took office.55 In 1966 the Department of State reported that the two battalions based in Guatemala City, the Mariscal Zavala Infantry Battalion and the Guardia de Honor, had grown to 97 and 98 percent of “planned capability” respectively, while a battalion in Zacapa was at 100 percent.56 Other units’ essential to counterinsurgency were established, equipped, and sustained by MAP and

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ready for action by mid-1966.57 Although MAP accounted for an average of only 10 percent of Guatemala’s total defense budget between 1963 and 1966, the vast majority of Guatemala’s funds were dedicated to personnel pay and allowances or operations and maintenance. In 1964, only 1 percent of the Guatemalan defense budget was spent on force improvement.58 Thus, the MAP contribution to military development in Guatemala was significant.59 USAID funds went to equip the army for the first time in 1963, which included the transfer of resources meant for civic action toward improving counterinsurgency capabilities units.60 In 1966, the State Department reported that two H19 helicopters, originally part of the “Civic Action Squadron,” had been reallocated “due to the increase in internal security operations” and converted into the “Special Air Warfare unit with the composite missions of coastal patrol, target locations, psychological operations, medical aid evacuation, and trooplift.”61 While U.S. military assistance to the Guatemalan armed forces contributed to their material strength and capability to engage in counterinsurgency, aid was incapable of correcting institutional deficiencies that plagued the security system. Despite this substantial show of support, the United States attempt to professionalize the armed forces failed, due to the Guatemalan military’s unwillingness to address institutional problems. In 1966, the State Department complained that even though an average of $636,000 per year was provided in training, there remained many “institutional deficiencies” hindering the effectiveness of U.S. investment in the army. For instance, U.S. analysts complained that by the time poorly paid conscripts, who served two year terms, were adequately trained, they were back in civilian life.62 The State Department concluded that despite gains in material support, equipment, and training, the armed forces were still a “cumbersome, antiquated and inefficient organization.”63 The lack of professionalization and effectiveness of the military was evident in the fact that after five years of U.S. assistance they were unable or unwilling to defeat the few guerrillas that existed in the eastern countryside.64 Although the United States contributed to the material strength and expansion of the Guatemalan military, financial assistance and training alone were insufficient to create a strong, professional, and unified army. The Méndez administration presented an opportunity for the United States to exert influence in counterinsurgency operations. Shortly after Méndez took office, a U.S. Joint State-Defense statement demonstrated a revived interest in counterinsurgency and contemplated the possibility of

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providing “crash counterinsurgency training [to] specific military units (e.g. Zacapa brigade).”65 Moreover, a U.S. Special Forces Mobile Training Team in 1967 helped organize the Special Commando Unit of the Guatemalan Army (SCUGA) which became involved in counter-terror and illegal operations.66 Yet U.S. training and assistance to the security system became counterproductive to the goals of the Alliance for Progress as it contributed to excessive violence and political instability. In 1968, Viron P. Vaky, a State Department official, criticized the U.S. role in Guatemala’s counterinsurgency, stating: We have condoned counter-terror [and] may even in effect have encouraged or blessed it . . . Is it conceivable that we are so obsessed with insurgency that we are prepared to rationalize murder as an acceptable counterinsurgency weapon?67 Thus, the United States assisted in the development of the Guatemalan military, which utilized the expansion of the security system to create an atmosphere of fear and insecurity that permitted them to become the dominant force within the political system.

Counterinsurgency and the Attack on the Left The Guatemalan armed forces launched a renovated counterinsurgency campaign in October 1966 against the guerrillas in the eastern countryside. Consequently, by the end of Méndez’s term thousands of civilians were dead and leftist and reformist elements in the political system were almost nonexistent. The three central figureheads of the campaign were Minister of Defense Colonel Rafael Arriaga, Commander of the Zacapa-Izabal Military Zone Colonel Carlos Arana Osorio, and Vice-Minister of National Defense for Coordinating Counterinsurgency Colonel Manuel Francisco Sosa Avila.68 The initial success of the military included the wounding of MR-13 leader Yon Sosa and the death of FAR’s second-in-command, which received a great deal of press coverage. According to the State Department, the new “anticommunist image of the government” due to the success of the new offensive weakened right-wing arguments for a coup.69 Yet the adoption and implementation of counterinsurgency gave way to counterterror measures, characterized by extrajudicial murders, political violence, and the persecution of leftists, reformists, and members of the PR.

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Among the most controversial features of the Guatemalan counterinsurgency was the use of anticommunist death squads that had direct ties to the military. The Mano Blanca was the first and only unit created independently from the armed forces by the MLN in 1966 to prevent Méndez from taking office. Thereafter, it openly justified counterterror by declaring that it would use “the same violence used by the communists” and engaged in psychological warfare through bombing and death threats.70 In 1967, there were at least twenty death squads operating in Guatemala City that produced death lists labeling people as communists who were then targeted for murder. These death lists were often published with people’s mug shots from police files and passport photographs accessible only to the Ministry of Interior, indicating an unofficial relationship with the government.71 With the exception of Mano Blanca, these death squads were all phantom organizations constructed to permit the armed forces to carry out illegal operations. According to the State Department, the most infamous death squads were covers “for clandestine army commando units” to carry out extrajudicial executions. In addition, these phantom units were “formed by well trained and highly motivated younger military personnel [and] provided the high command with an outlet [to satiate] impatient younger officers clamoring for action,” many of whom were trained by the United States.72 Military involvement in death squads became an open secret but continued to provide a cover to operate outside of the law. The two elite units involved in illicit and covert operations were SCUGA and the Fourth Corps within the National Police. SCUGA was a thirty-five man commando unit composed of young anticommunist army officers and extreme right-wing civilians. The State Department reported that the commando unit was performing extra-legal activities such as bombings, abductions, and assassinations against “real and alleged communists” and other “vaguely defined enemies of the government.”73 The Fourth Corps was an illegal fifty-man assassination squad that operated in secrecy from the other members of the National Police and occasionally worked with Mano Blanca to carry out counterterror. Both of these units took direct orders from Colonel Arriaga, as well as Colonel Sosa in the case of the Fourth Corps.74 The danger of these units became further apparent when the military utilized them for political purposes to threaten, abduct, or assassinate dissenting voices against the armed forces. A favorite target became the PR, which at the time was the most organized and biggest opposition to the Guatemalan military. The State Department reported in 1967 that all PR deputies

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in Congress had received death threats from death squads, which had connections to the clandestine units. In October 1967, SCUGA was implicated in a plot to assassinate four PR congressmen but that was postponed and never carried out.75 Hence, death squads provided the military the opportunity to operate outside of the law with impunity. Armed civilians or comisionados proved to be the most effective element of the counterinsurgency operations in Zacapa and Izabal. Before the 1960s, comisionados were former military personnel and part of the army reserves used to recruit and force peasants and indigenous people into the military. Beginning with Peralta, these civilians began to serve as informants to the military and under the command of Arriaga were expanded to actively combat the guerrillas. In 1966, the brigades in Zacapa and Izabal under the direction of Arana issued weapons to over 3,000 to 5,000 civilians to participate in the counterinsurgency campaign.76 The overwhelming majority of comisionados in Zacapa and Izabal were members of the MLN. Not surprisingly, many of these armed civilians participated in counterterror and massacred peasants with impunity and harassed PR members, which again served to weaken a strong oppositional force to the military.77 These comisionados pledged allegiance to Arana and the armed forces and remained a valuable asset in the counterinsurgency movement. By the beginning of 1968, escalating political violence and repression against all voices of opposition—peasants as well as members of the president’s own political party—characterized the counterinsurgency campaign. At the height of the conflict, forty-three persons were killed or kidnapped every week during Mendez’s presidency.78 Between 1966 and 1970, an estimated 8,000 civilians died as a result of the counterinsurgency, the majority being unarmed peasants.79 U.S. officials were increasingly concerned with the brutality, complexity, and difficulties for the government to control the various counterinsurgency operations in Guatemala. In a secret State Department document entitled “Guatemala: A Counter-Insurgency Running Wild?,” Thomas L. Hughes warned, “[the] continued use of . . . rough and ready counterinsurgency tactics . . . brings into serious question the ability of President Méndez . . . or even [Arriaga] to control the activities of the counter-insurgents. . . . the counterinsurgency machine is out of control.”80 Arana’s counterinsurgency campaign was so effective, brutal, and violent that it earned him the title “Butcher of Zacapa.”81 Moreover, members of Méndez’s own political party were complaining about the violence directed at them and were refusing to run for local office

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in Zacapa and Izabal, at times leaving the MLN to be the only party running a candidate for office. During the 1967 municipal elections, national representatives for the PR visiting Zacapa to ensure that the PR was running for every position, were met with resistance from potential candidates and only filled a small fraction of the slots.82 Furthermore, public outrage over the violence increased with the torture, rape, and mutilation of Rogelia Cruz Martínez, the former Miss Guatemala, by extreme rightists in 1968.83 The incident was followed by the assassination of the Chief of the U.S. Military Mission Colonel John D. Webber, and Naval Attaché Lieutenant Commander Ernest A. Munro at the hands of the guerrillas.84 By 1968, political violence was becoming uncontrollable, but Méndez continued to allow the military to engage in counterinsurgency operations with impunity. Méndez’s tolerance for the armed forces’ abuse of violence peaked with the March 1968 kidnapping of Archbishop Mario Casariego in a rightist attempt to oust the president by blaming the crime on the guerrillas and stirring public outrage. The embassy was alarmed to discover the involvement of many high-level officers in the conspiracy, such as the head of SCUGA and possibly Arriaga and Arana.85 But the kidnapping did not have its intended effect. The United States denounced any attempt to oust the president and public outrage did not materialize, forcing the kidnappers to abandon the archbishop in a farmhouse in Quetzaltenango. Yet Arriaga and Arana were never fully implicated in the kidnapping. The incident was surrounded with ambiguity, especially after two of the kidnappers were suspiciously gunned down by unknown assailants while in police custody.86 As a result of the coup attempt, Méndez in an astonishing act removed Arriaga, Arana, and Sosa from their military positions and sent them into “exile” by assigning them to diplomatic posts. The president’s move was intended to end the constriction of the armed forces on the government and halt counterterror. According to the CIA, the three exiled officers were surprised by Mendez’s action but were “unwilling to risk an open split in the armed forces” and left Guatemala without protest while “resist[ing] the urgings” of their strong followings within the military and armed civilians to retaliate.87 The president’s replacements for these posts were described by the CIA as “second-rate officers [who] lacked qualifications” in counterinsurgency, sparking dissension among the young officers who “voiced a lack of confidence” in their new leaders.88 To make matters worse for the military, Méndez ordered the removal of weapons in the possession of 3,000 armed civilians, purged the military of extreme-rightist officers, disbanded the Fourth Corps

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and downsized SCUGA.89 Although Méndez demonstrated resiliency to decrease the power of the armed forces, his efforts only motivated the military to further unite against civilian interference in national security and what they perceived to be a breach in their autonomy. The shakeup of the security system increased military cohesiveness but also the military’s ambitions to rule Guatemala as well as animosity against Méndez. After Méndez’s sweeping changes, the MLN and the PID joined “in an electoral pact to insure the unity” of the right and the military for the 1970 presidential elections.90 Aiding the MLN-PID for the 1970 elections was the resurgence of FAR activity two years after the start of the 1966 counterinsurgency campaign.91 More important, the August 1968 assassination of Ambassador Mein, the first U.S. ambassador to be killed abroad, renewed calls from the public, the United States, and the military for harsh counterinsurgency measures.92 Mein was killed after a failed kidnapping in which his embassy car was ambushed by two cars in broad daylight. Two men attempted to kidnap him at gunpoint, but after Mein ran from his car the assailants shot him in the back. While the FAR claimed responsibility for the murder, there was speculation by observers and journalists that rightist groups were behind Mein’s assassination.93 By the 1970s, many leftists, PR members, and voters became disenchanted with the electoral process, which had allowed Méndez to ascend to power but not carry out social or economic reform. As a result, many leftists either opted to leave the PR and join the newly legalized Christian Democrats or abstain from voting. Furthermore, the military was still present in the countryside and intimidated the peasantry into supporting the MLN-PID.94 Thus, by the time the MLN-PID coalition nominated Arana as their presidential candidate, Guatemalans were either disillusioned about participating within the electoral system; or supported (forced or freely) Arana’s platform of security and order, allowing him to win the presidency. In contrast to the 1966 elections, the weak and almost nonexistent left-of-center was now split between the Christian Democrats and the PR whereas the right and military were strongly unified under the MLN-PID coalition. With Arana gaining the presidency in 1970 through the MLN-PID coalition, Peralta’s goal of institutionalizing the military as the dominant force in the political system was accomplished. Soon after taking office, Arana again initiated a brutal counterinsurgency campaign in which seven hundred political deaths occurred between November 1970 and March 1971, further weakening opposition to the military. The MLN-PID coalition fraudulently

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won the 1974 presidential elections with General Kjell Laugerud as their candidate.95 Although the MLN-PID coalition broke down for the 1978 elections, the PID was able to claim victory with General Romeo Lucas Garcia.96 Throughout the 1970s, the military began to engage in extensive business and development projects that increased the officer corps’ wealth, thus furthering the military’s transition from protector of the elite to becoming part of the elite. Arana established the Army Bank, which granted loans to officers to begin private businesses, and many development project loans from international banks often ended in the pockets of officers.97 General Lucas Garcia was overthrown by General Efraín Rios Montt in 1982 and General Montt by Minister of Defense General Óscar Humberto Mejía Victores in 1983. The military remained in control of the government until 1985, when it transitioned the presidency to civilian Marco Vinicio Cerezo Arévalo. Despite this official shift in the presidency, the military prevented Cerezo from exercising real authority, similar to Méndez’s term in office.98 After 1970, the military ruled without opposition in the political system and continued to commit human rights abuses with impunity, even after it transitioned to “democracy” in the 1980s.

Conclusion Peralta’s overthrow of Ydigoras in 1963 marked the initial rise of the military state in Guatemala. Although Peralta was able to limit the political process, division and inexperience among officers as state rulers made them incapable of engaging in power sharing, thus splitting the military in the 1966 elections. As a result, the presidency slipped to a civilian, which eventually led the military to cooperate as a unit to regain formal authority in 1970. With the assistance of the United States to equip and support the army’s call for internal security, the military was able to launch a brutal counterinsurgency in 1966 that served to reduce the MLN’s desire to initiate a coup as well as unify the military in combating a common enemy, the guerrillas, who up to 1966 were disregarded as a serious threat. At the same time, while the United States maintained considerable influence in preventing a coup against Peralta and Méndez from rightist elements, as well as providing assistance for counterinsurgency, that influence should not be overestimated as it was unable to control the Guatemalan military and its domestic affairs. This is clear from U.S. official’s disapproval of death squads and gross human rights violations that were running out of control. As mentioned earlier, these

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concerns were highlighted by a State Department official who questioned the ability of Méndez or even Arriaga in controlling the counterinsurgency campaign that was becoming increasing violent. But, while U.S. diplomats seemed to disapprove of these counterinsurgency tactics, they did nothing to stop them. As we can see, the situation in Guatemala in the 1960s, while influenced by the Cold War, was not the direct result of an East-West struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. The presence of the guerrillas provided the justification for military repression, which went unabated until Méndez gained enough courage to briefly stop counterterror through a military shakeup. Although the military had the power to overthrow Méndez, many antigovernment plots were abandoned due to the U.S. support for Méndez. Consequently, the military formed the MLN-PID alliance, which survived into the mid-1970s, leading to a closed political system characterized by excessive violence and repression against oppositional forces. These conditions fueled social unrest that eventually gave rise to various guerrilla movements in the 1970s and 1980s, demonstrating the failure of the Alliance for Progress to prevent revolutionary movements and promote democracy. In conclusion, the Guatemalan armed forces in the 1960s utilized counterinsurgency to address fractionalization as well as to consolidate the Guatemalan military state by 1970. notes 1. Jim Handy, Gift of the Devil: A History of Guatemala (Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 1984), 158–61. 2. Susanne Jonas, The Battle for Guatemala: Rebels, Death Squads, and U.S. Power (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991); Handy, Gift of the Devil; Eduardo Galeano, Guatemala: Occupied Country, trans. Cedric Belfrage (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969). 3. Michael McClintock, The American Connection, vol. 2, State Terror and Popular Resistance in Guatemala (London: Zed Books, 1985); Deborah Levenson-Estrada, Trade Unionists Against Terror: Guatemala City 1954–1985 (London: University of North Carolina, 1994); Rachel May, Terror in the Countryside: Campesino Responses to Political Violence in Guatemala, 1954–1985 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001); Galeano, Guatemala: Occupied Country; Hector Rosada-Granados, Soldados en el poder: proyecto militar en Guatemala, 1944–1990 (San José, Costa Rica: FUNPADEM, 1999); Stephen M. Streeter, “Nation-Building in the Land of Eternal Counter-Insurgency: Guatemala and the Contradictions of the Alliance for Progress,” Third World Quarterly 27 (2006): 1, 57–68. 4. Richard N. Adams, “The Development of the Guatemalan Military,” Studies in Comparative International Development 4 (1968/69): 5, 91–110; Sheryl Lynn Shirley, “The Impact of U.S. Security Assistance on Democracy in Latin America: The Case of Guatemala during the 1960s,” (dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 1997).

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5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 1 3. 14.

1 5. 16.

17.

1 8. 19. 20.

21.

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Two exceptions are Andrew J. Schlewitz, “Imperial Incompetence and Guatemalan Militarism, 1931–1966,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 17 (2004): 4, 585–618, and Streeter, “Nation-Building in the Land of Eternal Counter-Insurgency.” Adams, “The Development of the Guatemalan Military,” 91. McClintock, The American Connection, 69. Adams, “The Development of the Guatemalan Military,” 91–95. Ibid. Ibid. Officers were prohibited from running liquor factories or cabarets. Ibid. Galeano, Guatemala, 33. Adams, “The Development of the Guatemalan Military,” 95. Adams provides a further discussion on traditional factions within the military. Handy, Gift of the Devil, 153. John O. Bell to Department of State, 3 Apr 1963, National Security Archives, Death Squads, Guerrilla War, Covert Operations, and Genocide: Guatemala and the United States, 1954–1999 [hereafter cited as NSA, Guatemala 1954–1999], #00131; Adams, “The Development of the Guatemalan Military,” 108. Adams also attributes Peralta’s personal willingness as one of the reasons the military allowed a civilian to take power. Adams states that while Peralta had many opportunities to become Chief of State he “actually avoided them.” He notes that Peralta had his first opportunity after the 1944 revolution when he was favored for the presidency. Peralta even refused to take the title of president after the 1963 coup in order to “avoid the impression that the military government wished to remain in power.” Handy, Gift of the Devil, 158. “Guatemala Elections Will Be in Effect a Plebiscite,” 7 May 1964, National Security Files, Country File, NSF, box 54, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, TX [hereafter Country File, NSF, box 54, LBJPL]; Handy, Gift of the Devil, 158. The left-ofcenter Christian Democrats collected more than 50,000 signatures, but Peralta did not allow them to participate in the 1966 elections. Shirley, “The Impact of U.S. Security Assistance on Democracy in Latin America,” 273. Among its most influential members were the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces Miguel Angel Ponciano Samayoa, Colonel Adolfo Callejas, Kjell Laugerud García, and Colonel Rafael Arriaga. “The Situation in Guatemala,” 12 Jan 1965, Country File, NSF, box 54, LBJPL. Ibid. Handy, Gift of the Devil, 159; “Guatemalan Dead on Campaign Eve,” New York Times, November 1, 1965, 16. The PR originally elected party leader Mario Méndez Montenegro as their presidential candidate. But, shortly before the official start of campaigning, Mario Méndez suspiciously died, committing suicide by shooting himself in the heart. Left without a candidate the PR nominated his brother Julio. The PR hoped that Julio’s prestige as dean of the law school and the public emotion over the death of his brother would aid him in the elections. “Plans of Political Leaders and Military Officers for a Coup Before 24 May 1964,” 3 April 1963, NSA, Guatemala 1954–1999, #00173; “Continuing Plots for a Coup to Depose the Chief of the Guatemalan Government,” 16 May 1964, NSA, Guatemala 1954–1999, #00175.

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2 2. 23.

24.

25. 26. 2 7. 28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 3 4. 35. 36. 37. 38.

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One of the officers involved was Colonel Jose Cruz Salazar, head of Castillo Armas’s political party, the Nationalist Democratic Movement, which was the MLN’s predecessor. “Guatemala’s Dilemma,” 18 Jan 1966, NSA, Guatemala 1954–1999, #00248. “The Communist Insurgency Movement in Guatemala,” 20 Sep 1968, Country File, NSF, box 54, LBJPL. According to the CIA, in 1965 Fidel Castro promised the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR) complete financial support if they intensified their activities in Guatemala. “The Situation in Guatemala,” 10 Dec 1965, Country File, NSF, box 54, LBJPL; AmEmbassy, Guatemala to Secretary of State, 24 Nov 1965, Country File, NSF, box 54, LBJPL; AmEmbassy to Secretary of State, 6 Dec 1965, Country File, NSF, box 54, LBJPL. Ibid. The MLN also held that Peralta was seeking to hold fraudulent elections to favor the PID. Shirley, “The Impact of U.S. Security Assistance on Democracy in Latin America,” 273. The Commander of the Guatemalan Military Zone was Colonel Rafael Arriaga. AmEmbassy to Secretary of State, 8 Dec 1965, Country File, NSF, box 54, LBJPL. Vaky to Secretary of State, 14 Dec 1965, Country File, NSF, box 54, LBJPL. Vaky reports meeting with the MLN leader Sandoval, Ponciano, and Ponciano’s running mate, Chacon Pazos, in order to dissuade them from engaging in a coup attempt. Vaky claims that the MLN leaders were “clearly highly bitter against chief government” and “blame inadequate [government] response to security situation on Peralta” as well as expressing other complaints. The importance of U.S. position in Guatemalan politics rests on the historical fact that without the support of Washington, no coup up to 1966 had been possible in Guatemala. Walter LaFeber provides a good analysis of U.S. intervention in Central American domestic politics. Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America. (New York: Norton, 1993), 56–60. Streeter states that Peralta was able to initiate a coup against Ydigoras after it gained permission to do so from the United States. Recovery of Historical Memory Project (REMHI), Guatemala: Never Again! (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999), 197–98. Méndez was forced to select a Minister of Defense from a list of three officers that included Arriaga. “Visita Presidencial a los Diferentes Cuerpos Militares,” Revista Militar, July–September 1966, 79–86. “Guatemala—A Current Appraisal,” 8 Oct 1966, Country File, NSF, box 54, LBJPL. Asturias was charged as a communist by some military officers and was forced into exile after Castillo Armas overthrew the Arbenz regime. He later returned when Méndez became president. “The Danger of a Military Coup in Guatemala,” 28 Sept 1966, NSA, Guatemala 1954–1999, #00307. Ibid. “Guatemala—A Current Appraisal,” 8 Oct 1966, Country File, NSF, box 54, LBJPL. Ibid. The ex-U.S. Army soldier was MLN-supporter Carlos Jose Thompson Cattanio, who served from 1943–1946. He was also arrested in 1961 for plotting against Ydigoras. “Guatemala: Army Coup Plotters to be Exiled,” 16 Nov 1966, NSA, Guatemala 1954–1999, #00315. “State of Siege Declared in Guatemala,” 7 Nov 1966, NSA, Guatemala 1954–1999, #00313; “Emergency Rule Decreed in Guatemala to Fight Terrorism,” New York Times, November 4, 1966, 13. Mario Sandoval was not found but his brother Armando was arrested.

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39. “Guatemala: Army Coup Plotters to be Exiled,” 16 Nov 1966, NSA, Guatemala 1954–1999, #00315. The three officers were reportedly heading for exile in Paraguay. 40. Streeter, “Nation-Building in the Land of Eternal Counter-Insurgency,” and LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions, 147–96. LaFeber further analyzes the impact of the Alliance for Progress in Central America. Streeter provides an in-depth look at the contradictions of U.S. foreign policy and the Alliance for Progress in Guatemala. 41. For a detailed account on the well-known role of the United States in the 1954 coup, see Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944– 1954 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Richard Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention (Austin: Texas Press, 1982). For Guatemalan military resentment against the United States, see Douglas W. Trefzger, “¿De Guatemala a Guate-Peor? Guatemalan Military Interventionism, 1944–1970,” Armed Forces and Society 28 (2001): 1, 77–97. According to Trefzger, “Senior Guatemalan officers began to rationalize that the United States might invade should the rebel incursion fail. By 25 June, these fears circulated at the front, and Guatemala’s military forces at Zacapa refused to engage the Liberation Army. The military had effectively turned against Arbenz.” 42. LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions, 166–67. Over one-third of the army participated in the revolt against Ydigoras. 43. Jonas, The Battle for Guatemala, 70. 44. The internal division, ideology, political development, and operations of the revolutionary guerrilla movement are beyond the scope of this paper. For details on these topics see Galeano, Guatemala; Jonas, The Battle for Guatemala; Turcios Lima: Biografía y Documentos (La Habana: Instituto del Libro, 1969). 45. Galeano, Guatemala, 30–31. 46. “Report on Guatemala,” 12 Jun 1965, Country File, NSF, box 54, LBJPL; “Monthly Guerrilla Report, Dec 1–31,” 15 Jan 1966, NSA, Guatemala 1954–1999, #00247. 47. John O. Bell to Jack Hood Vaughn, 1 Jul 1965, Country File, NSF, box 54, LBJPL. For reports on guerrillas’ plans to attack U.S. citizens in Guatemala and State Department response, see “Establishment of Guerrilla Headquarters in Guatemala City; Plans for the Assassination of Guatemalan Officials and for Actions against US Citizens,” 29 Jun 1965, Country File, NSF, box 54, LBJPL; Dept of State to AmEmbassy, 1 Jul 1965, Country File, NSF, box 54, LBJPL. 48. Shirley, “The Impact of U.S. Security Assistance on Democracy in Latin America,” 168. 49. Adams, “The Development of the Guatemalan Military,” 105; American Embassy to Secretary of State, 17 Dec 1965, Country File, NSF, box 54, LBJPL; Victor Perera, “Guatemala: Always La Violencia,” New York Times, June 13, 1971, 50. Perera reports that Ydigoras did not take the guerrillas very seriously and that his own Guatemalan father dismissed them as “romantic young army officers and university students” who were viewed as “weekend guerrillas.” Adams reports that many urban government and private individuals spoke about the “guerrillas as being more of a bother than a menace,” although this attitude began to change after the kidnapping of wealthy Guatemalans for ransom in 1965. Similarly, Ambassador Mein states that Peralta refused to call Yon Sosa and Turcios guerrillas and his government publically regarded them as bandits. 50. “U.S. Internal Security Programs in Latin America: Guatemala,” 30 Nov 1966, NSA, Guatemala 1954–1999, #00318. The civic action programs were supported by both USAID and the Military Assistance Program.

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5 1. Ibid. The monetary total consisted of both MAP and USAID funding. 52. Shirley, “The Impact of U.S. Security Assistance on Democracy in Latin America,” 154–56. 53. LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions, 169; Galeano, Guatemala, 79. 54. “U.S. Internal Security Programs in Latin America: Guatemala,” 30 Nov 1966, NSA, Guatemala 1954–1999, #00318. 55. “U.S. Internal Security Programs in Latin America: Guatemala,” 30 Nov 1966, NSA, Guatemala 1954–1999, #00318. MAP supported four T-33’s, four C47’s, three forty-foot Coast Guard utility boats each armed with 50-caliber machine guns, as well as provided trucks, arms, ammunition, radios, and training. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid.; McClintock, The American Connection, 57. These counterinsurgency units included the 1st Airborne Infantry and the 1st Special Forces Company, which consisted of elite troops modeled after the U.S. Army Rangers and Green Berets respectively. 58. Shirley, “The Impact of U.S. Security Assistance on Democracy in Latin America,” 208–9. The average for force improvement in 1964 was 9 percent in Latin America. 59. Ibid. According to Shirley, “When Guatemala’s $100,000 in expenditures for force improvement was combined with the $1.1 million in MAP funds expended on Guatemalan force improvement, total Guatemalan force improvement reached $1.2 million” and comprised 92 percent of the total. 60. McClintock, The American Connection, 56–57. 61. “U.S. Internal Security Programs in Latin America: Guatemala,” 30 Nov 1966, NSA, Guatemala 1954–1999, #00318. 62. Ibid. Short terms of conscription, lack of education, and lack of professional noncommissioned officers contributed to the difficulties of training. 63. Ibid. 64. “Guatemala—A Current Appraisal,” 8 Oct 1966, Country File, NSF, box 54, LBJPL. 65. “Joint State-Defense Message,” 30 Jul 1966, NSA, Guatemala 1954–1999, #00295. 66. “Guatemala—Internal Security Situation,” 29 Sep 1967, NSA, Guatemala 1954–1999, #00344. 67. “Guatemala and Counter-Terror,” 29 Mar 1968, NSA, Guatemala 1954–1999, #00367. 68. McClintock, The American Connection, 79. Both Arriaga and Arana were classmates at the Escuela Politecnica and graduated together in 1939. 69. “Guatemala: Army Gains Initiative against Insurgents,” 1 Dec 1966, NSA, Guatemala 1954–1999, #00319; Mein to Secretary of State, 26 Nov 1966, NSA, Guatemala 1954–1999, #00317. Also in October 1966, Turcios Lima died in a car accident, leading FAR to experience a leadership crisis. At this point in time, the MR-13, led by Yon Sosa, split from FAR for ideological and personalistic differences. 70. MLN quoted in McClintock, The American Connection, 85; “Guatemala: Vigilantism Poses Threat to Stability,” 12 May 1967, NSA, Guatemala 1954–1999, #00332. 71. McClintock, The American Connection, 86. 72. “Guatemala: Vigilantism Poses Threat to Stability,” 12 May 1967, NSA, Guatemala 1954– 1999, #00332. Among the most prominent death squads/phantom organizations were the New Anti-Communist Organization and the Guatemalan Anti-Communist Movement. 73. “Organization of the Guatemalan Internal Security Forces,” 5 Feb 1968, NSA, Guatemala

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7 4. 75. 76. 7 7. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83.

84.

85.

8 6. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

93.

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1954–1999, #00357; “Guatemala: A Counter-insurgency Running Wild?,” 23 Oct 1967, NSA, Guatemala 1954–1999, #00348. Ibid. Ibid. “Guatemala: Vigilantism Poses Threat to Stability,” 12 May 1967, NSA, Guatemala 1954– 1999, #00332. Ibid. Levenson-Estrada, Trade Unionists Against Terror, 45. Jonas, The Battle for Guatemala, 63. “Guatemala: A Counterinsurgency Running Wild?,” 23 Oct 1967, NSA, Guatemala 1954–1999, #00348. Hughes was the director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research for the State Department. Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala under General Efraín Ríos Montt, 1982–1983 (New York: Oxford Press, 2010), 17. “Report of Field Trip,” 20 Nov 1967, NSA, Guatemala 1954–1999, #00350. For example, in 1967, an MLN candidate was the only one running for mayor in Gualan, Zacapa. The New Anti-Communist Organization, other rightist groups, and members of the Fourth Corps have been implicated in Rogelia’s death. For more on Rogelia’s life and death, see Mary Jane Treacy, “Killing the Queen: The Display and Disappearance of Rogelia Cruz,” Latin American Literary Review 29 (January–June 2001): 57, 40–51. McClintock, The American Connection, 94–95; “Guatemala: Caught in the Crossfire,” Time, January 26, 1968, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,837725,00. html. Webber and Munro had just left headquarters of the U.S. military mission in Guatemala City when they were ambushed in broad daylight along with Major John R. Forster and Chief Petty Officer Harry Green. While Forster and Green survived the attack, Forster was wounded in the hand and Green was shot in the spine. “Mein to Secretary of State,” 30 Mar 1968, NSA, Guatemala 1954–1999, #00363; “Weekly Summary,” 29 Mar 1968, NSA, Guatemala 1954–1999, #00366. The State Department speculated that the plot was scheduled to coincide with Arriaga’s trip to the United States in March. The vice president was also implicated and PR leaders demanded his resignation without success. Handy, Gift of the Devil, 163; McClintock, The American Connection, 94–95. “Guatemala after the Military Shake-Up,” 13 May 1968, Country File, NSF, box 54, LBJPL. Ibid. “The Military and the Right in Guatemala,” 8 Nov 1968, NSA, Guatemala 1954–1999, #00387. “Guatemala: Disbanding the Right-Wing Vigilantes,” 21 Oct 1968, NSA, Guatemala 1954–1999, #00383. “Guatemala: Guerrillas Attack US Drilling Site after Two-Year Lull,” 10 Oct 1969, NSA, Guatemala 1954–1999, #00403. McClintock, The American Connection, 96–97; “Terror Again in Guatemala,” New York Times, September 1, 1968, E10; “Guatemala: Caught in the Crossfire,” Time, September 6, 1968, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,837725,00.html. Ibid. McClintock suspects that the MLN may have been behind Mein’s assassination. The New York Times similarly states, “some observers suspected right-wing vigilantes had done it to give the Guatemalan Army an excuse for savage ‘retaliation’ against all leftwing elements.”

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94. Handy, Gift of the Devil, 166–67. Of six million people, only 546,000 votes were cast in the 1970 presidential elections. 95. Garrard-Burnett, Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit, 42–43. Garrard-Burnett states that General Efraín Rios Montt actually won the 1974 presidential election as the candidate for the Christian Democrats, but the election was stolen by the MLN-PID when “ironically . . . his fellow military officers began to fear that he might implement democratic reforms that could limit the army’s war against a reemergent insurgency.” 96. Handy, Gift of the Devil, 169–75. 97. Shirley, “The Impact of U.S. Security Assistance on Democracy in Latin America,” 286–88. 98. For more on the transition to a civilian government in 1985, see Jonas, The Battle for Guatemala, 154–59. Jonas states, “Once the army had completed the genocidal phase of its military campaign, and once the institutions of the counterinsurgency state were legalized in the 1985 constitution, elections and civilian government could proceed without requiring a fundamental change. And in practice, although the balance between civilians and military changed . . . after 1986, much of the power remained in the hands of the army. Cerezo himself acknowledged upon taking office that he held no more than 30 percent of power.”

· Ch a p t er T h r e e ·

Season of Storms The United States and the Caribbean Contest for a New Political Order, 1958–1961

5 A r ag or n Stor m M i l l er

Throughout most of the 1950s, U.S. policymakers enjoyed rela-

tive success in insulating the Western Hemisphere from the ideological tensions of the Cold War, and U.S. allies in the region managed to maintain local politics within contours established decades earlier. Beginning in 1958, however, a new generation of Latin American leaders challenged this status quo. This challenge manifested itself most prominently in the Caribbean basin, where Venezuela’s Romulo Betancourt and Cuba’s Fidel Castro helped overthrow dictators allied with the United States in an effort to establish governments responsive to their own populations. In response, the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo arose as the key conservative—even reactionary—antagonist to Betancourt and Castro. This rivalry sprang from long-running personal animosity and from critical disagreements over the meanings of capitalism and communism, debates that naturally invoked the currents of the global Cold War. Recognizing the ascendance of democratic reform and the obsolescence of dictatorial rule, but unable to defuse the Caribbean crisis, the United States increasingly aligned itself with Betancourt, who appeared to be the best prospect for centrist leadership 76

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independent of Castro’s and Trujillo’s excesses. As the 1960s dawned, the relative intimacy and harmony of the Washington-Caracas partnership played a key role in ensuring that economic and political development in the hemisphere occurred within a pro-U.S. context. This partnership stabilized and reshaped Caribbean—and by extension hemispheric—politics by moderating ascendant left-wing reform, strengthening international security organs such as the Organization of American States (OAS), and crippling the power of right-wing reactionaries. This chapter corroborates recent historiographical trends emphasizing the unusually strong influence of the developing world in U.S. Cold War policymaking by delving into a crucial yet undertreated dimension of hemispheric politics. In the mid-1990s scholars such as Stephen Rabe and Michael Hall spearheaded the reconsideration of the role of Latin America in the Cold War, judging that Latin American leaders often played important roles in shaping the way the Cold War unfolded in the hemisphere. As Max Paul Friedman neatly puts it, this new historiography sought to “strike a balance by acknowledging the enormous impact of the Western Hemisphere’s only superpower without ignoring the role of Latin Americans in shaping their own history.”1 Building on such contributions, scholars like Hal Brands have further showcased the independent thought and agency of Latin Americans, arguing that local leaders acted as more than simple tools for, or students of, the so-called superpowers. In many cases, runs this line of reasoning, these leaders often conceived and executed their own policy prescriptions without seeking the advice or consent of the superpowers.2 This inquiry takes such ideas further, examining the exercise of agency within a fresh context and pushing beyond the notion that the Cold War in the Americas involved simple binaries of “right” or “left,” intervention or cooperation. The argument is that Latin American agency was heterogeneous and constantly shifting, such that Latin Americans debated among themselves over what it meant to be independent or associated with various global powers and political trends. Latin American agency sometimes meant opposition to U.S. policy and a quest for autonomy, but just as often it meant a fluid internal struggle over the meaning and purpose of such autonomy and efforts to forge fresh ties with various powerbrokers in Washington and across the Atlantic. There was an attractive principle to public criticism of Uncle Sam, to be sure, but savvy and pragmatic Latin American leaders recognized that the United States and Europe had much to offer, and that many within the U.S. and European foreign relations

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community were eager to accommodate themselves to new political trends emanating from the region. The sort of disagreements introduced above—in this case between Cuba, Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic—forced Washington into an uncomfortable position as mediator and judge. U.S. policymakers worked to placate and punish, court and confound, these governments, all the while reckoning whether their ideological and political positions represented capitalism, communism, pure nationalism, or some combination of the three. Often paying little attention to Washington, the Caribbean leaders—at the state and nonstate level—developed various political aspirations and alignments for their own nations. While 1959 saw Betancourt and Castro embrace one another, for example, by 1961 rumors began to spread of a secret pact between Castro and Trujillo against Betancourt and John F. Kennedy. The struggles of these leaders for the hearts and minds of the Caribbean had such drastic repercussions that they amounted to the struggle for the future of the hemisphere. The alliances that formed at the end of the 1950s would endure through the most dangerous days of the Cold War in the Western Hemisphere. While the historiography has primarily devoted itself to the more visible examples of U.S.-Cuban rivalry, the critical negotiations and alignments—particularly those between the United States and Venezuela—took place years before this rivalry broke into the open with dramatic events such as the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Troubled Alliances, 1958 and Beyond As Eisenhower’s second term progressed, his administration recognized the limits of privileging stability and pliable strongmen at the expense of democracy. Eisenhower’s policymakers pondered the possibility of phasing out the dictatorships, while at the same time preventing communist encroachment. This challenge forced them to reevaluate key ideological assumptions and cultivate cooperative and mutually respectful relationships with longtime collaborators, promising new partners, and potential enemies. Further, leaders from across the political spectrum in Latin America and the wider world were not passive actors, and indeed challenged U.S. hegemony in advancing their own agendas. By the spring of 1959 the Eisenhower administration could count successes in its efforts to play a more progressive role in the hemisphere; anti-U.S. sentiment associated with deposed dictatorships in

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Venezuela and Cuba, however, indicated that Washington still lagged behind the curve of new political trajectories in Latin America. As historian Peter H. Smith has noted, during the late 1940s and early 1950s the Truman and Eisenhower administrations became unusually intimate with right-wing leaders in the region by virtue of their lockstep with U.S. diplomatic and trade imperatives. Eisenhower heaped praise on the Venezuelan caudillo Marcos Pérez Jiménez for, among other things, severing relations with the Soviet Union in 1952 and even awarded him the Legion of Merit in 1954. Trujillo distinguished himself by seconding the United States in any and every OAS and United Nations (UN) vote. As Secretary of State John Foster Dulles characterized the situation, the dictators were the only trustworthy actors in the region.3 Yet the apparent hegemony enjoyed by the United States masked a much more complicated relationship. The regional strongmen needed U.S. support to stay in power, but Washington’s reliance on such unrepresentative and repressive actors in Latin America meant that any regime change would tend to diminish U.S. control. U.S. policy toward the Dominican Republic in the second half of the 1950s illustrates the tenuousness with which Washington stayed ahead of hemispheric politics. Trujillo had long relied on a shrewd combination of populism and patronage to maintain power and generate national wealth. Peasant smallholders produced coffee and cacao for competitive prices on the world market, and Trujillo reciprocated by building infrastructure and providing a wide array of modern services. At the beginning of the 1950s, however, Trujillo sought to transform the country from a relatively self-contained and selfreliant entity into a fully modern state and monoculture exporter, funded by a postwar boom in world sugar prices. Such a new direction, however, meant the expropriation of the relatively small but entirely foreign-owned domestic sugar industry. For the next few years, the government bought out several U.S. refineries—at below market prices—and spent millions on lavish new construction projects in and around Ciudad Trujillo, formerly Santo Domingo. Trujillo’s staunch support of Eisenhower’s foreign policy helped mute cries from the disgruntled U.S. sugar industry.4 Throughout the 1950s Trujillo made Dominican territory available for U.S. missile testing and radar tracking sites, and provided significant assistance—transmitting propaganda broadcasts and arranging secret arms transfers, for example—to the 1954 effort to overthrow Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán in Guatemala.5 Indeed, the two administrations found themselves increasingly bound

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to each other, for better or for worse. Since the 1930s, U.S. trade policy set quotas giving 50 percent of the domestic sugar market to foreign producers, at prices more than twice as high as the market rate. Of this 50 percent share, Cuba and the Philippines enjoyed the vast majority, leaving only scraps to other countries. Trujillo aggressively worked to increase his share, trumpeting his rigid anticommunism and loyal consumption of U.S. manufactured goods in the halls of Congress and the boardrooms of U.S. exporters. By 1957, the Dominican share of U.S. markets had increased 500 percent over 1948, from 8,133 tons to over 42,000 tons. Trujillo continued to expand the domestic sugar industry until his country and his personal fortune could not survive—at least 50 percent of national revenue came from sugar export taxes— without the sugar industry. Yet Trujillo’s authoritarianism made him so many enemies within his own borders and elsewhere that U.S. policymakers continued to support him for fear of a possibly leftist and less-pliable regime replacing him.6 This support began to erode after the Galíndez incident. In March 1956, Jesús de Galíndez, a lecturer at Columbia University whose scholarship harshly condemned the Dominican dictator, disappeared under mysterious circumstances.7 By September, there was still no conclusive proof about who was responsible, though subsequent investigations strongly suggested the involvement of Trujillo.8 Later that year Gerald L. Murphy, a U.S. citizen and pilot for Dominican Airlines, disappeared in Ciudad Trujillo after several indiscreet and drunken boasts that he had been the pilot who had smuggled Galíndez out of the United States, disguised as a cancer patient, to meet the vengeance of Trujillo. After a month of inquiries by the U.S. embassy, the Dominican government announced that another Dominican Airlines pilot, Octavio de la Maza, had hanged himself in prison and left behind a note confessing to murdering Murphy after the end of their homosexual affair. A State Department investigation in March of 1957 revealed the sordid nature of Dominican involvement. In its report, the State Department held that Ciudad Trujillo had demonstrated unacceptable conduct for legitimate democratic nations and, rather, had acted on par with outlaws and communists.9 By 1958, there was no outright condemnation of the Trujillo regime by Washington, but the bubble had been conclusively burst on Trujillo’s image as a forthright partner of U.S. interests in the hemisphere.10 In this context, Washington came to reconsider Venezuela’s Betancourt— a revolutionary with communist ties in the 1930s who had evolved into a

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moderate champion of democracy in the 1940s—as something other than an annoyingly persistent critic of U.S. policy. Perhaps, U.S. policymakers concluded, he might be a useful future ally. Betancourt had long since forsworn earlier associations with communism, and he had worked easily with U.S. diplomats during his brief 1945–48 stay in power in Caracas. Betancourt had labored for decades to craft a comprehensive political and socioeconomic vision of a modern Latin America capable of negotiating with the United States on equal terms, a region free from foreign capitalist intervention and domestic authoritarian rule. In exile throughout the early 1950s, Betancourt assiduously lobbied centrist and leftist constituencies in the United States for support. At a January 1957 Carnegie Center luncheon for the Inter-American Association for Democracy and Freedom, for example, Betancourt asserted that U.S. big business poisoned hemispheric relations by showing Latin America the “wrong face of Uncle Sam.” Through cooperation with unionization and labor negotiation, he contended, U.S. business interests could show the “other face” of the United States, the face of those who “sincerely believe in democracy.”11 Betancourt also conspicuously publicized the darker aspects of dictatorial regimes and suggested that U.S. support for them was inconsistent with rhetorical commitments to democracy and human dignity. In an October 1955 letter to the New York Times, Betancourt complained that Eisenhower’s endorsement of the Pérez Jiménez regime violated the UN and OAS charters. Here was the first example of the emerging “Betancourt Doctrine,” which held that dictatorial regimes were inconsistent with the U.S. system. The UN and OAS sanctified the principle of nonintervention, but, since Pérez Jiménez did not represent the true interests of the nation, the United States was in effect intervening in Venezuelan domestic affairs. Further, the United States shirked international mandates to respect and guard human rights.12 Continuing his efforts to promote hemispheric democratization and isolate the dictators, Betancourt later sought to take advantage of the GalíndezMurphy affair. In a January 12, 1957, speech at the Carnegie Center in New York, he surveyed the ills of the Latin American political situation. The institution of the Latin American dictator, he asserted, was on its last leg. Trujillo’s decision to use his secret police on foreign shores simply illustrated his flailing desperation. While the Eisenhower administration continued to support Trujillo, it did so with a lower public profile. To assuage critics such as Betancourt, the administration placed minor roadblocks in routine U.S.– Dominican Republic technical and military exchange programs. Betancourt, for his part, continued to espouse a new era, free from dictatorships. At the

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end of 1957, this goal came closer to fruition, as the dictator of his own country suddenly teetered to the brink of collapse. In December 1957 Venezuela’s Marcos Pérez Jiménez—who had installed himself in power in 1948 and rigged the elections of 1952—staged a plebiscite giving him another five years in office.13 Unlike earlier such episodes, however, there was widespread public opposition to such political theatrics. Within six weeks, a broad swath of Venezuelan constituencies united against the dictator, calling for a general strike for January 21. At that point, thousands of protestors convened near the center of Caracas and traded blows with the police until nightfall. The uprising and strike spread to other cities and paralyzed the oil fields of western Venezuela. Seeing the writing on the wall, Pérez Jiménez boarded an air force transport plane and fled the country at 3 a.m. on January 23, 1958.14 In just over a month, Betancourt’s lifelong political goal—the toppling of dictatorship in his homeland—had gone from remote dream to actuality, and he returned to join a civilian-military junta working to conduct free elections as soon as practicable. While the Eisenhower administration did not go so far as to embrace Betancourt’s call for a campaign against dictatorships, it quickly recognized and offered support to the new government.15 Within Venezuela, the main contenders for the presidency observed a “gentleman’s agreement” to conduct their campaigns in an atmosphere of mutual respect and civility. The three main political parties met in October to sign what came to be known as the Punto Fijo Pact. Under this agreement, whichever party won the upcoming presidential election would include the others in its decisions about government appointments, and the losing parties would honor the election results. The group ultimately confirmed Betancourt as the victor.16 In his February 1959 inaugural, Betancourt devoted significant attention to foreign affairs. If he stood for democracy at home, he would demand it across Latin America. He invoked the founding OAS document, the Charter of Bogotá, and its restriction of membership in the organization to “governments of respectable origin, born of the will of their people as expressed in the only legitimate source of power: free elections.”17 Regimes that refused to respect basic human rights and relied on totalitarian police power should be quarantined and vanquished through the peaceful collective action of the American community. In this effort, Betancourt called for cooperation from the United States as well as the armed forces of Venezuela. He also sought closer beneficial relations with the Catholic Church. In short, Betancourt envisioned taking the first steps toward a golden age for people within his own nation and throughout the hemisphere.

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Old Grudges, New Politics: To the Santiago Conference, Spring and Summer 1959 Immediately upon Castro’s assumption of power in Cuba in January 1959 and Betancourt’s inauguration as president of Venezuela, Trujillo began excoriating these apparent harbingers of democracy. The Dominican dictator cast them as bandits, if not outright spearheads of a communist invasion. Within Venezuela, remnants of the Pérez Jiménez constituency echoed these warnings. Transferring thought into action, these perezjimenistas initiated a strident clash against moderate parties over the proper political orientation of the hemisphere. The intensity and scope of the struggle raised questions about the role of the OAS in settling long-running American debates over democracy and nonintervention. After spending the first half of 1959 on the defensive, the Betancourt government succeeded in chastening the hemispheric right at the OAS Fifth Meeting of Consultation of Foreign Ministers in Santiago, Chile, an event that established Venezuela as a growing force in the maelstrom of hemispheric politics. Betancourt’s impending inauguration and the presence of Dominican political refugees in the Venezuelan embassy in Ciudad Trujillo poisoned Dominican-Venezuelan relations in the early months of 1959. Trujillo monitored the events surrounding the inauguration and became greatly displeased with the overwhelmingly positive response it generated throughout the Americas. Oregon Congressman Charles O. Porter, for example, attended the event as a special guest of Betancourt, and on February 10 he publicly predicted Trujillo’s imminent downfall. The following day Porter spoke to the Caracas press again, calling for a harder line in U.S. relations with Latin American dictatorships and lumping the Dominican strongman with those in Paraguay, Haiti, and Nicaragua.18 Porter’s sympathy paled in comparison to the warm embrace that Castro and the new Cuban regime gave President-Elect Betancourt. Three weeks before the inauguration, Castro had chosen Venezuela as the site for his inaugural state visit, accepting the invitation of the Caracas University Students’ Federation to observe the anniversary of the overthrow of Pérez Jiménez. Arriving at Maquetía airport early on the afternoon of January 23, Castro received the cheers of some 50,000 spectators. Interim President Rear Admiral Wolfgang Larrazábal, who had governed since the coup the previous January, stood ready to receive him and show him around the capital.19 The following day Castro held a series of private consultations with the incoming Venezuelan leadership and selected journalists. Publicly, he spoke of forming a Latin American or Caribbean league that would oppose military

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governments and dictatorships. Privately, he sounded out Betancourt about entering into a partnership against Trujillo. This thinking closely complemented Betancourt’s; what the U.S. press had come to call the Betancourt Doctrine held that dictatorships could no longer be tolerated in the hemisphere.20 With regard to the United States, however, the two had their differences. Castro told Betancourt that he was considering “having a game with the gringos,” and hoped that Venezuela might underwrite such a challenge to the United States with a $300 million loan and oil subsidies in case his actions provoked a U.S. embargo.21 Betancourt demurred, indicating that he had committed to political evolution rather than revolution.22 Disagreeing over only this point, and with opposition to Trujillo a much more unifying theme than potential opposition to the United States, Castro left Betancourt a friend. Soon after this visit, Venezuelan port authorities at Maracaibo seized a Norwegian freighter, the Tronstad, on suspicion that it contained subversive literature critical of the national government. Because the ship had made an extended port of call in Ciudad Trujillo immediately before sailing to Maracaibo, Venezuelan authorities determined the subversive literature to be of Dominican origin. On June 12, Venezuelan leaders announced an end to diplomatic relations with the Dominican Republic.23 The following day, Miraflores accused the Dominican Republic of financing a vast network of spies and agitators within Venezuela and promised to add this issue to the growing list of grievances against the Dominican Republic it was preparing to present to the OAS.24 Nearly simultaneously, Cuban-Dominican relations collapsed. On June 14, 1959, Dominican exiles based in Cuba launched an invasion against the Trujillo regime. Though exile and Dominican government accounts differed—Ciudad Trujillo claimed the invaders arrived with the aid of the Cuban navy while the exiles claimed to have commandeered a Dominican transport plane—it seemed clear that some two hundred men had established a presence in the northwest town of Constanza before fleeing into the mountains. The Dominican government immediately charged Havana with complicity in the affair, a charge that the Cuban leadership denounced vehemently. On June 26, Cuban Foreign Minister Raúl Roa announced the end of CubanDominican relations in a letter to the OAS outlining widespread Dominican human rights abuses and hostility toward the Cuban people.25 In the course of a month, then, the Caribbean feud had moved from informal to official. All three aggrieved parties shifted the conflict into the arena of the OAS. The moderate course championed by the United States and many Latin

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Americans met severe challenges once the Cuban, Venezuelan, and Dominican delegations shared the same room. In the evening of the first day, Roa charged the Dominican Republic with responsibility for an abortive uprising in Cuba the previous week. Seated directly across from him, Dominican minister Porfirio Herrera Báez compared Roa to a squid spouting ink. The battle between the two men escalated: while the chairman banged his gavel to restore order, observers overheard Roa calling Herrera Báez a “moron” and Herrera Báez’s aides threatening to kill the Cuban. In a classic understatement, New York Times correspondent Tad Szulc observed, “Today’s outbreak could conceivably make more difficult the hard task of agreeing here on a Caribbean peace formula acceptable to all.”26 Nonetheless, the moderate bloc pressed on. The South American contingent invited the Venezuelan, Dominican, and Cuban delegates to individual, closed-door meetings, urging them to compromise. By August 16, the American republics had committed in principle to forming a commission that could investigate interstate disputes on its own authority, or at the request of a given government. At Cuban and Venezuelan insistence, however, the commission would require the consent of the government directly involved before it could undertake an investigation on national soil. The key differences between the Caribbean antagonists remained unresolved. Yet the American republics avoided the worst-case scenario of open war and the collapse of the OAS. The compromise held, and on August 18 the Permanent Council of the OAS adjourned after issuing what came to be known as the Santiago Declaration. Building on precedent, the OAS recognized that “the effective exercise of representative democracy is the best vehicle for the promotion of [American] social and political progress”; therefore, “harmony among the American republics can be effective only insofar as human rights . . . and the exercise of representative democracy are a reality within each of them.” Furthermore, the body ruled that “anti-democratic regimes” violated its founding principles and subsequently called upon members to adhere to the principles of nonintervention and democratic governance. Most important for the future, the declaration authorized the Inter-American Peace Committee to investigate acts of interstate intervention or aggression and situations in which human rights and democratic institutions appeared to be in jeopardy.27 In many respects the Santiago Declaration gave renewed validity and a new mission to the OAS. Critics in Latin America had long asserted that the United States paid only lip service to the sections of the OAS charter

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that mandated democracy and respect for human rights. In this view, Washington had created the OAS to serve Cold War security concerns and then neglected it to the point of irrelevancy. Now, however, Latin Americans were beginning to set the agenda of the organization to better serve their own interests and aspirations. Though obviously Washington remained a crucial participant in regional parlays, the end of the 1950s ushered in unprecedented Latin American leadership and gave the lie to the notion that the OAS was nothing more than a classic tool of U.S. imperialism.

The Perezjimenista-Trujillo Union and the Assault on Betancourt, Autumn through Winter 1959–1960 Rather than concede the struggle or consider moderation, however, Trujillo raised the stakes. As Betancourt built his reputation as a leading hemispheric statesman, the Dominican dictator laid plans to silence him by any means necessary. While Pérez Jiménez himself had begun to focus more on gaining asylum in the United States than reinstalling himself in Venezuela, many of his supporters and former constituents within Venezuela were willing to go to any lengths to throw out the democrats and create a new right-wing dictatorship. A nasty and virulent propaganda campaign in the last months of 1959 culminated with sponsorship by the Dominican Republic of both an invasion of Venezuela and an assassination attempt against Betancourt in the spring and summer 1960. By the end of this episode Betancourt had not only survived, but also increased his stature as a leader throughout Latin America and emerged as an important partner for policymakers in the White House and State Department. The State Department tracked several groups that portrayed themselves as homegrown Venezuelans but who were in fact part of the Dominican propaganda machine. In January 1960 the U.S. Embassy in Ciudad Trujillo intercepted a copy of Proof of Communist Domination in Venezuela, an eighty-one–page polemic published by the Anti-Communist Liberation Movement of Venezuela that was essentially a manifesto of the Pérez Jiménez– Trujillo assault against political moderation. The work asserted that Betancourt had been a tool of Soviet communism since the 1920s and had fallen in league with Castro in an effort to deliver Venezuela to the communist bloc. Betancourt, an “extremely bad and vulgar political writer . . . [and an] assiduous traveler along the dark paths of Sodom and Gomorrah,” had deceived the wider Caribbean into thinking him a worthy leader.28 A traitor

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to all Venezuelans, he cast himself as an intellectual elite but was of too obscure origins to be accepted by the bourgeois or middle classes. “Two Soviet agents, Betancourt and Fidel Castro, have been given the job by their Russian boss, agitating throughout the Caribbean for the purpose of opening a new front against the United States, this time on the very doorstep of the great northern nation,” the manifesto asserted.29 The Trujillo-perezjimenista alliance backed up its invective by creating cadres of provocateurs in Venezuela and potential invaders in the Dominican Republic. In the last months of 1959 the Venezuelan government began monitoring a sophisticated network of perezjimenistas and Dominican secret agents operating within its borders. Using the Dominican consulate in Curaçao as a way station, Dominican Military Intelligence Service agents cultivated contacts among the Venezuelan right and sponsored efforts to breed civic unrest and plant the seeds of a popular coup. In the first days of 1960, the perezjimenistas unleashed the first salvo of their terrorist campaign, using Dominican-supplied explosives to bomb radio stations and trains in downtown Caracas. Before each attack, “Dominican Voice” broadcasts from Ciudad Trujillo predicted “grave events in Caracas,” while similar antigovernment broadcasts circulated from clandestine transmitters in Venezuela. During this time, the Venezuelan government learned that Jesús Maria Castro León, a former general and high functionary in the Pérez Jiménez regime who was in exile following a coup attempt against the Larrazábal provisional government, had visited Ciudad Trujillo and enjoyed an audience with the Dominican dictator.30 Around this time the Trujillo regime put Castro León at the head of an invasion force against Betancourt. The Venezuelan exile had spent November in Puerto Rico, meeting with various anticommunists and railing against Betancourt. Former Dominican Ambassador to Venezuela Rafael F. Bonnelly had kept Trujillo informed of these affairs and perhaps arranged Castro León’s arrival in Ciudad Trujillo.31 Trujillo had a ready-made army for the Venezuelan’s use, thanks to the redirecting of funds from the armed forces budget to a shadowy anticommunist foreign legion. Based at Feria Ganadera, some sixty-seven officers and several hundred men had consumed at least $17,000 a month for rations since August 31, accounting for 2 percent of the defense budget in the first months of 1960.32 Castro León was not long in launching his invasion. He and several hundred men had infiltrated Colombia, and on April 20 they attacked the city of San Cristobal, in Venezuela’s southwestern Táchira state, about

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three hundred miles from Caracas. The raiders forced the surrender of the local army garrison and, for several hours, controlled the town. Making use of two local radio stations, Castro León declared his intention to save the country from communism and demanded Betancourt’s surrender. The Trujillo propaganda apparatus breathlessly supported the invasion, even jumping the gun by announcing the event hours before it occurred. Ciudad Trujillo portrayed the invasion as a popular movement embraced throughout Venezuela and immediately announced its recognition of the Castro León government and its intention to send a new ambassador as soon as practicable. By April 22, however, Venezuelan National Guard units, supplemented by a five-hundred-man militia of local farmers, had defeated the force and put Castro León in flight.33 Few Venezuelans doubted Trujillo’s direct involvement in the invasion, and such overt intervention did more harm than good to the prospects for the right wing. Indeed, public discontent with Betancourt tended to transform into strong support whenever the government appeared threatened from abroad. Quickly denouncing Castro León as a Dominican agent, the Betancourt government sought to focus domestic discontent on foreign policy problems, making its charges public on April 24. The United States immediately signaled its support for the Betancourt government and continued distancing itself from Trujillo. The State Department also continued its work on the Trujillo problem. On April 14, Acting Secretary of State Christian A. Herter secretly advised Eisenhower that the administration needed a back-up plan if it could not groom a “moderate, pro–United States leadership” from the existing civilian or military opposition in the Dominican Republic. Specifically, the United States ought to be willing to employ “U.S. Armed Forces at the request of [a] provisional government under Article III of the Rio Treaty to deter or prevent Castro- or communist-inspired invasions or armed insurrections.”34 In Ciudad Trujillo, U.S. Ambassador Joseph Farland cultivated contacts among a number of dissidents seeking to establish a democratic government with Washington’s blessing and support. Eisenhower approved Herter’s memo on April 21, during the Castro León insurrection, compelling the ambassador to continue his contacts. At a cocktail party with several dissidents, Farland fielded initial requests for materiel support, in the form of sniper rifles, in the effort to depose Trujillo. In May, as Farland’s tour in Ciudad Trujillo expired, he introduced the dissident group to Deputy Chief-of-Mission Henry Dearborn, now their unofficial link to the CIA.35 Like the previous summer, Dominican and Venezuelan diplomats

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prepared to confront each other within the OAS. Unlike the previous summer, however, Trujillo could find no sympathy or support among the hemispheric community. In fact, he suffered so many setbacks at the hands of Betancourt that, around the middle of May, Trujillo ordered his assassination. On May 8, 1960, Venezuelan businessman and longtime Dominican resident Juan Manuel Sanoja left Venezuela, headed for the Dominican Republic by way of Haiti. Sanoja soon secured a Dominican passport and headed for Madrid, Spain, intent on recruiting ex-Venezuelan navy captain Eduardo Morales Luengo to help lead a military coup in Venezuela. The two returned to Ciudad Trujillo on May 30, where they were received by Johnny Abbes, chief of Servicio de Inteligencia Militar (SIM), and taken to consult with Trujillo. Sanoja then made another trip to Venezuela to inform a group of conspirators that Morales Luengo had returned from exile and agreed to lead the rebellion against Betancourt. On the morning of June 17, Sanoja, along with several Venezuelan conspirators, left Maiquetía. Their declared destination was El Piñal, in Venezuela’s Apure state, but shortly after takeoff they detoured and headed for the Dominican Republic. The plane landed at San Isidro Air Base, near Ciudad Trujillo. The Venezuelans met again with Abbes García, who introduced the idea of using a remotely detonated car bomb to kill Betancourt. The conspirators agreed and asked for arms to supply two hundred civilians allegedly waiting to join elements of the Venezuelan armed forces in a coup. The following day the Venezuelans, along with the arms and munitions, returned to Maiquetía. On the morning of June 24 the conspirators parked an Oldsmobile sedan that had been fitted out with the explosives along Betancourt’s motorcade route to Armed Forces Day celebrations at the Miraflores presidential palace. Cabrera Sifontes stationed himself some three hundred meters away with a radio transmitter and, when the motorcade passed by around 9:15 a.m., detonated the bomb.36 Betancourt’s driver and aide-de-camp died instantly. The president and the other passengers—including the minister of defense and other military officials, along with their wives—suffered major burns. By the end of the day, Betancourt had undergone surgery and recovered enough from anesthesia to address the nation. “Today’s attack,” he declared, “is the clearest example that the national and international enemies of Venezuelan democracy will stop at nothing in order to establish despotism in this nation. . . . That which has happened will not dissuade me,” he continued, “and I will maintain my loyalty to the mandate given me in free elections by the Venezuelan people.”37 Public support for the government exceeded even the levels seen in the

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aftermath of the Castro León affair. Editorialist Juan Liscano portrayed the attack on the president as nothing less than an assault on the entire nation perpetrated by the depraved and marginal Pérez Jiménez–Trujillo clique. The clique intended its attack against Betancourt to spark a conflagration that would restore the dictatorial regime. It nearly succeeded, given the ineffectiveness of the national security services and the “excessive weakness” of the democratic regime, Liscano continued. But, he added, the conspirators’ key failure lay in their inability to appreciate the new social and political reality in Venezuela. Despite popular frustration with the Betancourt administration, the people had no desire to return to the old days of dictatorship.38 Liscano nicely summed up the state of Caribbean politics and Venezuelan public sentiment. Whatever dissatisfaction the citizenry harbored with the transition to democracy and maldistribution of wealth across social strata, there was little sentiment for a return to the autocratic politics of the postwar decade. By trying to force the issue through assassination and spectacular violence, the right-wing constituency made its plight that much more desperate. In the wake of the June attack, Venezuelans who had been ambivalent or hostile to Betancourt rallied around him. Liscano accurately judged that Venezuelans saw the assassination attempt as an affront to the nation. After a difficult first year and a half in office, Betancourt found himself to be a national hero, enjoying an unprecedented degree of legitimacy and popularity. As 1960 progressed, it became clear that the right-wing attack against political moderation had reached its high-water mark.

The Death Rattle of the Right: The San José Conference and the Collapse of the Dominican Dictatorship, July 1960–May 1961 As Betancourt recovered from his injuries, a mountain of documentary evidence revealed that the highest levels of the Dominican government had been involved in the attack. The case was so compelling that the OAS agreed to convene almost immediately to consider sanctions against the Trujillo regime. As hemispheric opinion hardened further against the dictator, Venezuela enjoyed an unprecedented moment of unity behind its democratically elected leader. Political divisions temporarily faded away and there was little room for the remnants of the perezjimenistas. By the spring of 1961 the right wing in Latin America was dramatically weakened, and the governments in Caracas and Washington were ready to confront the budding challenge presented by the political left.

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The conference opened at an extremely delicate moment in relations between the United States, Venezuela, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. Washington had concluded that it could not have a constructive relationship with Castro or Trujillo and that Betancourt was its best prospect within the Venezuelan political scene. The critical problem involved deciding which relationship ought to be terminated first—Castro or Trujillo—and doing so in a manner that did not empower the remaining dictator or prejudice relations with Betancourt. CIA Director Allen Dulles had counseled Eisenhower that the Dominican problem might have to be solved first, despite the fact that Cuba represented a greater long-term threat to U.S. interests. After all, Castro appeared capable of exploiting any void created by Trujillo’s collapse, and Betancourt indicated he would abandon his partnership with Washington if it equivocated with Trujillo. White House adviser Andrew J. Goodpaster echoed this counsel, noting that Latin American sentiment was generally identical to the Venezuelan desire to marginalize Trujillo before Castro. The best Washington could expect was to keep the Cuban and Dominican problems linked.39 The difficulties experienced by the Eisenhower administration in allocating the U.S. sugar quota illustrate this problem. Throughout 1960 Eisenhower and the U.S. Congress had agreed to reduce Cuba’s above-market price share of the domestic sugar market. Many senators sympathetic to Trujillo, however, had worked to funnel this share toward the Dominican Republic, a situation that enraged the Venezuelans. From Caracas’s perspective, no connection existed between the Cuban and Dominican issues. To Betancourt, Trujillo represented the clear threat; the OAS needed to work against him first and foremost, and only later, if at all, against Castro. During a July 1960 National Security Council Meeting, Dulles and Secretary of State Herter noted this focus; Herter had even overheard the Venezuelan foreign minister advising his colleagues in the United Arab Republic and Bolivia that the nonaligned nations of the world ought to support Castro.40 The Venezuelan leader still thought Castro could be brought back into the political mainstream. In recent conversations with Ambassador Edward J. Sparks, Betancourt called for a one-month interval between the passage of anti-Trujillo sanctions and the consideration of antiCastro sanctions. He hoped that a group of neutral Latin American nations could use such time to secure a more positive posture from Castro.41 The San José conference thus became two conferences, as OAS protocol dictated that a first session would consider the Venezuelan complaint against the Dominican Republic, and a later session would convene shortly thereafter

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to hear U.S. charges of communist infiltration in Cuba. At the Sixth Meeting, Venezuela favored outright expulsion of the Dominican government from the OAS, while Herter proposed that Trujillo agree to hold internationally supervised elections. Ciudad Trujillo rejected even this moderate solution, portraying it as a flagrant violation of national sovereignty. The Dominican Republic had its own constitution and political institutions, insisted the Dominican government, and it could decide on its own whether to alter such institutions. Given as always to hyperbole, the Dominican newspaper El Caribe declared that Herter’s plan would constitute “the clearest and most humiliating example of intervention ever realized.”42 At the last minute, however, Herrera Báez tried to throw a curve ball, asking that an OAS commission be sent to his country to observe political processes with an eye toward possible presidential elections in 1962, as a way to forestall almost certain punitive sanctions. This move, coming on the penultimate day of the conference, did not pay dividends for Ciudad Trujillo. The United States, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay had already arranged a compromise that would punish the Dominican Republic, keep it inside the OAS, and oversee any potential reforms on the island nation.43 In the final meeting of the conference, the OAS conclusively condemned the Dominican Republic. The body determined that the November 1959 attempt to drop antigovernment leaflets over Caracas, the April 1960 Castro León invasion, and the June 1960 assassination attempt against president Betancourt had all been carried out with the knowledge and assistance of the highest levels of the Dominican government. As a result, the OAS called on its members to break diplomatic relations with Ciudad Trujillo immediately and to take part in an economic sanctions regime that would begin with war materiel and broaden if the Dominican government continued its belligerence.44 Following the OAS sanctions, cooperation between Trujillo and the Venezuelan right ruptured under the pressure of international isolation, leaving the right wing in both countries to a withering existence as 1960 continued. Like the earlier Santiago conference, the San José conference illustrated the shift in OAS priorities from an exclusive U.S. concern—some critics might claim “obsession”—with regional security and world communism to a Latin American concern with ending autocratic and despotic rule. Since the organization’s inception, dictators had taken advantage of charter guarantees of nonintervention and lingering distrust of U.S. motives, creating sham “popular” governments that barely placed a fig leaf over political repression. The new generation of Latin American democrats, however, subjected the

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nonintervention/democracy paradigm to probing scrutiny and demanded that the United States follow suit. The budding partnership between Washington and Caracas would have several obstacles to negotiate during this political sea change from extremism to moderation. As the Venezuelan president informed the nation in an address on September 13, there was cause for guarded optimism. The coalition stood on solid footing, and proof of economic recovery could be seen in the vast increases in government revenue and significant new levels of foreign investment. The forces of right-wing reaction had been “damaged but not eliminated.” The focus of the nation, he declared, should be on internal improvement, both in terms of projects like the construction of affordable public housing and in the elimination of the last threats to peace and order.45 In October Caracas played host to a large gathering of Dominican exile groups. The consensus here was that “Chapita”—the puny little man, as many Venezuelans referred to Trujillo—would disappear, almost as if by osmosis, at the beginning of the New Year, with or without sugar markets or any other ability to secure U.S. aid.46 Publicly, Trujillo and the right seemed to have already been relegated to the dustbin of history. In private, however, both the United States and Venezuela continued to undermine the weakened perezjimenista-Trujillo faction. In the spring of 1960, Eisenhower authorized the construction of a radio station on Swan Island, a guano island off the coast of Honduras, for the purpose of broadcasting anti-Castro propaganda throughout the Caribbean. As 1960 progressed, U.S. policymakers sought to use Radio Swan to promote opposition to Trujillo as well. Radio Swan programming focused on the deepening conflict between Trujillo and the Catholic Church—suggesting that he should be opposed not simply for being a tyrant but also for being a poor Christian—and featured news and editorials from various Dominican dissident groups. A typical example of this format was a letter from an opposition group called “25th of November” that General Consul and de facto CIA Chief-of-Station Henry Dearborn recommended for broadcast in January 1961. The letter criticized the Church for waffling in alternately denouncing and supporting Trujillo. The opposition called to account those, like Archbishop Octavio Beras, who pursued an accommodation.47 U.S. intelligence also remained in contact with dissident groups inside the Dominican Republic and understood, at least within the CIA, that these groups intended to assassinate Trujillo. In February 1961 CIA agents met with dissidents in New York City and discussed specific plans in which U.S.

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weaponry and expertise would be used in killing the Dominican leader. By March these requests had circulated through channels in Washington, but compelled no firm action beyond the decision to send a minute quantity of small arms to the U.S. embassy in Ciudad Trujillo for potential distribution to the dissidents.48 Trujillo behaved defiantly in public. In private, however, it appears evident that, during the last months of 1960 and first weeks of 1961, he made a desperate and unsuccessful overture toward Cuba and the Soviet Union in an effort to stay in power. In the months since the San José conference the Dominican government had suffered two critical setbacks: it appeared unlikely that the country would get as much extra income from gains of Cuba’s share of the U.S. sugar quota as it needed, and the Eisenhower administration had gradually expanded economic sanctions arising from the August meetings. In light of these intractable difficulties and driven by his overwhelming desire to remain in power, Trujillo, unexpectedly, reached out tentatively to Cuba. By the end of the summer of 1960 Dominican-Cuban détente, if not an alliance, seemed to be in the air. As Washington Post journalist Gerry Robichaud observed at the end of July, the radio propaganda war of words between the two nations had essentially ceased. While the two leaders still despised one another, the ceasefire suggested that they had found the cycle of conflict exhausting and unsustainable. It was especially curious, then, that, when the OAS announced its judgment of Dominican guilt in widespread human rights abuses, Raúl Castro issued a strident defense of the Trujillo government before Ciudad Trujillo even had time to formulate a response. The journalist felt it unlikely that either Castro brother would extend himself on Trujillo’s behalf unless he had some assurance that the Dominican dictator would follow suit if the roles were reversed.49 New York Times writer Will Lissner echoed these feelings in August, following the Sixth Meeting of Consultation. Whereas Robichaud’s assertions relied on circumstance, Lissner relied on observers and informants in Washington and Ciudad Trujillo. Apparently Trujillo and his advisers were frustrated enough with their inability to gain more access to Cuba’s sugar quota to forswear continued trade relations with the United States. Their goals were now securing an accommodation with Cuba and a trade agreement with the Soviet Union.50 Max Frankel of the New York Times also picked up on this story during an assignment in Ciudad Trujillo. He reported in early January on apparent high-level meetings between Cuba and the Dominican Republic designed to

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lighten each party’s load of foreign policy concerns. Senior Trujillo assistants Johnny Abbes García and General Arturo Espaillat had met with Castro representatives in eastern Cuba near the end of 1960. At these meetings, the representatives had formalized an agreement to observe a mutual propaganda ceasefire and to make common cause against Venezuela and the United States. If these reports were credible, it would therefore be no coincidence that the Dominican Republic’s Radio Caribe chose this time to begin a new campaign of concerted praise for Cuba and hatred toward the United States and the Catholic Church.51 In other broadcasts, Radio Caribe criticized President-Elect Kennedy, suggesting, in December 1960, for example, that his inability to fix the mess in the Caribbean left by Eisenhower would force the Dominican Republic to turn to the Soviets for help.52 Also following this story was Tad Szulc, whose sources in Washington indicated that Trujillo’s foreign policy plans involved far more than simply an accommodation or alliance with Cuba. Either immediately before or after the Cuba overture, Dominican secret police chief Abbes García had traveled through the Soviet bloc soliciting economic and moral support for the flagging Trujillo regime. Just as Castro acceded to only a modus vivendi with Trujillo rather than a formal pact, the Soviets and Eastern Europeans apparently listened politely before wishing the Dominican diplomat well on his journey home. According to Szulc’s sources, not even the propaganda victory of having another Caribbean country declare loyalty to the USSR could offset the damage that would be done to the Soviet image by reaching out to someone as universally detested as Trujillo. The fact that the Dominican economy continued to falter in the first months of 1961 increased the probability that the Soviets rejected Abbes García. In response, Trujillo had reportedly begun plotting a last ditch effort to replicate the Castro program, expropriating U.S. property and somehow forcing the USSR to welcome him into the socialist camp.53 Whatever happened during Abbes García’s tour, signs of détente continued to emanate from Havana and Ciudad Trujillo throughout the spring of 1961. As far as the outgoing Eisenhower administration was concerned, the Castro-Trujillo rapprochement had become a formal pact. According to a briefing document provided to President-Elect Kennedy in January 1961, “a Hitler-Stalin type of cooperation between Castro and Trujillo appears to exist.”54 On January 6, Che Guevara announced during a radio broadcast that Trujillo was “now our friend.” Radio Caribe reciprocated this gesture in its observance of May Day, suggesting that Trujillismo had been a “vanguard of

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socialism” long before the Cuban revolution.55 In April 1961, shortly after the Bay of Pigs invasion, Ciudad Trujillo made it known that it would be willing to exchange the surviving prisoners from the June 1959 Cuban raid against the Dominican Republic for prisoners in Cuba who participated in a similar raid originating from the Dominican Republic.56 In mid-May, however, Ciudad Trujillo publicly put an end to any potential alignment with the socialist camp. The New York Times issued new reports that Trujillo pursued an accommodation with Castro and the Soviets, prompting the Dominican government to issue a statement declaring that its opposition to Castro and Communism, along with its support for democracy, remained unwavering. “I’d like to remind those who have suggested the possibility of a so-called Ciudad Trujillo–Havana axis,” Consul General Luis R. Mercado said, “that the government of the Dominican Republic has not at any moment moved an inch away from its firm position alongside the democratic nations in the Western Hemisphere.”57 It would appear, then, that any accommodation by Trujillo with Cuba or the Soviet bloc never reached an advanced or formal stage. While rumor and innuendo persisted for a time, Trujillo apparently returned to the notion of going it alone. Despite these maneuvers in the international realm, Trujillo could not forever forestall domestic opposition. At approximately 10 p.m. on May 31, 1961, seven assassins opened fire on Trujillo as his car left the capital city on the way to the dictator’s estate in San Cristobal. Among the assassins were two brothers of Octavio de la Maza, the man whom the Dominican government had accused of killing U.S. pilot Gerald L. Murphy before his own jailhouse “suicide.”58 The participation of the de la Maza family in the assassination thus provided a curious bookend to the Galíndez affair and to the campaign of terror and intimidation waged by the right wing in the Caribbean Basin since 1956. The assassins failed to catalyze the spontaneous uprising for which they had hoped in their homeland. Nevertheless, their actions helped empower the forces of political moderation and modernization in the hemisphere and energized the debate over the future of hemispheric politics.

