In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War 9780822390664

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∫ 2008 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $ Designed by Erin Kirk New Typeset in Minion by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data appear on the last printed page of this book.

This book was published with the assistance of the Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund of Yale University.

Contents

Preface vii I New Approaches, Debates, and Sources

What We Now Know and Should Know: Bringing Latin America More Meaningfully into Cold War Studies Gilbert M. Joseph 3 Recovering the Memory of the Cold War: Forensic History and Latin America Thomas S. Blanton 47 II Latin America between the Superpowers: International Realpolitik,

the Ideology of the State, and the ‘‘Latin Americanization’’ of the Conflict The Caribbean Crisis: Catalyst for Soviet Projection in Latin America Daniela Spenser 77 The View from Havana: Lessons from Cuba’s African Journey, 1959–1976 Piero Gleijeses 112 Transnationalizing the Dirty War: Argentina in Central America Ariel C. Armony 134 III Everyday Contests over Culture and Representation in the Latin

American Cold War Producing the Cold War in Mexico: The Public Limits of Covert Communications Seth Fein 171 ¡Cuba sí, Yanquis no! The Sacking of the Instituto Cultural México– Norteamericano in Morelia, Michoacán, 1961 Eric Zolov 214

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Miracle on Ice: Industrial Workers and the Promise of Americanization in Cold War Mexico Steven J. Bachelor 253 Chicano Cold Warriors: César Chávez, Mexican American Politics, and California Farmworkers Stephen Pitti 273 Birth Control Pills and Molotov Cocktails: Reading Sex and Revolution in 1968 Brazil Victoria Langland 308 Rural Markets, Revolutionary Souls, and Rebellious Women in Cold War Guatemala Carlota McAllister 350 IV Final Reflections

Standing Conventional Cold War History on Its Head Daniela Spenser 381 Selective Bibliography 397 Contributors 427 Index 429

Preface

The challenge of writing a more multilayered and multivocal history of the Latin American Cold War, one that would synthesize new approaches and interpretations from the field of diplomacy and foreign relations with new work by social and cultural historians of Latin America, is what motivated this volume. When we began planning the project in 2000, the timing could not have been better, for Cold War scholars were now the beneficiaries of an avalanche of new documentation that had become accessible in the United States, the former Soviet bloc, and Latin America itself. To bring this project to fruition, we realized that a far-flung collaboration was essential. It began between us and our home institutions—the Council on Latin American and Iberian Studies at Yale University and the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (ciesas) in Mexico City. As plans began to emerge for an international conference, ‘‘México, América Central y el Caribe durante la Guerra Fría,’’ which would assess new documentary sources and conceptualizations of the Latin American Cold War within a global context, we enlisted the partnership of the Cold War International History Project (cwihp) at the Woodrow Wilson International Center of Scholars in Washington, through its director, Christian Ostermann, and the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Relations (sre), through the director of its Acervo Histórico Diplomático, Mercedes de Vega. Our first debts therefore spring from this unique four-way international collaboration encompassing academics and archivists, think tanks and state agencies, which produced a stimulating three-day conference at the Foreign Relations Ministry in November 2002 and ultimately gave rise to a Spanish volume, Espejos de la guerra fría: México, América Central y el Caribe, ed. Daniela Spenser (Mexico City: Miguel Ángel Porrúa, 2004). We gratefully acknowledge the e√orts of ciesas’s former director Rafael Loyola Díaz, and those of Gustav Ranis, former director of Yale’s MacMillan Center for

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International and Area Studies, without whose financial and moral support the conference and Spanish volume would have been much more di≈cult. The 2002 conference received the lion’s share of its funding from Yale University, through its Latin American and Iberian Council, then directed by Gil Joseph and assistant chair Beatriz Riefkohl. The dialogue between new sources and interpretations that distinguished the Mexico City conference would not have been possible without the unstinting support of Christian Ostermann of the cwihp. Throughout 2000 and 2001, Christian made available new Eastern European documents and financed research in Mexican archives, all of which generated materials that found their way into several of the papers and enlivened our discussions. In making the conference’s local arrangements, Daniela Spenser received invaluable logistical support from Mercedes de Vega and her sta√ at the Archive of the Mexican Foreign Relations Ministry; moreover, the ministry’s former vice minister for Latin America, Gustavo Iruegas, generously joined Mercedes as host of the event. Obviously, we are also tremendously indebted to the broad array of colleagues who shared ideas and insights at the Mexico City conference that enriched this volume—particularly Adolfo Gilly, Friedrich Katz, Lorenzo Meyer, Jürgen Buchenau, Jorge Alonso, Barry Carr, and Kate Doyle. The present volume includes refocused and expanded versions of several of the papers that appeared in the Espejos collection (for which we are grateful to the original publishers), as well as several essays commissioned expressly for this occasion. It seeks to grapple with broader Cold War debates involving the region and the international conflict, in an e√ort to bring Latin America more meaningfully and centrally into Cold War studies: too often the region has been marginalized from that literature, apart from a preoccupation with a few highprofile events, personalities, and coups. The collection also showcases a healthy sample of newer work on the culture, representation, and memory of the Latin American Cold War; includes a state-of-the-art inventory of new sources of documentation; and speculates about where future research on the Latin American Cold War should go. Like the 2004 Spanish volume, this collection’s strengths remain Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, but several essays give more comparative attention to the Southern Cone and other parts of Latin America, and one focuses on Cold War struggles among Mexican and Chicano workers in post1945 California. (Readers may be interested in knowing about a companion volume, also based on a Yale conference and forthcoming from Duke University Press’s American Encounters/Global Interactions series. Edited by Greg Grandin and Gil Joseph, A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence

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during Latin America’s Long Cold War focuses extensively on the post-1945 period as part of a broader examination of revolution and counterrevolution throughout the twentieth century. A Century of Revolution includes chapters on countries such as Chile, Peru, and El Salvador and Nicaragua, which are not featured in the present volume.) Some final acknowledgments are in order regarding the preparation of this volume. We are grateful to Frances Bourne and Amanda Levinson for ably translating two of the contributions from Spanish, and to Yale’s Latin American Council for helping to cover these and other costs connected with the manuscript. Ruth DeGolia, Christopher Dampier, Christina Li, Evan Joiner, Sydney Frey, Sarah Morrill, and Alejandro Peña García provided timely research and clerical assistance as the manuscript moved toward completion. We also want to acknowledge Duke’s two anonymous readers for their particularly detailed and helpful reviews. Last, it gives us great pleasure to thank our editor at Duke, Valerie Millholland, for the encouragement she has bestowed at every phase of this journey. She has been with us in New Haven and Mexico City and provided good counsel and therapy at many moments in between. Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniela Spenser

GILBERT M. JOSEPH

What We Now Know and Should Know Bringing Latin America More Meaningfully into Cold War Studies

Few periods in Latin America’s history have been as violent, turbulent, and, some would argue, transformative as the half century that ran roughly from the end of World War II to the mid-1990s and constituted the Latin American Cold War. This is because, as in other regions of the global South, Latin America’s Cold War experience was rarely cold.∞ Indeed, one has to go back to the nineteenth-century wars of independence to find comparably protracted and far-flung episodes of mass mobilization, revolutionary upheaval, and counterinsurgent reprisal; yet the international linkages, organizational capacities, and technologies of death and surveillance at work in the late twentieth century render this earlier cycle of violence almost quaint by comparison. Gabriel García Márquez graphically evoked this ‘‘outsized’’ and ‘‘unbridled reality’’ in his 1982 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, conjuring up the apocalyptic events of the 1970s and early 1980s that turned Central America and the Southern Cone into latecentury killing fields and challenged him to develop a new literary genre— ‘‘magical realism’’—to assimilate the period’s mind-boggling occurrences and ‘‘render our lives believable.’’≤ Since 1971, when his colleague the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda had received his Nobel Prize, García Márquez reflected, ‘‘we have not had a moment’s rest’’: There have been five wars and seventeen military coups; there emerged a diabolical dictator [Guatemala’s Efraín Ríos Montt] who is carrying out in God’s name the first Latin American genocide of our time. In the meantime, twenty million Latin American children died before the age of one—more than have been born in Europe since 1970. Those missing because of repression number nearly one hundred and twenty thousand, which is as if no one could account for all the inhabitants of Uppsala. Numerous women arrested while pregnant have given birth in Argentine prisons, yet nobody knows the whereabouts and identity of their children. . . . Because they tried

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gilbert m. joseph to change this state of things, nearly two hundred thousand have lost their lives in three small and stubborn countries . . . Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. If this had happened in the United States, the corresponding figure would be that of one million six hundred thousand violent deaths in four years. One million people have fled Chile, a country with a tradition of hospitality—that is, ten percent of its population. Uruguay, a tiny nation of two and a half million inhabitants which considered itself the continent’s most civilized country, has lost to exile one out of every five citizens. Since 1979, the civil war in El Salvador has produced almost one refugee every twenty minutes.≥

How do we account for such cataclysmic violence? To be sure, the Latin American past is littered with alternating cycles of social reform and intense conservative reaction, in which the influence, aid, and intervention of imperial powers have figured prominently. Even so, the dynamics of the Latin American Cold War are embedded in a particularly ferocious dialectic linking reformist and revolutionary projects for social change and national development and the excessive counterrevolutionary responses they triggered in the years following World War II. This dialectic, which shaped regional life in the late twentieth century and conditioned the region’s prospects for the new millennium, played out in overlapping and interdependent domestic and international fields of political and social power.∂ At a macro level, the Cold War was a struggle between superpowers over shifting geopolitical stakes and ‘‘mass utopias,’’ ideological visions of how society and its benefits should be organized.∑ But what ultimately gave the Cold War in Latin America its heat—what Greg Grandin terms its ‘‘transcendental force’’—was the ‘‘politicization and internationalization of everyday life.’’ On a variety of fronts across several decades, Latin American elites and popular classes participated in local and national political contests over land, labor, and the control of markets and natural resources that rarely escaped the powerful undertow of the larger conflict. At certain junctures (most notably the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and the strategy of international armed struggle that it supported in the 1960s and 1970s, or the transnationalized anti-Communist crusade of the 1970s and 1980s), these struggles and the leftist and rightist ideologies that fueled them transcended national borders and powerfully influenced the relationship between the superpowers themselves.∏ The result was an ‘‘international civil war’’ that not only pitted the United States against the Soviet Union and ‘‘capitalism’’ against ‘‘Communism’’ but, at the national and grassroots levels, opposed di√erent views of the shape that social citizenship would take.π As local conflicts throughout Latin America