Conclusion In a 1960 letter to Thomas C. Mann, Henry Dearborn compared Trujillo to the fictional Count Dracula, suggesting that only by driving a stake through his heart could the Dominican people conclusively free themselves from the curse he bore. Such language invoked the sentiments expressed by Rómulo

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Betancourt during his years in exile, when he suggested that the right-wing dictatorships of Latin America were dinosaurs, relics of a primitive age in hemispheric politics who relied on dark and unnatural powers to postpone their own extinction. If such imagery had any validity, June 1961 marked the lifting of a curse and the dawning of a new age in the Americas. Ciudad Trujillo, long the last resort for vanquished dictators like Batista and Pérez Jiménez, had vanquished the ultimate example of the American caudillo. The revolution for social justice predicted by Milton Eisenhower and Juscelino Kubitschek gathered momentum. As presidents Betancourt and Kennedy had observed in their inaugural addresses, it appeared to be a revolution guided by democratic moderation and not by the caprices of far right-wing or leftwing ideologues. The “decade of maximum effort” promised by the Alliance for Progress was barely a few months old, and for the burgeoning center-left constituency in the Americas the moment seemed propitious for the redress of 140 years of U.S.–Latin American ambivalence and acrimony. In the leading nations of the hemisphere, democratically elected leaders stood shoulderto-shoulder with the new U.S. president. Despite such bright prospects for the centrist coalition, however, storm clouds already menaced the political horizon. By year’s end, Castro would make official his devotion to communism and his allegiance to the Soviet Union. Such a development added only venom to the already-poisoned relationship between the United States and Cuba. But it bore the potential to put subtle fractures in the Venezuelan political scene into far bolder relief. There had been many cooperative and combative ties between leaders in Caracas and Havana for several years and, despite key differences in their postures toward Washington, the two groups largely made common cause in the struggle against Trujillo and the Caribbean right wing. Now, there could be no fudging Castro’s devotion to nationalism or communism, and the Venezuelan center left would have to decide where its loyalties lay. In terms of potential divisions, the Venezuelans needed little help. Almost as soon as the San José conference concluded, it became clear that all was not well within the Punto Fijo coalition. Jóvito Villaba’s Democratic Republican Union had always been an uneasy partner and, as 1960 concluded, the party made it clear that it harbored deep sympathies for the Cuban revolution and felt poorly treated by its AD and Christian Socialist brethren. One of the great victories of U.S. policy toward Latin America had been the cultivation of the Betancourt government as a bulwark against political extremism, and the Kennedy administration inherited a key partner in the implementation of socioeconomic

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modernization in the form of the Alliance for Progress. Yet the extreme left wing had its own agenda to pursue. For the Caracas-Washington partnership, the transition from right-wing agitation to left-wing agitation suggested that its future was a case of “out of the frying pan and into the fire.” As we have seen, U.S.–Latin American relations between 1958 and 1961 involved much more than simply U.S. hegemony or Latin American agency, right-wing or left-wing ideology. At national and local levels throughout the hemisphere Americans reconsidered the character and purpose of regional relationships. Exercises of gunboat diplomacy might not be fully relegated to the dustbin of history—the hemisphere had just witnessed the Bay of Pigs debacle and would see a new round of U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic shortly—but the political cost of one nation attempting to impose its will on the others was becoming prohibitive. The spirit of the Good Neighbor, to the extent that any of its vestiges remained, was out of fashion, too, as many leaders judged that the valorization of nonintervention at the expense of democracy essentially turned the clock back to the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The new security exigencies and socioeconomic aspirations of the Cold War world demanded an unprecedented degree of regional negotiation and cooperation. But if most Americans agreed by 1961 that the Latin American caudillo and benign neglect of Washington had reached obsolescence, serious disagreements remained over the apparent shift toward the political left. The older generation championed democracy but conflated communism with despotism, while members of a younger generation that had risked their lives in the struggles of 1958 and beyond increasingly considered communism a legitimate path to political liberation. Despite this complicated picture, however, this study makes several things clear. Foremost, the conventional narrative of the Cold War in Latin America as a U.S. crusade against Castro and communism is inadequate. Of prime importance to the story are issues and actors in play when the Cuban Revolution was still in a stage of relative infancy. The first stage of the hemispheric Cold War involved a U.S.-Venezuelan alliance against right-wing extremism and political violence, rather than a unilateral U.S. campaign against burgeoning leftism. The mention of Venezuela as a U.S. partner introduces the next conclusion, namely that Venezuela’s key role in the struggle against political extremism demands closer attention than it has previously received from Cold War historians. Under the stewardship of leaders like Betancourt, Caracas bore much of the burden and exercised dynamic leadership in the growing regional Cold War. In particular, Venezuela was of crucial importance in the

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revival and redirection of the OAS into a powerful tool for combating both communism and political repression. As much as the story of Caribbean politics between 1958 and 1961 is one of discord and unresolved crisis, it is also the story of U.S.–Latin American cooperation in closing a chapter of the past and in creating a framework to deal with the challenges of the future. notes 1. Max Paul Friedman, “Retiring the Puppets, Bringing Latin America Back In: Recent Scholarship on United States–Latin American Relations,” Diplomatic History 27, no. 5 (November 2003): 625. 2. Stephen G. Rabe’s “The Caribbean Triangle: Betancourt, Castro, and Trujillo and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1958–1963,” Diplomatic History 20, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 55–78, and The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), study the efforts of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations to adjust to new political trends in Latin America. Rabe’s work in the 1990s was particularly important and influential; indeed, in many ways this chapter uses his work as a starting point for a more nuanced and subtle study of Caribbean politics in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Eric Paul Roorda’s The Dictator Next Door: The Good Neighbor Policy and the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic, 1930–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998) shows how U.S.–Latin American partnerships evolved into complicated dances of mutual manipulation. Michael R. Hall’s Sugar and Power in the Dominican Republic: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the Trujillos (London: Greenwood Press, 2000) illustrates the degree to which socalled puppet Latin American leaders could complicate and influence U.S. foreign policy. Hal Brands’s Latin America’s Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010) explores the manner in which Latin Americans influenced local politics in the context of global ideological and economic trends. 3. Peter H. Smith, Talons of the Eagle: Latin America, the United States, and the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 124–25, 128. 4. Richard Lee Turits, Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, Trujillo, and Modernity in Dominican History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 239–45. 5. “Dominican Republic Aids U.S. on Missile Tracking,” New York Times, November 27, 1951, 11; “Radar Sentinels Ready to Track AF Missiles,” Washington Post, February 28, 1956, 3; and CIA Memo, “Guidance for Negotiation of Arms Purchase by Nicaragua from the Dominican Republic,” April 28, 1954, http://www.foia.cia.gov/docs/DOC_0000923781 /DOC_0000923781.pdf, and CIA Report, “Project PBSuccess,” November 16, 1954, p. 170, CIA Electronic Reading Room, http://www.foia.cia.gov/docs/DOC_0000928348 /DOC_0000928348.pdf. 6. Hall, Sugar and Power, 61–63, and R. Hart Phillips, “Cuba is Thriving on Dearer Sugar,” New York Times, January 8, 1958, 49. 7. David Anderson, “Galíndez Reported Murdered on Ship,” New York Times, May 30, 1956, 1. 8. “Trujillo vs. Galíndez,” New York Times, September 13, 1956, 34. 9. Stephen G. Rabe, “The Caribbean Triangle: Betancourt, Castro, and Trujillo and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1958–1963,” Diplomatic History 20. no. 1 (Winter 1996): 59.

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1 0. “After Two Years,” New York Times, March 12, 1958, 30. 11. “Latin America Role of Labor is Praised,” January 13, 1957, New York Times, 27. 12. Rómulo Betancourt, letter to the editor, New York Times, printed as “Aiding Latin America: United States’ Interest Commended as Speeding End of Dictators,” October 28, 1955, 24. 13. “Venezuelan Vote Tallied,” New York Times, December 20, 1957, 8. 14. Tad Szulc, “Venezuela Is Set for Strike Today,” New York Times, January 21, 1958, 1; Szulc, “Ouster of Ruler Is Aim,” New York Times, January 22, 1958, 3; and Szulc, “Caracas Revolt Ousts Dictator; Dead Exceed 100; Pérez Jiménez Overthrown in Two-Day Battle—Flees Venezuela,” New York Times, January 23, 1958, 1. 15. Acting Secretary of State Christian A. Herter to the president, “Recognition of New Government of Venezuela,” January 28, 1958, folder: “Venezuela (1),” Dwight D. Eisenhower Papers as President, 1953–1961 (Ann Whitman File): International Series, box 54, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, Kansas (hereafter DDEPL). 16. Rómulo Betancourt, “A Government Program: Address Delivered on His Inauguration as Constitutional President of Venezuela,” 5–6, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin. 17. Betancourt, “A Government Program,” 10. 18. Unpublished UPI press releases, Caracas, February 10–11, Fondo Presidencia de la República, Sección Palacio Nacional, s/c, Fecha 1958–1959 Documentos-Cuba, Caja A, Archivo General de la Nación, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic (hereafter AGNDR). 19. “Hero’s Welcome Given to Castro at Caracas,” New York Times, January 24, 1959, 3; and “Castro Asks Move to Curb Dictators,” New York Times, January 25, 1959, 12. 20. “Castro Urges U.S. to Revise Policy,” New York Times, January 26, 1959, 1. 21. Fidel Castro, as quoted by Rómulo Betancourt in Hugh Thomas, Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 1080–90. Castro’s exact meaning is unclear, since the conversation took place away from aides and reporters, and Betancourt said little about the conversation in public. Most sources indicate that Castro sought to pursue an independent and defiant policy with regards to the United States, assuming that Betancourt would aid him. 22. Thomas, Cuba, 1089–90. 23. AP dispatch, Maracaibo, Venezuela, June 13, 1959, Fondo Presidencia de la República, Sección Palacio Nacional, s/c, Fecha 1958–1959 Documentos-Cuba, Caja A, AGNDR; and “Venezuela Cabinet Ends Dominican Tie,” New York Times, June 13, 1959, 8. 24. “Caracas Charges Dominican Spying,” New York Times, June 14, 1959, 29. 25. “Cuba Breaks Ties with Trujillo Regime, Charges Killing of Defenseless Civilians,” Washington Post, June 27, 1959, A4. 26. Tad Szulc, “Caribbean Clash Causes an Uproar at Americas Talk,” New York Times, August 14, 1959, 1. 27. OAS Official Records: Fifth Meeting of Consultation of Ministers of Foreign Affairs (Washington, D.C.: Pan American Union, 1960), 1–13. 28. Proof of the Communist Domination of Venezuela (Caracas: Anti-Communist Liberation Movement of Venezuela, 1959), 5–6. Record Group 59-250-63-1-5-7, Department of State, Bureau of Inter-American Affairs, Office of the Assistant Secretary of State for

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32.

33. 34.

35.

36.

37. 3 8. 39.

40.

41.

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Inter-American Affairs, Office of the Special Assistant on Communism, Subject Files, “President’s Trip to South America to Cuba: Anti-Castro Activities,” box 7, folder: “Venezuela,” National Archives, College Park, MD (hereafter NACPM). Ibid., 15–16. “El terrorismo está dirigido desde Santo Domingo,” El Nacional [Caracas], January 4, 1960, 1. Bonnelly to Trujillo, Untitled Memos, November 3 and November 23, 1959, Fondo Presidencia, Sección-Palacio Nacional, Código 30111 Embajada Dominicana en Venezuela, Año 1959, box 1617, AGNDR. Dominican Secretary of State José Garcia Trujillo to Trujillo, “Informe de gastos efectuados en raciones para los miembros de la Legión Extranjera, desde el día primero al 31-859, inclusive,” September 11, 1959; and “Remisión de presupuesto de la Legión Extranjera, para el año 1960,” October 26, 1959, Fondo Presidencia, Sección-Palacio Nacional, Código 20111-5 Legión Extranjera Anti-Comunista, Años 1958–1991, AGNDR. “Venezuela Reports a Rebellion Halted,” New York Times, April 21, 1960, 1; and “Ya Trujillo había nombrado embajador ante Castro León,” El Nacional, April 25, 1960, A1. Herter to the President, “Memorandum for the President: Possible Action to Prevent Castroist Takeover of Dominican Republic,” April 14, 1960, University of Texas at Austin Declassified Documents Reference System, http://galenet.galegroup.com.ezproxy.lib .utexas.edu/servlet/DDRS;jsessionid=4597F5552B5A6A4D96086CD29AB7A937?loc ID=txshracd2598. Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders: An Interim Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), 192–93. Informe que rinde la Comisión del Consejo, constituido provisionalmente en Organo de Consulta en el caso presentado por Venezuela, para dar cumplimiento al tercer punto dispositivo de la Resolución del 8 de Julio de 1960 (San Jose, Costa Rica: Organization of American States, August 8, 1960), 8–20. “El Presidente solo sufrió heridos superficiales en el atentado de ayer,” El Nacional, June 25, 1960, A1. Juan Liscano, “Terrorismo contra el pueblo,” El Nacional, June 25, 1960, A4. National Security Council (NSC), “Discussion at the 450th Meeting of the National Security Council, Thursday, July 7, 1960,” July 11, 1960, Eisenhower, Dwight D.: Papers as President, 1953–1961 (Ann Whitman File), NSC Series, box 12, folder: “450th Meeting of NSC July 7, 1960,” DDEPL; and “Synopsis of State and Intelligence Material Reported to the President,” August 19, 1960, White House Office: Office of the Staff Secretary, 1952–1961, Subject Series, Alphabetical Subseries, box 14, folder: “Intelligence Briefing Notes, Vol. II (5),” p. 2, DDEPL. Memorandum of Discussion at the 452nd Meeting of the National Security Council, July 21, 1960, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960, Cuba Volume VI (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1991), 1022. John S. D. Eisenhower, “Synopsis of State and Intelligence Material Reported to the President,” August 10, 1960, White House Office: Office of the Staff Secretary, 1952–1961, Subject Series, Alphabetical Subseries, box 14, folder: “Intelligence Briefing Notes, Vol. II (5),” pp. 4–6, DDEPL.

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4 2. “La Fórmula de Herter,” El Caribe [Ciudad Trujillo], August 19, 1960, 5. 43. Tad Szulc, “OAS Drafts Plan on Trujillo Regime,” New York Times, August 20, 1960, 1. 44. Sixth Meeting of Consultation of Ministers of Foreign Affairs, Serving as Organ of Consultation in Application of the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, Final Act (Washington, D.C.: The Secretariat of the Organization of American States, 1960). 45. “La coalición debe mantenerse,” El Nacional, September 14, 1960, A1. 46. “Chapita desaparecerá a comienzos de 1961,” El Nacional, October 18, 1960, A25. 47. U.S. General Consul Henry Dearborn to Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Frank J. Devine, January 18, 1961, Record Group 59-25063-1-5-7, Department of State, Bureau of Inter-American Affairs, Office of the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, Office of the Special Assistant on Communism, Subject Files, Dominican Republic-Chronology to Peru, box 9, folder: “Dominican Republic-(Misc.) 1961,” NACPM. 48. Alleged Assassination Plots, 198–99. 49. Gerry Robichaud, “Is Gen. Trujillo Cuba’s New Ally?” Washington Post, July 28, 1960, A18. 50. Will Lissner, “Dominicans Calm after OAS Move,” New York Times, August 25, 1960, 16. 51. Max Frankel, “Castro and Trujillo Call Truce, Diplomats in Caribbean Believe,” New York Times, January 5, 1961, 13. 52. “Radio Scores Kennedy,” New York Times, December 27, 1960, 3. 53. Tad Szulc, “A Dominican Bid to Moscow Seen,” New York Times, May 15, 1961, 13. 54. Task Force on Immediate Latin American Problems, “Report to the President-Elect,” box 1074, Pre-Presidential Files, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston, Massachusetts. 55. Peter Kihss, “Murder of Dictator Laid to a General Seeking Revenge,” New York Times, June 1, 1961, 1. 56. “Cuba Gets Captive Bid,” New York Times, April 23, 1961, 20. 57. “Dominicans Deny Deal,” New York Times, May 17, 1961, 4. 58. Peter Kihss, “Killers Still at Large,” New York Times, June 2, 1961, 8.

· Ch a p t er Fou r ·

Counterrevolution in the Caribbean The CIA and Cuban Commandos in the 1960s

5 Jonat h a n C. Brow n

Cuban viewers tuned in to an interesting program televised

by the revolutionary government in February 1965. The show presented the interrogation of four counterrevolutionary infiltrators recently captured in the Sierra Cristal near Baracoa in Oriente Province. A man once prominent in the uprising against Fulgencio Batista and subsequently in the revolutionary army had led the group’s armed incursion against the Castro regime. Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo had made the transition from revolutionary to counterrevolutionary. During the televised interrogation, Menoyo admitted to defecting from Cuba early in 1961. On arriving in the United States, he said, he spent four months at a detention center in Texas. There he eventually accepted an offer to undergo military training with the United States Army. Subsequently, Menoyo joined the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for training on handling explosives and machine guns. His Cuban interrogators asked to what purpose Menoyo applied these new skills. He replied that he organized a group of counterrevolutionary combatants, raised $50,000 in the Miami area, purchased arms and watercraft, and directed six or seven armed attacks on Cuban targets. Menoyo led several allied organizations, known as the Segundo Frente Nacional del Escambray (the Second National Front of the Escambray), 103

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Alpha 66, and the Movimiento Revolucionario del Pueblo (the Revolutionary Movement of the People). The interrogators asked how Menoyo and his three associates had been able to acquire sophisticated weaponry and set up bases offshore in the Bahamas, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. They replied that U.S. authorities protected these assets, as did the Dominican armed forces. Menoyo also had to admit that Cuban workers and peasants were in favor of the Castro revolution. “I had to go to many houses—the houses of peasants,” Menoyo said of his armed raid. “I found that they were hostile to the U.S. and that as soon as we left, they reported [to the armed forces] that we were in the area. . . . [W]e were surrounded and captured on 23 January, at which time I could see that hundreds of production workers had left their work and had taken up weapons and gone out to pursue us.”1 The broadcast seemed to confirm two important arguments that Fidel Castro had been making since shortly after taking power in 1959: first, that Cuban “traitors” like Menoyo were working for the CIA and, second, that the Cuban masses supported the revolution. In and of itself, the propaganda ploy exposing armed interventions from one country to another had become a standard feature of Caribbean affairs in the 1960s. General Rafael Trujillo had supported batistiano exiles in an air assault on Trinidad in July of 1959, and governments throughout the Caribbean Basin provided other anti-Castro groups with training and operational bases. Anti-Castro groups operated out of Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Evidence of U.S. complicity with counterrevolutionary groups had abounded in the botched CIA airdrops to antiCastro guerrillas in the Sierra Escambray (Escambray Mountains) and in the training of the Cuban émigrés defeated at the Bay of Pigs. The counterrevolution—and the support of the U.S. government for it— cannot be understood without acknowledging its antithesis: Cuba’s export of revolution. In fact, Fidel Castro’s inner circle of advisers, especially Ernesto “Che” Guevara, actively sponsored armed rebellions in neighboring countries months before having to confront serious resistance at home and abroad. Castro’s security organization initiated a landing of armed revolutionaries on the Atlantic coast of Panama within three months of Batista’s fall.2 The Castro government was to sponsor, train, and sometimes finance revolutionaries in a dozen Latin American countries. The U.S. government ended financial support to émigré commandos in 1965, at about the same moment that the insurrections in the Sierra Escambray were also winding

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down. Yet Che Guevara and sixteen Cubans still entered Bolivia in 1966, and many Latin American leftists found encouragement in Cuba well into the 1970s.3 In essence, Cuba was exporting both its revolution and its counterrevolution. This chapter analyzes the counterrevolutionary groups that continued the struggle outside of Cuba. A large amount of recently declassified materials facilitates this project. The archives of presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson have gathered together some of these papers in the Foreign Relations of the United States series.4 Additional “secret” documents of U.S. intelligence agencies (the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the CIA, and the State and Defense Departments) are also on deposit in the presidential archives. Few members of the groups examined in this chapter would have considered themselves counterrevolutionaries and often incorporated the term “revolution” into the titles of their organizations. The CIA favored émigré groups led by men who had participated in the resistance to the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship and served for a time in Castro’s revolutionary government. Of the two most important leaders of covert operations, Gutiérrez Menoyo was a liberal and the other, Manuel Artime Buesa, was a Catholic conservative. Both would agree that it was not they who betrayed the revolution; it was Fidel. Technically, only those former supporters of Batista might have wished to reinstate the old regime or something like it. But the batistianos received little U.S. support for covert activities, although the CIA did recruit them to serve in the Bay of Pigs landing. Nor did the U.S. government extradite back to Cuba any batistiano who might have engaged in human rights’ abuses during the dictatorship. Nonetheless, the exrevolutionaries and the former supporters of the dictator shared two goals that may be defined as counterrevolutionary: to overturn Castro’s government and to oust the communists. “Beginning in 1961,” as one government study concluded, “the CIA developed a major capability for paramilitary operations against Cuba. A substantial number of Cubans have been selected and intensively trained in all aspects of paramilitary work, including commando tactics and sabotage. . . . [O]nly a small percentage of the trained personnel has been employed.”5 This article examines why the U.S. government supported counterrevolution and how it became self-defeating and counterproductive. In their covert operations, the émigré combatants sought publicity for their exploits, broke U.S. and international laws, threatened U.S. allies, and committed piracy and terrorism. The U.S. government tolerated and paid for such activities because,

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following the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, political leaders in Washington could devise no other viable policy to bring down Castro’s communist regime. Into this policy vacuum stepped the Cuban counterrevolutionaries. In their efforts to achieve deniability, CIA officials lost control over the armed raids, funded or not by the United States. Consequently, the covert activities of the anti-Castro commandos accomplished more to confirm than to undermine Castro’s power. The Cold War consisted of great-power confrontation on a global scale that involved Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The powers were the United States and the Soviet Union. Seen as a global chess match, one might consider Washington and Moscow as the opposing queens. Argentina, Brazil, and Nicaragua were but pawns. Yet the Cold War on a regional scale made local powers like China a major player, a bishop as it were, even though in the 1960s it did not project its reach much beyond its immediate neighbors. Cuba made itself a chess figure of unique agility. In alliance with one of the global queens, the Soviet Union, it utilized its small-power status to project itself over the regional chess board of Latin America where it challenged the United States at every turn. Indeed, one might say that the Cuban Revolution brought the Cold War to the Americas and began a secondary contest of strategy between Washington and Havana. Within this regional conflict, one found numerous actors and agents besides Fidel Castro and whoever held the U.S. presidency at a particular point in time. This is the story of agency in which a growing group of refugees from the Cuban Revolution sought to influence Cold War outcomes in the circum-Caribbean region with the assistance of global powerholder President Lyndon Baines Johnson preoccupied by the larger struggle.

Counterrevolutionary Fervor in Miami Miami’s Cuban community propagated many transient groups possessing a few fishing boats and some guns that pretended to organize attacks on Soviet shipping and Cuban military targets. Others landed “infiltrators,” as the CIA called them (“saboteurs” was Castro’s definition), onshore near Havana or close to the island’s several mountain ranges. Coast Guard commanders, the CIA, and Florida and Miami authorities had knowledge of these activities because members of the émigré community talked freely and hopefully about such ventures. Not having the financial resources to set up bases in third countries, many groups broke U.S. neutrality laws, launching armed forays

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from Florida or Puerto Rico. Yet few were prosecuted. In fact, some Cuban counterrevolutionaries seemed to have invited the attention of border agents and Coast Guard cutters for publicity purposes. The presidential papers stand testimony to the large number of conspirators from whom government officials confiscated guns and boats—some of which were returned to their owners.6 Historians have not recorded the names of many individuals because their plans never progressed beyond the stage of discussions over coffee. Literally dozens of counterrevolutionary groups existed in Miami, New Jersey, and New York. They were the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (Student Revolutionary Directorate), Cubanos Libres (Free Cubans), Movimiento Insurreccional de Recuperación Revolucionaria (Insurrectional Movement of Revolutionary Recouperation), Frente Unido de Liberación Nacional (United Front for National Liberation), Movimiento Democrático Cristiano (Cristian Democratic Movement), and Federación Estudiantil Universitario (University Student Federation). Most of the organizations originated among former collaborators of Fidel Castro who had formed anticommunist opposition groups inside Cuba prior to escaping abroad. A liberal particularly favored by the Kennedy administration, Manuel Ray Rivero, received substantial financial assistance for his group, the JURE (Junta Revolucionaria Cubana). He had served as the minister of public works in the first revolutionary government in 1959, defecting in November 1960. However, Ray’s activities generated more publicity than armed raids on Cuba.7 Former supporters of Batista organized other groups such as the Confederación de Trabajadores de Cuba en Exilio (Cuban Workers Confederation) and La Luz de Yara (The Light of Yara). The former deputy minister of interior in the Batista regime, Rafael Díaz Balart, headed La Rosa Blanca (White Rose), which also operated out of Miami. The batistianos resented the U.S. government’s refusal to finance any of their paramilitary groups.8 In addition, party leaders of the 1940s such as Carlos Prío Socarrás, Aureliano Sánchez Arango, and Tony Varona of the Authentic Party and Raúl Chibás of the Orthodox Party also engaged in endless anticommunist conspiracies. Intelligence officials at the State Department wrote off such activity as the “sterile bickering and empty posturing of ambitious and discredited exile politicians and incompetent would-be leaders in Miami.”9 The FBI and CIA were utilizing Spanish speaking informants and agents to assemble dossiers on all these potential combatants and hired bilingual staff to translate the information. The secret intelligence documents sent to the White House cited sources such as “a prominent Cuban exile leader,

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formerly of ministerial rank,” “a member of a group of Cuban emigrés [sic] trained in the techniques of collection of information,” or a participant who “has provided useful reports for over two years.”10 Some in the Cuban communities of Miami and New York might have volunteered information in hopes of getting on the government payroll. The CIA uncovered details about arms buying and clandestine training of shady groups who claimed powerful patronage.11 Some groups devised the preposterous. Cuban paramilitaries planned invasions of Haiti or Guatemala together with local conspirators to seize the governments there and turn these countries into bases from which to attack Castro.12 Publicity rather than secrecy seemed to be the tactic of many groups—especially those with few prospects. If U.S. agents knew details of these counterrevolutionary plots, Castro’s spies might have known as well. Agents of the Cuban Departamento de Seguridad del Estado (Department of State Security or DSE) planted spies among refugees fleeing the island and, from time to time, CIA agents were able to expose DSE agents operating in the United States.13 Endless requests for financial support sparked skepticism among many U.S. policymakers, which explains why so few groups received funding. Even the Bay of Pigs hero Erneido Oliva’s RECE (Representación Cubana en el Exilio, Cuban Representation in Exile) could not get the government to loosen the purse strings. “Basically, I do not think that the Cuban exiles have much to offer the U.S. by way of significantly helping U.S. to solve our Cuban problem,” wrote White House adviser Gordon Chase. “This factor, coupled with the long history of highly troublesome, relatively unfruitful U.S.-exile relations, leads me to the conclusion that the burden of proof rests, in very great measure, on those who argue in favor of starting a program of support . . . for RECE.”14 National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy cautioned that support for the counterrevolution made the United States appear hypocritical, especially when seeking OAS votes condemning the Cuban Revolution for its sponsorship of guerrilla fighters in Latin America. On the other hand, he observed, “[W]e will still be living with Castro some time from now, and . . . we might just as well get used to the idea. At the same time, we should probably continue our present nasty course; among other things, it makes life a little tougher for Castro and raises slightly the poor odds that he will come apart and be overthrown.”15 With the presidential election approaching in 1964, White House advisers worried about Castro using exile raids as an excuse to shoot down one of the U.S. U-2 spy planes that were continuing overflights initiated during the Cuban Missile Crisis. “This is just

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the sort of thing that evokes a highly emotional response from Castro,” said one White House aide. “As things stand, he seems convinced that we are tied into the raids—as indeed we are.”16 Notwithstanding the skepticism, support for the counterrevolutionaries continued into the mid-1960s. Why? Neither the Bay of Pigs nor the assassination plots of Operation Mongoose had worked. After 1963, no other policy remained for eliminating Castro. Within the Johnson administration, many officials voiced reservations about continuing Kennedy’s support for the Cuban paramilitaries, which explains why only a few of these many groups received enough financial backing to enable them to operate offshore in the greater Caribbean theater. The leaders of neither of these commando units suffered the taint of having served under Batista’s dictatorship. Instead, each had collaborated with Castro in the revolution and in the provisional government. In U.S. security lexicon, they were “liberals.” The CIA selected Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, and especially Manuel Artime Buesa, as champions of the counterrevolution.17 Their stories reveal large expenditures, collaboration with autocratic regimes in Central America, the weakness of counterrevolution abroad, and the strength of the Cuban revolutionary regime. These anti-Castro forces produced no devastating blows against the revolution and frequently embarrassed U.S. policymakers.

The Old Experienced Guerrilla Fighter The Second National Front of the Escambray had its origin in the struggle against Batista. In 1957, Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo had been a member of the Revolutionary Directorate (Directorio Revolucionario or DR), the Havanabased urban guerrilla group that had become the armed wing of the student resistance movement at the Universidad de La Habana. It had links to the Auténtico Party of expresident Prío Socarrás. Led by José Antonio Echeverría, the DR in 1957 posed a more serious threat to the Batista dictatorship than the handful of guerrillas with Castro’s Movimiento 26 de Julio (26th of July Movement or M-26) in the Sierra Maestra. The Directorio Revolucionario devised a strategy of striking at the top. It laid plans to attack Batista at the presidential palace. Menoyo’s elder brother Carlos directed the assault of some fifty fighters on March 13, 1957, but the attack failed. The DR suffered numerous casualties, including the deaths of its leader, Echeverría, and of the elder Menoyo. Eloy and several other followers of Echeverría eventually fled to the Escambray Mountains.18 There they fought a rural guerrilla campaign

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not unlike that of Castro’s but without the support groups that sustained M-26 in the Oriente. Also they fell into division. Menoyo and an American, William Morgan, split off from the others and formed a “second front.” The M-26 guerrilla band grew in the Sierra Maestra; the Second National Front and the DR in the Escambray merely survived. When Guevara arrived in the Escambray in October 1958 with an M-26 column of some 140 guerrilla fighters, the two DR guerrilla bands joined in the battle of Santa Clara, which fell to the revolutionaries and led to Batista’s flight from the island on New Year’s Eve. The Second National Front of the Escambray was the first group of combatants to enter Havana on New Year’s Day.19 Gutiérrez Menoyo and his confederates then joined the 35,000-man Revolutionary Armed Forces headed by Castro and made up of M-26 plus remnants of Batista’s old army that had not been involved in atrocities. Comandante Gutiérrez Menoyo served the Revolutionary Armed Forces in Las Villas province. There he played an important role in defeating one of the only armed incursions of postrevolutionary Cuba by partisans of the former dictator. The incident occurred in August 1959, when communist influence in the new Armed Forces was rising. Batista’s exofficers made contact with comandantes Gutiérrez Menoyo and Morgan in order to involve them in the conspiracy. They were planning to coordinate an insurrection against Castro with the landing of a planeload of exiled batistianos from the Dominican Republic. However, Menoyo and Morgan helped the rebel army arrest five hundred soldiers who had served the old army and capture the men on the plane.20 Fidel appeared on television and praised the loyalty of comandantes Gutiérrez Menoyo and Morgan. Their service to the revolution increasingly consolidated under the authority of Castro continued into 1960. Whenever he gave interviews, Menoyo voiced opposition to the threats posed by Batista’s former supporters and their sponsor, Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. But he made no denouncements of the “imperialists” for harboring pro-Batista “war criminals” or for U.S. sponsorship of the counterrevolution, even though these concepts had already become a staple of Fidel’s speeches. The Second National Front of the Escambray continued to lose influence within the revolution after its leaders challenged Che Guevara. The occasion was a TV interview in which labor leader Conrado Rodríguez criticized Guevara for having a known Batista collaborator on his staff. Photos and documents were furnished. Che had responded by smearing the union boss for “doing nothing for the revolution.” Rodríguez pointed to the presence in the

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TV studio of majors Morgan and Gutiérrez Menoyo as testimony to his outstanding service to the overthrow of Batista.21 A month later, Menoyo yielded to pressure from Castro. He announced the disbandment of the Second National Front of Escambray. Menoyo said he now desired to bring together all revolutionary elements into “a single movement under a common program based on the ideals of Martí and the radical essence of our liberating action.”22 But he clandestinely moved some of his partisans into open rebellion in the Escambray Mountains. The U.S. embassy in late 1960 estimated that about six hundred antiCastro guerrillas were holding out in the Escambray, only half of whom had sufficient weapons. The first militia units that the revolutionary government sent to the province could not contain the rebels. Castro used the counterrevolutionary threat to rally peasants and workers. He allowed Guevara to take temporary leave from his new job directing the National Bank so that Che could go to Santa Clara to prepare troops for the campaign against the bandidos, as the counterrevolutionaries were called. “These are actions of tiny groups of stupid and misguided men,” he told the soldiers. “No real threat.”23 Events proved Che wrong. Insurgency in the Escambray forced the government to make a major commitment to its elimination. The revolution gained a martyr in the earliest phase of the insurrection. In January 1961, anti-Castro guerrillas captured and hung Conrado Benítez, a young volunteer teacher in the Literacy Campaign. “He was poor, he was a Negro, and he was a teacher,” Castro said. “There you have three reasons why the agents of imperialism assassinated him.”24 The Bay of Pigs invasion, which had been anticipated in Cuba for months, alerted officials to the danger of infiltrators reinforcing guerrilla cadres in the mountains. The militia forces that, despite heavy casualties, had contained the beachhead at Playa Girón received another assignment in 1962: they were to become the shock troops of the campaign against the bandidos. Cuban officials tended to downplay the number of insurgents. Armed forces chief Raúl Castro in 1963 said they numbered only about one hundred on the whole island. Cuban officials estimated in 1964 that one hundred counterrevolutionaries were responsible for killing cattle and burning cane fields in Las Villas Province.25 However, scholars acknowledge that the size of the insurgency might have been much higher and may have included numerous peasants. As many as 180 different bands may have been operating during the period, according to Cuban government sources. The number killed or captured in the entire campaign totaled 3,500, and militia deaths

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amounted to five hundred over six years of fighting.26 Castro committed thousands of troops to the campaign. The militia units threw up a cordon around the base of the mountains and assigned companies to respond to guerrilla movements by surrounding the suspected site with two or three rings of troops. Then they would march to the center, tightening the circle and engaging any bandidos trapped inside. In this fashion, the militias intercepted most of the air drops of arms and supplies that CIA planes commenced to deliver even before the Bay of Pigs landing.27 Peasants of the Escambray also fell victim to the campaign. “Complete families of peasants accused of harboring and helping anti-Castro guerillas are being rounded up and broken up,” reported one British diplomat in Cuba. “Heads of families are sent to penal battalions for forced labor on the land. Mothers and children are taken to Havana—the mothers to special compounds under detention and the children to . . . child institutions.”28 After all, the peasants were supposed to be supporting Fidel. The Cubans ruthlessly pursued the fight against the bandits and eventually brought it to a close in 1965. By then, Gutiérrez Menoyo had long ago escaped the Escambray, where many of his former associates were falling to the militia forces. In January 1961, the rebel army comandante had made his way out of Cuba and begun the three-month interrogation in Texas. Menoyo fled Cuba on a boat with three other comandantes of the Second Front, and he recreated his resistance organizations in Miami. He formed Alpha 66, which acted under his leadership simultaneously with the activities of the Second Front. These groups specialized in infiltration and sabotage. He approached the CIA with Plan Omega, in which these organizations were to send armed infiltrators into the province of Las Villas. Menoyo himself was to lead the first of three groups. He also pointed out for the benefit of his CIA handlers that he was seeking training bases in the Yucatan peninsula, Panama, and the Dominican Republic (now that Trujillo was eliminated). Additional financial support would come from Prío Socarrás, he announced.29 He claimed that the Second Front also had assets in Venezuela where President Rómulo Betancourt, fighting his own leftist guerrillas, encouraged anti-Castro activities. A member of the Second Front met with Herbert Matthews of the New York Times in the hopes of gaining publicity for its activities.30 Plan Omega may not have been as coherent as announced. The State Department reported that several of his collaborators felt marginalized and that there remained those in Miami wary of the Second Front for having betrayed the batistiano conspiracy of 1959. However, Gutiérrez Menoyo did

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succeed in building public support in the exile community by organizing an effective boycott of British products in protest against Great Britain’s sale of buses to the Castro government.31 Members of the U.S. intelligence community expressed approval of his “resolute” personality. At the State Department, he was known as a “Spaniard who only became a Cuban citizen in 1959 [and who] keeps his own counsel and is secretive to a degree almost unknown among Cubans.”32 Subsequent events would chip away at this image of resolve and secrecy. In May 1964, rumors rapidly spread through Miami’s Cuban community when Gutiérrez Menoyo disappeared from view. News arrived from the Dominican Republic that boats of the Second Front had just departed for Cuba. Menoyo’s wife came to the door of their home to inform reporters that her husband had left and would be gone “for a while.” Separately an associate from the Second Front attempted to mislead the public by indicating that the leader had gone to New York rather than to Cuba. Rumors persisted nevertheless that Menoyo was in Pinar del Río province with some seventy combatants who had assembled fast boats and arms in Venezuela and the Dominican Republic.33 Some speculated also that Menoyo’s men were planning an air attack on a British ship. Agents learned of large troop mobilizations and the movement of tanks and heavy weaponry in Pinar del Río. Government forces there reported having killed a number of counterrevolutionary guerrillas in the Organos Mountains.34 Indeed, the expedition met heavy resistance from militia forces and Rebel Army units. Menoyo was said to have found refuge in Havana until he was able to rendezvous at sea with a rescue boat. He returned to Miami. For the next six months, the Second Front entered a period of reflection and rebuilding. The strategy changed from a massive landing of seventy to one hundred guerrillas of the type that had just met with defeat to an incremental infiltration of small units. The expeditionaries would depart from their Dominican base, the first group to be led by Menoyo himself. They would hide in the mountains for a month in order to establish amicable relations with the peasant population. Then additional small units would reinforce this vanguard. Menoyo chose a landing site at the base of the Sierra Cristal near Baracoa, at the extreme eastern end of the island. He and three men landed shortly after Christmas Day 1964. The first reports from Miami exaggerated the success of the invaders, said to number ninety men. The Second Front’s executive officer in Miami was preparing to fly to New York to meet with reporter Tad Szulc of the New York Times in order to publicize Menoyo’s successes.35

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The truth was quite different. Workers’ militias from nearby Guantánamo answered the alert and pursued a small group of four counterrevolutionaries until they surrendered. Prensa Latina in Havana announced that Menoyo and his three accomplices had been captured. Castro himself arrived in Baracoa.36 U.S. naval officers at Guantánamo Bay reported heavy concentrations of troops in the area: “[Government] troops were observed in [Guantánamo] city. Troops were in soiled field uniforms and were rejoicing because they had captured [four] armed bandits in Baracoa.”37 Meanwhile, the White House scrambled for a policy statement, even as it denied any complicity with Menoyo’s group. Gordon Chase advised that the United States could not intercede on Menoyo’s behalf. It would be an admission that Menoyo was a CIA asset in Cuba, which would “make things worse for him.” Besides, observed Chase, White House staff members that very month were to meet with the OAS to discuss Cuba’s subversive activities in the Americas.38 “It will be a blow to anti-Castro morale in Cuba,” Chase wrote. “Also, it shows how efficient the Cuban Government is; Menoyo is an old experienced guerrilla fighter who, in the past, has impressed [us] with his intelligence, security, and carefulness.”39 So the U.S. government stood back as the Cuban interrogators interviewed the four captives on television. The story appeared in U.S. newspapers, which quoted Menoyo as saying “I worked for a while with the CIA.”40 In Miami, only the pro-Batista groups were pleased by the capture of the Second Front guerrillas. Demoralization set in among the rest of the exile community.41 The subsequent military trial condemned Gutiérrez Menoyo to thirty years in prison. Shortly thereafter, Castro interrupted a talk he was delivering at the University of Havana, whose student body several years earlier had been purged of most privileged youth. Therefore, on this occasion, Castro stopped to ask the sons and daughters of peasants and workers who then attended the university if Menoyo should be executed or ransomed. The students voted by acclamation for ransom.42 In a rare show of unity, the “liberal” organizations of the Cuban community in Miami signed petitions for clemency. Such pleas also came from world-famed cellist Pablo Casals and former Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas, a frequent guest of the Cuban revolutionary government.43 Ultimately, Menoyo did gain a reprieve—though no ransom—and spent twenty-two years in Cuban prisons. By this time, 1965, the CIA’s finest champion of covert operations was also nearing the end of his usefulness.

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The Golden Boy of the CIA No counterrevolutionary group received as much support from the U.S. government as the Movimiento de Recuperación Revolucionaria (Movement for Revolutionary Recouperation or MRR) of Manuel Artime Buesa. Unlike Menoyo, Artime joined the struggle against Batista only in its last days, but he spent many months in the service of the revolution. He emerged from the struggle as a lieutenant of the new Revolutionary Armed Forces. In May, Castro, as prime minister, decreed the first land reform law and established the Institute of Agrarian Reform (Instituto Nacional de la Reforma Agraria or INRA) under military control. Captain Antonio Núñez Jiménez, suspected of communist tendencies by the U.S. embassy, became the first director of INRA, and Lieutenant Artime administered agrarian reform in the district of Mansanillo in Oriente Province. He was in charge of the so-called Rural Commandos.44 Artime claimed that he soon began to be bothered by the increasingly anti-American and anti-Catholic rhetoric of revolutionary leaders. The Huber Matos affair confirmed his reservations. Comandante Matos, who had fought valiantly against Batista under Castro’s command in the Sierra Maestra, resigned from his post as commander of the military district of Camagüey in October 1959. His letter of resignation abhorred the undue influence of the communists in serving a revolution they had little role in bringing about. Fidel ordered the chief of the Rebel Army, Major Camilo Cienfuegos, to arrest Matos and his staff of officers. Shortly afterward, Cienfuegos died mysteriously in a plane crash whose wreckage at sea was never found.45 Fidel was tightening his control of the regime as each former collaborator fell from grace. Artime was to say later that Castro himself precipitated his own defection. Shortly after the arrest of Huber Matos, the prime minister and new National Bank president Che Guevara addressed officials of INRA. They both indicated then that the revolution would continue in its turn toward socialism, as Artime subsequently indicated in his own letter of resignation.46 He sent a copy to be published by one of the few newspapers not yet taken over by the government. Its appearance caused a sensation. The government accused Artime of having become a reactionary under the direction of U.S. imperialism. Artime fled from his INRA post and entered into the protection of an underground organization run by the Catholic Church. His superiors in INRA accused him of embezzling public money, but it is unclear if this accusation or his conscience motivated the flight. In a Havana safehouse, he

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met with other dissidents and formed the MRR. He then proposed to go abroad to seek U.S. support, while his associates remained in Cuba. Priests ultimately directed him to the CIA agents who smuggled him out of Cuba on a Honduran freighter. Other CIA men awaited his arrival in Miami.47 The publication of his renunciation of the revolution in Cuba had given Manuel Artime a great deal of credibility among other émigrés as well as with the CIA. Once President Dwight D. Eisenhower approved the operation that became the Bay of Pigs invasion, CIA handlers decided that Artime’s connections made him a candidate for its leadership. They helped him write and publish his book denouncing Cuban communism and sent him on a Latin American lecture tour. Back in Miami, he helped recruit the military leadership of Brigade 2506 of the Bay of Pigs invasion. It was Artime who enlisted the services of two former Batista Army officers, José San Román, and Erneido Oliva. The CIA sent him to the Panama Canal Zone for training in jungle warfare and military communications. He then joined other émigrés for combat training in Guatemala. U.S. army trainers appointed him as the brigade’s chief of civilian administration (a kind of political commissar), and he became a charter member of the Cuban Revolutionary Council. Once launched from bases in Nicaragua with the cooperation of the Somozas, the Cuban invaders made an amphibious landing at the Bay of Pigs. Brigade 2506 suffered a crushing defeat. When Cuban militia and army troops captured most of the surviving brigadistas, Artime attempted to flee to the Escambray but wandered aimlessly in the swamps until captured by Castro’s forces. He spent more than a year and a half in Castro’s prisons, gaining final release with the other brigadistas just two months after the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Back in Miami again, Manuel Artime wished to continue the fight against the communists, and the CIA found him a logical choice for support. Famous dissident, experienced guerrilla, advanced military trainee, and a Bay of Pigs hero—even former president Carlos Prío Socarrás admired him. Prío used his prestige and his connections to assist Artime’s MRR. He negotiated with Dominican army officers for logistical support and with Luis Somoza, the former president of Nicaragua, to facilitate the journey of recruits to join the MRR at its Nicaraguan base. Prío also suspected—as did most of the Cuban community in Florida—that the CIA supported the MRR. Artime was very ambitious, Prío once said, and had “the backing of the Jesuits.”48 Indeed, Jesuit priests in Havana had helped Artime escape. However, the CIA’s backing made Artime’s outfit the best equipped and

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most effective paramilitary force among the counterrevolutionaries in the Caribbean. Unlike other resistance leaders, he did not have to spend time dunning a few bucks here and there at fundraising dinners. He did not seek publicity and told everyone that he did not get money from the CIA. But Artime’s staff received training directly from CIA operatives, especially in advanced communications. “We’re going to overthrow Castro,” he told his men, “this time we’re really going to do it.”49 His name alone gained him audiences with leaders of Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Panama, and Nicaragua. Manuel Artime did not have to operate in violation of U.S. neutrality laws because his MRR possessed the wherewithal to mount armed raids against Cuba from several bases outside of U.S. territory. He assembled about three hundred men and two hundred tons of arms, costing the CIA approximately six million dollars.50 Naturally, his backing alienated smaller groups that received nothing from the Central Intelligence Agency. CIA support and Artime’s reputation provided numerous advantages in recruiting the best men available. Once accepted for MRR training, volunteers in Miami received $150 to $250 per month just for waiting for transportation to the Caribbean bases. In the last week of December 1963, upwards of one-hundred-fifty Cubans were already training in Costa Rica, where Artime had acquired a naval base on land belonging to Teodoro Quirós Castro, vice president of the Costa Rican Legislative Assembly. Other Cubans were training on the ranch of Ludwig Starke, leader of an anticommunist paramilitary organization called the Movimiento Costa Rica Libre (Free Costa Rica Movement). Costa Rican government officials, with the assistance of Nicaragua’s Somoza brothers, helped Artime acquire arms. Quirós Castro even sought to import two $30,000 mechanized landing craft from a Baltimore manufacturer.51 MRR leaders recognized that Starke and Quirós Castro were profiting from the rental of facilities, the importation of arms, and the purchase of supplies for the Cubans. However, information about the relationship between the politicians and the anti-Castro fighters soon reached the Costa Rican public. Left-wing commentators publicized the fact that Cuban émigrés were undergoing military training in Costa Rica. Communist leader Manuel Mora Valverde went on radio and denounced the émigrés for preparing “an invasion of Cuba.” Valverde accused the government of Costa Rican President Francisco Orlich and the president’s brother, too, of arming not only the Cubans but also the Costa Rican right-wing paramilitaries. Lamented a U.S. diplomat after the broadcast: “Word will soon get out.”52

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Personnel at the embassy in San José did not have to wait long. Prensa Libre in San José broke the news in May 1964. Its reporters traveled to the training areas, where they did not find any Cubans but did discover evidence of target practice in discarded cartridges and empty ammo boxes. Nevertheless, training proceeded. Fifty of Ludwig Starke’s men and the seventy Cubans doggedly prepared for joint military maneuvers at Starke’s ranch, while news stories linked President Orlich’s brother to the training sites.53 Therefore, the Costa Rican president was in a glum mood shortly thereafter when he made a state visit to Washington, D.C. He inquired about the U.S. government’s attitude toward the Cuban counterrevolutionaries. Thomas Mann of the State Department revealed no CIA secrets, observing only that Artime and others “were trying to help Cuba return to freedom and we sympathized with their objective.”54 Expectation concerning Artime’s plans for 1964 was building in the Cuban exile communities throughout the Caribbean. MRR members were spreading the word that one hundred men were training in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic (though the number actually may have been larger). MRR spokespersons claimed that they were getting “full material support” from the U.S. government—yet they also intimated that the MRR was timing its activities in the election year of 1964 in order to pressure the United States to accomplish more for the émigré cause. A leading Cuban exile in Venezuela referred to Artime as the “golden boy of the CIA.”55 However, its exposure in Costa Rica prompted the MRR to lose some momentum as it moved men and materiel next door to Nicaragua, where its position was much more secure. With the backing of the Somozas, Manuel Artime did not have to confront embarrassing left-wing criticism. He found in Nicaragua’s National Guard chief, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, a companion at arms in the fight against communism—and a spokesman for his cause. “Whoever is backing Artime on the American side should not send him people with whom he cannot work,” Somoza told a CIA informant, “but let Artime run the show and forget about replacing him with someone else—if, in fact, any serious thought is being given to this idea.” Somoza said he did not care if MRR raiders fell into Castro’s hands. “[I]n light of proved acts of terrorism through infiltration of revolutionaries, some of whom are in Nicaraguan jails,” Somoza told the U.S. agents, “Nicaragua is taking all steps necessary to retaliate” against Castro.56 But even in Nicaragua, the presence of counterrevolutionaries could not be kept secret. Newsmen and radio commentators in Managua talked openly about Cuban activities at Puerto Cabezas. They

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reported that the Cuban émigrés would soon launch an invasion “with [the] help of U.S. armed forces.” U.S. Embassy personnel in Managua had to scramble to deny rumors of U.S. military involvement, even though they were not sure what was transpiring on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast.57 The aid that the Cuban émigrés received from Somoza certainly outweighed that of the more open political system in Costa Rica. In Nicaragua, the regime facilitated operations, enabling the Cubans to concentrate on military training. Somoza’s consul in Miami, himself a lieutenant of the Guardia Nacional (National Guard), expedited the MRR’s communication and travel. The Nicaraguan government also waived the usual customs requirements for freighters supplying the MRR.58 Evidence suggests that the Somoza dictatorship even supported the MRR in security and disciplinary matters. In one instance in Puerto Cabezas, three Cubans in handcuffs were turned over to the Guardia Nacional and transported to Managua. Informants believed these men might have been Castro’s spies.59 Intelligence reports coming to Washington, D.C., indicated that the MRR was assembling an impressive paramilitary apparatus. The MRR naval station at Monkey Point was located within a military security zone on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast. Government security measures undercut land usage so much that property values began to plummet. The Somozas thereupon commenced buying up the cheap lands, enhancing the isolation of the Cuban trainees. A newly constructed airstrip facilitated air support. MRR crews in fast boats traveled back and forth along the coast between Bluefields and Monkey Point. Landing barges were spotted in training along the coastline. Cuban personnel often took time off in the bars of Puerto Cabezas and Bluefields. Therefore, when all of them headed back to their camps in midMay 1964, informants believed that some sort of raid was imminent.60 They were correct. The MRR attacked the sugar refinery along the coast at Puerto Pilón, Cuba, on May 13 and claimed a great victory. Information circulated that the raiders had destroyed the mill, the fuel storage depot, and a radio tower. Despite the refinery being fully manned by work crews, a member of the attack team said that only two women were slightly injured. “At a distance of 25 to 30 miles at sea, flames from the burning target were still clearly visible,” reported the MRR fighters.61 But the CIA had its doubts, stating that the raid had only burned two sugar warehouses and 70,000 bags of sugar. Secretary of State Dean Rusk himself verified the truth of the attack but pointed out that this counterrevolutionary action did not originate from U.S. territory.62

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National Security officials in the White House continued to monitor the activities of the MRR. “Artime is expected to strike again sometime during the week,” one aide speculated in June 1964. “There appears to be little to do except to hold onto your hat along with the rest of us.”63 Eventually, in August, the MRR carried out another armed raid, this one supposedly a fifty-fiveminute attack on a radar station at Cabo Cruz on the southern coast of Oriente Province. In a press conference in Panama, Artime claimed that his commandos “destroyed” a radar station from which 150 Cubans and three Russian advisers had tracked boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba.64 There followed the event that threw the exiles’ anti-Castro campaign into question, particularly the U.S. government’s support for it. The MRR mother ship had delivered fast boats to the Caribbean waters east of Oriente Province. In the early morning darkness of September 15, 1964, one of the motorboats came upon a freighter steaming toward Cuba. The boat circled the ship, which was displaying its full complement of running lights, then sped off. Shortly thereafter, three speed boats returned and opened fire on the ship’s bridge with rocket launchers and 50-caliber machine guns. “Attacking boats presented [the] appearance of pleasure craft,” the crew reported later. They left the ship a “burning hulk,” dead in the water. A Dutch freighter responded to the SOS transmissions and picked up nine survivors out of a crew of twenty, taking them to the Bahamas. A U.S. Navy helicopter from Guantánamo picked up eight wounded crewmembers and the bodies of three killed in action. The latter consisted of the captain and two officers of the deck.65 Later in the day, exile sources claimed that anti-Castro commandos linked to Manuel Artime had attacked a Cuban ship carrying sugar. However, Artime’s own spokesperson denied attacking any vessel in Caribbean on the previous evening. He had good reason for denial. Apparently, the raiders believed they were attacking the Sierra Maestra, cargo vessel of the Cuban merchant marine; in point of fact, the Sierra Maestra was en route to China with a cargo of sugar.66 The MRR had attacked the Sierra Aranzazu, a Spanish vessel. The government of General Francisco Franco in Spain, along with the governments of Great Britain and France, had not broken off diplomatic and commercial relations with Castro’s Cuba as did most OAS members. Flights still proceeded between Havana and Madrid, making Spain the principal center of émigré Cubans in Europe. Under pressure from the United States, Spanish officials had agreed to end shipping to Cuba by April 1965. However,

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the Sierra Aranzazu incident outraged the Spanish government so much that it contemplated reneging on the agreement. The foreign ministry issued an accusatory news release: “Such acts would never have taken place were it not for the piracy and banditry against Cuba which has been carried out by the U.S. government using bases situated in North American territory and in other Caribbean and Central American countries.” The foreign ministry went on to state that the “U.S. Government knows perfectly well who carried out this attack since the authors were mercenary elements equipped, paid, and directed by the Central Intelligence Agency.”67 Spanish protests were temporarily mollified when U.S. officials promised to investigate. In the meantime, security agents of the United States knew full well that the MRR had mounted the attack on the Sierra Aranzazu. But for security reasons, they convinced the White House that the U.S. government must deny prior knowledge of the attack and reject the notion that any group funded by the United States had attacked the Spanish freighter.68 John Crimmins of the White House worked on “talking points” to give Spanish authorities “the minimum [information] necessary to keep them from thinking that we are trying to deceive them.”69 White House aides also gave instructions to President Johnson’s press secretary. He was to say that the U.S. investigation had established that the attack on the Sierra Aranzazu was not launched from U.S. territory and thus broke no U.S. laws. If asked, the press secretary was additionally instructed to say, “The allegation that Artime works directly under the CIA is false.”70 Technically, this statement was accurate. The U.S. government only provided financial support to the MRR— not the sort of operational direction with which it managed Brigade 2506 at the Bay of Pigs. After the Sierra Aranzazu incident, Manuel Artime’s status with the CIA began to decline. Over the next few weeks, U.S. security officials requested that Artime cancel further attacks during the fall elections of 1964 while the CIA undertook a reassessment of its relations with the MRR, still “the strongest of the active Cuban exile groups.”71 Artime and his MRR managed to mount one final raid on a Cuban target. His fast boats attacked a fuel depot at Casilda on the south coast of Las Villas Province in February 1965. Little damage resulted. The boats never approached close enough to the target but preferred to exchange fire with Cuban army units from afar. U.S. officials doubted Artime’s claim that the fight lasted two hours.72 At nearly the same time as the raid, the MRR attempted to “exfiltrate” two of its agents from Cuba. Instead, they were captured and

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agents feared they would “spill their guts.” So the U.S. government had to prepare for the usual denials. “State [Department] has just about had it with the Artime group and seems to be leaning in favor of an immediate cut-off of ties with Artime,” wrote Gordon Chase at the White House.73

Conclusion Several conclusions about the Cuban counterrevolution abroad are worthy of note. The first concerns its domestic origin. It did not come from the members of the former regime of Fulgencio Batista. Most real threats to Castro’s consolidation of the revolution originated from among his former associates—the so-called liberals who had helped him in the struggle against the dictatorship. Even a few members of his own rebel organization, the M-26, broke with Fidel and contributed to the counterrevolution. These elements had provided the leadership of the internal rebellions that infested the Sierra Escambray from 1960 to 1965. Second, this study concludes that U.S. diplomats became involved with the internal dissention from the beginning. Embassy personnel maintained contact with the moderates in the Cuban provisional government and continued communication when they went into opposition. Many important dissidents found their way out of Cuba with help from the United States up until the embassy closed in January 1961. U.S. diplomats continued espousing the cause and concerns of these “liberals” in exile and, regrettably for the CIA sponsorship of the Bay of Pigs invasion, adopted their underestimation of the strength of the revolution’s adherents. Finally, one has to conclude that the U.S. commitment to the anti-Castro cause continued as it emigrated to Miami and other Caribbean locations. There was great tolerance for most commando groups and significant financial support for at least two of them. The question remains: Why did the U.S. policymakers support the counterrevolution in the Caribbean and risk exposing U.S. meddling in Latin American affairs—confirming for the whole world the most simplistic notions about U.S. imperialism? Part of the answer has to be that foreign policy advisers believed that the final objective of ridding themselves of Fidel Castro through subversion outweighed the cost of this strategy. For the most part, the CIA financially sponsored commandos operating offshore while none of its agents actually directed operations or selected targets. Technically, U.S. policymakers could, with straight faces, say that the Cuban paramilitaries did

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not operate “under the control” of the U.S. security agencies. One might say that these “autonomous” émigré groups gave cover to the politicians. “They’re freedom fighters,” government spokespersons were able to say with sufficient room for broad interpretation. It was true. The commando operations of Artime and Gutiérrez Menoyo did offer greater deniability to U.S. political leaders than did CIA direction of the Bay of Pigs invasion. The Second Front and MRR secured their own bases abroad, cultivated leaders of countries targeted by Cuban-trained revolutionists, and chose their own targets and the means to engage them. Most of all, armed raids and infiltration of saboteurs required no action on the part of U.S. military forces, thus not violating President John F. Kennedy’s pledge to Premier Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 that the United States would not invade Cuba. The CIA also believed that the commando raids might spark an internal rebellion against Castro. As one agent concluded, “externally mounted raids against Cuban targets have helped sustain hope among the many Cubans disillusioned with [Castro’s] regime.”74 Yet, this hope never resulted in an island-wide uprising against the communists. If inexpensive covert action with deniability offered such potentially rich returns, however unlikely, why did the White House discontinue the CIA program aiding the Cuban counterrevolution in the Caribbean? Basically, U.S. policymakers became convinced that support for the émigré commandos had become counterproductive. Menoyo’s revelations on Cuban television embarrassed the world’s most powerful nation. It exposed U.S. policy in Latin America as duplicitous and reactionary. It made Americans appear just as imperialistic as Fidel and Che said they were. Artime’s faux pas proved more devastating. The interdiction of neutral shipping in the Caribbean Sea threatened the anticommunist alliance in the United States’ most strategic region—Western Europe. That the counterrevolutionaries would attack merchant vessels in international waters horrified the Americans, and the government of Generalissimo Francisco Franco certainly was no friend of communism. Moreover, President Johnson wished to deemphasize the failed antiCastro policies he had inherited from the Kennedy administration. The post– Missile Crisis projects in assassination plots, sabotage, and commando raids had not weakened the Cuban Revolution at all.75 In point of fact, U.S. policymakers realized they were enabling Fidel to strengthen his personal power. The counterrevolutionaries were giving him an excuse to arrest potential

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enemies and to eliminate contenders for power. They gave Fidel the motivation to organize the militias, confiscate the properties, fill the prisons, militarize the island, organize neighborhood surveillance, and mobilize the people. Every exposure of conspiracy generated hundreds of arrests and purges. One CIA report concluded that Castro considered U.S. tolerance of counterrevolutionary raids as “a propaganda gift,” for it reminded the Cubans of U.S. hostility. Already the CIA was gearing up for the struggle against communism in Southeast Asia.76 In the end, policymakers had to admit that commando forays may have reinforced the longevity of the communist regime. “The Cuban exiles in general refuse to believe that liberation is not around the corner,” the CIA’s Richard Helms observed in 1964.77 Yet, the damage was done. Frustrated by his lack of policy options toward Cuba, President Johnson once asked Thomas Mann of the State Department how he could rid himself of Fidel Castro. “As long as that army is loyal to him,” Mann replied, “he’s going to be there until he dies.”78 notes 1. The translated transcript of the televised interview was furnished to the Johnson White House by U.S. security agents. “Gutierrez Menoyo Questioned by State Security,” Feb. 3, 1965, National Security Files, Country Files (hereafter NSF), box 22, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, Texas (hereafter LBJPL). 2. Only two of the ninety combatants captured shortly after the landing were Panamanians. The rest, Cubans! John C. Shillock Jr., “Comments on Recent Invasion Crisis,” May 6, 1959, 719.00/5-659, Records of the U.S. Department of State Relating to the Internal Affairs of Panama, 1955–1959, National Archives, Washington, D.C. 3. Even Che Guevara, architect of the export of revolution, did not deny Cuba’s efforts. He saw them as necessary for Latin America’s liberation from U.S. imperialism, as he told Senator Eugene McCarthy in 1964. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, vol. 32: Dominican Republic, Cuba, Haiti, Guyana (hereafter FRUS 1964–1968, Dominican) (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2005), 699. On Cuba’s export of revolution, see Jorge I. Domínguez, To Make a World Safe for Revolution: Cuba’s Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 113–46; Paul J. Dosal, Comandante Che: Guerrilla Soldier, Commander, and Strategist, 1956–1967 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003); Manuel Piñeiro, Che Guevara and the Latin American Revolutionary Movements, ed. by Luis Suárez Salazar, trans. by Mary Todd (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2001); William M. LeoGrande, “Foreign Policy: The Limits of Success,” in Cuba: Internal and International Affairs, ed. Jorge I. Domínguez, 167–92 (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1982). 4. See especially endnotes 3 and 15. 5. “Future of CIA’s Cuban Paramilitary Program; Proposed UDT Sabotage Operations,” Jan. 18, 1965, NSF, box 22, LBJPL. For President John F. Kennedy’s policy directive establishing the covert program, see FRUS 1964–1968, Dominican, 720–21.

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6. Richard Helms, “Analysis of the Reaction of the Cuban Government and Cuban Exiles to Recent Anti-Castro Activity,” May 21, 1964, NSC, box 22, LBJPL. 7. On Ray’s JURE, see Jonathan C. Brown, “La CIA y los paramilitares cubanos en los 60,” Temas: Cultura, Ideología, Sociedad 55 (July–September 2008): 62–64. 8. CIA Intelligence Information Cable, Feb. 19, 1964, NSF, box 22, LBJPL. Rafael Díaz Balart was Fidel’s brother-in-law and father of two sons who now serve as U.S. Congressmen from South Florida. 9. Department of State Airgram, Dec. 20, 1963, NSF, box 22, LBJPL. 10. CIA Information Report, “Planned Attack by Commandos L against a Soviet Ship in Cuban Waters,” Nov. 28, 1963, NSF, box 22, LBJPL; CIA Information Cable, Mar. 4, 1964, NSF, box 22, LBJPL. 11. CIA Intelligence Information Cables, Apr. 15, Apr. 20, 1965, NSF, box 22, LBJPL; Department of State telegram, Nov. 4, 1964, NSF, box 22, LBJPL. 12. “Security Threat in Isthmian Area,” Jul. 12, 1965, NSF, box 31, LBJPL. 13. CIA Intelligence Information Cable, Jun. 14, 1964, NSF, box 22, LBJPL; Peter Kornbluh, ed., Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba (New York: The New Press, 1998), 96. 14. Gordon Chase to John Crimmins, Feb. 18, 1964, NSF, box 22, LBJPL. 15. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, vol. 31, South and Central America, Mexico (hereafter cited as FRUS 1964–1968, South and Central America) (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2004), 11. 16. Chase to Bundy, May 14, 1964, Jun. 16, 1964, NSF, box 22, LBJPL; Peter Jessup, “Memorandum for the Record,” Apr. 9, 1964, NSF, box 22, LBJPL. 17. FRUS 1964–1968, Dominican, 611. 18. See Carlos Franqui, Diary of the Cuban Revolution, trans. Georgette Felix et al., 147–69 (New York: Viking Press, 1980); Hugh Thomas, Cuba or the Pursuit of Freedom, rev. ed. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 926–29; Ramón L. Bonachea and Marta San Martín, The Cuban Insurrection, 1952–1959 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1974), 175–87; Julia E. Sweig, Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 106, 180. 19. Jorge G. Castañeda, The Life and Death of Che Guevara (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 134–45; John Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Grove Press, 1997), 354; Dosal, Comandante Che, 152–53. 20. U.S. Embassy Havana, “Weeka Report,” Aug. 11, Aug. 18, 1959, Confidential U.S. State Department Central Files, Cuba: Internal Affairs and Foreign Affairs, 1955–1959, National Archives (microfilm) (hereafter NARA, Cuba, 1955–1959), 737.00(W)/8-1159, /8-1959. Gutiérrez Menoyo performed this service for the revolution despite having previously been denounced in the communist newspaper Hoy for being “a tool of Yankee imperialism” for a goodwill trip he took to the United States. See “Weeka Report,” Mar. 24, 1959, NARA, Cuba 1955–1959, 737.00(W)/3-2459; Rufo López Fresquet, My Fourteen Months with Castro (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1966), 133–38. 21. “Weeka Report,” Feb. 16, 1960, Confidential U.S. State Department Central Files, Cuba: Internal Affairs, 1960–1963, National Archives (microfilm) (hereafter NARA, Cuba 1960–1963), 737.00(W)/2-1660. 22. “Weeka Report,” Mar. 16, 1960, NARA, Cuba 1960–1963, 737.00(W)/3-1660. Also see Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, El Radarista (Madrid: Editorial Playor, 1985).

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2 3. “Weeka Report,” Sep. 14, 1960, NARA, Cuba 1960–1963, 737.00(W)9-1460. 24. Richard R. Fagan, The Transformation of Political Culture in Cuba (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1969), 41. Also see Jesús Arboleya, The Cuban CounterRevolution, trans. Rafael Betancourt, 113–19 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2000). 25. Intelligence Information Cable, Dec. 19, 1963, NSF, box 32, LBJPL; Directorate of Intelligence, “Weekly Cuban Summary,” Dec. 23, 1964, NSF, box 36, LBJPL. 26. Jorge I. Domínguez, Cuba: Order and Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 345–46; Enrique G. Encinosa, Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution (Austin, TX: Eakin Press, 1988), xii. 27. Encinosa, Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution, 75. 28. CIA Intelligence Information Cable, May 6, 1964, NSF, box 22, LBJPL; Directorate of Intelligence, “Weekly Cuban Summary,” Apr. 21, 1965, NSF, box 36, LBJPL. In 1966, a Stanford University professor visited one such resettlement camp of Escambray peasants in Pinar del Río Province. See Fagan, The Transformation of Political Culture, 170. 29. “Planned Activation of Plan Omega,” Nov. 28, 1963, NSF, box 22, LBJPL. 30. Department of State Telegram, Dec. 17, 1963, NSF, box 22, LBJPL. 31. Department of State Airgram, Feb. 27, 1964, NSF, box 22, LBJPL. 32. Department of State Airgram, May 20, 1964, NSF, box 22, LBJPL. 33. CIA Intelligence Information Cables, May 13, May 15, May 22, 1964, NSF, box 22, LBJPL. Both Eloy and his late older brother Carlos had been born in Spain, where Carlos fought for the leftists in the Spanish Civil War. 34. CIA Intelligence Information Cable, May 19, 1964, NSF, box 22, LBJPL. 35. Directorate of Intelligence, “Weekly Cuban Summary,” Jan. 19, Jan. 27, 1965, NSF, box 36, LBJPL; CIA Intelligence Information Cable, Jan. 20, 1965, NSF, box 22, LBJPL. 36. “Translation of Havana Prensa Latina Report,” Jan. 27, 1965, NSF, box 22, LBJPL. The prisoners were identified as Menoyo, Ramón Quesada Gómez, Domingo Ortega Acosta, and Noel Salas. 37. Navy Department report, Jan. 30, 1965, NSF, box 22, LBJPL; “Weekly Cuban Summary,” Feb. 10, 1965, NSF, box 36, LBJPL. 38. Chase to Bundy, Jan. 26, 1965, NSF, box 31, LBJPL. 39. Chase to Bundy, Jan. 26, 1965, NSF, box 20, LBJPL. 40. “Cuba Airs ‘Confession’ by Menoyo,” Washington Post, Feb. 2, 1965, 1. 41. Directorate of Intelligence, “Weekly Cuban Summary,” Feb. 3, 1965, NSF, box 36, LBJPL. 42. CIA, “Weekly Cuban Summary,” Apr. 7, 1965, NSF, box 36, LBJPL. Ransoming counterrevolutionaries was not novel. In December 1962, Cuba received $53 million worth of medicine and baby foods in exchange for the Bay of Pigs prisoners. Haynes Johnson with Manuel Artime, et al., The Bay of Pigs: The Leaders’ Story of Brigade 2506 (New York: Dell, 1964), 329. 43. Directorate of Intelligence, “Weekly Cuban Summary,” Feb. 10, 1965, NSF, box 36, LBJPL; CIA, “Weekly Cuban Summary,” Feb. 24, 1965, NSF, box 36, LBJPL. 44. “Weeka Report,” May 19, 1959, NARA, Cuba 1955–1959, 737.00(W)/5-1959. 45. See Huber Matos, Cómo llegó la noche: Memorias (Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 2002), 337–52. 46. He subsequently published his resignation letter and a detailed version of the INRA meeting in Manuel F. Artime, Traición! Gritan 20,000 Tumbas Cubanas (Mexico City: Editorial Jus, 1960).

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47. Johnson et al., The Bay of Pigs, 23–26, 33; Félix I. Rodríguez and John Weisman, Shadow Warrior (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 117; History of an Aggression: Testimony and Documents from the Trial of the Mercenary Brigade Organized by the U.S. Imperialists that Invaded Cuba on April 17, 1961 (Havana: Ediciones Venceremos, 1964), 75, 239. 48. CIA Information Reports, Dec. 3, Dec. 6, 1963, NSF, box 22, LBJPL. The MRR maintained a naval refueling station in the Dominican Republic. Rodríguez and Weisman, Shadow Warrior, 122. 49. Rodríguez and Weisman, Shadow Warrior, 116. 50. Ibid., 119. The CIA funneled the money through a dummy corporation called Marítima BAM. 51. AmEmbassy San Jose to State, Dec. 27, 1963, NSF, box 16, LBJPL. 52. CIA Intelligence Information Cable, Mar. 19, 1964, NSF, box 22, LBJPL; AmEmbassy San Jose to State, Mar. 24, 1964, NSF, box 16, LBJPL. 53. AmEmbassy San Jose to State, May 22, 1964, NSF, box 16, LBJPL; CIA Intelligence Information Cable, Jul. 10, 1964, NSF, box 22, LBJPL. 54. FRUS 1964–1968, South and Central America, 179. 55. CIA Intelligence Information Cable, Apr. 15, 1964, NSF, box 22, LBJPL. 56. CIA Intelligence Information Cable, Apr. 16, 1964, NSF, box 22, LBJPL. 57. Department of State Airgram, Apr. 22, 1964, NSF, box 22, LBJPL. 58. CIA Intelligence Information Cable, Jul. 2, 1964, NSF, box 22, LBJPL. 59. CIA Intelligence Information Cable, Jul. 10, 1964, NSF, box 22, LBJPL. Félix Rodríguez, who served as communications officer with the MRR in Nicaragua, writes of catching one spy and saboteur in Nicaragua. He claims that the suspect Gabriel Albuerne later escaped from Nicaraguan custody during the 1972 Managua earthquake. Rodríguez and Weisman, Shadow Warrior, 121. 60. Rodríguez and Weisman, Shadow Warrior, 121; CIA Intelligence Information Cable, 14 May 1964, NSF, box 22, LBJPL. 61. “Attack on Sugar Mill at Puerto Pilon,” Jun. 5, 1964, NSF, box 22, LBJPL. 62. Dean Rusk to AmEmbassy Rio de Janeiro, May 25, 1964, NSF, box 30, LBJPL; CIA Intelligence Information Cable, Jun. 1, 1964, NSF, box 32, LBJPL. Félix Rodríguez supports the MRR claim of extensive damage and quotes Artime as saying “It is . . . the hardest blow Cuban communism has received since the Bay of Pigs.” Rodríguez and Weisman, Shadow Warrior, 122–23. 63. Chase to Bundy, Jun. 8, Jun. 15, 1964, NSF, box 20, LBJPL. 64. “Raid,” Aug. 31, 1964, NSF, box 22, LBJPL. 65. Department of Defense, National Military Command Center, cable, Sep. 15, 1964, NSF, box 15, LBJPL; Department of State incoming telegram, Sep. 15, 1964, NSF, box 22, LBJPL. 66. Associated Press releases, Sep. 15, 1964, NSF, box 22, LBJPL. Also see Rodríguez and Weisman, Shadow Warrior, 122–23. 67. News release, Sep. 16, 1965, NSF, box 22, LBJPL. 68. Robert F. Woodward to W. W. Rostow, Oct. 3, 1964, NSF, box 22, LBJPL. 69. Chase to Bundy, Nov. 10, 1964, NSF, box 20, LBJPL. Secretary of State Dean Rusk told subordinates to make the findings “as indeterminate as is possible.” FRUS 1964–1968, Dominican, 688. 70. “For the Noon Briefing,” Jan, 18, 1965, NSF, box 30, LBJPL. The emphasis is the author’s.

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71. “Future of the Autonomous Group Headed by Manuel Artime,” Nov. 6, 1964, NSF, box 22, LBJPL. 72. Directorate of Intelligence, “Weekly Cuban Summary,” Feb. 10, 1965, NSF, box 36, LBJPL. 73. Chase to Bundy, Feb. 9, 1965, NSF, box 22, LBJPL. 74. Some analysts hoped that disgruntled officers in the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces, stimulated by offshore raids, would stage a coup d’état. FRUS 1964–1968, Dominican, 550, 554. 75. Stephen G. Rabe, The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press), 79–80; Bradley Earl Ayers, The War That Never Was: An Insider’s Account of C.I.A. Covert Operations Against Cuba (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs Merrill, 1976), 211. 76. CIA, “Weekly Cuban Summary,” Mar. 17, 1965, NSF, box 36, LBJPL. As Jorge Domínguez writes, “All Cuban mass organizations were founded at times when the revolutionary government was threatened.” Domínguez, Cuba: Order and Revolution, 445. 77. Richard Helms, “Analysis of the Reaction of the Cuban Government and Cuban Exiles to Recent Anti-Castro Activity,” May 21, 1964, NSF, box 22, LBJPL. 78. FRUS 1964–1968, Dominican, 659–60.