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(some of which had extensive antecedents, issuing as they did from the social contradictions of capitalist development) were subsumed in the intensely polarizing global struggle, opposition movements, like the governments they opposed, received inspiration and material support from afar. Not infrequently, Latin American states used a Cold War rationale, generated outside the region, to wage war against their citizens, to gain or perpetuate power, and to create or justify authoritarian military regimes. In the process, the stakes rose precipitously, and the potential for violence and terror escalated to an almost inconceivable scale. A scene from cnn’s documentary series on the Cold War starkly and eerily illustrates this point. ‘‘I saw these weird weapons,’’ a Cuban campesino reminisces, referring to the ballistic missiles that rolled by his modest shack one morning in the fall of 1962. ‘‘I said to my friend Pablo, ‘Pablo, how powerful are these weird weapons?’ and he answered ‘these are nuclear missiles.’ So I thought, ‘oh, really powerful.’ And they just put them here [he points to his field], right out in the open.’’∫ Happily, the missiles were never launched, and ultimately, thirty years later, the Cold War wound down in its final, most brutal theaters, with the negotiation of the Central American Peace Accords terminating civil wars in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador in the early to mid-1990s. But can we really say that the Latin American Cold War has ‘‘ended’’? Certainly, it endures in the tortured context of U.S.–Cuban relations and is intensely alive in Miami’s ‘‘Little Havana,’’ where an increasingly frail Fidel Castro has haunted diasporic Cubans for nearly fifty years. Although the comparable graying of the exile community has slightly diminished its zeal and transformed the monolithic stridency that once defined it, there is little question that it remains a force in state and national politics, and in the United States’ unswerving opposition to normalizing relations with the hemisphere’s last (albeit considerably tempered) Communist regime.Ω Certainly the Cold War is still palpable in Central America, the Southern Cone, the Andean nations, and even Mexico, as relatives of the victims of terror continue to protest past atrocities, exhume graves, and actively press legal claims against the perpetrators. Although the results of these legal actions are, at best, mixed, with most individuals from the former security forces continuing to enjoy immunity, some signal gains have been registered, and in the process, the cultural fabric of these societies and the manner in which the past is collectively remembered have been substantially changed.∞≠ Finally, apart from the bubbling up of local episodes of extrajudicial violence that frequently map onto the fault lines and frustrations of recent Cold War pasts (e.g., lynchings that continue to plague countries like Guatemala and

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Nicaragua), there is a larger question that should be raised about the Cold War’s conclusion, or at least regarding continuities of power: is the United States essentially waging a new version of the conflict under another name? Over a century ago, in his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, President Theodore Roosevelt told the U.S. Congress that ‘‘chronic wrongdoing or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society may in America as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation,’’ namely, ‘‘however reluctantly,’’ the United States. Indeed, one might argue that over the past century, the United States has repeatedly intervened to protect its southern neighbors from foreign and evil empires and ensure that the ‘‘ties of civilized society’’—as Washington defined them—remained firm. With talk of ‘‘benevolent hegemony’’ (and even of a ‘‘benevolent U.S. empire’’) once again explicitly on the agenda,∞∞ and with the Bush administration having already demonstrated its preemptive resolve to contend globally to guarantee not only U.S. interests but its prescriptions for global civilization as well—‘‘(constrained) free elections, (selective) free markets and (U.S.-dominated) international security’’∞≤ —are we not embarked on another dichotomizing rendition of cold war? In this incarnation, ‘‘democracy promotion’’ (‘‘dempro’’ to practitioners and Bush administration insiders) has become something of a cottage industry,∞≥ and there is a new ‘‘axis of evil,’’ comprising drug lords, terrorists, failed states, and rogue regimes and movements. The members of this network (which include some holdovers from the last conflict, such as Castro and the Sandinistas) can be constructed as broadly or narrowly as circumstances dictate—just as Communism was. Indeed, at certain moments, as when Vladimir Putin’s Russia approved a deal to send fighter planes to Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela in July 2006, one experiences an eerie sense of déjà vu—which raises a host of questions. Are Russia and the United States once again moving into potentially ominous opposing alliances? Ultimately, how di√erent is Putin’s brand of authoritarian realpolitik from that of his Soviet predecessors?∞∂ And what of continuities in U.S. attitudes and practice? This would not be surprising, given that Latin America—particularly Central America in the 1980s—seems to have played a defining role in the genesis of the foreign policy of the current generation of New Right activists, and that several key Latin Americanists in the Bush administration previously advised Presidents Reagan and Bush (the father) on Nicaragua and El Salvador a generation ago. Ultimately, is Chávez’s ‘‘Bolivarianism’’ a more aΔuent and hemispherically influential version of the ‘‘Tercerismo’’ (‘‘Third Way’’ strategy) of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas of the 1980s, who were similarly led to purchase weapons from Russia following an earlier campaign by the U.S. government to pre-

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vent American and Western defense contractors from selling arms to them?∞∑ To what extent have the end of the Cold War and the lifting of the onus of Communism allowed social justice issues to rise to the top of inter-American relations where nations such as Venezuela or Evo Morales’s Bolivia are concerned? This volume, which represents a collaboration among eleven North American, Latin American, and European historians, anthropologists, and political scientists, all students of the Latin American Cold War, does not pretend to present a ‘‘new history’’ of that struggle. Such claims are made too frequently these days, almost as frequently as new caches of documents are discovered, reclaimed, or declassified in Washington, the former Eastern bloc, or elsewhere, and ‘‘the truth can now be known.’’ Rather, what this volume aspires to contribute is an intellectual ‘‘rapprochement’’ with the Cold War in Latin America. This reencounter with the conflict identifies new sources of documentation (see particularly the essay by Blanton) and suggests how they might alter prevailing paradigms of interpretation, particularly where questions of international realpolitik, the ideology of Cold War states, and the ‘‘Latin Americanization’’ and ‘‘transnationalization’’ of the conflict are concerned. For example, the essays in part II shed important new light on the projection of Soviet, Cuban, and Argentine power and the ideologies that underwrote the strategies of each of these nations. In part III, the essays by Fein, Zolov, and Bachelor further our understanding of the motivation and capacity of the Mexican state to skillfully balance between the superpower contenders.∞∏ At the same time, the collection also seeks to delve more deeply into what was actually being fought over in the Latin American Cold War among grassroots populations (including Chicanos in the U.S. Southwest). In the process, especially in part III, contributors focus on everyday contests over culture and representation that brought Cold War states, elite establishments, and culture industries into play with local populations. Readers will note this collection features a strong emphasis on Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean; there is less coverage of South America, and certain high-profile Cold War arenas—for example, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Chile, Bolivia—do not receive explicit treatment. Probably no single volume can adequately cover the gamut of multiform engagements that constituted the Latin American Cold War; we have sought to feature instructive and absorbing cases representing mainland and circum-Caribbean areas, and to include Brazil as well as Spanish America. Perhaps the two major South American nations, Brazil and Argentina, are treated in essays by Langland and Armony that have conceptual and substantive reach across national borders. The vol-

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ume’s overarching essays, by Joseph, Blanton, and Spenser, treat the region as a whole and also suggest arguments and methods that apply to nations that do not receive monographic attention. Finally, the strong emphasis on Mexico is meant to address important lacunas in the literature on the Latin American Cold War. The Mexican case not only points up oft-ignored, highly ambivalent relationships between Cold War allies but also showcases pivotal cultural and social issues, thereby moving the narrative away from its prevailing emphasis on diplomatic confrontation and military intervention. That Mexico’s experience has thus far received so little treatment in Cold War studies is astonishing: not only is Mexico (with Brazil) one of Latin America’s two ‘‘middle powers,’’ but it is the southern neighbor of the hemisphere’s Cold War hegemon. One of the abiding goals of this project is to foment a more sustained dialogue between foreign relations (or diplomatic) historians of the Cold War— particularly those who work on Latin America—who have largely been preoccupied with grand strategy and the determinants of U.S. policy, and those who approach the conflict from the standpoint of the periphery, often ‘‘from below,’’ using the tools of area studies, social and cultural history, and cultural studies. Sadly, although foreign relations historians and Latin Americanists should share fraternal relations, they have more often been, in the words of one diplomatic historian, ‘‘polyglot distant cousin[s].’’∞π Most of this volume’s contributors have worked across the methodological, interpretive, and linguistic divides that have until now separated these fields, and their essays portend a more vital crossfertilization of them. The Cold War and Latin America: Perspectives from Foreign Relations History No field of foreign relations history is as well studied as the Cold War.∞∫ Initially, attention focused on the conflict’s early phases (i.e., from the mid-1940s through the 1960s), but in recent years, foreign relations historians have ranged beyond staples such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War (which have constituted veritable cottage industries in the U.S. diplomatic field) to concentrate on the later phases of the conflict. In the process, they are more systematically engaging the Cold War in its peripheries in the global South.∞Ω The current boom in Cold War studies is not really surprising. The end of the conflict paved the way for greater access to the records of the former Soviet Union, its satellites in Eastern Europe, and those of the People’s Republic of China. Increasingly, key documents from the era have also become more accessible in the United States,

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Mexico, the Southern Cone, Central America, and, to a lesser extent, Cuba.≤≠ Moreover, the sudden implosion of the Soviet Union and the resounding cries of victory by the West triggered a wave of euphoria among some U.S. diplomatic and political historians that immediately prompted them—and others who resisted such triumphalism—to reassess the origins, the variegated trajectory, and denouement of the conflict. It also brought a number of Western and Eastern European scholars, and increasingly Asian historians, into the debate.≤∞ And based on production in the field’s journal of record, Diplomatic History, the appearance since 1999 of several new specialist journals, and the continuing vitality of the Cold War International History Project of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the National Security Archive of George Washington University, interest in the global conflict shows no sign of abating.≤≤ Scholars continue to debate—often quite heatedly—the causes, strategies, ideologies, flash points, turning points, and legacies of the global conflict, in addition to contending in their assessments of the Cold War’s endgame. For their part, diplomatic historians of Latin America have scrutinized the strategic stakes of the United States and the Soviet Union in Cuba, Central America, and the Caribbean; debated the psychology and personal style of Fidel Castro; sought to gauge the ebb, flow, and relative autonomy of his relationship with the Soviets, and the consequences for Cuban and Soviet intervention abroad; and examined U.S. policies to contain that intervention. But, in the words of Mark Gilderhus, the senior foreign relations scholar charged with taking stock of this field, the Latin Americanist literature, despite some impressive pieces of work, remains ‘‘fragmented,’’ ‘‘dominated by the monograph, narrowly focused, and largely dependent upon the records of the United States.’’≤≥ Greg Grandin, a historian of Guatemalan social movements who recently produced a major study of the Guatemalan Cold War that attempts a provocative new synthesis of the broader Latin American conflict, independently supports Gilderhus’s 1995 assessment, chiding diplomatic historians for their myopic concerns: Poets may see the world in a grain of sand . . . but only diplomatic historians could reduce the Latin American Cold War to a Cuban beach. The Cold War radically transformed Latin America, yet historians of U.S. policy toward the region inevitably focus on the period’s most rousing events. These episodes more often than not have to do with Cuba—the 1959 Revolution, the Bay of Pigs, the Missile Crisis, and plots to murder Fidel Castro. Yet just as Fidel eventually made it o√ the beach and into the mountains, the time has come for U.S. historians to assess the Latin American Cold

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gilbert m. joseph War from [another] vantage point, one less preoccupied with what motivated United States policymakers and more concerned with identifying what was being fought over in Latin America itself.≤∂