· Ch a p t er Fi v e ·

Don Lázaro Rises Again Heated Rhetoric, Cold Warfare, and the 1961 Latin American Peace Conference

5 R e nata K e l l er

General Lázaro Cárdenas looked out over the crowd of 10,000

people gathered at Mexico City’s Arena de México. The audience deliriously cheered his arrival; then, an eager silence fell as Cárdenas stepped to the microphone. He cleared his throat and began reading the declarations of the Latin American Conference for National Sovereignty, Economic Emancipation, and Peace, also known as the Latin American Peace Conference. “The Latin American people want peace,” Cárdenas stated. “But what interests them even more directly is that Latin America be free and sovereign to determine its own destiny,” he continued, and the crowd erupted in applause.1 When Cárdenas declared that the Cuban Revolution revealed the path to liberation from foreign domination, the audience shouted its agreement. The crowd stayed in the arena for the rest of the three-hour ceremony, as the 1961 Latin American Peace Conference came to a close. At the time of the conference, Fidel Castro’s revolutionary government controlled Cuba, an anticommunist crusade consumed U.S. policymakers, and Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) dominated Mexican politics. The Cuban Revolution of 1959 had reinvigorated the left throughout Latin America by exposing vulnerability in the United States’ hegemonic 129

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control over the region. Lázaro Cárdenas, a former Mexican president who had joined his nation’s pantheon of revolutionary heroes through his land distribution policies and his nationalization of the petroleum industry, was among those most inspired by Castro’s success. Since leaving office in 1940, Cárdenas had become disillusioned with the increasingly political battlefield.2 However, he could not resist the urge to return to the national and international limelight in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution. Like others, Cárdenas wanted to capitalize on the popularity of the Cuban Revolution to call the world’s attention to devastating poverty in Latin America, denounce U.S. imperialism in the region, and express his solidarity with Castro’s government. Lázaro Cárdenas was a master of the art of geopolitical theater. He knew how to manipulate both international tensions and public opinion to pursue his own agendas. In his time as president in the late 1930s, he used the German threat to gain leverage with the United States and secure his nationalization of Mexico’s petroleum industry.3 During and after the Spanish Civil War, Cárdenas offered asylum and Mexican citizenship to thousands of Spanish republican refugees.4 He even posed for photographs with a shipload of Spanish refugee children upon their arrival to Mexican shores.5 Half a year after Castro and his fellow bearded guerrillas took power in Cuba, Cárdenas flew to the island to celebrate July 26th, the anniversary of the day in 1953 when Fidel began his revolutionary quest. In an interview on the way back to Mexico, Cárdenas explained his sympathy for the difficulties that the Cuban leaders were encountering and reminisced about how Mexican revolutionaries had faced the same animosity, criticism, and false accusations.6 The Latin American Peace Conference was one of the largest events in the hemisphere for leftist politics in 1961 and Lázaro Cárdenas was its producer, director, and star. In light of its importance, the peace conference has received insufficient attention in the historiography of the Cold War in Latin America. Scholars who have written about it discuss it briefly without fully examining the significance of the conference for its participants and its opponents.7 This chapter provides the first in-depth analysis of the Latin American Peace Conference. What was the Latin American Peace Conference and why was it important? This analysis begins with a portrait of the gathering: the goals, the preparations, the participants, and the content. Using publications and texts of speeches produced by participants, it reveals the significance of the event for the Latin American Left—both new and old.8 The conference brought

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together thousands of people from across the hemisphere, including such important personages as Mexican labor leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano and Vilma Espín, the president of the Federation of Cuban Women and Raúl Castro’s wife. It was one of the earliest and largest international efforts to harness the momentum of the Cuban Revolution and spread its perceived achievements throughout Latin America. Just as the Latin American Peace Conference had numerous supporters, it also inspired a great deal of opposition. There were many who were eager to thwart the goals of the so-called Communist Conference. The second part of this chapter examines efforts to contain the gathering and minimize its repercussions. U.S. government documents reveal not only the fear and anger that the Latin American Peace Conference inspired among officials, but also their attempts to disrupt and hamper the events. The U.S. press also responded negatively, portraying the conference as a leftist conspiracy against the United States. The major national newspapers in Mexico adopted a similarly disapproving stance, as the government used its influence over the media in order to limit the conference’s political impact. The recently declassified records of Mexican intelligence and security forces reveal that the gathering worried the Mexican government enough to prompt heavy surveillance. Why did a conference that promoted peace provoke such apprehension in the Mexican government and outrage in the United States? This in-depth study of the Latin American Peace Conference provides a lens through which to examine numerous issues: leftist attempts to take advantage of the momentum of the Cuban Revolution, Latin American nationalism and anti-U.S. sentiment, Cuban efforts to protect and spread their revolution, and conservative strategies to limit Castro’s influence in the hemisphere. The peace conference also sheds light on Mexico’s ambivalent role in the Cold War and its leaders’ attempts to balance the conflicting demands of leftist heroes like Cárdenas and anticommunist crusaders from the United States. This chapter analyzes the weapons of the Cold War in a battlefield largely overlooked in the historiography—Mexico. It argues that Cárdenas’s peace conference helped escalate Cold War tensions in Latin America by producing a bold demonstration of leftist solidarity that demanded a response.

Conference Background and Preparations Cárdenas’s peace conference was a Latin American event with Soviet connections. In 1949, Soviet leaders and pacifists from around the world founded

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the World Peace Council.9 According to its promotional materials, the council’s main objectives were the prohibition of weapons of mass destruction, the abolition of foreign military bases, the elimination of all forms of colonialism and racial discrimination, the establishment of mutually beneficial trade and cultural relations, and the replacement of force with negotiation. The World Peace Council also promoted respect for sovereignty and independence, respect for the territorial integrity of states, noninterference in the internal affairs of nations, and peaceful coexistence between states with different political systems.10 Over the years, the World Peace Council embraced many causes that directly challenged U.S. policies, raising questions about the group’s political loyalties. The council defended the “Vietnamese people’s struggle against U.S. imperial aggression” and “the eradication of racism and racial discrimination in Southern Africa, the U.S.A., and the Israeli-occupied Arab territories.”11 Political analysts in the U.S. State Department believed that the World Peace Council was actually a communist-front organization that sought to discredit the United States and its allies around the world.12 The Mexican Peace Movement emerged in 1949 as a branch of the World Peace Council, with a distinguished list of members that included Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Mexico’s greatest modernist poet, Enrique González Martínez. Jesús Silva Herzog, the nationally renowned economist and historian who had helped lay the groundwork for Lázaro Cárdenas’s expropriation of the foreign-owned oil companies, also participated in the Mexican Peace Movement. The organization languished throughout the 1950s until Narciso Bassols, a former minister of education, minister of the interior, minister of finance, and diplomat, paired up with Cárdenas’s close friend General Heriberto Jara to reinvigorate it in 1958. Two years later, Cárdenas accepted the nomination to become of one of three copresidents of the Latin American branch of the World Peace Movement.13 He held a press conference in December of 1960, announcing that the Latin American Peace Conference was to be held in Mexico City the following March. Cárdenas and the other organizers had numerous agendas. According to the official announcement, the objectives were to demand democracy, sovereignty, independence, economic development, and education.14 Such goals were generic enough to appeal to a wide audience. A later section of the announcement related a more specific, controversial goal: defense of the Cuban Revolution. “We understand that the defense of Cuba is the defense of Latin America,” the organizers declared. With this statement,

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they inserted themselves in the mounting battle between the United States and Cuba. The Latin American Peace Conference came at a time when Cold War tensions within and among nations across the hemisphere were swiftly mounting. The U.S.-engineered coup d’état against Jacobo Arbenz’s leftist government in Guatemala in 1954 heralded the arrival of the global Cold War to Latin American shores.15 Fidel Castro took measures soon after coming into power on January 1, 1959, that alarmed the U.S. government and raised the specter of communism.16 Within a few months, Castro began a program of agrarian reform that expropriated land owned by U.S. investors and imposed stiff taxes on imports. In February 1960, the Cubans signed a major trade agreement with the Soviets, and seven months later Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev embraced Fidel at a meeting of the United Nations in New York City. Castro confiscated the holdings of U.S. petroleum companies, the United States eliminated Cuba’s sugar quota, and Fidel nationalized U.S. properties.17 By the time of the 1961 Latin American Peace Conference, the United States had cut relations with Cuba and had put into motion numerous plans to overthrow Castro’s regime, including the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion that took place a little over a month after the conference’s closing ceremony.18 The group in charge of organizing the Latin American Peace Conference spent months preparing and advertising for the big event. Lázaro Cárdenas held three press conferences to attract attention. The organizers ran multiplepage advertisements in Mexican magazines and newspapers such as Política and La Prensa. The ads took advantage of Cárdenas’s popularity and highlighted his role in the proceedings.19 They boasted lists of thousands of adherents from across Mexico and Latin America, including ex-presidents and vice presidents, senators, governors, economists, lawyers, intellectuals, painters, dancers, writers, historians, scientists, engineers, educators, students, doctors, nurses, midwives, social workers, accountants, musicians, journalists, pharmacists, business leaders, oil workers, health workers, railroad workers, government employees, and a chess Grandmaster. Among the most internationally recognized adherents were Mexican poet and author Rosario Castellanos, Brazilian writer Jorge Amado, and Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. In addition to publicizing the conference through the press, the organizers spread the message through fliers, posters, and word of mouth. They distributed the official announcement of the conference to unions and

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workers’ groups in Mexico City. They also held meetings and roundtables with student, teacher, and union groups throughout the country to discuss the goals of the conference and collect donations. Cárdenas’s statements to the international press on February 17, 1961, demonstrated the importance of these grassroots fundraising and publicity efforts. He claimed that money donated by “Mexicans of scarce and modest resources” would cover the entire cost of the conference.20 Cárdenas’s statement implied that the public’s enthusiasm for the conference was significant.

The Peace Conference The Latin American Peace Conference began in Mexico City on March 5, 1961. More than 2,500 delegates from twenty Latin American nations as well as Europe, Asia, and Africa crowded into an auditorium, and at least a thousand additional people listened to the proceedings on loudspeakers installed outside the building.21 Newspaper and television journalists from across the world attended. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and Premier Zhou Enlai of the People’s Republic of China sent telegrams congratulating the organizers on their efforts. Over the course of the four-day conference, delegates discussed the importance of international solidarity, proclaimed the right of the nations of Latin America to defend their sovereignty, and vigorously denounced the imperialist practices of the United States. The Cuban Revolution and the Cuban delegation frequently took center stage in the proceedings, as attendees celebrated the Caribbean nation’s challenge to U.S. dominance in the hemisphere. Lázaro Cárdenas opened the events with a speech that set the tone for the rest of the conference. He extolled Latin America’s pacifist tradition and denounced the dangers of imperialist war in the atomic age. He lauded the Cuban Revolution and praised its “incorruptible” leaders. Cárdenas also emphasized the need for cooperation among the “less developed” nations in order to improve their economic standing. “As long as there is one country without liberty, as long as we witness the existence of nations without political independence . . . it will not be possible for peace to prevail in the world,” he declared.22 This became a mantra of the rest of the conference, as numerous speakers echoed Cárdenas’s message of international solidarity. Vilma Espín gave a rousing speech about the liberation of the Cuban people at the opening ceremony. She had significant revolutionary credentials, having worked with Frank País, the urban coordinator of Castro’s movement,

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to help prepare the Cuban Revolution. Upon País’s death, Espín took command of the second front of the rebel army in the island’s eastern cities. She married Raúl Castro less than a month after the success of the revolution and in August 1960 founded the Federation of Cuban Women.23 In her speech at the Latin American Peace Conference, Espín compared Fidel Castro to Abraham Lincoln and said that the Cuban Revolution was an example to the world of the vulnerability of imperialism. She declared that although her country did not export revolutions, it was impossible to contain the power of the island’s example. She also expressed gratitude to the socialist nations and to Cuba’s “sister nations,” such as Mexico, for their “generous and uninterested help” in overcoming the stranglehold of U.S. imperialists.24 She ended her speech with Fidel Castro’s famous slogan: “¡Patria o muerte! ¡Venceremos!” Other delegates seconded Vilma Espín’s claims about the exemplary power of the Cuban Revolution. Argentine professor of engineering Alberto T. Casella, one of the copresidents of the conference, called the Cuban experience an important lesson and inspiring example. A delegate from the Dominican Republic described Cuba as “the example and pride of Latin America” and said that he hoped that one day the socialist nations would offer the same support to his country. Ramón Danzós Palomino, a prominent Mexican agrarian leader, also praised the Cubans, stating that all people and nations could benefit from studying their profound reforms. Mexican labor and socialist leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano ended his speech with the hope that “the light of the Cuban Revolution may illuminate all of America.”25 Conference attendees vowed to follow the example of the Cuban Revolution and to defend Cuba from aggression. The delegates produced a final declaration, which Cárdenas read at the closing ceremony. “In energetically reaffirming that they will defend Cuba against all aggression,” the expresident proclaimed, “the Latin American people know that they defend their own destiny.”26 The final resolutions of the conference went into further detail on how to protect Cuba. They contained promises to fight all enemies of Castro’s government—counterrevolutionaries, mercenaries, and North American imperialists—wherever they were found. The conference attendees also defended the Cuban people’s right to determine their own government and to seek and accept help from any country of the world.27 This assertion flew in the face of the United States’ longstanding practice of playing kingmaker in Latin American politics. It also challenged U.S. efforts dating as far back as the Monroe Doctrine to keep European countries—in this case, the Soviet Union—out of the Americas.

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Conference attendees devoted a similar amount of attention in their speeches and resolutions to the related theme of U.S. imperialism. Alberto T. Casella called attention to the contradiction between the United States’ assumed right to expansion and the Latin American peoples’ right to selfdetermination. “Yankee imperialism has returned to the most aggressive forms in its history in its relations with Latin America,” Vicente Lombardo Toledano declared. A representative from Paraguay protested her country’s “official and permanent intervention” in recent years by the U.S. State Department. A Peruvian delegate denounced his own nation’s role as a “peon of Yankee imperialism.”28 The conference attendees accused the United States of a wide range of crimes, including economic exploitation, military intervention, territorial conquest, cultural penetration, and support of tyrants. The final declaration of the conference put it plainly. “The fundamental force that blocks the development of Latin America is North American imperialism,” it read. The declaration denounced the Monroe Doctrine, the Organization of American States, and the United States’ policies of hemispheric defense and Panamericanism. It concluded, “North American imperialism has compromised Latin America in the politics of the Cold War.”29 While the subjects of Cuba and the United States dominated much of the delegates’ attention at the Latin American Peace Conference, it is important to note that the assembly had other goals as well. So-called New Left concerns such as anti-imperialism, the rejection of both capitalism and bureaucratic communism, and the desire to take bold action took center stage. But Old Left issues of labor and unions also received significant attention. Attendees discussed economic concerns such as agrarian reform, nationalization, industrialization, lending practices, ownership of natural resources, workers’ rights, and international cooperation. In addition, they made concrete proposals of ways to encourage world peace, such as the abolition of nuclear weapons, the limitation of war propaganda, an end to military pacts and aggressive alliances, and improvements in education. Even when the conversations did not explicitly address Cuba or the United States, however, references to the two countries frequently colored the remarks. With regard to economic emancipation, delegates held Cuba up as an example in both its agrarian reforms and its nationalization of properties, industries, and resources. They denounced U.S. economic domination and the exploitive practices of North American monopolies, blaming the United States for Latin America’s economic woes. The resolutions regarding national

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sovereignty referred exclusively to North American imperialism, omitting any mention of European or Soviet imperialism. When discussing the promotion of peace, attendees depicted the United States as the single greatest threat to world harmony. In every facet of the Latin American Peace Conference, the attendees made their loyalties clear in the escalating confrontation between the United States and Cuba.

Reaction to the Peace Conference As the conference participants observed, Latin America had become compromised in the politics of the Cold War and their gathering served to highlight and increase Latin America’s involvement. Not surprisingly, the reaction in the United States to an international conference that denounced U.S. imperialism was decidedly negative. Shortly after the conference’s closing ceremony, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing to investigate. Dr. Joseph F. Thorning, a professor of Latin American history at Mount St. Mary’s College, associate editor of World Affairs, and author of multiple books on both communism and Latin America, provided testimony.30 Dr. Thorning called the conference a propaganda show and accused the organizers of attempting to promote the “political enslavement of all the American Republics under a Soviet regime, economic thralldom as a part of the Soviet economic juggernaut, and internecine warfare throughout the Western Hemisphere.” He warned the Senate that the Latin American Peace Conference sought to stir up “Fidel Castro-type revolutions” through active Soviet intervention.31 Dr. Thorning claimed that Lázaro Cárdenas had proven himself “most effective” in carrying out Soviet directives and policies. The Central Intelligence Agency also suspected that the Soviets were the driving force behind the Latin American Peace Conference. A CIA memo tied it to a proposal for a “People’s Congress” for Latin America that emerged from the 1959 international Communist Party congress. According to the CIA, the Soviets planned to have prominent leftist figures in the region—including Cárdenas— overtly sponsor the conference in order to camouflage communist participation. “Cárdenas’s reputation may give the conference a substantial anti-U.S. propaganda impact,” the intelligence agency warned. In the CIA’s view, the peace conference aimed to take advantage of Latin American nationalism in order to spread anti–United States and pro-Castro sentiment.32 The author or authors of the memo apparently overlooked or dismissed some of the conference’s less controversial goals and saw it strictly within the context of the Cold War.

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The major U.S. press outlets did their part to cast the peace conference in a negative light. Like the CIA, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times all focused on the conference’s defense of Cuba and condemnation of the United States, with no mention of other goals such as agrarian reform or nuclear nonproliferation. A Washington Post headline protested, “Latin Leftist Parley Calls U.S. Villain,” while the New York Times announced, “Leftists Stress Latin Solidarity: Meeting in Mexico Steps Up Attacks on U.S.”33 Nearly all of the articles on the subject mocked the declared peaceful nature of the conference by putting ironic quotation marks around the word “peace”; for example, a headline in the Los Angeles Times read, “Leftist Latin ‘Peace Conference’ Praises Castro and Denounces U.S.”34 All the articles in the three major newspapers described the conference as communist or “red.”35 The Washington Post warned that the delegates were urged to return to their countries and prepare for a fight against the United States.36 On the whole, U.S. journalists, intelligence agents, and even some scholars depicted the Latin American Peace Conference as a gathering of rabid communists determined to harm the United States. Meanwhile, Mexican President Adolfo López Mateos refused to play the role of enthusiastic host to the Latin American Peace Conference. The gathering came at a time when he was already struggling to keep domestic leftist enthusiasm for Cuba from spreading. His party’s claims to representing an institutionalized revolution were suffering from comparison to Castro’s government. The fact that Lázaro Cárdenas, the last truly revolutionary Mexican president, had thrown his weight behind Castro made López Mateos’s job even harder. President López Mateos did everything he could to dampen the effects of the Latin American Peace Conference short of direct confrontation. He did not attend the conference, nor did he lend his name to any of the documents that it produced. According to a memo of a meeting between the Mexican president and CIA chief Allen Dulles on January 14, 1961, López Mateos described the gathering as “a communist tool” and “a domestic political problem.” When Dulles asked why he did not prevent the conference, the president explained that his nation’s constitution limited his options. At Dulles’s suggestion, the memo claims, López Mateos promised to do whatever he could to help the CIA “disrupt and hamper” the conference. He reportedly boasted about his government’s capacity for coverage and control.37 While López Mateos expressed his opposition to the Latin American Peace Conference in private, the president of the PRI, Alfonso Corona del

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Rosal, was publicly dismissive. In a meal with foreign journalists immediately following the events, Corona del Rosal portrayed the sectors represented at the meeting as an irrelevant minority. “I respect General Cárdenas as an ex-president of our party, but regarding his behavior in this congress I leave all judgment to what his conscience dictates as a citizen and as a Mexican,” the PRI spokesman stated.38 By minimizing the conference to the foreign press and implying that its chief organizer would have to answer to his conscience for his actions, Corona del Rosal attempted to contain its impact both in Mexico and abroad. Indeed, the PRI leader’s statements might have been an element of President López Mateos’s plan to “disrupt and hamper” the peace conference. The three most important national newspapers in Mexico, Excélsior, El Universal, and Novedades, also did their part to limit the effects of the peace conference. Excélsior provided brief, disparaging coverage of the events. It published three short descriptions of the conference on interior pages and simultaneously ran an equal number of negative articles. Every time the author of the Excélsior articles described one of the speeches at the peace conference, he inserted either his own disagreement or referred to dissent among the attendees. The reporter went so far in his criticism as to claim that the presence of the delegates from Cuba “imposed upon the assembly the shadow of a totalitarian regime, a terrorist one at the margin of popular will, without elections, a ferocious dictatorship of communist stamp.”39 The author also devoted a significant amount of attention to opposition to the peace conference, dwelling at length on a few stink bombs that a group of students had thrown during the first day of meetings. Excélsior devoted more space in its pages to articles that criticized the Latin American Peace Conference or showed public opposition to the events than to coverage of the meeting itself. One article, titled, “They Ask A.L.M. to Repudiate the Communist Meeting,” contained the text of telegrams to President Adolfo López Mateos from Cuban exiles denouncing the conference.40 Another article, “Liberty for the Destroyers of Liberty,” criticized the Mexican government for “hosting at this moment a great meeting of communists to whom we concede complete liberty to destroy at their pleasure our rights and our liberties.”41 Novedades condemned the peace conference with almost total silence, publishing only three short articles on the events, while the editors of Universal took a different approach and published lengthy criticisms of the meeting. One editorial in Universal called the Latin American Peace Conference

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seditious and accused it of disturbing public order and the rhythm of work in the nation. It predicted that the “agitators” in attendance would use the occasion to “radiate separatist demagogy” and “encourage red infiltration of other countries of our continent.”42 Universal also reprinted critical editorials from newspapers in Peru and Argentina. One from Buenos Aires warned that the conference would stoke the coals of Soviet propaganda in Latin America and called the gathering “a decisive step by International Communism to destroy our America.”43 The editorial from Lima proclaimed that neither Castro nor Cárdenas fooled anyone any more.44 The three main newspaper chains also refused to print paid publicity for the peace conference, much to Lázaro Cárdenas’s disgust. The ex-president wrote in his personal journal in January 1961 that the organizers had sent the announcement of the conference to Excélsior and Novedades. According to Cárdenas, the secretary to the editor of Novedades promised to print the information, but the next day informed the organizers that the editing chief had ordered the suspension of the advertisement. “So this is how the owners of newspapers such as Novedades and Excélsior honor freedom of the press,” Cárdenas remarked.45 None of the three biggest newspaper chains ever published any of the documents produced by the conference. It is impossible to know definitively the reasons for the negative reaction in the major Mexican newspapers to the Latin American Peace Conference. In light of President López Mateos’s promise to the CIA chief, it is possible that the Mexican president instructed the press to adopt a policy of silence and condemnation. Journalists from the leftist magazine Política promulgated the theory of a government-imposed blanket of silence; they reported learning that the major press outlets had received orders from the private secretary to the Mexican president to publish nothing about the conference, neither in favor nor against it.46 Cárdenas and the other organizers did not blame the Mexican government, however. In a meeting with the international press, Cárdenas stated that the pressures of “imperialism” were impeding the coverage of the conference by the major newspapers. A journalist who attended the gathering reportedly said that the U.S. State Department spent more money silencing the press than the organizers had spent putting on the events.47 Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes blamed the press themselves, accusing them of “criminally abstaining from informing the public.”48 It is likely that the conservative interests of the wealthy owners of the major newspapers coincided with those of the Mexican and U.S. governments, and that the press was all too eager to restrict coverage of the conference.49

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At the same time that Mexican leaders were limiting the public’s knowledge about the Latin American Peace Conference, they were busily collecting vast amounts of information for their own benefit. Agents from the elite intelligence organization known as the Department of Federal Security, or DFS, and their fellow investigators from the Department of Political and Social Investigations, or IPS, compiled hundreds of pages of reports on the conference for their supervisor, the minister of the interior.50 The reports detailed the preparations, participants, finances, logistics, speeches, press coverage, proceedings, and aftermath. The security officials collected national and international press clippings regarding the conference, as well as publications by its organizers and participants. They paid particular attention to the activities of the twenty-eight Cuban delegates and to Lázaro Cárdenas. A fifteen-page memorandum composed by IPS agents provides a vivid portrait of the fear and hostility that the peace conference inspired among Mexican government officials and security forces. The report stated that all of the foreign delegates were of the extreme left and fervent followers of the Soviet Union, “red China,” and Fidel Castro. The agents claimed that the Cuban government had provided “extremely large” quantities of money to finance the conference. Castro’s contributions reportedly included a 150,000peso payment from the Cuban ambassador in Mexico to conference organizers and unspecified “large sums” paid directly to Cárdenas by a special emissary from Havana.51 These claims directly contradicted Cárdenas’s statements to the press that numerous small donations from enthusiastic Mexican citizens covered the costs of the assembly. IPS agents warned that the Cuban participants were taking advantage of the conference to encourage subversion and revolution throughout Latin America. The report claimed: All the Cuban delegates—28 of whom arrived from Havana—in interviews sustained with foreign and Mexican delegates, exhorted them to work, each in his own country, to overthrow bourgeois governments and substitute them with Fidel-style regimes. They all promised the moral and material aid of Cuba.52 The intelligence agents also claimed that Cárdenas and all conference delegation presidents had secretly agreed to initiate a permanent, continent-wide campaign of sabotage against U.S. businesses, properties, and general interests.53 According to the intelligence report, the conference leaders did not in reality seek peaceful, nonviolent ways to promote national sovereignty and

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economic emancipation. The agents portrayed the conference as a meeting of communists and other extreme leftists, coming together to plot revolution, subversion, and destruction. However, what worried intelligence agents even more than Cuban machinations was the growing power of Lázaro Cárdenas. They devoted at least half of their report to the ex-president and his role in the proceedings, describing him as the undisputed central figure of the conference. According to the intelligence agents: The congress, in spite of the silence of the press and other media, was a huge success. The figure of Cárdenas has now reached gigantic proportions. The president of the Argentine delegation, Engineer Casella, recognized that General Cárdenas is currently the authentic and only chief of the progressive (communist) elements in Latin America.54 IPS officials spread the story that Cárdenas wanted to start a new political party in Mexico to rival the PRI. They said that he had denied that possibility in statements made during the conference, but that a journalist close to him remarked that only six months earlier Cárdenas actually had been exhorting his associates to create a new party. According to the intelligence agents, Cárdenas was extremely powerful, popular, and dedicated to the “Fidelization of [Latin] America.” They spared no ink in their efforts to raise the alarm about the danger that the ex-president could pose to the Mexican government if he so wished. As with the Mexican press, it is impossible to know definitively the reasons and motivations behind the security forces’ reaction to the conference— but it is possible to make some observations and posit a few hypotheses. Intelligence agents were trained to inform the government about threats to national security and likely received instructions from their supervisor, the minister of the interior, regarding which groups and people required special attention. Logically, government officials would have seen foreign revolutionaries and powerful, disaffected politicians as significant threats to their leadership and thus probably instructed their agents to watch the Cubans and Lázaro Cárdenas. The attention devoted to these two elements in the security reports supports the hypothesis that the minister of the interior specifically requested information about them. As Mexican political scientist Sergio Aguayo Quezada has argued, intelligence agents protected their jobs

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by telling their employers what they wanted to hear and at times made their work seem more necessary by exaggerating various threats.55 By portraying the Latin American Peace Conference as a communist conspiracy and by emphasizing Cárdenas’s role and his personal power, the security agents played to and probably increased their superiors’ fear of leftist activities. Intelligence agents were not the only ones worried about Cárdenas and the communist threat. The Mexican National Anti-Communist Party held its first convention in Mexico City on the same four days as the peace conference. In fact, its leaders even changed the dates of their gathering so as to coincide.56 The president of the Anti-Communist Party claimed in his memoirs that the idea for the rival conference came directly from President López Mateos.57 An article in the New York Times said that the organizers expected a thousand people to attend.58 According to a reporter from Excélsior, hundreds of people from across Mexico, mostly of humble origins, gathered for the anticommunist meeting.59 Writers from the leftist magazine Política retorted that most of the attendees “of the humble class” were only there because they were paid to attend.60 The speakers at the conservative convention launched vitriolic attacks against the Latin American Peace Conference. They criticized Cárdenas and other “bad Mexicans who allow communism to enter our country and corrode our customs and traditions.”61 Anticommunist groups published advertisements in La Prensa and Atisbos mocking the peace conference and demanding national sovereignty for the nations within the Soviet orbit.62 The ads denounced the “peace” that reigned in Hungary and Tibet (areas occupied by the armed forces of the USSR and the People’s Republic of China), along with the “peace” of Soviet concentration camps, Chinese communes, and Cuban “paredones.”63 Church leaders also joined in the efforts to malign the peace conference. This came as little surprise, since the Catholic Church in Mexico and the rest of Latin America had been a long-time ally of conservative groups and the upper classes. According to an article in Política, on the first day of the conference, clergy in Mexico City churches distributed religious images on cards with a message on the back. The cards described the Latin American Peace Conference as “a communist farce that seeks to destroy Mexican sovereignty” and exhorted Mexicans to open their eyes to the betrayal and deceit. The message concluded with a prayer. “Sacred Virgin of Guadalupe, Queen of Peace, Empress of America: Defend us from the enemy!”64

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The Latin American Conference for National Sovereignty, Economic Emancipation, and Peace had significant repercussions in Mexico. It accelerated General Lázaro Cárdenas’s return to the political scene, bringing the former president once more into the national and international limelight. A week after the closing ceremonies, Cárdenas made a speech to his fellow conference organizers, encouraging them to create a permanent, national organization in Mexico.65 He presided over a National Peace Assembly the following August, during which the attendees created a leftist coalition called the National Liberation Movement to implement the resolutions of the international peace conference.66 This coalition grew in size and power over the next few years, claiming over 300,000 members at its height in the mid1960s.67 Cárdenas and the National Liberation Movement used their popularity to promote a number of causes, including defense of the Cuban Revolution. Thanks in part to their efforts, the Mexican government never broke diplomatic ties with Cuba.68 The Latin American Peace Conference encouraged leftist activism throughout the Americas. Prompted by the widespread popularity of the Cuban Revolution, the organizers of the conference tried to seize the opportunity to both expand the revolution and defend it. The participants analyzed Castro’s actions for lessons on the pursuit of national sovereignty and economic emancipation. They praised his agrarian reforms, his nationalizations, and his defiant attitude toward the United States. At this point, Castro had not yet openly described his government as socialist or himself as a Marxist, so even the more moderate participants in the conference could embrace his example. Was it a communist conference? The Soviets had played a pivotal role in creating the World Peace Movement, which had provided the platform and possibly some of the funding for the Latin American Peace Conference. However, cooperation with communists does not necessarily entail participation in a sinister scheme to foment worldwide revolution and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. Cárdenas himself was not a communist, despite many claims and accusations to that effect, nor were the majority of the organizers and attendees. The conference’s goals—national sovereignty, economic emancipation, defense of Cuba, and peace—were not communist. They arose from the specific historical experience of the Latin American people. Because the United States was the target of Latin American anger, the Soviets were eager to support the conference. In this case, the communists supported Latin American goals, not vice versa.

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The issue of peace was also complicated. Cárdenas and the other organizers showed a great deal of concern for peace-related issues such as nuclear nonproliferation and the annulment of military treaties. At the same time, however, they vowed to defend the Cuban Revolution, and some of the ways they publicly and perhaps privately proposed to do so were not entirely peaceful. The resolution to fight against Cuban counterrevolutionary elements contained violent undertones, as did the promise to defend Cuba against all aggression. In fact, Cárdenas held true to his promise to defend Cuba and tried to fly to Castro’s aid during the Bay of Pigs invasion, but members of the Mexican armed forces acting on the orders of President López Mateos prevented his departure. If the reports by Mexican intelligence services were accurate, Cuban leaders encouraged the other delegates at the peace conference to overthrow their own governments and sabotage properties and businesses, and some of the conference participants agreed to do so. The problem with the issue of peace was that, as the conference leaders observed, Latin America had become compromised in the Cold War. Neither side in the war—neither the United States nor the Soviet Union and Cuba— limited their actions to those of a peaceful nature. The conference demonstrated that while nonviolent “weapons” such as political organization and public denunciations could be effective in some ways, they also had severe limitations. The organizers of the gathering met with resistance from Mexican and U.S. governments and journalists, as well as political, religious, and intelligence organizations. These groups used the weapons of silence, propaganda, and surveillance, and, a little over a month after the conference, U.S.-trained forces attacked Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. The U.S. invasion sent a clear message that peaceful defense of the Cuban Revolution was not enough: violence would have to be met with violence. It is ironic that Lázaro Cárdenas’s peace conference helped in part to escalate the tensions and the violence of the Cold War in Latin America. The conference’s bold demonstration of both nationalism and solidarity, and the attendees’ vows to defend the Cuban Revolution, demanded a response. The Mexican government, the host but not the target, was able to answer with a combination of repression and concession. The United States, however, as the object of the vast majority of the criticism and condemnation, had to respond more forcefully. The conference called attention to the desires of many Latin Americans to emulate the Cuban Revolution and impelled the U.S. and Mexican governments to recognize the popularity—and danger— of Castro’s example.

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Renata Keller notes

1. 2.

3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

1 0. 11. 12. 13.

I am indebted to Jonathan Brown, Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Mark Lawrence, Julio Moreno, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on this piece. “Nuestra América se Reúne,” Política, March 15, 1961, 9–10. On the Mexican government’s conservative turn after Cárdenas’s departure from office, see Stephen R. Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s: Modernity, Politics, and Corruption (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999); Soledad Loaeza, Clases medias y política en México: La querella escolar, 1959–1963 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1988); Luis Medina, Historia de la Revolución Mexicana 1940–1952: Del cardenismo al avilacamachismo, vol. 18 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1978); Olga Pellicer de Brody and Esteban L. Mancilla, Historia de la Revolución Mexicana 1952–1960: El entendimiento con los Estados Unidos y la gestación del desarrollo estabilizador, vol. 23 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1978). Friedrich E. Schuler, Mexico Between Hitler and Roosevelt: Mexican Foreign Relations in the Age of Lázaro Cárdenas, 1934–1940 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998). Friedrich Katz, “Mexico, Gilberto Bosques, and the Refugees,” The Americas 57, no. 1 (July 1, 2000): 1–12; Pablo Yankelevich, ed., México, país refugio: La experiencia de los exilios en el siglo XX (Mexico City: Plaza y Valdés, 2002). The Archivo General de la Nación (hereafter AGN) in Mexico City houses a collection of photographs of this event. Elena Poniatowska, Palabras cruzadas (Mexico City: Editorial Era, 1961), 31. Christopher M. White, Creating a Third World: Mexico, Cuba, and the United States during the Castro Era (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007); Enrique Condés Lara, Represión y rebelión en México (1959–1985) (Mexico City: Miguel Ángel Porrúa, 2007); Eric Zolov, “‘Cuba sí, Yanquis no!’: El saqueo del Instituto Cultural México-Norteamericano en Morelia, Michoacán, 1961,” in Espejos de la guerra fría: México, América Central y el Caribe, ed. Daniela Spenser, 175–214 (Mexico City: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, 2004); Olga Pellicer de Brody, México y la revolución cubana (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1972). For an insightful discussion of the “new” and “old” Left in the Latin American context, see Eric Zolov, “Expanding Our Conceptual Horizons: The Shift From an Old to a New Left in Latin America,” A contra corriente 5, no. 2 (Winter 2008): 47–73. On the founding and objectives of the World Peace Council, see The World Peace Council: What It Is and What It Does (Helsinki: Information Centre of the World Peace Council, 1978). See also Frederick C. Barghoorn and Paul W. Friedrich, “Cultural Relations and Soviet Foreign Policy,” World Politics 8, no. 3 (April 1956), 323–44; Bernard S. Morris, “Communist International Front Organizations: Their Nature and Function,” World Politics 9, no. 1 (October 1956), 76–87; U.S. Department of State pamphlet, “Soviet Active Measures: The World Peace Council” (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of State, 1985). The World Peace Council: What It Is and What It Does. Ibid., 19, 23. U.S. Department of State, “Soviet Active Measures.” Cárdenas’s copresidents were Alberto T. Casella of Argentina and Domingos Vellasco of Brazil. On the Mexican Peace Movement prior to 1961, see “Soberanía Nacional y Paz,” Política, March 1, 1961, 5–6.

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1 4. “Convocatorio de la Conferencia Pro-Paz,” La Prensa, January 28, 1961, 22–23. 15. On Guatemala, see Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Stephen C. Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, 1999); Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). 16. Castro did not officially describe his government as socialist until his speech at the May Day celebration on May 1, 1961. 17. Marifeli Pérez-Stable, The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course, and Legacy, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). On increasing hostilities between the United States and Cuba, see also Lars Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 18. On the United States’ counterrevolutionary campaign, see chapter 4 in this volume. 19. “Al pueblo de México,” La Prensa, March 3, 1961, 16. 20. “Soberanía Nacional y Paz,” 9–10. 21. Most of the delegates were not officially affiliated with their national governments. La Prensa estimated the attendance inside the building at 2,500, Política estimated 3,000. Mexican intelligence agents from the Department of Political and Social Investigations (hereafter IPS) stated that attendance never dropped below 1,500, while agents from the Department of Federal Security (hereafter DFS) stated that 4,000 people fit inside the building for the opening ceremonies. Manuel Arvizu, “Dió comienzo la junta de carácter pacifista,” La Prensa, March 6, 1961, 3 and 12; “Nuestra América se Reúne”; “Conferencia Pro-Paz documents,” March 1961, IPS Caja 1475-B, Exp 40-43, AGN; Manuel Rangel Escamilla, “Conferencia Pro-Paz,” May 5, 1961, DFS, Exp. 11-6-61, Leg. 2, Hoja 311, AGN. 22. “Documentos de la Conferencia Latinoamericana por la Soberanía Nacional, la Emancipación Económica y la Paz,” Política, April 1, 1961, xix. 23. Por siempre Vilma (Havana: Editorial de la Mujer, 2008). 24. “Documentos de la Conferencia Latinoamericana por la Soberanía Nacional, la Emancipación Económica y la Paz,” xxvii–xxix. 25. Ibid., xxx–xxxiii. 26. “Declaración de la Conferencia pro Soberanía,” Excélsior, March 9, 1961, 12. “North America” is and was common shorthand for the United States. References to “North America” very rarely include Mexico and Canada. “Yankee” is another popular substitute. 27. “Documentos de la Conferencia Latinoamericana por la Soberanía Nacional, la Emancipación Económica y la Paz,” xvii. 28. Ibid., xxi–xxxiii. 29. “Declaración de la Conferencia pro Soberanía,” i–ii. 30. Dr. Thorning’s publications include Joseph F. Thorning, Communism in U.S.A. (New York: America Press, 1936); and Joseph F. Thorning, Miranda: World Citizen (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1952). 31. U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Cuban Aftermath—Red Seeds Blow South: Implications for the United States of the Latin American Conference for National Sovereignty and Economic Emancipation and Peace (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1961), 3.

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32. CIA, “Pro-Communist ‘Peace’ Conference to Meet in Mexico,” February 23, 1961, CIA CREST Database, U.S. National Archives, College Park, MD. 33. “Latin Leftist Parley Calls U.S. Villain,” Washington Post, March 6, 1961, 9; Paul P. Kennedy, “Leftists Stress Latin Solidarity: Meeting in Mexico Steps up Attacks on U.S.— Role of Cardenas in Doubt,” New York Times, March 7, 1961, 11. 34. “Leftist Latin ‘Peace Conference’ Praises Castro and Denounces U.S.,” Los Angeles Times, March 6, 1961, 4. 35. “Latin Red Parley Backs Castro’s Revolution,” Los Angeles Times, March 9, 1961, 8. 36. “Latin Leftists Urge Fight Against U.S.,” Washington Post, March 7, 1961, 4. 37. “Meeting Between López Mateos and Dulles,” January 14, 1961, RG 263 CIA Miscellaneous Files JFK-M-7 (F1) to JFK-M-7 (F3), box 6, JFK-MISC 104-10310-10001, U.S. National Archives, College Park, MD. According to the memorandum of the meeting, Dulles did not take the opportunity to inform López Mateos about the upcoming U.S. invasion of Cuba. 38. “El PRI anhela tener un rival poderoso, no importa si es de izquierda o derecha,” Excélsior, March 10, 1961, 1 and 12. 39. “Abrióse la junta izquierdista que convocó Cárdenas: Hubo que arrojar agua de colonia para disipar el olor de unas bombas,” Excélsior, March 6, 1961, 4–5. 40. “Piden a ALM que repudie la junta izquierdista: Telegramas de varios grupos de cubanos en el exilio,” Excélsior, March 7, 1961, 3. 41. Emilio Escobar, “Libertad a los destructores de la libertad,” Excélsior, March 7, 1961, 5 and 12. 42. “En paz si quiere paz,” El Universal, March 3, 1961, Editorial sec., 3. 43. Alberto Daniel Faleroni, “Se realizará en México una conferencia que agitará los lemas políticos de Moscú,” El Universal, March 1, 1961, Editorial sec., 3 and 11. 44. “Ni Castro ni Cárdenas engañan yá a nadie,” El Universal, March 8, 1961, 4. 45. Lázaro Cárdenas, Obras: Apuntes 1957/1966, vol. III (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1986), 186. 46. “Soberanía Nacional y Paz,” 11–15. 47. “Conferencia Pro-Paz documents,” March 1961, IPS Caja 1475-B, Exp 40-43. 48. Carlos Fuentes, “La Prensa, El PRI y la Conferencia Latinoamericana,” Política, March 15, 1961, 12–13. 49. An agreement based on shared interests rather than force is especially likely since the Mexican government’s control over the press, while significant, was not complete. Other newspapers and magazines, such as Política, La Prensa, El Popular, El Diario de México, El Diario de la Tarde, ¡Siempre!, and El Fígaro, provided neutral or positive coverage of the conference. However, with the exception of La Prensa, these newspapers and magazines had a much smaller readership and circulation than Excélsior, El Universal, and Novedades. On the Mexican press, see Jacinto Rodríguez Munguía, La otra guerra secreta: Los archivos prohibidos de la prensa y el poder (Mexico City: Random House Mondadori, 2007); Carlos Monsiváis and Julio Scherer, Tiempo de saber: Prensa y poder en México (Mexico City: Nuevo Siglo Aguilar, 2003); Chappell H. Lawson, Building the Fourth Estate: Democratization and the Rise of a Free Press in Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 50. On Mexico’s intelligence services, see Aaron Navarro, Political Intelligence and the Creation of Modern Mexico, 1938–1954 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010); and Sergio Aguayo, La Charola: Una historia de los servicios de intelligencia en México (México, D.F.: Grijalbo, 2001).

Don Lázaro Rises Again 5 1. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 5 7. 58. 59. 6 0. 61. 62. 63.

6 4. 65. 66. 67. 68.

149

“Conferencia Pro-Paz documents,” March 1961, IPS Caja 1475-B, Exp 40-43. Ibid. Emphasis in original. Ibid. Ibid. Emphasis in original. Aguayo, La Charola, 72. Manuel Rangel Escamilla, “Conferencia Pro-Paz,” May 5, 1961, DFS, Exp. 11–6–61, Leg. 2, Hoja 311, AGN. Mario Guerra Leal, La grilla (Mexico City: Editorial Diana, 1978), 156. Paul P. Kennedy, “Rival Talks Open in Mexico Today: Full Police Force Is Alerted for Duty as Leftists and Anti-Reds Enter Capital,” New York Times, March 5, 1961, 30. “Comenzó ayer la junta del Partido Anticomunista: Atacaron a Cárdenas e hicieron un desfile sobre las banquetas,” Excélsior, March 6, 1961, 4–5. “Nuestra América se Reúne,” 15. “Comenzó ayer la junta del Partido Anticomunista: Atacaron a Cárdenas e hicieron un desfile sobre las banquetas,” 4–5. “Conferencia Latinoamericana por la Soberania Nacional, por la Emancipacion Económica y por la Paz,” La Prensa, March 5, 1961, 8. In the Cuban context, paredón (literally, “large wall”) was shorthand for the wall against which victims of firing squads stood to be executed. Castro’s government received a great deal of international criticism for sending prisoners to the paredón. “Nuestra América se Reúne,” 15. Manuel Rangel Escamilla, “Conferencia Pro-Paz,” March 14, 1961, DFS, Exp 11–6–61, Leg. 3, Hoja 156, AGN. Manuel Rangel Escamilla, “Asamblea Nacional por la Paz,” August 4, 1961, DFS, Exp 11–6–61, Leg. 4, Hoja 134, AGN. Gastón Martínez Rivera, La lucha por la democracia en México (Mexico City: Grupo Editorial Cenzontle, 2009), 57. On the connection between domestic activism and Mexico’s foreign relations with Cuba, see Renata Keller, “A Foreign Policy for Domestic Consumption: Mexico’s Lukewarm Defense of Castro, 1959–1969,” The Latin American Research Review 47, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 100–119.

· Ch a p t er Si x ·

From Ploughshares to Politics Transformations in Rural Brazil during the Cold War and Its Aftermath

5 Set h Ga r fi e l d

If Brazil’s military government trumpeted national security

and economic development as antidotes to fight communism, the countryside was one of its battlegrounds. The coup of 1964, fuelled by elite fears of peasant mobilization under the leftist presidency of João Goulart, unleashed brutal repression against rural labor activists and advocates of agrarian reform. Through the promotion of agribusiness, unionization, and frontier colonization, Brazilian military and civilian authorities further sought to stanch rural unrest and underdevelopment. Over the course of more than two decades, the Brazilian military achieved many of its objectives in the countryside. Capital investment skyrocketed. Rural movements emerged from military rule with an extensive organizational base and strong linkages to the state.1 Yet the Brazilian military government’s agrarian policies also left a bitter legacy of social exclusion and violence. With the transition to democracy in 1985, pent-up popular demands for land reform and expanded rights for rural workers erupted amid the growth of new social movements. Over the following decade, landowners and police murdered more than one thousand rural workers in Brazil, far 150

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surpassing the killings in the countryside perpetrated by security forces under the military government. This chapter explores the origins and impacts of agrarian policies in Brazil during the Cold War. The Brazilian countryside, historically marked by deep-seated socioeconomic inequalities, oligarchic politics, and the absence of popular incorporation into state structures, had long tested the modernizing impulses of policymakers in the central government. During the postwar era, however, as urbanization, industrial growth, rural mobilization, and the expansion of the electorate transformed Brazilian society, the “agrarian question” gained greater political visibility and urgency. The military regime’s rural project, rather than an offshoot of the struggle between Moscow and Washington or its proxies for supremacy in Latin America’s largest nation, illuminates how Brazilian government policies were entangled in longstanding local conflicts over economic and political power.2 Brazilian actors tailored Cold War mantras—whether revolutionary or counterrevolutionary doctrines, national security ideologies, or developmentalism—to suit domestic political agendas. Indeed, this chapter’s analytical time frame, transcending the transition to democratic rule in Brazil and the demise of the Eastern Bloc, suggests the importance of reconsidering standard periodizations of Cold War histories in assessing legacies of violence, political conflict, and social exclusion in Latin America. This study also examines how subaltern groups in Latin America shaped and were affected by Cold War ideologies of national security and developmentalism. Brazil’s rural poor responded to the transformations around them in myriad ways. Droves voted with their feet: between 1960 and 1980, an estimated 29.4 million people migrated from the countryside to the cities (a population larger than most Latin American countries). A predominantly rural nation in 1960, 70 percent of Brazil’s population lived in urban areas twenty years later.3 Many rural workers, however, stayed put, seizing upon political openings afforded by military-era policies and legislation. Whereas in 1970 an estimated 1.5 million rural workers belonged to 1,322 unions, by the end of military rule 9.5 million workers had organized into 2,732 trade unions.4 Still others held on to their plots, migrated to the frontier in search of land, or joined grass roots organizations demanding land redistribution and democratic governance. Cold War–era policies would leave an indelible mark on the Brazilian countryside.

152

Seth Garfield The Postwar “Agrarian Question” in Brazil, 1946–1964

During the early 1960s, Brazilian government planners feared that rural underdevelopment would hamper domestic growth, divert foreign exchange to food imports, and provoke urban food shortages and social unrest.5 Constituting more than half the Brazilian population in 1963, the rural sector was marked by a 90 percent illiteracy rate (compared to less than 40 percent in urban areas) and accounted for only 28 percent of national income.6 A cadastral survey of 1965 found that 1.5 percent of rural property owners controlled 50 percent of all farmland in Brazil,7 and although controlling 7.5 times more land than the family farms, latifundia did not have more land in crops.8 Of an employable rural population estimated at 25 million in 1963, almost 5 million workers were unemployed or underemployed.9 Moreover, domestic industry for agricultural inputs was meager, and imports of farm equipment were limited; even by 1960, there was still only one tractor for every twentytwo farms in the “advanced” southern states. Thus, economist Octávio Gouvêa de Bulhões opined that “by improving agriculture and making it more productive, industrialization will be made easier since in this way it will be possible to produce more economically and to obtain a larger quantity of raw materials to be processed by the national industries.”10 By the early 1960s, the United States had also come to promote land reform in Latin America as a prophylactic to political radicalism in the wake of the Cuban Revolution. The Charter Objectives of the Alliance for Progress, hammered out at the Punta del Este Conference of 1961, championed “programs of comprehensive agrarian reform” to achieve an “equitable system of land tenure,” and tied U.S. foreign aid to its implementation.11 In 1961, Brazilian President Jânio Quadros created the Special Commission for Agrarian Reform to study the problems of the rural sector.12 His successor, João Goulart, endorsed agrarian reform in the Three Year Plan of 1962. Brazil’s political leadership, however, faced considerable hurdles to solve centuries-old problems of rural productivity and inequality. Rising demands for land reform, enfranchisement of the peasantry, and modernization of rural production confronted the institutional bulwarks of oligarchic privilege. The constitution of 1946 granted the poorer, rural states proportionately higher representation in congress than the more industrial states of the center-south.13 The constitution further protected landowners by denying illiterates the vote and only allowing for land expropriation through just and previous payment in cash, which rendered large-scale

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redistribution prohibitive. Even efforts to extend labor legislation to the countryside were opposed by landowners, who continued to pay their workers below the minimum wage and to overcharge for housing.14 Indeed, the polarized environment of the Cold War led adversaries to cast rural transformation as a zero-sum game. Large landowners assailed legal amendments or political concessions to the peasantry as violations of the constitutional right to property and a Trojan horse of communist subversion; leftists vilified the latifundia as allies of U.S. imperialism who impeded economic development. In the meantime, rural conflict festered due to explosive population growth, the rise in land rents, frontier land grabbing, and the breakdown of patron-client bonds. To be sure, the rural poor in Brazil were not homogeneous, given the broad variety of labor and land tenure conditions in the countryside; the term “camponês,” adapted by the Brazilian Left from the Spanish American campesino, was a rhetorical gloss to forge political unity and class-based identity among a racially and occupationally varied population.15 During the populist period from 1946 to 1964, there was not one “peasant movement” but disparate clusters of rural mobilization that lacked broader national cohesion and articulation.16 Between 1949 and 1954, for example, there were fifty-five strikes by rural workers (primarily on coffee estates in São Paulo, but also at cacao and sugar plantations or mills in the northeast) over issues such as job stability, an eight-hour workday, overtime and severance pay, job stability, and social security.17 Most protests, however, were linked to the postwar rise in land rents that had provoked a rash of evictions and land grabbing.18 In northeastern Brazil, for example, landowners sought to increase sugar output or to convert land into cattle pasture as the expansion of the domestic market brought higher demand and prices for foodstuffs. By the 1950s, 76 percent of all properties in Pernambuco’s sugar zone—11,262 landholdings—held only 3 percent of the total available land, while 1,500 landholders controlled properties of over one hundred hectares that accounted for over 90 percent of all land.19 Census figures for 1960 also revealed the overall decrease of sharecroppers and the rise of salaried employees during the previous decade.20 The expansion of transportation networks and the mass media, the competitiveness of democratic politics, and the rise of the Left in the postwar period facilitated new forms of peasant alliances, as urban-based groups of varied political persuasions competed for greater influence over the countryside.21 In 1954, peasants from the Galiléia sugar plantation in Pernambuco organized a

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mutual aid society and sought the assistance of Francisco Julião, a leftist lawyer from the capital of Recife; Julião became the honorary president of the Peasant Leagues, riding a wave of mounting urban opposition to the rural oligarchy.22 By 1963 there were approximately 30,000 to 50,000 league members in Pernambuco and 80,000 in the entire northeast.23 Although the leagues initially focused on curtailing evictions and unpaid labor obligations, their demands became radicalized in the context of social upheaval in Latin America. Following Julião’s visit to revolutionary Cuba in 1960, and a subsequent trip in which he was accompanied by one hundred league militants, the leadership pressed for radical agrarian reform without compensation “by law or by force.”24 In 1961, the leagues split between one faction advocating guerrilla struggle, led by Clodomir Moraes, and an unarmed sector led by Julião.25 The feared revolutionary potential of the Peasant Leagues became the subject of front-page newspaper articles in the United States, leading president-elect John F. Kennedy to affirm that “no other region deserves greater or more urgent attention than the vast Brazilian Northeast.”26 The Peasant Leagues’ efforts to empower the peasantry were challenged on various fronts. The Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), banned in 1947 with the onset of the Cold War, advanced a gradualist approach: while supporting land reform, the party advocated the organization of the rural masses through unions and national congresses and mobilization through legal channels and political institutions.27 By the mid-1950s, the PCB had repudiated previous endorsement of armed struggle, advocating collaboration with the national bourgeoisie in an anti-imperialist front.28 In 1954, the PCB founded the União dos Lavradores e Trabalhadores Agrícolas do Brasil (ULTAB), a national union of rural workers that campaigned for social welfare benefits, payment in wages (rather than in kind or services), unionization of rural workers, and land redistribution.29 In Pernambuco, the PCB established thirty-seven rural trade unions in the sugar zone between 1961 and 1964, and more than forty local strikes occurred in the state in 1963 alone.30 The Catholic Church’s Serviço de Assistência Rural also entered the fray (partly supported by funds from the USAID and the CIA), disavowing the communist premise of class conflict and the redistributionist goals of the Peasant Leagues. Targeting small producers, the Service emphasized workers’ rights, literacy training, community assistance, and social justice.31 Furthermore, at the federal level, Goulart signed into law the Rural Labor Statute in March 1963, legalizing rural unionization, a minimum wage, a weekly rest period, paid vacations, maternity leave, workers’ compensation,

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and job stability.32 The National Confederation of Agricultural Workers (CONTAG), formed in 1963 with the backing of the labor ministry, included 263 legally recognized rural syndicates, 480 in the process of gaining legal status, and 29 federations of rural syndicates from nineteen Brazilian states.33 Yet the relative weakness of rural unions—by 1964 only an estimated half million people belonged to them, while salaried workers constituted only one-third of all economically active individuals in rural areas—combined with the leagues’ more radical demands for land redistribution, ultimately radicalized Goulart’s position.34 After the Brazilian congress rejected a draft constitutional amendment on compensation for expropriated land, Goulart announced at a mass rally on March 13, 1964, a decree arrogating to the federal government all land within ten kilometers of highways and dams.35 Absent a constitutional amendment allowing for payment in longterm bonds, the measure amounted to outright confiscation. Goulart’s desperate political gamble, devoid of broad-based support in the countryside, hastened his downfall. Landed interests fumed, as did conservative sectors of industry, the church, the media, and the armed forces, that such rabblerousing, in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, heralded imminent social upheaval.36 The army removed Goulart from office less than three weeks later, establishing the first in a series of military regimes that would rule the nations of the Southern Cone during the Cold War. Land reform did not singularly provoke the military coup in Brazil, but the prospect of massive land redistribution and a radicalized peasantry threatened the status quo. And while mounting inflation and urban strikes under Goulart alienated the Brazilian elite and middle class, the specter of rural unrest in the aftermath of Fidel Castro’s insurgency in the Cuban Serra Maestra held particular (geo)political resonance in Cold War Latin America. For centuries, Brazil’s central government had struggled to pry the rural masses from an oligarchic grip that had precluded their full-fledged participation in the market economy and identification with the nation-state. The military government, touting the Cold War doctrine of internal security and development, would now try its hand.

Military Rule, the National Security State, and the Remaking of the Countryside During two decades in power, the Brazilian military had a decisive impact on rural politics and society. Through repression, the regime purged agrarian

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radicals and cowed dissenters. Through public policies favoring the extension of rural credit and subsidies, agrarian capitalism advanced at a precipitous, if uneven, pace and was marked by regional variation. Agroindustry swept across southern Brazil, the northeastern sugar industry, and much of the central cerrado. On the Amazon frontier, the military parceled public plots to small farmers and colonization companies, eschewing the redistribution of private land.37 And through the political incorporation of rural workers into state-dominated unions, the military extended social rights to the rural poor, suppressed radical alternatives, and consolidated state power in the countryside. An analysis of state-backed terror, agricultural modernization, rural unionism, and Amazonian settlement under military rule reveals the tactics of the national security state to remake rural Brazil during the Cold War. The military regime sought to silence dissent through the curtailment of democratic process and widespread repression. Institutional Act No. 1 of 1964 cancelled the mandates of numerous elected officials, stripped scores of citizens of political rights, and purged the state bureaucracy of “subversives.” Leftist politicians who had advanced the cause of rural workers were jailed or exiled, while military police inquiries interrogated public sector employees engaged in “subversive” activities in the countryside.38 The military also intervened in 90 percent of the rural unions organized between 1963 and 1964 and replaced the leadership.39 Of the military regime’s thirty-six sets of legal proceedings targeting labor union activities, eleven investigated rural episodes; this figure does not include the numerous cases of detention and torture of peasant leaders that never reached the military tribunals.40 Over the course of military rule, government authorities interrogated and prosecuted CONTAG’s leaders under the National Security Law, interfered with the union’s elections, and censored its newspaper.41 Those most brutalized by state-sponsored violence, however, were peasant and labor militants: Benedito Serra, president of the rural workers’ union in Castanhal, Pará, who was arrested at the time of the coup for supposed communist involvement and later pronounced dead in a military hospital; João Alfredo “Negro Fubá,” leader of the Peasant Leagues in Sapé, Paraíba, who disappeared after being interrogated by the military; Pedro Fazendeiro, vice president of the Sapé league, who also disappeared under similar circumstances less than two weeks later; Albertino José de Oliveira, expresident of a Pernambucan peasant league, whose decomposed body was found on the Vitória de Santo Antão estate; and six disappeared peasant leaders in the state of Rio Grande do Norte.42 Security forces tortured the PCB rural organizer

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José dos Prazeres so badly that he suffered a stroke, while his comrade, sixtythree-year-old Gregório Bezerra, was beaten with iron pipes and paraded through Recife streets half naked with a rope around his neck.43 Between 1964 and 1969, a total of forty-five peasants and rural workers died at the hands of the military or landowners.44 In quotidian practice, the military relied on the traditional forces of repression in the countryside—landowners and local law enforcement officials—to quash rural protest. In 1970, during the most repressive period of military rule, President Emílio Garrastazu Médici stated: “Our development policy will target substantial growth in agricultural production and the increase of exports, which will lead to the rapid expansion of the domestic market and will induce an expansion of the industrial sector.”45 Médici’s pronouncement underscores how state-sponsored violence served a broader strategy of promoting agricultural modernization without land redistribution. Indeed, under the leadership of Finance Minister Antônio Delfim Netto, the state heavily subsidized agricultural credit, which historically had been dominated by merchant capital. The Banco do Brasil mushroomed from 578 agencies in 1964 (primarily in the urban southeast) to 1,226 branches in 1978 (with 92 percent located in the nation’s interior), while agricultural credit increased fivefold in the 1970s, accounting for 33 percent of total credit in 1975.46 Under military rule, Brazil witnessed the growth and diversification of agro-exports, the expansion of domestic food and food-processing industries and commercialization networks (particularly supermarkets) demanding steady and high-quality supply of goods, and an increase in industrial production of agricultural machinery and inputs.47 From 1960 to 1980, for example, the area dedicated to soybeans increased from 0.2 to 9 million hectares. In the northeast, the area planted in sugarcane doubled from 1.5 million hectares in 1972 to 3.8 million in 1985 as the regional developmental body, Superintendência do Desenvolvimento do Nordeste (SUDENE), offered fiscal incentives to the livestock industry and export crops, while the alcohol program, PROÁLCOOL, subsidized sugar producers and distillers of ethanol in the wake of the oil crisis of the 1970s.48 Thus, although agriculture’s overall significance for Brazil’s economy declined under military rule, the sector still accounted for 40 percent of exports and 25 percent of employment. Agriculture would also prove to be more economically dynamic than industry over subsequent decades, growing at an average annual rate of 3.4 percent in the 1980s in comparison to industrial growth of 1.7 percent, and an average annual rate of 2.2 percent between 1990 and 1994 that likewise surpassed

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industry.49 Nor was the capitalization of agriculture restricted to large estates. A privileged set of small and middle-sized landowners succeeded in transforming their farms into capitalized enterprises (even as many of their neighbors capitulated to market pressures); properties of less than one hundred hectares in Brazil now produce the majority of the nation’s staple crops of rice, corn, beans, and manioc.50 Agricultural modernization, nevertheless, did not extinguish preexisting forms of production entirely. Rather, the process engendered highly capitalized farms alongside unproductive estates and an impoverished peasantry. In regions with low-level or capital-intensive industrialization, millions of small landowners, sharecroppers, and tenants remained in farming because of the lack of alternatives in the urban sector; in frontier regions, small producers continued to secure access to land and to supply foodstuffs.51 Most notably, land concentration worsened under military rule. Although the military government’s Land Statute of 1964 allowed for land expropriation through indemnification in public bonds rather than cash, between 1965 and 1981 the federal government issued only 124 expropriation decrees, or an average of less than eight annually during a period when at least seventy land conflicts erupted per year. Moreover, although the Land Statute established a land tax and recognized long-term squatters’ land rights, the complex formula for tax assessment, together with the precariousness of the state administrative apparatus, rendered the law ineffective for breaking up unproductive holdings.52 Thus, between 1975 and 1985, the total area controlled by farms with less than ten hectares (30 percent of all properties) declined from 1.2 to 1.0 percent, while the area occupied by estates with more than one thousand hectares (2 percent of all properties), increased from 48 to 57 percent.53 Brazil’s Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA) classified 70 percent of farmland as latifundia, while 11 million cultivators lacked adequate land to support their families.54 According to another estimate, between 1970 and 1980 the total income of the poorest 50 percent of the rural population dropped from 22 percent to 15 percent, while that of the wealthiest 5 percent increased from 24 percent to 45 percent.55 By 1980, roughly half of the rural population made less than one minimum salary ($29 per month in 1980), while 21.8 percent earned one to two minimum salaries.56 In lieu of large-scale redistribution of private land, the military promoted union organization, extension of social welfare legislation, and frontier colonization. Following the coup, the Castelo Branco regime (1964–67)

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worked with the U.S. government and the Catholic Church to build rural unionism in a conservative guise. Tellingly, the military did not roll back Goulart’s Rural Labor Statute but rather sought to capitalize on its corporatist underpinnings to mold unions into conduits of state-sponsored social services. In turn, the leadership of CONTAG that helped build the rural union movement—emerging from the ranks of the progressive (but nonrevolutionary) Catholic unions and the Communist Party that had survived the military purges—sought mediation through the labor courts (which allowed them to bypass civil judges) and extension of social welfare policies. Dominated by leaders from the sugarcane zone of Pernambuco, CONTAG’s directorate sought to socialize new leaders into a class-based political identity as “rural workers”: citizens entitled to distinct social rights codified in legislation based upon their labor.57 To be sure, the military government’s unprecedented extension of social security, medical and dental care, and disability pensions to rural workers under the Programa de Assistência Técnica e Extensão Rural (PRORURAL), created in 1971, offered significant incentives for unions to conform to the new rules. (The program was not funded by rural workers directly but rather by a tax on the commercialization of agricultural products and a payroll tax on urban companies.) Since the federal government was barred from delivering services directly to workers—instead subcontracting delivery of benefits to rural worker unions, employer unions, municipal government, or charitable organizations—unions risked forfeiting control over services to local oligarchies if they failed to participate. Union membership ballooned from approximately one million in 1971 to over six million in 1978, with leaders emerging from the ranks of the peasantry and rural working class rather than from the urban middle class. Rural unionization, which had prompted landlord support for military intervention in 1964, had become institutionalized within state structures that reserved a space for organized labor.58 Rural labor legislation, however, also led landowners to rely more extensively on casual or “undocumented” labor to circumvent minimum wage, payment for overtime and holidays, and workers’ compensation. The agrarian census of 1985, for example, classified 56 percent of Brazil’s five million wageearning rural workers as “temporary” ( and often residing in towns), while the 44 percent of wage earners classified as permanent tended to be more skilled, such as tractor and machinery operators, managers, and cowhands.59 In São Paulo, 90 percent of the casual workers earned less than 60 percent of the minimum monthly wage.60 As in urban Brazil, a two-tiered system had come

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to divide the institutional, unionized labor force from the informal, unregulated sector and to depress workers’ wages. Moreover, although CONTAG endorsed agrarian reform, union leaders found it more expedient to deliver health services and other benefits to their members than to engage in land struggles whose outcomes were riskier and often more violent.61 Such fragmentation in the rural movement was perhaps inevitable given the diversity of the labor force. Squatters, geographically dispersed and reliant on pooled family labor, have typically engaged in determinate land struggles; salaried employees, particularly those in large industries, have more easily banded together through formal institutions over questions of wage and work conditions; and small holders have been most concerned with prices for crops and agricultural inputs.62 Yet the decoupling of the land and labor issues promoted by the military and embraced by rural unions in practice diluted any possibility of broad-based support for land reform—a triumph of the rural modernization project endorsed by the generals and their civilian successors.63 Frontier colonization served as yet another initiative of the military government to mediate social conflict and consolidate state power in the countryside. The 1970 Plan of National Integration projected the settlement of one million families alongside the newly inaugurated Transamazon Highway on parcels of 250 acres per family. Although the number of families settled through state-sponsored colonization has been estimated between 70,000 and 159,000, “spontaneous” immigration to the Amazon and central west surged as settlers arrived from both northeastern and southern Brazil in search of inexpensive land. Between 1960 and 1980, the frontier population grew by almost 10 million people.64 As Anna Ozorio de Almeida concludes, a number of colonists experienced social mobility on the Amazon frontier, often relocating repeatedly in response to rising land prices and speculation in real estate. Overall, however, the military’s homesteading policy fell short of stated goals and proved costly in financial, social, and environmental terms. The military government expended an estimated $7.5 billion in public funds on colonization—more than half of which went to road building and only 6 percent to settlement projects, with even less spent on titling.65 Colonists confronted poor soils, high market costs, epidemic disease, and inadequate technical support and social services. By 1985, INCRA’s inefficiency in issuing land titles and the inaccuracy of rural cadastres had contributed to a rise in the total number of squatter-occupied

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lands to 34 percent of Amazonian territory and a concomitant increase in violent conflict.66 Pressured by corporate interests, the military government ultimately abandoned its populist policy promoting land to the tiller on the frontier. Since 1966 the Superintendência de Desenvolvimento da Amazônia (SUDAM), the government’s regional development agency, had allowed registered Brazilian corporations to deduct up to 50 percent of their income tax liability against approved projects in Amazonia, and to receive fifteen-year exemptions from payment of federal taxes. Subsidized livestock ranches in the Amazon, occupying approximately 8.4 million hectares, netted government incentives totaling $700 million, although by 1985 only 16 percent of these ventures had achieved their production goals.67 Likewise, between 1968 and 1984, INCRA approved seventy-one private colonization projects in the Amazon, although firms were legally obligated to settle colonists on only 20 percent of their property.68 In 1976, two federal decrees further rewarded large landowners by legalizing all extant land titles in the Amazon, even those obtained fraudulently, while restricting squatters’ claims with a tenyear residency requirement.69 By 1985, nearly two-thirds of farmers in Amazonia possessed less than one hundred hectares and occupied only 13 percent of total farmland, while the 6 percent of landowners with more than one thousand hectares held 80 percent of the farmland. In the states of Rondônia and Acre, 60 and 90 percent of farmland respectively was concentrated in estates of more than one thousand hectares.70 The military regime had successfully promoted the extension of a land market to Amazonia and the economic articulation of the frontier with southern industrial and financial markets. But public policies favoring large estates in Amazonia had explosive consequences: vast latifundia, extensive deforestation by large and small landholders, and a disgruntled peasantry bereft of land, legal title, or social services. The increase in land concentration and expulsions transformed the Amazon into one of the most violent regions in Brazil: of the 1,681 victims of rural violence in Brazil between 1964 and 1981, one-third were killed in the Amazonian state of Pará alone. The Amazon frontier, an area upheld by many military-era policymakers as a safety valve and a surrogate for private land redistribution in the nation’s more densely settled regions, had become a social tinderbox.71 With traditional political parties, leftist organizations, and civic groups weakened by state repression, the Catholic Church emerged under Brazilian

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military rule as a principal institution confronting political violence and social exclusion. Internationally, the progressive turn of the Vatican II Council (1962–65), reaffirmed several years later at the Second Conference of Latin American Bishops, pledged a “preferential option for the poor.” In 1975, church officials founded the Comissão Pastoral da Terra (CPT) to provide social and legal assistance to peasants and rural workers. Denouncing the impact of “developmentalism” on the rural poor, the Church came to back popular struggles for land redistribution, social justice, and democratic participation. Under the military regime, some 80,000 ecclesiastic grass roots communities were formed throughout Brazil, where church and lay leaders upheld popular Christianity as a potential wellspring of social transformation.72 Pastoral agents defined land occupations as legitimate, if technically illegal, citing the biblical basis of collective or community property rights and lambasting speculation and exploitation as anti-Christian.73 As Archbishop of Paraíba José Maria Pires stated in a pastoral letter of 1978: “We sustain that purchase with money cannot be the only nor the principal source of property rights. Privation and work are more noble and legitimate titles. Those who need land have more right to it than those who do not.”74 The National Council of Brazilian Bishops officially endorsed land reform in 1980 with the issuance of The Church and Land Problems.75 In organizing opposition movements and molding a radical religious-political identity aimed at transforming Brazilian society, the progressive church helped to nurture social movements such as the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Workers Movement, or MST), which offered a radical critique of capitalism and exclusionary politics.76 During the last years of the dictatorship, military officials aimed to defuse rural violence and church-based peasant mobilization through the regularization of land titles and the selective distribution of land.77 Under the presidency of General João Figueiredo, special federal land commissions were formed to coordinate and expedite the issuance of land titles.78 These included the Extraordinary Ministry for Land Affairs (1983–85), directed by General Danilo Venturini, general-secretary of the National Security Council, as well as federal agencies confined to the Amaon region, such as the Executivo Group for Araguaia-Tocantins (GETAT, 1980–87), the Executive Group for Lower Amazonia (GEBAM, 1980–86), and the Special Coordination for Acre (1980–85).79 By the end of 1984, the federal government had demarcated 139.9 million hectares in an effort to resolve conflicts over ownership and occupancy, yet the fundamental inequalities in the land tenure structure,

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conjoined with ongoing disputes over occupancy rights, would engender mounting conflict over the following decade.80 Military rule bequeathed multiple legacies in the countryside: a modernized agricultural sector vying with traditional systems of production, a restructured system of rural labor relations, and a radicalized segment of the peasantry. Although many smallholders and rural workers were victims of the Brazilian military regime’s “economic miracle” and counterinsurgency measures, the rural poor also confronted, and even drove, such transformations through mass migration, unionization, and grass roots organization. Strike activity and protests remained high in the waning years of military rule and its aftermath, as rural workers pressured the state for parity in social welfare benefits with urban workers.81 There certainly was much to protest: 56 percent of the rural population lived below the poverty level (compared to 39 percent in the cities), where the average level of schooling was 2.6 years (compared to the urban average of 5.9 years);82 63 percent of rural poverty was concentrated in the northeast region.83 In military-era Brazil, public policies that impacted millions of rural dwellers had been justified by Cold War ideologies of counterinsurgency, national security, and developmentalism. Yet social tensions in the countryside, which predated the Cold War, would also outlive it, inflamed by the political and economic dislocations that marked military rule and its aftermath.

Rural Violence in the Wake of Military Rule With the return to democracy in 1985, a political showdown took place in Brazil over land redistribution and social empowerment in the countryside. As the economy slowed during the “lost decade” of the 1980s, slashing disposable credit in the countryside from $18.45 million to $6.44 million, over 800,000 rural workers lost their jobs between 1986 and 1988, particularly in the cotton, cacao, and sugarcane sectors.84 Hyperinflation, ranging from an annual rate of 389 percent in 1987 to 1,765 percent in 1989, drained the real incomes of the rural wage-earning population. Soaring unemployment and violence in Brazilian metropolises crimped rural migration to the cities and rendered agrarian reform potentially more relevant to urban voters. Yet Brazil’s least populous and most rural and conservative states (in the north and northeast) remained overrepresented in the congress: São Paulo state, for example, with 21.9 percent of the Brazilian electorate, has only sixty federal deputies, while Roraima, with 0.1 percent of the total electorate votes,

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boasts the minimum of eight congressional representatives. Moreover, the congressional rural “bloc,” comprising more than 25 percent of the chamber’s representatives, retained outsize influence due to its cohesiveness and leverage in ratifying political and neoliberal economic reforms.85 One of the first tests under the presidency of José Sarney was the National Program for Land Reform of October 1985. The plan proposed the settlement of 7.1 million rural workers by the year 2000, largely through the redistribution of unproductive private property. In opposition, large cattle ranchers formed the União Democrática Rural (UDR) in 1985, which lobbied against land reform and organized private militias in the countryside.86 As a founder of the UDR stated, “The problem is to increase production and investment by increasing farming profits, not to divide land. . . . Land should go to entrepreneurs who are trained, intelligent, and have a capacity for production. Peasants have no management skills; they will quickly lose their land and go to urban favelas [slums] after one to two years.”87 Land reform under newly democratic rule would falter for various reasons. Opposition emanated not only from large landowners but members of the bourgeoisie, sectors of the military, and even smallholders who feared the loss of their property.88 Moreover, due to decades of accelerated rural proletarianization, the leadership of CONTAG, traditionally more focused on labor than land issues, advocated political moderation while disengaging in practice from the campaign for land redistribution. Indeed, many rural workers doubted the Sarney government’s commitment to large-scale land redistribution given its high cost during a time of economic crisis, the marginalization of rural workers in the drafting of the plan, and the president’s background as a large landowner and former member of the military’s official political party.89 The skepticism proved justified. The initial goal of resettling 250,000 families on 7.6 million hectares of expropriated land by 1987 dropped to a more modest 21,367 families on 714,000 hectares.90 In turn, the MST, the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT), and churchbased groups advocated direct and even extra-legal actions such as occupations of unused private land and government offices. These groups challenged CONTAG’s claim to represent all “rural workers,” yet they lacked strong urban working class, middle class, and party support to effect comprehensive land redistribution.91 Agrarian reform suffered significant setbacks as well in the constitution of 1988. The charter maintained the social function of land, fulfilled when “rationally and adequately used,” but exempted productive land from

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expropriation and mandated “just and previous indemnification” (payable in titles of agrarian debt and indexed against inflation)—overturning the military government’s 1969 decree that had allowed for subsequent payment.92 The constitution further dismantled military-era legislation that had pegged the assessed value of the expropriated property to the typically understated tax value. Aside from leaving the definition of productive land subject to interpretation and conflict, the constitution had made land reform potentially far more expensive and unwieldy. Proposals to limit the size of landholding were also defeated in the constituent assembly, and the maximum amount of land claimable by long-term squatters was reduced from one hundred to fifty hectares.93 The political impasse over land reform and the broader struggle for rural democratization exacerbated violent conflict.94 Of the 1,681 murders of rural workers between 1964 and 1992, more than one thousand occurred between 1980 and 1988, with a marked regional concentration in the Amazon and northeast. Data gathered by the Comissão Pastoral da Terra on rural conflicts, for example, showed a peak of 636 violent incidents in 1985.95 The following year there were nearly three hundred registered deaths in land conflicts, twothirds of which occurred in Amazonia. (Thirteen percent of the casualties in 1986 in land conflicts were landowners and/or their henchmen.96) According to a 1985 Brazilian government report, 80 percent of the murders resulted from longstanding disputes over land tenure, rather than “invasions,” as many landowners claimed; a government report of the following year found that most killings took place in areas that had benefited from agricultural subsidies and tax shelters.97 In rural regions where wage relations predominate, such as the sugar zone of Pernambuco, labor-related conflicts have been the primary factor behind the assassination of union leaders, particularly where labor costs assumed a higher proportion of total production costs.98 Landowners typically resorted to murder when a court ruling or grassroots mobilization empowered a labor union or a peasant community. Such was the case of union leader Nativo da Natividade de Oliveira in central Goiás, who had campaigned tirelessly for better wages and conditions for his members before he was shot dead in October 1985.99 It was also the case of Chico Mendes, whose successful efforts in organizing rubber tappers in Acre against deforestation and land eviction prompted his murder in December 1988. Gunmen have also killed defenders of peasants’ rights such as nuns, priests, lawyers, and trade union leaders. In 1986, Father Jósimo Moraes Tavares, a crusader for the rights of squatters and rural workers, was gunned down on

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the steps of the diocese in Imperatriz, Maranhão. The 1980s also witnessed a disturbing increase in nonlethal incidents such as beatings, rape, torture, arson, vandalism, and threats against rural workers and smallholders. Amid socioeconomic exclusion and political obstructionism, the ranks of the MST grew. Founded in 1984, the Landless Workers Movement coalesced out of disparate land occupations by smallholders in Brazil’s southernmost states in the late 1970s and early 1980s, where highly mechanized farms growing state-subsidized export crops had overran an estimated 200,000 small properties. The MST’s earliest members—tenants, sharecroppers, and the children of smallholders whose plots could no longer sustain extended families— opposed eviction, urban migration, or resettlement in the Amazon. They counted on the support of the Catholic and Lutheran churches in pressuring the military to expropriate unproductive estates in their home region, a prospect that was legally tenable under the military regime’s Land Statute but rarely implemented. Unlike Amazonian squatters who disputed the ownership of public or untitled land, the struggles of the landless in southern Brazil challenged the legality of private property that failed to serve the public good. The movement also congregated smallholders who had been victimized and inadequately compensated by state-owned hydroelectric dams.100 Following Brazil’s return to democracy, the MST stepped up land invasions as a means to revive the campaign for agrarian reform and to pressure government authorities in the national and international arena. Inspired by liberation theology and Marxist ideals, the MST repudiated the conservative project of agricultural modernization and rural unionism endorsed by the military regime and its civilian successors. Financed by the participants in land invasions, religious groups, local politicians, and foreign organizations, the MST has no official links to any party, although it has strong allies among church leaders, students, academics, international human rights groups, and the Workers’ Party.101 To garner support for land distribution and social empowerment, the MST has used national marches, media coverage, rallies, the Internet, foreign visits, and occupation of government offices. By 1996, the MST had organized in twenty-two of Brazil’s twenty-six states and claimed to have helped approximately 140,000 people obtain land in its twelve years of existence, although it accounted for only 45 percent of the land invasions. The following year, between 1,500 and 2,000 landless workers participated in the National March for Land Reform, Employment, and Justice, a twomonth, thousand-kilometer protest march from various points in Brazil to the nation’s capital to mark the first anniversary of the massacre of nineteen landless farmworkers in Eldorado dos Carajás, Pará.102

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The MST’s hallmark tactic, however, has been land occupation—dubbed a festa, or party, by the movement’s adherents, and an invasion by its detractors. Prior to occupation, the movement usually sets up camps alongside a road near the targeted property where the settlers, numbering anywhere from two hundred to 2,500 families, fine-tune the logistics for its execution. Government expropriation of the property, if successful, can be delayed for years. By law, beneficiaries of expropriated land may not sell their plots for ten years, and are entitled to special interest-free loans from the federal government for planting and investment. The success of these settlements has varied widely, based on the quality of the land, the organization of the settlers, and access to the market and social services. According to a general survey of settlements at least two years old conducted by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the settlers’ monthly earnings were 3.7 times the minimum wage, which was slightly below the national average but significantly above the rural average.103 Another researcher found that in 30 percent of the cases settlers succeeded in commercializing their crops, in another 30 percent they reached only subsistence level, and in 40 percent of the cases settlers sold their land and moved on.104 The MST’s emphasis on market proximity in the redistribution of land repudiates the military’s policy of Amazonian colonization yet has also made landowners likelier to mobilize to protect their investment. Indeed, even in the Amazon, violent conflicts have been concentrated in regions where land is commercially promising.105 Since Brazilian law allows landowners to defend their territory by force if it is under immediate attack, they have relied increasingly on private security agencies and hired gunmen and even preemptive assaults on peasant settlements.106 Landowners have also responded with a mix of violent threats, financial inducements, and legal mechanisms to remove invaders. In approximately 95 percent of cases where INCRA has authorized expropriation, landowners have contested the order in federal courts, delaying the process of land redistribution (and often securing higher compensation from the government).107 Although occupation of privately held land is illegal under statutory law, the MST has appealed to federal legislation that allows for the expropriation of unproductive property. In theory, determinations over expropriation are initiated by INCRA, but in practice the MST has nudged the federal agency to expropriate land, thereby keeping the issue politically relevant. Researchers studying land conflicts in the Amazonian state of Pará, for example, found that INCRA is more likely to expropriate a farm in which the invasion was organized by an outside group such as the MST, and where squatters’

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proximity to INCRA’s regional offices have allowed them to sustain pressure on agency officials and enlist media coverage.108 Thus, the MST has strategically exploited a pattern that gained greater prominence in the final years of military rule: forcing the state’s hand in parceling out land in response to rural unrest and peasant mobilization. Whereas in 1991 there were seventy-seven occupations involving 14,720 families, in 1995 there were 198 invasions throughout Brazil involving 31,400 families. Moreover, while traditionally land conflicts have been more pronounced in the north and northeast, in 1995 the states of Minas Gerais and São Paulo registered the greatest number of conflicts, signaling the diffusion of land invasions even to those areas with the most modernized agriculture.109 While the MST has endorsed the initial importance of individual landholdings, the organization promotes agricultural cooperatives as part of an effort to build an egalitarian and socialist society. In the words of one of its former leaders, the MST seeks to “reorganize agriculture on a different social base, democratize access to capital, democratize the agroindustrial process (something just as important as landownership) and democratize access to know-how, that is, to formal education.”110 In this vein, the MST aims to transform settlers into empowered citizens, or “free workers,” through study groups on social history and radical theory. In 1988, 38,000 students and 1,500 teachers were directly involved in the new education project.111 Thus, the MST emerged as one of the most stalwart opponents to neoliberalism in Latin America, defying the military government’s efforts to defuse popular demands for land redistribution and academic prognostications on the demise of the Brazilian peasantry. Although millions of hectares in Brazil still lay idle, land redistribution under democratic rule represents a significant improvement over the military government’s record. In particular, during the first administration of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1994–98), the federal government expropriated millions of hectares of unproductive land; implemented measures to speed up the process of expropriation and retitling of land; raised the tax on unproductive land from 4.5 percent to 20 percent of its value; increased state credit to land recipients; and used new satellite technologies to revise land cadastres and monitor land distribution and use.112 Whereas over two decades Brazil’s military regime settled only 65,993 families on 506 settlements, or an average of 3,229 per year, between 1985 and 1997 democratic governments settled 352,306 families on 2,201 settlements, or an average of 27,100 per year, and redistributed over 8.7 million hectares of land.113

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Conclusion: The Cold War and Its Legacies in Rural Brazil During the Cold War, the Brazilian military government’s policies in the countryside were transformational, uneven, and contradictory. The military endorsed agricultural modernization to promote economic growth and counterinsurgency, while placating traditional oligarchs. It encouraged homesteading in the Amazon as a solution to inequitable systems of land tenure, while replicating land concentration on the frontier. It broadened access to information and investment in the countryside by expanding transportation and telecommunications networks, while precipitating the expulsion of millions of smallholders and the suppression of civil liberties. The military regime oversaw widespread rural unionization and the extension of social welfare benefits to the countryside, while carrying out or condoning brutal repression. The rural Brazil that emerged from military rule was marked by increased land concentration, a robust and diversified agro-export industry, mechanized production on middlesized farms, the proliferation of wage and often casual labor, and a radical segment demanding the immediate redistribution of land and political power. Rural policies in authoritarian Brazil during the Cold War culminated longstanding efforts by policymakers to modernize the countryside and to incorporate the peasantry into the nation-state. The origins and outcomes of such conflicts in the Brazilian countryside are thus best understood as the outcome of deep-seated local struggles for economic and political power, rather than a mere extension of U.S.-Soviet rivalries. It is impossible, of course, to sequester national histories from global contexts, particularly amid the whirlwind of revolution and counterrevolution in the Americas, and the long shadows cast by transnational corporations, multilateral development banks, and massive foreign debt. Yet the importance of the Cold War in heralding the historical transformation of rural Brazil lies less in superpower meddling than in the institutional and market realignments enabled or legitimized by a newfound (geo)political climate. Ultimately, the military’s counterinsurgency and developmentalist policies failed to stem the poverty and social exclusion that have plagued millions in rural Brazil—problems that defied Cold War doctrines and whose solutions require broad-based governmental action and societal commitment.

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1. Peter P. Houtzager and Marcus J. Kurtz, “The Institutional Roots of Popular Mobilization: State Transformation and Rural Politics in Brazil and Chile, 1960–1995,” Comparative Studies of Society and History 42, no. 2 (April 2000): 396–99. 2. For a similar approach emphasizing the agency of Latin American actors in regional histories of the Cold War, see Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniela Spenser, eds., In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2008). 3. Biorn Maybury-Lewis, The Politics of the Possible: The Brazilian Rural Workers’ Trade Union Movement, 1964–1985 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 29. 4. Ibid., 12. 5. Solon Barraclough, Agrarian Structure in Latin America: A Resume of the CIDA Land Tenure Studies of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Peru (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1973), 87–109. 6. Marta Cehelsky, Land Reform in Brazil: The Management of Social Change (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1979), 37. 7. Barraclough, Agrarian Structure in Latin America, 106. 8. Ibid., 92–95. 9. Cehelsky, Land Reform in Brazil, 37. 10. See Verena Stolcke, Coffee Planters, Workers, and Wives: Class Conflict and Gender Relations on São Paulo Coffee Plantations, 1850–1980 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 72–75. 11. Quoted in Barraclough, Agrarian Structure, xv. 12. Cehelsky, Land Reform in Brazil, 68. 13. Aspásia Alcântara Camargo, “Authoritarianism and Populism: Bipolarity in the Brazilian Political System,” in The Structure of Brazilian Development, ed. Neuma Aguiar (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1979), 105. 14. Barraclough, Agrarian Structure, 44–45. 15. José de Souza Martins, Os camponeses e a política no Brasil (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1981), 21–22. On the varieties of wage and land tenure arrangements, see Barraclough, Agrarian Structure, 22, 101–2. 16. See Shepard Forman, “Disunity and Discontent: A Study of Peasant Political Movements in Brazil,” Journal of Latin American Studies 3, no. 1 (1971): 190, and Martins, Os camponeses e a política no Brasil, 79. 17. Leonilde Sérvolo de Medeiros, História dos Movimentos Sociais no Campo (Rio de Janeiro: FASE, 1989), 24. 18. See Forman, “Disunity and Discontent,” 190. 19. Anthony W. Pereira, The End of the Peasantry: The Rural Labor Movement in Northeast Brazil, 1961–1988 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), 28–29. 20. Maria Conceição d’Inção e Mello, O Bóia Fria: Acumulação e Miséria (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1976), 148. 21. See Pereira, The End of the Peasantry, 19. 22. Gerrit Huizer, The Revolutionary Potential of Peasants in Latin America (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath and Company, 1972), 126. 23. Forman, “Disunity and Discontent,” 195n49.

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24. Florencia Mallon, “Peasants and Rural Laborers in Pernambuco, 1955–1964,” Latin American Perspectives 5, no. 4 (Fall 1978): 53–56. On the history of the Peasant Leagues, see also Huizer, The Revolutionary Potential of Peasants, 124–32. 25. Medeiros, História dos Movimentos Sociais no Campo, 76. 26. Quoted in Camargo, “Authoritarianism and Populism,” 112. 27. Martins, Os camponeses e a política, 82–87. 28. Cliff Welch, The Seed Was Planted: The São Paulo Roots of Brazil’s Rural Labor Movement, 1924–1964 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 124. 29. Martins, Os camponeses e a política, 85–86. 30. Pereira, The End of the Peasantry, 33. 31. José de Souza Martins, The Agrarian Reform: The Impossible Dialogue on the Possible History (Brasília: Ministério do Desenvolvimento Agrário, INCRA, 2000), 16; Mallon, “Peasants and Rural Laborers in Pernambuco,” 58. 32. Stolcke, Coffee Planters, Workers, and Wives, 108–10. 33. Cehelsky, Land Reform in Brazil, 46–47. 34. Houtzager and Kurtz, “The Institutional Roots of Popular Mobilization,” 399; Cehelsky, Land Reform in Brazil, 43–44. 35. Cehelsky, Land Reform in Brazil, 89–98. 36. Ibid., 51–57. 37. Peter Houtzager, “State and Unions in the Transformation of the Brazilian Countryside, 1964–1979,” Latin American Research Review 33, no. 2 (1998): 115n27. 38. Joan Dassin, ed., Torture in Brazil (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 108–9. 39. Maria Helena Moreira Alves, State and Opposition in Military Brazil (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988), 47. 40. Dassin, Torture in Brazil, 108–9. 41. Pereira, The End of the Peasantry, 51. 42. Maria Cristina Vanucchi Leme, Assassinatos no Campo: Crime e Impunidade, 1964–85 (São Paulo: Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, 1986). 43. Mallon, “Peasants and Rural Laborers in Pernambuco,” 66. 44. Alves, State and Opposition, 121–22. 45. Quoted in Houtzager, “State and Unions,” 115. 46. Houtzager, “State and Unions,” 124–25. 47. Bernardo Sorj, “Agrarian Structure and Politics in Present Day Brazil,” Latin American Perspectives 7, no. 1 (1980): 25. 48. Anthony L. Hall, “Land Tenure and Land Reform in Brazil,” in Agrarian Reform and Grassroots Development: Ten Case Studies, ed. Roy L. Prosterman, Mary N. Temple, and Timothy M. Hanstad (Boulder, CO, and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1990), 215–16. 49. Francisco Graziano Neto, Qual reforma agrária?: Terra, Pobreza e Cidadania (São Paulo: Geração Editorial, 1996), 49. 50. José de Souza Martins, “The Political Impasses of Rural Social Movements in Amazonia,” in The Future of Amazonia: Destruction of Sustainable Development?, ed. David Goodman and Anthony Hall (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 252; Gilberto Dimenstein, Democracia em Pedaços: Direitos Humanos no Brasil (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996), 133.

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5 1. Pereira, The End of the Peasantry, 45, 60. 52. José de Souza Martins, A militarização da questão agrária no Brasil (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1984), 22. 53. Americas Watch, The Struggle for Land in Brazil: Rural Violence Continues (New York: Human Rights Watch), 2. 54. Hall, “Land Tenure and Land Reform in Brazil,” 207, and José de Souza Martins, “The State and the Agrarian Question in Brazil,” in Frontier Expansion in Amazonia, ed. Marianne Schmink and Charles H. Wood (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1984), 470–71. 55. Hall, “Land Tenure and Land Reform in Brazil,” 208. 56. Martins, A Militarização da Questão Agrária no Brasil, 82. 57. Houtzager, “State and Unions,” 111–14, 127–31. 58. Ibid., 117–19, and Pereira, The End of the Peasantry, 53–74. 59. Graziano, “Qual Reforma Agrária,” 80. 60. See Pereira, The End of the Peasantry, 48, and D’Incão e Mello, O Bóia Fria. 61. Pereira, The End of the Peasantry, 80. 62. Martins, A militarização da questão agrária no Brasil, 93, 104. 63. Pereira, The End of the Peasantry, 99. 64. Anna Luiza Ozorio de Almeida, The Colonization of the Amazon (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 29, 92. 65. Ibid., 111. 66. Lee J. Alston, Gary D. Libecap, and Bernardo Mueller, Titles, Conflict, and Land Use: The Development of Property Rights and Land Reform on the Brazilian Amazon Frontier (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 45. 67. Hall, “Land Tenure and Land Reform in Brazil,” 209–10. 68. Alfredo Wagner Berno de Almeida, “The State and Land Conflicts in Amazonia, 1964– 1988,” in The Future of Amazonia, ed. Goodman and Hall, 232; and Almeida, The Colonization of the Amazon, 86. 69. Martins, “The State and the Agrarian Question in Brazil,” 478–79. 70. Hall, “Land Tenure and Land Reform in Brazil,” 209–10. 71. Ozorio de Almeida, The Colonization of the Amazon, 116–17. 72. Ralph Della Cava, “The ‘People’s Church,’ the Vatican, and Abertura,” in Democratizing Brazil: Problems of Transition and Consolidation, ed. Alfred Stepan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 144–50. 73. See Pe. Paulo M. Tonucci, ed., Igreja e Problemas da Terra (Vozes: Petrópolis, 1981). 74. Quoted in Ivo Poletto, “A Terra e a Vida em Tempos Neoliberais: Uma Releitura da História da CPT,” in A Luta Pela Terra: A Comissão Pastoral da Terra 20 Anos Depois, Secretariado Nacional da CPT (São Paulo: Paulus, 1997), 42n20. 75. See N. Patrick Peritore and Ana Karina Galve Peritore, “Brazilian Attitudes Toward Agrarian Reform: A Q-Methodology Opinion Study of a Conflictual Issue,” The Journal of Developing Areas 24 (April 1990): 382. 76. Houtzager and Kurtz, “The Institutional Roots of Popular Mobilization,” 402. 77. Martins, “The State and the Agrarian Question in Brazil,” 482. 78. Alfredo Wagner Berno de Almeida, “A reforma agrária localizada e a política regional,” in Os donos da terra e a luta pela reforma agrária, ed. IBASE (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Codecri, 1984), 43–44.

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7 9. Almeida, “The State and Land Conflicts in Amazonia,” 229. 80. Martins, A Militarização da Questão Agrária no Brasil, 99; Almeida, “The State and Land Conflicts,” 231–34. 81. Houtzager and Kurtz, “The Institutional Roots of Popular Mobilization,” 394–405. 82. John L. Hammond, “Law and Disorder: The Brazilian Landless Farmworkers’ Movement,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 18, no. 4 (1999): 471. 83. Graziano Filho, Qual Reforma Agrária?, 98. 84. Maria Orlanda Pinassi, “An Interview with João Pedro Stédile,” Latin American Perspectives 27, no. 5 (September 2000): 51. 85. “A Turma do Calote,” Veja, May 17, 1995, 31. 86. Almeida, “The State and Land Conflicts,” 239. 87. Quoted in Peritore and Peritore, “Brazilian Attitudes toward Agrarian Reform,” 391. 88. Claus Germer, “O desenvolvimento do capitalismo no campo brasileiro e a reforma agrária,” in A Questão Agrária Hoje, ed. João Pedro Stédile (Porto Alegre: Editora da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, 1994), 145, and José Gomes da Silva, “A reforma agrária no Brasil,” in Stédile, A Questão Agrária Hoje, 168–69. 89. Pereira, The End of the Peasantry, 109. 90. Alston, Libecap, and Mueller, Titles, Conflict, and Land Use, 49. 91. Pereira, The End of the Peasantry, 139–42. 92. On the trajectory of land reform in the Constituent Assembly, see José Gomes da Silva, Buraco Negro: A reforma agrária na Constituinte de 1987/88 (São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1989). 93. Quoted in Peritore and Peritore, “Brazilian Attitudes toward Agrarian Reform,” 387. 94. Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, “Democratic Consolidation and Human Rights in Brazil,” Working Paper No. 256 (Notre Dame, IN: Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, 1998), 1. 95. Alston, Libecap, and Mueller, Titles, Conflict, and Land Use, 158, and Americas Watch, The Struggle for Land in Brazil: Rural Violence Continues (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1992), 9. 96. Hall, “Land Tenure and Land Reform in Brazil,” 212. 97. Amnesty International, Brazil: Authorized Violence in Rural Areas (London: Amnesty International Publications, 1988), 1–6. 98. Pereira, The End of the Peasantry, 114–16. 99. Amnesty International, Brazil, 1–6. 100. Martins, A militarização da questão agrária, 98–103. 101. Alston, Libecap, and Mueller, Titles, Conflict, and Land Use, 52–63. 102. On the march, see Christine de Alencar Chaves, A Marcha Nacional dos Sem-Terra: Um Estudo Sobre a Fabricação do Social (Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumará, 2000). 103. Hammond, “Law and Disorder,” 474–80. 104. André Petry, “Idéais com o Pé no Chão,” Veja, April 23, 1997, 35. 105. Alston, Libecap, and Mueller, Titles, Conflict, and Land Use, 63–65, 89. 106. Amnesty International, Brazil, 3. 107. Alston, Libecap, and Mueller, Titles, Conflict, and Land Use, 73. 108. Ibid., 95, 157. 109. Lucio Flavio de Almeida and Felix Ruiz Sanchez, “The Landless Workers’ Movement and Social Struggles Against Neoliberalism,” Latin American Perspectives 27, no. 5 (September 2000): 19–20.

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1 10. Maria Orlanda Pinassi, “An Interview with João Pedro Stédile,” 52. 111. Almeida and Sanchez, “The Landless Workers’ Movement,” 17. 112. José Evaldo Gonçalo, Reforma agrária como política social redistributiva (Brasília: Editora Plano, 2001), 94; Carlos E. Guanzirolli, The Agrarian Reform and the Globalization of the Economy: Brazil’s Case (Brasília: INCRA/FAO, 1999), 96; Hammond, “Law and Disorder,” 483; Ministry Extraordinary for Land Policies, The Agrarian Reform in the Government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (Brasília: Ministry Extraordinary for Land Policies, 1998), 10. 113. Carlos E. Guanzirolli, The Agrarian Reform and the Globalization of the Economy, 13; Houtzager and Kurtz, “The Institutional Roots of Popular Mobilization,” 405.

· Ch a p t er Sev e n ·

The Indian Wing Nicaraguan Indians, Native American Activists, and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1979–1990

5 Ja m e s J e n k i ns

In 1973, the American Indian Movement (AIM) withstood a seventy-

one-day siege by the U.S. government at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Carlos Fonesca, a cofounder of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN), sent a letter from Nicaragua in support of Russell Means and other Indian activists who were protesting U.S. policies. Yet thirteen years later, Means traveled to Nicaragua, where he fought the Sandinista army in armed combat on behalf of an indigenous counterrevolution.1 Means went to Nicaragua to assist an insurgency of Miskitu Indians on the Atlantic Coast that began in mid-1981. The insurrection made up a portion of a war against the new socialist government, a war that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and President Ronald Reagan actively supported. The Miskitu conflict has generated an immense literature that traces the impact of U.S. intervention and Sandinista policies to explain the militancy of the Miskitu.2 However, scholars have all too often emphasized the left-right ideological conflict without fully examining the influence of global indigenous activism, which emerged as a powerful force within international politics by the end of the 1980s. Native American organizations became involved in the hope that Miskitus would attain expanded political autonomy. But contrary to their 175

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intent, American Indians ultimately weakened Miskitu demands in Nicaragua and fragmented their own movement in the United States. The Miskitu conflict underscores the complicated ways Latin American politics operated in the context of the Cold War. Miskitu leaders took advantage of the polarizing Cold War discourse and the emerging indigenous rights politics to assert themselves in the international sphere. At the same time, the political environment compelled Miskitus to appear differently depending on their audience, and this divided both the Miskitu guerrilla movement and the U.S. Indian organizations that supported it. As the largest indigenous group inhabiting the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua, Miskitus positioned themselves as victims of encroachment by an assimilationist mestizo Nicaraguan state. In addition to their racial difference from western Nicaragua, Miskitus spoke their own native language, tended to be Moravian rather than Catholic, and inhabited a sparsely populated jungle that was dominated by U.S. corporate interests. Miskitus occupied the bottom rung of the social ladder in eastern Nicaragua, but they maintained a considerable degree of autonomy from state institutions.3 This helps to explain why many Miskitus initially supported the Sandinista revolution against Somoza only to distrust the Sandinista government once its influence expanded over the Atlantic Coast. The Contras, or counterrevolutionary Nicaraguans, took up arms against the revolutionary government for geopolitical reasons that mattered little to the Miskitus. Contra leaders espoused a right-wing agenda and tied their struggle to the global east-west conflict. By contrast, Miskitu leaders demanded autonomy and self-determination, and they defended their alliances with Contras as a matter of expedience or survival. By the mid-1980s, the MiskituSandinista conflict had simmered to a low-intensity conflict. Miskitu guerrilla leaders projected varying images to different groups as they negotiated their demands with the Nicaraguan government. The presence of international indigenous groups, particularly the Indian organizations from the United States, profoundly transformed the character of the Miskitu insurgency.

Roots of the Insurgency From the moment of its inception, the Miskitu insurgency struggled to project an image apart from the Somocistas, who wished to reinstate the Somoza family dynasty that had ruled Nicaragua since 1936. This downplaying of Somocista ties caused tension within the indigenous resistance that

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would eventually fracture the group’s leadership and lead Miskitu leader Brooklyn Rivera to stage a separate rebellion based out of Costa Rica. These developments reflected the need for an armed force that could appear outside of the left-right political spectrum and thus receive greater international assistance. Rivera positioned himself and his followers as part of a decolonization movement rather than as a rejection of the Sandinistas’ leftist policies. The Nicaraguan Indian leaders’ relations with the United States and the Contras allowed Miskitus to obtain military resources. But that relationship threatened to deny the Miskitu people a place within the global indigenous movement. As a result, Miskitu attempts to distance the revolt from the larger U.S.-backed war marked the first several years of military confrontation with the Sandinistas. Ironically, the most prominent Indian leaders from the Atlantic Coast had risen to power thanks to the revolutionary government. Steadman Fagoth, Brooklyn Rivera, and Hazel Lau studied mathematics and science together at the University of León. Roberto Campbell, a Creole costeño, organized these three Miskitus into a Sandinista student cell in 1978 shortly before the FSLN came to power.4 After the July 1979 revolution, Sandinista leaders turned their attention to the Atlantic Coast. There, a Miskitu and Sumu organization called Alpromisu maintained considerable political influence over northeast Nicaragua. This representative council worried the new revolutionary government because the council had strong connections with international organizations like the Moravian Church, the World Council of Churches, and the World Council of Indigenous Peoples. Complicating matters further, an unusually high proportion of Miskitu Indians had served in Somoza’s National Guard. Many Miskitus had joined the National Guard to improve their economic situation, and most had been deployed in the western part of the country. As a result, there was no easy way for the Sandinista government to determine whether a particular Miskitu person had served in the National Guard. In fact, many former Miskitu guardsmen returned to the Atlantic Coast and volunteered for Sandinista militias.5 This situation compounded the Sandinista’s mistrust of the Miskitu population and led Sandinista leaders to assert more control over the Atlantic Coast. In November 1979, FSLN Comandante Daniel Ortega attended the Fifth National Assembly of the Miskitu and Sumu peoples with the clear intention of creating a new governing body.6 Thanks to help from the three University of León students, Ortega succeeded in replacing the existing indigenous organization with MISURASATA, which stood for “Miskitus, Sumus,

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Ramas, and Sandinistas All Together.” Oddly, Ortega included Rama Indians despite the absence of any Ramas at the assembly, and he excluded the substantial black Creole population. Ortega installed Rivera, Fagoth, and Lau as heads of the new Atlantic Coast governing body, and revolutionary leaders hoped that they would help integrate the eastern region with the rest of Nicaragua.7 Much as Alpromisu had done during the 1970s, MISURASATA began to study and formulate Miskitu land claims based on prior treaties with Britain. In 1977, members of Alpromisu had traveled to a UN conference on indigenous peoples in Geneva to complain about the Somoza dictatorship’s disregard for treaty-based indigenous rights. Like their predecessors, MISURASATA leaders pored over documents such as the 1860 Treaty of Managua between Britain and Nicaragua, in which Nicaragua affirmed that Miskitu Indians “shall enjoy the right of governing, according to their own customs, and according to the regulations which may from time to time be adopted by them.” Moreover, the treaty stipulated that “Nicaragua agrees to respect and to not interfere with such customs and regulations so established.”8 On the other hand, MISURASATA skillfully denounced Britain’s 1906 treaty with Nicaragua. In 1906, Britain had arranged for collective land rights for costeño families in an effort to deter the numerous petitions by Nicaraguan Indians that asked Britain to intervene and liberate the Atlantic Coast. But MISURASATA argued that the amount of land allotted by the treaty was insufficient and that the Miskitu people required more explicit forestry rights.9 As a result, the organization constantly petitioned the Sandinista government for broader entitlements during the first two years of MISURASATA’s existence. The political power of the new coastal Indian organization rapidly grew. The revolutionary government granted the Miskitus, Sumus, and Ramas a single seat in the Council of State in May 1980, though a voting block of nine Sandinista Defense Committee members ensured that the FSLN could overrule any nonparty decision.10 Nevertheless, the Sandinista leaders claimed to champion indigenous culture and identity, and they frequently yielded to Miskitu and Sumu requests. MISURASATA asked the Council of State for control over the national education program and jurisdiction over the natural resources in the Atlantic region. In August, the government acceded to these demands. Sandinistas paid for Miskitu and Sumu educators to develop their own literacy campaigns that taught indigenous languages and English in addition to Spanish. Moreover, the Sandinistas conceded that Atlantic Coast

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Indians owned woodcutting rights within their communal lands, as well as 80 percent of the forests in dispute between tribal communities and the government.11 Miskitus obtained further land-use concessions from the Council of State after they closed down stores and restaurants in the important coastal city of Puerto Cabezas. Confident of their progress, Miskitu leaders shifted from emphasizing villages’ land rights and began claiming the right to rule over the territory of the Indian nation.12 They produced a document asserting the rights to political authority over a large portion of the Atlantic Coast, which corresponded to 30 percent of Nicaragua’s territory. The FSLN embraced multiculturalism by granting the Miskitu people a unique status based on indigenous heritage.13 Yet Sandinista recognition of Miskitu indigeneity had a surprising result. The Sandinista government hired Miskitu people to travel to villages as teachers so that they could facilitate the incorporation of rural Miskitus into the Nicaraguan state project. But these teachers encouraged difference in a way that went beyond the language of multiculturalism. One Miskitu man recalled that a traveling teacher “taught us that Indians have many rights, our own territory, the right to selfgovernment.” Another remembered that “they also taught us Miskitu history, about the Miskitu king. . . . we also learned about our land rights.”14 Those rights called Nicaragua’s title over the Atlantic Coast into serious question. Miskitus recalled and referenced the fact that they had once been a kingdom, and Sandinista policies of cultural revitalization only increased demands for autonomy. Yet Sandinista officials seemed oblivious to Miskitu claims and to how Sandinista policies were encouraging those claims. The Nicaraguan government even invited ten American Indian Movement and International Indian Treaty Council leaders to spend the month of December 1979 on the Atlantic Coast, where they offered advice to the indigenous and Creole organizations.15 The increasing presence of nongovernmental political groups precipitated the dramatic events that would soon follow. Armed combat between the Sandinista army and the Atlantic Coast Indians began in 1981. Many scholars have erroneously linked the outbreak of war to tensions between indigenous ideologies and socialism. On February 21, the revolutionary government arrested about fifty Miskitu leaders, detaining most only briefly but accusing others of “separatist” agendas. The Sandinistas released all of the prisoners within a week except for MISURASATA’s general coordinator, Steadman Fagoth, because the government had discovered documents that revealed communication between Fagoth and Somoza’s Secret Police. Fagoth’s supporters later claimed that he had only spied on Somoza’s

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National Guard under orders from the revolutionaries. But even this defense suggests a relationship that would have made Sandinista leaders uneasy, given Fagoth’s growing control over the Atlantic Coast.16 At this point, the United States had become interested in overthrowing the Sandinista government as a matter of policy because of its ties to communist Cuba and its implied connections to the Soviet Union. Sandinista officials especially feared that U.S. intelligence was courting the Miskitu of the northern Atlantic Coast in anticipation of using that region to bring down the revolution. A heightened sense of paranoia, brought on more by the growing U.S.-backed counterrevolution than by a Miskitu-Sandinista ideological clash, led the FSLN to take action. A skirmish occurred one day after Fagoth’s detention. Government soldiers entered a Moravian church intent on arresting Fagoth’s close associate Elmer Prado, who had witnessed Fagoth’s arrest. Accounts vary over who started the fight, but the armed scuffle left four Sandinistas and four Miskitus dead. Ensuing arrests and combat severed the trust between the revolutionaries and the Atlantic Coast Indians.17 After the Sandinista government released Fagoth in April 1981, whatever tenuous links he may have had with the CIA and Somocistas hardened into an alliance. In the face of popular dissent throughout the Atlantic Coast, the FSLN freed Fagoth under the condition that he would leave Nicaragua to attend college in a Soviet Bloc country. But he instead exiled himself to Miskitu territory in Honduras, where thousands of young Miskitus joined him. Although Fagoth was hardly alone among Miskitu leaders in accepting U.S. assistance, he openly requested U.S. and Somocista support. Fagoth announced in July that “we are looking for alliances with democratic groups and countries including Nicaraguan exiles to help us morally, politically, and economically in our continuing fight for our rights.”18 Fagoth immediately began planning with U.S. officials to visit Washington so that he could begin “making contacts with key figures within the executive and legislative branches.”19 While Fagoth quickly arranged to bring MISURASATA firmly within the U.S.-backed Contra movement, Brooklyn Rivera began lobbying international indigenous organizations on the Miskitu group’s behalf. Rivera flew to Australia to lead a Nicaraguan Indian delegation at an annual World Council of Indigenous Peoples assembly at precisely the same time that the government released Fagoth.20 Although Fagoth’s and Rivera’s ideologies seemed to be at odds, both benefited from the unlikely combination of U.S. foreign intervention and transnational indigenous organizations. Fagoth and Rivera worked

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closely together staging a guerrilla war based out of Miskitu territory in Honduras until 1984. The Miskitu insurgents courted international assistance because their lack of numbers limited their actual military potential. They conducted only sabotage missions and a few guerrilla raids, often working with other Contra forces and using CIA equipment.21 They could claim to control large portions of the sparsely populated northeast Nicaragua, but a decisive military victory never came within sight. Rivera and Fagoth used different methods to compensate for MISURASATA’s limited military power, and their disagreements caused a permanent rift between the two leaders less than a year after their self-imposed exile. Fagoth placed himself in an impossible position to negotiate with the Sandinista government through his overt acceptance of aid from numerous anti-Sandinista sources. He received funding from the CIA after President Reagan approved $19 million to support the Contras in November 1981. Moreover, private Somocista supporters from the United States funneled millions of dollars into Fagoth’s militia through refugee groups in Honduras. Rivera’s distance from Fagoth put Rivera in a position where he could still command respect from leftist advocates of indigenous peoples, even though Rivera maintained a military alliance with both Fagoth and Contra groups.22 Most contemporary observers described Fagoth’s and Rivera’s disagreements as ideologically based, but in retrospect it seems more likely that Fagoth believed that a regime change would soon come in Nicaragua. Both Fagoth and Rivera found it opportune and necessary to accept U.S. support during the first years of hostilities, but Fagoth’s position as the leader of the Honduran based Miskitu guerrillas made his ties to U.S. intelligence more overt.23 The arrests of the Miskitu leaders and the subsequent military confrontation spurred U.S. politicians and Native American organizations into action. Although American Indians were becoming increasingly frustrated with the U.S. government at home, they appeared to find common cause with the United States on the issue of eastern Nicaragua. On the night of Fagoth’s arrest, the U.S. staff at the Managua embassy wired the U.S. State Department to inform them of the situation. In light of the detentions, they suggested, somebody should immediately notify the North American Indian groups that had contact with the Miskitus.24 The Americans working in that embassy predicted that international pressure from nongovernmental organizations would have an impact on the struggle in eastern Nicaragua as much

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as any government or armed force. The unlikely combination of pan-Indian organizations and the U.S. government supported this new Miskitu struggle for self-determination.

Miskitu Diplomacy In early 1984, Rivera and his followers left Honduras for Costa Rica, where he became associated with Contra leader Eden Pastora of the Democratic Revolutionary Alliance. The Alliance distanced itself from the Nicaraguan Democratic Force, which encompassed Fagoth’s group and had much closer ties to the CIA and U.S. financial support. Nevertheless, Rivera agreed to negotiate with the Sandinista government over a possible ceasefire, provoking outrage from the Alliance and the Nicaraguan Democratic Force alike.25 Rivera organized the peace talks out of desperation; he had run out of money. Rivera arranged for his close friend Armstrong Wiggins to ask Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy for help. By this time Wiggins had considerable influence inside the Indian Law Resource Center, a nongovernmental organization based in Washington, D.C. Instead of helping Rivera obtain money, Kennedy contacted Daniel Ortega and began to make plans for peace negotiations between the Costa Rica–based armed Miskitus and the Nicaraguan government.26 Kennedy’s role during the ceasefire demonstrates the complicated intersections between nation-states and indigenous organizations in the Miskitu resistance. Throughout the process, Rivera and his many foreign supporters attempted to win major concessions regarding political control of the Atlantic Coast. At the same time, Rivera’s followers tried to dissociate themselves from the ideological rhetoric of the Contra War as a whole because it threatened their image as indigenous activists. Kennedy made arrangements for Rivera and Sandinista officials to negotiate, and Kennedy’s involvement led to three official rounds of talks in Bogotá, Colombia, between December 1984 and May 1985. More than thirty indigenous organizations from around the Americas flew representatives to Bogotá to assist Rivera in various ways.27 Most of these groups sent delegates accredited by the United Nations as nongovernmental organizations. The involvement of so many native groups reflected the growing international activity of many U.S.-based associations like the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) and the National Congress of American Indians. The talks were arranged by Kennedy and sponsored by the president of Colombia.28 Neither the United States nor Colombia stood to benefit from any agreement that would suggest

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inalienable indigenous rights, but ironically Rivera and the NGO delegations struggled to obtain precisely such an acknowledgment. George Manuel’s idea of a “Fourth World” informed the stance of the Indian negotiators. In 1974, National Indian Brotherhood Chief George Manuel had proposed that native peoples constituted a “Fourth World” because they were nations without states and thus in a worse position than the “Third World.”29 Bernard Nietschmann, a U.S. geographer and adamant supporter of the Miskitu, tried to create the image of a nonideological struggle during the proceedings. He claimed that the Sandinistas misunderstood Miskitu demands and that “the real issue is not whether or not to negotiate a peace treaty . . . but to establish a truly revolutionary accord based on the fact that Latin America is also Indian America.” He went on to say that the “FSLN represents a revolutionary Third World movement and MISURASATA represents a revolutionary Fourth World movement. . . . it is a revolution, not a counterrevolution.”30 Rivera also emphasized that “the Indian fight is neither of the left wing nor the right wing. It is the Indian wing.”31 Rivera and his close associates found it necessary to use a language that made questions of socialism irrelevant in order to appeal to the indigenous organizations that backed them at the talks. Even Ortega acknowledged that Rivera’s forces sought autonomy and land rights rather than a counterrevolution.32 The Indian leaders from outside Nicaragua generally agreed that the Rivera-Sandinista peace talks dealt with an indigenous issue that had nothing to do with socialism. After the first round of negotiations, National Congress of American Indians Director Suzan Shown Harjo publicly stated that “the East-West issues and the objectives of the left and the right ideologies have overshadowed the life-threatening situation of the Indian people and their struggle to survive in Nicaragua,” and she denounced the Contras and Sandinistas alike for treating MISURASATA like a “political football.”33 The World Council of Indigenous Peoples drew up a declaration during the Bogotá negotiations asserting that Miskitus had rights to political autonomy and territory because they had lived on the Atlantic Coast since “time immemorial.” This language pervaded numerous draft proposals submitted by the organizations, but the official agreements never contained references to inherent indigenous rights. Thus, while the talks produced reams of statements and proposals, the negotiations accomplished little beyond the temporary suspension of military engagements between the Sandinista army and Rivera’s guerrilla force.34 During the early peace talks, Rivera struggled simply to create a common language between Sandinista officials and his organization. At the first

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round of negotiations, the FSLN agreed to consider the Miskitu Indians as “autonomous” but found it baffling that Rivera and his supporters referred to the Miskitu as a “nation.” Rivera finally produced a recently written book by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, whom he considered “the Sandinistas’ foremost Indian policy defender in the USA.” The Sandinista officials found themselves embarrassed by the fact that Dunbar-Ortiz referred to the Miskitu people as a “nation” many times in her book, Indians of the Americas.35 Nevertheless, the Sandinista negotiators found it difficult to understand or concede that MISURASATA represented anything more than an ethnic group with some general rights to autonomy. National Directorate member Luís Carrión offered that his government was “prepared to discuss special rights for ethnic groups in our national integration,” to which Rivera bitterly replied that “ethnic groups run restaurants. We have an army. We are a people. We want selfdetermination.”36 Rivera’s reference to his army and his indigenous identity in the same breath reveals that Rivera drew his legitimacy in part from his authority over an armed force that seemingly had no ties to the FSLN or the United States. Rivera understood that the existence of other Miskitu groups risked delegitimizing MISURASATA. The Sandinista government began negotiations with a government-funded civilian Miskitu group called MISITAN headed by Hazel Lau at about the same time that the talks with Rivera began. MISITAN represented a number of influential Miskitus who had remained in Nicaragua during the early years of fighting. Rivera stressed that only a minority of Miskitu villages supported MISITAN and that the nonmilitant group had close ties to the Sandinista government.37 On the other hand, Steadman Fagoth’s guerrilla army, MISURA, maintained connections with various Contra groups and U.S. intelligence. Rivera struggled to assure international audiences that he had no connections to MISURA because such a link might have implied that Rivera was an arm of U.S. intervention in Nicaragua. Rivera proclaimed that only his command was truly divorced from both the leftist Sandinista government and the right-wing forces that backed Fagoth.38 Rivera positioned himself in this way so that he could argue that only MISURASATA represented the Miskitu people. Although Rivera claimed to speak for the aspirations of the Miskitu villages, his demands and declarations increasingly reflected the language of groups that helped draft his proposals. MISURASATA leaders insisted that the Sandinista government acknowledge their right to self-defense as “the inherent right of our peoples for the collective protection and defense of our

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existence, society, and territory against external and foreign acts of genocide and/or ethnocide.”39 Yet other indigenous NGOs eventually overruled Rivera by omitting the right to self-defense during the formal negotiations. Moreover, leaders of international indigenous organizations counseled MISURASATA to participate in the Nicaraguan government’s autonomy policy rather than demand a unilateral withdrawal of Sandinista forces from the Atlantic Coast. Furthermore, the World Council of Indigenous Peoples encouraged Rivera to abandon MISURASATA’s treaty-based claims in favor of universal rights of indigenous self-determination. The World Council of Indigenous Peoples delegation during the peace talks was mostly composed of the government recognized pan-Indian Colombian group, the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC). Representatives from ONIC stressed mutual recognition and respect between indigenous peoples and nation-states, probably to affirm ONIC’s close relationship with the Colombian government.40 This came at the expense of Rivera’s more substantive demands for change. MISURASATA also found itself deeply influenced by the National Indian Youth Council, based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The Youth Council provided Rivera with legal services and drafted many of Rivera’s statements during the negotiations.41 The recent history of Indian activism in the United States undoubtedly had an impact on how the Youth Council articulated Miskitu demands. The Youth Council’s executive director, Gerald Wilkinson, made direct parallels between the negotiations and the North American Indian struggle for self-determination. Throughout the negotiations, Wilkinson was “reminded by the efforts of Indians leaders in the USA to explain to federal bureaucrats the concept of tribal sovereignty and peoplehood in the 1960s. In fact the Sandinistas seem impressed by the degree of independence afforded Indians in the USA by the federal government.”42 Youth Council members led Rivera to formulate claims of Miskitu autonomy in much the same way that Indian activists in the United States had petitioned the federal government in the 1960s and 1970s. Youth Council lawyers chose to ignore historical sources that documented the Miskitu Kingdom.43 They may have feared a backlash from the United States and other settler-state governments. Throughout the nineteenth century, U.S. officials had refused to recognize the sovereignty of the Miskitu people. In 1848, Secretary of State John Clayton had declared that the United States “never can acknowledge the existence of any claim of sovereignty in the Miskito Kingdom or any other Indian claim in America. To do so would be to deny title of the United States to our own territory.” Clayton

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had gone on to say that “having always regarded Indian title as a mere right of occupancy, we can never agree that such a title should be treated otherwise than a thing to be extinguished at the will of the [state].”44 Youth Council members had many reasons to avoid antagonizing the U.S. government. For instance, staff lawyer James Anaya’s salary depended on funding through the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act.45 Moreover, Anaya seemed convinced that invoking the Miskitu Kingdom would be a poor strategy of negotiation. The Youth Council’s arguments for Indian sovereignty proved incompatible with the claims that Miskitu Indians had made prior to the 1980s based on what it considered to be Nicaragua’s illegal annexation of the Atlantic Coast in 1894. The Youth Council’s conception of sovereignty relied on the presumption that the Nicaraguan state would delegate governing power to the Atlantic Coast Indians. Youth Council lawyers persuaded Rivera to request an autonomous government derived from and partially administered by the state. Ironically, the Sandinista government began implementing the autonomy law on the Atlantic Coast with civilian Miskitus based on the demands made by MISURASATA. In disgust, Rivera declared that “the government’s so-called ‘autonomy statute’ is nothing more than a pseudo-project of administrative reorganization,” and he believed that Sandinista officials wished to “convert their opportunistic loyalists into the Government’s police for the control and repression of the Indian people.”46 Delegates from the World Council of Indigenous Peoples and the Youth Council persisted in asking the Sandinista government to grant the Miskitu people state-derived rights. Although Rivera succumbed to these groups and framed his demands accordingly, he continued to insist that the Sandinista army vacate the Atlantic Coast. Sandinista officials steadfastly refused. Rivera and many of his supporters left the discussions angry with FSLN leaders’ refusal to concede to MISURASATA demands, but Rivera had set forth conditions that the Sandinistas were unwilling to accept. The Center for World Indigenous Studies reminded Anaya that nation-states interpreted “sovereignty” and “autonomy” to mean something very limited when applied to indigenous nations, because international law did not apply to aboriginal people. Moreover, the Center argued that these terms did not help Rivera because he no longer had any political institutions through which to govern the Atlantic Coast. Since Rivera could not “act” autonomously without power delegated to him from the Nicaragua government, Rivera’s demands for the Nicaraguan army to vacate the Atlantic Coast only perplexed Sandinista negotiators.47

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The Center’s observations led Indian leaders in Bogotá to soften their demands. Ted Kennedy also played a role in this toning down of language; his suggestions pervaded the correspondence between the Center and the Youth Council.48 Rivera found himself caught between the reluctance of both Kennedy and Sandinista Comandante Tomás Borge to accede to any substantive Miskitu demands. Kennedy probably envisioned his role in the peace talks as the beginning of the end of the war in Nicaragua. Instead, Rivera refused to waver from his insistence that Sandinista forces leave the Miskitu territory, and the negotiations broke down after six months. Why did Borge, Kennedy, and so many international organizations become involved in a diplomatic effort that seems to have had no chance of success? MISURASATA had negligible military strength and controlled no territory, whereas the Sandinista army had reclaimed most of the Atlantic Coast by the time of the peace talks. Nevertheless, Managua felt that it needed to negotiate because inflammatory human rights reports threatened to incite an international response that the government desperately wanted to avoid. In May 1984, the Organization of American States Inter-American Commission released an account of glaring human rights abuses by the Sandinista army against the Miskitu Indians. Specifically, the army violated international law by relocating several Miskitu villages from the Río Coco River bordering Honduras to several inland settlements. The removal itself may have been warranted by the threat of Contra invasion from across the river, but the commission concluded that the Nicaraguan government transferred people with little notice and in an excessively violent manner. Bernard Nietschmann and Armstrong Wiggins, both of whom had close ties to Brooklyn Rivera, contributed the bulk of the testimony to the report. Soon after, the Americas Watch Committee published similar findings and received much greater attention.49 As a result, Nicaraguan leaders had to find a Miskitu with whom they could negotiate to alleviate this new international pressure. Rivera, proclaiming himself an Indian leader who refused U.S. assistance, was the best choice available. Comandante Borge agreed to consider Rivera as the legitimate leader of the Miskitu people during the very first Bogotá meeting.50 Thanks to international attention provided by human rights organizations, Rivera found himself in a position of power when he started negotiating with the government. It looked possible, even probable to some, that Rivera would succeed in gaining political autonomy for eastern Nicaragua. The Center for World Indigenous Studies and Senator Kennedy correctly predicted that MISURASATA would have difficulty claiming authority over

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a massive territory over which it had no control. Nevertheless, the Sandinista government seemed willing to grant the Atlantic Coast Indians some degree of self-government. Consequently, Rivera’s failure at the negotiating table did not stop international indigenous organizations or Kennedy from continuing to offer assistance to the Miskitu Indians. Many American Indian activists continued to support Rivera even as Rivera’s forces gradually renewed their alliances with the Contras. This support caused massive divisions within American Indian groups.

Fragmentation of the Indian Movement Many Indian leaders from the United States and Canada traveled to Nicaragua in 1984 and 1985 with the intention of extending the rights of selfdetermination to indigenous peoples on the Atlantic Coast. Ironically, they jeopardized their own organizations and the Native American social movement in general. Rather than returning north and forgetting about the Nicaraguan conflict after the peace talks broke down, many Indian leaders continued to support Brooklyn Rivera in a number of ways. They gave him media attention, helped secure funding for his guerrillas, and continued to offer legal assistance. Meanwhile, the Sandinista government began taking measures to restore order on the Atlantic Coast. In mid-1985, Comandante Borge gave relocated Miskitus permission to return to the Río Coco. And as a result of the MISURASATA ceasefire, foreign aid workers and researchers could safely travel to the coast for the first time since 1982.51 Thus, it became increasingly difficult for American Indians to support the Miskitu armed resistance without appearing conspicuously anti-Sandinista. The most immediate backlash from the Bogotá negotiations occurred when AIM member Russell Means condemned the Sandinistas. This organization had a reputation for being the most radical of American Indian activist groups, and it became famous after members stormed the Bureau of Indian affairs in 1972 and staged the seventy-one-day occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973.52 During the siege, FSLN cofounder Carlos Fonseca sent a typed letter to AIM expressing his support. By the 1980s, Vernon Bellecourt led AIM with his brother Clyde, and Vernon visited Nicaragua as a special guest of the Sandinistas five times between 1981 and 1986.53 Means played an important role in the organization’s early days, and his theatrical speeches made Means one of AIM’s more memorable spokespeople. However, Means stirred controversy by campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination with

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pornography entrepreneur Larry Flint in 1984. In November, Means sent a declaration to the organizers of the MISURASATA peace talks claiming to be “the leader of the American Indian Movement.” He assured the other participants of the negotiation rounds that “when the United States chooses to invade Nicaragua, AIM will be prepared to send in a brigade to kill off the American invaders, just as we are willing to support the fight of the Miskito against their Sandinista oppressors.”54 Means and his circle of followers began to articulate a position of solidarity with any mobilized Indian movement that trumped any consideration of geopolitics or political ideology. Means participated in the peace talks as a representative of the American Indian Movement without incident. The last round of negotiations occurred in May 1985, after which Means realized that the Sandinistas had ceased to communicate with MISURASATA. Nicaraguan government officials probably stopped negotiating because they were receiving greater support from civilian Miskitus in light of the ceasefire. But Means had invested much of his time and resources into Rivera’s struggle and could not accept these developments. He issued a press release in which he claimed to lead the American Indian Movement and vowed to recruit “90 warriors” to join him in Nicaragua to fight the Sandinistas. After reading this statement, Vernon Bellecourt officially expelled Means from AIM, and the two engaged in a media battle for the next several years. Bellecourt emphasized that no split had actually occurred and that Means’s egotistical personality had simply led him to become a “scout for the cavalry.” Moreover, Bellecourt insisted that Means’s “defection” would eventually be revealed to have been “orchestrated by Reagan and the CIA to overthrow the Sandinistas.” Means’s press releases appeared in major U.S. newspapers like the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, but these periodicals did not cover Bellecourt’s perspective.55 Apparently, Means could still invoke the militancy of the Red Power movement to attract non-Indian attention well into the 1980s. Bellecourt misjudged Means by blaming his “defection” on his personality, and several American Indian Movement members joined Means. Codirectors Glen Morris and Ward Churchill of AIM’s Colorado chapter threw their support behind Means.56 Moreover, Hank Adams and Clem Chartier, both veterans of Native American direct activism, joined Rivera and Means on an illegal trip to Nicaragua, where they filmed a short documentary and participated in several skirmishes with Sandinista troops. Means went on to join the “rabidly pro-Contra” Unification Church on a tour that showed the anti-Sandinista Lee Shapiro documentary, Nicaragua Was Our Home. Means

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made further headlines when, at one showing, a man stood up and yelled, “Lies! Bullshit! CIA Lies.” Means promptly walked to where the person was standing and punched him in the face.57 Although Means’s media histrionics alienated many Native Americans and critics of U.S. foreign policy, it increased awareness of the Miskitu insurgency, which groups like the Youth Council wanted. Staff lawyer James Anaya could not make public spectacles in the way that Means could because many supporters of the council opposed the Contra War. Nevertheless, Anaya knew about Means’s plans and encouraged them. Probably referring to the illegal trip that Means would take to Nicaragua, Anaya told Means, “I suggest that you try to get a hold of [Rivera] about working out you know what. The last time I talked with him, he said the logistical difficulties I discussed with you still exist.”58 The Youth Council stayed in constant contact with other groups that wrote publicity on Rivera’s behalf. It consistently updated its contact lists to include sympathetic organizations in places as far away as Sweden, as well as people like Bernard Nietschmann and Penny Lernoux, who wrote frequent editorials about the Miskitu resistance.59 The Youth Council created a propaganda machine of its own called Pana Pana in 1985. The Youth Council claimed that Pana Pana consisted of a newsletter and fundraising efforts for humanitarian aid on the Atlantic Coast. However, all the money that Pana Pana received was used to pay for the newsletter, which writers specifically designed to cast the Miskitu resistance as an Indian movement with no relationship to the Contras.60 Much like Means’s emphasis that the Miskitu insurgency was fundamentally an Indian movement, Pana Pana downplayed the importance of the Contra movement and its right-wing politics. The Youth Council helped Rivera and his guerrillas by giving them legal assistance, flying them to different places, and creating a nonprofit newsletter. The organization even offered Rivera emergency funds, at one point wiring MISURASATA $4,500 to be used for “gastos urgentes.”61 In their most astonishing feat, they helped assure that Congress awarded Rivera’s group $5 million of the $100 million awarded to the Contra forces in October 1986. Senator Kennedy “deputized” Anaya to act as a “conduit” between him and Rivera, and Kennedy succeeded in adding the allotment of millions of dollars to the massive 1986 aid bill.62 At speaking engagements, Rivera had told audiences that he would use the money for humanitarian purposes, but in fact he used at least $4 million for military expenses. Moreover, the CIA maintained ties with Rivera even after he left for Costa Rica.63

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Donors to the National Indian Youth Council had no way of knowing whether the CIA still funded Rivera, but Rivera’s acceptance of aid from Congress caused some benefactors to cease contributing to the Youth Council. The Youth Council’s first Pana Pana solicitation mailing provoked a drop in membership, with many exmembers resigning via handwritten notes on donation cards. One man’s response typified most replies. After checking, “I will not continue contributing,” he wrote in, “P.S. Because NIYC actively supports the opportunistic Brooklyn Rivera, whose support among Nicaraguan Indians is minimal and whose efforts work to the detriment of the Miskito, I cannot continue to support the NIYC. Please come to your senses.”64 This sudden spike in membership cancellations only added to the gradual loss of supporters that had begun when the National Indian Youth Council first sent Anaya to Nicaragua in December 1984. Executive Director Gerald Wilkinson responded to dissenters who sent the Youth Council formal letters. Wilkinson usually wrote that the Miskitus had no connection to the Contras and made the dubious claim that MISURASATA had in fact engaged Contras in several armed confrontations. These letters rarely persuaded Wilkinson’s critics.65 Nevertheless, the ability to obtain $5 million from Congress must have justified the loss of some constituents. The Youth Council played the paradoxical role of helping provide Rivera with military supplies, even as the organization discouraged Rivera from seeking political independence from Nicaragua. Many critics of the National Indian Youth Council asked Wilkinson why the council used so many of its resources in Nicaragua when the Indians in Guatemala appeared to be facing much more dire circumstances. In response, Wilkinson insisted that the council sympathized with the Indians in Guatemala but that the latter were not mobilized to the extent of Nicaraguan Indians. Wilkinson usually claimed that that the two situations were different because “the Indians in Nicaragua are in armed revolt against their government for their rights and while some Indians are fighting the government in Guatemala, Indians generally are not at this stage.”66 This was more than a rhetorical statement. The Youth Council had in fact reached out to Maya peoples in Guatemala, as well as Indians in countries such as El Salvador, Colombia, and Ecuador during the early 1980s. Nevertheless, only Rivera’s MISURASATA responded enthusiastically.67 American Indian activists that advocated militant Miskitu resistance increasingly came to be seen as right wing in the polarizing context of the Cold War. Colorado AIM member Ward Churchill, for example, struggled

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to defend his advocacy of Rivera’s forces in the late 1980s by using a MarxistLeninist argument to criticize the Sandinistas. Churchill declared that Leninist thought allowed for the right of nationalist minorities to secede, and that Borge and others had abandoned their own ideological framework by trying to assimilate the Miskitu into the Nicaraguan state.68 But other North American Indian activists continued to support the Sandinista government, and disagreements along ideological lines caused debilitating fractures among Native activists in the United States. A cadre of American Indian activists suffered considerable fragmentation within their groups in order to sustain Rivera’s efforts in Nicaragua. However, these Native Americans did not foresee that the Sandinistas would begin negotiating with other Miskitu organizations with considerably more success. A splinter group from the Honduras-based Miskitu insurgency called KISAN por la paz (KISAN for peace) began making peace overtures toward the Sandinistas, and the group made considerable progress toward attaining autonomy for the Atlantic Coast. A comandante from this new organization observed that the negotiations turned Rivera into “a political corpse begging to negotiate with the government.” Toward the end of the 1980s, it appeared that Rivera wielded almost no authority over the Miskitu population. Rivera made two attempts at reaching a deal with the Sandinista government in 1988, but these talks led to no substantial agreements. Moreover, immediately after the second round of 1988 meetings, Ortega issued a widely printed press release in which he claimed that “Rivera does not represent anyone. He came to ask that the government recognize and legalize the independence of the Atlantic Coast. This is totally absurd.”69 The FSLN had granted the Atlantic Coast political concessions through the April 1987 “autonomy law,” and Ortega believed that he had the firm support of civilian Miskitus. The autonomy statue created two autonomous zones on the Atlantic Coast and two powerful regional councils with representational power in the National Assembly. The autonomy law also provided birth and residency requirements for voters in the autonomous zones. In 1988, Fagoth and Rivera together reorganized the remnants of their forces in Honduras and Costa Rica into a political party called YATAMA, and Ortega believed that neither person had much support within Nicaragua. Yet, Ortega miscalculated. The Miskitu population voted overwhelmingly for YATAMA in the 1990 elections that ousted the FSLN from power, suggesting that most Miskitus still considered Fagoth and Rivera to be their traditional leaders.70

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The autonomy law has provided few clear benefits for the Miskitu people, and it has compelled Nicaraguan Indian activists to address their grievances through the apparatus of the state. Worse, the legislation has offered only vague suggestions about how much authority Miskitu people have over their own territory. The law guarantees that the autonomous government of the northern Atlantic Coast has the right only to participate in decisions made by the Nicaraguan state. 71 This accommodation of Miskitu views has resulted in a limited recognition of indigenous rights. One might ask why Miskitu people have not rejected the autonomy law and stressed their continuity with the sovereign Miskitu Kingdom. The answer lies in the complex role of global indigenous activism during the 1980s, which compelled even Rivera to forgo claims based on nineteenth century treaties. Recent work by social scientists suggests that some models of indigenous nationhood actually empower the state. Multicultural policies legitimize the state by rewarding indigenous groups who frame their demands within the spirit of law.72 One could compare the Miskitu Indian situation in the 1980s to that facing Native Hawaiians more recently. Kēhaulani Kauanui has argued that the current movement to grant Native Hawaiians domestic dependent nationhood seeks to delegitimize Native Hawaiian sovereign rights under international law. She contends that giving Native Hawaiians the same status as American Indian nations would allow the U.S. government to arrange a transfer of sovereignty from the Kingdom of Hawaii, which was illegally annexed in 1898, to the United States.73 Similarly, until the late 1970s Miskitu Indians claimed sovereignty over the Atlantic Coast in part by refusing to recognize Nicaraguan president José Santos Zelaya’s annexation of the Mosquito Coast in 1894. Indeed, the Miskitu responded to the annexation in 1894 by vigorously petitioning Britain to protect them and by staging their own militant resistance. The Miskitu were technically subjects of the British crown, which had formally recognized the Miskitu Kingdom. But the United States had a much greater stake in the Atlantic Coast by the 1890s, controlling 90 percent of all investments in the region. During most of the twentieth century, Miskitu Indians aligned ever more closely with the United States and the Moravian Church in an effort to protest what all of these parties saw as the illegal intrusion of Nicaraguan settlers.74 The 1980s saw a shift away from claims based on the Miskitu Kingdom of the nineteenth century. Instead, Miskitu leaders began to demand a form of domestic nationhood within Nicaragua. One outcome of the Contra War was that Nicaragua’s sovereignty over the Atlantic Coast

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became firmly entrenched. As Rivera catered to the legal advice of his indigenous allies from outside Nicaragua, references to the Miskitu’s history as a kingdom became thoroughly obscured by a set of demands that Sandinista officials found less threatening to the Nicaraguan state.

Conclusion Few scholars have approached the Miskitu-Sandinista conflict as an early instance of the global indigenous movement. Social scientists have argued that the struggle occurred as the result of either U.S. interference or the intrusion of Sandinista policies.75 Both explanations ignore the tremendous influence of international indigenous activism. Ties between Miskitu militants and American Indian activists shaped the trajectory of the resistance. MISURASATA abandoned its claims of sovereignty based on the 1860 Treaty of Managua in favor of a militant pan-Indianism that resembled the Red Power era of the United States. This had the paradoxical effect of limiting the scope of Miskitu demands. Even so, the Sandinista government successfully avoided making any substantive arrangement with militant Miskitus by recognizing Hazel Lau and other noncombatants as legitimate Miskitu voices. Moreover, indigenous organizations and Indian activists convinced Rivera to demand a form of recognition very similar to the autonomy law. After successfully helping to remove the FSLN from power in 1990, the Miskitu people found themselves confined to working within the autonomy legislation. Both U.S. imperialism and Sandinista policies in part provoked the Miskitu to militancy. But the emergence of global indigenous activism had an equally profound effect on the actions of Miskitus during the Contra War. The context of the Cold War had two significant and contradictory effects on the Miskitu resistance. On the one hand, U.S. interests in Nicaragua helped Miskitu leaders to negotiate a position of power despite their marginalization as an indigenous people in an economic periphery. U.S. involvement on the Atlantic Coast allowed the Miskitu to stage a sustained militant resistance movement that attracted the attention of countless international indigenous groups. Yet at the same time, the polarizing environment of the Cold War compelled the Miskitu and their indigenous allies to carefully frame their demands or risk falling squarely into one side of a left-right political binary. By the end of the 1980s, it became impossible to take a position on the Miskitu conflict without drawing criticism from the right or the left, and this had a devastating impact on the American Indian organizations that became involved.

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notes 1. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005), 56; Russell Means, Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 471–73. 2. In general, existing literature is divided between authors who stress U.S. imperialism vs. authors who emphasize Sandinista policies as the basis for Miskitu mobilization. Philippe Bourgois and Charles Hale, “The Atlantic Coast,” in Sandinista Nicaragua: An Annotated Bibliography with Analytical Introductions, ed. Neil Snarr (Ann Arbor: Pierian Press, 1989), 135–64; Charles Hale, Resistance and Contradiction: Miskitu Indians and the Nicaraguan State 1894–1987 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 17–18. 3. Interview with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, October 8, 2010. 4. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, interview by Ward Churchill, ca. 1990, tape #8, Robert E. Robideau American Indian Movement Papers, 1975–1994 (MSS 557 BC), box 25C, Center for Southwest Research, University Libraries, University of New Mexico (hereafter Robideau AIM Papers, box 25C, CSR Library). 5. Ibid. 6. At the outbreak of hostilities between the Miskitu Indians and the FSLN, roughly 67,000 Miskitus lived in the Atlantic Coast region of Nicaragua. There were also about 5,000 Sumus and 650 Ramas, as well as 25,000 Creoles and 175,000 mestizos. Carlos M. Vilas, State, Class, and Ethnicity: Capitalist Modernization and Revolutionary Change on the Atlantic Coast (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1989), 3–4. 7. Hale, Resistance and Contradiction, 132–33; Richard M. Adams, “The Dynamics of Societal Diversity: Notes from Nicaragua for a Sociology of Survival,” American Ethnologist 8, no. 1 (February 1981), 13–15. For a more thorough discussion of the Black Creole experience in the 1980s, see Edmund T. Gordon, Disparate Diasporas: Identity and Politics in an African Nicaraguan Community (Austin: University of Texas Press: 1998). 8. PANA PANA Newsletter 1, no. 1 (Fall 2006), National Indian Youth Council Records, 1935–2000 (MSS 707 BC), box 21, folder 27, Center for Southwest Research, University Libraries, University of New Mexico (hereafter NIYC Records, box 21, folder 27, CSR Library). 9. Hale, Resistance and Contradiction, 252n43. 10. Katherine Hoyt, The Many Faces of Sandinista Democracy (Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1997), 48–49. 11. “Nicaragua: Atlantic Coast Separatism,” CIA Document, December 19, 1980, Nicaragua Collection, Digitized National Security Archives, Washington, D.C. (hereafter Nicaragua DNSA); Vilas, State, Class, and Ethnicity, 123; Hale, Resistance and Contradiction, 78–80. 12. Vilas, State, Class, and Ethnicity, 125. 13. Elizabeth Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 266. 14. Hale, Resistance and Contradiction, 79. 15. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “The Miskito People, Ethnicity, and the Atlantic Coast,” in Committee for Solidarity with the Nicaraguan People, ca. 1984, Robert E. Robideau American Indian Movement Papers, box 17, folder 9, CSR Library; Hale, Resistance and Contradiction, 100. 16. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, interview by Ward Churchill, ca. 1990, tape #8, Robideau AIM

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17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

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Papers, box 25C, CSR Library; Stedman Fagoth, La Moskitia: autonomía regional: lamento indígena, ocaso de una raza que se resiste a fallecer, a pamphlet available in the Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin, S.1: s.n, 1985, 47; Hale, Resistance and Contradiction, 135, 125. Anupama Mande argues that earlier works essentialized Miskitus and Sandinistas, but she still interprets the conflict in ideological and cultural terms. Anupama Mande, “Subaltern Perspectives on a Revolutionary State: The Sandinista Miskito Conflict in Nicaragua: 1979–1990,” PhD thesis, Ohio State University, 1999. “Biographical Sketch of Steadman Fagoth Leader of Nicaragua’s Miskito, Sumo, and Rama (MISURA) Indians,” CIA document, September 10, 1984, reproduced in Declassified Documents Reference System (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2009) (hereafter DDRS); see also Bernard Nietschmann, The Unknown War: The Miskito Nation, Nicaragua, and the United States (New York: Freedom House, 1989), 33; Reynaldo Reyes and J. K. Wilson, Ráfaga: The Life Story of a Nicaragua Miskito Comandante (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 41. “FSLN Releases MISURASATA Leader, Steadman Fagoth,” Confidential, Cable, 01858, April 22, 1981, U.S. Embassy–Nicaragua, Nicaragua DNSA; “Miskito Leaders Hold Press Conference Confidential,” Cable, 05434, July 24, 1981, U.S. Embassy–Honduras, Nicaragua, DNSA. “Miskito Leader, Steadman Fagoth, to Visit U.S.,” Confidential, Cable, 03829, June 2, 1981, U.S. Embassy–Honduras, Nicaragua DNSA. “MISURASATA Affair Festers,” Confidential, Cable, 02001, May 4, 1981, U.S. Embassy– Nicaragua, Nicaragua DNSA. Centro de Investigaciones y Documentación de la Costa Atlántica, “Trabil nani: historical background and current situation on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua: a report of the Center for Research and Documentation of the Atlantic Coast,” 1984, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin. Hale, Resistance and Contradiction, 153, 257n23; Reyes and Wilson, Ráfaga, 142; “Nicaraguan Indian Denies Rebel Forces Massacred Villagers,” New York Times, July 15, 1984, 12. “Assessment of Recent Fighting and Shift in Contra Strategy,” Cable, 14 Oct 1983, U.S. Embassy–Nicaragua, DNSA; “Miskito Leadership,” Non-Classified, Memorandum, 18 Mar 1982, U.S. Embassy–Nicaragua, Nicaragua DNSA. “Arrest of Nicaraguan Indian Leaders: U.S. Private Interest,” Cable, 26 Feb 1981, U.S. Embassy–Nicaragua, Nicaragua DNSA. “Faction of the Democratic Revolutionary Alliance (ARDE) led by Eden Pastora rejects negotiations being carried out by Nicaragua Indian leader Brooklyn Rivera,” CIA document, 11 Dec 1984, DDRS; “GRN Details FDN [Nicaraguan Democratic Force] Camps in Honduras,” 9 Jan 1985, U.S. Embassy–Nicaragua, DNSA; “Leader of MISURA, Steadman Fagoth, accuses Brooklyn Rivera, MISURASATA (Miskito, Suma, Rama Sandinista Unity) leader of being a traitor because he went to Nicaragua to talk with Daniel Ortega,” November 2, 1984, CIA Document, DDRS. “Oliver North Notebook Entries for October 2, 1984,” North Diary, Iran-Contra Affair Collection, Digitized National Security Archives (hereafter Iran-Contra DNSA). “Indigenous Leaders Support MISURASATA 1985 Declaration of Bogota,” NIYC Records, box 21, folder 27, CSR Library; Nietschmann, The Unknown War, 67–89.

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28. Gerald Wilkinson to NIYC Board and Advisory Council, December 7, 1984, NIYC Records, box 21, folder 27, CSR Library; Gerald Wilkinson to NIYC Board and Advisory Council, February 23, 1984, NIYC Records, box 21, folder 27, CSR Library. 29. George Manuel, Fourth World: An Indian Reality (New York: Free Press, 1974), xvi. 30. Bernard Nietschmann, “Behind Bogota,” December 17, 1984, NIYC Records, box 21, folder 27, CSR Library. 31. Brooklyn Rivera, “Press Statement,” January 29, 1985, NIYC Records, box 21, folder 27, CSR Library. 32. Report by Bernard Nietschmann for Gerald Wilkinson, January 2, 1986, NIYC Records, box 21, folder 27, CSR Library. 33. National Congress of American Indians, “News Release,” January 29, 1984, NIYC Records, box 21, folder 27, CSR Library. 34. World Council of Indigenous Peoples, “Bogotá Declaration,” March 27, 1985, NIYC Records, box 21, folder 27, CSR Library; Nietschmann, The Unknown War, 87. 35. Gerald Wilkinson to Ann Maytag, December 20, 1984, NIYC Records, box 21, folder 27, CSR Library. 36. Bernard Nietschmann, “Geography and Fourth World Resources: Rights and Wars,” NIYC Records, box 21, folder 27, CSR Library. 37. Ironically, MISITAN would soon present a list of militant demands to the FSLN. As overt conflict began to erupt, the Sandinista government cut off MISITAN’s funds and ceased recognizing it, causing the organization to collapse. Hale, Resistance and Contradiction, 176 38. Brooklyn Rivera, “Press Statement,” January 19, 1985, NIYC Records, box 21, folder 27, CSR Library. 39. MISURASATA, “Por el territorio, cultura y autonomia indígena,” NIYC Records, September 12, 1985, box 21, folder 27, CSR Library. 40. “Declaration of Indigenous Leaders,” September 1985, NIYC Records, box 21, folder 27, CSR Library; World Council of Indigenous Peoples, “Bogotá declaration,” March 27, 1985, NIYC Records, box 21, folder 27, CSR Library; Jean E. Jackson, “Contested Discourses of Authority in Colombian National Indigenous Politics,” in Indigenous Movements, Self-Representation, and the State in Latin America, ed. Kay B. Warren and Jean E. Jackson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 83, 93. 41. James Anaya to Brooklyn Rivera, confidential letter, April 11,1985, NIYC Records, box 22, folder 4, CSR Library. 42. Gerald Wilkinson to Ann Maytag, December 20,1984, NIYC Records, box 21, folder 27, CSR Library. 43. Historical documents with notes, NIYC Records, box 21, folder 27, CSR Library. 44. Quoted in Bill Means, “Who Oppresses the Indian?,” November 15, 1986, NIYC Records, box 23, folder 17, CSR Library. 45. Leslie Dunbar to Robert Coulter, July 8, 1980, Field Foundation Archives, box 2T61, “Indian Law Resource Center 1981,” Dolph Briscoe Center for American Research, University of Texas at Austin. 46. MISURASATA, “MISURASATA ATKLAKLABRIKA BA,” September 25, 1985, NIYC Records, box 22, folder 5, CSR Library. 47. Center for World Indigenous Studies (Rudy) to Jim Anaya, August 23, 1985, NIYC Records, box 22, folder 5, CSR Library.

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48. Center for World Indigenous Studies to Jim Anaya, ca. January 1985, NIYC Records, box 22, folder 5, CSR Library. 49. Americas Watch Committee, The Miskitos in Nicaragua 1981–1984, November 1984, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin; “Testimony of Armstrong Wiggins,” Indian Law Resource Center, before the OAS Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, May 11, 1984, NIYC Records, box 21, folder 27, CSR Library. 50. “Acuerdo de Bogotá,” December 8, 1984, NIYC Records, box 21, folder 27, CSR Library. 51. Hale, Resistance and Contradiction, 3–4; Dunbar-Ortiz, Blood on the Border, 56. 52. Paul Chatt Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New York: The New Press, 1996). 53. “Dates of Visit by Vernon Bellecourt to Nicaragua,” ca. 1994, Robideau AIM Papers, box 19, folder 26, CSR Library. 54. Means, Where White Men Fear to Tread, 443; “Declaration of Russell Means,” November 11, 1984, NIYC Records, box 22, folder 9, CSR Library. 55. Robert Robideau, Handwritten Note, ca. 1990, Robideau AIM Papers, box 19, folder 26, CSR Library; “In Solidarity with the American Indian Movement,” The National Alliance (New York), March 14, 1986, 4–6; “On the Side of the Revolution, Interview with Vernon Bellecourt,” The Talking Leaf (Los Angeles), February 1986, vol. 1, no. 2, 1; “American Indians to Fight Sandinista Regime,” Los Angeles Times, December 28, 1985, 10; Stephen Kinzer, “U.S. Indians Enlist in the Miskito Cause,” New York Times, November 11, 1985, A3. 56. Glen Morris and Ward Churchill, “Colorado AIM Position,” November 14, 1985, NIYC Records, box 22, folder 10, CSR Library. 57. Quote is Means’s own words. Means, Where White Men Fear to Tread, 470–79. 58. James Anaya to Russell Means, July 3, 1985, NIYC Records, box 22, folder 5, CSR Library. 59. Support group mailing lists, 1986–1988, NYIC Records, box 23, folder 21, CSR Library. 60. “Announcing the Formation of Pana Pana,” ca. 1985, NYIC Records, box 23, folder 14, CSR Library; “Pana Pana Finance Reports, 1986–1987,” NYIC Records, box 23, folder 17, CSR Library. Pana Pana 1, no. 1 (Fall 1986), NYIC Records, box 22, folder 1, CSR Library. 61. Gerald Wilkinson, “Proposal: To Continue to Provide Assistance to the Indians of Nicaragua in their Effort to Negotiate a Peace Settlement with the Sandinista Government,” undated, NYIC Records, box 22, folder 10, CSR Library; “Recibo,” February 6, 1986, NYIC Records, box 22, folder 3, CSR Library. 62. Edward Kennedy to James Anaya, 9 Feb 1988, NIYC Records, box 23, folder 7, CRS Library. 63. Kay Bird, “Indian Rebel Leader Speaks,” New Mexico Daily Lobo (Albuquerque), September 5, 1986, 1, 3; “Budget for the Aid Approved by the United States Congress for the MISURASATA Indian Resistance,” ca. 1986, NIYC Records, box 22, folder 1, CRS Library; “North Notebook Entries for July 6, 1985,” North Diary, July 6, 1985, Iran-Contra DNSA. 64. Rejected donation forms, 1985–1987, NIYC Records, box 22, folder 5, CSR Library. 65. Gerald Wilkinson to Alan White, 17 Feb 1986, NIYC Records, box 22, folder 1, CSR Library. 66. Gerald Wilkinson to Mollie Siegal, March 3, 1986, NIYC Records, box 22, folder 1, CSR Library.

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67. “International Project Activities,” 1984, Field Foundation Archives, box 2T56, folder NIYC 1985, Dolph Briscoe Center for American Research, University of Texas at Austin. 68. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, interview by Ward Churchill, ca. 1990, tape #8, Robideau AIM Papers, box 25C, CSR Library. 69. Reyes and Wilson, Ráfaga, 157; Nietschmann, The Unknown War, 83–87; Stephen Kinzer, “Hard-line Contra May Attend Talks: Rebel Commander’s Presence Could Mean New Fighting if Current Truce Lapses,” New York Times, May 22, 1988, 6. 70. Hale, Resistance and Contradiction, 112, 196–97; James Anaya, Indigenous Peoples and International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 115. 71. Ibid. 72. Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition, 267–68. 73. J Kēhaulani Kauanui, “Precarious Positions: Native Hawaiians and US Federal Recognition,” The Contemporary Pacific 17, no. 1 (2005): 3, 19. 74. Hale, Resistance and Contradiction, 37, 40, 48–56. 75. Ibid., 264n48.