No doubt these critiques account in part for the fact that the region has rarely been incorporated into the great historiographic debates about the character of the Cold War and remains disproportionately underrepresented in journals specializing in the conflict.≤∑ But this is not the only reason. For many years (indeed, through the mid1990s at least) Cold War debates centered excessively on the origins of the conflict —e√ectively on who was to blame—and, of course, the U.S.–Soviet rivalry began in terms of the postwar settlement in Europe. The Cold War then spread, first to East and Southeast Asia, then to Latin America and roughly simultaneously to the Middle East, and finally to Africa. While foreign relations scholars disagree vehemently on which side was the fuerza motriz of the Cold War, they may be said to have reached a baseline consensus on the conflict’s broader contours. It is useful to establish this broader understanding at the outset, since the second half of this essay (and, more implicitly, the volume as a whole) engages it from a rather di√erent perspective, that of newer approaches to Latin American political, social, and cultural history. Diplomatic historians concur that the Cold War was a complex phenomenon that turned on the rivalry of two powerful states, each a ‘‘rookie superpower,’’ each possessing a universalizing ideology and a distinct system of political economy. The rivalry between them led to the division of Germany and Europe, an intense, often violent competition in the southern peripheries, and a strategic arms race. Although the belligerents were careful not to engage in direct hostilities with each other, they consistently eschewed serious negotiation of their disputes—in e√ect seeking a diplomacy based on their own terms. The conflict took place in the wake of World War II, when an unsettled international system conjured up unprecedented threats and opportunities for the leaders of many nations, but especially for those of the United States and the Soviet Union. As Melvyn LeΔer has put it: ‘‘Interpreting those threats and opportunities through ideological lenses, cultural traditions, and cognitive habits of mind, American and Russian o≈cials had the incentive and the power to pursue their strategic and economic goals in ways that accorded with their understanding of national interest and their ideological predilections. Their actions triggered reactions in a spiraling model of distrust and recrimination. Meanwhile, other governments (and parties and groups within those nations) sought to exploit the rivalry to enhance their own interests.’’≤∏

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Finally, the consensus holds, one of the belligerents, the United States, was far more powerful and wealthy throughout and enjoyed a political-economic system that was vastly more productive, flexible, and technologically responsive. ‘‘The wonder,’’ LeΔer observes, is that the other side imploded without precipitating a major conflict.’’≤π Intellectual historians of foreign relations have contributed important insights into the intensely ideological character of this ‘‘abnormal’’ war. This was no ordinary state conflict, and geopolitical analysis does not su≈ce to explain the cruel and brutal form it took, especially in the global South. Indeed, geopolitics may enrich our understanding of the military-political domain of the global conflict, but it has little to say about the ideological-cultural realm. The irony of the Cold War was that it represented, in the words of Anders Stephanson, ‘‘an extreme polarity organized around total annihilation of the opponent in a period of ostensible peace.’’≤∫ Before 1963, annihilation literally seemed a distinct possibility. Thereafter, neither side appeared to require or seriously risked the actual destruction of the other. In theory, each could have gone on indefinitely without having to change its system as a result of the other’s existence (the ‘‘long peace,’’ as John Lewis Gaddis terms it),≤Ω since open conflict was deterred by the nuclear reality of ‘‘mutually assured destruction’’ and e√ectively displaced and managed on the so-called Third World periphery. Yet in another sense, the Cold War remained systemic and total. It was waged in fiercely doctrinal terms as an ‘‘invasion’’ or delegitimization of the other’s social order, replete with a demonology of the other and a mythology of one’s own eternal virtues. No doubt, argues Stephanson, the rigid territorialization of systems, beginning in 1947 in Europe, only intensified the mutually exclusive ideological aspect of the war, propelling it into its most primitive forms. This intensification of ideology assisted in securing, in di√erent ways and contexts, each side’s socioeconomic systems in the two halves of Europe and in spheres of influence such as Latin America.≥≠ Yet in whatever context, the domestic social order could never be taken for granted: repression of internal dissent was axiomatic: redbaiting and worse in the United States and Mexico; wholesale purges in the Soviet Union; ethnocide in the western highlands and northern jungles of Guatemala. The Cold War therefore cannot be reduced in its origins or development to notions of geopolitics and strategy. Unfortunately, for too long the great debates in Cold War literature were often reductionist and disproportionately preoccupied with geopolitics and grand strategy. Such ‘‘realist’’ staples fueled paradigms of explanation that have contended over the last fifty years with other master narratives emphasizing the

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logic of U.S. economic domination.≥∞ Since many area studies scholars may not be familiar with these venerable paradigms, they are worth glossing here. First there was the ‘‘orthodoxy’’ of the 1950s and early 1960s, driven by o≈cials of the U.S. government, which saw a paranoid style of Stalinist expansionism as forcing the pace of world events.≥≤ This gave way in the 1960s and 1970s to a New Left ‘‘revisionism,’’ which proved most compelling during the Vietnam War. This paradigm viewed inexorable U.S. economic drives, interwoven with a muscular liberal capitalist ideology, as mostly responsible for the character of the global struggle between East and West. New Left revisionism, in turn, was displaced by a self-proclaimed school of ‘‘postrevisionism,’’ which held sway from the late 1970s through the middle 1990s.≥≥ This current of interpretation, galvanized by a series of seminal writings by John Gaddis, trumpeted a new synthesis in Cold War studies.≥∂ While recognizing the structural patterns of the world economy, it stressed the dynamics of the postwar international system, which, in combination with the exigencies of U.S. domestic politics, best accounted for the behavior of Washington and Moscow. Unlike the ‘‘revisionists’’—who argued that ‘‘American policy merely fitted the Soviet problem into a much larger context,’’ that of sustaining and reforming world capitalism, whose ‘‘specific needs’’ shaped the United States’ ‘‘global role’’≥∑ —Gaddis contended that American o≈cials were not seeking economic hegemony. Rather, constrained by partisan and bureaucratic politics at home and obsessed with attending to global power balances, they sought to contain the imperial drives of the Communist bloc. In the process, Gaddis acknowledged (and here he was influenced by European scholars) that the United States established its own empire. Yet unlike its Soviet counterpart, it was an empire of liberty and diversity, an ‘‘empire of invitation,’’≥∏ called into existence by America’s allies in Western Europe and elsewhere who embraced the promise of liberal democracy. In his earlier writings of the 1970s and 1980s, Gaddis was not overly preoccupied with apportioning blame. He judged the Soviet Union to be primarily responsible for the Cold War, arguing that ‘‘Stalin’s paranoia, together with the bureaucracy of institutionalized suspicion with which he surrounded himself,’’ made agreement futile—but Gaddis devoted relatively little attention to the matter of blame.≥π It is therefore striking that in his more recent, post–Cold War statements, especially his highly influential book We Now Know: Rethinking the Cold War (1997),≥∫ he essentially jettisons postrevisionism and harks back to the orthodoxy of America’s early cold warriors. Gaddis finds in the plethora of new documents from Russian, East European, and Chinese archives clear-cut sub-

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stantiation that the Soviets not only started the Cold War but determined its trajectory.≥Ω For Gaddis, ‘‘the ‘new history’ is bringing us back to an old answer,’’∂≠ namely, that the Cold War was determined by the authoritarian cast of Soviet government and the revolutionary romanticism of Marxist-Leninist ideology, which inspired both the Kremlin’s leaders and their international clients from Mao to Castro.∂∞ For Gaddis, the central significance of the Cold War now becomes the abiding role of the United States (and its allies) in resisting and defeating this ferocious brand of authoritarianism. Indeed, in his presidential address to the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations in 1993, he called on his colleagues to join him ‘‘at the center of that debate.’’∂≤ Other diplomatic historians, certainly the revisionists but also a number of Gaddis’s former postrevisionist colleagues, have read the new sources somewhat di√erently. Melvyn LeΔer referred to We Now Know as ‘‘in many ways . . . the scholarly diplomatic counterpart of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History’’ and warned that ‘‘master narratives will soon be outdated if they are too influenced by contemporary fashions [that is, triumphalism].’’ He added that what struck him about the new documentation and resulting scholarship was ‘‘the extent to which [it] leaves itself open to diverse conclusions.’’∂≥ In his view, a close reading of the new materials ‘‘suggests more nuanced conclusions’’: The Cold War was not a simple case of Soviet expansionism and American reaction. Realpolitik held sway in the Kremlin. Ideology played an important role in shaping their perceptions, but Soviet leaders were not focused on promoting worldwide revolution. They were concerned mostly with configurations of power, with protecting their country’s immediate periphery, ensuring its security, and preserving their rule. Governing a land devastated by two world wars, they feared a resurgence of German and Japanese strength. They felt threatened by a United States that alone among the combatants emerged from the war wealthier and armed with the atomic bomb. Soviet o≈cials did not have preconceived plans to make Eastern Europe communist, to support the Chinese communists, or to wage war in Korea. Soviet clients [e.g., Ulbricht and Honecker’s East Germany, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba], moreover, could and did act in pursuit of their own interests, sometimes goading the Kremlin into involvements it did not want.∂∂

Thus, like Gaddis, LeΔer believes the newly accessible documents a√ord much greater insight into how foreign policy was made in the Communist world. Unlike Gaddis, however, LeΔer’s reading of the new materials suggests that Soviet actions were less reflexive, and more contingent, than previously imagined. (For a particularly apposite example of this, see Spenser’s essay in this

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volume on the 1962 Caribbean crisis and its consequences for the projection of Soviet power.) Still, according to LeΔer, likely nothing the United States might have done would have eased Soviet suspicions, at least in the early years of the Cold War. In actuality, American policies only exacerbated the anxieties of the Warsaw bloc, thereby fueling the arms race and the extension of the conflict into the Third World. ‘‘Rather than congratulate themselves on the Cold War’s outcome,’’ LeΔer concludes, ‘‘Americans must confront the negative as well as the positive consequences of U.S. actions and inquire much more searchingly into the implications of their nation’s foreign policies.’’∂∑ The current moment of documentary revelation is clearly fraught with pitfalls as well as promise. Are the sources dribbling out in such piecemeal fashion that they produce incomplete impressions that must constantly be revised? Will they be read in Rorschach fashion, as historians seek in them the confirmation of existing views? For a number of Eastern European and U.S. scholars, the new documentation from the Communist world seems only to further their preoccupation with Soviet culpability and bipolar confrontation, while minimizing the relevance of North-South contexts. Will the new evidence merely provide new ammunition to refight old battles? Michael Hogan, who recently concluded an innovative tenure as editor of Diplomatic History, worries that the new evidence from Communist archives will become a ‘‘strait jacket’’ for historians of foreign relations, ‘‘locking them into well-established categories of analysis when they might be exploring new directions and asking new questions.’’∂∏ In his essay in this volume, Seth Fein echoes this view, warning against ‘‘fetishizing the declassification of new documents,’’ whose production and consumption are overdetermined by the prevailing Cold War master narratives.∂π Hogan’s and Fein’s concerns about the hegemony of established categories are borne out when we examine more closely the scholarship by U.S. diplomatic historians on the Cold War in Latin America.∂∫ Although this regional body of work has rarely informed the Great Debate, it has certainly been inspired by its contending paradigms. Not surprisingly, radical revisionist narratives have dominated writing on Latin America. Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, the New Left history of William Appleman Williams and his students was complemented and updated by neo-Marxian dependency theory and world systems analysis, both of which were heavily indebted to Latin American and African thinkers. The fit seemed appropriate. Latin America had su√ered colonial and neocolonial structural inequality since the early modern era: After centuries of Spanish and Portuguese colonial rule and a briefer period of British hegemony, the United States practiced new forms of imperial domination as the world’s pre-

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eminent capitalist power. Moreover, during the Cold War, Latin America represented something of an ‘‘Achilles’ heel in the hard armor of U.S. virtue’’: even the most triumphal Cold War scholars were hard pressed to explain away U.S. actions that brought about the toppling of popularly elected regimes and contributed to the murder and torture of hundreds of thousands of people.∂Ω It is hardly surprising, therefore, that, aided by the increased declassification of U.S. security documents, there has been a steady stream of monographs critiquing U.S. involvement in Latin America from the late 1940s to the 1990s—even as some synthesizers of the larger conflict have declared an unshakable faith in American righteousness and exceptionalism. New Left scholarship and dependency theory came together most forcefully in Walter LaFeber’s Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America. Appearing in 1984, as Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador had become the Cold War’s final killing fields, the volume highlighted the contradiction created by a U.S. development model that generated chronic poverty and insurgency and a regional diplomacy that enforced political stability at tremendous human cost.∑≠ More recently, in a mammoth, meticulously documented, and powerfully written critique of U.S. policy toward Central America from the late 1970s to the early 1990s (particularly support for Nicaragua’s anti-Sandinista Contras and El Salvador’s military-backed governments), William LeoGrande argues that where the isthmus was concerned, both the Carter and the Reagan administrations participated in the completion of the debate on Vietnam. Drawing on a trove of documents declassified in the wake of the investigation by the U.S. Congress into the Iran-Contra scandal, LeoGrande shows how conservatives attempted to exorcise the ghost of Vietnam and liberals desperately sought to avoid repeating its mistakes. Unfortunately absent from the tome’s almost eight hundred pages of policy analysis is a nuanced understanding of the internal (much less grassroots) dynamics of contention that intersected with U.S. and Soviet-Cuban involvement.∑∞ This is not to say that the ascendancy of a ‘‘triumphal realism’’ has not registered an impact on the foreign relations literature on the Latin American Cold War. A number of admirably researched histories of Cold War interventions have obsessively debated the ‘‘motivations’’ of U.S. policymakers in a seeming attempt to distinguish the well-meaning intent of government actors from the more horrific consequences of U.S. actions.∑≤ While not inattentive to economic interests, historical-structural inequalities, and long-running traditions of imperial hubris and racism, these scholars have often ultimately chosen to focus on the political culture, climate of heightened fear, and international

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exigencies of the Cold War to explain away a series of ‘‘tragic U.S. mistakes.’’ Thus, after substantial critique, Stephen Rabe concludes his recent study of JFK and Communist revolution in Latin America in the following manner: ‘‘Kennedy brought high ideals and noble purposes to his Latin American policy. Ironically, however, his unwavering determination to wage Cold War . . . led him and his administration ultimately to compromise and even mutilate those grand goals for the Western Hemisphere.’’∑≥ Similarly, Robert Pastor and others have ascribed democratic motives to Eisenhower amid the human tragedy wrought by the cia-orchestrated 1954 coup in Guatemala.∑∂ Interestingly, the cognitive dissonance between the liberal democratic values that America claims to defend and the terrible consequences of its policies in the Third World even bedeviled the doyen of New Left revisionism, William Appleman Williams. Throughout his writings, Williams ‘‘always seemed to feel that the United States could, if only it just would, abandon its imperialist career and go into a more modest business.’’∑∑ It is, of course, less surprising that John Gaddis takes this tack in We Now Know, in his own brief discussion of the U.S.-engineered overthrow of the reformist government of Jacobo Arbenz. Deeming U.S. policy a mistake, ‘‘a massive overreaction’’ at a moment fraught with anti-Communist hysteria, he then goes a step further, writing the episode o√ as a response to ‘‘a minor irritant,’’ one that ‘‘did little to alter the course of events inside Guatemala,’’ where Arbenz’s ‘‘Quixotic’’ regime ‘‘had made so many enemies . . . that it probably would not have lasted in any event.’’∑∏ Reassessing the Latin American Cold War from Within Gaddis’s bullet verdict on Guatemala, invoking as it does the correlation of domestic forces underwriting the 1954 Guatemalan coup, provides the entry point for the second half of this essay. I want to take discussion of the Latin American Cold War in a di√erent direction, beyond—or better beneath—the great diplomatic debates that have particularly stunted the region’s Cold War historiography. Marc Bloch wrote in The Historian’s Craft that ‘‘to be excited by the same dispute, even on opposing sides, is still to be alike. This common stamp . . . is what makes a generation.’’∑π A veritable obsession with first causes, with blame, and with the motives and roles of U.S. policymakers has served to join New Left historians and realists at the hip and until only recently preempted other intellectual agendas for examining the Latin American Cold War. In this sense, this volume represents an attempt to bring its study ‘‘in from the cold,’’

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that is, to transcend frayed, dichotomizing paradigms of interpretation that themselves appear to be artifacts of the conflict. My fellow contributors and I would be the last to argue that the state and its agents do not play a preponderant role in the history of the Latin American Cold War.∑∫ But the manner in which foreign relations historians have assessed the conflict in terms of national interest, state policy, and the broad imperatives of the international economy has often marginalized human subjects, particularly women and members of the poorer and middle sectors (e.g., peasants, workers, intellectuals, students, and religious workers of di√erent ideological stripes, indigenous and ethnic groups), ignoring a serious examination of their social and cultural identities and political agency. At times, it has seemed as if the region’s Cold War historiography served only to illustrate Thucydides’ classic (eminently realist ) maxim: ‘‘Large nations do what they wish, while small nations accept what they must.’’∑Ω The prevailing diplomatic literature on the Latin American Cold War has also largely neglected other political-cultural realms—we might call them transnational ‘‘contact zones’’—in which the state’s power is deployed (and contested) through a series of representations, symbolic systems, and new technologies involving agents that transcend the state: business and communication networks, culture industries, educational institutions, and philanthropic foundations, to name but a few. Several of this volume’s contributors focus on these sites of transnational encounter—for example, the electronic and print media (Fein and Langland); forms of popular culture, leisure, and consumption (Fein, Bachelor, Pitti, Langland, and McAllister); riots and public demonstrations (Zolov and Pitti); revolutionary and counterinsurgent aid missions (Gleijeses and Armony)—which throw subtle, foreign-local dimensions of Cold War power relationships, as well as critical interstate collaborations, into sharp relief. Several of these essays mark out a broader understanding of political history as ‘‘integrative’’ history that blends material and cultural levels of analysis.∏≠ They acknowledge that Cold War history should be properly fixed on the exercise of power, but appreciate that power does not flow only from the policies and interventions of states; it also works through language and symbolic systems and manifests itself in identities and everyday practices.∏∞ I hasten to emphasize that while the scholarship gathered in this book represents a relatively new approach to the Cold War in Latin America, it draws from and builds on some exciting new developments in the larger field of foreign relations history. For many years, the gatekeepers of the diplomatic field practiced a strategy of containment on those who would introduce newer forms of social and cultural history, purporting to welcome arguments based on these

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new approaches but then ‘‘demonstrating why older conceptual frameworks remain more persuasive.’’ Happily, over the course of the past decade or so, an increasing number of foreign relations historians have moved away from a narrow preoccupation with institutional political and economic history and built a compelling justification for the usefulness of cultural, gendered, ethnoracial, visual, and deconstructionist approaches to the study of empire and the Cold War.∏≤ This corpus of work has sought to establish a concern with culture and ideology at the center of the inquiry and, to varying degrees, to connect the realm of elite policymaking with that of everyday experience.∏≥ It has breathed new life into Cold War studies and extended the horizons of foreign relations history, a field that even many of its practitioners had begun to refer to as a hidebound, increasingly irrelevant discipline. Some of the present volume’s contributors have previously played a role in this boundary shift,∏∂ and the essays in the second part of the collection contribute to it. While this burgeoning new literature is admirably heterogeneous in its interdisciplinarity, it owes its greatest debts to the latest currents in American studies and cultural studies, particularly critical studies of gender and postcoloniality. Much of this new work in foreign relations history focuses on the representational machines of American empire—particularly the technologies and discourses that conveyed empire to audiences back home.∏∑ While the present volume has much to say about imperial enterprises of representation (and the Pitti essay focuses explicitly on the domestic reception of Cold War events and symbols), it is more concerned with representation as an integral dimension of Cold War encounters at the Latin American grassroots. Thus particular attention is given to a materially grounded, processual analysis of U.S. and other foreign interaction with local polities, societies, and cultures.∏∏ The manner in which Cold War encounters reciprocally shaped imperial cultures at home, although implicit or secondary in some of the essays, is not a central concern here. In shifting the conceptual focus of the Latin American Cold War to the international struggle’s ‘‘periphery’’—especially its grassroots—and to the intersection of culture and power, we hope to constructively engage with mainstream diplomatic historians of the regional conflict. If only to accomplish their core objectives of identifying the relevant interests and actors involved, and explaining the determinants and consequences of policy, these scholars should take note of newer work on the region’s social and cultural history that has been produced over the past decade or so. Interestingly, one of John Gaddis’s central arguments in We Now Know is that New Left historians have refused to come to terms with

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the ‘‘strong base of popular support, confirmed repeatedly,’’ that supported the American presence in Western Europe and Asia and kept friendly governments in power. The same criticism might also be leveled at those who underestimate the level of support for anti-Communist authoritarianism in Latin America— among middle sectors, workers, campesinos, Christians, men and women— and adduce terror to be the only compelling reason for the existence of latetwentieth-century counterinsurgent regimes in Central America and the Southern Cone. Any adequate history of the global Cold War, Gaddis concludes and we would concur, must therefore also be a social and cultural history, one that takes seriously the actions, identities, and beliefs of ordinary people, as well as of elites.∏π Such a social and cultural history of the Latin American Cold War would contribute to the oft-declared yet never achieved synthesis sought by several leading foreign relations scholars. It would scrutinize the abstract claims of relevant but insu≈cient paradigms like dependency and world systems theory with on-the-ground studies of hard-fought battles involving state and society over economic exploitation, national inclusion, and the meaning of citizenship. At the same time, it would force us to come to a more rigorous understanding of just what we mean by the term ‘‘Cold War.’’ For historians and social scientists of Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century, the term has been used as a kind of ‘‘shorthand to describe either direct U.S. or Cuban [or Soviet] intervention in Latin American politics, or the collateral damage from superpower conflict.’’∏∫ What has been lacking is a framework for understanding the grassroots dynamics and meanings of the Latin American Cold War, one that would enable us to better integrate the conflict’s domestic and foreign dimensions. This is obviously a far-flung assignment given the diversity of the region and the duration of the Cold War. Even in suggesting the potential of such an approach, I can only paint in broad strokes here. Recent work by a variety of social and labor historians has examined the region’s brief but tumultuous ‘‘democratic spring’’ in the years immediately following World War II. The war had spurred the economic growth and facilitated the political mobilization of Latin American societies. Although only indirectly associated with the Allied e√ort, large numbers of people, especially among the lower and middle classes, were a√ected by the democratic discourse and ideological fervor that inspired the struggle against fascism. Nationalist wartime propaganda, crafted in collaboration with Nelson Rockefeller’s O≈ce of the Coordinator of Inter-American A√airs, promoted democratic values and freedoms, often invoking strong, popular liberal traditions in Latin American