· Ch a p t er Eight ·

Doctors Within Borders Cuban Medical Diplomacy to Sandinista Nicaragua, 1979–1990

5 K . Ch e a st y A n der son

In 1979, when the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN)

won its struggle to oust the Somoza dictatorship from Nicaragua, the victorious revolutionaries inherited a nation ravaged not only by war but also by decades of neglect. In addition to problems engendered by economic devastation and a literacy rate of approximately 35 percent, Nicaragua possessed some of the Western Hemisphere’s most appalling health statistics. The number one cause of death was diarrhea, and the official infant mortality rate, which was grossly underreported, was eighty-seven out of every one thousand live births. Almost one half of the population did not have even a latrine, and health services were completely unavailable to 72 percent of the population.1 The new Sandinista government quickly declared that providing comprehensive health care would be one of its key obligations to the Nicaraguan people. In order to implement this ambitious social reform, however, they would need assistance. The new government found an able and willing ally in Fidel Castro, a staunch supporter of the Nicaraguan Revolution. Within a week of the Sandinista victory, the Cubans were on their way to Nicaragua. Opposition groups have rightly criticized the Sandinista regime over the years for ineffectively managing agrarian reform, mishandling the economy, and suppressing dissent. In fact, the time is now ripe for an academic debate 200

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about the causes and nature of these shortcomings. A monocular focus on these failures, however, obscures the Sandinista government’s signal triumph: its health care program. From 1979 until 1990, Nicaragua’s Ministry of Health (MINSA), with help from Cuba and other donor nations, built up its hospital network and expanded a nationwide free primary health care system that relied on a distribution of power to the regions, community organization, popular health education, and high levels of popular participation. This system, not coincidentally, was a near replica of the world-renowned health care program in Cuba.2 The Sandinistas’ efforts were so successful that by 1983 Nicaragua was added to the World Health Organization’s short list of countries that provided full-coverage health care to its populations.3 Through systematic, well-planned vaccination and sanitation campaigns, MINSA eradicated polio while greatly reducing levels of measles, whooping cough, diarrhea, respiratory disease, leishmaniasis, malaria, and dengue, all of which were previously endemic, especially in rural areas. Nicaragua could not have done this without Cuba’s technical, material, and advisory support. During the revolution (1974–79), Somoza’s National Guard bombed most of the nation’s hospitals. In the revolution’s aftermath, some 30–40 percent of Nicaragua’s doctors left the country, while Somoza himself emptied the national treasury of all but $3 million on his way out of the country. To further complicate the problems engendered by this lack of personnel and the financial crisis, the erstwhile guerrillas who undertook governance of the Nicaraguan state were young and inexperienced. The oldest member of the FSLN directorate in 1979, Tomás Borge, was only thirtynine years old, and he was almost a decade senior to many other leaders. Some had attended college; few had finished their degrees. Many had dropped out of medical or law school to devote themselves entirely to the revolution. As a result, the new government was, almost from the moment it took power, in crisis. Given its almost total lack of resources in 1979, and the deteriorating economic conditions Nicaragua faced as the 1980s wore on, Nicaragua’s government ministries relied upon foreign assistance programs to maintain services. For example, MINSA depended heavily upon Cuban aid. Among people interested in Nicaragua’s recent history, it is commonly understood that during the Sandinista regime, Cuba assisted the fledgling Ministry of Health in its efforts to build a nationwide socialist health care system.4 It is not, however, broadly realized just exactly how critical that aid was, or how pervasive the Cuban presence in Nicaragua was during the 1980s. Among Nicaraguans, on the other hand, there is a strong cultural memory of

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Cuba’s role during the Sandinista government. As one Managua taxi driver put it, “Señorita, those Cuban doctors were everywhere. In every hospital, in every clinic, in the cities and in the most rural communities in the country. In those days you couldn’t get up to use the restroom without tripping over a Cuban.”5 This Cuban presence meant different things to different people; to Sandinista loyalists, it was a positive presence, and the work they did was laudatory in the extreme. Opponents to the revolution or the Sandinista government felt quite the opposite. Nonetheless, fieldwork conducted in Managua, Matagalpa, and the rural mountainous north from 2008 to 2010 confirmed that most Nicaraguans agree that health care reform was one of the Sandinista government’s finest achievements. What’s more, Nicaraguans freely acknowledge the importance of foreign assistance to that success, and—whether openly or begrudgingly—they point to Cuban contributions as particularly indispensable. This is not to say that there are not vocal detractors of Sandinista policies and Cuba’s involvement therein, but a vast majority of more than one hundred oral history informants concur with newspaper accounts and government documentation. Without Cuban aid, the Nicaraguan Ministry of Health would have been unable to achieve even a fraction of what it accomplished. But what was the nature of this aid? In the fraught political climate of the Cold War, this health care program was invested with meanings, both sinister and noble, by advocates of capitalism and communism, respectively. Was Cuban activity in Nicaragua, as the United States feared, an attempt to convert Nicaragua into another beachhead for communism in the Western Hemisphere? In particular, were Cuba’s permanent medical brigades and policy advisors merely a clever disguise for political propagandists to penetrate the government bureaucracy? Were doctors and nurses inculcating a communist fervor in the deepest rural reaches of the Nicaraguan countryside? Or, as the Cuban medical professionals themselves saw the project, were they simply acting on a commitment to humanitarianism and a sense of moral obligation rooted in the desire to build a postrevolutionary utopian society? As historians digest events of the recent past and attempt to understand the actions of governments within a geopolitical context, all too often the “lived reality” of these struggles goes understudied. This chapter examines the impact of Cuban aid-based foreign diplomacy on the development of a socialist health care system in Sandinista Nicaragua. By focusing on the local and the personal as well as the global, this study explores not only what Cuba’s

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aid to Nicaragua meant vis-à-vis the Cold War and U.S.–Latin American relations, but also how the Cuban medical aid program to Sandinista Nicaragua shaped the lives of citizens and participants. A careful reading of oral histories, newspaper accounts, MINSA documents, and secondary sources allows for a fairly comprehensive reconstruction of the general themes and quotidian realities of the ongoing Cuban medical mission to Nicaragua and points to several conclusions.6 First, in spite of the broad perception that Cuba was a magnanimous donor nation, the relationship between Cuba and Nicaragua was a mutually beneficial one. Though Nicaragua unquestionably received the lion’s share of benefits in the relationship, Cuba perceived both practical and nontangible advantages in maintaining a permanent medical mission to Nicaragua. In practical terms, Cuba saw its support of the Sandinista government as part of its global mission to promote its health care policy and oppose the hegemony of the capitalist United States in Latin America. Thus, Cuba helped the socialist Sandinista government succeed by building and maintaining social services throughout Nicaragua. Nontangible benefits the Cuban government perceived included the continuing education Cuban medical workers received as they worked in abysmal Third World health conditions. Cuba had long since eradicated such conditions at home. In theory, then, an ancillary benefit to this exposure was to sustain revolutionary buy-in among its medical workers. The Castro government encouraged its health brigades to reflect upon the benefits of life in communist Cuba relative to the public health disaster that “capitalist” Nicaragua had become under the Somoza dictatorship. Second, despite U.S. and international fears that Cuba was using its medical missions as a propaganda tool, it appears that humanitarian aid was the primary purpose of the Cuba’s medical diplomacy. The Cuban government structured its medical workers’ experiences in ways that—as much as possible—curtailed their lives to the professional and restricted the extent to which they could engage in politics or form personal relationships with Nicaraguans. These efforts, by and large, were successful, though there were significant gaps in enforcement. Therefore, though Cuba’s broad geopolitical agenda was indeed to promote communism and revolution, the manner in which it managed its deployed medical brigades limited the extent to which its health workers in Nicaragua were able to promote communist ideology. Last, evidence shows that the Nicaraguan government reinforced Cuba’s efforts to isolate its medical workers from full social and cultural integration with the communities they served. Despite being modeled upon and reliant

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upon the Cuban Ministry of Public Health, the Nicaraguan Ministry of Health was at pains to maintain the illusion of autonomy and, if not selfsufficiency, at least self-determination. Although by all accounts the Cuban presence was numerically overwhelming in the realm of health care, government reports consistently elided the existence of large numbers of Cubans in Nicaragua. With a few exceptions, a researcher using only Nicaraguan government documentation would be hard-pressed to conclude that Cuba did more than minimal aid work in Sandinista Nicaragua. Newspaper accounts and oral histories, however, praise the numerous brigades of Cuban doctors and nurses to the point of tribute. This tendency to simultaneously minimize and mythologize the Cuban medical worker buttressed the Castro government’s attempt to isolate its workers from social integration. Thus, although a traditional Cold War interpretive lens would cast Cuba as the tireless promoter of communism in the struggle against capitalism, in the realm of health care, the reality was vastly more complex than such a straightforward binary construction. Without a doubt, the Castro government did see its role in Nicaragua as critical to beating back U.S. capitalist hegemony. Without Cuba’s military, material, and financial support, the Sandinista government might have toppled to the U.S.-backed Contra War in short order. Medical diplomacy was critical to legitimizing the Sandinistas’ ability to follow through on their revolutionary promises, but in their view was not, ipso facto, central to the Cold War struggle against capitalism. On an advisory level, the Cubans certainly advocated building a system modeled upon their own, but the Sandinistas were not passive recipients of this aid, and the Cubans were remarkably cautious in the delegation of medical brigades throughout the country. Although the Reagan administration cast a broad accusation of communist propaganda across any and all Cuban activity in Nicaragua, neither Cuba nor Nicaragua saw this arrangement as an intrinsic part of winning the global Cold War. In the words of one Cuban doctor, “Propaganda? That’s funny. We didn’t even have enough time to grab a bite to eat between treating patients. Talking politics was the last thing on my mind.”7

Global Impact of Cuban Aid in Light of the Cold War As the lone representative of international communism in the Western Hemisphere, Cuba often opposed the United States during the Cold War period. After the 1962 missile crisis, Cuba avoided direct military confrontation with the United States, but it continued working in subtler ways to

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undercut the power of the capitalist hegemon to the north. Its major objective was to support revolutionary movements spreading throughout Latin America and Africa in the second half of the twentieth century and, through that support, to reinforce the potential benefits of communism as an alternative to capitalism. Funding, arming, training, and advising revolutionary groups throughout the Third World, providing disaster relief, medical aid, training for doctors, educational resources and teachers, and negotiating international accords with other governments are examples of Cuba’s approach to Cold War geopolitics.8 In 1963, Cuba began a policy of providing direct medical aid to Third World countries, a policy it continues to the present day. The program grew so dramatically that by 1985, the New York Times wrote that Cuba had “perhaps the largest Peace Corps-style program of civilian aid in the world.”9 At the time of that writing, there were approximately 1,500 doctors serving in twentyfive countries—more than the World Health Organization (WHO) at the same time.10 In Healing the Masses, Julie Feinsilver provides a list of thirty-two countries receiving Cuban medical aid as of 1988, listed chronologically by the date the aid began. They are as follows: 1963 Algeria 1965 Mali 1966 Congo 1966 Tanzania 1967 Guinea-Conakry 1969 Vietnam 1972 Democratic (South) Yemen 1973 Equatorial Guinea 1973 Laos 1975 Guinea-Bissau 1976 Angola 1976 Cape Verde Islands 1976 Guyana 1976 São Tome and Príncipe 1977 Benin 1977 Ethiopia

1977 Mozambique 1977 Saharan Arab Republic 1978 Iraq 1979 Kampuchea 1979 Nicaragua 1979 Uganda 1980 Burundi 1980 Seychelles 1983 Ghana 1985 Burkina Faso 1985 Kuwait 1986 Sri Lanka 1986 Zimbabwe 1988 Botswana 1988 Maldives

Grenada (until October 1983) and Jamaica (until 1981) also received Cuban medical aid.”11 Quick reflection on this list makes apparent the Cuban objective to provide aid to countries with political climates friendly to Cuba’s communist ideology.

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Thus, international medical aid was (and continues to be) an example of Cuba’s policy of promoting revolutionary objectives in Latin America in order to undermine U.S. hegemony in the region. Cuba’s well-established tradition of supporting health care in underdeveloped nations was not, principally, a challenge to U.S. foreign policy, though in some cases that was certainly a much-appreciated side effect.12 In Nicaragua the Cubans worked to support the Sandinista regime at the same time the United States was funding, training, and organizing the Contra War. Thus, although outright war was never declared between the United States and Cuba, they were nonetheless positioned on opposite sides of a war in which they both had a vested interest in the outcome. This sort of jockeying for influence and power was in line with key geopolitical aspects of the Cold War, which didn’t always include direct military confrontation. Broadly, Cuba’s global focus on health promotion was also a direct challenge to a history of U.S. policy in Nicaragua that, with only a few exceptions, limited investment in social services.13 In his preface to Julie Feinsilver’s Healing the Masses, David Apter writes that in Cuba, “health care as a form of political outreach became one of the dominant narratives of the Cuban revolution. . . . Indeed, good medical practice [was] part of the historic and inversionary struggle against imperialism in general and American instances of such imperialism in particular.”14 In the case of Nicaragua, increasing the accessibility and quality of health care became, as Feinsilver writes, “symbolic of the contrast between socialism and capitalism, with aspects of U.S. society (and dependent capitalist societies) symbolic of capitalism’s inherent inequality and failure to provide [José] Marti’s goal, . . . a life of dignity.”15 In keeping with this sociopolitical orientation and a deepseated belief in the superior virtues of socialism and communism, Cuba maintained a steady flow of personnel, administrators, advisors, medical supplies, and technical assistance to Nicaragua’s Ministry of Health throughout the eleven years of Sandinista rule.

Intra-Regional Relationships in Latin America during the Cold War Period In spite of the strong arguments to be made for viewing Cuban aid to Nicaragua within the traditional concept of a Cold War framework—one in which the capitalist West and the communist bloc battle for supremacy—this

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is far from the only, or even most important, lens through which we can examine the relationship between Cuba and Nicaragua during the 1980s. Understanding the relationship between these two leftist governments—one well established, one emergent—in a hemisphere whose recent history had been shaped and dominated by the United States is critical to grasping the full scope of Cold War geopolitics in Latin America.16 The process of examining the power dynamics within the Latin American and Caribbean Basin states is key to understanding the intraregional considerations of the Cold War in Latin America. Looking at the ways Latin American states aligned and grouped themselves to either attract or rebuff U.S. involvement in regional issues opens up a different lens for understanding Latin American geopolitics. For example, throughout the Cold War period, postrevolutionary Cuba tried to position itself to assume a mantle of authority and responsibility within the Latin American and Caribbean region. As the sole communist state in the Western Hemisphere, Cuba was the first government many Latin American revolutionary groups contacted for help. Besides Nicaragua, other Central and South American leftist factions, from communist parties to revolutionary groups, kept open lines of communication with Castro’s Cuba, often soliciting advice, financing, military training, and public support.17 In this way, Cuba became, if not a global power, certainly a somewhat effective counterweight to the force of U.S. regional hegemony. Most visibly, Cuba exercised its authority in that respect through its medical aid programs, which by the 1980s were well organized and internationally well regarded. In becoming the bearer of aid, the seat of technical know-how, and the provider of substantial sums of money, material, and personnel, Cuba took on an almost paternalist role vis-à-vis regional revolutionary and communist movements, a role it took very seriously.

Cuban Medical Diplomacy to Nicaragua: National and Regional Cuba’s quasi-paternalism is evident in the case study of Nicaragua. Although there was much talk of Cuban brigadistas (brigade members) being compañeros de salud (comrades in health), in reality there was little doubt that Cuba was in charge. In every aspect of the arrangement between the two countries, Cuba was the leader, the teacher, and the donor. Nicaragua, though it took pains to present an image of autonomy and downplayed the importance

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of Cuban aid in MINSA’s official documentation and language, was the recipient of Cuba’s largesse. Cuban aid to Nicaragua’s Ministry of Health consisted of several components: a ministry-level advisory role; the provisioning of materials, equipment, and financing for health care; training and education for medical professionals; and the staffing of hospitals and health posts with nurses, doctors, specialists, and support personnel. Even a cursory glance reveals the extent to which Nicaragua’s MINSA mirrored Cuba’s Ministerio de Salud Pública (MINISAP). Just like Cuba, the Sandinistas built a hierarchical structure of rural health posts, urban health centers, polyclinics, and regional hospitals. This system functioned like a funnel; thousands of small units (the health posts) stationed in rural areas and urban neighborhoods took care of preventive and rudimentary health care. Usually staffed by nurses and volunteer brigadistas, health posts referred cases beyond their capacity to the bigger health centers. Hundreds of health centers, usually staffed by at least one doctor, were located in towns and larger sections of cities. They took care of more serious illnesses, minor operations, and so on. Anything a health center could not handle went to the small hospitals, of which there was one in each medium-sized city, and from there, to one of seven regional hospitals. There were several even larger hospitals in Managua, some of which were known for a particular specialty—obstetrics, ophthalmology, and pediatrics, for example. In Cuba, the structured reorganization of clinical medicine began in the 1960s with the institution of a sectorized system that integrated clinical medicine and public health outreach by making local nurse-physician teams responsible for the health of a bureaucratically designated community sector (usually based on population).18 In Nicaragua, that same idea of sectorizing and regionalizing was the basis of the Sandinista attempt to build a national health care network based on primary care. Though Nicaragua lacked the resources to fully staff nurse-doctor teams as Cuba did, MINSA nonetheless did its best to assign nurses and doctors to specific sectorized areas of cities, towns, and rural enclaves. Following the Cuban model, MINSA inserted doctors into rural communities via compulsory social service assignments. The ministry also recruited and trained local health volunteers (brigadistas) to educate and monitor local populations. Prior to 1979, in any given region, one privately owned hospital had been the only health resource for hundreds of thousands

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of people. For the poor, it was rare to receive the care they needed; often they relied upon missionary and charity health clinics, which were able to treat only the tiniest fraction of the population in need of care. Within a short period after the revolution, the Sandinistas, with help from Cuban and other international aid donors, had made health accessible not only to the urban elite, but also to the urban and rural poor for the first time. The system was far from flawless, but given the almost total absence of health care nationwide prior to the revolution, the change was remarkable for its breadth, depth, and the speed with which the network was built. Dora María Téllez, minister of health from 1984 to 1990, frankly acknowledged the extent to which her ministry relied upon the Cuban example. “Whenever we didn’t know what to do, or how to resolve a problem, we looked for the most simple and effective solution. Many times—not always, but often—the example of the Cuban Ministry of Public Health gave us a good example to follow.”19 The permanent seat occupied by a “Cuban advisor” in MINSA’s main advisory council reflects the extent of Cuba’s integration into the bureaucracy of the Nicaraguan MINSA.20 By the mid-1980s the seat was usually vacant at monthly meetings, but Dr. Téllez asserted in an interview that “by then we didn’t need him there every time, but earlier on, the advisor was always there.”21 Many of Nicaragua’s national health priorities mimicked contemporary health projects in Cuba. For example, beginning in 1981, then minister of health Lea Guido launched a mother-infant health program (maternoinfantil) that was closely modeled on the successful materno-infantil program that Cuba promoted in 1977. Nicaragua’s project mandated a series of health care norms, among them being: “Early detection of pregnancy; early consultation with the obstetrical health team, provision of at least nine prenatal examinations and consultations for women in urban areas and six for women in rural areas; education about hygiene, health during pregnancy, childbirth, and childcare, among other topics; special prenatal attention to women considered at high obstetrical risk; psychological counseling with regard to childbirth; instruction in birth exercises; and finally, provision that all childbirth take place in hospitals.”22 Given shortages in personnel, problematic infrastructure, difficulty in accessing the rural interior, and the worsening Contra War, MINSA could not enforce all of these norms effectively. Large numbers of women still gave birth at home with midwives, and in war zones few women approached the prescribed six prenatal visits with

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a doctor.23 Nonetheless, in most urban zones and in many rural areas, Guido oversaw a radical transformation in both maternal and infant health and a steep decline in these respective mortality rates. This Cuban-inspired program became the capstone of Guido’s tenure in the ministry, and its effects were long lasting. Even in 2008, at the time of the research conducted for this chapter, women’s health cooperatives and local midwives still relied on many of the educational materials and methods emphasized in the early 1980s. For example, MINSA promoted oral rehydration units (ORU) that were so effective at preventing infant death from dehydration that women began mixing the solution at home. To this date, infant mortality rates due to dehydration and diarrhea have remained far below the statistical high-water mark of the 1970s.24 In addition, many midwives interviewed still used the training manuals and mimeographed information sheets they were given during the 1980s.25 On a regional level, the Cuban role as advisor was more limited. Dr. Orlando Rizo, former regional director for Region VI (Matagalpa and the Mountainous North), indicated that only in Managua did MINSA offices have a Cuban advisor. In Matagalpa and in other regions, he said, the Cubans had the capacity to shape health policy, but only at a local level. For example, a Cuban surgeon at the regional hospital might share ideas about resource allocation, or a doctor serving at a local health post could point out a place where people were not getting equal access to health resources.26 Thus, at a national level, the advisory role of the Cuban medical presence was more clearly defined and formalized, and on the regional and local levels, more informal. Nationally, Cuba not only provided an important advisory role, it was also an abundant source of much-needed medicines and medical equipment throughout the 1980s. The commitment to send a medical mission did not just relate to sending doctors and nurses. Cuba also undertook to fully equip the teams with everything they needed—from food and clothing to medicines, syringes, surgical equipment, bandages, and the like. By ship and by plane, reliable consignments arrived on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis for more than a decade. Sister Sandra Price, a U.S. citizen working in the remote mountain town of Siuna, remembers the Cuban ship that came once a month to Puerto Cabezas with medicines, vaccines, and medical supplies for the Atlantic Coast and mountainous interior. Especially during the hardest years of the Contra War, Price commented, “That Cuban shipment was the only thing that kept us in any kind of health during that time. You know, the Sandinistas did a good job, and they really did the best they could, but

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because of the war, they just couldn’t get to us all the time. The Cuban shipments kept us going.”27 Without invoices or inventories of shipments, it is challenging to estimate exact quantities of aid, but oral histories indicate that Cuba was committed to a substantial level of material donation for the duration of the Sandinista regime. To combat equipment shortages or to provide health care services for which Nicaragua was unequipped, Cuba also brought Nicaraguans in dire need of complicated surgical procedures to Cuban hospitals for those treatments. Many sources spoke about this service, noting that a plane would leave for Cuba once a week with Nicaraguans in need of intensive treatment. The Cuban government would provide free room, board, health care, and transportation. “That was one of the only good things, how they would take care of the sick and wounded like that,” said Gabriel Pérez Rosales, a Nicaraguan teacher who in all other respects was highly critical of Cubans as a people and Cuban involvement in Nicaragua.28 Cubans serving on medical missions served not only as doctors and nurses, but also as educators and administrators. Cubans staffed positions at the medical schools and at training academies for nurses and nurse assistants. One of the first orders of business MINSA undertook in the aftermath of the revolution was increasing the number of medical students studying in any one cohort. In order to do this MINSA first expanded the class size at the medical college in León. By December of 1979, that school had enrolled a class of five hundred students, a ten-fold increase over earlier class sizes.29 Second, the ministry founded a second medical college in Managua in 1982. Many Cuban doctors and administrators served long missions at Nicaraguan medical schools in order to provide enough teachers for these larger classes, expand the number of specialties the schools offered, increase the quality of the medical education, and administer an efficient degree program.30 Lastly, Cuban medical aid took the form most commonly imagined: doctors, nurses, and technical support staff worked in hospitals, health centers, and rural health posts, working directly with the Nicaraguan people. These Cuban doctors were not, according to the Cuban-Nicaraguan agreement, technically allowed to supervise Nicaraguan doctors, but outside of Managua, in practice, this stricture was widely ignored. Dr. Félix Sosa Mas recounted a story in which he worked as a medical resident in the hospital at Jinotega, a position that was subordinate to the attending Nicaraguan physician. Dr. Sosa Mas found, however, that his attending physician often

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deferred to him, the Cuban medical resident, in matters of significance.31 Miguel Angel Estupiñán, a Cuban nurse, commented that upon arriving at his post in Matagalpa, he immediately found the need to take charge of the ward in which he worked to ensure that the best medical practices were followed.32 Despite the imbedded nature of Cuban medical work in Nicaragua, the Cuban government shaped the experience of its health workers in ways that emphasized their separateness from the Nicaraguan people at the same time that Cuban medical workers personally participated in creating social change at the local, personal level. Though the doctors and nurses working in Nicaragua engaged with the communities at health posts, teaching facilities, and in hospitals, they lived in separate quarters.33 The doctors had almost nothing in the way of spending money; the Cuban government provided everything for them from food to clothing to equipment.34 The brigadistas came and left on a fixed schedule—they worked in Nicaragua for a two year period and then returned to Cuba. The mission chiefs discouraged fraternization and often required Cuban doctors to travel in pairs at all times. This “together but separate” ethos enforced a paradigm in which the Cuban government tried to hold its workers both apart from and above the Nicaraguan state while at the same time standing in solidarity with the Sandinistas against hostile U.S. and counterrevolutionary actions. This position reflected Cuba’s confidence in what by the 1980s was a wellorganized mechanism of providing international medical aid. As highly organized professional teams, Cuban medical workers arrived with the understanding that they were to work rigorously, serving a higher revolutionary goal. Socializing with locals was subordinate to the task at hand.35 The restrictive lifestyle conditions, however, also addressed Cuban fears of their medical workers defecting to a capitalist society while serving abroad. These doctors were being temporarily deployed, not permanently relocated, so acculturation had to be curtailed.36 Cuba sent medical missions to Nicaragua and other nations out of a sense of revolutionary duty and in order to cement their intraregional position as an alternative to the United States for foreign aid. Nonetheless, Cuba did perceive obvious benefits from deploying these medical missions. The service Cuban medical workers rendered during their missions was invaluable to both MINSA and to the health and well being of the Nicaraguan people, but, as Julie Feinsilver writes, “There is little doubt that the chance to do internationalist service and to see firsthand what colonialism,

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imperialism, and capitalism mean for Third World peoples, tends to increase the revolutionary zeal of Cuban youth, whose relative apathy worries Cuban leaders. In medicine, internationalism has provided Cuban doctors with experience in tropical medicine and diseases of poverty long since eradicated in Cuba and has given them even greater pride in Cuba’s own medical accomplishments.”37 Cuban medical professionals who served in Nicaragua repeatedly referenced their belief that they benefited from the educational opportunities presented by foreign service. For example, the medical conditions Cuban doctors witnessed in Nicaragua, especially in rural zones, were educational in the extreme, and, for many doctors, a reminder of just how well cared for—in health terms—the Cuban population was. In the words of Dr. Sosa Mas, “Look, in Cuba we didn’t always understand how bad it was for people in other places. But when you arrive to your clinic at six in the morning and there are 150 people lined up for treatment, not just one day, but day after day for months and months and months, and you don’t stop seeing patients even once to rest until late in the night, well, then you start to understand.”38 The end result for Cuban medical workers was an appreciation of Cuba’s well-run and comprehensive health care system and—hopefully—an increased loyalty to the homeland that provided such care for its people.

The Cuban Experience: A Personal Story When the first Cuban medical brigade arrived in Nicaragua, it found health conditions that would challenge the education and experience they had had in Cuba. When the first field hospital opened in Matagalpa, the team found that “hundreds of patients queued up for treatment day and night. Within one month the Cuban team had used up medicines they expected to last for three.”39 Many of the Cuban doctors and nurses were shocked by what they saw. Patients suffered from diseases that had disappeared from Cuba, such as polio and neonatal tetanus. Malnutrition made the symptoms of measles so severe that the Cubans had difficulty recognizing this as the same disease that, in their country, had been controlled through mass immunization and improved nutrition. Estupiñán, who arrived in Nicaragua in 1981, said, “seeing diseases like tetanus and measles, a ton of illnesses that you never see in Cuba, well, it was a shock. Some were so bad they didn’t even look like the pictures I’d seen. But it was really good for my experience. And beginning to cure them, well that was excellent.”40

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For some, however, the experience was not only educational, but also somewhat traumatic. Several doctors have particularly vivid recollections of treating leishmaniasis, a flesh-eating disease also called “mountain leprosy” that was endemic to the mountainous north. For many others, the memory of treating the war wounded, in particular women and children lacerated by bombs and grenades, still causes intense emotional pain. “It was all-consuming work,” commented Dr. Victor Pérez, a sentiment echoed by other Cubans interviewed for this project. “We saw patients, some in horrible conditions, at every hour of every day in 12-hour shifts, 24 hours a day. It was work, work, work with no rest, and some of it was so hard, especially the war wounds. It still causes me pain to remember some of the most serious cases.”41 Nicaraguans also recall the intensity and dedication Cuban medical professionals brought to their work. “I tell you, those Cuban doctors and nurses,” commented Dr. Orlando Rizo, the former regional director of health for Matagalpa, “the work they did was extraordinary. They did the sort of work that Nicaraguans wouldn’t do, and in places Nicaraguans wouldn’t go, like right into the war zones.”42 That dedication to service and health provision, while admirable, was not without a personal cost.

Matagalpa: A Case Study Health workers on Cuban medical missions had disparate experiences depending on where they were stationed in Nicaragua. Cuban teams in urban areas tended to be numerically large. Their work schedules were predictable, and a resident brigade chief controlled their social interactions with the community. Smaller teams and individual doctors and nurses were deployed into the interior and into war zones, where work habits tended to be more itinerant and situationally responsive and daily life was much more integrated with the local community. The brigade stationed in Matagalpa city offers a good example of what life was like within an urban Cuban medical mission. The first Cuban medical brigade arrived in Nicaragua on July 24, 1979, armed with a three-month supply of medicine and a fully equipped field hospital. Within twenty-four hours they had set up an open-air clinic next to the bombed-out hospital in Matagalpa, the central city of the mountainous north, a two-hour drive northeast of Managua. They began treating patients the next day. To house the sixty-person team, the local Sandinista command center requisitioned a home for them, a mansion that had belonged to Nacho Araúz, a Somocista

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who had fled Nicaragua when the revolution gained momentum.43 For the duration of the Sandinista period, a team of health workers switched out every two years. About half of those sixty workers were sent to other cities or interior communities, and from 1979 until 1990 Matagalpa housed a contingent of thirty to forty Cuban health workers at all times.44 After Trinidad Guevara, the old hospital in Matagalpa, was rebuilt, medical treatment moved inside the building, and in 1984 when the new regional hospital opened on a hillside on Matagalpa’s outskirts, the brigade split between the Regional and Trinidad Guevara, which became a twenty-four-hour health center.45 Cuban doctors were also stationed around the city in each neighborhood’s health clinic. They participated in sanitation and vaccination campaigns, going door-to-door in the communities with other Nicaraguan health workers, and operated biannual continuing education programs for doctors and nurses. Though according to the Cuban-Nicaraguan agreement no Cuban doctors were technically allowed to be the boss or supervisor of a Nicaraguan, in practice this stricture was widely ignored. Of the thirty specialties offered at the regional hospital, twenty-six of the positions were filled by Cubans, and Cuban nurses were often put in charge of entire wards when Nicaragua could provide only a staff of auxiliary nurses.46 The effect of this aid had an immediate impact on the lives of Nicaraguans in very personal ways. Norma Ochóa, a domestic worker from Matagalpa, stated that before the revolution she gave birth with a partera empirica (self-taught midwife), just like every other woman she knew. When asked if she had noticed a change in health care during the 1980s, she responded, “Yes, well of course, I began to give birth in the hospital because then the medical attention was better there. Because the Cubans had come, the Cuban doctors, there were so many of them and they were very good, and the medicines [they brought] were free. They helped us out so much, and . . . a lot of Nicaraguan doctors went to Cuba to receive better training.”47 While many health care workers spoke about the Cuban medical brigades in positive terms, the fact that an uneducated, apolitical woman from the campo also identified the Cuban presence in Nicaragua as being beneficial to the health of the Nicaraguan people indicates the extent to which these medical missions shaped not only the development of a primary health care system, but also the life experiences of ordinary Nicaraguans. While there were, and still are, vocal detractors of the Cuban medical missions, the overwhelming response among informants was a positive one. Cuban medical workers were far from being the only foreign health

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workers volunteering their services in support of the Sandinista government, but the nature of the Cuban experience differed dramatically from that of other internacionalistas. Volunteers from North America, Europe, and other Latin American nations came either alone or in small brigades and stayed for periods ranging from two weeks to eleven years. Bearing letters of introduction, they were relatively free to come and go in Nicaragua. They could leave the country at short notice or extend their service indefinitely, but while in the country they were subject to the dictates of the Nicaraguan state and were assigned roles within the auspices of the ministries of health, agriculture, or education.48 The Cuban brigade experience, by contrast, was organized in a quasimilitary fashion, though participation was voluntary. According to Dr. Sosa Mas, “it was like this. Sometimes you wanted to do something—study a specialty, or see the world, or learn a new skill, so you signed up for these brigades, because good compañeros were rewarded for volunteering for service.”49 In Sosa Mas’s case, he volunteered for a mission in Nicaragua in the hope that he might subsequently be permitted to study for a specialty in cardiac surgery. Others recounted volunteering purely to serve people less fortunate and with a greater need, like the young nurse Miguel Angel Estupiñán, who came to Nicaragua at age seventeen.50 Once on a brigade, however, the medical professional surrendered all autonomy, a situation they were well trained to accept. As Katherine Hirschfeld notes in her book, Health, Politics, and Revolution in Cuba Since 1898, “Cuban doctors receive years of military training as part of their medical education—training that emphasizes hierarchy, rank, and unquestioning obedience to authorities.”51 The Cuban government sought to control every aspect of its brigadistas’ lives abroad, from time of deployment, the nature of their work, their location, the provision of supplies for daily life (food, clothing, spending money, and so on), and even when and with whom individual health workers were allowed to consort, an effort that met with greater success in urban areas and lesser in rural placements. Medical brigades were composed not just of doctors, but of workers of all ages and experience levels: general practitioners, surgeons, medical specialists, dentists, nurses, equipment technicians, and medical educators. Each health worker was subject to the command of a brigade chief, and the brigade typically lived all in one house, homes that are still known in communities around Nicaragua as “las casas de los cubanos” (Cuban homes). Norma Ochoa, quoted earlier in her appreciation for the Cuban medical

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workers, was still rather dismissive of them in light of their reluctance to become part of the community. “Yes, they were good workers, but you know, they always stayed within their own circle, lived in their house, had their own lives there, and just went to work and then back home.”52 The rather cloistered existence of the Cuban medical brigades was partly due to their brutal work schedule, but was also a strategic move by the Cuban government, which designed these social restrictions to protect and control their brigades. Though the popular mythology of the selfless Cuban doctor is that he served, in the words of former Regional Health Minister Orlando Rizo, “in the most rural and most dangerous places, where no Nicaraguan doctor would even go,” in reality the Cuban government prevented its health workers from extreme personal danger both in designating where they were permitted to work and how their lives were structured within their service location.53 It is true that Cuban doctors worked in the war zones and in the interior, but when the Contra war heated up and medical workers started dying in bombings and kidnappings, the terms of Nicaragua’s agreement with Cuba allowed them to be stationed only at well-guarded military hospital installations or in urban areas. For example, in Siuna, an extremely dangerous conflict zone in the interior, Sister Sandra Price said Cuban doctors as well as Nicaraguans worked in the town, and they went out into the campo, at least in the early years. “[But then,] because of the war, the doctors were forbidden to go out into the campo, it would’ve been too dangerous. And we did have a few instances where doctors who did go out were kidnapped by the Contra and some of them were killed.”54 This restriction, then, was a valid response to the fear of losing health workers to Contra violence. The other reason for the restrictions was to prevent Cuban health workers from trying to settle permanently outside of Cuba. To prevent this, Dr. Victor Pérez explained, “we had a lot of restrictions. It was prohibited to walk alone, or with a non-Cuban that wasn’t part of our mission. This was because it was wartime, and we could have been kidnapped. That was the theory. In reality, it was because they didn’t want us to get too comfortable living in another country—they didn’t want to lose the investment they put in us, so they didn’t want us to fall in love or stay here. But many of us did anyway.”55 This belief was expressed repeatedly, both by Nicaraguans and Cubans and reflects reality in the sense that a great number of Cuban doctors who served abroad did eventually defect from Cuba to another country. Dr. Sosa Mas estimated that of his brigade of forty Cubans, perhaps only fifteen or twenty still live in Cuba today.56 Not all had stayed in Nicaragua,

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but over time around 50 percent settled in or defected to other countries, indicating that the Cuban government did have reason to fear losing its personnel and for implementing strict lifestyle restrictions on their Nicaraguan medical brigades. In spite of these restrictions and their training, however, Cuban medical brigadistas often stepped outside their designated role and formed enduring relationships with individuals or the communities they served. It is revealing of a deeper humanitarian impulse that in interviews many of these socalled militantes de salud (health warriors) spoke about serving “with love in their hearts.”57 One doctor, Geraldo Pais, spoke with great conviction, saying, “I did [my service here] from my heart, to serve, out of my true commitment to humanitarian medicine.”58 Dr. Sosa Mas said that the only thing that kept him motivated in the most difficult days of epidemics, scarcity of resources, hunger, and shortage of personnel was a genuine care for the poor and sick. “Our work here in that time was tremendous, voluminous, and absolutely exhausting. We worked around the clock, with no rest, on call for whatever emergency might arise. It was 24-hour-a-day kind of work. We did it because we cared.”59 Though confined to collective living arrangements, forbidden to walk about the towns and cities alone, and moved from station to station depending upon the needs of the health care system, some Cuban medical workers still managed to form affective ties and build personal relationships with Nicaraguans. These relationships took different forms and evolved in different ways. Many Cubans fell in love and married Nicaraguan women. In these cases, doctors and nurses met their future wives in the course of their work. Félix Sosa Mas married his surgical nurse, and Victor Pérez married the daughter of one of his chronic patients. Miguel Angel Estupiñán fell in love “at first sight” with a girl who attended the school two doors down from the Cuban’s house. “I used to see her walking past our house every afternoon,” he recalled, “and one time I couldn’t stop myself, I just called out to her. She stopped to talk, and we fell in love. Two years later we married right before I had to go home to Cuba, and she came with me.”60 Less life-altering relationships took place in the exchanges of daily life and commerce. The owner of a small cafeteria near one of Matagalpa’s medical clinics said that she always liked it when the Cubans came in for lunch. “Mostly because their accents were so funny,” she said, “and they were always good for laughing at themselves.” She remembered one of her favorite stories, of a time they came in for lunch and one of the doctors said, in a typical

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Cuban accent, “Señora, quiero una sopa de pesca’o.” She asked him why they always contracted the end of their words like that, and the Cuban looked back at her, somewhat perplexed. “Oh, sí? Pues, no sé. No me había fija’o.”61 In these simple moments of cultural exchange, laughter, familiarity, and falling in love, Cubans and Nicaraguans managed to break down some of the barriers that the Cuban government placed in their way. In spite of these social restrictions, medical workers serving in Nicaragua managed to form relationships with the people they served in a professional capacity.

Voices in Opposition Though the majority of Nicaraguans interviewed generally approved and appreciated the work Cuban medical brigades did during the 1980s, it is worth noting the vocal minority that accuse, criticize, and blame Cubans for many of the problems with which Nicaraguans contended during the Sandinista period. Besides feeling that the Cubans isolated themselves deliberately from communities, some Nicaraguans felt Cuban doctors were high-handed and acted as if they believed themselves superior to their Nicaraguan counterparts. Some blamed the Cuban medical presence for inhibiting MINSA’s ability to deliver health in rural areas. More broadly, some blame the Cubans for causing the Contra War, and others believe that their “medical work” was really a front for ideological indoctrination. While some Nicaraguans like Norma Ochoa, who tried to remain neutral, simply offered the observation that Cuban doctors kept to themselves, others attributed a more sinister purpose to the isolated living conditions of the Cuban medical brigades. “They thought they were better than everybody else, that they should automatically be the boss over Nicaraguans,” commented Gabriel Pérez Rosales, a Matagalpan teacher and health brigadista. “The trouble with the Cubans is that they are arrogant, and they made a lot of people mad,” he concluded.62 In fact, some Cuban doctors did feel frustrated with what they perceived as antiquated and inefficient practices in the Nicaraguan hospitals. “Well, we had to teach a lot of people a lot of new techniques and sometimes even educate them about how to cure diseases they didn’t understand,” said Cuban nurse Miguel Angel Estupiñán.63 As in many cases in Nicaragua, one’s political perspective colored his or her perception of a Cuban’s attempt to educate or improve. Some felt, especially in the hardest years of the Contra War, that the presence of Cuban doctors was a challenge to the effective delivery of health

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services to rural mountainous zones. One doctor, Dr. Virgilio Cisne, explained, “Look, at first I was okay with the Cuban doctors. Sometimes I’d have them over to my house for dinner because they were here, working hard, and the poor bastards didn’t have even a few cents to spend on the basics.” Then, he continued, as the Contra War got worse and the Sandinistas got more rigid and ideological, the Cubans got bolder in talking about their politics. “And I wasn’t all right with that, because health, in my opinion, ought to be separate from politics, and the Cubans can’t see it that way.” He went on to explain that many Nicaraguans, trying to avoid taking sides in the conflict, would avoid going to the doctor if he was Cuban, even if the Cuban was the only doctor around. “Because of fear, you understand? Especially out in the country, the thought was, if you go to a Cuban doctor, the Contra would come in the night and take you for a Sandinista.”64 Dr. Cisne was one of several who spoke about this conflict of interests and blamed the Cuban presence for actually restricting access to health care in rural zones. Last, the most die-hard anti-Sandinistas blamed the U.S.-backed Contra War on the Cuban presence in Nicaragua. As a result, some ingenious (if decidedly inaccurate) rumors spread rapidly in the countryside to discourage the peasantry from interacting with the Sandinistas and their Cuban allies. “If the Cubans hadn’t been here in the first place, the United States never would have attacked us,” an anti-Sandinista peasant from Mulukukú asserted. “Or if they had, the Sandinistas would have fallen a lot faster.”65 He went on to mention how one of the most malicious things the Cubans did was spread communism. When asked how, exactly, they did that if the peasants wouldn’t even talk to the Cubans, he asserted matter-of-factly, “It was those ‘vaccines.’ They said they were curing polio or whatever, but we knew they were really injecting people with communism.”66 I later confirmed this seemingly outlandish story with several other informants. Brigadista Rafael “Don Payo” Hernández shook his head sadly when I asked him about it. “It was ridiculous, they didn’t even know what communism was, but they knew they didn’t want any of it, and that it came with the Cubans.”67 Norma Ochoa, the housewife quoted earlier in this chapter, also confirmed the story, though she giggled. “Yes, that’s what some of us thought.” I asked her what she believed communism was, and she responded, “Well, I don’t really know. I think it’s that little pain you feel after you get an injection, right?”68 As evidenced by these anecdotes, Nicaraguan fears of or anger toward Cubans was not always based on facts, or even a clear understanding of the issues at hand. Nonetheless, they were damaging not only to the work Cuban

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and Nicaraguan health care workers were trying to do, but also to the reputation and legacy Cubans would leave in Nicaragua after the Sandinista years ended. Stories like these illustrate the extent to which even social improvement programs can be captive to the politics of ideology.

Conclusion Cuba’s role in Nicaragua was reflective of the Castro government’s commitment to ideologically motivated international aid provision. Over the years, Cuba has sent aid to myriad developing nations in any number of circumstances: military involvement, disaster relief, and technical support for governments whose ideology aligned them with the Eastern bloc nations. In no other country, however, did Cuban support come close to the levels it reached in Nicaragua during the 1980s. In 1987 alone, Cuban doctors in Nicaragua attended 856,000 patients, performed 7,163 major operations, and delivered 1,704 babies.69 Cuba’s foreign policy of supporting health care initiatives in Third World nations has drawn much well-deserved praise over the years, but the effects of this policy are poorly understood. This chapter, the first to study the nature and impact of such medical aid in a donor state, teaches us something about Cuba’s geopolitical goals and logistical fears, but also about how these missions affected the lives of both the Cuban medical workers and the citizens of the country in which they served. This chapter has argued that Cuba’s extraordinary support for the development of a socialist health care network in Nicaragua was part of its Cold War foreign policy, the objective of which was supporting leftist governments against U.S. coercion and aggression. Concomitantly, however, Cuba attempted—with greater and lesser degrees of success—to constrain the lives of its medical workers and prevent their integration with Nicaraguan communities for two reasons: one, to assert community superiority over the emergent socialist Nicaraguan state, and two, to prevent Cuban medical workers from defecting to other countries. There is, then, an imbedded contradiction between the global and even intraregional assumptions about the intent of Cuba’s deployment of medical missions as a tool of foreign diplomacy and what the structure of this medical aid actually lent itself toward. Though the United States and much of the world assumed that the ulterior motive of these brigades was to spread communism, Cuba constrained the lives of its medical workers so strictly to the

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professional as to limit, whether deliberately or inadvertently, the potential for that outcome. The brigades were able only to proffer an example of how a communist health care system functioned. Their proximate purpose, and all-consuming occupation, was simply to serve in their capacity as health care workers. The case of Cuban medical missions to Nicaragua is an excellent lens through which to examine the ongoing academic debates about transnationalism, internationalism, and regional hegemony. For instance, the nature of the work would seem to fit the definition of transnational, as medical workers mixed with the Nicaraguan communities in which they were stationed. However, because of the lifestyle restrictions placed upon the Cuban brigadistas and the fear of Contra retributions among rural Nicaraguans, an effective stopgap existed between the two cultures and populations that held them distinctive and apart from each other. It was, in essence, internationalism more than transnationalism, as governments attempted to interrupt the mixing of personal lives and experiences with regulations and restrictions. The personal interactions, where they occurred, were transnational, but the Cuban government continually structured the experience in a way that pulled back from the personal, the interstitial, and the transnational, and reestablished the physical and metaphorical borders of nation and citizenship. The irony of this scenario is that the West’s great fear of international communism was that it would result in breaking down national borders, offering communist ideology as a unifying principle and a palliative for all ills. Yet in Nicaragua, it was Cuba, the communist state, that worked to maintain the integrity of border and national identity. So although the Cuban medical mission to Nicaragua had great potential to be a transformative transnational project, in reality it ended up being an internationalist program that brought the concept of the nation into relief. notes 1. John Donahue, The Nicaraguan Revolution in Health: From Somoza to the Sandinistas (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1986), 11. 2. Julie Feinsilver, Healing the Masses: Cuban Health Politics at Home and Abroad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 3. Melissa Smith and Robert Drickey, MD, MPH, “Education and Primary Health Care,” Möbius: A Journal of Continuing Education Professionals in Health Sciences 5, no. 3 (July 1985): 136. 4. Cuba also sent brigades to assist with education, agriculture, and military programs, among others.

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5. Managua taxi driver, conversation with author, September 2008. 6. Lamentably, many of the statistics regarding Cuban medical aid to the Sandinista government are unknown due to an absence of archival records in Nicaragua. Given the lack of archived budgets, invoices, signed accords, professional reports, proposals, or personal communications, it is impossible at this point to reconstruct a statistical portrait of the program. For example, we do not know the numbers of Cuban medical workers that served in Nicaragua from 1979 through 1990, nor can we know the quantities or monetary value of medicines and equipment donated by the Cuban government or the specific input of advisors and administrators working at the national and regional levels. Nonetheless, oral histories, published annual health plans, the scattered remnants of MINSA documents, and newspaper accounts fill in many of those gaps. 7. Dr. Geraldo Pais, interview with author, March 7, 2009. 8. Feinsilver, Healing the Masses, 156. 9. New York Times, January 22, 1985, A2. Quoted in Feinsilver, Healing the Masses, 157. 10. Granma Weekly Review, supplement, February 24, 1985, 3. Quoted in Feinsilver, Healing the Masses, 157. 11. Feinsilver, Healing the Masses, 160–61. 12. Here I wish to draw a distinction between the Cuban government’s political purposes and the medical brigades’ professional and humanitarian goals. Cuba sent military assistance to Latin American and to Africa, but this article deals only with its medical brigades. For more information on Cuba’s military campaigns in Africa, see Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 13. Here I should mention the Rockefeller Foundation’s campaigns to combat hookworm in the 1940s, though that was a private enterprise and not a governmental initiative. Likewise, beginning in the 1960s the aid programs built into Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress did encourage improvements in social services like health care and education, though Somoza appropriated much of those funds and employed the remainder to combat dissident movements in the mountains. As a result, this U.S. policy was unique, badly utilized, and spread unequally within the Nicaraguan nation. In the minds of Nicaraguans, U.S. influence over the years has been overwhelmingly negative. 14. David E. Apter, “Foreword,” in Feinsilver, Healing the Masses, xiii. 15. Feinsilver, Healing the Masses, 17. 16. While there is a rich and ongoing scholastic conversation about the nature of transnationalism, internationalism, and hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, this discussion is directed almost in its entirety along a North-South axis, and focuses on U.S.–Latin American relations. The essays in Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.–Latin American Relations, edited by Gilbert Joseph, Catherine LeGrande, and Ricardo Salvatore, offer a particularly well-conceptualized look at this budding literature, but still no concerted scholastic effort has examined the power dynamics within the Latin American and Caribbean Basin states—that is to say, looking at power dynamics when the United States is not involved, or at the ways Latin American states align and group themselves to either attract or rebuff U.S. involvement in regional issues. Nonetheless, the theoretical and analytical tools employed by Gilbert Joseph, Steve Stern, Michael Schroeder, Micol Seigel, and others in their examination of U.S.–Latin American relationships offer an excellent starting point for an exploration of

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1 7. 18. 19. 20.

2 1. 22. 2 3. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

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intraregional hegemonic and transnational relationships in the Caribbean and Latin America. It is outside the scope of this paper to analyze comprehensively the balance of power among nations of Latin America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, but it is worth noting the lacuna here and calling for a future debate that explores the complexities and nuances of the balance of power among and between Latin American states. For example, the FMLN in El Salvador and so on. Feinsilver, Healing the Masses, 214. Dr. Dora María Téllez, interview with author, December 3, 2008. Actas Ministeriales, mimeographed copies in Dora María Téllez’s personal papers, Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica, Universidad de Centroamérica, Managua, Nicaragua. Téllez, interview. Richard Garfield and Glen Williams, Health Care in Nicaragua: Primary Care Under Changing Regimes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 48. Dr. Orlando Rizo Espinosa, interview with author, March 21, 2009. Dr. Francisco Gutiérrez, interview with author, October 24, 2008. Lucia Mantila, interview with author, February 3, 2009. Rizo Espinosa, interview. Sister Sandra Price, interview with the author, March 5, 2009. Gabriel Pérez Rosales, interview with author, September 21, 2008. “500 estudiantes en Facultad de Medicina,” La Prensa, December 2, 1979, 1. Gutierrez, interview. Dr. Félix Sosa Mas, interview with author, March 11, 2009. Miguel Angel Estupiñán, interview with author, March 13, 2009. Estupiñán, interview; Mario Zúniga, interview with author, February 4, 2009. Dr. Victor Pérez, interview with author, March 10, 2009. Dr. Geraldo Pais, interview. Victor Pérez, interview; Estupiñán, interview. Feinsilver, Healing the Masses, 13. Sosa Mas, interview. JMC Cruz, “La salud en la revolución,” El Nuevo Diario, November 27, 1980, 3. Estupiñán, interview. Dr. Victor Pérez, interview. Rizo Espinosa, interview. Zúniga, interview; Dr. Noe Garcia, interview with author, February 6, 2009. Garcia, interview; Dr. Virgilio Cisne, interview with author, February 11, 2009. Garcia, interview. Estupiñán, interview. Norma Ochoa, interview with author, February 3, 2009. As broad and varied a group as the internacionalistas were, it is difficult to describe the work they did in any brief way. In the city of Matagalpa, for example, people came from all over and for varied time periods to volunteer in any number of capacities, from education to agriculture to health care. In the arena of public health, for example, a group of East Germans arrived in the mid 1980s and stayed for six months to build a watertreatment plant. A Peruvian military doctor became a Sandinista military trainer at the behest of Tomás Borge, the minister of the interior, after which he worked at

Doctors Within Borders

4 9. 50. 51. 5 2. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

6 2. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

225

Trinidad Guevara in Matagalpa as a doctor. A Spanish midwife came to conduct a twoweek training course for local midwives and ended up staying for the rest of her life. The most famous of all internacionalistas is perhaps a young American named Benjamin Linder, an engineer who volunteered in any capacity he could find, be it juggling to entertain children or riding his unicycle through town to promote an upcoming vaccination campaign. He was killed in a Contra attack while inspecting a dam for possible repair work. Though many volunteers came and went rather quickly, the opportunity for internacionalistas to imbed themselves in the communities in which they lived and worked was profound. Sosa Mas, interview. Estupiñán, interview. Katherine Hirschfeld, Health, Politics, and Revolution in Cuba Since 1898 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2007), 217. Ochoa, interview. Dr. Freddy Meynard, interview with author, October 8, 2008; Gutierrez, interview. Price, interview. Victor Pérez, interview. Sosa Mas, interview. Pais, interview. Ibid. Sosa Mas, interview. Estupiñán, interview. Anonymous, interview with author, February 3, 2009. The English translation loses the joke because the last words don’t compress the way they do in the Cuban’s accent. Nonetheless, the exchange translates as follows: “Ma’am, I would like a bowl of fish soup.” His response to her query is: “Oh yes? Well, I don’t know. I hadn’t noticed.” Gabriel Pérez Rosales, interview with author, September 24, 2008. Estupiñán, interview. Cisne, interview. Anonymous rural Nicaraguan, interview with author, February 24, 2009. Ibid. Don Rafael Hernández, interview with author, February 18, 2009. Ochoa, interview. Feinsilver, Healing the Masses, 162.

· Ch a p t er N i n e ·

The Other Dirty War Cleaning Up Buenos Aires during the Last Dictatorship, 1976–1983

5 J e n n ifer T. Hoy t

Many of the contributions in this volume approach the Latin

American Cold War experience from the national or international perspective. They either follow the interactions of states or their representatives, or they examine decisions made at the national level. However, events taking place at those higher levels frequently filtered down to local stages. In this way, the struggle between East and West entered the everyday lives of citizens and affected even the most mundane of activities. While well known for its atrocious actions, the last military dictatorship of Argentina went far beyond national reforms as it pursued its “reorganization.” Its total control of the state, from the presidency on down to mayors’ offices, and its expansive agenda infused even the simple task of taking out the trash with Cold War fears and ideals. The conflict between capitalist and communist powers ushered in a period characterized by dictators and terror throughout much of Latin America. Argentina was no exception. The military regime that governed the Southern Cone nation from 1976 to 1983 remains infamous for its “Dirty War.” This campaign of state terror that cowed the populace into submission claimed the lives of ten to thirty thousand people. As the armed forces lost 226

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legitimacy late in their tenure and relinquished power, numerous accounts of abduction, torture, and murder came to the public’s attention, effectively condemning the generals in charge and all who followed them. Despite the passage of almost three decades, however, recollections of the Dirty War remain very much alive and still cause bitterness and pain. Many Argentines still await justice through the prosecution of the regime’s leaders and followers. The horrific nature of the armed forces’ behavior has captured the attention of scholars from many disciplines, and their work has served a purpose beyond simple academic interest.1 These studies have helped fuel a larger movement to create a body of evidence that cannot be covered up or ignored. While the regime worked to keep the Dirty War out of the public’s eye, people’s memories of the period have become an accessible, damning account. However, the Dirty War represents only one aspect of the actions this regime took in pursuit of a wider, more complex goal. The armed forces did not seize control of the nation simply to eradicate a section of the population deemed threatening. Another reason that Argentina found itself mired in violence, leftist insurgency, and a deteriorating economic situation was that previous administrations had struggled to adequately manage the nation. Shortly after the military coup on March 24, the titular president, General Jorge Rafael Videla pointed out this shortcoming. He argued that the armed forces’ actions were not “motivated by special interests or an appetite for power. . . . [Its actions were] only in response to the fulfillment of an unavoidable obligation emanating from the specific mission to safeguard the highest interests of the Nation.”2 The Argentine state prior to this point, according to the military, became paralyzed by corruption and demagoguery. The bloated public administration entered a period during which, “Efficiency . . . [was] the exception and deficiency the norm.”3 With the state in disarray, the economy vacillated wildly and left many citizens feeling anguished and hopeless. Violence took its toll. Brian Loveman and Thomas M. Davies Jr. identify Videla’s language as “apolitical,” a common characteristic among Latin American militaries during this period. Internal divisions among political parties had left the state mired in ineptness and malfeasance, but the armed forces felt that their institutional discipline would result in effective and stable governance.4 In this way, military leaders began to see themselves as above partisan squabbles. Additionally, the Cold War colored perceptions of underdevelopment and weak governance as two faults that opened the door to communist infiltration.

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By taking control of the Argentine government, the military rendered political affiliations null. Only the ability to act and produce results mattered and, in this way, the armed forces fully expected to instill order, restore dignity to the nation, and avoid falling to the left. To correct the failures of past administrations, the generals in charge drafted a wide-ranging plan called the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (the Process of National Reorganization). The Proceso sought to achieve three main goals: end leftist subversion, jumpstart the sluggish economy through neoliberal reforms, and remake Argentine society. The Dirty War represented the military’s concerted effort to end violence from guerrilla groups and stamp out dissent at all costs. The economic situation has also received ample scholarly attention. Unfortunately, neoliberal reforms failed to bring about necessary changes and ultimately contributed to Argentina’s crushing debt, which took its toll in 2001.5 With much of academic interest focused on the repression and economic turmoil, this has left the remaking of society in an ambiguous space. What did it mean for the Proceso regime to “remake” society? What behaviors or systems needed to be altered and to what end? How did the military government’s actions filter down to the masses and affect the daily lives of Argentines? Finally, did people respond positively or negatively to the reforms and why? Military control of the government, from the national level to local mayoralties, represented a concerted effort to remake Argentina via responsive, efficient administration. The reforms resulting from this assumption of authority would allow the armed forces to change the whole of society. Examination of the specific projects and programs pursued by the military and its representatives sheds light on what the armed forces found most troubling about Argentine society beyond subversion. This approach follows Gilbert Joseph and Daniela Spenser’s idea of “contact zones,” local spaces where the Cold War filtered into everyday practices and experiences.6 The international conflict pitted nations against each other, but the battle between East and West was also fought through each nation’s management of its domestic affairs. Again, it was believed that poor administration potentially opened the door to communist infiltration. The Proceso generals tried to use their power and alliance with the West to take Argentina down a new path that would resolve decades of violence and instability. With full control of not only the national government but also key provincial and municipal governments, they would be able to affect change where previous civilian administrations and military regimes failed.7

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This chapter examines an ambitious project undertaken by the military’s appointed mayor of Buenos Aires, Brigadier Osvaldo Cacciatore, and the public’s reaction to its goals and requirements. In 1977 Cacciatore oversaw the construction of a massive green belt that would eventually surround the capital city. Covering 74,000 acres (approximately eighty-seven times the size of New York City’s Central Park), the green belt went beyond simply adding parks and recreation space to the sprawling, dense metropolis. Its unique construction using sanitary landfill techniques ultimately absorbed millions of tons of trash, thus providing an environmentally sound disposal solution for the city’s refuse. With the military junta backing his actions, Cacciatore worked to bring efficiency to the municipal government and resolve longstanding urban problems with deficient green space and waste management. Despite its efforts to transform the city into a cleaner space with sound administration, the green belt project did not proceed smoothly. This raised questions regarding whether the military could capably administer. Citizens had trouble understanding new garbage collection regulations and cleaning crews did not always complete their rounds, leaving piles of unsightly and noxious refuse on the streets. The people of Buenos Aires naturally turned to municipal authorities and demanded that they account for these failures. Despite his involvement with the military, Cacciatore still served as mayor and therefore had to answer to the population of Buenos Aires. He responded by not only trying to clarify the law, but also by convincing residents that they had a vital role to play in keeping the city clean despite any municipal shortfalls. The resulting conflict raised an important question: who should be charged with keeping the city clean, the government or the people? Rarely did citizens make the connection between trash collection and the new parks, as Buenos Aires residents (known as porteños) primarily focused on the city government’s inadequacies with garbage collection. Officials countered that the population had a significant role to play in maintaining Buenos Aires’s cleanliness and that shirking this duty kept the city in an unkempt state. The municipal government banked on the full participation of residents and their acceptance of the project’s long-term goals, yet improper trash disposal and littering continued. Using the press and records from the institution responsible for building the green belt, the examination of this contact zone reveals a unique history that moves beyond clandestine torture and terror. Public projects such as the green belt attempted to rationalize administration and leave an indelible mark on the urban landscape. Yet at the same time, porteños still expected

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Cacciatore to manage the city capably despite his questionable appointment. Residents justifiably demanded answers and expressed their dissatisfaction when trash collection fell short of stated goals or created inconveniences. The mayor tried to counter these reactions through campaigns to promote the projects’ long-term goals and citizens’ responsibilities in maintaining their city’s cleanliness. The resulting conflict between the de facto municipal government and the people of Buenos Aires demonstrates the limits of the regime’s coercive power and identifies an important space where residents could dissent without fear of reprisals.

A Plan Is Formed The Buenos Aires of the 1970s carried only faded reminders of the rapid population growth and incredible wealth that had characterized the nation when it established an agro-export economy in the late nineteenth century. Over subsequent decades, migration from the interior provinces brought tens of thousands of people to Buenos Aires in search of employment, but the city could not support this influx.8 A housing deficit forced new arrivals to find open land and to construct their own shelters, leading to a boom in villas miserias (shantytowns) during the 1950s and 1960s.9 Car ownership exploded during this time, and severe congestion clogged the old avenues and narrow side streets. The defined limits of the municipality could not contain this growth, and the city spread beyond those boundaries. As the federal district reached its zenith (its population leveled off in the 1950s), the greater metropolitan area continued to grow.10 Without clear leadership and a guiding design during this time, Buenos Aires’s development threatened to spin out of control. Existing administrative divisions attempted to meet the needs of such an immense area and population. During the Proceso period, Buenos Aires was divided spatially and politically into two main areas: the central Capital Federal, a federalized district, and the surrounding metropolitan area of Greater Buenos Aires.11 The Capital Federal contained close to three million people within its 115 square miles, while Greater Buenos Aires had a population of seven million people within 1,467 square miles.12 Greater Buenos Aires and the Capital Federal together claimed more than one-third of the nation’s population, and this gave the city a definitive say in national matters. The limits of the federal district were determined by Avenida General Paz, a highway that delineated the northern and western boundaries, and by the

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Riachuelo River to the south. Greater Buenos Aires encompassed a total of twenty partidos, administrative divisions that oversaw local governance, and numerous municipalities. This Greater Buenos Aires area fell under the jurisdiction of the province of Buenos Aires, whose governor was and still is elected by popular vote. The president of Argentina appointed the mayor of the Capital Federal at this time.13 Unfortunately, the established boundaries of these two divisions did not keep them from influencing each other’s development, and the problems of one division often became another’s as well. This difficult relationship stemmed from the fact that no authority oversaw administration of the metropolitan region as a whole. Each partido and suburban municipality governed its own affairs as an autonomous entity, as did the Capital Federal. The desire to preserve local sovereignty meant that these governments rarely worked together to complete projects for the benefit of the region. The cacophony of competing interests exacerbated urban problems. Insufficient transit networks made for long travel times throughout metropolitan Buenos Aires and slowed down the movement of goods and people. Lax environmental regulations led to high levels of pollution in water sources like the Río de la Plata. Land use and services became particularly vexing issues. The dense settlement of the federal district made property scarce and expensive. Accessible land in the suburbs attracted people and industries, but, without dedicated municipal involvement, many settlements and factories lacked running water, sewage, and electricity.14 Without cooperation among its various components, metropolitan Buenos Aires was doomed to uneven development and inequality. Architects, engineers, and urbanists created numerous master plans for Buenos Aires over the century in an effort to control its growth.15 However, due to government inaction, they mostly remained theoretical visions of what the city could be. These plans did share two common and pressing concerns, though: the lack of green space available and the necessity for a plan that equally considered the futures of both the Capital Federal and Greater Buenos Aires.16 During the Proceso period, professionals estimated that each resident had between five square meters and eight square meters of green space.17 International standards recommended at least twenty-four square meters per person.18 How could the city make up for this severe deficiency? The dense settlement of the federal district made expropriating land there unreasonable and costly. Even though Greater Buenos Aires had a higher population, it covered a much larger area and thus had a lower density than

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the Capital Federal. In theory, those factors could allow authorities to procure land there more easily. One man in particular clearly saw this opportunity for cooperation and presented a plan of action. The proposal for the green belt appeared in 1974 with the publication of Guillermo Domingo Laura’s book, El cinturón ecológico. Laura was an ideal candidate to have the ear of the government. He held degrees in law and economics, and for years he had worked on some of the nation’s largest engineering projects, such as the Salto Grande hydroelectric project. In El cinturón ecológico, he examined the intense urbanization of Western and developing countries and the problems associated with that growth. Millions of residents, mass transit systems, individual automobile ownership, and thousands of buildings and factories had transformed the urban environment profoundly. Laura did not see these items as inherently terrible, but rather lamented the lack of balance between nature and development. Asphalt and concrete replaced grass and trees, making green space scarce, and contributed to atmospheric pollution. Increasing amounts of mass-produced consumer goods created tons of waste that needed to be disposed of in some manner. Together, this growth and industrialization posed a serious threat to maintaining a healthy, clean environment.19 To reset the scales, Laura suggested a system of regional parks that would ultimately solve three major problems: insufficient trash collection, troublesome flooding, and lack of green space.20 He envisioned a comprehensive new garbage collection system in the Capital Federal and the surrounding suburbs. The refuse, once collected and compacted, would then be delivered to low-lying, flood-prone lands in the suburbs and interred. Workers would eventually construct parks over the landfills, and inhabitants would enjoy the final recreation space.21 Laura estimated that the project would be able to absorb 200 million tons of trash over three years and cost two billion pesos to purchase the necessary land (US$400 million in 197422). The plan’s creator rationalized the price by calculating that the cost to each resident amounted to 2,500 pesos each and would be paid out over the span of ten years through taxes and concessions.23 Ultimately, it would be a small price to pay for thirty-seven square meters of green space per person. Laura saw the green belt as solving three specific issues, but the project ultimately responded to wider concerns about the quality of the environment and the quality of life. Clearly the environment occupied a prominent place in this plan. Along with improved trash collection, the parks would act as “lungs” for the city, the green space taking in carbon dioxide and releasing

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life-giving oxygen. Also, by burying trash, citizens would no longer burn it, thus eliminating that contamination source. Incineration had been the primary method of disposal since the late nineteenth century. Not only did many buildings have their own furnaces for this purpose, but the city operated large municipal incinerators as well. Lax regulations and enforcement meant that even though the law permitted people to burn their trash only at certain times, chimneys still belched out black smoke throughout the day in all parts of the city. According to Laura, this had to come to an end for everyone’s sake. As the environment improved with this plan, the lives of citizens would as well. Laura noted in a 1973 interview with La Prensa that people needed to enjoy the outdoors: “Men, women, and children need to be put into frequent contact with nature, pushed toward the outdoors in search of recreation space, forested zones, rivers, and beaches that permit them to forget, for at least a moment, the stress and discomfort of the city.”24 Laura also saw the new parks as an opportunity to educate children on vegetation and the importance of the environment. Preserving parts of the natural pampean flora and planting diverse species would create an excellent outdoor classroom. The green belt, therefore, called for a radical change in how the city would function and how people would live in it and with it.25 When the military seized power, Laura received a chance to put his plan into action. Brigadier Cacciatore had read Laura’s books and, once appointed mayor of the city, he appointed Laura secretary of public works for the municipality. The new mayor also took notice of the trash problems plaguing the city. In his memoirs, Cacciatore described the chaos surrounding the disposal of refuse. Aside from massive open-air landfills and incinerators spewing out polluted air, he criticized the disorganized and inefficient collection system. The trucks did not have the capacity to pick up all the trash. Workers charged with putting the garbage in the trucks did not always do so. Citizens also posed a problem, as many frequently did not put their waste in sturdy plastic bags. The thin bags and paper ones broke easily, strewing debris everywhere. When workers did not collect the refuse, citizens frequently placed their rubbish on corners away from their homes, in front of vacant buildings, or in abandoned lots. The timing of pickups did not help matters either. Residents placed their trash outside at night, but collectors did not come until morning, thus allowing stray animals and rodents to dine upon the contents.26 Laura and Cacciatore took it upon themselves to resolve this situation definitively.

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To make the green belt a reality, the Municipality of the City of Buenos Aires—the official name of the Capital Federal’s government—and the province of Buenos Aires, which administered the partidos, had to coordinate their efforts somehow. In May 1977, the military junta approved the creation of an institution to oversee the project and facilitate the municipality and province’s cooperation. This new entity, CEAMSE (Cinturón Ecológico de la Área Metropolitana, Sociedad del Estado), consisted of various representatives from the metropolitan governments. Together, they took charge of collecting, sorting, transporting, and interring refuse, as well as constructing the 74,000 acres of green space.27 The institution also assumed responsibility for closing open-air landfills in the partidos. The municipality of Buenos Aires and the province of Buenos Aires cooperated by expropriating the necessary land, enforcing regulations, and paying for CEAMSE’s services. The institution’s founding marked a major shift in the management of metropolitan problems. Before this moment, urban issues that affected both the municipality and province had little hope of being resolved, as any response required the collaboration of many autonomous governments. CEAMSE represented the military’s efforts to improve efficiency and to find solutions to longstanding problems. The institution not only had a defined agenda, but the municipality and province’s approval of CEAMSE helped compel the two governments to cooperate and work toward achieving the stated goal. Immediately following its establishment, CEAMSE set to work. In 1977, the institution focused on surveying possible lands, securing funds (which mostly came from municipal and provincial banks), and negotiating with suburban municipalities. CEAMSE officials had to ensure they could procure the lands as well as confirm cooperation from the partidos and municipalities. The first phase to be completed was the Bancalarí Experimental Area in the Zona Norte partido of San Fernando. This section ultimately covered 407 acres and contained soccer fields, tennis courts, skating zones, playgrounds, refreshment stands, a sporting goods store, and other support facilities.28 CEAMSE built similar parks in San Martín, Avellaneda, Estebán Echevarría, Villa Domínico, and along the Río de la Reconquista. Garbage collection had to be reorganized in order to create the green space, and that trash had to be specially processed for interment. With a new fleet of trucks, garbage collectors picked up the refuse and delivered it to transfer stations where workers compacted the trash and redistributed it for delivery to the selected provincial lands. The municipality oversaw the construction of three stations in the Capital Federal. They had similar layouts, and

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all three used recently appropriated land.29 These properties included land once occupied by a villa miseria, a former landfill, and the location of an old municipal incinerator. After six months of construction, CEAMSE officially inaugurated the stations in June 1979. Each station processed one thousand tons of trash each day. Compaction allowed more trash to be carried by each truck, and the cleanliness of the operation reduced contamination by keeping direct handling to a minimum. The stations operated with fifteen workers for each eight-hour shift, and it only took fifteen minutes to unload the trash, process it, and reload it on the trucks. The completion of the transfer stations allowed CEAMSE to gather and process much more trash than in previous years (see table 1). Table 1. Amount of Trash Collected, 1977–1983 Year

Tons of Trash Collected

Percent Change

1977

3,278.9

—

1978

490,519

149.5

1979

1,688,223.4

344

1980

2,405,728.7

42.5

1981

2,676,555.2

11.3

1982

2,421,803.4

-9.5

1983

2,148,875.6

-11.3

Source: CEAMSE, Memoria y balance general, 1977–83.

As the municipality and its concessionaires collected the trash, citizens could breathe easier for a number of reasons. Municipal ordinance 33.291 prohibited further use of domestic and municipal incinerators, thus removing a major source of atmospheric contamination. CEAMSE also worked closely with the National Forestry Institute (IFONA) in order to plant trees in the reclaimed green belt lands. The two groups originally set out to plant 4,950 acres of trees over a span of ten years and to reforest more than 12,000 acres over five years in the Arco Sudoeste specifically.30 In 1980, CEAMSE and IFONA planted 16,000 trees in the northern part of the green belt and 7,000 in the Arco Sudoeste.31 Participants added more than 37,000 additional trees in 1981.32 With the cessation of incinerators and the creation of green space and new forests, CEAMSE did much to provide purifying “lungs” for the metropolitan area.

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With such a massive undertaking, cost represented a major concern, but CEAMSE’s organization and operations clearly put the project in line with the dictatorship’s national economic plan. José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz, the regime’s minister of economics from 1976 to 1981, called for the privatization of businesses and opening the nation to foreign investors. Martínez de Hoz hoped that these actions would bring in better technology and expertise, thereby increasing productivity and efficiency in all industries.33 The directors of CEAMSE followed this agenda by awarding concessions to private companies that were then responsible for collecting garbage throughout the city and metropolitan area. CEAMSE contracted with the group MANLIBA S.A. for street cleaning, installing trash bins in public spaces, and gathering refuse in certain areas of the city. It also worked closely with a U.S. company, Waste Management International, Inc., to secure necessary equipment, including 160 new trash compacting trucks, twenty-five street sweepers-vacuums, five dump trucks, two street washers, and two stormdrain cleaners.34 Eventually authorities added more trucks to their fleet, bringing the count up to 330.35 While well-equipped concessionaires saw to the actual collection of garbage, CEAMSE maintained a relatively small staff of fifty-two people to oversee operations.36 In the directors’ eyes, CEAMSE presented a new paradigm that exemplified how well government could function. Open competition for contracts and new technology allowed work to proceed efficiently and with minimal state involvement. The directorate argued that once other government institutions considered the benefits, they too would outsource public functions to private companies. CEAMSE also saw this arrangement as financially advantageous. As the company’s work really began in 1979, CEAMSE officials reflected on the superiority of the entity’s structure over the traditional functioning of state entities: “In overpopulated countries with low capitalization, frequently unemployment is deliberately disguised by the state by means of salaried positions, which in reality are simply subsidies for unnecessary work or for the use of low-level technology.”37 According to the directors’ thinking, excessive employees and inadequate technology created unnecessary costs. The transfer stations represented one of the major areas of improvement. CEAMSE estimated that the old incinerators employed 2,800 workers who could process only 20 to 30 percent of the city’s waste. In 1976, approximately 12,000 people collected 2,000 tons of trash a day. However, by 1980 only one thousand workers saw to the collection of the same amount. In addition, new technology plus a minimal number of employees meant that garbage

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collection only cost fifty dollars per ton whereas before it was one hundred dollars per ton.38 The investment in advanced equipment and transforming the system created significant savings.39 CEAMSE’s streamlined organization represented exactly what the Proceso government envisioned when it seized power: a dynamic entity that wasted no time in correcting ignored and unresolved issues. Just as the junta worked to carry out a profound transformation on a national scale, its municipal representatives echoed that call in Buenos Aires. Attempting to rationalize governance responded to decades of chaos and uncontrolled expansion. The authoritarian and military nature of the Proceso government enabled its municipal and provincial representatives to coordinate their efforts and to agree upon a plan of action. Competition for contracts, skilled experts, and up-to-date equipment further guaranteed efficiency. In the midst of disappearances and political repression, the ingenious plan covering trash collection, flood control, pollution reduction, and green space construction started to come to fruition. However, this transformation of society did not proceed without difficulty. The populace that the military sought to control presented the biggest obstacle and threatened the overall success of the project.

Bad Administration or Lack of Environmental Responsibility? The green belt did not receive automatic praise and support. Readers’ letters in one of the city’s most widely circulated papers, La Nación, reveal a heated debate between porteños and the municipal government over trash collection. As the city moved from incineration and dumping to sanitary landfills, this seemingly beneficial change caused confusion and spurred many residents to react strongly to perceived failures. Workers did not always collect garbage at the appointed times, which angered many porteños. The situation prompted residents to question the Proceso regime’s ability to manage the metropolis capably. Clearly CEAMSE—and therefore the municipality— could not manage the project, as concessionaires repeatedly did not fulfill their contracts. These criticisms struck at the foundation of the regime by questioning its competence. Cacciatore and his officials staunchly defended their actions in their own letters and advertising campaigns by noting that residents frequently did not follow the new regulations. Many porteños did not put their trash out at the set times or in appropriate receptacles. Some even continued to use their incinerators. Simply returning the blame to residents would not change the

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situation, however. The municipality also defended its administration by trying to instill a new sense of environmental responsibility in citizens. As porteños raged against the system’s problems, they did so in a manner that focused on the immediate concern of trash collection and not the long-term goals of reducing pollution and building green space. In turn, this shortsightedness raised the question of who held ultimate responsibility for maintaining a clean city and healthy environment: the city government or its residents? The green belt represented a massive undertaking and the first project of its kind attempted in Argentina. Given that CEAMSE built the parks in Greater Buenos Aires, however, this distance arguably led people in the Capital Federal not to associate the project with their refuse. This left the green belt entity and the municipality with the difficult task of convincing residents of the necessity of the project, thereby enhancing compliance with trash regulations. Cultivating environmental responsibility and cooperation among porteños presented the greatest challenge for the municipal government. The cessation of trash incinerators came under fire first. The municipality lauded this action as key to restoring the city’s good name and improving the lives and health of all citizens. The new law specifically compelled the installation of compactors in buildings over four stories tall and with more than twenty-five units. Residents had one year to comply. This abrupt elimination of the use of roughly 17,000 incinerators would drastically reduce carbon particles in the air, thus restoring the city’s air to a purer, more healthful state.40 In an article, La Nación praised this step as a “little miracle.” Children, old people, and the infirm would breathe easier, and women would no longer have to worry about soot landing on their person or belongings. Even though compactors cost millions of pesos, the editorial estimated that some 90 percent of buildings did not fall under the new law requiring one of these machines.41 Only a minimum supposedly had to comply. The transition from burning trash to compacting encountered significant obstacles. Porteños repeatedly decried the expense of replacing their incinerators. In numerous readers’ letters dating from 1978 through 1981, residents raised the common complaint that their economic positions made the cost of compactors an extreme burden. One woman noted that footing the US$3,500 simply meant that the city could pass on the expense to residents rather than spend money on more collection trucks.42 A compacting truck cost more than a simple truck; by keeping the former to a minimum,

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CEAMSE and its concessionaires could save money. This in turn put pressure on those residents of “middling” means who had to foot the bill for the incinerators. Other letters echoed this concern. One man noted that most of the tenants in his building were retirees.43 He asked how they could contribute when only one or two people resided in a unit and lived on a fixed income. While the expense of compactors upset many, some citizens questioned the apparent arbitrariness of the new law. Why did the new law single out buildings over four stories and with more than twenty-five units (or over 1,500 square meters, when the law was revised in December 1979)?44 Those who wrote to the newspaper asked this question and suggested alternatives. Perhaps the law should have been based on the number of occupants or the volume of trash produced. One man observed that his building, while totaling over 1,500 square meters, produced only a medium sized bag of garbage daily. Trash compactors required a larger quantity in order to function properly, so why should he and his fellow occupants be compelled to invest their money in this machine?45 Some porteños did not understand the municipality’s cutoff choices and saw it as dismissive of individual building characteristics. Municipal authorities clearly heard porteños complaints. On July 13, 1979, the subsecretary of urban development for the city, Ubaldo Néstor Spasari, replied with his own letter.46 He sought to clarify the law and its requirements and demystify the reasoning behind this plan of action. This new system, according to Spasari, offered four advantages. First, it reduced the cost of trash collection. The subsecretary pointed out that the collection and transport of trash typically represented 75 percent of expenditures while disposal made up the other 25 percent. Compacting allowed trucks to pick up more trash at a time, thus reducing that cost. Second, the suspension of incineration put an end to injuries sustained by those building attendants previously charged with burning the trash. The law also stipulated that citizens should place their trash in plastic bags. This led to the third advantage: the plastic bag provided a stronger barrier against scavenging rodents and insects. Finally, Subsecretary Spasari said the cessation of incineration reduced atmospheric pollution. By pointing out these advantages, Spasari hoped citizens would look at the long-term improvements rather than the shortterm expense. The compactor complaints revealed an overwhelming concern among the public for the economics of trash disposal, yet made no mention of the greater goal behind this reorganization of garbage collection. Residents did not understand why they needed to invest their own money into this process

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and resented the municipality’s attempt to pass on the cost. Citizens also saw the expense as unreasonable considering their own trash output. Building size did not necessarily reflect the quantity of garbage produced. This situation also contained a startling absence, however. The first step in building the green belt was the efficient collection of trash, but just two letters made a passing association with the environmental aims of this project. Only the subsecretary of urban development explicitly connected trash collection to green space and higher environmental aims. From the start of the complaints, porteños seemingly did not associate waste with park construction and thus did not recognize the ultimate goal that the municipality pursued. Aside from the complications that arose, the initiation of the new collection procedures created other pollution concerns. People observed that even though the atmosphere above the city was relatively free of soot, the air at street level had a terrible odor. The compacting plan had somehow fallen short. Refuse remained piled up in various parts of the city, creating mountains of garbage. Throughout the entire federal district, citizens complained about trashmen neglecting their duties. The letters painted a picture of a toxic city in which full bags of waste never received attention; heaps of garbage secreted noxious odors and liquids; and rotten food provided ample sustenance for stray animals, insects, and rodents. Such unsightly and fetid filth destroyed the city’s healthy and clean image and converted the metropolis into a deplorable dump. Secretary of Public Works Guillermo Laura, however, staunchly defended the system. He denied that the municipality had received complaints from residents about trash pickup and insisted that despite some truck routes running behind schedule, the city was always clean by midday.47 The continued domestic burning of refuse posed another obstacle. The new law prohibited the use of incinerators, but some people persisted in using them. One resident noticed buildings in his neighborhood burning every single day despite the new law.48 He called upon the municipality to enforce the law, noting that it was incredibly obvious who disobeyed. A woman recalled Cacciatore’s promise to create a “clean and pure sky,” but her hopes were dashed as she watched chimneys continually spew out poisonous black smoke.49 Yet another woman bemoaned the sorry state in which she found her home after a vacation. Soot completely covered the balcony, furniture, and curtains. In her letter, she questioned whether the city had actually banned the use of incinerators.50 Residents commonly faulted the municipal government for the lack of

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consistent cleaning of streets and removal of trash. One man’s letter speculated that the municipality did not have enough resources at its disposal to collect thousands of tons of trash.51 Others pessimistically thought that the city had no genuine concern for residents’ grievances. One person bluntly stated that “the authorities have no interest” in improving collection.52 Many citizens felt entitled to a clean city, considering that they paid municipal taxes for sanitation services. “We have the right to receive the services for which we paid,” wrote one man.53 The yearly taxes levied by the municipality for cleaning, light, and street sweeping rose dramatically during this period, but residents did not necessarily receive these services regularly.54 All of these conclusions placed the blame squarely on the municipality and CEAMSE. Since CEAMSE outsourced garbage collection to private businesses, these criticisms indicated structural and organizational problems. In order for the concession system to work, CEAMSE had to maintain tight control and ensure proper service. Whether this happened with MANLIBA, the enterprise’s main concessionaire, was debatable. Buenos Aires resident Miguel Angel Paz submitted two letters, one in July 1980 and the other in September 1980. In the July letter, Paz detailed some recent experiences he had had with the municipality and MANLIBA regarding trash pickup in his area. With trash sitting outside his home and the surrounding area, Paz called the city to request a pickup. A brand new trash truck eventually came and collected the refuse in front of his home but nowhere else. Trash remained scattered in the street and blocked storm drains. With the drains obstructed, recent torrential rains resulted in the flooding of Paz’s garage. He called MANLIBA directly to arrange for the cleaning of the storm drains, but a company employee informed him that, “For now we have insufficient personnel, and the mayor wants us specifically to keep the city center very clean.”55 The concessionaire admittedly prioritized its services and focused primarily on Buenos Aires’ business and tourism center, thus neglecting residential neighborhoods. After this incident, Paz sought to understand exactly what services MANLIBA had been contracted to cover and in what areas.56 During a call to the city, an official informed Paz that MANLIBA was responsible for street cleaning, but with some exceptions. According to the official, street sweeping no longer occurred every day. Instead, MANLIBA would see to this activity twice a week: once manually and once with a street-cleaning vehicle. However, in this discussion with the MANLIBA employee, Paz discovered why he had

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rarely seen the mechanical street cleaner in his neighborhood. Parked cars made it difficult to clean the streets. Yet with the city center emptied of vehicles at night, the concessionaire could actually fulfill its contract there. Paz wondered why citizens had to pay for this new service when few if any received it. These experiences with costs, collection, and guaranteed services revealed a division between CEAMSE and its main concessionaire. Faults in the enterprise’s structure created confusion and anger as the municipal government’s move to rationalize governance fell short of its stated goals. Improving trash collection meant efficiently organizing routes to ensure optimal coverage of the city.57 Of course, key to the overall success of this venture was the reduction of costs. Decreasing the number of employees, keeping the number of trucks to a minimum (though making sure those trucks were equipped with the latest technology), and increasing productivity represented the ultimate goal of this phase. However, these minimal inputs could not handle the amount of trash produced, and CEAMSE clearly did not communicate effectively with residents or its concessionaires. Citizens lashed out against these shortfalls as a result and demanded to know in what way this new system benefited them. The situation looked bleak as city officials doggedly maintained their pursuit of the Proceso’s goals and services continued to suffer. Even though the city government received the bulk of the blame, some porteños denounced their fellow citizens. The president and the secretary of Friends of the City, a group that monitored the proper functioning of government and fostered civic pride among citizens, submitted a letter lamenting the trash situation.58 They reminisced about an earlier time in the city’s history when Buenos Aires was known as one of the cleanest cities in the world. However, President Alejandro L. Rocca and Secretary José J. Maroni reprimanded the city’s residents for the current mess. The amount of litter in every identifiable public place clearly demonstrated a lack of respect for their own habitat. “From elevators, corridors, and patios of houses and apartments, to sidewalks, avenues, train stations, between vehicles, and in the plazas, parks, and all public places,” they wrote, “sadly, [porteños] discard cigarette butts, wrappers, cigarettes, papers of all kinds, containers, chewing gun, tickets, etc.” Every kind of trash seemed to end up on the ground and in any public space. Rocca and Maroni saw this behavior as a widespread disregard among Argentine urbanites for public cleanliness and hygiene. Other readers noted similar behaviors and reprimanded the irresponsibility of their fellow residents. In a different letter, a man lamented the

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“uncivilized” behavior of his neighbors who habitually ignored city ordinances.59 The writer regularly witnessed people dumping their trash at the bases of trees as though it was the most “natural” thing to do. Others still complained of the continued incinerator use and widespread disregard for city ordinances.60 The ever-present haze of black smoke clearly indicated persistent disobedience. However, even when citizens were at fault, letter writers still called upon the city to do its job and enforce the law. No matter what, they seemed to say that ultimate responsibility lay with the municipal government. These exchanges between local government and residents revealed that porteños did not automatically see themselves as having any obligatory role in the process. Many felt that the city ultimately bore the burden of public cleanliness and demanded that municipal authorities fulfill their duty. Changing social perceptions regarding trash disposal and the grander goal of achieving a cleaner environment had to become central to CEAMSE’s agenda. The enterprise needed to respond to the blatant public littering and disregard for trash ordinances in the same manner it had aggressively pursued the closure of open-air landfills. Some citizens suggested that the municipality impose strict fines for infractions, which would act as a deterrent to these behaviors. Unfortunately, this course of action would require more employees and increased expenditures. In addition, proper imposition of fines required the full force and support of government in order to compel compliance. There was no indication that the city wanted to pursue this plan or that disobedient people would change their behaviors as a result. Green belt officials proposed education as the answer to the problem of noncompliance. The municipal government did see this as a viable avenue, especially by focusing on educating the youth of Buenos Aires. CEAMSE already organized tours of the green belt’s completed parks for primary school children.61 Also, the city government looked into changing school curriculum to include ecological studies. Working with the Society for the Protection of Animals, officials sought to add lessons on preserving natural resources and understanding the interdependency of species.62 The final proposal listed the topics to be covered and called for a program to train teachers to cover the material.63 The curriculum stressed maintenance of clean air, water, and soil, as well as understanding the negative impact industries had on ecological systems. Authorities saw fit to pursue and cultivate a new concern for the environment. Education presented an opportunity to create a collective environmental consciousness and stewardship for the natural world. CEAMSE officials’ attempts to change popular behaviors extended

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beyond youth education and into the media. The green belt enterprise and the municipality produced three animated films meant to reach a wider audience and to educate them on the enterprise’s activities and the importance of the environment. The films were The Balance of Nature, Recuperating Buenos Aires, and The River for Everyone. The movie theater group, Lowe S.A., incorporated these films into its distribution network and showed them before the main features in theaters from November 1979 to January 1980. The Balance examined environmental issues and eventually won a silver medal at the New York documentary film festival in 1980.64 Recuperating in particular focused on how far CEAMSE’s plans had advanced in 1979. CEAMSE also produced a third film in 1980. The River explored the enterprise’s latest project, a coastal park and residential area along the Río de la Plata. CEAMSE also sought to connect with the public through advertising campaigns. Ads appeared in newspapers and on television to disseminate basic details about the company’s projects and convince people of the vital importance of its environmental goals. Its main campaign, “Mantenga limpia a Buenos Aires” (Keep Buenos Aires Clean), focused on public waste and tried to dissuade porteños from littering and polluting the city.65 By attempting to influence residents’ actions, CEAMSE essentially asked the people to aid in its quest to make Buenos Aires a clean city once again. The “Mantenga” slogan appeared on the trash collection trucks and public trashcans throughout the city. CEAMSE also used the catchphrase extensively in broader advertising programs. A series of Mantenga ads that ran throughout winter of 1980 stands out for attempting to engage newspaper readers directly. The city ran four different ads from June to August, but they all bore similarities in style and content. The first ad asserted that, “Your city is the continuation of your house,” and below the phrase was a picture of a crushed can and a bottle, as well as the Mantenga slogan.66 A similar ad ran two days later. It said, “Your city is not your home’s garbage bin,” and had a picture of a crushed cigarette and a cigarette box.67 The third ad declared: “Do not obstruct the path of the trash trucks with your car. Avoid the tow truck.” A “no parking” sign appeared below and the Mantenga slogan, too.68 The fourth ad read, “Catch the cleaning rhythm.” Its illustration showed a piece of trash arcing into a trash bin that bore the Mantenga logo.69 Significantly, CEAMSE always published the ads in the same exact place: on the page opposite the readers’ letters. These messages responded directly to concerns expressed in the letters. Residents needed to be more considerate of public cleanliness and to avoid

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littering or disposing of trash in public spaces. Officials asked that residents replicate their private practices in public since no one would leave trash littered throughout their own apartment or house. They also needed to be more mindful of the trash collectors and to try not to obstruct their work. The ads asked that people participate in the actions already underway, and these messages explicitly contrasted with the issues expressed in readers’ letters. In addition, the placement of the ads demonstrated that the municipality and CEAMSE paid attention to what appeared in this section of the newspaper and wanted to respond in kind. A handful of the letters directly addressed Mayor Cacciatore, and on at least one occasion, a city official submitted his own letter. The opinion page, therefore, became a public space for debating the environmental future of Buenos Aires.70 Other advertisements occupied a more traditional role in that they displayed the triumphs of these environmental projects. On February 3, 1980 (the date on which all incinerators should have been inactive for roughly two months), the municipality ran a quarter-page advertisement declaring the drastic reduction of soot and carbon particles in the atmosphere.71 The top of the ad declared publicly that Buenos Aires was well on the road to clean air. By displaying this data, the municipality posed the question, “Do you remember the soot?,” and declared the city’s victory over burning trash. It hailed the purity of the air given that the cessation of incinerations reduced contaminants by 70 percent in 1978 and even more so in 1979. This ad and similar ones allowed Cacciatore’s government to display its triumphs and thus defend its management of the city. The ad also strove to win over the citizenry and gain greater support for its environmental projects. CEAMSE and the municipality’s advertisements and educational objectives clearly demonstrated a strong need to engage the populace and win its support for this massive undertaking. Private enterprise had to familiarize residents with the unique aspects of the project, especially given that the green belt was the first of its kind and scale attempted in Argentina. This meant that the municipality had to find some means by which to guarantee participation and adherence. Advertisements did not subtly call porteños to action, but rather directly addressed the perceived flaws in the system, told citizens what was expected of them, and explained CEAMSE’s wider objectives. This campaign not only tried to save face for the municipal government, but also promote its agenda. Despite general perceptions of this repressive period, Mayor Cacciatore and his officials could not compel total cooperation with absolute decrees and force.

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It is difficult to gauge the success of CEAMSE’s campaigns. Changes in the municipal government—Laura was relieved of his position in 1981 and Cacciatore of his in 1982—and the military regime’s overall loss of legitimacy kept many projects like the green belt from moving forward. Final outcomes aside, the debate over the park system and trash collection still presents a new approach to the Cold War history of Latin America and understanding the military’s goals. Mayor Cacciatore used his authority and the junta’s approval to transform the physical appearance of the city and a very basic practice in which all citizens engaged. The goals fell in line with the regime’s emphasis on efficient, responsive governance, as well as its push to privatize and reduce bureaucracy. With every park opened and every bag of trash collected, Cacciatore and CEAMSE officials saw the ultimate success of their venture. A cleaner city with a healthier citizenry was within reach. However, residents did not think that the mayor had fully achieved the goals of a greener, more efficient Buenos Aires. Newspapers regularly presented letters written by residents that catalogued the many failures of the new garbage collection system. A public debate ensued as porteños demanded that Cacciatore fulfill his role as mayor and see to the proper functioning of public services. The mayor, on the other hand, tried to compel cooperation by selling the project’s long-term environmental goals. This interaction contrasts with current studies of the Proceso period by identifying a place where residents openly denounced failures in the military government and its projects. There is no available evidence to suggest that those who wrote into La Nación suffered any backlash or repression. In addition, CEAMSE and the municipal government could not completely compel porteños to participate in this plan. Citizens did not accept the costs nor did they wholeheartedly follow the new garbage laws. Within this contact zone, the dictatorship’s authority had limits. notes 1.

The most well-known and oft-cited studies include the following: John Simpson and Jana Bennett, The Disappeared and the Mothers of the Plaza: The Story of the 11,000 Argentinians Who Vanished (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985); Emilio Fermín Mignone, Witness to the Truth: The Complicity of Church and Dictatorship in Argentina, 1976–1983 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988); Donald C. Hodges, Argentina’s “Dirty War”: An Intellectual Biography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991); Marguerite Guzman Bouvard, Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1994); Marguerite Fietlowitz, Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and

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2.

3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

1 4. 15.

16.

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the Legacies of Torture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Paul H. Lewis, Guerrillas and Generals: The “Dirty War” in Argentina (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002). “Discurso del Excmo. Señor Presidente de la Nación Argentina, Teniente General Jorge Rafael Videla, pronunciado el día martes, 30 de marzo,” Compendio de documentos del Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (Buenos Aires, 1976), 28. Ibid., 29. Brian Loveman and Thomas M. Davies, The Politics of Antipolitics: The Military in Latin America (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1997), 3–4. Jorge Schvarzer, Martinez de Hoz: la lógica política de la política ecónomica (Buenos Aires: Centro de Investigaciones Sociales sobre el Estado y la Administración, 1983); Paul H. Lewis, The Crisis of Argentine Capitalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); and Paul Blustein, And the Money Kept Rolling In (and Out): Wall Street, the IMF, and the Bankrupting of Argentina (New York: PublicAffairs, 2005). Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniela Spenser, eds., In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 17. The Proceso government’s control of key provinces and municipalities represented a new approach, as previous military regimes concentrated primarily on the national government. Marta Castiglione, La militarización del estado en la Argentina (1976/1980) (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1992), 52–57. Margarita Gutman and Jorge Enrique Hardoy, Buenos Aires: História urbana del Área Metropolitana (Buenos Aires: Editorial Mapfre, 1992), 169. Eduardo Blaustein, Prohibido vivir aquí: erradicación de las villas durante la dictadura (Buenos Aires: Editorial Punto de Encuentro, 2006), 19–25. El Censo Nacional de Población y Vivienda, 1980: Serie B, Características Generales, Capital Federal (Buenos Aires: Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos, Argentina, 1980), x; El Censo Nacional de Población y Vivienda, 1980: Serie B, Características Generales, Partidos del Gran Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires: Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos, Argentina, 1980), x. This spatial and political division was established in 1880 in an attempt to curb the city’s primacy within the nation. James Scobie, Buenos Aires, Plaza to Suburb, 1870– 1910 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 9–10. Miguel De Luca, Mark P. Jones, and María Inés Tula, “Buenos Aires: The Evolution of Local Governance,” in Capital City Politics in Latin America: Democratization and Empowerment, ed. David J. Myers and Henry A. Dietz (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002), 65–68. This changed in 1994 when the Capital Federal achieved autonomy. Aside from being renamed Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, the mayor (no longer “intendente,” but “jefe de gobierno”) is now elected by popular vote. Gutman and Hardoy, Buenos Aires, 221–25. Previous plans included: Comisión de Estética Edilicia (1925); Plan Director de Buenos Aires (1937); Plan Director de Buenos Aires, Organización del Plan Regulador (1958–65); and Organización del Espacio de la Región Metropolitana de Buenos Aires, Esquema Director Año 2000 (1967–69). Odilia Suarez, Planes y códigos para Buenos Aires, 1925–1985 (Buenos Aires: Secretaría de Extensión Universitaria de la Facultad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1986), 13–18.

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17. The Consejo del Planeamiento Urbano for the municipality estimated five square meters per resident (“Espacios aereatorios y recreacióna cielo abierto,” Boletín del Consejo de Planificación Urbana 5 [1980]: 15). The construction journal Construcciones estimated that there were 6.4 square meters per resident (“Cinturón Ecológico Area Metropolitano,” Construcciones 279 [September–October 1979]: 33). A CEAMSE (Cinturón Ecológico de la Área Metropolitana, Sociedad del Estado) official put the amount between 7.5 and 8 square meters (“Una muralla verde para Buenos Aires,” La Nación, February 1, 1978, p. 7). The difference in estimates can be attributed to how each defined “green space,” as some used a more permissive definition. 18. “Una muralla verde para Buenos Aires,” La Nación. It is not clear which “international standard” the writer of the article was quoting. 19. Guillermo Domingo Laura, El cinturón ecológico (Buenos Aires: Ediciones CEAMSE, 1978). The study was originally published in 1974. 20. The idea of a green belt had been proposed as early as the late nineteenth century. At that time, city officials considered the possibility of a green belt outside of city limits. However, opponents defeated the idea since it placed necessary parks far from the city center and arguably would not be used by residents. Diego Armus, “La idea del verde en la ciudad moderna. Buenos Aires 1870–1940,” Entrepasados 10 (1996): 10. 21. Once the interred garbage reached a certain height, a clay cap was to be placed over it. The cap established the foundation for the parks and created a necessary barrier between the decomposing trash and the green space. 22. World Currency Yearbook (Brooklyn: International Currency Analysis, 1984), 65. 23. Laura, El cinturón ecológico, 81–82. 24. Quoted in Laura, El cinturón ecológico, 38. 25. Control of urban space was not unique to the Proceso regime, as earlier Argentine governments saw parks and plazas as a way to mold the population into a modern citizenry. Aside from being spaces that promoted health via exercise and contact with natural surroundings, Diego Armus argues that liberal leaders also saw green spaces as social equalizers that brought people of all classes and backgrounds into contact. Adrián Gorelik echoes this conclusion as he delves deeper into the specifics of public space and civic development. Unlike the spontaneity and unchecked development that James R. Scobie advocates in his seminal work, Gorelik posits that the Argentine state actively shaped the developing city in an effort to promote a cohesive population. The 1977 green belt project represents a recycling of this old idea, though the military had a less democratic goal in mind. See Diego Armus, “La idea del verde en la ciudad moderna,” 13–14; Adrián Gorelik, La grilla y el parque: espacio público y cultura urbana en Buenos Aires, 1887–1936 (Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 1998), 35–40; and Scobie, Buenos Aires. 26. Osvaldo Andrés Cacciatore, Sólo los hechos (Buenos Aires: Metáfora Editorial, 1993), 211–13. 27. As a “Sociedad del Estado” (meaning that the entity was under the auspices of the state), CEAMSE’s board of directors consisted of public authorities, including Guillermo Laura, the minister of government for the province, the minister of public works for the province, and the secretary of government for the Capital Federal. CEAMSE, Memoria general y balance 1977 (Buenos Aires: CEAMSE, 1977), 1. 28. “Cinturón Ecológico Área Metropolitano,” 34–35.

The Other Dirty War 2 9. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 4 3. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

5 5. 56. 57.

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Ibid., 35. “Bosque artificial,” La Nación, June 13, 1979, 14. CEAMSE, Memoria y balance general 1980 (Buenos Aires: CEAMSE, 1980), 14. CEAMSE, Memoria y balance general 1981 (Buenos Aires: CEAMSE, 1981), 9–10. Paul H. Lewis, The Crisis of Argentine Capitalism, 448–50. CEAMSE, Memoria 1979 (Buenos Aires: CEAMSE, 1979), 16. CEAMSE, Memoria 1980, 13. CEAMSE, Memoria 1979, 9. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 16. None of this proceeded without corruption. For example, engineers determined that water comprised 40 percent of the collected garbage’s weight. If extracted, the weight and therefore the tariffs charged for transporting trash would decrease. Plans to build a plant specifically for this purpose unsurprisingly never came to fruition, thus allowing concessionaires to earn extra money for that water weight. Mario Rapoport and María Seaone, Buenos Aires, historia de una ciudad, vol. 2 (Buenos Aires: Fundación Banco Ciudad, 2007), 447. Ángel O. Prignano, Crónica de la basura porteña: Del fogón al cinturón ecológico (Buenos Aires: Junta de Estudios Históricos de San José de Flores, 1998), 311. “Adiós a los incineradores y una cordial bienvenida al aire puro,” La Nación, January 11, 1978, 9. In 1978, US$3,500 was equivalent to 3.5 million Argentine pesos. World Currency Yearbook, 65; “Los compactores y la economía,” La Nación, January 18, 1978, 6. “Una sola bolsa de residuos,” La Nación, December 4, 1978, 8. “Las casas de más de 1500 m2 deberán tener compactador,” La Nación, December 21, 1979, 8. “Compactadoras,” La Nación, January 29, 1981, 8. “Las compactadoras,” La Nación, July 13, 1979, 8. “La recolección de los residuos: un problema que se atenúa,” La Nación, January 28, 1978, 5. “Incineración de residuos,” La Nación, April 21, 1978, 8. “Smog todavía,” La Nación, December 30, 1979, 8. “Hollín,” La Nación, January 18, 1980, 8. “La recolección de residuos,” La Nación, January 18, 1979, 8. “Recolección de residuos,” La Nación, January 31, 1980, 6. “Limpieza de la ciudad,” La Nación, February 7, 1979, 8. Rising municipal taxes became a heated topic in 1980 as Argentina’s general economic situation deteriorated. Yet again, residents submitted letters to the editor detailing current taxes compared to previous years. The following articles published in La Nación are representative of the discussion: “Tasa municipales: 140% de aumento,” January 29, 1980, 6; “Cómputos municipales,” March 2, 1980, 8; “Luz, escoba y limpieza,” June 1, 1980, 8; “Alumbrado y MANLIBA,” April 24, 1981, 6. “Los deberes de la ciudad,” La Nación, July 1, 1980, 8. “Barrido y MANLIBA,” La Nación, September 6, 1980, 6. Osvaldo F. Allen and Aldo H. Mennella, “Sistema de recolección automática por contenedores en la ciudad de Buenos Aires,” presentation delivered at the XVIII Congreso Interamericano de Ingeniería Sanitaria y Ambiental in Panama City, Panama, August 1982, 17–28.

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5 8. “Por una ciudad limpia,” La Nación, January 7, 1980, 8. 59. “Agüero entre Charcas y Güemes,” La Nación, October 14, 1980, 8. 60. “Mayor control municipal,” La Nación, April 5, 1979, 8; “Compactadores,” La Nación, April 23, 1980, 8. 61. CEAMSE, Memoria 1980, 15. 62. “Le [sic] ecología como materia escolar,” La Nación, September 8, 1980, 6. 63. “La educación ecológica,” La Nación, July 21, 1981, 6. 64. CEAMSE, Memoria 1980, 22. 65. The public trash collection group, MANLIBA, S.A., took its name from the “Mantenga limpia a Buenos Aires” campaign. 66. “Su ciudad es la continuación de su casa,” La Nación, June 27, 1980, 9; July 7, 1980, 9; July 23, 1980, 9; August 4, 1980, 9. 67. “Su ciudad no es el tacho de basura de su casa,” La Nación, June 29, 1980, 15; July 26, 1980, 9; August 10, 1980, 9. 68. “No impida con su auto el paso de las barredoras. Evitará la grúa,” La Nación, July 14, 1980, 9; July 29, 1980, 9; August 11, 1980, 9. 69. “Tómele el ritmo a la limpieza,” La Nación, July 18, 1980, 9; August 3, 1980, 9; August 15, 1980, 9. 70. Adrián Gorelik defines public space as “an arena of dialogue constructed by autonomous citizens.” Readers submitted their unsolicited grievances to the newspaper, and the section in which they appeared became an “arena of dialogue” as Cacciatore and his officials clearly had to respond to the issues. This interaction made the newspaper a public space for debate. Gorelik, La grilla y el parque, 46. 71. “¿Se acuerda de hollín?,” La Nación, February 3, 1980, 3.

· Ch a p t er T en ·

“Restoring All Things in Christ” Social Catholicism, Urban Workers, and the Cold War in Guatemala

5 Bona r L . H er ná n dez

Los mártires son semillas. Y renacen. Renacen. —Manuel José Arce, Diario de un escribente1

On May 15, 1962, José Ángel Berreondo fell victim to an assas-

sin’s bullet in downtown Guatemala City. Berreondo, an overlooked Catholic activist of the 1950s, had come of age religiously and socially within the ranks of the Juventud Obrera Católica (Young Christian Workers, JOC). His assassination, reportedly at the hands of the much-feared state secret police, highlights the radicalization of Guatemalan politics during the Cold War and its consequences for Guatemalan society.2 By the early 1960s, JOC and other Catholic lay groups had emerged as important links between the Catholic Church and young workers. In the years to come, these groups were to play an integral role within what scholars have termed the “progressive” church in Latin America.3 As the bipolar world of the Cold War took hold in Guatemala, progressive Catholics such as Berreondo were not immune from the political violence that gradually engulfed the Central American country during this period. Through an analysis of oral and printed sources, this chapter examines 251

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the trajectory of JOC in Guatemala during the 1940s and 1950s. A Catholic lay organization formed by young female and male workers, JOC constituted part of the church’s campaign in the twentieth century to restore its influence among the working class. JOC members, Jocistas, viewed themselves as “worker-apostles” who were entrusted with a mission to save their fellow young workers from the ravages of capitalism and communism. Jocistas articulated a middle-of-the-road path—a “third way,” as prescribed by the social doctrine of the church—that would provide the foundations for the establishment of a harmonious, classless world. Such social order, JOC members hoped, would spare workers from the physical exploitation brought about by capitalism and provide a concrete alternative to communism. The internal dynamics of the Guatemalan JOC, the changing face of Guatemalan Catholicism, and the politics of the Cold War conspired to transform Jocistas into religious and social activists. Although they clung onto the central tenets of the church’s social doctrine, including its anticommunist orientation, Jocistas gradually moved closer to the reformist elements that resurfaced in the aftermath of the 1954 overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz. This shift occurred not only as a direct result of JOC’s working-class character but also as an outcome of the political polarization brought about by the Cold War. In other words, Catholicism provided a space for young workers to become social actors and put forward religious and social ideologies that did not fit neatly into the bipolar world of the second half of the twentieth century. There were limits to the ability of individuals to transcend ideological polarities, but the story that follows seeks to bring to the forefront the ability by Berreondo and his fellow Jocistas to challenge the ideological underpinnings of the Cold War. This is not to argue that Jocistas were all-powerful social actors who transcended or bypassed altogether the ideological divide of the Cold War, nor is it to deny the importance of the power struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States after the mid-1940s. Rather, this study of the Guatemalan JOC highlights the extent to which Latin Americans at the grass roots level contested the bipolar conflict. Jocistas did not seek to escape the communist-anticommunist ideological conflict; in fact, the available evidence indicates that they embraced it by putting forward an anticommunist position, one that was ultimately shaped by their religious and social conditions. The analysis that follows, therefore, contributes to a mushrooming Cold War historiography that portrays the Cold War as a complex and multifaceted historical period.4

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Church-State Relations in Modern Guatemalan History In order to understand why Catholic lay groups such as JOC came into existence, it is necessary to briefly discuss the history of the Catholic Church in Guatemala during the postcolonial period. In the aftermath of independence in the 1820s, this history became inexorably tied to national politics and, more broadly, the process of nation building. As in other Latin American countries, an important dimension of this process was the conflict between liberals and conservatives. While the former emphasized the creation of a modern, secular state along the lines of Great Britain and the United States, the latter favored the maintenance of certain colonial institutions, particularly the Catholic Church, in postcolonial Guatemalan society. In contrast to liberals, conservatives considered the church a source of social stability and cohesion. To a large extent, this struggle dictated the contours of Guatemalan politics during the nineteenth century.5 This ideological conflict reached its zenith in the 1870s. It was during that decade when Guatemalan liberals assumed control of the Guatemalan state. Once in power, they set out to remove all “obstacles” to the construction of a modern nation. The Catholic Church, which for liberals constituted one such impediment, became a target of an anticlerical campaign that would reverberate well into the twentieth century. During the 1870s, liberals such as Justo Rufino Barrios instituted the separation of church and state, expelled foreign clergymen, and expropriated valuable church properties. Institutionally weakened by this anticlerical program, the church lost much of its doctrinal and social influence among the rural population, especially among Maya communities in western Guatemala. By the turn of the twentieth century, the Guatemalan church, facing a chronic shortage of priests, found itself unable to attend to the spiritual needs of the majority of the Guatemalan population.6 The first half of the twentieth century may be regarded as a period of gradual institutional renovation for the Guatemalan church. The rise to power of Liberal Jorge Ubico (1931–44) signified a gradual shift in churchstate relations. A fascist sympathizer who ruled the country with an iron fist, Ubico differed in various ways from previous generations of liberals. For one, the Guatemalan dictator, eager to consolidate his regime, actively pursued political alliances with some of the country’s conservative sectors. During the 1930s and 1940s, he struck a political pact with Catholic leaders, especially Archbishop Mariano Rossell Arellano (1939–64), and Vatican diplomats then

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stationed in Central America. While Ubico gained the backing of the church, one of the pillars of Guatemalan conservative society, Rossell and the Holy See obtained the opportunity to carry out reforms designed to take the church out of its institutional lethargy.7 In 1936, this political partnership took on an official character when church officials, including Vatican diplomats, and the Ubico administration orchestrated a modus vivendi between church and state. A central component of this arrangement was the establishment of diplomatic relations between Guatemala and the Holy See and the arrival of new foreign missionaries such as the Catholic Foreign Missionary Society of America (or Maryknoll) in 1942. The newly arrived religious personnel became a key factor in the institutional and popular revival of Guatemalan Catholicism in the second half of the twentieth century.8 The establishment of closer relations between the Guatemalan church and the state paved the way for the creation and propagation of Catholic lay organizations among the rural and urban population. Starting in the 1940s, Catholic Action, a lay association organized under the auspices of ecclesiastical authorities, allowed the Guatemalan church to reassert its moral and doctrinal influence in society. One of the Catholic Action groups that emerged during this period was the Juventud Obrera Católica. Like other Catholic lay organizations, JOC served as a link between church leaders and the urban working class. The remainder of this chapter documents the revival of urban Guatemalan Catholicism in the middle years of the twentieth century. It does so by zooming into the history of JOC during the 1940s and 1950s and its relationship to the national and international politics of the Cold War.9

The Emergence of JOC JOC had its origins in the church’s efforts to reassert its doctrinal and social influence among Guatemala’s working class. In the 1940s, church leaders adopted the urban lay movement—the Jeunesse Ouvriè Chrétienne—created in 1924 by the Belgian priest Joseph Cardijn. JOC quickly spread throughout Europe and the Americas in the ensuing decades. Its members, young urban workers (fourteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds), were called to “conquer” their social and generational peers. JOC members congregated in small groups or cells in which they received religious instruction, participated in cultural activities, and gained consciousness about their working-class condition. They considered themselves “worker-apostles” whose mission was to

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recruit—or, as Jocistas themselves referred to their calling, “conquer”—other workers in and outside the workplace for JOC and the church. After 1925, when the Vatican officially recognized JOC, this youth organization quickly spread to other parts of Europe and several countries in the Western Hemisphere. By July of 1938, when 75,000 Jocistas met in Paris to affirm their mission to conquer the urban working youth, there were about half a million JOC members in Europe alone.10 Jocistas’ apostolic career in Guatemala began in the mid-1940s, just as the church began to reemerge institutionally. Church hierarchs conceived JOC as a specialized, urban form of Catholic Action devoted to the conquest of young workers in Guatemala City and its environs. Keenly aware of the lack of priests in the country and believing that “the work of the priest is not enough” to allow the church to reclaim its influence among the working class, ecclesiastical authorities mobilized young workers to propagate Catholic doctrine and social values in urban Guatemala. They called on Jocistas to heed the words of Pope Pius X when the prelate pronounced in 1903 that laypeople should endeavor “to restore all things in Christ and to lead men back to the submission of God.”11 Church leaders, in other words, saw JOC as a crucial link between the Guatemalan church and young urban workers. As a grass roots organization, JOC served to transform young workers into social protagonists. To be sure, this was a hierarchical organization, closely supervised by ecclesiastical authorities and parish priests. Guatemalan JOC leaders and rank-and-file members assembled in small groups (secciones), whose activities were closely monitored by an ecclesiastical advisor, Father Gilberto Solórzano, and Archbishop Rossell.12 At the same time, Guatemalan Jocistas viewed themselves as following Pope Pius XII’s pronouncement that “the apostles of the workers should be workers themselves.”13 They concluded that only young workers, who were themselves familiar with the realities of the working class, could act as worker-apostles or intermediaries between the church and workers. Jocistas considered themselves central players within the above-mentioned renovation experienced by Guatemalan Catholicism starting in the 1930s.14 JOC’s worker apostles surfaced among ladino workers.15 Jocistas targeted working-class neighborhoods as a recruiting ground for new members. The first JOC sección in the country emerged in a Guatemala City workingclass neighborhood—the neighborhood surrounding the Church of Our Lady of Candelaria, where Father Sólorzano served as parish priest.16 JOC sections subsequently sprang up in other working-class neighborhoods of

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the city.17 In the early 1950s, Jocistas began to expand their recruiting efforts to rural areas surrounding Guatemala City, beginning with the foundation of a new cell in 1950 in the town of San José Pinula, located approximately fourteen miles east of Guatemala City.18 This expansion from the city to the countryside continued in the first part of the 1950s, as was the case when in 1953 young peasants formed a JOC section in the rural municipality of San Pedro Ayampuc north of the capital.19 Thus, JOC soon expanded to urban and rural communities. Even though one must be careful not to overstate the impact of this growth, it is important to place Catholic Action organizations such as JOC in their proper historical context. Jocistas were concentrated in workingclass neighborhoods in and around the country’s capital.20 In this respect, JOC was not an organization of national proportions. Its membership, moreover, never reached the numbers of rural Catholic Action, which focused their activities among the Maya population in western Guatemala. One author estimates that, at its height in the mid-1950s, JOC never surpassed a membership of “more than a few hundred young workers.”21 In one important sense, this estimate is irrelevant. In a country where anticlericalism and the chronic lack of clergymen limited the church’s ability to exert its doctrinal and moral power over workers, the existence of a Catholicinspired organization for young urban workers represented an important departure from the recent past.

Jocistas, Social Catholicism, and the Cold War In its formative years, JOC was deeply influenced by the ideas of social Catholicism. Largely grounded on the “social encyclicals,” particularly Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891) and Pope Pius XI’s Quadragessimo Anno (1931), social Catholicism embodied the church’s response to the advance of capitalism and communism. Leo XIII’s encyclical, in particular, called for a “middle ground” between what clergymen viewed as the excesses of these political and economic systems. It represented a response to the emergence of the “social problem,” that is, the advent of industrialization and the concomitant birth of a new class of urban workers. This middle-of-the-road stance upheld the sacrosanctity of private property and sanctioned workers’ right to organize in Catholic-oriented labor unions. It also called on capital and labor to respect each other’s rights in order to restore social harmony to society. In the view of clergymen and lay Catholics, unfettered capitalist

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development and communist infiltration in society contributed to the erosion of the traditional social order. Jocistas considered themselves integral players in the church’s efforts to bring about this utopian, precapitalist world.22 During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Guatemalan JOC adhered to the tenets of social Catholicism. Jocistas’ allegiance—or, to use the phrase of the time period, “confessionalism”—was not unique to Guatemala. As church historians have indicated, Jocistas in other countries in the Western Hemisphere and Europe exhibited a strict faithfulness to the ideas of the social encyclicals. For instance, during their first years of existence French and Canadian JOC organizations supported worker-owner collaboration, not class confrontation, as the answer to society’s ills. Likewise, Mexican Jocistas supported the creation of a spiritual “Christian social order,” one that would be guided by a harmonious relationship between labor and capital.23 The influence of social Catholicism among Jocistas expressed itself in the pages of Avance Juvenil, the official publication of the Guatemalan JOC. The JOC newspaper constantly urged Jocistas to uplift, spiritually and morally, young workers.24 JOC members, Avance Juvenil stressed, could not overlook their material condition, but they should focus first and foremost on improving their spiritual and moral well-being. “Let’s fight fellow workers,” a 1950 editorial urged Jocistas, “for our material and economic welfare; but . . . let’s also fight with even more conviction for our moral improvement because in our noble human condition . . . this will be what effectively will determine our smallness or our greatness.”25 Another editorial that same year expanded on this view. Its author contended that the welfare of young workers went beyond the attainment of certain material rights (including the right to better working conditions and higher wages) or any other earthly concerns: “We have not been born,” remarked the author of the editorial, “for small things, just like the Earth, which will one day come to an end, but for greater things, like Heaven, which is eternal.”26 Yet, no matter how much JOC may have wanted to rise above the material world, it could not extricate itself from the national trend toward democratic politics of the mid-1940s. On October 20, 1944, the nascent urban Guatemalan middle class, backed by two military officers, Major Francisco Javier Arana and Captain Jacobo Arbenz, toppled Jorge Ubico, bringing to an end thirteen years of military dictatorship. Now holding the reins of political power, the middle class, supported by progressive military officers,

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inaugurated a period of reform—known as the October Revolution (1944– 54)—during which they moved decisively to put an end to what the Guatemalan writer, poet, and critic Luis Cardoza y Aragón once called “the land of eternal tyranny.”27 The major task of the middle class was to establish the foundations of a democratic, capitalist nation. Under Juan José Arévalo, the first president of the revolutionary period and an avowed admirer of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Guatemala witnessed the passage of a new constitution (1945), a social security law (1946), and a labor code (1947). This corpus of legislation guaranteed freedom of the press, speech, and association, and it allowed for the creation of a pluralistic political system. It also provided, if only in a limited manner, Guatemalan labor with health benefits and increased its bargaining power in the workplace. Arévalo, a university professor turned politician, came to embody the enthusiasm and confidence of a new generation of Guatemalans who aspired to overcome the country’s dictatorial past and launch an era of progressive reformism.28 The impact of these reforms on Jocistas increased as the Cold War left its first imprints on national politics. As recent scholarship has revealed, grass roots organizations in Latin America were not immune from the communist-anticommunist divide that captured the minds of politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, commentators, and common citizens in Moscow and Washington, D.C. Guatemalans on the ground, so to speak, responded to and participated in the major national and international developments of the middle decades of the century.29 JOC members were no exception to this trend, for they took advantage of the political opening of the revolutionary period to proselytize in Guatemala City’s urban neighborhoods and participate in the major ideological conflicts of the time period. None of this means that Jocistas influenced the outcomes of the Cold War to the same degree as powerbrokers in Guatemala, the Soviet Union, or the United States. It does mean, however, that the Cold War was not fixed in time and that its participants were more socially and politically diverse than previously thought. The Guatemalan JOC saw itself not only as a spiritual movement but also as a socially oriented organization. Jocistas came to oppose what they perceived as the propagation of materialist ideologies, particularly communism, brought about by the October Revolution. According to Jocistas, during the Arévalo presidency communism began to infiltrate the nascent labor movement. What was more, Arévalo’s “spiritual socialism,” the president’s political philosophy, smacked not of reformism (as Arévalo claimed) but of

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communism.30 Labor leaders, Jocistas complained, aimed to spread “anarchy” and “communist ideologies” among Guatemalan workers. The editors of Avance Juvenil argued that the country’s major labor unions had become an extension of the Confederación de Trabajadores de América Latina (Confederation of Latin American Workers, CTAL). In the view of Jocistas, this international workers’ federation, led by the Mexican labor leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano, represented nothing more than a tool of international communism.31 The JOC newspaper considered Lombardo Toledano as the number-one agent of international communism in Latin America and consequently strongly opposed the Mexican labor leader’s planned visit to Guatemala in 1947.32 In the early 1950s, the agrarian policies of the second president of the revolutionary period, Jacobo Arbenz, also received the attention of Jocistas. JOC members claimed that Arbenz’s 1952 Agrarian Reform Law (Decree 900) best epitomized the “communist menace” of the post-war years.33 Most historians agree that Decree 900 constituted a moderate, capitalist law. It authorized the expropriation of fallow land on large private states (latifundios) and on state-owned lands. The agrarian law stipulated that the expropriated land would be given either in lifetime tenure or rented in plots of eight to thirty-three acres to peasants with little or no land. The beneficiaries, in turn, were required to pay the government 3 to 5 percent annually of the assessed value of the land that they had received. For its part, the Guatemalan state committed itself to compensating affected landowners with 3 percent bonds maturing in a period of twenty-five years. The size of each loan would vary depending on the amount of taxes that each landowner had paid the Guatemalan state as of May 9, 1952.34 Described by Arbenz as the “most precious fruit of the revolution,” Decree 900 was intended to effect a major change in the country’s land tenure structure.35 It was inspired by the fact that as of 1944 only 2 percent of the population held 72 percent of the country’s land. Its goal was to put an end to feudal relations in the countryside through the distribution of land and the provision of technical assistance and agrarian credit. Or, as the Guatemalan president himself put it in his second annual report to Congress, with the agrarian law his administration hoped to “bring into the open the wound,” namely the highly unequal distribution of land that had for decades afflicted the Guatemalan peasantry.36 As the redistribution of land moved forward, Arbenz predicted, Guatemala would become an industrial, capitalist nation.37 Although the editors of Avance Juvenil did not directly address Decree

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900, their stance vis-à-vis the “agrarian problem” conformed to that of the Catholic hierarchy.38 In June 1952, the same month when Decree 900 became law, the JOC newspaper printed an editorial that had recently appeared in Verbum, the church’s mouthpiece. The author of the Verbum piece contended that the leaders of the October Revolution, particularly Arbenz and his inner circle of advisors, had artificially inflated the so-called agrarian problem in order to gain the votes and general support of illiterate peasants, the main beneficiaries of Decree 900. Like the communists’ efforts to pose as legitimate labor leaders, the 1952 agrarian law constituted nothing but a scheme to facilitate the advance of leftist ideologies among rural workers.39 With Decree 900, continued the Verbum editorial, Arbenz and his supporters provided a “Marxist solution” to Guatemala’s land-tenure system. First, the agrarian law did not turn peasants into property owners; rather, it only authorized them to receive land in usufruct, with the Guatemala state remaining the sole and ultimate owner of land. “It is a Marxist principle that only the state can be a property owner and, even more, hold land in usufruct,” and, the editorial maintained, this was a guiding principle of the agrarian law. Second, Decree 900 failed to give affected landowners “just” compensation for their lost lands. It was true that the Guatemalan state promised to compensate them with government bonds. But, the Verbum piece indicated, if recent Guatemalan history served as an indicator for future developments, this compensation was not likely to materialize. The state had not, for instance, “justly” compensated the Catholic Church for the expropriation of church property in the aftermath of the anticlerical reform of the 1870s. Finally, the agrarian law granted the president powers that belonged to other branches of government. According to Decree 900, Arbenz would act as the final arbiter of problems that might arise from the law’s implementation. This again purportedly revealed the communist character of the agrarian law, for it aimed at nothing less than enthroning a one-man dictatorship. In sum, Decree 900 represented a preparatory stage “of subsequent communist projects.”40 The architects of the agrarian law may not have envisioned the institution of such a political system, but Jocistas truly believed that communism was on the rise. They appropriated the discourse of the Cold War to advance the ideas of social Catholicism and, ultimately, the interests of the Catholic Church and conservative sectors in the country.41 According to Jocistas, the years of liberal development made possible the communist menace during the October Revolution. Avance Juvenil blamed the reigning anticlerical legal regime for the emergence of communism

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within the labor movement and the Arbenz government. It argued that, despite the October Revolution’s democratic opening, the Catholic Church continued to be “tied down” by the country’s longstanding corpus of anticlerical legislation. The church’s inability to exert its influence among workers “facilitated the work of communists in a way that may surprise many.” In this context, communists had “been able to make the most out of ” Catholicism’s institutional weakness.42 Liberalism and the secular culture that it had engendered choked the spiritual life out of young workers and thus gave rise to a highly “materialist culture.” Devoid of God, the country could only be headed toward its self-destruction. “Such a picture,” Avance Juvenil complained, “cannot be more depressing, precisely because a society without God, a man without God, and a home and school without God does not augur anything for the world but a social cataclysm.”43 This stance was informed by the ideas of social Catholicism. In Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII had left no doubt as to the church’s position regarding the effects of materialism on modern society. “What advantage,” the Pope asked his readers, “can it be to a working man to obtain . . . material well-being, if he endangers his soul for lack of spiritual food.”44 The anticlerical movement of the nineteenth century, according to this perspective, created a social context that gave birth to and nurtured godless souls. JOC members maintained that communists found fertile ground for their ideology and tactics. Jocistas often complained about the proliferation of workers who were in need of “spiritual food” but also about communists who, passing as the “liberators” of the popular classes, exploited the misery of workers in order to spread anarchy, create chaos, and eventually destroy Christian civilization.45 Working youth, desperate to find solutions to their condition and defend their rights as manual laborers, often had no alternative but to become part of communist-led labor unions.46 If Jocistas opposed these tactics, they were equally critical of employers’ treatment of the working class. This critique was a central component of social Catholicism.47 But it was also informed by the condition of Guatemalan workers. Jocistas contended that Guatemalan laborers would not have been receptive to the “redeeming” doctrines of communist labor leaders had the owners of capital treated them justly and paid them fair wages. There were exceptions to this assessment, but the editors of Avance Juvenil lamented that the majority of employers treated their workers, not justly and as human beings, but as disposable, cheap labor. Workers, having found little or no justice in the workplace, learned to resent their employers and in many

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instances became themselves the instigators of strikes, which they organized and carried out not out of a sense of justice but out of a sense of revenge against capitalists.48 There were numerous references to these developments on the pages of Avance Juvenil. The staff of the JOC newspaper often went to great lengths to document the “excesses” and “greed” of capital by interviewing workers. Workers expressed this sense of vengeance because of the supposed selfishness that prevailed among Guatemalan capitalists. They often felt that their employers, in addition to giving them unjust wages, did not treat them favorably in the workplace. It was not uncommon to find employers who did not allow their workers to take any breaks during the workday and refused to give them permission to take leaves of absence in cases of emergencies. Among the disaffected laborers were those who had worked for the same employer for many years. “Imagine,” one such worker told a reporter for Avance Juvenil, “that I have been working for my employer for eighteen years and during that time I have not known the meaning of distinction.” He continued describing his employer in the following terms: I have realized that [my boss] is a man who only cares about himself and thus neglects to treat his employees, who [with their labor] provide him with everything, in a just manner. One cannot take a break from work because he then tells us that he pays us to work and not to rest. No matter how urgent the situation might be, one cannot ask for a leave of absence; if he allows it, one is subjected to all kinds of recriminations and one is even forced to compensate him later for the missed work. These conditions led workers to justify acts of retaliation against employers. “This is why I have concluded,” related the same worker, “that many of those who take reprisals against employers are justified to do so.”49 Although it is difficult to gauge whether or not most Guatemalan workers shared this attitude vis-à-vis their employers by relying solely on the content of Avance Juvenil, scholarly work on the revolutionary period indicates that there was enough worker discontent to spur worker mobilization and participation in the labor movement. These workers often joined leftist labor unions and political parties.50 In this respect, capitalists’ unjust treatment of workers nurtured an atmosphere conducive to unrest among Guatemalan workers.

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Even when capitalists bore part of the blame for the rise of leftist political doctrines, this did not mean, the Jocista argument went, that workers were justified to use violence against employers. Guatemalan Jocistas, again following the central tenets of social Catholicism, viewed themselves as constituting a vanguard for the realization of social harmony, not a violent communist revolution. In 1950, Pope Pius XII asked JOC members worldwide to promote “a spirit of collaboration between the professional and the popular classes.”51 Archbishop Rossell reinforced this view when he pointed out that, without labor-capital collaboration, Guatemala would soon fall prey to the “advance of the [communistic] barbaric hordes that today, like in the days of Attila the Hun, threaten the culture and the [Catholic] religion in Guatemala.”52 The establishment of a harmonious social order, Avance Juvenil reminded young workers, constituted a much-needed prescription to uproot the communist threat and promote national prosperity. “As long as harmony between workers and employers is nonexistent,” Avance Juvenil reiterated, “there will be no progress in our nation.”53 Without labor-capital collaboration there could be no social harmony among Guatemalans.54 The JOC position, in this sense, had its roots in the social doctrine of the church and the evolving Cold War conflict in Guatemala during the 1940s and 1950s.

Anticomunismo reformista: Challenging Cold War Polarities By the second half of the 1950s, the Juventud Obrera Católica found itself at a crossroads. Jocistas had begun to step into unexpected ideological positions. Such an evolution materialized as JOC gradually expanded geographically and numerically. In the late 1950s, church leaders created new JOC male and female sections in rural areas around Guatemala City.55 In the village of Labor Vieja, for example, a female Jocista section began to function with ten members.56 As of 1958, JOC was present throughout central Guatemala, which roughly corresponded with the jurisdiction of the Archdiocese of Guatemala. The celebration of the Primer Encuentro Arquidiocesano de la Juventud Obrera Católica (First Archdiocesan Congress of the Young Christian Workers) in May 1958 not only brought together many Jocistas but symbolized the maturation of the Jocista movement.57 Despite this expansion, there was a growing sense among Jocistas that JOC had failed to live up to its original goals. Avance Juvenil took the lead in making this point. One of its editorials in 1956 lamented that, despite the

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various Jocista apostolic efforts, young workers lived in similar spiritual, moral, and material conditions as in 1947. Although good will, courage, and enthusiasm seemed to prevail among the members of the Guatemalan JOC, the editorial pointed out that, in the face of “almost insurmountable obstacles” faced by young workers, it appeared as if Jocistas had made little impact on young urban workers.58 This self-criticism, however, masked an underlying development: in the second half of the 1950s, the Guatemalan JOC moved beyond the “confessionalist” position of its first ten years of existence. True, Jocistas continued to aim to win over young workers and to criticize the seemingly expanding influence of communism and the negative consequences of capitalist development among Guatemalan youth. More generally, JOC remained committed to the ideas of social Catholicism. But as the country’s political landscape underwent yet another shift of seismic proportions in the second half of the 1950s and as JOC itself experienced a number of internal transformations, Jocistas, without negating the church’s position on communism and capitalism, sought to distance themselves from what they considered the most reactionary forces of anticommunism. They intended to position themselves as part of a moderate reformist force in the country. In the process, their anticommunism became imbued with a sharp critique of “negative anticommunism,” which in the perspective of Jocistas became synonymous with opposition at any cost—even at the cost of political repression and violence— to much-needed reforms to improve the daily lives of young workers. This evolution was very much an outgrowth of the so-called JOC method. The Guatemalan JOC, like its counterparts worldwide, functioned as a school for young male and female workers. Its ultimate goal was to give workers “consciousness about their individual and social importance as members of the working class.”59 Jocistas were expected to gain this awareness about their individual and social condition through the “See-Judge-Act” approach. Devised by JOC founder Joseph Cardijn, See-Judge-Act required young workers to look (see) at the realities of their working class lives; to analyze (judge) the causes and consequences of the problems that affected them on a daily basis in light of the social doctrine of the church; and, more crucially, to put forward solutions (and to act upon them) to these difficulties. The JOC method permitted young workers to base their opinions and actions on concrete realities.60 In other words, See-Judge-Act allowed Jocistas to harmonize the doctrine of the church with their own actions; it permitted them to adapt church doctrine to their own experiences.61

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While Jocistas came into contact with the See-Judge-Act approach during the late 1940s and early 1950s, it was not until the second half of the 1950s that this method had its greatest impact among them.62 In 1956, Jocistas began to apply See-Judge-Act to help improve the lives of young workers. That year, for instance, the Labor Vieja JOC section established a caja de ahorros (savings bank) to give its members a form of social security in times of need. The Labor Vieja Jocistas also petitioned the Guatemalan government to make drinking water accessible to the local population.63 Although these services and efforts had a limited impact on the lives of workers, they opened the door for future “transformational” experiences among Jocistas. The JOC method was intended to introduce Jocistas to the notion that manual labor was socially valuable and that they could be agents of social change by making moral judgments and acting upon them. Its purpose was to make them conscious of their potential as workers and human beings.64 The implementation of the JOC method was made possible partly by a generational shift experienced by JOC starting in 1956. In January of that year, a new national committee took over the direction of the Catholic organization. The new committee consisted of a new generation of Jocistas who had risen through the ranks of JOC. These included José Ángel Berreondo (president), Julio Celso de León (secretary), and Miguel Enrique Flores (vicesecretary).65 As their actions would later demonstrate, these new JOC leaders were more willing than Mario Azmitia Molina, who had served as JOC national president since the late 1940s, to push the Jocista stance regarding social issues and politics into unforeseen paths. Levenson-Estrada has argued that the Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo (PGT, the communist party) influenced the activities of the new JOC leaders.66 It is worth noting, however, that, although the PGT had a presence among Guatemalan workers during the late 1950s, Jocistas remained committed to the church’s anticommunism. To be sure, Marxist interpretations of society did eventually influence some Jocistas, particularly in the 1960s. But, as one former Jocista recounts, the JOC method provided an alternative to the Marxist analysis of society.67 The JOC method and the rise of a new JOC leadership proved fundamental as Jocistas separated themselves from the forces of reactionary, violent anticommunism. But this shift should also be understood as a result of developments that were external to the JOC organization. In June 1954, a military invasion from Honduras engineered by the Central Intelligence Agency and led by a Guatemalan military officer, Carlos Castillo Armas, resulted in the overthrow of

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President Arbenz. Archbishop Rossell endorsed the coup. He saw in Arbenz the personification of a communist dictator and in his regime the embodiment of international communism. Rossell elaborated on his position in regards to the “communist” character of the Arbenz government in his 1954 pastoral letter, Carta pastoral sobre los avances del comunismo en Guatemala. In it, the prelate called for a national “crusade” against communism, which in his view the Arbenz regime had come to epitomize.68 Castillo Armas, who formally assumed control of Guatemala toward the end of 1954, appreciated the church’s anticommunism. His regime was quick to reward the church hierarchy’s opposition to Arbenz. The 1956 constitution, drafted by Castillo Armas’s anticommunist allies in the national legislature, best exemplifies the new president’s position vis-à-vis the church. The new constitution granted the Catholic Church some of the privileges that it had lost under the 1871 constitution, principally the right to own property and, when requested, to provide religious instruction in the nation’s public schools.69 In a political sense, the 1956 document embodied the consolidation of the church-state rapprochement that had begun to materialize in the 1930s. The aftermath of Arbenz’s fall from power, however, exposed cracks in this emerging anticommunist coalition. Indeed, a less enthusiastic, if not somber, attitude emerged among church leaders and Catholic lay groups regarding the Castillo Armas government. As the Castillo Armas regime gave way to a wave of repression against suspected communists and their sympathizers, even the fervently anticommunist archbishop seemed to have misgivings about the willingness of the new president to combat communism. In La paz, fruto de la justicia, his pastoral letter of July 2, 1954, Rossell applauded Castillo Armas for overthrowing the Arbenz government. At the same time, the prelate argued that the “peace and progress” brought about by Castillo Armas’s army would soon dissipate unless it was based on the social doctrine of the church. Although Armas succeeded in ousting Arbenz from political power, Rossell insisted, he would not be able to contain indefinitely the intrusion of communism into the country’s political life through the use of force alone.70 More precisely, Rossell extolled Guatemalan politicians to work toward an improvement in the material condition of workers. Arbenz’s downfall did not automatically translate into better living and working conditions for this social class. The country’s political leadership, Rossell contended, must take advantage of the 1954 coup to implement concrete reforms that would result

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in an improvement in the living conditions of workers. Such changes must have as their pillar the precepts of social Catholicism, and, more specifically, the contents of encyclicals such as Rerum Novarum and Quadragessimo Anno.71 Still, even these calls for social reform fell on deaf ears. Persecution and repression against Arbenz’s supporters and against suspected communists—indeed anyone who had participated in the popular organizations that challenged the economic interests of the United States during the revolutionary period—reached unprecedented levels after 1954. Bowing to pressure from the U.S. embassy in Guatemala, Castillo Armas established the Comité de Defensa Nacional Contra el Comunismo (Committee for National Defense Against Communism, CDNCC), a three-person commission that ordered the arrest and imprisonment of approximately 4,000 communist suspects. Assisted by undercover CIA agents, CDNCC compiled a black list with 70,000 names of suspected communists. Decree 59, issued in August of 1954, authorized the Castillo Armas government to imprison anyone on the list and use force against those who were not on it, including peasants and workers who had had no contact with communist organizations such as the PGT.72 Social reformers and moderate politicians, whether or not they supported Arbenz, became suspected communists.73 In this polarized Cold War climate, Jocistas continued to denounce communism and capitalism. Through Avance Juvenil, they criticized the country’s labor leaders, who, in their view, lacked the courage to curb the activities of communists during the May Day workers’ celebrations of 1956.74 Jocistas again cautioned young workers to avoid the communist trap—of enticing the working class with the promise of a utopian redemption in order to install a proletarian dictatorship—which had been extremely successful not only in the Soviet Union but also in Poland, Czechoslovakia, China, and Hungary after 1945.75 In so arguing, JOC supported the anticommunist position of the church hierarchy.76 But Jocistas also kept up their criticism of capitalists. The latter, in their unbridled drive for wealth, relegated workers to a life of misery by giving them “starvation wages.”77 In May 1957, Avance Juvenil called on the Guatemalan Congress to approve a bill that would increase the minimum wage. The JOC newspaper hoped that Congress would act to protect the interests of the working class, which the aforementioned bill would supposedly do, and not reward those who defended the interests and exploitative methods of capitalists.78 Despite these ideological continuities, the 1954 coup and the internal

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dynamics of the Guatemalan JOC impacted Jocistas in important ways. After June 1954, they saw the economic, political, and social realities of the country through the lenses of the JOC method and viewed some of the anticommunist groups that had supported the overthrow of Arbenz as the enemies of workers. As repression against social activists, including urban labor leaders and peasant organizers, became increasingly common after 1954, the Jocista call for social harmony and worker-capitalist collaboration, though it continued to appear on the pages of Avance Juvenil, slowly began to give way to a growing critique not only of capitalism and communism but, more important, of the virulent and often violent positions taken by various anticommunist groups. Jocistas observed the wave of repression of the post-1954 years, contemplated its consequences for workers, and began to steer away from what they considered the “negative anticommunism” of these elements. The latter, they believed, supported an anticommunist rhetoric in order to maintain their positions of privilege and power and thus to perpetuate the deplorable living and working conditions faced by Guatemalan workers. By the second half of the 1950s, Jocistas began to advocate what they referred to as “positive anticommunism,” which, in their view, would provide concrete and positive solutions to the problems facing workers.79 JOC members concluded that the only viable solution to the problems facing young workers resided in the construction of an alternative social position, one situated between communism and “negative” anticommunism. Pope Pius XII seemed to provide workers the blueprint for doing so. He asked Catholics worldwide to do more than to simply oppose communism. “We remind the Christians of the industrial age,” the Pope proclaimed, “to not be content with an anticommunism based on vacuous liberty.” Echoing Pius XII’s words, Avance Juvenil indicated that the major challenge facing Jocistas consisted of opposing communism but also “constructing” a new, more just world.80 JOC’s mission now became evident: build a middle ground based on the social doctrine of the church, one that would simultaneously result in better living and working conditions for workers and serve as a bulwark against communism. Such intermediate position would give anticommunism the much-needed positive agenda to prevent the institution of a communist social order. In the eyes of Guatemalan Jocistas, there was no other avenue to solve the country’s many problems. “The dilemma,” the JOC newspaper pondered, “is authentic Christianity or communism; there is no room for temporary arrangements that sooner or later will lead us to communism.” Anything short of this “authentic Christianity” would leave JOC’s

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anticommunism without much meaning and could potentially result in another Arbenz regime.81 Implicit in this ideological evolution was a call for action. That is, the attainment of an “authentic Christianity” entailed more than the promotion of social harmony. It required bringing about, in the words of a Jocista, the “humanization of the workplace.”82 Workers should not resign themselves to their fate but instead aspire to live and work as human beings and fight, in a just and legal manner, to defend such right. Workers were entitled to adequate living and working conditions and to receive wages in a timely manner in order to provide for themselves and their families. This humane treatment of the laboring classes was pivotal for the realization of social justice as prescribed in Rerum Novarum and Quadragessimo Anno.83 This position would have differed little from what Jocistas had argued prior to 1954 had it not included a more forceful critique of the country’s structural problems. For Jocistas, there could be no humanization of the workplace without a more equitable distribution of wealth—a distribution that should be carried out in light of the teachings of social Catholicism.84 In order for the laboring classes to enjoy any measure of social justice, Guatemalans, especially wealthy Guatemalans, should recognize that private property, though a sacrosanct right according to church doctrine, also had a social function, that its acquisition and distribution could be regulated for the sake of the common good of society. The realization of a more equitable distribution of wealth could not be postponed any longer through simple charitable deeds.85 It required bolder actions, namely a major reform of the social and economic structures that created the conditions for the exploitation of the working classes. “We demand and fight,” Jocistas proclaimed, “for profound reforms to the socioeconomic structures [of the country], so that we can overcome the injustices brought about by capitalist exploitation and collectivist exploitation.”86 In the context of the post-1954 years, this standpoint made JOC a moderate, reformist religious organization. JOC was not the only Catholic Action organization that articulated these ideas. Indeed, the ideological shift experienced by Jocistas was symptomatic of broader changes taking place during this period within the Catholic Action movement in the urban centers and the countryside. For example, rural Catholic Action members, especially those among Maya communities in western Guatemala, assumed the role of social and religious activists. They took the lead in instituting programs of socioeconomic development, particularly agricultural and credit cooperatives. This was especially the case among

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Catholic Action groups under the supervision of the Maryknoll fathers and sisters in the Department of Huehuetenango, where by the late 1950s Catholic Action members had begun to challenge local power structures and act as agents of social change.87 Likewise, Jocistas became actively involved in social matters. They sought to make “authentic Christianity” a reality in order to give anticommunism a positive agenda. They did so by supporting a Catholic-inspired labor movement, which became a reality on July 21, 1954, with the creation of the Federación Autónoma Sindical (Autonomous Labor Federation, FAS). Blessed by Archbishop Rossell and led by its founder, the longtime Catholic activist José García Bauer, FAS aimed to provide a positive and anticommunist solution to the problems of the working class. For Jocistas, the federation’s Catholic and social orientation—its support of social Catholicism—stood in sharp contrast to the violent solutions that had arisen among capitalists and communists.88 The church hierarchy encouraged Jocistas to support the new federation, which initially brought together twenty-five unions representing approximately 50,000 workers. JOC members now began to participate in the labor movement and to take an active stance regarding the country’s social problems.89 Jocistas’ support of FAS highlighted the fractured nature of the anticommunist camp and brings to the fore the multifaceted character of the Cold War in Guatemala. In the view of Jocistas, the numerous attacks directed against the Catholic labor federation after 1954 exposed the fallacy behind the arguments made by several anticommunist commentators. One such individual, the journalist Alfredo Schlesinger, wrote a series of articles in 1954 and 1955 for La Hora, one of the country’s most influential newspapers, in which he equated labor unionism, including FAS, with communism. Jocistas conceded that communist agitators had infiltrated the labor movement during the October Revolution, but they also contended that a vibrant, Catholic-inspired labor movement, as exemplified by FAS, formed an integral part of a more equitable social order. Avance Juvenil pushed the argument one step further when its editors argued that workers had the right to organize themselves in labor unions in order to defend their interests. This right had been established not only in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, of which the Guatemalan state was a signatory, but also in the social encyclicals.90 The initial enthusiasm for FAS on the part of the ecclesiastical authorities, however, soon faded. The antilabor climate of the post-Arbenz period

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led the Catholic federation into an increasingly critical stance vis-à-vis the Castillo Armas government. The anticommunist press interpreted this criticism as a sign of communist infiltration within the federation.91 There was some truth to this accusation. While Jocistas had participated in the initial organization of FAS, the members of the now underground PGT had been “working from within” the federation. By 1957, the Guatemalan state began to target the communist elements within FAS, “much to the horror of JOC’s young people.”92 Church authorities sought to steer Jocistas away from what they saw as the growing radicalism of FAS. Solórzano, in particular, “opposed forms of struggle that were as systematic and potentially contentious as trade unionism.”93 But some Jocistas, especially the socially conscious Berreondo, De León, and Miguel Ángel Albizúres, began to take increasingly active and, in the eyes of Solórzano, radical positions regarding the condition of Guatemalan workers. In 1959, Berreondo, on an invitation by the radicalized Cuban JOC, attended the Cuban Revolution’s first May Day celebration. He returned home, in the words of a former Jocista, “energized and politicized.”94 But, as Jocistas would find out, talking about social justice was now synonymous with political radicalism. State-sponsored violence soon reached the Jocista leadership. On May 15, 1962, on the anniversary of the publication of Rerum Novarum, Berreondo was assassinated in Guatemala City. Six months before, he had survived an attack by members of the national police outside his residence. According to one former Jocista, it was later rumored that the chief of La Judicial (the secret police) had ordered his assassination. This same Jocista recounts that, in the aftermath of his trip to Cuba, Berreondo, along with De León, Albizúres, and another Jocista, Adolfo Hernández, planned to exit JOC and form a Christian-inspired labor movement, one that would be able to accomplish what FAS had been unable to do: reach ununionized workers and push for reforms of the country’s socioeconomic structures based on the social doctrine of the church.95 This is exactly what happened in 1962. In the aftermath of the March– April 1962 urban uprising against the government of Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes and due to the church hierarchy’s opposition to JOC’s participation in trade unionism, several Jocistas, including de León and Tereso de Oliva, who himself would fall victim to state-sponsored violence in the late 1960s, left the Juventud Obrera Católica to form the Frente de Trabajadores Cristianos (Christian Workers’ Front, FTC). In the words of De León, they left the JOC to “do what JOC had told us to do: act against injustice.”96 Those Jocistas

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who left the organization to become labor leaders decided that JOC’s raison d’être—the conquest and the humanization of the workplace—had not been accomplished by the early 1960s. Although Jocistas won over young workers and incorporated them into a lay Catholic organization, they did not carry out the other part, namely “the return to the workplace in order to reChristianize factories.” JOC was meant to serve both as a vanguard and as a brazo largo (long arm) in the workplace, where historically the church had had little presence. As the years passed, it grew numerically and expanded into both urban and rural areas, but this growth and expansion took place outside the workplace. The church developed a working-class grass-roots entity, which after 1954 became “the best-organized and largest grass roots youth group” in Guatemala City. However, by joining this movement Jocistas distanced themselves from the working class and its natural environment, that is, the workplace. Here, therefore, was the contradiction (and irony) of JOC: it gave young workers a space in which they could act as modern-day apostles and gain consciousness about their social condition, but this took place at the expense of maintaining close obedience to church leaders and parish priests. In the early 1960s, such conformity became a burden for those Jocistas who gravitated toward a type of reformism that often put them at odds with ecclesiastical authorities and the Guatemalan state.97 In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Guatemalan Jocistas came to support the realization of structural reforms, that is, better treatment of workers and more equitable distribution of wealth. JOC members contended that young Guatemalan workers enjoyed a “liberty of hunger”—a liberty characterized by unjust working conditions and wages, unjustified firings, and rising levels of unemployment.98 They also argued that certain material conditions, in particular social and economic reforms intended to alleviate the exploitation to which the working class was subjected, had to be implemented before young Guatemalan workers could be brought into the fold of the church.99 This was part of the reality that greeted the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) and the increasingly polarized Cold War context during the 1960s and thereafter. Just as Catholic bishops from around the world convened in Rome in the early 1960s to bring about a renewal of Catholicism, Catholic communities in various parts of Latin America were beginning to take progressive positions regarding their social, economic, and political problems. A “progressive” church was beginning to emerge in various parts of Latin America. The numerous documents produced by the participants of the council served to affirm the work of this emerging community of Catholics

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and in other cases it helped to spark new changes within the church, including the rise of liberation theology during the 1960s. In the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution, however, the Guatemalan state (and other states throughout Latin America) established counterinsurgency programs designed to eliminate communists and communist suspects. In the eyes of the military leaders who ruled Guatemala after 1954, the actions and positions taken by Catholic activists, including those that left JOC to become labor and social leaders, did not differ substantially from those of communist revolutionaries.100

Conclusion JOC served as a school for Jocistas. It equipped them with a perspective (social Catholicism) and a method (See-Judge-Act) to observe their condition as young workers, to analyze the causes and consequences of their poverty, and to take concrete steps to improve their lives. In a word, JOC gave them a unique perspective about their potential to change their own circumstances. This all involved changing “mentalities,” that is, changing the value that society (and workers themselves) ascribed to the (manual) labor of the working class.101 In the late 1940s and early 1950s, such change permitted Jocistas to criticize the impact of capitalism on young workers, condemn the infiltration of communism during the October Revolution, and form a tightly knit religious community at the neighborhood level. They did so through the prism of the social doctrine of the church. Beginning in the mid-1950s, Guatemalan Jocistas’ unanimous support of the social doctrine of the church began to dissipate as JOC expanded numerically, as it underwent a generational shift, and as it came to experience first-hand the realities of the Cold War. Jocistas did not seek full autonomy from the church hierarchy or attempt to extricate their proselytizing from the contents of social Catholicism. That was not their goal. But the JOC method and the political violence of the post-1954 years put them at odds with the same anticommunist elements that supported the overthrow of Arbenz. Thus, they progressively disassociated themselves from the extremism and violence exhibited by certain anticommunist elements. After 1954 they put forward what they regarded as a concrete solution to the problems faced by young workers. JOC members continued to oppose communism, to criticize capitalism, and to support the social doctrine of the church. As the 1950s drew to a close, however, they came to conclude that their apostolic

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work—the “restoration of all things in Christ”—could not take place without first supporting broad reforms of the socioeconomic structures of the country. JOC members came to the realization that they all shared a responsibility to act upon their religious and social convictions to effect a change in the temporal world. They challenged the seemingly static communistanticommunist rift of the 1950s and 1960s. Berreondo’s assassination in 1962 did not dissuade Jocistas from working to implement these ideas. Indeed, some of them became important social activists in the 1960s and thereafter and gave new life to the progressive work that they and their fallen comrade Berreondo had initiated. notes

1. 2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

The author would like to thank the Jocistas who, with their insights about the Guatemalan church, contributed the development of the ideas presented here. Special gratitude is due to the following individuals for their help in the completion of this chapter: Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Mark Lawrence, Julio Moreno, Jonathan Brown, Matthew Butler, Charles R. Hale, and José A. Barragán. Manuel José Arce, Diario de un escribente (Guatemala City: Piedra Santa, 2006), 172. Estuardo Quiñonez, interview by the author, Guatemala City, January 29, 2007. For an introduction to the “progressive” church, see Scott Mainwaring and Alexander Wilde, eds., The Progressive Church in Latin America (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989). For an example of recent approaches to the study of the Cold War, see Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniela Spenser, eds., In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). For an in-depth analysis of this struggle during the consolidation of the nation-state in the middle of the nineteenth century, see especially Ralph Lee Woodward, Rafael Carrera and the Emergence of the Republic of Guatemala, 1821–1871 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993); and Douglas Sullivan-González, Piety, Power and Politics: Religion and Nation Formation in Guatemala, 1821–1871 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), 81–119. The anticlerical campaign of the late nineteenth century is covered in J. Lloyd Mecham, Church and State in Latin America: A History of Politico-Ecclesiastical Relations, rev. ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966); Mary P. Holleran, Church and State in Guatemala (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949); and Hubert J. Miller, La Iglesia y el estado en tiempo de Justo Rufino Barrios, trans. Jorge Luján Muñoz (Guatemala City: Editorial Universitaria, 1976). Hubert J. Miller, “Las relaciones entre la Iglesia católica y el estado,” Anales de la Academia de Geografía e Historia 71 (1996): 121–52. For examples of the role played by Vatican diplomats in the establishment of this rapprochement, see “Ritorno dei Padri Gesuiti in Guatemala,” No. 2300, Pos. 77, fasc. 13, Archivio della Sacra Congregazione degli Affari Ecclesiastici Straordinari, Guatemala, 1933–1946, Vatican Secret Archives, Vatican City; and Giuseppe Beltrami, April 12,

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1 0. 11.

12. 13. 1 4. 15.

1 6. 17.

18. 1 9. 20. 21. 22.

23.