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politics and culture that went back to the independence struggles of the early nineteenth century.∏Ω Miners, factory workers, and some campesinos organized, joined unions (or bid for greater union independence in nations, like Mexico, where the labor movement was closely controlled by the state), mounted strikes of unprecedented militancy, supported new democratic parties, and injected strength into existing Communist, socialist, and radical movements. In some places (e.g., Mexico, El Salvador, Chile), such Old Left formations had galvanized local rebellions and popular struggles in the 1920s and 1930s, which had been targeted by repressive, typically oligarchical states during virulent Red Scares that some scholars now refer as the ‘‘first Cold War.’’π≠ Now, in the aftermath of World War II, validated by antifascist patriotism and frequently neglected by Moscow, many of the region’s Communist parties sought to consolidate their wartime strategy of allying with other ‘‘progressive’’ sectors of society in nationalist, popular movements to break the power of the so-called feudal landed class. In a real sense, then, Latin America had much in common with Western and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, India, China, Southeast Asia, and Japan, where the years linking the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War constituted an e√ervescent and critical conjuncture. The pioneers in the study of this period for Latin America, Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough, assembled a team of scholars to flesh out these themes across the continent.π∞ Despite local variation, in case after case, they found ‘‘a forward march by democracy, the Left, and labor,’’ but also ‘‘a shift in the nature of political discourse and ideology.’’ Democracy took on a pronounced social flavor, coming to mean ‘‘a commitment to popular, more particularly working-class participation in politics, and social and economic improvements for the poorer sections of the population.’’π≤ In both Communist and non-Communist sectors of the Left, democracy increasingly became identified with development and state welfarism, typically structured around nationalist strategies of import substitution industrialization (isi). According to the new scholarship, the postwar democratic spring and its undoing fell out in two phases. Its all-too-brief consolidation took place anywhere from 1944 through 1946, depending on the country. Throughout the hemisphere, dictatorships fell, popular forces were mobilized, and elections with a relatively high level of participation were held. For the first time, an array of reformist populist parties (some with roots going back to the 1920s) articulated the political, social, and economic demands of the urban middle class and the working class (though less frequently those of the peasantry).

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We should not minimize the diversity and contentiousness that characterized these popular movements and coalitions—in Peru, for example, the apra and the Communist Party occasionally attacked each other more fiercely than they did the oligarchs.π≥ Peronism in Argentina embodied a constant tension between impulses of reform and reaction, with its leadership, once in power, striving mightily ‘‘to contain the heretical challenge it had unleashed.’’π∂ But, as a host of recent local and sectoral studies of populist and popular front arrangements demonstrate, this did not preclude these reform movements and coalitions from tapping into and raising popular expectations of state-administered economic justice and national inclusion.π∑ At first the United States lent encouragement to this democratic e√ervescence, which prompted regional economic and military elites temporarily to acquiesce to popular demands for democratization of their societies. These were the years when Fidel Castro quoted Tom Paine and Thomas Je√erson rather than Lenin (just as Ho Chi Minh cited passages from the Declaration of Independence).π∏ The well-reported anecdote that, as a twelve-year-old, Fidel sent FDR a letter congratulating him on his victory earlier in the decade (and also asking him for a ten-dollar bill!) similarly accentuates the importance the New Deal state had as a model for would-be Latin American reformers.ππ The denouement of this postwar democratic spring played out in most cases during 1946 and 1947 and was completed almost everywhere by 1948—with the notable exception of Guatemala, where spring endured for ten years, until the 1954 coup. Most everywhere else, organized labor was reined in by the state and militants were purged; Communist parties were outlawed and su√ered severe repression; populist reform parties lost their dynamism or moved to the right; and the democratic advance was largely contained, if not reversed. The window of democratic opportunity for political and social change, which had cracked open at the end of the war, had essentially been slammed shut by 1948 as the Cold War gathered force.π∫ In a careful analysis that seeks to integrate domestic and international variables, Bethell, Roxborough, and their collaborators persuasively argue that ‘‘the attack on labor and the left, especially the Communist left, was . . . overdetermined.’’πΩ They remind us not to minimize the strength of Latin America’s authoritarian tradition, which—like its multistranded popular liberal tradition so much in evidence during the democratic spring—also had deep historical roots and was now harnessed to support the power of the threatened dominant classes, not least the landed class. The emerging Cold War reinforced a domestic anti-Communism that went back decades and was ingrained in the military,

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the Catholic hierarchy, and segments of the middle class—independent of U.S. prompting.∫≠ While the United States essentially neglected Latin America, its gaze fixed on Europe during the first years of the Cold War, it would still be a ‘‘mistake to underestimate its importance.’’∫∞ World War II had cemented a century-long process of U.S. ascendance in the hemisphere. U.S. intelligence realistically discounted the Soviet threat to the region in the mid-1940s, and little U.S. military or economic aid came into Latin America in the late 1940s. Nevertheless, operating through its embassy o≈cials, the fbi, the American Federation of Labor, and, after 1947, the newly created cia, the United States carefully monitored the region’s internal front, applying a range of economic and political pressures on governments and unions. The popular democratic movements that Washington had validated in the middle of the decade were discouraged by 1947. ‘‘Latin America is in the throes of a social revolution,’’ observed a worried State Department o≈cial, and Washington would take increasingly graduated measures to contain and then reverse it.∫≤ To conclude their analysis of how both national and international agendas came together to seal the fate of social democracy in the late 1940s, Bethell and Roxborough examine the perception that regional elites had of the new international economic order, and its consequences for Latin American political economy. The United States had quickly made it clear that there would be no Marshall Plan for its ‘‘good neighbors’’: compared with the $19 billion in foreign aid sent to Western Europe from 1945 to 1950, only $400 million flowed to Latin America—less than 2 percent of total U.S. aid.∫≥ Latin America’s ruling elites had no recourse but to seek private foreign capital to underwrite their nations’ costly isi initiatives. The attraction of such capital hinged on the creation of a proper investment climate, one shaped by political stability; a commitment to liberal, capitalist development; the marginalization of the Left; and the curtailment of independent currents in the unions. Thus the reversal of the democratic spring by ruling elites was regarded to be a ‘‘necessary precondition’’ for the region’s ‘‘participation in the unprecedented expansion of the international economy, in which the United States played the dominant role.’’∫∂ In his important study of Cold War Guatemala, The Last Colonial Massacre, Greg Grandin analyzes the belated, violent overthrow of Guatemala’s Ten Years of Spring, the outlier in this historical watershed of the rise and fall of an extremely diverse, popularly driven social democracy. The heart of the book is Grandin’s ability to evoke the shifting struggles of indigenous Guatemalan campesinos, mostly Q’eqchi’ Mayan peasants and plantation workers from the co√ee-producing region of Alta Verapaz. Drawing on local archives and many

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hours of oral testimonies, he shows how these Mayans first responded to the democratic promise of the Arévalo-Arbenz revolution and its expanded vision of economic rights, agrarian reform, and claims to citizenship. Tracing local struggles back to the 1920s (and rooting their determinants in the mid-nineteenth century), Grandin attempts to convey how political action and political ideas defined people’s lives, and ‘‘how the frustration and ultimate destruction of their ideals a√ected not only those few who survived but a wider [Cold War] history.’’∫∑ In the face of triumphalist arguments that one of Communism’s worst sins was its dissolution of the self into an all-encompassing and tyrannical system of belief—such that Communism became fascism’s totalitarian twin, inimical to the autonomous individual that stands at the center of liberal democracy— Grandin suggests that it was political action associated with Guatemala’s homegrown Communist Party (the Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo) that produced a more pronounced sense of the self, an ‘‘insurgent individuality.’’∫∏ It was this insurgent individuality that struggled against, and succeeded in at least loosening, the chains of hierarchy and extreme exploitation that traditionally bound Guatemalan society together. But this notion of the self always existed ‘‘in relation to more encumbered social and cultural identities,’’ such as family, community, and race. Grandin argues that the strength and threat of Latin America’s Old Left, represented here by the pgt, was its ability through political action to bridge ‘‘the fault lines of modernity, linking nation and world, community and state, and self and society.’’∫π Thus, its class-based, male, modernist, urban bias notwithstanding, the pgt, which exerted a powerful influence on Arbenz’s revolutionary coalition, was driven by particular grievances and diverse identities. Struggles in the countryside, especially over access to land and an end to forced, uncompensated labor, stretched the party’s rhetorical frame of modernizing Marxist social democracy to encompass the multitude of experiences and subjectivities on the ground. The pgt’s founder Humberto Alvarado alluded to this tension and his party’s bridging mission when he wrote: ‘‘To be universal, one has to be from somewhere.’’∫∫ After the 1954 coup, reform strategies divided. A new generation of vanguardist revolutionaries dismissed the pgt’s attempt to usher in progressive capitalism as misguided, in view of U.S. intervention, and irrelevant, in the wake of the Cuban revolution. Banned and persecuted by the state, but still influential nationally and in its highland centers of strength, the pgt ultimately allied with these New Left rebels. It did so grudgingly, regarding armed resistance more as a pressure tactic than a viable means of taking state power. (Here, as elsewhere, regional Communist parties and Cuban-inspired vanguards mostly disagreed

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on this point.) Grandin shows that many of the pgt’s leaders, along with other nationalist reformers, still hoped to remake Guatemalan social democracy. That dream was extinguished early in 1966 with the kidnapping, torture, and execution of close to thirty pgt and other non-Communist reformers by a U.S.trained elite counterinsurgency unit. With the pgt obliterated, Grandin chronicles at the grassroots level the transition from Guatemala’s Old Left to the New, and the conversion of political repression into a new and particularly intense form of state terror that peaked in the Scorched Earth campaign of the early 1980s.∫Ω The second major contribution of Grandin’s new volume is precisely the intimate account it provides of this counterinsurgent regime and its social and political consequences. Ruling elites not only continued to turn outward to the hemisphere’s Cold War hegemon, the United States, which had multiple reasons for supporting the status quo. They also reached downward to local power holders able to mobilize an often popular but terribly savage anti-Communism among campesinos, members of the urban poor and middle sectors. Not only did members of these popular sectors occasionally nurture personal rivalries and other discontents with the increasingly indigenous leftist insurgency; the counterrevolution was also ‘‘powered by subterranean currents of status anxiety, race hatred, and fear of social liberalization, which for men could mean a loss of prerogative and for women a loss of protection.’’Ω≠ Significantly, Grandin shows that, in the main, the fight against Guatemala’s burgeoning revolutionary challenge was directed not by those ‘‘at society’s commanding heights’’ but by middle-class ideologues, often anti-Communist Catholic students who fancied themselves in the vanguard of a worldwide movement of the Right. With the assistance of the cia, ‘‘these students a√ected an insurgent internationalism exuberant in tone and content, communicating with other anti-communist movements not only throughout Latin America but in Asia as well, and promoted the ‘salvation’ of Guatemala as merely the ‘first step’ in liberating Latin America from Communism. It was this impassioned middle sector that functioned as a broker between the upper echelons, both domestic and foreign, of reaction and the street thugs and paramilitary forces responsible for some of the worst acts of counterinsurgency.’’Ω∞ In Latin America, as other recent work by scholars such as Robert Holden, Martha Huggins, Marguerite Feitlowitz, Peter Kornbluh, Cecilia Menjívar and Néstor Rodríguez, Ariel Armony, Sergio Aguayo, Leslie Gill, and Juan Corradi, Patricia Weiss Fagan, and Manuel Garretón shows, counterinsurgency became the well-honed, high-tech art of counterrevolution.Ω≤ The formidable power of