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1942, Central America, Apostolic Nuncio Correspondence, 1942–1968, Maryknoll Mission Archives, Ossining, New York. For the institutional growth of the church after the 1940s, see Bruce Calder, Crecimiento y cambio de la Iglesia Católica guatemalteca, 1944–1966 (Guatemala City: Editorial José de Pineda Ibarra, 1970). For accounts on the development of Catholic Action (especially as it developed in rural Guatemala), see Douglas E. Brintall, Revolt against the Dead: The Modernization of a Maya Community in the Highlands of Guatemala (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1979); Ricardo Falla, Quiché rebelde: estudio de un movimiento de conversión religiosa, rebelde a las creencias tradicionales, en San Antonio Ilotenango, Quiché (Guatemala City: Editorial Universitaria, 1978); and Kay Warren, The Symbolism of Subordination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989). Time, September 26, 1938, 40–41. Pius X, E Supremi: Encyclical of Pope Pius X on the Restoration of all Things in Christ, http://w w w.vatican.va/holy_father/pius _ x/encyclica ls/documents/hf_p-x _ enc_04101903_e-supremi_en.html (accessed June 9, 2009). The number of priests in the country had fallen from 119 in 1872 to ninety-four in 1925. These numbers, however, mean little if one fails to put them in the context of a growing Guatemalan population. In other words, the ninety-four priests that remained in the country in 1925 had to attend to a much larger population than was the case of the 119 pastors of 1872. See Holleran, Church and State, 235. Father Ábel López, interview by the author, Guatemala City, November 17, 2006; and Julio Celso de León, interview by the author, Guatemala City, November 15, 2006. “Magnífico éxito tuvo nuestra 3ra. jornada de estudios,” Avance Juvenil (hereafter AJ), August 1950, 1. “Hacia el apostolado obrero” (editorial), AJ, March 1953, 1. The term ladino is used in Guatemala to refer to racially mixed (European and Indian) individuals, as well as indigenous peoples who have adopted western-style dress and cultural traits, including the Spanish language. “Antena Jocista,” AJ, June 1952, 4. “Antena Jocista,” AJ, February 1955, 3; “Antena Jocista,” AJ, October 1953, 3; “Antena Jocista,” AJ, July 1953, 3; and “4 años de la sección ‘José Cardijn,’ son festejados,” AJ, August 1956, 3. “Espíritu Jocista en San José Pinula: surge el plan de apostolado, el centro ‘Carlos Bouchard,’” AJ, December 1950, 1–2. “Antena Jocista,” AJ, October 1953, 3. Julio Celso de León, interview. Deborah Levenson-Estrada, Trade Unionists Against Terror: Guatemala City, 1954–1985 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 83. The central components of social Catholicism can be found in Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, http://www.vatican.va/holyfather/leoxiii/encyclicals/documents/hf l -xiiienc15051891rerum-novarumen.html (accessed June 9, 2009). The JOC’s adherence to the Vatican was further evidenced when the Guatemalan Jocistas celebrated mass in commemoration of the sixty-second anniversary of the publication of Rerum Novarum. See “Homenaje de los trabajadores al Santo Padre,” AJ, July 1953, 1, 4. For the French and Canadian JOC movement, see Oscar Cole-Arnal, “Shaping Young Proletarians into Militant Christians,” Journal of Contemporary History 32, no. 4

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24.

2 5. 26. 27.

28.

29.

30. 3 1. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

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(October 1997), 516–17. For the Mexican case, see José Aparecido Gomes Moreira, “Para una historia de la Juventud Obrera mexicana (1959–1985),” Revista Mexicana de Sociología 49, no. 3 (1987), 205. The contributors of Avance Juvenil were generally Jocistas themselves. The JOC newspaper was published on a monthly basis from 1947 to the mid-1960s, when, according to a former Jocista, it became increasingly difficult to find a printing house that would be willing to print material that dealt with social issues. Avance Juvenil was first published in tabloid format and after 1955 appeared in broadsheet format. Julio Celso de León, interview; and Estuardo Quiñonez, interview. “Por otras rutas” (editorial), AJ, August 1950, 2. “Hacia la verdadera liberación” (editorial), AJ, October 1950, 2. Focusing on Guatemala’s long history of dictatorship, Cardoza y Aragón called the period of 1944–54 “los diez años de primavera en el país de la eterna tiranía” (the ten years of spring in the country of the eternal tyranny), a reference to the phrase coined by Alexander Van Humboldt, who, referring to the country’s temperate climate and rich natural resources, had called Guatemala “the land of the eternal spring.” Luis Cardoza y Aragón, Guatemala: las líneas de su mano (Guatemala City: Editorial Universitaria, 2002), 392. For the 1945 constitution, see Kalman H. Silvert, A Study in Government: Guatemala (New Orleans: Tulane University Press, 1954), 13–18, 28–29; and for the social security law and the labor code, see Archer C. Bush, “Organized Labor in Guatemala, 1944– 1949: A Case Study of an Adolescent Labor Movement in an Underdeveloped Country” (master’s thesis, Colgate University, 1950), 40–44 (part I), 1–4 (part III), 77 (part III), 3 (conclusion). Greg Grandin has made this point in The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Other examples of how Guatemalans and other Latin Americans lived these realities include Joseph and Spenser, In from the Cold; and Greg Grandin and Gilbert M. Joseph, eds., A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America’s Long Cold War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). “Frente a la actuación comunista: nosotros no perdemos de vista sus pasos,” AJ, September 1951, 2. See also “Amenaza comunista,” AJ, January 1952, 4. “Desorientación sindical,” AJ, October 1950, 2. “A traves de la lente: ya iba a venir,” AJ, December 1947, 1, 4. “El enemigo acecha” (editorial), AJ, September 1951, 3. Ley de Reforma Agraria: Decreto Número 900 (Guatemala City: Publicaciones del Departamento Agrario Nacional, 1952), Articles 4, 6, 32, 37, 39, and 43. Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, Informe del Ciudadano Presidente de la República, Coronel Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, al Congreso Nacional en su primer período de sesiones ordinarias del ano 1953 as published in El Guatemalteco, March 4, 1953, 1. Arbenz, Informe . . . al Congreso, in El Guatemalteco March 4, 1953, 1; on the various aspects of the Agrarian Reform Law, see Jim Handy, “‘The Most Precious Fruit of the Revolution’: The Guatemalan Agrarian Reform, 1952–1954,” Hispanic American Historical Review 68, no. 4 (1988): 675–705; and Piero Gleijeses, “The Agrarian Reform of Jacobo Arbenz,” Journal of Latin American Studies 21 (1989): 453–80.

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37. Ley de Reforma Agraria, Article 3 (photocopy); Alfonso Bauer Paiz, Interviews on Recent Guatemalan History, interview by James Wallace Wilkie and Marta Cehelsky, CD recording, disc 2, Guatemala City, Guatemala, 1968. 38. This convergence of opinions or, to be more precise, adherence to the mandates of the hierarchy was also manifested by the Jocistas’ full support of Archbishop Rossell’s decision to send the image of the Black Christ of Esquipulas on a pilgrimage throughout the country as part of his crusade against the radicalism of the Arbenz presidency. The JOC fully supported the archbishop’s decision. See “La J.O.C. protesta su adhesión y simpatía al jefe de la Iglesia guatemalteca,” AJ, February 1953, 1–3. Jocistas, in this respect, formed part of what Gleijeses has termed the “Christian opposition” to the Arbenz presidency. See Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 209–22. 39. “Frente al ante-proyecto de la ley agraria formulado por el ejecutivo” (editorial), Verbum, no. 467, as reprinted in AJ, June 1952, 3. 40. Ibid., 4. 41. The leftist character of Decree 900 seemed to gain legitimacy from the fact that some of Arbenz’s top advisors were indeed communists. Among these was José Manuel Fortuny, member of the Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo (PGT), the country’s communist party. As Gleijeses writes, although Arbenz himself was not a communist, his economic program for Guatemala coincided in some key areas with the economic platform of the PGT. Land reform constituted one such area. See Gleijeses, Shattered Hope, especially chapter 8. 42. “Ante el momento actual,” AJ, August 1952, 4. 43. “Contra la tempestad que se avecina” (editorial), AJ, August 1952, 1–2. In so arguing, Jocistas concurred with the position of the church hierarchy. In a 1946 pastoral letter, the Guatemalan episcopate argued that the separation of church and state and the accompanying institution of a secular educational system that emerged in the aftermath of the anticlerical campaign of the 1870s served as a preparatory stage for the infiltration of communism in Guatemala. Carta pastoral colectiva del episcopado de la provincia eclesiástica de Guatemala, sobre la amenaza comunista en nuestra patria (Guatemala City: Sánchez y de Guise, 1946), 3–4. 44. Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, http://www.vatican.va/holyfather/leoxiii/encyclicals /documents/hfl-xiiienc15051891rerum-novarumen.html (accessed June 9, 2009). 45. “Para reflexionar” (editorial), AJ, December 1947, 3. See also “El enemigo acecha” (editorial), AJ, September 1951, 3; and “Los aventureros trafican con el sudor de las clases oprimidas,” AJ, April 1954, 1–2. 46. “Nuevos tiempos,” AJ, August 1950, 5. 47. Leo XIII expressed this view when he wrote: “If we turn not to things external and material, the first thing of all to secure is to save unfortunate working people from the cruelty of men of greed, who use human beings as mere instruments for money-making.” See Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, http://www.vatican.va/holyfather/leoxiii/encyclicals /documents/hfl-xiiienc15051891rerum-novarumen.html (accessed June 9, 2009). 48. “Es mejor prevenir que curar,” AJ, August 1950, 5. See also “Reflexiones de fin de año,” AJ, December 1950, 4; “No hay derecho,” AJ, July 1953, 3.

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4 9. “Así piensan nuestros obreros,” AJ, June 1952, 4. 50. For examples of worker mobilization, see Bush, “Organized Labor in Guatemala”; Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre; Jim Handy, Revolution in the Countryside: Rural Conflict and Agrarian Reform in Guatemala, 1944–1954 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); and Cindy Forster, The Time of Freedom: Campesino Workers in Guatemala’s October Revolution (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001). 51. “Trascendental radiomensaje de Su Santidad al Congreso Internacional de la JOC,” AJ, December 1950, 2. 52. Carta pastoral el Excelentísimo y Reverendísimo Señor Don Mariano Rossell Arellano, Arzobispo de Guatemala, sobre la justicia social, fundamento del bienestar social (Guatemala City: Unión Tipográfica, Castañeda, Avila y Cia., 1948), 14. 53. “Alerta compañeros,” AJ, June 1952, 2. 54. “Así piensan nuestros obreros,” AJ, June 1952, 4. 55. “Antena Jocista,” AJ, August 1957, 3. 56. “Antena Jocista: actividad de los Jocistas de la sección Pío XII,” AJ, February 1957, 2. 57. “Primer Encuentro Arquidiocesano de la J.O.C.,” Verbum, May 18, 1958, 1–2. The Archdiocese of Guatemala included the departments of Guatemala, Sacatepéquez, Chimaltenango, Santa Rosa, and Escuintla. A brief explanation of the administrative structure (and the changes that this structure underwent in the 1950s) can be found in Agustín Estrada Monroy, Datos para la historia de la Iglesia en Guatemala (Guatemala City: Tipografía Nacional, 1979), 637. 58. “En el décimo aniversario de la J.O.C.,” AJ, May 1956, 1. 59. Father Ábel López, interview by the author, Guatemala City, November 17, 2006. 60. “Una gran lección,” AJ, March 1953, 4; and Father Ábel López, interview. 61. “J.O.C. y su mística,” AJ, October 1956, 4. 62. Father Ábel López, interview. 63. “Antena Jocista,” AJ, October 1956, 3. 64. Estuardo Quiñonez, interview; and Levenson-Estrada, Trade Unionists Against Terror, 81–82. 65. “Antena Jocista,” AJ, April 1956, 3. 66. Levenson-Estrada, “The Life That Makes Us Die/The Death That Makes Us Live: Facing Terrorism in Guatemala City,” Radical History Review 85 (Winter 2003): 98. 67. Father Ábel López, interview. 68. Carta pastoral sobre los avances del comunismo en Guatemala (Guatemala City: Acción Católica Guatemalteca, 1954). 69. Ricardo Bendaña Perdomo, Ella es lo que nosotros somos y mucho más: tesis histórica del catolicismo guatemalteco, 1951–2000 (Guatemala City: Artemis Edinter, 2001), 18. 70. La paz, fruto de la justicia, as reproduced in AJ, September 1954, 1–2. 71. Ibid., 2–3. 72. Stephen M. Streeter, Managing the Counterrevolution: The United States and Guatemala, 1954–1961 (Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 2000), 34–41. 73. Renate Witzel de Ciudad, Más de cien años de movimiento obrero urbano en Guatemala, vol. 2 (Guatemala City: Asociación de Investigación y Estudios Sociales, 1991), 32–33. 74. “Dónde está la Madera de los líderes obreros,” AJ, May 1956, 1.

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75. “Ni comunismo ni anticommunismo puramente negativo” (editorial), AJ, December 1957, 1. 76. “Monseñor Rossell Arellano urge oraciones por Hungría: sentido y vibrante mensaje pastoral de nuestro arzobispo,” AJ, November 1956, 1–2. 7 7. “Parias de los tiempos modernos: campesinos de ‘Hacienda Nueva,’” AJ, November 1956, 4. 78. “Salarios justos no son dádivas,” AJ, May 1957, 13. 79. This moderate anticommunist viewpoint was not unique to the Guatemalan church. For a discussion of how this reformist form of anticommunism took root in the Costa Rican church, see Iván Molina Jiménez, Anticomunismo reformista (San José: Editorial Costa Rica, 2007). 80. “¿Seremos traidores?,” AJ, June 1956, 2. 81. Editorial, AJ, November 1957, 1–2. 82. Father Ábel López, interview. 83. “El comunismo pasado de moda?” (editorial), AJ, July 1957, 3. 84. “El hambre y la miseria,” AJ, December 1957, 2. 85. “Justicia o caridad: la solución del problema social no es asunto de caridad,” AJ, February 1955, 1–2. 86. “Esta juventud desafía la historia,” AJ, September 1956, 2. Jocistas made a similar argument in “Ni comunismo ni anticomunismo,” AJ, December 1957, 4. One cannot help but to associate this argument with the reformism of the revolutionary period. Examples of how the reformist spirit of the “ten years of spring” reverberated well into the second half of the century are provided by Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre; and Charles R. Hale, Más que un Indio (More Than an Indian): Racial Ambivalence and Neoliberal Multiculturalism in Guatemala (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2006), especially chapter 3. 87. For an analysis of these developments, see Calder, Crecimiento y cambio, especially chapter 4; and Thomas R. Melville, Through a Glass Darkly: The U.S. Holocaust in Central America (n.p.: Xlibris, 2005). 88. “Federación autónoma sindical surge pujante en Guatemala: su orientación es profundamente cristiana y se basa en la doctrina social de las encíclicas,” AJ, September 1954, 1. 89. Levenson-Estrada, “The Life That Makes Us Die,” 98. 90. “La Federación Autónoma Sindical en defensa del sindicalismo sano: merecida respuesta que dá la F.A.S. al antisindicalista Alfredo Schlesinger,” AJ, February 1955, 1–2. 91. Nuestro Diario, September 23, 1954, 1, as cited in Witzel de Ciudad, Más de cien años, 31–34. 92. Levenson-Estrada, “The Life That Makes Us Die,” 98. 93. Levenson-Estrada, Trade Unionists Against Terror, 88. 94. Ibid., 89. 95. Estuardo Quiñonez, interview. 96. Levenson-Estrada, “The Life That Makes Us Die,” 98. 97. Julio Celso de León, interview; and Levenson-Estrada, Trade Unionists Against Terror, 83. 98. “La libertad con hambre es una libertad falsa,” AJ, April 1957, 1. 99. “Esta juventud desafía la historia,” AJ, September 1956, 2.

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100. For an introduction to the effects of Vatican II on the Latin American church in the context of the Cold War during and after the 1960s, see Mainwaring and Wilde, The Progressive Church in Latin America; Edward L. Cleary, ed., Born of the Poor: The Latin American Church since Medellín (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992); and Daniel H. Levine, Popular Voices in Latin American Catholicism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). Gustavo Gutiérrez provided the theological framework for liberation theology. See his Teología de la liberación (Lima: Centro de Estudios y Publicaciones, 1971). 101. Estuardo Quiñonez, interview.

· Ch a p t er E l ev en ·

The Evolution of “Narcoterrorism” From the Cold War to the War on Drugs

5 M ich el l e De n ise R eev e s

In November 1985, M-19 (Movimiento 19 de Abril) guerrillas in-

filtrated the Colombian Palace of Justice, taking the entire Colombian Supreme Court hostage and destroying thousands of documents, among which were numerous U.S. extradition requests for major narcotics traffickers. A little over twenty-four hours later, Colombian troops stormed the building, ending the siege and contributing to a grisly death toll. Among the casualties were forty insurgents, fifty Palace of Justice employees, and eleven of the twenty-four justices, including Supreme Court President Alfonso Reyes Echandia.1 A report later surfaced alleging that drug traffickers, including Pablo Escobar, head of the notorious cocaine-trafficking Medellín cartel, had paid the guerrillas almost $1 million to destroy the extradition requests.2 The incident stunned Colombians, drew international attention to a phenomenon known as “narcoterrorism,” and prompted a momentous shift in the scope and definition of U.S. national security. Peruvian President Fernando Belaunde Terry coined the term “narcoterrorism” in 1982 to describe the activities of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), a Maoist guerrilla group whose origins were rooted in the factionalism unleashed in the mid-1960s by the Sino-Soviet split.3 In the late 1960s, university professor Abimael Guzman and other pro-Chinese dissidents 281

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criticized the proximity of Velasco’s left-wing military regime to the Soviet Union.4 Guzman went on to found Shining Path, which remained largely confined to academic circles until the late 1970s, when it coalesced into a guerrilla movement centered in Ayacucho province. By the early 1980s, Sendero insurgents had infiltrated the Upper Huallaga Valley—one of the major sites of coca cultivation in the country—to provide protection for the coca farmers in exchange for payments that were used to fund terrorist activities aimed at destabilizing the Peruvian government. Throughout the decade, U.S. counternarcotics policies focused on destroying drug production had the unintended consequence of enhancing the legitimacy of Sendero Luminoso and of strengthening its base of peasant support.5 The insurgents became more involved in the drug trade as the decade progressed, expanding from merely providing protection to growers and taxing traffickers to adopting a more active role in the actual cultivation and processing of the drug. As more evidence of the insidious narco-guerrilla connection accumulated, Latin American and U.S. officials began to link the threats posed by drug trafficking and leftist insurgency in sweeping rhetoric that failed to adequately distinguish between the goals of guerrillas, growers, and traffickers. The term narcoterrorism became shorthand for a wide variety of behaviors adopted by a motley crew of actors—the drug cartels whose terrorism was designed to cow the Colombian government and populace into submission, the guerrilla insurgencies in Peru and Colombia that became ever more deeply implicated in the drug trade, and the right-wing paramilitary death squads whose extrajudicial approach to justice involved their own brand of terror and increasing involvement in narcotics trafficking. While the situations in Colombia and Peru were very different—rendering narcoterrorism’s catchall definition unhelpful at best—both countries were nevertheless victims of terrorism that was in some way related to the production and trafficking of narcotics. The United States, however, was relatively unaffected by these developments. Domestic demand for cocaine remained remarkably impervious to price fluctuations resulting from the availability of coca. But because of rising public concern over drug abuse (and particularly the media blitz surrounding the “crack epidemic”), which coincided with the drawdown of Cold War hostilities and the resulting search for a mission within the Defense Department, U.S. officials declared that drugs were a national security threat by linking narcotics trafficking with international terrorism. The U.S. public, moreover, had demonstrated a palpable aversion to

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becoming involved in any conflict that even remotely resembled the war in Vietnam. Congress had slapped restrictions on funding the Contras in the form of the Boland amendments, and as the deescalation of tensions with the Soviets proceeded apace, the threat of communist subversion in the Western Hemisphere no longer animated the fears of the U.S. public. In short, the drug issue was potent enough to command the attention and commitment of the American people while that of leftist guerrilla insurgency had been neutered by the denouement of the Cold War. In the United States, George H. W. Bush, first as vice president and then as president, played a key role in forging the link between drugs and terrorism. Bush had chaired both the Reagan administration’s task force on combating terrorism and the Southwest Florida task force, which aimed to detect and confiscate drug shipments crossing the U.S. border. He was therefore uniquely situated to observe both phenomena. Bush was at the forefront of establishing the conceptual connection between terrorism and narcotics in the public imagination. Less than six months after the Palace of Justice raid, and at Vice President Bush’s behest, National Security Decision Directive 221 declared drugs a national security threat, widening the scope of military involvement in the drug war and linking counterinsurgency and counternarcotics in official U.S. policy for the first time. There are many excellent studies of U.S. international drug control policy and particularly of U.S. policy toward Latin America’s drug-producing nations.6 While some of these works focus on the consequences of this policy, others focus on its origins and evolution. Yet because these works are centered on U.S. foreign policy, the goals and interests of the Latin American drug-producing countries are sometimes discounted or given insufficient consideration. Much of the literature on the drug war, moreover, uncritically adopts the language of narcoterrorism and the oversimplification of complex realities that it implies.7 While some scholars have questioned the utility of the narcoterrorist rhetoric for the creation and implementation of counternarcotics and counterinsurgency policies, to date not enough has been done to interrogate the conceptual framework of narcoterrorism itself.8 Because of the highly charged political context in which the concept of narcoterrorism emerged, it is not entirely surprising that some of the literature on the topic is driven by a political agenda. Rachel Ehrenfeld’s work on narcoterrorism, published in 1990 at the height of the drug war, perpetuates the myth that it was the province of the communist left. She goes so far as to suggest that narcoterrorism was a Kremlin-directed project.9 Her work is clearly agenda

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driven, and her conclusions lack the evidentiary support that scholarship demands. Yet her approach both influenced and legitimized the tendency of the U.S. government—both the Reagan administration and Congress—to cast hemispheric developments in the context of Cold War hostility toward the Soviet Union and its Latin American clients. The rhetoric of narcoterrorism has therefore not only contributed to an overly simplistic approach to an extremely complex set of problems, but it also sanctioned a politicized view of interhemispheric relations. It would be impossible to provide a comprehensive analysis of the transnational phenomenon of narcoterrorism in a single chapter. It is possible, however, to briefly adumbrate the circumstances in which the rhetoric of narcoterrorism developed and to explore some of the consequences for the creation and implementation of U.S. international counternarcotics policy. This analysis will be confined to the Reagan and Bush years and will show that while the concept of narcoterrorism in the United States initially served as a rhetorical weapon with which to bludgeon Marxist-Leninist regimes in the Western Hemisphere, it evolved as a device to link the interests of the United States in the drug war with those of the Andean cocaine-producing countries battling guerrilla insurgencies. For this reason, the focus here will be on Colombia and Peru. While U.S. policymakers considered Bolivia a key partner in narcotics control efforts, the country was not besieged by a homegrown insurgency linked with the production and trafficking of narcotics. This chapter will also show that contrary to the view of Latin Americans as victims of U.S. policy—a view that prevails in certain scholarly circles—leaders in both Peru and Colombia manipulated the narcotics issue to ensure U.S. funding and support, while clearly distinguishing their preferred solutions to the threats of terrorism and narcotics trafficking from the strategies and goals of U.S. counternarcotics policies. In Colombia, such differences led to conflicts with the United States over the extradition issue, while in Peru it involved a fundamental disagreement over the nature of the drug problem. Colombian and Peruvian officials were anything but compliant pawns in a U.S.-directed scheme to militarize the war on drugs.

The Politics of Narcoterrorism In early March 1982, President Belaunde of Peru held a press conference in Lima in which he described the recent activities of the Sendero Luminoso in the Upper Huallaga Valley as “narcoterrorism.”10 In an ironic twist of

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historical fate, Belaunde’s first term as president from 1963 to 1968 coincided with widespread Cuban-inspired peasant uprisings, and some U.S. officials believed his ouster in 1968 by the left-wing military junta under the command of General Juan Velasco was precipitated at least in part by Belaunde’s overreaction to the insurgency.11 During his second term as president, he watched with alarm as Shining Path guerrillas infiltrated the Upper Huallaga Valley, the source of much of the world’s cocaine. Belaunde, exemplifying the maxim about always fighting the last war, claimed that the guerrillas of Shining Path were funded and directed by Cuba. He provided no evidence for this claim, and indeed, no evidence existed to substantiate it. The anachronistic accusation, based on the experience of his first term in office, underscored the politicized nature of the concept of narcoterrorism. By invoking the specter of a foreign-backed conspiracy, Belaunde evaded the necessity of examining the essentially domestic roots of the insurgency.12 Belaunde’s press conference coincided with a series of U.S. congressional hearings on the role of Cuba in international terrorism and subversion. Special agents from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement testified that Cuban officials had been smuggling weapons to leftist insurgents in Nicaragua and El Salvador and that drug profits were being used to finance terrorism.13 According to the agents’ testimony, which was based on the allegations of arrested drug traffickers, Cuban officialdom was deeply implicated in the establishment of that island as a major transit point for Colombian drug shipments; the Cuban government had reportedly “advised these drug smugglers that as long as they fly the Cuban flag, the U.S. Coast Guard will not interfere so as not to cause an international incident.”14 Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Thomas Enders also testified that the Castro regime had been using a ring of Colombian drug traffickers headed by Jaime Guillot Lara to funnel weapons and cash to Colombia’s M-19, the guerrilla group that went on to stage the Palace of Justice raid in 1985.15 Thus, the concept of narcoterrorism emerged simultaneously in Peru and the United States, but it described very different threats. In the highly politicized context of the Cold War, the Reagan administration seized upon charges that the Soviet client regimes of Latin America were trafficking in illicit narcotics not only to fund leftist subversion, but also to undermine U.S. democracy. Castro’s Cuba and Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, the administration claimed, had cultivated extensive ties with leftist guerrilla groups in the northern Andes in order to use the profits from drug trafficking to finance Marxist revolution in the Western Hemisphere and, as a

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bonus, to destabilize U.S. society by exacerbating the problem of drug addiction. Meanwhile, Peru was reeling from the shocking brutality of a terror campaign waged by guerrillas so radical that they condemned Soviet, Chinese, and even Cuban revisionism (and went so far as to attack the Soviet and Chinese embassies in Peru) even more stridently than they did U.S. imperialism.16 Allegations of official Cuban sanction of drug trafficking resurfaced in a 1983 Senate hearing, during which Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs James Michel claimed that “the government of Cuba has, as a matter of policy, used narcotics trafficking as an instrument for advancing its own interests in corrupting democracies within the hemisphere and advancing arms flow to revolutionary groups.”17 Despite circumstantial evidence of the involvement of corrupt Cuban and Nicaraguan officials in the drug trade, however, there was nothing to indicate a knowledge of illicit activities in the upper echelons of those countries’ governments, much less the adoption of drug trafficking as a policy designed to corrupt U.S. society. The evidentiary basis for Cuban and Sandinista complicity in the drug trade was similar to that of drug trafficking among the right-wing counterinsurgency forces battling the Sandinistas—charges that the Reagan administration dismissed out of hand. Funding the Contras was one of Reagan’s pet projects and his administration continued to provide various guerrilla groups with military and humanitarian support after allegations of their involvement in narcotics trafficking became public.18 In 1984, in yet another congressional hearing designed to establish the complicity of the Western Hemisphere’s Soviet-allied regimes in the drug trade, Senator Paula Hawkins of Florida described Nicaragua as “the newest player in the narcoterror game.”19 Customs Commissioner William Von Raab, after insisting that, “the involvement of Cuba in international narcoterrorism is well known,” testified not only that the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the M-19 were narcoterrorists but also that “Colombia even experiences situations where drug traffickers and terrorists are so close in their operations that the two are virtually indistinguishable.”20 Von Raab was also careful to mention that “narcoterrorists are alive and well in Peru,”21 and he indicated that Cuban officers were providing the Shining Path weapons and training.22 This allegation was refuted by U.S. embassy officials in Lima, who were, according to an internal document, “surprised . . . by Commissioner Von Raab’s statement that Cuban officers led

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Sendero terrorists,” and who emphasized that, “there is no intelligence . . . of Cuban support for SL [Sendero Luminoso] operations.”23 Clyde Taylor, assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics Matters, challenged another part of Von Raab’s testimony, pointing out that “while individual Cuban officials have been indicted, there is no solid evidence of Cuban government involvement, nor do reports confirm a connection between international terrorism and Cuban involvement in narcotics trafficking.”24 By 1987, even the CIA was publicly backing away from charges of Sandinista and Cuban drug trafficking. One news article noted that “accusations of involvement in international drug traffic have been a standard feature of the ideological battles over the administration’s Central American policy.”25 The article, which referred to official allegations of left-wing drug running as a “propaganda effort,” also described the dubious nature of information provided by informants: “They can usually tell what the Drug Enforcement Administration or their other U.S. intelligence paymasters would like to hear, so they dish it up with enthusiasm—but take care that their colorful inventions are impossible to verify or discredit. When an informant’s fable fits an administration policy line, it is promptly transformed into leaks, official statements, and headlines.”26 Governments were not, however, the only entities involved in perpetuating the myth of communist narcoterrorism. Israeli criminologist Rachel Ehrenfeld imparted a pseudo-intellectual veneer to the falsehood that narcoterrorism was a leftist political phenomenon. She argued in her 1990 monograph that “Marxist-Leninist-oriented regimes and terrorist groups have, in fact, initiated, developed, and nearly totally dominated this particularly dirty business.”27 Defining narcoterrorism as “the use of drug trafficking to advance the objectives of certain governments and terrorist organizations,”28 she made no mention of the Contras, whose activities epitomized her definition. Ehrenfeld even went so far as to argue, without any evidence, that narcoterrorism was a Kremlin-directed project, and she ignored a wealth of evidence documenting the involvement of right-wing insurgencies in terrorist activities fueled by narcodollars.29 Ehrenfeld was repeatedly called upon as an expert witness to testify before Congress on the subject, and her highly politicized views both reflected and reinforced the tendency to view interhemispheric relations through the prism of the EastWest conflict.

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Evidence of the narco-guerrilla connection surfaced as early as 1980. U.S. embassy officials in Bogotá alerted the State Department to allegations that FARC was trafficking marijuana to obtain weapons. The embassy pointed out that the long-term goals of the traffickers and the subversives were fundamentally different: “while the traffickers prefer to cozy up to the Colombian government and suborn officials, the guerrillas seek to overthrow legally constituted authority.”30 This prescient distinction, however, failed to anticipate the drug-related tumult that would rock Colombia throughout the decade and into the 1990s. When suborning officials became an unreliable means of enforcing its will and the Colombian government cracked down on traffickers, the Medellín cartel would launch a vicious campaign of bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations to deter the government from signing an extradition treaty with the United States. FARC, on the other hand, would enter into amnesty talks and even attempt to transform itself into a legitimate political party, the Union Patriotica (UP). This development led to open warfare between the guerrillas and the traffickers, culminating in the assassination of UP’s presidential candidate in the 1986 elections, Jaime Pardo Leal. U.S. embassy officials in Bogotá also identified one of the key obstacles to the success of counternarcotics efforts in Colombia—the intransigence of Colombia’s armed forces. Just like its U.S. counterpart, the Colombian military resisted the drug war and “consistently maintained that the real danger in Colombia is political subversion, not drug trafficking.”31 The cable noted the necessity of “ensur[ing] that U.S. assistance is used exclusively in the anti-narcotics phase of the military program and is not diverted to counterinsurgency.”32 U.S. officials recognized that maintaining the stability of the Colombian government and enhancing its counterinsurgency capabilities was in the interest of the United States. But because of congressional restrictions on counterinsurgency funding, the Reagan administration was obliged to couch this interest in the language of the drug war. The concept of narcoterrorism thus bridged the interests of the United States in its counternarcotics campaign to those of the Colombian government in counterinsurgency. As early as April 1981, Colombian President Julio Turbay Ayala was (wittingly or not) laying the groundwork for closer cooperation with the United States by condemning the “alliance between drug traffickers and political subversives.”33 In September 1982, just weeks after Belisario Betancur was elected as

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president of Colombia, U.S. embassy officials reported allegations that the Ejercito Popular de Liberación (EPL) was becoming more heavily involved in the drug trade and was no longer merely providing protection to growers but was also “growing its own crops.”34 The EPL was a Maoist offshoot of Colombia’s communist party, and though it was no match for FARC in terms of resources and influence, embassy officials nevertheless found reports of its increased participation in the drug trade to be “disturbing.”35 Indeed, as the 1980s wore on, evidence surfaced to indicate that Colombia’s subversive groups were being drawn inexplicably deeper into the production, processing, and distribution of illicit narcotics. The deepening involvement of Colombia’s guerrillas in the narcotics industry yielded benefits beyond mere cash flow. Coca growers often benefited from the ability of groups like FARC to act as mediators between producers and traffickers. Narcotraffickers were predatory by instinct and often used threats of violence to extort growers out of their product. FARC provided protection to the peasantry from the traffickers and negotiated higher prices for the raw coca. The guerrillas were thus often welcomed among the local peasantry as much-needed counterweights to the power of the trafficking cartels. For its part, FARC benefited not merely from the “taxes” that it charged growers for protection and traffickers for access routes, but as U.S. embassy officials noted in November 1983, “the transient labor attracted by the coca boom has provided FARC with an excellent pool of potential recruits.”36 In April 1984, hard evidence surfaced that unequivocally linked FARC and M-19 to the cartel kingpins. A joint Colombian–Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) raid on the Tranquilandia cocaine-processing center in the heart of Caqueta province revealed the existence of auditing statements from the guerrilla groups along with receipts for cash payments and for the delivery of coca paste from Peruvian and Bolivian traffickers.37 President Betancur reacted to the news by delivering a televised address to the Colombian people in which he characterized the drug trade as “the greatest problem that the nation has ever faced” and “acknowledged the need for greater international cooperation against narcotics trafficking.”38 Despite this strongly worded condemnation, the president appeared unwilling to jeopardize a recently signed ceasefire agreement with FARC “by attacking them [FARC guerrillas] for their drug operations.”39 The assassination of Colombian Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, apparently in retaliation for the Tranquilandia raid, revealed the extent of the cartels’ power. They had bugged Lara’s phone and sent him transcripts of

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his own conversations. The security apparatus that the traffickers had built and surrounded themselves with was in all likelihood viewed as more of a threat to the government than their routine drug-trafficking activities.40 After news of Lara’s assassination became public, the president took to the airwaves to declare a state of siege and announce the inception of a full-on war against the traffickers. He also widened the scope of military involvement in the drug war by authorizing the armed forces to arrest drug traffickers. He continued to carefully distinguish between the traffickers and the guerrillas so as not to jeopardize the ceasefire agreement with FARC.41 Then, in November 1985, M-19 guerrillas seized the Colombian Palace of Justice in a stunning display of lawlessness that provoked an international outcry. The incident highlighted the national security implications of the narcoguerrilla connection in Colombia and precipitated an official reevaluation of U.S. national security requirements. National Security Decision Directive 221 (NSDD-221), issued in April 1986 at the behest of Vice President George H. W. Bush, declared drugs a national security threat, thereby authorizing the administration to skirt congressional notification requirements for implementing narcotics policies abroad and widening the scope of military involvement in the drug war. The directive was aimed specifically at “those nations with a flourishing narcotics industry, where a combination of international criminal trafficking organizations, rural insurgents, and urban terrorists can undermine the stability of the local government; corrupt efforts to curb drug crop production, processing, and distribution; and distort public perception of the narcotics issue in such a way that it becomes part of an anti-U.S. or anti-Western debate.” 42 NSDD-221 explicitly addressed the threat posed by insurgent movements in drug-producing countries, suggesting that the antigovernment activities of these groups could be halted through an attack on their major source of funding—profits from drug trafficking. Thus, the directive linked the goals of counternarcotics and counterinsurgency in official U.S. policy for the first time. The directive, moreover, revealed the vice president as a key coordinator of “drug law enforcement activities with foreign governments.”43 In a press conference, Bush described the links between terrorism and drug trafficking and recalled the intense violence of the M-19 raid on the Palace of Justice. Bush related the fact that most of the documents the guerrillas had destroyed were U.S. extradition requests for major Colombian drug traffickers. He cited his authority as chairman of the administration’s Task Force on Combating Terrorism and warned that “the demonstrable role drug trafficking played in the massacre is anything but an isolated event.” Consequently,

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he explained, one of the major goals of NSDD-221 was “to reduce the ability of terrorists to derive support from drug trafficking.”44 Driving home the connection between domestic drug abuse and terrorism, Bush admonished, “when you buy drugs, you could also very well be subsidizing terrorist activities overseas.”45 By the time Bush was elected president in 1988, the drug problem had shot to the top of the national security agenda and was consistently cited as the number-one problem facing the nation. The newfound willingness of the Pentagon to engage more actively in the drug war was not merely a belated concession to public opinion and congressional demands, but was also a function of a change in leadership. Although mid-level institutional resistance to militarizing the drug war persisted, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney designated drug production, trafficking, and abuse as a “high priority national security mission of the Department of Defense.”46 Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, moreover, the war on drugs became the primary stated foreign policy objective in the Andean cocaproducing countries and the raison d’être for maintaining and even increasing defense spending. Cheney was forthright in his opposition to congressionally approved budget cuts. He remained skeptical about Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s stated intention to pare down Soviet strategic weapons and criticized colleagues he felt were too eager to cut back on U.S. military spending in response to Gorbachev’s pledges. “It is as if they had decided to give away their overcoats on the first sunny day in January,” Cheney lamented.47 In his first address to the nation as president, Bush tackled the subject of drug abuse, conveying a dark vision of a nation beset by grave danger. Claiming to represent the will of the American people and declaring that “all of us agree that the gravest domestic threat facing our nation today is drugs,” he beseeched Americans to “turn on the evening news or pick up the morning paper” so they could see for themselves “what some Americans know just by stepping out their front door: our most serious problem today is cocaine, and in particular, crack.”48 He described the extent of the drug menace: “No one among us is out of harm’s way. When four-year-olds play in playgrounds strewn with discarded hypodermic needles and crack vials—it breaks my heart. When cocaine—one of the most deadly and addictive illegal drugs—is available to school kids—school kids—it’s an outrage. And when hundreds of thousands of babies are born each year to mothers who use drugs—premature babies born desperately sick—then even the most defenseless among us are at risk.”49

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During the Reagan years, narcoterrorism described the activities of Sovietallied regimes in the Western Hemisphere. Because Reagan was intent on overthrowing the Sandinistas, his administration ignored allegations of Contra drug trafficking while bruiting those in which the Cubans and Sandinistas were involved. During the Bush years, as the Cold War wound down, the concept of narcoterrorism was used to link the Colombian and Peruvian counterinsurgency campaigns with the U.S. counternarcotics effort. Bush administration officials frankly acknowledged the U.S. interest in supporting counterinsurgency efforts in Colombia and Peru and realized the necessity of bypassing congressional limitations on the type of aid provided to those countries. In order to placate Congress, the Bush administration encouraged Colombian and Peruvian officials to frame the problems of their respective nations in the language of the drug war. For their part, Colombian and Peruvian officials were more than willing to emphasize the links between insurgents and drug traffickers in their appeals to the United States for support. Domestic politics, however, required these same officials to clearly distinguish between the militarized approach to the drug war as exemplified by the United States and their own vision of the drug problem as an inherently economic one. In April 1988, Charles Gillespie, the U.S. ambassador to Colombia, argued that it was impossible to “separate the Colombian government’s antinarcotics and anti-insurgency activities in any meaningful way.”50 While acknowledging the complexity of the relationship between the traffickers and the insurgents and conceding that “their objectives differ and they even frequently kill each other,” he suggested that the term “narco-guerrilla” reflected the intricacies of the Colombian reality. Regardless of the nature of the relationship between the narcos and the guerrillas, however, both elements threatened the security and legitimacy of the Colombian government, “and in that way, directly engage the United States’ national interest objective of a stable, democratic government in Colombia.” Colombian President Virgilio Barco, elected in 1986, had declared war on the narco-guerrillas, creating a special narcotics unit in the National Police and bringing the police into closer collaboration with the military. Gillespie recognized that any material or military assistance provided by the United States (in this case, the ExportImport Bank) would be used not only to cripple the cocaine cartels but also to immobilize the insurgents.51

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In the spring of 1988, Congressman John Murtha and Secretary of the Army John Marsh visited Colombia and met with President Barco and highlevel Colombian military officials. They explicitly informed Barco that narcotics trafficking and abuse was the primary political issue in the United States and that the U.S. public, as the fall elections approached, was expressing increasing dissatisfaction with the lack of tangible results in the drug war.52 Barco agreed that he should emphasize the narcotics issue in his upcoming visit to the United States and in meetings with U.S. congressmen, and he commented on the complicated nature of the guerrilla presence in Colombia.53 Murtha also encouraged Barco to emphasize the threats to Colombian law enforcement and judicial personnel posed by the traffickers, particularly surrounding the extradition issue. Barco explained that the Colombian public was overwhelmingly against extradition because of what it perceived to be cruel and unusually lengthy sentences meted out by U.S. courts.54 Colombian defense minister General Rafael Samudio complained of the restrictions on support from the U.S. Export-Import Bank, noting that requests for matériel had been withheld due to their classification as “military” and not “civilian” equipment. He emphasized the connection between the narcos and the guerrillas, a link that would result in any equipment being used to combat both traffickers and guerrillas.55 Samudio was thus arguing that the bank should provide funding and support under the auspices of U.S. antinarcotics policy for equipment to combat the guerrillas. His emphasis on the connection between the insurgents and the narcos served notice that support provided under the auspices of U.S. counterdrug efforts would be used to combat the guerrillas, the “traditional enemy of the military.”56 Then in the late summer of 1989, the Medellin cartel threw its terror campaign into overdrive with the assassination of the Liberal Party candidate in the 1990 presidential elections, Luis Galan. Galan had pledged to crack down on the traffickers and had intimated that he would have no problem extraditing the narcos to the United States. His assassination stunned and horrified the country and prompted President Barco to unleash the full force of the state in the hunt for Pablo Escobar. In addition to suspending habeas corpus and authorizing police to seize the cartels’ landholdings, Barco welcomed increased assistance from the United States and honored dozens of U.S. extradition requests for drug traffickers.57 Barco’s successor, Cesar Gaviria, continued this policy of enhanced cooperation with U.S. law enforcement agencies.

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Meanwhile, the U.S. embassy in Lima was warning that the Sendero presence in the Upper Huallaga was likely to lead the Peruvian government and military to focus on combating the insurgents and not on eliminating coca production. A March 1988 cable explained that the Peruvian military leadership had “shifted its principal concern to dealing with the growing insurgency” and argued that U.S. policy should focus on “providing low cost, low profile cooperation on U.S. counter-insurgency doctrine.”58 The embassy also reported on the nature of local support for Sendero, acknowledging that “peasants support it out of fear or in response to excesses of the security forces.”59 U.S. assistance to the Peruvian military and security forces may have driven the coca-growing campesinos into a deeper relationship with the insurgents. National Security Council (NSC) analysts drafted a policy option paper in June 1989 that recognized the inseparability of counternarcotics and counterinsurgency in Peru and encouraged a coordinated approach to combating the threats of drugs and terrorism. One of the suggested options was to authorize Defense Department personnel to adopt an expanded training and operational support role in the Andean countries; the NSC frankly acknowledged that the upside of this option was to “link our interests (CN) [counternarcotics] with theirs (CI) [counter-insurgency].”60 The draft also noted the longstanding rivalry between the Peruvian national police and military, and it lamented the Peruvian military’s reluctance to become involved in antinarcotics efforts: “Peru’s military will not get involved in narcotics control, absent significant assistance; it sees its primary role as addressing the insurgent problem.”61 The appropriate U.S. response, the draft suggested, should “encourage the inter-operability of counter-insurgency and counter-narcotics forces in Peru, recognizing the parallel nature of the threat as well as the links that exist between some trafficking organizations and terrorist groups.”62 The NSC therefore realized that by making the links between the insurgents and the traffickers more explicit, the Peruvian military would recognize its interest in hitting the narcos. A State Department briefing memorandum drawn up in the summer of 1989 made clear that the participants in a regional U.S.-led counternarcotics campaign should be made fully aware that “military assistance will go toward two uses: narco-insurgents and traffickers.”63 This approach formed the basis of National Security Directive 18, which was issued a little over a month later and declared that “the violence and corruption of the drug traffickers and their alliance with insurgent groups has had a destabilizing effect

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on friendly governments [and] it is thus imperative for our own well-being and the development of democratic and economically stable governments around the world that this problem be dealt with aggressively.”64 The directive authorized deployment of several hundred Green Beret counterinsurgency troops to the Upper Huallaga Valley. In so doing it overrode the objections of certain officials in Congress and the Pentagon who argued that congressional authorization was required in order to deploy U.S. troops because the Upper Huallaga was a war zone. The directive also provided for increased assistance to indigenous police, military, and intelligence officials in Peru, Colombia, and Bolivia “for the purpose of assisting them to regain control of their countries from an insidious combination of insurgents and drug traffickers and to suppress the flow of narcotics to the United States.”65 Economic assistance to the Andean countries was premised on the attainment of certain antinarcotics goals, “with each increment disbursed only after specific anti-narcotics targets are met.”66 In the run-up to the Andean Summit, a regional gathering designed to showcase the solidarity of the United States and the Andean countries in combating the drug trade, the State Department outlined the Bush administration’s policy priorities and goals for the summit: “The first priority of President Bush’s international strategy is to help strengthen counternarcotics programs in the Andes.”67 In order to achieve this goal, the following talking point was recommended to address Peruvian President Alan García’s primary concern: “We understand that your government’s highest priority is defeating Sendero Luminoso, not narcotics trafficking. But there is a significant overlap, especially in the Upper Huallaga Valley. In coca-producing areas where Sendero Luminoso is active, we can provide assistance to both the police and the military.”68 The provision of U.S. military aid to Peru was thus contingent on the linkage between the insurgents and the traffickers. In the fall of 1989, U.S. embassy officials in Lima clearly delineated the relationship between counternarcotics and counterinsurgency in Peru: “The crux of the matter is that we are unlikely to get any more Peruvian support for counter-narcotics activities until we help them solve their number one problem, which is subversion.”69 The cable frankly acknowledged that “as soon as the money for Peruvian high priority programs stops so do the counter-narcotics efforts.”70 U.S. officials thus emphasized that the Andean program in Peru would be implemented as “an anti-subversive program” and that it was “limited to the coca producing areas and . . . designed to combat both terrorists and drug traffickers.”71 Adhering to the U.S. preference for

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military solutions, the cable’s authors insisted that “reducing the dependence of the Peruvian economy on coca dollars should only be medium priority.”72 Not all Peruvian officials agreed. During García’s presidency, the Peruvian economy entered a period of hyperinflation, and Alberto Fujimori was elected in 1990 on a platform of economic resurgence. Fujimori, while launching a full-scale war against Sendero Luminoso, rejected U.S. military aid and argued that the drug problem was an inherently economic one that could not be solved through military force. In September 1989, in the run-up to the 1990 presidential elections in Peru, President Bush floated an offer of $35.9 million in military aid—an offer that would have signaled a decisive shift in U.S.-Peruvian relations, which had not included a military-to-military component since the 1968 coup under General Velasco. Fujimori found himself trapped between the military officials who welcomed the offer and the Peruvian politicians who had been charging that the offer was a Trojan horse for the entrance of U.S. troops into Peruvian territory. Fujimori was not alone, however, in prioritizing an economic approach to the drug problem. In the Bush administration’s preparations for yet another regional summit, to be held in Cartagena, the Office of National Drug Control Policy outlined the goals and motives of the Andean countries’ leadership. The Andean presidents “want to appear to their respective publics and to the rest of Latin America as on a par with President Bush, and may seek to gain ‘face’ through political posturing and critical public words.”73 Even in such a firmly allied country as Colombia, “national pride [was] a factor working against close cooperation with the U.S. on the drug war.”74 Policy analysts warned that “U.S. aid, advice, and presence all carry unintended overtones of ‘Yankee imperialism.’”75 Both Peru and Colombia, moreover, ranked the desire for economic assistance as their top priority going into the summit, while the desire for increased enforcement and interdiction assistance was ranked as their lowest priority.76 The Andean Initiative, which prioritized a military and law enforcement approach to the drug problem, was adopted by the United States, Peru, Colombia, and Bolivia despite Fujimori’s concerns and even in the face of warnings that “enhanced involvement by Andean military and police could have human rights abuse implications.”77 The provision of economic aid to Peru was conditioned on counternarcotics performance and the acceptance of military assistance.78 Support for Peru’s counterinsurgency efforts was

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premised on the necessity of establishing security in coca-production zones to facilitate crop eradication and alternative development schemes. U.S. officials continued to premise the success of counternarcotics efforts on counterinsurgency even after it had become apparent that Fujimori was unwilling to sanction chemical coca eradication.79 In May 1991, a Memorandum of Understanding between the governments of the United States and Peru declared that “in certain areas, counter-narcotics activities are threatened by subversive groups whose activities impede effective government action to combat narcotics trafficking, and whose activities are inextricably intertwined with those of the narcotics traffickers, and . . . in those instances, counter-insurgency actions are a justifiable component of counter-narcotics activities.”80 U.S. counterinsurgency assistance and training thus became officially incorporated into the war on drugs. The provision of U.S. counterinsurgency assistance to Peru did not proceed unhindered, however. Growing awareness of the human rights atrocities committed by the Peruvian military and security forces led some congressional leaders to firmly oppose continued aid to Peru. The administration insisted that despite widespread human rights abuses, fortifying Peru’s military was essential to securing the Peruvian government’s control over the Upper Huallaga Valley.81 Despite the correlation between U.S. military assistance and Peruvian human rights violations, Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger averred that “a program of security assistance which included the Army would assist President Fujimori in improving that organization’s human rights performance.”82 Given that the State Department’s own report on human rights in Peru had acknowledged that “security forces personnel were responsible for widespread and egregious human rights violations” and that “there were widespread credible reports of summary executions, arbitrary detentions and torture and rape by the military,” this argument was particularly dubious.83 Despite evidence of human rights abuses on the part of the Peruvian security forces, however, it is important to remember that Sendero Luminoso was no slouch when it came to brutality. The guerrillas had no compunction about using torture, rape, and extrajudicial killing as tools of repression and terror to cow the Peruvian peasantry into submission. Any moral or ethical reckoning of the effects of U.S. and Peruvian counterinsurgency efforts must acknowledge the widespread human rights abuses committed by the Shining Path.

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The capture of Abimael Guzman in 1992 and then of Pablo Escobar in December 1993 mitigated the salience of the narcoterrorism issue. While the removal of the two highest-profile leaders crippled their respective organizations, the threats that the two men represented had by no means been neutralized. In Peru, Fujimori’s counterinsurgency campaign racked up one triumph after another, and because of the top-down structure of Shining Path, Guzman’s capture essentially beheaded the insurgency. In Colombia, the capture and killing of Pablo Escobar heralded the eclipse of the Medellín cartel. There were plenty of other trafficking cartels waiting in the wings, however, and the drug trade flourishes in the early twenty-first century as never before. Yet because of these symbolic victories, narcoterrorism faded from the headlines. But while the public furor over narcoterrorism cooled, the drug war raged on. Billions of dollars and countless lives have been expended in the chimerical pursuit of a drug-free planet. FARC, moreover, flourished throughout the 1990s and in late 1998 successfully negotiated a ceasefire zone that quickly became known as “FARClandia.” Emboldened by this achievement, the FARC escalated its strategy of urban terror in preparation for an even more audacious power grab. A major restructuring of the Colombian armed forces and heightened U.S. involvement in the form of Plan Colombia followed. Although the plan was initially conceived as a “policy of investment for social development”84 by Colombian President Andres Pastrana, whose strategy of reconciliation with the guerrillas ultimately proved disastrous, the plan was reformulated in conjunction with U.S. officials to better reflect the U.S. preference for military solutions. Plan Colombia lent U.S. support for a combined counternarcotics and counterinsurgency mission. President Clinton attempted to placate foes of counterinsurgency by issuing an executive order prohibiting the U.S. military from sharing non-drug-related intelligence with the Colombians and even George W. Bush took pains to distinguish the drug war from counterinsurgency efforts in Colombia.85 In the aftermath of September 11, however, such precautions were no longer necessary. The brazen terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center obliterated the remaining vestiges of opposition to an explicit counterinsurgency mission in Colombia. It was no longer necessary to designate the FARC as “narcoterrorists”; they were merely terrorists and would be treated as such. In February 2002, the Colombian military invaded the

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ceasefire zone and reasserted state control over the territory. The following August, Congress authorized the Bush administration to launch a “unified campaign” against all terrorist groups in Colombia.86 Then in November, Clinton’s executive order banning intelligence-sharing on non-drug-related activities was reversed. The U.S. Southern Command (Southcom) immediately set to work devising a proposal to double the number of U.S. military personnel that could legally be deployed in Colombia at any given time.87 Congress and the U.S. public no longer needed to be convinced that the leftist guerrilla groups in Colombia posed a major terrorist threat. As during the Cold War, U.S. policy was carefully selective in the targets it pursued under the auspices of the combined counternarcotics and counterinsurgency campaign. The Reagan administration had been primarily concerned with the Soviet client regimes in the Western Hemisphere and had ignored evidence of Contra involvement in drug trafficking. The Clinton and Bush administrations sought to combat the leftist guerrilla insurgencies in Colombia while ignoring the right-wing paramilitary groups that were also heavily involved in drug trafficking. The United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) sought to debilitate FARC and Colombia’s other leftist guerrilla groups and was thus never the intended target of U.S.-supported counterinsurgency efforts despite being designated as a terrorist organization by the State Department.88 The trajectory of narcoterrorism as a concept with the power to animate U.S. policy bridges the Cold War and the drug war. During the early years of the Reagan administration, when the United States entered a period of intensified hostilities with the Soviet Union, narcoterrorism was touted as the province of the communist left. Cuba and Nicaragua, the two Sovietallied regimes in the Western Hemisphere, both of which were supposedly hell-bent on exporting their revolutions and subverting democracies throughout the region, were the most egregious narcoterrorists in the view of the U.S. government. As the decade progressed and the Cold War thawed, narcoterrorism became a useful framework for linking the U.S.-led war on drugs with the efforts of the Andean countries to stamp out the insurgent threats to their respective governments. The story of narcoterrorism in the Andes, moreover, reveals the persistence of Latin American hostility toward perceived U.S. imperialism. While Andean leaders sought closer cooperation with the United States on counterinsurgency support and training, they were keenly aware of the liabilities

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inherent in appearing to their domestic constituents to be kowtowing to the hegemon of the north. The U.S. prioritization of the drug war did not jibe with the most pressing problems facing the Peruvians and Colombians. While the U.S. relentlessly pursued an extradition treaty with Bogota and the Medellín cartel responded by intensifying its terror campaign, the Colombian government’s will to extradite the traffickers waxed and waned. Partly as a result of the desultoriness of the government’s response, selfdefense groups like Los Pepes (Perseguidos por Pablo Escobar, or People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar) launched their own retaliatory terror campaign. The Colombian people, surrounded by the constant savagery perpetrated by a virtually dizzying array of factions, were more than prepared to let the narcos off the hook if it meant a deescalation of the violence. Meanwhile in Peru, the supply-side focus of U.S. international narcotics control policy exacerbated what the Peruvian leadership and military widely perceived as a worse threat, the Shining Path insurgency. As it became clear to U.S. officials that the Sendero presence in the Upper Huallaga Valley prevented the pursuit of counternarcotics goals, the provision of counterinsurgency support and training to the Peruvian military was incorporated under the auspices of the war on drugs. This move led to an outcry among champions of human rights, who lamented the abuses of the security forces and called for a reevaluation of narcotics control policy. It is unclear whether the conceptual framework of narcoterrorism has aided counternarcotics and counterinsurgency efforts or whether the oversimplification of complex realities has proved a hindrance. When agricultural conditions amenable to the cultivation of narcotic crops exist in countries that host insurgent populations and have weak and corrupt central governments, drug profits will inevitably fund terrorism. And as long as a black market for drugs exists, the profit incentive will corrupt officials, encourage the formation of smuggling cartels, and mobilize insurgents. The labeling of these various actors as narcoterrorists conflates key distinctions in their actions and motivations and further complicates the difficult job of policymakers. Reducing the problems of drug production, trafficking, and insurgency to the singular concept of narcoterrorism has served the political purpose of garnering public support for U.S. foreign policy goals, but it has neither advanced our understanding of such phenomena nor contributed to an effective strategy for combating them.

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notes 1. Geoffrey Matthews, “Siege of Bogota ends in bloodbath; Colombian troops storm Palace of Justice held by subversive April 19 Movement,” Times of London, November 8, 1985, n.p. 2. See Mark Bowden, Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 53. 3. The Shining Path embraced Maoism and the violent path to revolution, unlike its more staid Stalinist rivals. See Gabriela Tarazona-Sevilla, Sendero Luminoso and the Threat of Narcoterrorism (New York: Praeger, 1990). 4. James F. Rochlin, Vanguard Revolutionaries in Latin America: Peru, Colombia, Mexico (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003), 32. 5. See Vanda Felbab-Brown, Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2009); and William L. Marcy, Politics of Cocaine: How U.S. Foreign Policy Has Created a Thriving Drug Industry in Central and South America (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2010). 6. On U.S. drug control policy in Latin America, see Marcy, Politics of Cocaine; FelbabBrown, Shooting Up; Sewall Menzel, Fire in the Andes: U.S. Foreign Policy and Cocaine Politics in Bolivia and Peru (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996); Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Russell Crandall, Driven By Drugs: U.S. Policy Toward Colombia (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2008); Brian Loveman, ed., Addicted to Failure: U.S. Security Policy in Latin America and the Andean Region (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006); and Ted Galen Carpenter, Bad Neighbor Policy: Washington’s Futile War on Drugs in Latin America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 7. See, for instance, Scott B. MacDonald, Mountain High, White Avalanche: Cocaine and Power in the Andean States and Panama (New York: Praeger, 1989). MacDonald, while carefully distinguishing between the various actors and their motives, adheres to a definition of narcoterrorism as what “occurs when politically motivated terrorist activities . . . become entangled with the narcotics trade” (10). Douglas J. Davids, NarcoTerrorism: A Unified Strategy to Fight a Growing Terrorist Menace (New York: Transnational Publishers, 2002); Andre D. Hollis, “Narcoterrorism: A Definitional and Operational Transnational Challenge,” in Transnational Threats: Smuggling and Trafficking in Arms, Drugs, and Human Life, ed. Kimberley L. Thachuk (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2007), 23–35. Hollis argues that definitions of narcoterrorism are too limited and should be broadened to account for the logistical networks that support drug trafficking and terrorist activity. 8. For instance, Vanda Felbab-Brown has challenged the narco-guerrilla approach to policy, arguing that counternarcotics policies designed to dry up the financial resources of guerrilla insurgencies often increase peasant support for the guerrillas, thereby enhancing the insurgents’ legitimacy—a theory she calls the “political capital model” (Felbab-Brown, Shooting Up, 5). In Cocaine Politics, Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall have also challenged the narco-guerrilla approach, and have even gone so far as to characterize narcoterrorism as a propagandistic invention of the Reagan administration (23). This characterization borders on conspiracy theory, and

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9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

1 4. 15. 16. 17.

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the authors tend to portray Latin America as a victim of predatory and deeply immoral U.S. government agencies, particularly the CIA. Rachel Ehrenfeld, Narcoterrorism (New York: Basic Books, 1990). Cable from the U.S. embassy in Lima to State Department, April 1982, “Peruvian Terrorism: The Nature of the Threat,” Narcotics Collection, box 7, folder: Peru, DOS documents, National Security Archive, Washington, D.C. (hereafter NSA). The CIA, for instance, predicted in a July 1981 intelligence report that “President Belaunde is unlikely to overreact and set off a chain of events similar to those that led to his ouster in 1968.” Narcotics Collection, box 7, folder: Peru: Sendero Luminoso, CIA Reports, 1981–1988, NSA. See Gustavo Gorriti, The Shining Path: A History of the Millenarian War in Peru (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 110–12. “The Role of Cuba in International Terrorism and Subversion,” Hearings before the Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Ninety-Seventh Congress, Second Session, February 26, March 4, 11, and 12, 1982, p. 42 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office [GPO], 1982). Ibid., p. 45. Ibid., p. 145. Lawrence A. Clayton, Peru and the United States: The Condor and the Eagle (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 269. “The Cuban Government’s Involvement in Facilitating International Drug Traffic,” Joint Hearing before the Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism of the Committee on the Judiciary and the Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs of the Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Drug Enforcement Caucus, United States Senate, Ninety-eight Congress, First Session, April 30, 1983, p. 90 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. GPO, 1983). Emphasis not in original. Allegations of Contra drug trafficking surfaced in 1985 in a series of articles by Associated Press journalists Robert Parry and Brian Barger. Parry and Barger interviewed several U.S. government officials who acknowledged that in 1984 they had begun receiving reports of Contra involvement in drug trafficking. This led to a series of congressional hearings devoted to the investigation of executive branch knowledge of Contra drug trafficking and terrorist activities—see Parry and Barger, “Contras Deal Drugs For Cause,” Chicago Tribune, December 21, 1985, Sec.: News, 1; Parry and Barger, “Contras Reportedly Trafficking in Cocaine to Help Fund War,” Los Angeles Times, December 21, 1985, Sec. 1, Foreign Desk, 16; Parry and Barger, “Contras are Linked to Cocaine Smuggling,” Seattle Times, December 22, 1985, Sec.: News, C6; and “Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy,” A Report Prepared by the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations, of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, December 1988 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. GPO, 1988). The report found that “the individuals who provided support for the Contras were involved in drug trafficking, the supply network of the Contras was used by drug trafficking organizations, and elements of the Contras themselves knowingly received financial aid and material assistance from drug traffickers. In each case, one or another agency of the U.S. government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring, or immediately thereafter” (p. 36). For more on U.S. government knowledge of, and complicity in, contra drug running, see Scott and Marshall,

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2 0. 21. 22. 23.

2 4. 25. 2 6. 27. 28. 29. 30.

3 1. 32. 33.

34.

3 5. 36.

37.

38. 39. 40.

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Cocaine Politics; and Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2003). See also “Documentation of Official U.S. Knowledge of Drug Trafficking and the Contras,” The Oliver North File, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 113, http://www.gwu .edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB113. “Drugs and Terrorism,” Hearing before the Subcommittee on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse of the Committee on Labor and Human Resources of the United States Senate, Ninety-eight Congress, Second Session on Investigation of the Link Between Drugs and Terrorism, August 2, 1984, p. 7 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. GPO, 1984). Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 52. Memo to Ambassador Sayre from ARA/AND Fred Rondon, subject: “Cuban activity in Peru,” August 2, 1984, Narcotics Collection, box 7, folder: Peru: Sendero Luminoso, State Dept. documents, 1987, NSA. “Drugs and Terrorism,” p. 25. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, “CIA Has Doubts About Sandinista, Cuba Dope Deals,” Newsday, June 3, 1987, Sec.: Viewpoints, 80. Ibid. Rachel Ehrenfeld, Narcoterrorism (New York: Basic Books, 1990), ix. Ibid., xiii. Ibid., xix–xx. Cable from the U.S. embassy in Bogota to State Department, “Guns for Grass: The NarcFARC connection,” October 1980, Narcotics Collection, box 8, folder: Colombia— Heroin, NSA. Ibid. Ibid. Cable from the U.S. embassy in Bogota to State Department, “President Turbay Reports on Narc-FARC connection,” April 1981, Narcotics Collection, box 8, folder: Colombia—Heroin, NSA. Cable from the U.S. embassy in Bogota to State Department, “Embassy officers visit drug trafficking/guerrilla zone near Gulf of Uraba,” September 1982, Narcotics Collection, box 8, folder: Colombia—Heroin, NSA. Ibid. Cable from the U.S. embassy in Bogota to State Department, “Guerrilla involvement in Colombian drug trafficking,” November 1983, Narcotics Collection, box 8, folder: Colombia—Heroin, NSA. Cable from the U.S. embassy in Bogota to State Department, “Evidence linking drug kings to Caqueta’s drug processing center,” April 1984, Narcotics Collection, box 8, NSA. Cable from the U.S. embassy in Bogota to State Department, “Betancur excoriates drug trafficking in national address,” April 1984, Narcotics Collection, box 8, NSA. Cable from the U.S. embassy in Bogota to State Department, “Narc/FARC connection,” May 1984, Narcotics Collection, box 8, NSA. Jenny Pearce, Colombia: Inside the Labyrinth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990), 194.

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41. Cable from the U.S. embassy in Bogota, “Narcotics/guerrilla connection in Colombia for use in ARA congressional testimony,” July 1984, Narcotics Collection, box 8, NSA. 42. National Security Decision Directive 221, “Narcotics and National Security,” April 8, 1986, Records Declassified and Released by the National Security Council, National Security Decision Directives 1–250, box 1, pp. 640–41, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, California (hereafter RRPL). 43. Ibid., 7. 44. Opening statement by the vice president, press conference, Houston, Texas, June 7, 1986, File: [VP] Drugs, Press Office, Bush Presidential Records, George H. W. Bush Presidential Library, College Station, Texas (hereafter GHWBPL). 45. Ibid. 46. Military Role in Drug Interdiction, Part 4, Hearing before the Investigations Subcommittee of the Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives, 101st Congress, 1st session, April 19, 1990, Statement of Stephen M. Duncan, p. 7. 47. Quoted in Molly Moore, “Cheney Blasts Cuts by House: Politics, Over-Optimism Said to Harm Defense,” Washington Post, August 24, 1989, n.p. 48. Address by the President on National Drug Policy, September 5, 1989, File: Drugs [3], [OA 5297] Series: Press Office, White House, GHWBPL. 49. Ibid. 50. Cable from the U.S. embassy in Bogota to the National Security Council, Subject: Equipment for Colombian Anti-Narcotics/Anti-Insurgency Activities, April 1988, McNamara, Thomas E.: Files, box 92270, Colombia (2), NSC Staff Files, RRPL. 51. Ibid. 52. U.S. Embassy Colombia cable, “Murtha and Marsh Visit Concentrates on Narco Power and Insurgency,” May 24, 1988, pg. 3, War in Colombia: Guerrillas, Drugs and Human Rights in U.S.-Colombia Policy, 1988–2002, Volume I: The Andean Strategy, Document 3, ed. by Michael Evans, Director, Colombia Documentation Project, NSA Electronic Briefing Book No. 69, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB69/part1.html. 53. Ibid., 4. 54. Ibid., 5. 55. Ibid., 7. 56. Ibid., 6. 57. Bowden, Killing Pablo, 64–65. 58. Cable from the U.S. embassy in Lima to National Security Council, Defense Intelligence Agency, Secretaries of State and Defense, and USCINCSO, Subject: Program for Enhanced Military to Military Relations with Peru, March 1988, McNamara, Thomas E.: Files, box 92200, Colombia (2), NSC Staff Files, RRPL. 59. Ibid. 60. National Security Council, Interagency Working Group Draft, “Strategy for Narcotics Control in the Andean Region,” June 30, 1989, p. 9, Colombia Documentation Project, Vol. 1, Document 11, NSA Electronic Briefing Book, number 69, http://www.gwu .edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB69/part1.html. 61. Ibid., Annex III: Country Summaries and Implementing Actions: Peru, p. 1. 62. Ibid., 3. 63. State Department Briefing Memorandum, Melvyn Levitsky, Bureau of International Narcotics Matters (INM) to Robert Kimmitt, Under Secretary for Political Affairs,

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64.

6 5. 66. 67.

6 8. 69.

7 0. 71. 72. 73.

7 4. 75. 76. 77.

78.

79.

80. 81.

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“NSC Deputies Committee Meeting on Enhancing Anti-Narcotics Efforts in the Andean Region,” July 7, 1989, White House Situation Room, p. 2, Colombia Documentation Project, Vol. 1, Document 12, NSA Electronic Briefing Book number 69, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB69/part1.html. National Security Council, National Security Directive 18, “International Counternarcotics Strategy,” August 21, 1989, p. 1, Colombia Documentation Project, Vol. 1, Document 13, NSA Electronic Briefing Book, number 69, http://www.gwu.edu/~ nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB69/part1.html. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 6. State Department cable, “Discussion with President Garcia on the Andean Summit,” December 8, 1989, p. 4, Colombia Documentation Project, Vol. 1, Document 16, NSA Electronic Briefing Book number 69, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB /NSAEBB69/part1.html. Ibid., 7. U.S. Embassy Peru cable, “Washington Interagency Comments on Narcotics Implementation Plan for Peru,” October 21, 1989, p. 2, Colombia Documentation Project, Vol. 1, Document 14, NSA Electronic Briefing Book number 69, http://www.gwu .edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB69/part1.html. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 7. Cartagena Drug Summit, Office of National Drug Control Policy, Executive Overview, Summit Objectives. Narcotics Collection, box 8, folder: Cartagena Drug Summit, February 15, 1990, NSA. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. National Security Council, Interagency Working Group Draft, “Strategy for Narcotics Control in the Andean Region,” June 30, 1989, p. 6, Colombia Documentation Project, Vol. 1, Document 11, NSA Electronic Briefing Book number 69, http://www.gwu .edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB69/part1.html. Cable to Secretary of State from U.S. embassy in Lima re: President Fujimori’s address on drug trafficking, October 1990, folder: Peru (General): July [1990]—December [1990] [1], [OA/ID CF00732–026], Pryce, William T.: Files, Subject File, National Security Council, GHWBPL. On conditionality, see Memorandum for General Scowcroft re: Cartagena Briefing, February 13, 1990, File: Drug Summit [OA 7237], Press Office, GHWBPL. Cable from U.S. embassy in Lima to Secretary of State, White House, Secretary of Defense, DIA, NSC, DOJ, CIA, USIA, U.S. embassies in Quito, Bogota, Caracas, La Paz, Subject: Fujimori addresses Peruvian Congress on counter-narcotics umbrella agreement, May 1991, File: Peru, General: January 1991–June 1991 [1], [OA/ID CF01371–007], Gillespie, Charles A.: Files, Subject File, National Security Council, GHWBPL. Memorandum of Understanding Between the Governments of the United States and Peru, May 14, 1991, Narcotics Collection, box 6, folder: Peru: Security Assistance, NSA. Memorandum to Governor Sununu from Governor Martinez Re: Aid to Peru for War

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83.

84.

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Against Drugs, September 27, 1991, folder: Peru [1], [OA/ID CF01028–006]. Canas, Richard L.: Files, Subject File, National Security Council, GHWBPL. Letter to Dante Fascell, Chairman the House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs, from Acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, September 30, 1991, File: Peru, General: July 1991–December 1991 [2], [OA/ID CF01371–011], Gillespie, Charles A.: Files, Subject File, National Security Council, GHWBPL. Letter to Acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger from Dante Fascell, Chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs, September 24, 1991, File: Peru, General: July 1991–December 1991 [2], [OA/ID CF01371–011], Gillespie, Charles A.: Files, Subject File, National Security Council, GHWBPL. Quoted in Maria Clemencia Ramirez Lemus et al., “Colombia: A Vicious Circle of Drugs and War,” in Drugs and Democracy in Latin America: The Impact of U.S. Policy, ed. Coletta A. Youngers and Eileen Rosin, 106 (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2005). Ibid., 109–10. Ibid., 110. Ibid., 110–11. James F. Rochlin, Vanguard Revolutionaries in Latin America, 149.

Afterword The Paradox of Latin American Cold War Studies

5 A l a n McPh er son

As I read this enormously instructive volume, I kept asking

myself what I could possibly add to it of value. The chapters, written largely by graduate students, evince impressive international research and the highest academic rigor. Contributors have mined all the relevant secondary literature, have traveled to various U.S. and Latin American archives, and have supplemented those sources with oral histories, statistical reports, and more. The introduction complements them well by familiarizing the reader with the broad lines of the latest scholarship in U.S.–Latin American relations and explaining how these chapters belong on the front ranks of that scholarship for uncovering new grassroots complexities in the Cold War while keeping in mind the overwhelming strictures placed upon Latin Americans by the United States and extra-hemispheric actors. So rather than try to compete with the redoubtable erudition, subtlety, and evenhandedness on display in these pages, let me take another tack and advance a less evenhanded but perhaps provocative alternate reading. I suggest a paradox in what could be called Latin American Cold War Studies, of which this volume would certainly be an exemplar. The paradox holds that the more historians find out about the Cold War in the hemisphere, the more that Cold War itself fades to the background. The fruit of a generation-long effort to grasp the totality of the ideological, political, social, cultural, economic, and military impact of the East-West confrontation in Latin America 307

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has been to discover instead the increasingly greater agency of Latin Americans as opposed to U.S. or Soviet taskmasters, the primacy of local motivations as opposed to global ones, and the constant irruption of parallel historical currents often succeeding in diverting even the mighty river that was the Cold War. While the East-West conflict undeniably had a tremendous and traumatic impact on Latin America, we are increasingly discovering that the Cold War was only one among a host of other important, often revolutionary processes occurring before, during, and after the years of the Cold War. Before I unpack this argument further, however, a few more words of praise and analysis for this volume are in order. The editors—Mark Atwood Lawrence and Virginia Garrard-Burnett, groundbreaking historians of U.S. foreign relations and Latin America at the University of Texas (UT), and Julio E. Moreno, one of only a few historians to tackle successfully the challenging study of U.S. business in Latin America—are too modest in their introduction. Too modest to claim the obvious, that this series of essays does as much as masterworks such as Piero Gleijeses’s Conflicting Missions, Daniela Spenser’s Espejos de la guerra fría, Gilbert Joseph and Daniela Spenser’s In from the Cold, Greg Grandin’s The Last Colonial Massacre, and Tanya Harmer’s Allende’s Chile. All, in their own way, have demonstrated the complexity both of contests for on-the-ground power within Latin American nations and of high-level international relations since World War II.1 They have shown that the Cold War, an event long perceived during the Cold War as pitting two monoliths against each other, was, on the Latin American “periphery” at least, a sprawling multidimensional saga. With impeccable research and insightful perspective, this volume breathes the same rarefied air as these works, adding precious new details to events we thought we knew, helping uncover others less familiar, and in every case adding texture and nuance to Latin American Cold War studies. It is a testament to UT and especially its history department, which is producing superlative PhDs in inter-American relations and thus marking itself as the best institution in which to earn such a degree. The young contributors to this book have notably made productive use of UT’s two great resources for Latin American research—the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection. The introduction also accurately analyzes the growing complexity and richness of Latin American Cold War studies in the past few decades. It seems that for the study of the Cold War in general, the high point of ideologically

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charged contention between historians was concurrent with the Vietnam War and immediately after, when “revisionist” scholars countered the patriotic narratives of “consensus” scholars, only to be soon answered by “postrevisionists.” By the early 1990s, most historians of U.S. foreign relations were more interested in complexity than contention, spurred by the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the cultural and linguistic turns in the academy. Perhaps because one of the bitterest Cold War episodes in Latin America occurred in the 1980s—the Central American wars that kept the embers of political conflict burning hot—the study of Latin America’s Cold War has taken longer to lose some of its contentiousness than the study of other arenas of the East-West struggle. At present, as Lawrence, Garrard-Burnett, and Moreno write, the best research is busy answering three questions: how much Latin American agency counted in the midst of a perception of total Cold War control over Latin American leaders; what exactly were the experiences of those outside of government; and how the reality of multiple Latin American preoccupations fared against the simplicity of left-right ideological bipolarity. To be sure, these questions do not cover it all. There is necessary and innovative work still to be done in further elaborating on the overwhelming power of the United States over Latin America during the Cold War. Scholars such as Greg Grandin and Stephen Rabe have done so with great aplomb, tracing the influence of U.S. political and military figures over their Latin American counterparts, identifying the nefarious influence of anticommunist paranoia over all politics, and painstakingly calculating the costs in lives and treasure.2 These issues, often at the core of Latin America’s Cold War, should be reinforced with further research, especially into Latin American archival collections that historians should insist be declassified and professionally organized. Most contributors, however, have focused on the three questions that the editors have proposed, and the result has been a trove of rich material for the reader. Julio Moreno’s chapter is a surprising response to the question about Latin American agency. After having somehow gained access to the Coca-Cola Company’s archives, Moreno argues that Coca-Cola executives in the United States, far from representing a corporate octopus extending its tentacles via affiliates in Latin America, were largely unable to control local actors. Because of its decentralized business model, which left it highly dependent on franchise bottlers, Coca-Cola was not the omnipotent transnational corporation we might have suspected. As Moreno suggests, hegemony by corporations

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during the Cold War was “a possibility but not a predetermined condition.” In most situations this proved advantageous because local bottlers allied with unsavory political figures and because the bottler-government alliance advanced the interests of the company. Coca-Cola also encouraged an image of political neutrality, for instance by continuing to push its product in revolutionary Cuba. But in Guatemala, unionized workers on the left and bottlers on the right saw their struggle through a Cold War lens, and there was little that Atlanta executives could do to influence either party, even when a resulting boycott threatened the company’s sales everywhere. Guatemalan bottlers attempted bribes, threats, intimidation, and violence, and they were encouraged by a right-wing regime and the presence of death squads. This Coca-Cola story not only illustrates the agency of Latin Americans but also points to a tragic irony of the Cold War—the ability of peripheral actors to distort local conflicts even further than U.S. “hegemons” wished them to. A more traditional but no less interesting example of Latin American agency is Storm Miller’s chapter on the animosity and competition between presidents Ernesto Betancourt of Venezuela, Fidel Castro of Cuba, and Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic in that crucial Cold War turning point of 1958 to 1961. Miller does not merely trace these three nations’ bilateral relationships with Washington, as most historians do, but even goes beyond the sophisticated reading of Washington’s foreign policy toward the three presidents of Stephen Rabe in his article on the “Caribbean Triangle.”3 He focuses, rather, on the agency of the three leaders themselves, who spanned the ideological spectrum of the Cold War from dictatorially anticommunist (Trujillo) to democratically centrist (Betancourt) to dictatorially communist (Castro). With research not only in U.S. publications and archives but also in Latin American counterparts, Miller argues “that Latin American agency was heterogeneous and constantly shifting, such that Latin Americans debated among themselves over what it meant to be independent or associated with various global powers and political trends.” These leaders, along with their various allies, were neither purely ideological nor purely realist, nor even a consistent mixture of both. Instead, each shifted his stance as conditions warranted. Miller calls them “savvy and pragmatic Latin American leaders.” The struggle, of course, was over the meaning of the Cuban Revolution, especially whether it threatened the survival of both democratic leftism, of which Betancourt became a symbol after the defeat in 1958 of Venezuelan dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, and totalitarianism, as embodied by Trujillo.