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counterinsurgent regimes resided in a deadly combination of ‘‘rational, precise counterinsurgent tactics’’—typically imported from the United States, Israel, South Africa, France, and, as Armony’s chapter in this collection documents, Argentina—and ‘‘more furious (local) sentiments and aesthetics.’’Ω≥ Thus the Southern Cone’s premier and highly centralized national intelligence agencies— Argentina’s side, Chile’s dina, and Brazil’s sni—were all funded and trained by the United States. Not only did they collaborate in surgically precise e√orts to track down and eliminate ‘‘leading subversives’’ across national boundaries (Operación Condor),Ω∂ but like the security apparatuses in Guatemala and El Salvador, they worked closely with local death squads to disappear, torture, and murder thousands of their own nationals, adopting brutal tactics that have elicited comparisons with those of European fascism. The practices and discourse of the ruling Argentine military junta during its ‘‘dirty war’’ underscore this synthesis of rationality and atavism: the junta employed free-market economists (‘‘los Chicago Boys’’) and Madison Avenue publicists to ‘‘bring Argentina into the twentieth century’’; simultaneously it orchestrated a vicious antiSemitic campaign against the nation’s Jews, proclaiming Freud and Einstein, along with Marx, to be three principal enemies in a ‘‘Third World War’’ between ‘‘dialectical materialism and [its own brand of ] ideological humanism.’’Ω∑ Although most U.S. diplomatic personnel throughout the continent may have sincerely believed, or at least went on record to state, that there was a clear di√erence between their aims and actions and the worst excesses of local security forces, the powerful glimpses a√orded by recently declassified documents suggest a far murkier situation.Ω∏ For example, the National Security Archive has revealed that as early as 1968, Viron Vaky, then second-in-command at the embassy in Guatemala City, was unnerved by the manner in which his subordinates had come to justify repression: ‘‘After all hasn’t man been a savage from the beginning of time so let us not be too queasy about terror. I have literally heard this from our people.’’ Filled with remorse, Vaky bluntly admitted: ‘‘We have condoned counter-terror; we may even in e√ect have encouraged or blessed it.’’Ωπ This certainly squares with the cia’s ‘‘Psy Ops’’ campaign before the coup it sponsored against Arbenz in 1954, in which one agent instructed that appeals and arguments be directed to the ‘‘heart, the stomach, and the liver’’—that is, to people’s fears rather than their reason.Ω∫ Moreover, it resonates with Henry Kissinger’s and the cia’s strategy, on the eve of another coup it backed in Chile in 1973, to ‘‘discredit Salvador Allende’s parliamentary solution as unworkable’’ and ‘‘make the [Chilean] economy scream.’’ΩΩ It is hardly surprising, then, that decades of repetition have not reduced the appeal of the old Latin American joke

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‘‘Why are there no coups d’etat in the United States? Because there is no U.S. embassy there.’’∞≠≠ At the end of the day, it is hard to argue with Grandin’s verdict that ‘‘counterrevolutionary terror was inextricably tied to empire. . . . That Washington was not solely responsible for the coups and atrocities carried out by their [Latin American allies], and at times had no involvement in them at all, matters less than the fact that it did little to discourage them.’’∞≠∞ Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, new research suggests, Latin American military regimes applied ‘‘best counterinsurgent practices,’’ perfected by the Americans in Vietnam, the French in Algeria and Indochina, and the British in Northern Ireland, to check Latin America’s New Left revolutionary movements.∞≠≤ ‘‘Following the success of the Cuban rural insurgency, militaries quickly learned not only to terrorize the population to dry up guerrilla support but to incorporate it into new ideological and political structures of authority.’’∞≠≥ Occasionally, in their pursuit of a new moral order, counterinsurgent regimes appeared to borrow from and even mimic the discourse and practice of the guerrillas: in Guatemala, the counterrevolutionary pacs, or civil patrols, were modeled on the insurgents’ own organizational patterns; Argentine junta leader General Jorge Videla spoke of his mission as nothing less than a ‘‘profound transformation of consciousness.’’∞≠∂ Meanwhile the destabilization of leftist governments and movements, psychological operations, and civic action programs—all of which crystallized in the 1980s in an emerging counterinsurgency doctrine known as ‘‘low-intensity conflict’’—were flexibly deployed by U.S.-supported military forces as circumstances warranted, most notably in Nicaragua and El Salvador.∞≠∑ The Right’s success in the final stages of the Latin American Cold War can also be attributed, at least in part, to its ability to address—and co-opt—some of the frustrated popular demands that had driven so many to reformers and revolutionaries in the first place. Guatemala’s pacs were repressive and helped to consolidate military rule, but they also entailed local development initiatives, some of which furthered the interests of indigenous actors at the expense of Ladino elites. Indeed, since the Alliance for Progress in the 1960s, military and civilian regimes on the right had attached some level of tepid social and agrarian reform to the imperatives of counterinsurgency. In the Southern Cone, the Brazilian and Chilean military regimes attempted to steal the Left’s thunder by implementing their own programs of moderate social reform, cultural renovation, and folk nationalism; in Uruguay, the military promoted a species of welfarism (targeting the humble families of its own recruits) in a society that had witnessed the collapse of one of Latin America’s most venerable welfare states.∞≠∏ But ultimately, much recent scholarship suggests, it was the fusion of rational

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counterinsurgent technologies with a brutal brand of local repression that enabled right-wing regimes in Guatemala, other parts of Central America, and much of South America’s Southern Cone to destroy ‘‘the ideological and political challenge set loose in the years following WWII.’’∞≠π Grandin, for example, argues compellingly that Cold War terror silenced demands for economic justice, hollowed out the egalitarian content from postwar democracy, severed alliances between reforming elites and popular classes, and used repression to reduce powerful collective movements to individual survival strategies. Where the last point is concerned, he invokes Elaine Scarry’s argument that the widespread use of torture ‘‘literally had the e√ect of ‘unmaking’ people’s worlds,’’ for victims were forced to choose between endless, excruciating pain and giving up the political comrades and networks that had sustained them.∞≠∫ All things considered, Grandin argues, Cold War terror powerfully transformed Latin America, discrediting collective, egalitarian notions of social democracy (‘‘the vision of a social and historical commons’’) and paving the way for an ‘‘age of astrictive neoliberalism,’’ which promoted a di√erent version of democracy tied exclusively to personal freedom and access to the market.∞≠Ω Thus, he would contend, Latin America’s ‘‘transition to democracy’’ did not come with the eclipse of the Cold War’s counterinsurgent military regimes; rather, they themselves brokered the transition, and their brutal ‘‘success’’ made Latin America’s post–Cold War, radical free-market policies possible. Of course, neoliberalism and the destruction of social democratic solidarities were not exclusively the product of brutal counterinsurgent states. In certain places (e.g., Bolivia) the Left imploded in relatively unthreatening circumstances; in other societies (e.g., Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador), nationalistic, welfare-oriented isi regimes were dismantled without recourse to the kind of severe repression and terror that distinguished the Southern Cone and much of Central America. Perhaps most importantly, the limitations of the isi model itself, coupled with the excessive levels of corruption that characterized the regimes that implemented it, produced a monumental debt crisis that rendered nationalist development strategies virtually indefensible against the pressures of financial markets, international institutions like the International Monetary Fund, and Washington’s increasingly strident neoliberal agenda to privatize industries, defang labor codes, and reduce social services. While Grandin accepts such caveats, he subordinates them in his analysis to ‘‘unrelenting repression.’’∞∞≠ While the origins of neoliberalism may be open to debate, it is di≈cult to argue with the verdict of a new generation of Latin American social and labor historiography that the most significant targets of the Latin American Cold War

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were the liberal-left alignments of the late forties and early fifties, heterogeneous popular coalitions that creatively combined aspects of liberalism and socialism at society’s grassroots, and typically built on earlier struggles in the 1920s and 1930s. This Latin Americanist literature runs counter to some other recent contributions to global Cold War studies that attack left alliances and popular fronts with gusto.∞∞∞ It also calls into question recent high-profile studies by the political scientist Jorge Castañeda and the anthropologist David Stoll. In the wake of the failed vanguardist projects that played out from the 1960s through the early 1990s, these social scientists have indicted the Cuban-inspired revolutionary road for interrupting what had been a still-viable evolutionary social democracy. They argue that the radicalization of Latin American politics after 1960 was a disastrous turn taken by romantic elite intellectuals turned absolutist revolutionaries, one that reaped a whirlwind of repression. They suggest that now that the Cold War is over and the vanguardist bubble has burst, the Left, broadly defined (and pruned of a troublesome Marxism), can get back on the right track and lead the current democratic renewal throughout the hemisphere.∞∞≤ Was the political terror that swept Latin America beginning in the 1960s primarily the result of a wrong turn by a New Left vanguard run amok, or was it more the manifestation of a fundamental political contradiction? Grandin’s work poses this contradiction most starkly: the grassroots promise of a social democratic option was e√ectively—and brutally—snu√ed out by an international Cold War alliance that deployed new strategies and technologies to beat back any egalitarian e√ort at reform, resulting in the spiraling polarization and radicalization that came to define the international Cold War. In this sense, it was Guatemala’s failed social democratic revolution, rather than Cuba’s successful Marxist revolution, that really ‘‘set the pace of much of Latin American Cold War politics.’’∞∞≥ But does his argument apply best to Guatemala, El Salvador, and Southern Cone examples (Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and Uruguay) of counterinsurgent ferocity, of politics in extremis?∞∞∂ If so, how do we conceptualize Cold War struggles in countries where the dialectic between episodes of popular mobilization and reaction had rather di√erent watersheds and valences and often seems more chaotic (e.g., Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and Venezuela)? And what of Mexico, where for decades a somewhat less brutal U.S.–Mexican Cold War alliance was mediated through, and substantially muted by, the intensely nationalistic filter of the pri’s formidable political and cultural apparatus, in close partnership with the establishment media and culture industries? (Here, see the contributions to this volume by Zolov, Fein, and Bachelor.)∞∞∑

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Definitive answers to these questions no doubt require much more research by Latin American historians on the critical period of the 1960s to the 1990s, particularly where the mobilization, demobilization, and shifting consciousness of left and counterinsurgent supporters are concerned.∞∞∏ Over the course of the last decade, as people have felt less constrained to tell their stories, as truth commissions have reported and documents have seeped out (see particularly the essay by Blanton)—in short, as a horizon of life has replaced one of death in the former killing fields and streets of Central America and the Southern Cone—a variety of fine-grained studies have emerged. They constitute early attempts to reconstruct the social histories and memories of the followers of both revolutionary and counterrevolutionary movements, as well as of men and women on the margins and in the interstices of both. These studies attend to complex local processes in workplaces, communities, and households whereby ideologies were mediated and appropriated.∞∞π They also shed light on the transformation of old left/populist formations into newer incarnations of the Left and populism. More often than not, these studies contain surprises that muddy the master narratives. They suggest that just as workers, peasants, the urban poor, and women were not mere creatures of populist and popular-front arrangements at midcentury, so they were also not passive instruments in the hands of vanguard intellectuals or counterinsurgent states later on. They draw our attention to more autonomous and creative uses of socialist ideas by the grassroots Left than model-building social scientists will allow. In some cases, the very durability of guerrilla movements had much to do with appeals to more latent but venerable traditions of popular liberalism or to radical, communally driven forms of democracy, under cover of more standard Marxist-Leninist discourse.∞∞∫ Finally this new scholarship, especially on Guatemala and the Southern Cone, gives us greater insight into how people remember and come to grips with the telling of episodes of collective violence and trauma, and how the protagonists in culture wars over memory use this arena to shape the political and cultural future.∞∞Ω Thus, here, as in the recent scholarship on the rise and fall of postwar democracies in the 1940s and 1950s, new social and cultural histories are graphically demonstrating the tenuousness of global assessments of the Cold War— realist and revisionist alike. From Olympian heights, these master narratives seek to generalize about late-twentieth-century superpower conflict over worldhistorical ideas of how society should be ordered. Unfortunately, too often they occlude the human beings caught up in the messy process of history. Perhaps an attempt to reconstruct and contextualize their complex stories is where a truly ‘‘new history’’ of the Latin American Cold War should begin.

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Notes I am particularly indebted to Greg Grandin for a variety of insights that helped shape the arguments of this essay, to my coeditor Daniela Spenser for her patient and thoughtful readings of several drafts, and to Duke University Press’s two anonymous readers for their constructive critiques and bibliographic suggestions. 1. The phrase ‘‘Cold War’’ is generally attributed to George Orwell, who used it in 1945 to describe the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union in Europe following the defeat of Nazi Germany. For a recent global synthesis, which e√ectively evokes the heat of the conflict in the global South, see Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 2. García Márquez, ‘‘The Solitude of Latin America (Nobel Lecture, 1982),’’ in Gabriel García Márquez and the Powers of Fiction, ed. Julio Ortega and Claudia Elliott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988), esp. 81. 3. Since 9/11 and the U.S. retaliation in Afghanistan and Iraq, it has almost become fashionable in European and American circles, left and right alike, to feel a twinge of nostalgia for the Cold War—when James Bond and his adversaries at least played by some set of rules. For a depiction of Cold War protocol and the adversarial ties that influenced spy-masters, see Robert DeNiro’s recent acclaimed film The Good Shepherd (2006). James Buchan has written: ‘‘Those were the days: political caution and circumspection, the survival (as if in ice) of old institutions and manners, history so slow you could even become tired of it.’’ Buchan, ‘‘The Superpowers’ Balance Sheet,’’ Guardian, January 28, 2006. In Latin America and other parts of the global South, where the Cold War was so much hotter, residents would be less prone to engage in such nostalgia. 4. I am grateful to Greg Grandin and Arno J. Mayer for this dialectic of revolution and counterrevolution in twentieth-century Latin America. See Grandin’s The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), which draws provocatively on Mayer’s model for understanding European cycles of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence, elaborated in The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Grandin and I use this dialectic to structure our new collection, A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America’s Long Cold War (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming). For deft analyses of overlapping and interdependent international and domestic fields of power, see Westad, The Global Cold War ; and Jonathan Haslem, The Nixon Administration and the Death of Allende’s Chile: A Case of Assisted Suicide (New York: Verso, 2005). Another synoptic study, which provocatively relates the contradictions of capitalist development and ensuing revolutionary transformations in the global South to the phasing of geopolitical conflict during the Cold War, is Richard Saull, Rethinking Theory and History in the Cold War: The State, Military Power and Social Revolution (London: Frank Cass, 2001); also see Saull, ‘‘El lugar

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del sur global en la conceptualización de la guerra fría: Desarrollo capitalista, revolución social y conflicto geopolítico,’’ in Espejos de la guerra fría: México, América Central y el Caribe, ed. Daniela Spenser (Mexico City: Miguel Angel Porrúa, 2004), 31–66. 5. In 1967, David Horowitz aptly observed: ‘‘The very term cold war may be a misleading description, for unlike its prototype, this war has no centrality in terms of geopolitical space. . . . Its contested areas are themselves shifting and non-delimitable.’’ Horowitz, ed., Containment and Revolution: Western Policy towards Social Revolution, 1917 to Vietnam (London: Anthony Blond, 1967), 9. 6. See, for example, the essays in this collection by Spenser and Gleijeses on the international dimensions of Cuba’s Marxist revolution, and also Armony’s contribution on Argentina’s understudied hemispheric crusade against Communism. Such cases underscore the arguments of scholars such as Saull (Rethinking Theory and History) and Grandin (The Last Colonial Massacre) that the texture of the Latin American Cold War emerged out of widening processes of social conflict in the global South—processes that should not be subordinated to the grand strategies or machinations of the superpowers. 7. Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre, 17. 8. cnn Cold War documentary, cited in Greg Grandin, ‘‘Living in Revolutionary Time: Coming to Terms with the Violence of Latin America’s Long Cold War,’’ in Grandin and Joseph, A Century of Revolution. 9. See, for example, Abby Goodnough, ‘‘Letter from Miami: Florida’s Zeal against Castro Is Losing Heat,’’ New York Times, July 6, 2005. 10. See, for example, Larry Rohter, ‘‘After 30 Years, Argentina’s Dictatorship Stands Trial,’’ New York Times, August 20, 2006; Rohter, ‘‘Argentine Ruling Revives Cases of ‘Dirty War’ Victims,’’ New York Times, July 15, 2005; Ginger Thompson, ‘‘Mexico Opens Files Related to ’71 Killings,’’ New York Times, February 13, 2005; James C. McKinley Jr., ‘‘Mexican Judge Throws Out Genocide Charge,’’ New York Times, July 27, 2005; McKinley, ‘‘Mexican Report Cites Leaders for ‘Dirty War,’ ’’ New York Times, December 23, 2006; ‘‘Colombia Unearthing Plight of Its ‘Disappeared’: Families of Victims of Right-Wing Militias Come Forward,’’ New York Times, August 10, 2005; Larry Rohter, ‘‘Chile’s Leader Attacks Amnesty for Pinochet-Era Crimes,’’ New York Times, December 24, 2006; and Blanton’s essay in this volume. 11. The neoconservative commentator Charles Krauthammer brought the term ‘‘empire’’ ‘‘out of the closet’’ (his words) in 2002; also see the writings of Wall Street Journal editor Max Boot: for example, ‘‘The Case for American Empire: The Most Realistic Response to Terrorism Is for America to Embrace Its Imperial Role,’’ Weekly Standard, October 15, 2001; and The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002). For an earlier statement, see Robert Kagan, ‘‘Benevolent Empire,’’ Foreign Policy, no. 111 (summer 1998): 24–36; for a more recent forum that rehabilitates the concept, see ‘‘Imperialistics’’/‘‘Kill the Empire! (Or Not),’’ New York Times Book Review, July 25, 2004, esp. 11–13, 23. In a similar vein, see Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004). For discussions of the

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‘‘new imperial discourse,’’ see Fred Rosen, ‘‘Introductory Essay,’’ in ‘‘Empire and Dissent,’’ special issue, nacla Report on the Americas 39, no. 2 (September–October 2005): 4–7; Alan Knight, ‘‘Empire, Hegemony and Globalization in the Americas,’’ nacla Report on the Americas 39, no. 2 (September–October 2005): 8–12; and Greg Grandin, ‘‘Imperial Overstretch,’’ Harper’s Magazine, December 2004, 89–93. 12. Rosen, ‘‘Introductory Essay,’’ 4; also see Luis Fernando Ayerbe, Los Estados Unidos y la América Latina: La construcción de la hegemonía (Havana: Casa de las Americas, 2001), esp. 292, for a similar rendition of the severely qualified values and ‘‘benefits’’ that the United States has bestowed on Latin America since World War II. For an incisive critique of the promotion and perils of U.S. ‘‘liberal imperialism’’ in the Caribbean Basin over the past century, see Michel Gobat, Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), esp. 267–80. 13. See, for example, Simon Romero, ‘‘Venezuela Groups Get U.S. Aid amid Meddling Charges,’’ New York Times, November 9, 2006. For the first substantial treatment of this Bush-administration phenomenon, which includes a diversity of views by U.S. and Latin American scholars, journalists, activists, and democracy promotion practitioners, see ‘‘In the Name of Democracy: U.S. Intervention in the Americas Today,’’ ed. Jonah Gindin and Kirsten Weld, special issue, nacla Report on the Americas 40, no. 1 (January– February 2007). For a darkly humorous documentary film on the marketing of America’s ‘‘brand’’ of democracy in Bolivia, see Rachel Boynton’s Our Brand Is Crisis (2005). 14. Not for nothing have Russianists like Stephen F. Cohen begun to speak ominously of a ‘‘new Cold War’’ in U.S.–Russian relations. See Cohen’s ‘‘The New American Cold War,’’ in The Nation, July 17, 2006. 15. See, for example, ‘‘Deal Approved to Send Russian Jets and Helicopters to Venezuela,’’ New York Times, July 28, 2006. Chávez’s highly publicized catching and expulsion of U.S. diplomats as ‘‘spies,’’ and the alarm that is registered in Washington every time Chávez or one of his diplomats visits a ‘‘terrorist regime’’ (e.g., Iran and Syria), also trigger memories of analogous choreographies during the Cold War. Indeed, in August 2006 the New York Times referred to ‘‘unsubstantiated claims’’ among Chavista opponents that ‘‘Mr. Chávez wants eventually to replay the Cuban missile crisis.’’ ‘‘Venezuela Boasts of Catching 4 U.S. Spies; Embassy Denies It,’’ New York Times, August 20, 2006; Simon Romero, ‘‘Venezuela, Tired of U.S. Influence, Strengthens Its Relationships in the Middle East,’’ New York Times, August 21, 2006 (quotation on a7); cf. David Sanger and Elaine Sciolino, ‘‘Iran Strategy: Cold War Echo,’’ New York Times, April 30, 2006. On the Central American roots of New Right foreign policy, see Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Henry Holt, 2006). 16. Regarding the balancing act of the Mexican state, also see Lorenzo Meyer, ‘‘La guerra fría en el mundo periférico: El caso del régimen autoritario mexicano. La utilidad del anticomunismo discreto,’’ and Jürgen Buchenau, ‘‘Por una guerra fría más templada: México entre el cambio revolucionario y la reacción estadounidense en Guatemala y