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Much of this debate took place within the Organization of American States, which Betancourt tried to wrest from U.S. control and transform into an instrument enforcing democratic politics on the right as well as the left. He almost paid with his life when Trujillo’s henchmen allied with the pérezjimenistas to attempt to assassinate the Venezuelan president with a car bomb that did not quite do the job. Miller thrillingly tells the story of an illconceived bombing that boomeranged against the Dominican. Horrified by Trujillo’s attempt, the hemisphere’s diplomats turned against him, as did the United States, which even shipped weapons to its embassy in Ciudad Trujillo if Trujillo’s enemies proved willing to use them. They did in May 1961. Throughout, however, the relationship between the three men and Washington is the crux of the story. Washington remains an important participant but an outlier that largely responded to these leaders’ decisions rather than dictated or even strong-armed them. Most curious is the evidence that Miller advances suggesting the possibility of the strangest of alliances between the Cubans and the Dominicans in late 1960 and early 1961. It is a rumor that, if true, would indeed confirm the pragmatic, if not psychopathic, nature of these regimes. One of the more disturbing and tragic instances of Latin American agency is found in Giovanni Batz’s chapter on Guatemala in the 1960s. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations stepped back from Dwight Eisenhower’s tendency to encourage coups at the first sign of reformism, and so they trained post-1954 Guatemalans in development work through the Alliance for Progress and wished for a moderate left-leaning government as an outcome. As Batz argues, however, the U.S. military also trained Guatemalans for internal security and multiplied the government’s military funding to the point of creating a Frankenstein monster. After the elections of 1966, the Guatemalan military sounded the alarm against a guerrilla movement, seeing in this tactic a way to justify its massively repressive counterinsurgency against all potential political opponents. Ultrarightists took over the military and unified it. If anything, such a story implies that local actors did not fully internalize the Cold War. Latin Americans were trained but not professionalized. They could not temper their paranoia, seek only credible guerrilla or insurgent threats, or appreciate subtleties between democratic leftists, noncommunist guerrillas, home-grown guerrillas, and actual Soviet- or Cuban-controlled guerrillas. Such a finding again confounds the traditional reading of right-wing terror as a predetermined outgrowth of U.S. training. It echoes scholarship by Eric Paul

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Roorda and others demonstrating the independence especially of “our sons of bitches,” to paraphrase Franklin Roosevelt.4 Many of the chapters in this book respond more directly to the question about the experiences of Latin Americans outside of government. Most contributors tackle this question by delving into the past of institutions such as the Catholic Church, the Coca-Cola Company, or workers’ unions or landless persons’ organizations. This book rightly identifies such research as woefully underdeveloped by historians. One of the more fruitful engagements of ordinary citizens with international politics comes in Renata Keller’s chapter about the 1961 Latin American Peace Conference, organized in Mexico by private groups. With masterful research, including Mexican intelligence documents, Keller reveals a surprisingly broad consensus among prominent Latin Americans about the benefits of the Cuban Revolution and the evils of U.S. imperialism.5 Old and new leftists, various professions, and political parties seemed united, if only for a moment. Soon after, in 1962, Cuba lost favor with much of the left because it harbored Soviet missiles, then ceased to inspire almost entirely when its economic model faltered. Also interesting is the public-private nature of many Cold War initiatives. Jonathan Brown’s chapter on Cuban exiles funded and trained by the CIA is a fine example of this partnership, adding fascinating detail about the lives of the leaders of the counterrevolution and about their little-known multinational training activities in Costa Rica and Nicaragua. Although Operation Mongoose—the series of covert plans to assassinate Fidel Castro and otherwise undermine the revolution—is widely known, the range and intensity of its activities is striking, especially considering President Kennedy’s pledge not to attack Cuba after the Missile Crisis. In the end, however, counting on exiles to do the job of the U.S. government proved, as Brown states, “self-defeating and counterproductive” for both the CIA and the Cuban commandos. When captured, some counterrevolutionaries became a public embarrassment. Some even caused a mistaken attack on a Spanish ship. The third question, about the ill-fitting bipolar ideological mapping of the Cold War onto Latin America, runs strikingly through several chapters. Examining the Latin American Peace Conference allows Keller, for example, to trace the arc of Mexican revolutionary sentiment, which had entered middle age by the mid-twentieth century, when the Cold War revived it. Bonar Hernández’s chapter, benefiting from rich research into the publications of the Juventud Obrera Católica, demonstrates that the Catholic

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Church in Guatemala in the 1940s and 1950s presented to workers a thirdway alternative to capitalism and communism, using the church to create “a space for young workers to become social actors and put forward religious and social ideologies that did not fit neatly into the bipolar world of the second half of the twentieth century.” It opposed, for instance, the reforms of Guatemalan presidents Juan José Arévalo and Jacobo Arbenz. But some of its activists could not help being sucked into the vortex of the Cold War. By the end of the 1950s, even moderate anticommunists could be assassinated for being suspected communists. Also seeking a way out of the ideological bind of the Cold War were the Miskitu of Nicaragua. James Jenkins proves admirably creative in assessing the relationship between this indigenous group of Nicaraguans, whose ambivalence toward the Sandinistas is well known, and U.S. Native American activists in the American Indian Movement. The Miskitu wanted to avoid appearing right wing despite their need for U.S. and Contra aid, because such aid would alienate them not only from the Sandinistas but also from the global indigenous movement. At the same time, Nicaraguan Indians wanted local autonomy in the form of political control of the Atlantic Coast while the Sandinistas enforced nationwide adherence to their creed. The resulting rhetorical strategy was for the Miskitu to call themselves “a decolonization movement” and adopt the global indigenous term “Fourth World” to immunize themselves against the Cold War ideological struggle. Cheasty Miller, meanwhile, finds subtle ideological detours in her story of Cuban international humanitarianism, partly by conducting interviews with Nicaraguans who were on the receiving end of Cuban generosity in the 1980s. And generosity it was. Miller finds, corroborating Gleijeses, that Cuban foreign policy was largely motivated by ideological purity and the desire to help others struggling with poverty and inequality. That finding in itself challenges the traditional view of Cuban subservience to Soviet goals. But Miller also finds some ideological conflict between Cuba and Nicaragua, with some “quasi-paternalism” coming from the Cubans toward Central American and other Caribbean communists. Some chapters, of course, respond to more than one of the questions central to the volume. Michelle Reeves, for instance, explores both Latin American agency and ideological ambivalence in her chapter on the term “narcoterrorism.” She demonstrates that Colombians and Peruvians had different definitions of the term than did the United States and applied it to domestic opponents rather than international ones. Reeves goes a step

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further to call the U.S. definition, which associated Soviet and Cuban support for drugs with terrorism, a “myth,” and accuses Washington of ignoring drug dealing on the right, for instance by the U.S.-funded Nicaraguan Contras. Both Andean nations eventually accepted military aid as the price for what they really wanted, economic aid. Their “drug wars” were therefore less ideologically determined than the one waged by the United States. Now back to the paradox. The path of new research in Latin American Cold War studies is certainly fraught with dangers. Among the main ones, as the editors of this book have found, is striking a balance in representing the power of Latin America and the United States. They worry that making Latin America so central to the story might remove the United States from the equation. Maybe, maybe not—rather than shrink from the proposition, we should test it. The analysis of alternate historical currents that overlapped and sometimes undermined those of the Cold War may just be the dominant reality of Latin America during this era, and we should not minimize it out of a desire to exaggerate the role of the United States. If U.S. power—and Soviet and Cuban power, for that matter—played minimal roles in Latin America from 1945 on, then so be it. Neither ideological precepts nor political correctness should overrule what the evidence indicates. There are three ways in which calling this a “Cold War book” may be a misnomer. The first is less important because it is more semantic. “Cold War” implies restraint from all-out warfare. It refers to a state of tension between states in which the threat of a confrontation was high but actual violence was minimal. Tragically, that definition does not apply to Latin America, just as it did not to the rest of the developing world, regions that experienced mindboggling levels of terror and violence, and several of these chapters fully bear this out. The second way in which this may not be a Cold War book gets more directly into the operation of the paradox. It is related to the first, but far more consequential: much of the violence perpetrated in the Cold War was not necessarily of the Cold War. It was due, at least in some important part, to other, intersecting historical forces. Hal Brands enumerated how Latin America’s Cold War “was a series of overlapping conflicts. It fused together long-running clashes over social, political, and economic arrangements; the persistent tension between U.S. power and Latin American nationalism; the ideological ramifications of decolonization and the rise of the Third World; and the influence of the bipolar struggle for preeminence in the developing

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countries.”6 To these I would add some “long-running clashes” that, as the contributions to this volume demonstrate, often had little to do with the United States and the Soviet Union: ethnic, racial, and religious tensions; contrary paths to development; traditional versus modern outlooks; democracy versus dictatorship; capital-labor relations; and old-fashioned political ambition and competition. Take, for instance, the chapter on the Nicaraguan Miskitu. Jenkins skillfully inserts his story into the Cold War but also identifies “complicated intersections between nation-states and indigenous organizations in the Miskitu resistance.” In other words this was partly a conflict over ideology but more so about the expansion of state authority over territory that was geographically isolated and culturally distinct. The Atlantic Coast had long fought for autonomy, both from Managua and from the imperial ambitions of the British and Americans. The Cold War intensified a long-simmering struggle by elevating to power a group that was particularly invested in securing the ideological loyalty of all parts of the nation. The third way the paradox operates is, in turn, related to the second, and it is Brands’s mention of the “long-running” nature of these conflicts. Many of the contributions to this volume trace events long before the Cold War and follow them up to the 1990s and beyond. They are not the first to do so. Grandin and Joseph’s recent edited collection on insurgency and counterinsurgency is certainly centered in the Cold War but discusses patterns of state-formation and ideological schisms that lasted a full century.7 The Catholic Church in Guatemala, too, was politicized long before the Cold War and had a history of social reform. Even Coca-Cola’s political troubles in Latin America predated the Cold War. Moreno perhaps makes the case too strongly that the Cold War, rather than nationalism, is at the heart of conflicts within the labor movement, which the Cold War certainly “shapes” but does not initiate. Several other chapters in this volume discuss historical trends that began before the Cold War, continued long after its demise, and often had relatively little to do with the East-West confrontation even from 1945 to 1991. Storm Miller, for instance, deals with a clear Cold War saga, the Cuban Revolution’s impact on the region. Parallel to that ideological struggle, however, was the contest between democracy and dictatorship. Here we have the opportunity for an interesting counterfactual. The Leslie Bethell–Ian Roxborough thesis about a democratic moment in the mid-1940s suggested that democracy would have flourished if not for the coming of the Cold War.8

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But what if it had not? Counterfactuals are of course fraught with uncertainty, but do we really believe that an all-powerful dictator such as Rafael Trujillo would have faced significant challenges to his rule even if he had not posed as an anticommunist ally of Washington? The victories against dictatorship in the mid-1940s could even have been reversed simply through the process of states growing in size and acquiring the means to monopolize force nationwide. Michelle Reeves correctly sees the term “narcoterrorism” originating in the Cold War. But in Peru the term was associated with the Shining Path guerrillas, who wanted nothing to do with either the Soviets or the Yankees, and the organization has recently reemerged as a non-ideological player in the protection of drug growers. More important, the struggle against illicit drugs in the Andes began largely independently of the Cold War and has intensified since its end, now becoming arguably the number-one problem in inter-American relations. Its connection to the Cold War, while of some interest, is peripheral to its continued existence. A fine example of state formation largely outside the Cold War is Jennifer Hoyt’s chapter on the Argentinian military government’s attempt to take out the literal trash in Buenos Aires. The ambitious beautification project led to a mutual blame game—by citizens angry that their government was not picking up all the garbage and by a government arguing that citizens failed to understand clear regulations. Hoyt is certainly correct that the littleknown struggle “demonstrates the limits of the regime’s coercive power and identifies an important space where residents could dissent without fear of reprisals,” and it was certainly not the only such area. But this is more or less the extent of the garbage campaign’s connection to the Cold War. Otherwise this is a chapter about modernization, urban development, and good governance, at the heart of which is a government attempting to educate porteños and give them an environmental consciousness. At most it could be argued that this chapter narrates the intersection of such long-term historical currents with the shorter-term Cold War. To be sure, the Cold War may have more easily led to a military government in 1976 that engaged in such a process of “ordering” society, but such a government may have alternatively arisen independently from the East-West struggle. Anyone who knows the neutralist tendencies of Juan Perón, who first rose to the presidency in 1946 by rejecting both capitalism and communism, could imagine this. Seth Garfield does similar work on the landless movement in Brazil. With tremendous statistical backing, Garfield traces the pre–Cold War

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roots of a phenomenon that was always larger than the East-West struggle. The landless problem was rooted in long-term agricultural trends and brought into the light by decades of activism by the rural population. Cold War anticommunism certainly coincided with a growing crisis in the countryside. Great landowners concentrated land into their hands and many began to farm cattle. Sharecroppers made up a smaller proportion of rural Brazil as more farmers became salaried employees. More leftist presidents such as João Goulart were on the side of peasants, Goulart perhaps too much so with radical land expropriations that only hastened the end of his regime. The military that replaced the democratically elected left from 1964 to 1985, however, did not seem to have had a rural land policy much influenced by the Cold War one way or the other. Garfield thus finds the military’s role in the struggle for land to be “transformational, uneven, and contradictory.” It championed the colonization of free land in the Amazon rather than redistribute private land. But it was not completely rigid toward the landless, extending social rights to rural workers, including “social security, medical and dental care, disability pensions, and funeral expenses.” Military governments did what many on the left and right did throughout the twentieth century, Cold War or not: they attempted to coopt agrarian movements and, when that failed, they unleashed repression, legal prosecution, and at times violence and torture. So the story of the landless was, again, only tangentially about the Cold War. Throughout, the central struggle was over longer-term Latin American themes: the ownership and use of land, the making of a corporatist state, and the rights of politically disenfranchised groups. It is not clear how much the left-right divide impacted rural activists, whether activists were labeled communists, whether they thought of themselves as such, and whether ideological self-identities continued after 1985. The Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra is now a relatively mainstream player in Brazilian politics, part of the base of leftist but pragmatic presidents such as Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva and Dilma Rousseff. Accordingly, much of Garfield’s chapter is devoted to the postmilitary years after 1985, when the landless had a real impact. Its attention to post–Cold War years brings up the real stakes of the movement—not ideology or great power politics but questions of development, state violence, grassroots political organization, and central authority versus rural autonomy, all of which survived long after the East-West baggage was dropped at the station.

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As many historians have realized, to point out the long-running character of conflicts that existed during the Cold War is not to deny the Cold War. I would add that it is better to understand it by seeing, theme by theme, how the Cold War distorted issues and conflicts. If I have one criticism of these contributions, it is that they too often attempt to force their topics into the vise of the Cold War. Why? Why not instead make the argument boldly that the Cold War was rather peripheral to the events they chronicle? The editors write in the introduction that they want to “inspire further research.” It is a laudable goal, and one that this book will no doubt achieve. But we should also inspire other researchers to question our most basic findings, even the finding that the Cold War pervaded Latin America. Scholars of other peripheral Cold War battlegrounds might come to similar conclusions. notes Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Daniela Spenser, ed., Espejos de la guerra fría: México, America Central y el Caribe (Mexico City: CIESAS, 2004); Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniela Spenser, eds., In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); and Tanya Harmer, Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 2. Greg Grandin, The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre; Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan, 2006); Stephen G. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of Anti-Communism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Stephen G. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Stephen G. Rabe, U.S. Intervention in British Guiana: A Cold War Story (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); and Stephen G. Rabe, The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 3. Stephen G. Rabe, “The Caribbean Triangle: Betancourt, Castro, and Trujillo and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1958–1963,” Diplomatic History 20, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 55–78. 4. Eric Paul Roorda, The Dictator Next Door: The Good Neighbor Policy and the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic, 1930–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). 5. Other scholars have also discussed this at least rhetorically strong anti-U.S. sentiment in Mexico early in the Cuban Revolution: see, for instance, Eric Zolov, “¡Cuba Sí, Yanquis No! The Sacking of the Instituto Cultural México-Norteamericano in Morelia, Mexico, 1961,” in In from the Cold, ed. Joseph and Spenser, 214–52. 1.

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6. See also Hal Brands, Latin America’s Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 7. 7. Greg Grandin and Gilbert M. Joseph, eds., A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America’s Long Cold War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 8. Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough, eds., Latin America Between the Second World War and the Cold War, 1944–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

Contributors

5 K. Cheasty Anderson is completing her PhD in history at the University of Texas at Austin. She is writing her dissertation about health reform in Matagalpa, Nicaragua, during the 1980s Sandinista era. Giovanni Batz is a doctoral student in the department of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, where he received his master’s degree in Latin American Studies. His thesis, “Expressions of Maya Identity and Culture in Los Angeles: Coloniality of Power, Resistance, and Cultural Memory,” examines how the children of Guatemalan Mayas self-identify and express their identity and culture in the United States. His dissertation will examine indigenous political mobilization against a hydroelectric dam among the Ixil-Maya in Cotzal, Guatemala. Jonathan C. Brown is a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. He has published four single-authored books: A Socioeconomic History of Argentina, 1776–1860 (1979), which was awarded the Bolton Prize; Oil and Revolution in Mexico (1993); Latin America: A Social History of the Colonial Period (2nd ed., 2005); and A Brief History of Argentina (2nd ed., 2009). He also edited a collection of essays on workers and populism in Latin America and has coedited books on the Mexican oil industry and on Argentine social history. He is currently writing a manuscript on the Cuban Revolution. Seth Garfield is an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil: State Policy, Frontier Expansion, and the Xavante Indians, 1937–1988 (2001) and In Search of the Amazon: Brazil, the United States, and the Nature of a Region (2013). 321

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Virginia Garrard-Burnett is a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. She has written more than two dozen articles on Central American history and on religion in Latin America. Her most recent monograph is Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala Under General Efraín Rios Montt, 1982–1983 (2010). She is currently coeditor of the Cambridge History of Religion in Latin America and is completing a manuscript on contemporary Christianity in Latin America. Bonar L. Hernández is an assistant professor of history at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania. He received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. His research and writing cover various topics of Central American history and the history of religion in Latin America. He is currently at work on a history of the Catholic Action movement in Guatemala before and after the Second Vatican Council. Jennifer T. Hoyt is an assistant professor of Latin American History at Berry College. Her research interests range from the Cold War in Latin America to the urban and environmental history of the region. Her current project explores the broad social agenda of the last military dictatorship in Argentina and its efforts to transform and control Buenos Aires through the built environment. James Jenkins is a doctoral student in history at the University of Texas at Austin and a Ford Foundation fellow. He is a member of Walpole Island First Nation, where he works as a research advisor. His dissertation concerns issues of Native identity and belonging in the Great Lakes borderlands. Renata Keller is an assistant professor of international relations at Boston University. She is currently writing a book on Mexico’s relations with Cuba and the United States. She has presented her work on Latin American history in a number of articles as well as at regional, national, and international conferences. Mark Atwood Lawrence is an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. He is author of Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to Vietnam (2005) and The Vietnam War: A Concise International History (2008), as well as articles and chapters on the history of the Cold War. He is also coeditor of The First Vietnam War: Colonial Conflict and Cold War Crisis (2007) and Nation-States and the Global Environment: New Approaches to International Environmental History (2013).

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Alan McPherson is a professor of international and area studies, ConocoPhillips Chair in Latin American studies, and founder and director of the Center for the Americas at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Yankee No!: Anti-Americanism in U.S.-Latin American Relations (2003) and Intimate Ties, Bitter Struggles: The United States and Latin America Since 1945 (2006). He has also edited Anti-Americanism in Latin America and the Caribbean (2006), The Anti-American Century (2007), and the Encyclopedia of U.S. Military Interventions in Latin America (2013). He is finishing a book about resistance to U.S. military occupations in Latin America. Aragorn Storm Miller is a lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin. He is currently revising a book manuscript on U.S.-Venezuelan relations during the 1950s and 1960s. His articles include “A Sword Cuts Two Ways: Cold War Policymaking in the OAS” in Portal and “Imperial Insecurity: Burma, the Chinas, and the United States, 1949–1953” in SAGAR: A Journal of South Asian Studies. Julio E. Moreno is an associate professor of history at the University of San Francisco. He is the author of Yankee Don’t Go Home!: Mexican Nationalism, American Business Culture, and the Shaping of Modern Mexico, 1920–1950 (2003) and articles on U.S. business and diplomacy in Latin America. He is currently writing a history of Coca-Cola in Latin America. Michelle Denise Reeves is a doctoral candidate in the history department at the University of Texas at Austin. She earned her MA at California State University, Northridge, where she wrote a thesis about the drug war and the Reagan administration’s support for the Contras. She is currently preparing a dissertation that reinterprets U.S. interventionism in Latin America during the Cold War by analyzing Soviet efforts to subvert hemispheric support for U.S. international policy goals.

Index 5 Page numbers in italic text indicate tables.

American Indian Movement (AIM), 15, 175, 313; diplomacy and, 182–88; fragmentation of, 188–94; roots of insurgency, 176–82 Americas Watch Committee, 187 Amnesty International, 40 Anaya, James, 186, 190 Andean Initiative, 296 Andean Summit, 295 Anderson, K. Cheasty, 15 anti-Americanism, 11, 32, 318n5 anticommunism, 9, 52, 63, 129, 131; Cold Warriors, 23; death squads and, 64; militant factions, 22; negative, 264, 268; opposition groups, 107; positive, 16, 268; Sandoval Alarcón and, 56; Somoza and, 14; Trujillo and, 15, 80, 87 Anti-Communist Liberation Movement, 86 Anti-Communist Party, 143 anti-democratic regimes, 85 apolitical language, 227 Apter, David, 206 Arana, Francisco Javier, 257 Arana Osorio, Carlos, 63, 65–68 Araúz, Nacho, 214 Árbenz Guzmán, Jacobo, 252, 257, 273, 313; agrarian reform and, 259–61; coup against, 52, 79, 133, 266–69 Arce, Manuel José, 251 archives, 11 Arévalo, Juan José, 258, 313

Abbes García, Johnny, 89, 95 Adams, Hank, 189 Adams, Richard N., 55 advertising campaigns, 244–45 agency, 7, 9, 19n21, 23, 77, 98; hegemony and, 46n10; local, 8 agrarian problem, 260 agrarian reform, 16, 150–51, 169; military rule and, 155–63; postwar, 152–55; violence and, 163–68 Agrarian Reform Law (Decree 900), 259– 60, 277n41 agribusiness, 150 agricultural modernization, 158 agro-exports, 157, 169, 230 Aguayo Quezada, Sergio, 12, 142 AIM. See American Indian Movement Albizúres, Miguel Ángel, 271 Albuerne, Gabriel, 127n59 Alfredo, João “Negro Fubá,” 156 Allende’s Chile (Harmer), 308 Alliance for Progress, 51–53, 59, 61, 63, 97– 98, 311; aid programs and, 223n13; Charter Objectives of, 152; failure of, 69 Alpha 66, 104, 112 Alpromisu, 177, 178 Amado, Jorge, 133 Amazon, 161, 167, 169 American Encounters/Global Interactions (Joseph and Rosenberg), 8

325

326

index

Argentina, 16, 25, 92, 106, 140; military dictatorship of, 226–29, 237. See also Buenos Aires, Argentina Arias, Oscar, 18n20 armed civilians. See comisionados Armus, Diego, 248n25 Army Bank, 68 Arriaga, Rafael, 58, 63, 66, 69 Artime Buesa, Manuel, 105, 109, 115–22, 123 Asturias, Miguel Ángel, 58 Atisbos (newspaper), 143 Atlantic Coast, Nicaragua, 175–80, 182–83, 185–88, 190, 192–94 AUC. See United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia Austin, Paul, 21–22 authentic Christianity, 268–70 Authentic Party, 107, 109 Autonomous Labor Federation. See Federación Autónoma Sindical autonomy, 12, 77, 186; law, 192–93, 194 Avance Juvenil (JOC newspaper), 257, 259–63, 267–68, 270, 276n24 Avenida General Paz, 230 Azmitia Molina, Mario, 265 Bahamas, 104 Baird, A. D., 25 The Balance of Nature (film), 244 Balboa High School, 1 Bancalarí Experimental Area, 234 Banco do Brasil, 157 Barco, Virgilio, 292–93 Barger, Brian, 302n18 Barrillas, César, 37 Bassols, Narciso, 132 Batista, Fulgencio, 27–28, 104–5, 107, 109, 122 Batz, Giovanni, 14, 311 Bay of Pigs, 15, 78, 96, 133, 145; counterrevolution and, 104–6, 109, 111–12, 116, 121–23; Ydigoras and, 59 Belaunde Terry, Fernando, 281, 284–85 Bell, John O., 55, 60 Bellecourt, Vernon, 188, 189 Benítez, Conrado, 111

Beras, Octavio, 93 Berlin Wall, 7–8, 17 Berreondo, José Ángel, 251, 252, 265, 271, 274 Betancourt, Romulo Ernesto, 80–84, 91, 96, 112, 310, 311; assassination attempt against, 89–91, 92; Castro, F., and, 76, 78; Pérez Jiménez–Trujillo union and, 86–90; U.S. and, 15 Betancourt Doctrine, 81, 84 Betancur, Belisario, 288, 289 Beverage World, 35 Bezerra, Gregório, 157 Bogotá, Colombia, 82, 182, 187–88, 288 Boland amendments, 283 Bolivia, 91, 105, 289, 295 Bonnelly, Rafael F., 87 Borge, Tomás, 187, 188, 201, 224n48 Branco, Castelo, 158 Brands, Hal, 12, 77, 314–15 Brazil, 25, 36, 106, 150–51, 169; constitutions of, 152, 164–65; military rule and, 16, 150, 155–63; national security state and, 155–63; postwar agrarian reform in, 152–55; violence and, 163–68 Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), 154 brigadistas (brigade members), 207, 212 Brown, Jonathan, 15, 312 Buenos Aires, Argentina, 229–37, 246, 316; divisions of, 231; pollution in, 240; trash collection in, 232–45, 235 Bundy, McGeorge, 108 Bureau of Indian Affairs, 188 Bureau of International Narcotics Matters, 287 Bush, George H. W., 283–84, 290–92, 295–96 Bush, George W., 298–99 Busto Gonzalez, Antonio, 32 Cacciatore, Osvaldo, 229–30, 233, 237, 240, 245–46 caja de ahorros (savings bank), 264 Calvet, Francisco, 29 Campbell, Roberto, 177 campesino, 153

index camponês, 153 Canada Dry, 35 Candler, Asa G., 24–25 Candler, Warren, 24 Capital Federal, 230–31, 232, 234 capitalism, 13, 76, 202–5, 226; agrarian, 156; Coca-Cola Company and, 23, 32–34, 40; democratic, 3; industrial, 10; JOC and, 252, 256, 262–64, 267–70, 273; liberal, 16; Third World and, 213 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 15, 114, 129–34, 137–42, 144–45 Cardijn, Joseph, 254, 264 Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, 168 Cardoza y Aragón, Luis, 258, 276n27 Caribbean, 11, 22–24; counterrevolution in, 103–24; Pérez Jiménez–Trujillo union and, 86–90; San José Conference and, 90–96; Santiago Conference and, 83–86; U.S. and, 76–99. See also specific countries Caribbean Triangle, 310 Caribe, El (newspaper), 92 Carnegie Center, 81 Carrión, Luís, 184 Carta pastoral sobre los avances del comunismo en Guatemala (Rossell), 266 Carter, Jimmy, 21, 41–42 Casariego, Mario, 66 Casella, Alberto T., 135, 136 Castellanos, Rosario, 133 Casti-Cola, 34–35 Castillo, Enrique, 34–35 Castillo Armas, Carlos, 56, 265–66, 267, 271 Castillo family, 34–36 Castro, Edgar Daniel, 37 Castro, Fidel, 9, 15, 91, 123–24, 129, 133, 135, 141, 310; anti-Americanism and, 32; Coca-Cola Company and, 21–22, 27–28, 32, 44; counterrevolution and, 104–20; FAR and, 71n23; Soviet Union and, 10, 97; Trujillo and, 76–78, 95–97; Venezuela and, 83–84, 86, 104 Castro, Raúl, 94, 111–12, 131, 135 Castro León, Jesús Maria, 87–88, 90, 92

327

Catholic Action, 254, 256, 269 Catholic Church, 159, 161, 166, 273–74, 312–13; Betancourt and, 82; church-state relations and, 253–54; Guatemala and, 251–52, 315; in Mexico, 143; polarities and, 263–74; Radio Caribe and, 95; Serviço de Assistência Rural, 154; social Catholicism, 256–63, 264, 267, 270, 273; Trujillo and, 93. See also Juventud Obrera Catolica Catholic Foreign Missionary Society of America, 254 Catholic workers, 16 C-C-Cola, 35 CDNCC. See Comité de Defensa Nacional Contra el Comunismo CEASME. See Cinturón Ecológico de la Área Metropolitana, Sociedad del Estado Center for World Indigenous Studies, 186, 187 Central America, 8–11, 251, 254, 287, 309, 313; Coca-Cola Company and, 22–27, 42, 44–45; counterrevolution in, 109, 121. See also specific countries Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 107–8, 114, 122–24, 175, 180–81, 287, 312; Artime Buesa and, 115–22; Bay of Pigs and, 59; Honduras and, 265; Johnson and, 2; Latin American Peace Conference and, 137; Méndez, J., and, 58, 66; Menoyo and, 103–5; Plan Omega and, 112; Trujillo and, 93 Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT), 164 Cerezo Arévalo, Marco Vinicio, 68 Cervecería Centroamericana, 34 Charter Objectives of the Alliance for Progress, 152 Charter of Bogotá, 82 Chartier, Clem, 189 Chase, Gordon, 108, 114 Cheney, Dick, 291 Chiari, Roberto, 1–2 Chibás, Raúl, 107 Chile, 6, 9, 92

328

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China, 3, 106, 141, 267 Christian Democratic Movement. See Movimiento Democrático Cristiano Christian Democrats, 67, 75n95 Christianity, 162; authentic, 268–70; Jesuits, 116; Lutheran Church, 166; social order, 257. See also Catholic Church; and specific churches Christian Workers’ Front. See Frente de Trabajadores Cristianos Church and Land Problems, The, 162 Churchill, Ward, 189, 191 Church of Our Lady of Candelaria, 255 church-state relations, 253–54 CIA. See Central Intelligence Agency Cienfuegos, Camilo, 115 cinturón ecológico, El (Laura), 232 Cinturón Ecológico de la Área Metropolitana, Sociedad del Estado (CEASME), 234–45 Circuit, Ted, 42 Cisne, Virgilio, 220 city planning, 16 civil action programs, 61 Civil Action Squadron, 62 civil conflicts, 7 civil war: Guatemalan, 37; Spanish, 130 clandestine units, 64–65 Clayton, John, 185 clinical medicine, 208 Clinton, Bill, 298, 299 Close Encounters of Empire (Joseph, LeGrande, and Salvatore), 11, 223n16 Coast Guard, 106–7 Coca-Cola Company, 2, 13, 21, 45, 309–10, 312, 315; American expansion and, 24–27; boycotts, 33, 40; Castillo family and, 34–36; in Cuba, 21–33; franchise contracts and, 29; Guatemala and, 22–23, 25–26, 33–44; labor negotiations and, 33–44; legal battles of, 28; local markets and, 26; Mexico and, 21, 25–26; organized labor and, 30–31; Thomas and, 31–32 Coca-Cola Cuba (newsletter), 32 Coca-Cola Overseas (magazine), 28

collective bargaining, 30 Colombia, 6, 17, 34, 87; AUC, 299; Bogotá, 82, 182, 187–88, 288; FARC, 286, 288–90, 298; narcoterrorism and, 281–82, 284, 286, 288–90, 292–300; ONIC, 185 colonization, frontier, 160 Columbia University, 80 comisionados (armed civilians), 65 Comissão Pastoral da Terra (CPT), 162, 165 Comité de Defensa Nacional Contra el Comunismo (CDNCC), 267 commercial expansion, 22 communism, 9, 14, 33, 76, 202; Árbenz Guzmán and, 266; Betancourt and, 81; bureaucratic, 136; Castro, F., and, 97; CIA and, 124; commercial expansion and, 22; Cuba and, 202–6, 220–22; despotism and, 98; Dirty War and, 16; Dominican Republic and, 96; Franco and, 123; JOC and, 252, 258–60, 264, 267–68, 273; Méndez, J., and, 58; in Panama, 3; social Catholicism and, 256; Soviet, 86; Trotter and, 23, 36–37, 42. See also anticommunism Communist Conference, 131 compaction, of trash, 235, 238–39 compañeros de salud (comrades in health), 207 Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, 186 comrades in health. See compañeros de salud Confederacion de Trabajadores de America Latina (CTAL), 259 Confederacion de Trabajadores de Cuba en Exilio (Cuban Workers Confederation), 107 confessionalism, 257, 264 Conflicting Missions (Gleijeses), 10, 308 consensus scholars, 309 Constituent Assembly, 56 constitution (1946), of Brazil, 152 constitution (1988), of Brazil, 164–65 contact zones, 11, 228–29 CONTAG. See National Confederation of Agricultural Workers

index Contras, 176–77, 180–84, 187–91, 302n18 Contra War, 182, 190, 193–94, 217, 219–20; MINSA and, 209–10; Sandinistas and, 204, 206 Corona del Rosal, Alfonso, 138–39 Costa Rica, 18n20, 104, 117–18, 177, 192 counterinsurgency, 61–62, 163; Guatemala and, 63–68; narcoterrorism and, 292– 97; violence and, 52–53, 69 counternarcotics, 292–97 counterrevolution, 122–24; Artime Buesa and, 115–22; in Cuba, 103–24; groups, 107; in Miami, 106–9 CPT. See Comissão Pastoral da Terra Creole Indians, 177–79, 195n6 Crimmins, John, 121 CTAL. See Confederacion de Trabajadores de America Latina Cuba, 2, 4, 6, 9–11, 15, 76, 78–80, 83, 312; Coca-Cola Company and, 21–33; counterrevolution in, 103–24; Dominican Republic and, 84–85; foreign policy of, 221, 313; health care and, 15–16; infrastructure of, 29; narcoterrorism and, 285–86, 299; Sandinistas and, 200–204, 208–9, 212, 220; Soviet Union and, 14, 32, 97, 106, 133, 180, 312–14. See also Castro, Fidel Cuba in the American Imagination (Pérez, L. A.), 11 Cuban homes. See las casas de los cubanos Cuban medical aid, 200–204, 221–22; case study in Matagalpa, 214–19; global impact of, 204–6; intraregional relationships and, 206–7; national and regional, 207–13; opposition and, 219–21; personal story of, 213–14; statistics of, 223n6 Cuban Missile Crisis, 6, 15, 78, 108, 123 Cubanos Libres (Free Cubans), 107 Cuban Representation in Exile. See Representación Cubana en el Exilio Cuban Revolution (1959), 59, 106, 108, 145, 271, 273, 310; Latin American Peace Conference and, 129–32, 135

329

Cuban Revolutionary Council, 116 Cuban Workers Confederation. See Confederacion de Trabajadores de Cuba en Exilio culture: history, 8, 10; representation, 11, 13 CUT. See Central Única dos Trabalhadores Czechoslovakia, 267 da Natividade de Oliveira, Nativo, 165 “Danger of a Military Coup in Guatemala, The” (CIA memorandum), 58 Danzós Palomino, Ramón, 135 Davies, Thomas M., Jr., 227 DEA. See Drug Enforcement Agency Dealers Relations Department, 31 Dearborn, Henry, 88, 93, 96 death squads, 53, 64, 65, 68, 310 Decree 900. See Agrarian Reform Law de la Maza, Octavio, 80, 96 de León, Julio Celso, 265, 271 Delfim Netto, Antonio, 157 democratic reform, 76 Democratic Revolutionary Alliance, 182 demoralization, 114 de Oliva, Tereso, 271 Departamento de Seguridad del Estado (Department of State Security), 108 Department of Federal Security (DFS), 141 Department of History (University of Texas), 6 Department of Political and Social Investigations (IPS), 141–42, 147n21 dependency theory, 46n9 despotism, 98 developmentalism, 151, 162–63 DFS. See Department of Federal Security Díaz Balart, Rafael, 107 Dios Aguilar, Juan de, 56 Directorio Revolucionario. See Revolutionary Directorate Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (Student Revolutionary Directorate), 107 Dirty War, 16, 226–30 Dominican Military Intelligence Service, 87

330

index

Dominican Republic, 10, 76, 78–80, 104, 117; Cuba and, 84–85; dictatorship collapse of, 90–96. See also Trujillo, Rafael Leonidas dos Prazeres, José, 157 “Double Dealing: Mexico’s Foreign Policy Toward Cuba” (Doyle), 20n31 Doyle, Kate, 12, 20n31 Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), 289 drug trafficking. See narcoterrorism DSE. See Departamento de Seguridad del Estado Duhn, Charles, 39 Duke University, 8 Dulles, Allen, 91, 138 Dulles, John Foster, 79 Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne, 184 Echeverría, José Antonio, 109 economic development, 4 education, 168, 178; green belt project and, 243; medical, 203, 208, 210–11, 213 EGSA. See Embotelladora Guatemanteca, S.A. Ehrenfeld, Rachel, 283, 287 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 9, 78–79, 93–95, 105–6, 311; Betancourt and, 81–82, 88, 91; foreign policy of, 79 Eisenhower, Milton, 97 Ejercito, El (periodical), 61 Ejercito Popular de Liberación (EPL), 289 El Salvador, 6, 18n20, 26, 285 Embotelladora Guatemanteca, S.A. (EGSA), 36, 43 Enders, Thomas, 285 Enlai, Zhou, 134 environment. See green belt project; trash collection EPL. See Ejercito Popular de Liberación ESA. See Secret Anti-Communist Army Escambray Mountains. See Sierra Escambray Escobar, Pablo, 281, 293, 298 Espaillat, Arturo, 95 Espejos de la guerra fría (Spenser), 308 Espín, Vilma, 131, 134–35

Estupiñán, Miguel Angel, 212, 213, 216, 218, 219 Excélsior (newspaper), 139–40, 143 Executive Group for Lower Amazonia (GEBAM), 162 Executivo Group for Araguaia-Tocantins (GETAT), 162 Export-Import Bank, 292–93 exports: agro-exports, 157, 169, 230; crops, 166; of revolution, 104–5, 135; sugar, 28, 80 Extraordinary Ministry for Land Affairs, 162 extremism, 97–98 factionalization, 52–55 Fagoth, Steadman, 177–81, 184, 192 FAR. See Rebel Armed Forces FARC. See Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia FARClandia, 298 Farland, Joseph, 88 FAS. See Federación Autónoma Sindical Fazendeiro, Pedro, 156 FBI. See Federal Bureau of Investigation Federación Autónoma Sindical (FAS), 270 Federación Estudiantil Universitario (University Student Federation), 107 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 107 Federation of Cuban Women, 131, 135 Fein, Seth, 11 Feinsilver, Julie, 205, 206, 212 Felbab-Brown, Vanda, 301n8 Fernández, Ramiro, 26 Fifth Meeting of Consultation of Foreign Ministers (OAS), 83 Figueiredo, João, 162 Finland, 40 First Archdiocesan Congress of the Young Christian Workers. See Primer Encuentro Arquidiocesano de la Juventud Obrera Católica flag riots, Panamanian, 1–3 Fleming, Mary, 36, 42 Fleming, Mutt, 36 Flint, Larry, 189

index flooding, 232 Flores, Miguel Enrique, 265 Fonesca, Carlos, 175, 188 Foreign Claims Commission, U.S., 21 foreign policy, 5; of Cuba, 221, 313; of Mexico, 15; of Trujillo, 95; of U.S., 7, 9, 11, 13, 22, 24, 45, 59, 79, 190, 206, 283, 291, 300 Foreign Relations of the United States, 105 Forster, John R., 74n84 Fortuny, José Manuel, 277n41 Fourth Corps, 64, 66, 74n83 Fourth World, 183 Franco, Francisco, 120, 123 Frankel, Max, 94 Free Costa Rica Movement. See Movimiento Costa Rica Libre Free Cubans. See Cubanos Libres free market doctrine, 50n98 free workers, 168 Frente de Trabajadores Cristianos (FTC), 271 Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN), 175, 177–80, 183–84, 186, 200–201 Frente Unido de Liberación Nacional (United Front for National Liberation), 107 Friedman, Max Paul, 77 Friends of the City, 242 frontier colonization, 160 FSLN. See Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional FTC. See Frente de Trabajadores Cristianos Fuentes, Carlos, 140 Fujimori, Alberto, 296, 297 Galan, Luis, 293 Galíndez, Jesús de, 80–81, 96 Gallin, Daniel, 40–42 garbage. See trash collection García, Alan, 295–96 Garcia, Julio, 37 García Bauer, José, 270 Garfield, Seth, 16, 316–17 Garrard-Burnett, Virginia, 308–9

331

Garrastazu Médici, Emílio, 157 Gartland, Dorothy, 39 Gaviria, Cesar, 293 GEBAM. See Executive Group for Lower Amazonia geopolitics, 6, 8–9, 11, 15; Contras and, 176; Cuban, 202–3, 205–7, 221; Means and, 189; theater, 130 Germany, 130 GETAT. See Executivo Group for Araguaia-Tocantins Gillespie, Charles, 292 Gleijeses, Piero, 10, 14, 308, 313 Goizueta, Roberto, 22, 32–33 González Martínez, Enrique, 132 Goodpaster, Andrew J., 91 Gorelik, Adrián, 248n25, 250n70 Goulart, João, 150, 152, 154–55, 159, 317 Gouvêa de Bulhões, Octávio, 152 Grandin, Greg, 11, 276n29, 308, 309, 315 Green, Harry, 74n84 green belt project, 229, 232–34, 243, 248n20 Green Berets, 59, 295 green space, 231–32 Grenada, 205 Guardia de Honor, 57, 61 Guatemala, 6, 9, 13–14, 16, 25–26, 51–54, 108, 273–74, 311; Catholicism and, 251–52, 315; church-state relations in, 253–54; civil war of, 37; Coca-Cola Company and, 22–23, 25–26, 33–44; counterinsurgency and, 63–68; JOC and, 254–56; military and, 51–69, 265; polarities and, 263–74; social Catholicism and, 256–63; U.S. and, 14, 51–54, 57, 59–63 “Guatemala: A Counter-Insurgency Running Wild?” (Hughes), 65 guerrillas, 14, 52–53, 60–62, 72n44, 72n49, 109–10, 311; anti-Castro, 104, 111–12; assassinations by, 66; comisionados and, 65; Dirty War and, 228; human rights abuses and, 297; kidnappings by, 56–57; military repression and, 69; Miskitu, 176, 181, 183–84; MLN and, 58–59;

332

index

narco-guerrilla connection, 288–91. See also specific groups Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 95, 104–5, 110, 115, 124n3 Guido, Lea, 209–10 Guzman, Abimael, 281–82, 298 Haiti, 83, 108 Hall, Michael, 77 Harjo, Suzan Shown, 183 Harmer, Tanya, 308 Hawaii, 25; Native Hawaiians, 193 Hawkins, Paula, 286 Healing the Masses (Feinsilver), 206 health: care, 15–16; centers, 208; compañeros de salud, 207; MINSA, 201–4, 208, 210, 219; mother-infant, 209–10; promotion, 206; public, 203, 208, 224n48; WHO, 201, 205. See also Cuban medical aid Health, Politics, and Revolution in Cuba Since 1898 (Hirschfeld), 216 health warriors. See militantes de salud hegemony, 14, 23; agency and, 46n10; language and, 13; limitations of, 15; regional, 222; of U.S., 10–12, 24, 78–79, 98, 203–4, 206–7 Helms, Richard, 124 Hernández, Adolfo, 271 Hernández, Bonar, 16, 312 Hernández, Rafael “Don Payo,” 220 Herrera Báez, Porfirio, 85, 92 Herter, Christian A., 88, 91–92 high-level policy-making, 3 Hirschfeld, Katherine, 216 historiography, 7–13 Honduras, 118, 180–81, 187, 192, 265 hookworm, 223n13 Hora, La (newspaper), 270 Hoyt, Jennifer, 16, 316 Hughes, Thomas L., 65 humanization, of workplace, 269 human rights violations, 40, 42, 68, 297 Hungary, 143, 267 Hunt, Edward W., 25 hyperinflation, 163

ideological polarity, 7 ideological systems, 4 IFONA. See National Forestry Institute imperialism: Soviet, 137; U.S., 13, 25, 86, 122, 136, 140, 153, 194, 195n2, 299 incineration, of trash, 233, 238–39 INCRA. See Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform Indian Law Resource Center, 182 Indians of the Americas (Dunbar-Ortiz), 184 infiltrators, 106 In from the Cold (Joseph and Spenser), 308 INRA. See Institute of Agrarian Reform Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA), 158, 160, 167 Institute of Agrarian Reform (Instituto Nacional de la Reforma Agraria), 115 Institutional Act No. 1 (1964), 156 institutional deficiencies, 62 Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), 129, 138–39 Instituto Nacional, 1 insurgency, 111; of Miskitu Indians, 176–82. See also counterinsurgency Insurrectional Movement of Revolutionary Recouperation. See Movimiento Insurreccional de Recuperación Revolucionaria Inter-American Association for Democracy and Freedom, 81 Inter-American Commission (OAS), 187 Inter-American Peace Committee, 85 Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, 39 internacionalistas, 216, 224n48 International Indian Treaty Council, 179 internationalism, 222 international relations, 5 International Union of Food and Allied Workers (IUF), 23, 33–34, 40, 43 intra-regional relationships, 206–7 IPS. See Department of Political and Social Investigations IUF. See International Union of Food and Allied Workers

index Jamaica, 205 Jara, Heriberto, 132 Jenkins, James, 15, 313 Jesuits, 116 Jeunesse Ouvriè Chrétienne, 254 JOC. See Juventud Obrera Catolica Jocistas. See Juventud Obrera Catolica Johnson, Lyndon B., 2–3, 59, 105–6, 109, 123–24, 311 Joseph, Gilbert, 8, 11, 223n16, 228, 308, 315 Julião, Francisco, 154 Junta Revolucionaria Cubana (JURE), 107 Juventud Obrera Catolica (JOC), 251–53, 273–74, 312–13; Avance Juvenil, 257, 259–63, 267–68, 270, 276n24; emergence of, 254–56; JOC method, 264; polarities and, 263–74; social Catholicism and, 256–63 Kahlo, Frida, 132 Katz, Friedrich, 9 Kauanui, Kēhaulani, 193 Keller, Renata, 12, 15, 312 Kennedy, Edward “Ted,” 182, 187, 190 Kennedy, John F., 78, 97, 109, 123, 154, 223n13, 311; civil action programs and, 61; Radio Caribe and, 95 Khrushchev, Nikita, 123, 133, 134 Killing Zone (Rabe), 12 King, A. C., 25–26 Kirby, John, 42 KISAN por la paz (KISAN for peace), 192 Kubitschek, Juscelino, 10, 97 labor, 136; humanization of workplace and, 269; international, 23; legislation, 153, 159; militants, 156; mobilization, 37; negotiations, 33–44, 81; organized, 30–32, 159; rural activists, 150. See also unions Labor Party, 60 ladino workers, 255 La Luz de Yara (The Light of Yara), 107 Landless Workers Movement. See Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra

333

Land Statute (1964), 158 language: apolitical, 227; hegemony and, 13 Lara, Jaime Guillot, 285 Lara Bonilla, Rodrigo, 289–90 Larrazábal, Wolfgang, 83, 87 Larsen Villafanes, Benito, 29 las casas de los cubanos (Cuban homes), 216 Last Colonia Massacre, The (Grandin), 308 Latin American Peace Conference, 129–30, 134–37, 144–45, 312; background and preparations, 131–34; reaction to, 137–43 Latin America’s Cold War (Brands), 12 Lau, Hazel, 177–78, 184, 194 Laugerud, Kjell, 68 Laura, Guillermo Domingo, 232–33, 240, 246 Lawrence, Mark Atwood, 308–9 left-right dichotomy, 5 LeGrande, Catherine C., 11, 223n16 leishmaniasis (mountain leprosy), 214 Leninism, 16, 192, 284 LeoGrande, William M., 10 Leo XIII (pope), 256, 261, 277n47 Lernoux, Penny, 190 Levenson-Estrada, Deborah, 265 liberalism, 261 Liberal Party, 293 liberation theology, 166 liberty of hunger, 272 Light of Yara, The. See La Luz de Yara Lincoln, Abraham, 135 Linder, Benjamin, 225n48 Liscano, Juan, 90 Lissner, Will, 94 Literacy Campaign, 111 litter, 242–43 local agency, 8 local conflicts, 7 Lombardo Toledano, Vicente, 131, 135, 136, 259 López Balam, Manuel, 39 López Mateos, Adolfo, 138–40, 143, 145 Los Angeles Times, 138, 189 Loveman, Brian, 227 Lucas García, Fernando Romeo, 38–39, 68 Lula Da Silva, Luiz Inácio, 317

334

index

Lutheran Church, 166 Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, 308 M-19. See Movimiento 19 de Abril M-26. See Movimiento 26 de Julio Machado, Gerardo, 30 MANLIBA S.A., 236, 241 Mann, Thomas C., 96, 118, 124 Mano Blanca, 64 Manuel, George, 183 MAP. See Military Assistance Program Mariscal Zavala Brigade, 56 Mariscal Zavala Infantry Battalion, 61 Maroni, José J., 242 Márquez, Israel, 38–40 Marsh, John, 293 Martínez, Rogelia Cruz, 66, 74n83 Martínez de Hoz, José Alfredo, 236 Marxism, 14, 60, 166, 192, 260, 265, 284–85 Maryknoll (Catholic Foreign Missionary Society of America), 254 Matagalpa, Nicaragua, 214–19 materialism, 261 materno-infantil program, 209–10 Matos, Huber, 115 Matthews, Herbert, 112 Maurer, Bob, 40 Maya communities, 253, 256, 269 McCann Erickson, 33 McNamara, Robert, 14 McPherson, Alan, 10–11, 32 Means, Russell, 175, 188–90 measles, 213 Medellín cartel, 281, 288, 293, 298, 300 medical aid. See Cuban medical aid Mein, John G., 60, 67, 72n49, 74n93 Mejía Victores, Óscar Humberto, 68 Memorandum of Understanding, 297 Mendes, Chico, 165 Méndez, Julio, 56–58, 61–63, 65–67, 69 Méndez, Roberto, 43–44 Méndez Montenegro, Julio César, 51–52 Méndez Montenegro, Mario, 70n20 Méndez Montenegro regime, 14 Mendizabal, Marlon, 39

Menoyo, Eloy Gutiérrez, 103–5, 109–14, 123 Mercado, Luis R., 96 Merrill, Dennis, 11 Mexican National Anti-Communist Party, 143 Mexican Peace Movement, 132 Mexican Revolution (1910), 9, 12, 15 Mexico, 19n21, 20n31, 25, 129, 131, 135, 138, 142, 145; Catholic Church in, 143; Coca-Cola Company and, 21, 25–26; foreign policy of, 15; JOC and, 257; U.S. and, 9, 11–12, 19n21 Meyer, Lorenzo, 9 Miami, counterrevolution in, 106–9 Michel, James, 286 militantes de salud (health warriors), 218 military, 36, 317; Argentina and, 226–29, 237; Brazil and, 16, 150, 155–63; counterinsurgency and, 63–68; Guatemala and, 51–69, 265 Military Assistance Program (MAP), 61–62 Miller, Cheasty, 313 Miller, Storm, 15, 310–11, 315 minimum wage, 267 Ministerio de Salud Pública (MINISAP), 208 Ministry of Health (MINSA), 201–4, 208, 210, 219 Ministry of Interior, 64 Ministry of Labor, 30, 37 Ministry of Public Health, 204 MINSA. See Ministry of Health MISITAN, 184, 197n37 Miskitu Indians, 15, 175–76, 313, 314; diplomacy and, 182–88; movement fragmentation and, 188–94; roots of insurgency, 176–82 Miskitus, Sumus, Ramas, and Sandinistas All Together. See MISURASATA MISURA, 184 MISURASATA (Miskitus, Sumus, Ramas, and Sandinistas All Together), 177–78, 180, 183, 184, 185, 187, 190–91, 194 Mitteleuropa, 17 MLN. See Movimiento de Liberación Nacional

index Monroe Doctrine, 135, 136 Moraes, Clodomir, 154 Moraes Tavares, Jósimo, 165 Morales Luengo, Eduardo, 89 Moravian Church, 177, 193 Moreno, Julio E., 12, 13, 308, 309 Morgan, William, 110, 111 Morris, Glen, 189 Mosquito Coast, 193 mother-infant health program, 209–10 mountain leprosy. See leishmaniasis Mount St. Mary’s College, 137 Movement for Revolutionary Recouperation. See Movimiento de Recuperación Revolucionaria Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Workers Movement), 162, 164, 166–68, 316–17 Movimiento 19 de Abril (M-19), 281, 285, 289 Movimiento 26 de Julio (26th of July Movement), 109–10, 122 Movimiento Costa Rica Libre (Free Costa Rica Movement), 117 Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (MLN), 51, 56, 57–59, 65, 67–68, 74n93 Movimiento Democrático Cristiano (Christian Democratic Movement), 107 Movimiento de Recuperación Revolucionaria (Movement for Revolutionary Recouperation), 115–20 Movimiento Insurreccional de Recuperación Revolucionaria (Insurrectional Movement of Revolutionary Recouperation), 107 Movimiento Revolucionario del Pueblo, 104 MR-13. See Revolutionary Movement of November 13th MRR. See Movimiento de Recuperación Revolucionaria MST. See Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra multiculturalism, 179, 193 Muñiz, Mirta, 32–33 Munro, Ernest A., 66, 74n84

335

Murphy, Gerald L., 80–81 Murtha, John, 293 Nación, La, 237, 238, 246 narcoterrorism, 17, 281–84, 298–300, 302n18, 313–14, 316; counterinsurgency and counternarcotics, 292–97; narcoguerrilla connection and, 288–91; politics of, 284–87 National Assembly, 33 National Confederation of Agricultural Workers (CONTAG), 155–56, 159–60, 164 National Confederation of Workers, 37 National Council of Brazilian Bishops, 162 National Council of Churches, 39 National Dealers Association, 31 National Forestry Institute (IFONA), 235 National Guard, 2, 119 National Indian Brotherhood, 183 National Indian Youth Council (NIYC), 182, 185–86, 190–91 National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC), 185 nationalism, 31–32; internationalism, 222; reform movements, 26; transnationalism, 222 nationalization, of U.S. companies, 23, 27, 32, 44 National Liberation Movement, 144 National March for Land Reform, Employment, and Justice, 166 National Peace Assembly, 144 National Program for Land Reform (1985), 164 National Security Council (NSC), 294 National Security Council Meeting, 91 National Security Decision Directive 221 (NSDD-221), 283, 290–91 National Security Directive 18, 294 Native Americans. See American Indian Movement; Miskitu Indians; and specific tribes Native Hawaiians, 193 negative anticommunism, 264, 268 Negotiating Paradise (Merrill), 11

336

index

neoliberalism, 13, 50n98, 168; reforms, 228 Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, 308 New Anti-Communist Organization, 74n83 New Left, 136 New York Times, 85, 113, 138, 143, 189, 205; Betancourt and, 81; on Trujillo, 94, 96 New Zealand, 40 NGOs. See nongovernmental organizations Nicaragua, 6, 14–16, 104, 106, 116–19, 285– 86, 299; Atlantic Coast, 175–80, 182–83, 185–88, 190, 192–94. See also Cuban medical aid; Sandinistas Nicaraguan Democratic Force, 182 Nicaraguan Indians. See Miskitu Indians Nicaraguan Revolution, 200–201 Nicaragua Was Our Home (documentary), 189 Niemeyer, Oscar, 133 Nietschmann, Bernard, 183, 187, 190 NIYC. See National Indian Youth Council nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 183, 185 Novedades (newspaper), 139–40 NSC. See National Security Council NSDD-221. See National Security Decision Directive 221 Núñez Jiménez, Antonio, 115 Nye, Joseph S., 47n24 OAS. See Organization of American States O’Brien, Thomas, 10–11 Ochóa, Norma, 215–16, 219–20 October Revolution (1944–1954), 258, 260– 61, 270, 273 Office of National Drug Control Policy, 296 Old Left, 136 Oliva, Erneido, 108, 116 Oliveira, Albertino José de, 156 ONIC. See National Indigenous Organization of Colombia Operation Mongoose, 109, 312 oral rehydration units (ORU), 210

Organization of American States (OAS), 77, 81–86, 90–91, 114, 120, 136, 311; InterAmerican Commission, 187 organized labor, 30–31, 159 Orlich, Francisco, 117, 118 Ortega, Daniel, 177–78, 182, 183, 192 Orthodox Party, 107 ORU. See oral rehydration units overview, 13–17 Ozorio de Almeida, Anna, 160 País, Frank, 134–35 Pais, Geraldo, 218 Palace of Justice, 281, 283, 290 Panama, 1–3, 25–26, 36, 41, 116–17 Panamericanism, 136 Pan American Washington Convention, 35 Pana Pana, 190–91 Paraguay, 83 Pardo Leal, Jaime, 288 Parejo, Jose M., 24–25 Parry, Robert, 302n18 Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo (PGT), 265, 271, 277n41 Partido Institucional Democrático (PID), 51–52, 56, 57–58, 67–68 Pastora, Eden, 182 Pastrana, Andres, 298 paz, fruto de la justicia, La (Rossell), 266 Paz, Miguel Angel, 241–42 PCB. See Brazilian Communist Party Peasant Leagues, 154, 156 peasants, 111–12, 153 Pease, Donald, 41–42 Pelotón Modelo, 37 Pentagon, 298 People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar. See Los Pepes People’s Congress, 137 People’s Power Institute, 33 Pepes, Los (Perseguidos por Pablo Escobar), 300 Pepsi-Cola, 35 Peralta Azurdia, Enrique, 51–52, 54–59, 61, 65, 67–68, 72n49

index Pérez, Louis A., 11 Pérez, Victor, 214, 217 Pérez Jiménez, Marcos, 79, 81–83, 86–90, 310 Pérez Rosales, Gabriel, 211, 219 Perón, Juan, 316 Perseguidos por Pablo Escobar. See Los Pepes Peru, 140; narcoterrorism and, 282, 284, 286, 289, 292, 294–98, 300 PGT. See Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo Philippines, 80 PID. See Partido Institucional Democrático Pires, José Maria, 162 Pius X (pope), 255 Pius XI (pope), 256 Pius XII (pope), 255, 263, 268 Plan of National Integration (1970), 160 Plan Omega, 112 Poland, 267 polarity, 14; challenging, 263–74; ideological, 7 polio, 213 Política (magazine), 133, 143, 147n21 political capital model, 301n8 political development, 4 political extremism, 97–98 pollution, 240 Ponciano Samayoa, Miguel Angel, 56, 57 popular movements, 7 porteños (Buenos Aires residents), 229, 237, 238–39 Porter, Charles O., 83 positive anticommunism, 16, 268 postrevisionist scholars, 309 power: intra-regional relationships and, 206–7; relations, 8; soft, 47n24 PR. See Revolutionary Party Prado, Elmer, 180 Prensa, La, 133, 143, 147n21, 233 Prensa Latina (news agency), 114 Prensa Libre (newspaper), 118 PRI. See Institutional Revolutionary Party Price, Sandra, 210, 217

337

Primer Encuentro Arquidiocesano de la Juventud Obrera Católica (First Archdiocesan Congress of the Young Christian Workers), 263 Prío Socarrás, Carlos, 107, 109, 116 Proceso de Reorganizacion Nacional (Process of National Reorganization), 16, 228, 230, 237, 247n7 professionalization, in military, 54–55 Programa de Assistência Técnica e Extensão Rural (PRORURAL), 159 progressive churches, 251, 272 Proof of Communist Domination in Venezuela (Anti-Communist Liberation Movement), 86 PRORURAL. See Programa de Assistência Técnica e Extensão Rural public health, 203, 208, 224n48 public projects, 229 public space, 250n70 Puerto Rico, 25, 104, 107 Punta del Este Conference (1961), 152 Punto Fijo Pact, 82, 97 Quadragessimo Anno (Pius XI), 256, 267, 269 Quadros, Jânio, 152 Quevedo, Pedro, 38 Quirós Castro, Teodoro, 117 Rabe, Stephen G., 9–10, 12, 77, 309, 310 Rada Family, 29 Radio Caribe, 95 Radio Swan, 93 Rama Indians, 178, 195n6 Ray Rivero, Manuel, 107 Reagan, Ronald, 10, 15, 18n20, 175, 181, 204; narcoterrorism and, 17, 283–84, 288, 292, 299 realpolitik, 15 Rebel Armed Forces (FAR), 60, 67, 71n23, 73n69 Rebel Army, 115 RECE. See Representación Cubana en el Exilio

338

index

Recuperating Buenos Aires (film), 244 Reeves, Michelle, 17, 313, 316 reform, 16; Coca-Cola Company and, 26, 28, 32; democratic, 76; JOC and, 258; left-wing, 77; Méndez, J., and, 51–53, 58, 67; neoliberal, 228; social, 15, 26, 59. See also agrarian reform regional parks, 232 reorganization, 226 Representación Cubana en el Exilio (Cuban Representation in Exile), 108 Rerum Novarum (Leo XIII), 256, 261, 267, 269, 271 revisionist scholars, 309 Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), 286, 288–90, 298 Revolutionary Directorate (Directorio Revolucionario), 109 Revolutionary Movement of November 13th (MR-13), 60, 63 Revolutionary Movement of the People. See Movimiento Revolucionario del Pueblo Revolutionary Party (PR), 53, 56, 64 Reyes Echandia, Alfonso, 281 Rio de Janeiro, 25 Rio Hondo Military Base, 37 Rios Montt, Efraín, 68, 75n95 Rio Treaty, 88 Rivera, Brooklyn, 177–78, 180–84, 186, 188, 190–92, 194 Rivera, Diego, 132 River for Everyone, The (film), 244 Rizo, Orlando, 210, 214, 217 Roa, Raúl, 84–85 Robichaud, Gerry, 94 Robles, Marco, 2 Rocca, Alejandro L., 242 Rockefeller Foundation, 223n13 Rodas, Juan Francisco, 37, 39 Rodríguez, Conrado, 110 Rodríguez, Félix, 127n59 Roorda, Eric Paul, 311–12 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 258, 312 Roosevelt, Theodore, 2 Rosa Blanca, La (White Rose), 107 Rosenberg, Emily, 8, 10, 11

Rossell Arellano, Mariano, 253–54, 255, 263, 266, 270 Rousseff, Dilma, 317 Roxborough, Leslie Bethell–Ian, 315 Rubio, Daniel, 32 Rufino Barrios, Justo, 54, 253 rural Brazil, 150–51, 169; postwar agrarian reform in, 152–55; violence and, 163–68 Rural Commandos, 115 Rural Labor Statute, 154, 159 Rusk, Dean, 119 Russia. See Soviet Union saboteurs, 106 Salvatore, Ricardo D., 11, 223n16 Samudio, Rafael, 293 Sánchez Arango, Aureliano, 107 Sandinista Defense Committee, 178 Sandinista National Liberation Front. See Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional Sandinistas, 14–15, 176–78, 180–81, 184–89, 192, 194, 313; criticisms of, 200–201; Cuban aid and, 200–204, 208–9, 212, 220; narcoterrorism and, 285–87 Sandoval Alarcón, Mario, 56 sanitation campaigns, 215 San José Conference, 90–96 Sanoja, Juan Manuel, 89 San Román, José, 116 Santiago Conference, 83–86 Santiago Declaration, 85 Santos Zelaya, José, 193 Sarney, José, 164 savings bank. See caja de ahorros Schlesinger, Alfredo, 270 Schultz, George, 15 Scobie, James R., 248n25 SCUGA. See Special Commando Unit of the Guatemalan Army secciones, 255 Second Conference of Latin American Bishops, 162 Second National Front of the Escambray. See Segundo Frente Nacional del Escambray

index Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), 272 Secret Anti-Communist Army (ESA), 37 See-Judge-Act approach, 264–65, 273 Segundo Frente Nacional del Escambray (Second National Front of the Escambray), 103, 110–13, 123 Seigel, Micol, 223n16 Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), 281–82, 284–87, 294–97, 316 September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, 298 Serra, Benedito, 156 Servicio de Inteligencia Militar (SIM), 89 Serviço de Assistência Rural, 154 shantytowns. See villas miserias Shapiro, Lee, 189 Shining Path. See Sendero Luminoso Sierra Aranzazu (ship), 121 Sierra Escambray (Escambray Mountains), 104, 109, 111 Sierra Maestra (ship), 120 Sifontes, Cabrera, 89 Silva Herzog, Jesús, 132 SIM. See Servicio de Inteligencia Militar Sisters of the Providence, 39, 40 Smith, Peter H., 4, 79 social Catholicism, 256–63, 264, 267, 270, 273 social conflict, 7 social harmony, 256, 263, 268–69 social interaction, 11, 13 social reform, 15, 26, 59 Society for the Protection of Animals, 243 soft power, 47n24 Solórzano, Gilberto, 255, 271 Somocistas, 176, 180–81 Somoza, Luis, 14, 116, 118–19, 179, 201 Sosa Avila, Manuel Francisco, 63, 66 Sosa Mas, Félix, 211, 213, 216–18 sovereignty, 132, 134; military, 58; Miskitu Indians and, 185–86, 193–94; national, 92, 141, 143–44 Soviet Union, 2–4, 7, 9, 141; Betancourt and, 86; Castro, F., and, 10, 97; CocaCola Company and, 22, 32; Cuba and, 14, 32, 97, 106, 133, 180, 312–14; dissolution of, 309; Dominican

339

Republic and, 95; imperialism, 137; Latin American Peace Conference and, 131; narcoterrorism and, 281–86, 291–92, 299; propaganda, 140; Trujillo and, 94– 96; Velasco and, 282; Venezuela and, 79; World Peace Movement and, 144 Spain, 120–21 Spanish-American War, 24–25 Spanish Civil War, 130 Spasari, Ubaldo Néstor, 239 Special Commando Unit of the Guatemalan Army (SCUGA), 63, 64–65, 67 Special Commission for Agrarian Reform, 152 Special Coordination for Acre, 162 Spenser, Daniela, 10, 11, 228, 308 spiritual socialism, 258 Spur la Super Cola, 35 squatters, 160, 161, 165, 166 Starke, Ludwig, 117, 118 starvation wages, 267 STEGAC. See Trade Union of Workers in the Guatemala Bottling and Associated Companies Stern, Steve, 223n16 Student Revolutionary Directorate. See Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil subversives, 156 SUDAM. See Superintendência de Desenvolvimento da Amazônia SUDENE. See Superintendencia do Desenvolvimento do Nordeste sugar, 79, 91, 94, 153, 157; exports, 28, 80; market, 33 Sumu Indians, 178, 195n6 Superintendência de Desenvolvimento da Amazônia (SUDAM), 161 Superintendencia do Desenvolvimento do Nordeste (SUDENE), 157 Swan Island, 93 Sweden, 40 Szulc, Tad, 85, 95, 113 taxes, 249n54 Taylor, Clyde, 287

340

index

Téllez, Dora María, 209 terrorism: September 11, 2001 attacks, 298; war on terror, 17. See also narcoterrorism tetanus, 213 Third World, 183, 203, 205, 221 Thomas, Monte, 31–32 Thorning, Joseph F., 137 Tibet, 143 Trade Union of Workers in the Guatemala Bottling and Associated Companies (STEGAC), 38–41 Transamazon Highway, 160 transnationalism, 222 trash collection, 232–37, 316; amounts, 235; response to, 237–45 Treaty of Managua (1860), 178, 194 Trinidad Guevara (hospital), 215 Tronstad (freighter), 84 Trotter, John C., 13, 23, 36–42, 44 Trujillo, Rafael Leonidas, 9, 83–84, 91, 94, 104, 110, 310–11, 316; anticommunism and, 15, 80, 87; Castro, F., and, 76–78, 95–97; Catholic Church and, 93; foreign policy of, 95; Pérez Jiménez and, 86–90 Truman, Harry S., 79 Turbay Ayala, Julio, 288 Turcios Lima, Luis Augusto, 60, 72n49, 73n69 25th of November, 93 26th of July Movement. See Movimiento 26 de Julio Ubico, Jorge, 54, 253–54, 257 UDR. See União Democrática Rural UFC. See United Fruit Company ULTAB. See União dos Lavradores e Trabalhadores Agrícolas do Brasil UN. See United Nations underconsumption thesis, 47n12 undocumented labor, 159 União Democrática Rural (UDR), 164 União dos Lavradores e Trabalhadores Agrícolas do Brasil (ULTAB), 154 Unification Church, 189 unionization, 81, 150, 154, 159, 163, 169

Union Patriotica (UP), 288 unions, 81, 133–34, 136; Catholic-oriented, 256; Coca-Cola Company and, 23, 30– 31, 33–34, 36–42, 44; JOC and, 256, 259, 261–62, 270–71; rural, 151, 154–56, 158– 60, 165–66 United Arab Republic, 91 United Front for National Liberation. See Frente Unido de Liberación Nacional United Fruit Company (UFC), 26 United Nations (UN), 79, 178, 182; Food and Agricultural Organization, 167; Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 270 United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), 299 United States (U.S.), 7, 106; antiAmericanism, 11, 32, 318n5; archival material in, 6; Artime Buesa and, 115– 22; Brazil and, 152; capitalism, 13, 23, 32, 34, 40, 203–4; Caribbean and, 76– 99; Coca-Cola Company and, 21–24; counterrevolution and, 104–5, 114, 122–24; dominance of, 4; Dominican Republic and, 79; expansion to, 24–27; foreign policy of, 7, 9, 11, 13, 22, 24, 45, 59, 79, 190, 206, 283, 291, 300; Guatemala and, 14, 51–54, 57, 59–63; hegemony, 10–12, 24, 78–79, 98, 203–4, 206–7; imperialism, 13, 25, 86, 122, 136, 140, 153, 194, 195n2, 299; Mexico and, 9, 11–12, 19n21; Miskitu Indians and, 175– 76, 180–81, 182, 185, 190, 194; narcoterrorism and, 282–300; nationalization of companies, 23, 27, 32, 44; Panama flag riots and, 1–3; Pérez Jiménez–Trujillo union and, 86– 90; San José Conference and, 90–96; Santiago Conference and, 83–86; trade policy of, 80; Venezuela and, 15; World Peace Council and, 132 Universal, El (newspaper), 139–40 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UN), 270 Universidad de La Habana, 109 University of Havana, 114

index University of León, 177 University of San Carlos, 56 University of Texas (UT), 6, 308 University Student Federation. See Federación Estudiantil Universitario UP. See Union Patriotica Urizar, Yolanda, 39 Uruguay, 25, 92 U.S. See United States U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), 53, 62 UT. See University of Texas vaccination campaigns, 215 Vaky, Viron P., 63 Valdez, Pedro Pablo, 29 Valverde, Manuel Mora, 117 Van Humboldt, Alexander, 276n27 Varona, Tony, 107 Vatican II Council (1962–1965), 162 Velasco, Juan, 282, 285, 296 Venezuela, 78–82, 97–98; anti-Castro groups in, 104; Castro, F., and, 83–84, 86, 104; Pérez Jiménez-Trujillo union and, 86–90; San José Conference and, 90–93, 95; Santiago Conference and, 83–85; Second Front in, 112; Soviet Union and, 79; U.S. and, 15. See also Betancourt, Romulo Ernesto Venturini, Danilo, 162 Verbum (editorial), 260 Videla, Jorge Rafael, 227 Vietnam, 283 Villaba, Jóvito, 97 Villacorta Vielmann, Manuel, 59 Villafanes, Arturo, 29 villas miserias (shantytowns), 230 violence, 2, 90, 145, 314, 317; agrarian reform and, 163–68; civil conflicts, 7; Coca-Cola Company and, 23, 33–34, 36–37, 41–42; counterinsurgency and, 52–53, 69; narcoterrorism and, 289–90, 300; political, 53, 63, 65–66, 98, 273; rural Brazil and, 163–68; statesponsored, 156–57, 271. See also terrorism

341

volunteers, medical, 215–16 Von Raab, William, 286–87 wars: Dirty War, 16, 226–30; on drugs, 17; postwar agrarian reform, 152–55; Spanish-American War, 24–25; Spanish Civil War, 130; on terror, 17; WWI, 28; WWII, 308. See also Contra War Washington Post, 94, 138 Waste Management International, Inc., 236 Webber, John D., 66, 74n84 Weis, Michael W., 10 White Rose. See Rosa Blanca, La WHO. See World Health Organization Wiggins, Armstrong, 182, 187 Wilkinson, Gerald, 191 worker-apostles, 252, 254 worker mobilization, 30–31 Workers’ Party, 166 working class, 261–62, 267, 270 World Affairs, 137 World Council of Churches, 177 World Council of Indigenous Peoples, 177, 180, 183, 185–86 World Health Organization (WHO), 201, 205 World Peace Council, 132 World Peace Movement, 132, 144 World Trade Center, 298 World War I, 28 World War II, 308 Wounded Knee, South Dakota, 15, 175 YATAMA, 192 Ydigoras Fuentes, Miguel, 52, 55, 59, 61, 68, 72n49, 271 Yon Sosa, Marco Antonio, 60, 63, 72n49, 73n69 Young Christian Workers. See Juventud Obrera Catolica Zamora, Efraín, 42 Zash, Antonia, 43–44 Zolov, Eric, 11

l atin a mer ic a

is a professor of history at the University of Texas. Her most recent book is Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala under General Efraín Ríos Montt, 1982–1983.

“Beyond the Eagle’s Shadow is an excellent

is an associate professor of history and a distinguished scholar at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas. His most recent book is The Vietnam War: A Concise International History.

paradigms; they open up new and exciting

v i rg i n i a g a r r a r d - bu r n e t t

m a r k at wo od l aw r e nc e

j u l io e . mor e no ,

associate professor of history at the University of San Francisco, is the author of Yankee Don’t Go Home!: Mexican Nationalism, American Business Culture, and the Shaping of Modern Mexico, 1920–1950.

BE YON D T HE E AGL E’S SH A DOW

history

contribution to the emerging literature on Latin America’s experience during the Cold War. The chapters challenge existing

avenues of inquiry; they show the promising directions in which the literature is likely to go in coming decades. This book belongs in the collection of anyone with an interest in Latin American history or U.S.–Latin American relations.”

—h a l b r a n d s , author of Latin America’s Cold War

BEYOND T H E E AGLE'S SH A DOW NEW HISTORIES OF LATIN AMERICA’S COLD WAR

of an ever-expanding group of scholars who rightly envision Latin America during the Cold War era as a region with both East-West concerns and internal and international concerns outside the traditional Cold War narrative.”

— c h r i s t oph e r m . w h i t e , author of Creating a Third World: Mexico, Cuba, and the United States during the Castro Era (UNM Press)

that the Cold War in Latin America

can be understood simply as a clash of the superpowers or of the political “left” and “right” that they sponsored in the region. In various ways, the essays disassemble the latter categories and explore the complexities of the Cold War in Latin America as it was experienced beneath the level of great-power relations. Contributors to this volume highlight the complexity of the Cold War. The dominant tradition in writing about U.S.–Latin American relations during this period views the United States as all-powerful. That perspective, represented in the metaphor “talons of the eagle” to which the title Beyond the Eagle’s

Garr ar d-Burnett, L awrence, and Moreno

“The contributors to this volume are part

T

his book ch allenges the ide a

Shadow refers, continues to influence much scholarly work down to the present day. The goal of this book is not to write the United States out of the picture but to explore the ways other governments, groups, companies, organizations, and individuals promoted their own interests and perspectives. The authors address three interrelated questions: How and to what extent did Latin American governments exercise initiative in shaping the Cold War in the Western Hemisphere? How did Latin Americans outside government experience the Cold War in their daily lives? And how well does the left-right, communist-capitalist dichotomy capture the reality of the Cold War

isbn 978-0-8263-5368-9

University of New Mexico Press unmpress.com 800-249-7737 Vector eagle ornaments: cr e atefir st Jacket design: lil a sa nchez

ISBN 978-0-8263-5368-9

9 780826 353689

90000

edited by virginia garrard-burnett, mark atwood lawrence, and julio e. moreno

as it was experienced by Latin Americans?