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Cuba,’’ both in Spenser, Espejos de la guerra fría, 95–117 and 119–49, respectively; and Kate Doyle, ‘‘The Quiet Americans: U.S. Policy in Mexico during the Cold War,’’ paper presented at the conference ‘‘México, América Central y el Caribe durante la guerra fría,’’ Mexico City, November 2002. 17. 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): 621–36, quote on 625. Friedman puts most of the blame on diplomatic historians, who have been slow to learn the relevant languages and use foreign archives. For an even more admonishing statement, by a past president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, which warns diplomatic historians to ‘‘internationalize’’ their scholarship before much of their field is ‘‘usurped’’ by area studies, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and American studies scholars, see Michael J. Hogan, ‘‘The ‘Next Big Thing’: The Future of Diplomatic History in a Global Age,’’ Diplomatic History 28, no. 1 (January 2004): 1–21. 18. Indeed, Hogan, in ‘‘The ‘Next Big Thing,’ ’’ laments that the field of U.S. foreign relations history and its flagship journal, Diplomatic History, have become ‘‘so narrowly focused on the Cold War’’ that some of the best diplomatic history research on imperialism, comparative and international history, and other themes is now published elsewhere (20). 19. In this regard, the most significant contributions to date are Westad’s awardwinning synthesis The Global Cold War, which like this volume interrogates the rather U.S. and Eurocentric notion of Cold War ‘‘peripheries,’’ and Piero Gleijeses’s Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 20. For the opening up of new caches of documents in Latin America and the Eastern bloc, see Blanton’s contribution and Spenser’s concluding chapter, respectively. The excitement generated by the bulk declassification of U.S. records that took place during the Clinton administration was tempered recently by revelations that the cia, U.S. military and intelligence, and other federal agencies have secretly been withdrawing from public access and at times reclassifying tens of thousands of pages of National Archives and Records Administration materials—documents these agencies felt had been improperly released. The disclosures have unleashed a firestorm of criticism from historians and other researchers, who contend that rather than constituting a threat to national security, these materials—some of which are more than fifty years old—were sequestered because they were embarrassing to the agencies in question. As this volume went into production, historians and scholars were awaiting the results of a government audit of the process of reclassification by the Information Security Oversight O≈ce. See New York Times, 21 February 2006, http://nytimes.com/2006/02/21/politics/21reclassify.html; and Bruce Craig, ‘‘Historians Expose Government Reclassification E√ort,’’ Perspectives: Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association 44, no. 4 (April 2006): 29–30. 21. On these scholarly trends, see Melvyn P. LeΔer, ‘‘Inside Enemy Archives: The Cold

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War Reopened,’’ Foreign A√airs 75, no. 4 (July–August 1996): 120–35; and LeΔer, ‘‘The Cold War: What Do ‘We Now Know’?’’ American Historical Review 104, no. 2 (April 1999): 501–24. 22. The new journals for Cold War specialists are the Journal of Cold War Studies, inaugurated by the Harvard Project on Cold War Studies in 1999; Cold War History, produced by the London School of Economics’ Cold War Studies Centre and first published in 2000; and American Communist History, sponsored by the Historians of American Communism, which began operations in 2002. The Cold War International History Project (cwihp), founded at the Smithsonian Institution’s Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington in 1991, has actively supported the dissemination of historical materials as governments on all sides of the Cold War have made such material available, and has become one of the major forums for new scholarly debates about the conflict. In addition to holding regular seminars and maintaining an award-winning website, the cwihp publishes articles, documents, and correspondence in its Bulletin and sponsors a book series. The National Security Archive at George Washington University has become the main conduit for ferreting out and circulating new archival sources, particularly declassified materials. 23. Mark T. Gilderhus, ‘‘An Emerging Synthesis? U.S.–Latin American Relations since the Second World War,’’ in America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941, ed. Michael J. Hogan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 424–61 (quotation on 424); originally published in Diplomatic History 27, no. 5 (November 2003): 429–52. 24. Grandin, ‘‘O√ the Beach: The United States, Latin America, and the Cold War,’’ in A Companion to Post-1945 America, ed. Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosensweig (New York: Blackwell, 2002), 426–45 (quotation on 426). The fortieth anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis has fomented a new cycle of foreign relations literature that has brought Cuba into the context of a broader, multisided ‘‘Caribbean Crisis’’ that transcends thirteen days of brinkmanship by the world’s superpowers. For example, in addition to Spenser’s essay in this volume, see Adolfo Gilly, ‘‘A la luz del relámpago: Cuba en octubre,’’ in Spenser, Espejos de la guerra fría, 215–45, and the National Security Archive’s fortieth-anniversary web page at http://www.gwu.edu/&nsachiv/nsa/cuba— mis—cri/index.htm. Also see the papers from the panel (‘‘Putting Cuba into the Cuban Missile Crisis’’) organized by Peter Kornbluh and James G. Blight for the Latin American Studies Association’s March 2003 meeting. The session focused on Cuban agency and placed events in a context of U.S.–Cuban hostility going back years; and see Blight’s and Kornbluh’s earlier volume Politics of Illusion: The Bay of Pigs Invasion Re-examined (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1998). 25. One is struck by the virtual absence of Latin America in new specialist journals like Cold War History and the Journal of Cold War Studies, even as coverage of other regions of the global South (e.g., South Asia and the Middle East) has increased. The flag-

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ship journal for foreign relations history, Diplomatic History, has done a bit better, but Latin America still remains grossly underrepresented in the journal’s o√erings on the Cold War. 26. LeΔer, ‘‘Bringing It Together: The Parts and the Whole,’’ in Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory, ed. Odd Arne Westad (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 43–63 (quotation on 56–57). Westad’s collection is particularly helpful in articulating the scholarly consensus on the Cold War’s broad contours; also see Hogan, America in the World. 27. LeΔer, ‘‘Bringing It Together,’’ 57. New scholarship on the Cold War’s denouement has proliferated of late. See, for example, the special issue ‘‘Ideas, International Relations, and the End of the Cold War,’’ Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 2 (spring 2005), which was preceded by a useful survey article by Jeremy Suri, ‘‘Explaining the End of the Cold War: A New Historical Consensus?’’ Journal of Cold War Studies, 4, no. 4 (fall 2002): 60– 92. Also see Olav Njolstad, ed., The Last Decade of the Cold War: From Escalation to Conflict Transformation (London: Frank Cass, 2004); Silvio Pons and Federico Romero, eds., Reinterpreting the End of the Cold War (London: Frank Cass, 2005); and the final two chapters (‘‘Actors’’ and ‘‘The Triumph of Hope’’) in John Gaddis’s recent interpretive synthesis The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin Press, 2005). 28. Anders Stephanson, ‘‘Ideology and Neorealist Mirrors,’’ Diplomatic History 17 (spring 1993): 285–95 (quotation on 293). 29. John Lewis Gaddis, ‘‘The Long Peace: Elements of Stability in the Postwar International System,’’ International Security 10 (spring 1986): 99–142; later reprinted as the final chapter in Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Though see Gaddis’s latest synthesis, The Cold War, which stresses the agency of ‘‘visionaries’’ such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who set about ‘‘sabotaging’’ the East–West stalemate by exploiting Soviet weaknesses and asserting the West’s strengths. 30. Stephanson, ‘‘Ideology and Neorealist Mirrors,’’ 294–95. 31. The following historiographic discussion draws on a broad literature, especially the essays in the Westad and Hogan collections cited earlier; Melvyn P. LeΔer, ‘‘The Interpretive Wars over the Cold War, 1945–1960,’’ in American Foreign Relations Reconsidered, 1890–1993, ed. Gordon Martel (New York: Routledge, 1994), 106–24; LeΔer, ‘‘New Approaches, Old Interpretations, and Prospective Reconfigurations, Diplomatic History 19 (spring 1995): 173–96; and Robert Buzzanco, ‘‘What Happened to the New Left? Toward a Radical Reading of American Foreign Relations,’’ Diplomatic History 23 (fall 1999): 575– 608. 32. See especially George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951). 33. For a discussion of the long-running debates between ‘‘revisionists’’ and their ‘‘realist’’ and ‘‘postrevisionist’’ critics, see Paul M. Buhle and Edward Rice-Maximin,

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William Appleman Williams: The Tragedy of Empire (New York: Routledge, 1995); and Bruce Cumings, ‘‘ ‘Revising Postrevisionism,’ Or, The Poverty of Theory in Diplomatic History,’’ in Hogan, America in the World, 20–62. 34. See, for example, John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972; Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); and Gaddis, ‘‘The Emerging Post-Revisionist Thesis on the Origins of the Cold War,’’ Diplomatic History 7 (summer 1983): 171–90. 35. Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945–1954, quoted in LeΔer, ‘‘Interpretive Wars,’’ 110. 36. The phrase comes from the Norwegian historian Geir Lundestad; see his essay ‘‘Empire by Invitation? The United States and Western Europe, 1945–1952,’’ Journal of Peace Research, 23 (1986): 263–77. 37. See, for example, Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 359. 38. John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 39. It should be pointed out that Gaddis’s synthesis is not based on his own research in the newly accessible archives but rather is culled from the way other historians have read the documents. 40. Odd Arne Westad, introduction to Reviewing the Cold War, 5. 41. Not least for Gaddis, the Cold War was the product of Stalin’s brutal, paranoid, and narcissistic personality. He waged cold wars incessantly, ‘‘within the international system, within his alliances, within his country, within his party, within his personal entourage . . . even within his family.’’ Gaddis, We Now Know, 292–93. 42. Gaddis’s presidential address, ‘‘The Tragedy of Cold War History,’’ was published in Diplomatic History 17 (winter 1993): 1–16, and, in slightly di√erent form, in Foreign A√airs, 73, no. 1 (January–February 1994): 142–55. 43. LeΔer, ‘‘The Cold War,’’ 523, 501. Since these comments by LeΔer in 1999, a rather acrimonious debate has ensued between the triumphalists and their critics. See, for example, Ellen Schrecker, ed., Cold War Triumphalism: The Misuse of History after the Fall of Communism (New York: New Press, 2004); and John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003). 44. LeΔer, ‘‘Inside Enemy Archives,’’ 120–21. LeΔer’s larger argument about realpolitik and contingency is certainly on target, but his statement that the Soviet Union lacked ‘‘preconceived plans to make Eastern Europe communist’’ or ‘‘support the Chinese communists’’ seems rather dubious. The war in Korea may have surprised the Soviets, but the weight of new research supports the view that the Soviet Union had formulated a careful strategy vis-à-vis Eastern Europe before the end of World War II, and their e√orts to support Mao’s Communists began as far back as 1920. On these matters, see Vojtech Mastny, The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Odd Arne Westad, ed., Brothers in Arms: The Rise

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and Fall of the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1945–1963 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); and Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005), esp. 19. Regarding the self-interested, refractory, and often pivotal role of Soviet client states (and the West’s ‘‘junior partners’’) in the global history of the Cold War, see Tony Smith, ‘‘A Pericentric Framework for the Study of the Cold War,’’ Diplomatic History, 24, no. 1 (fall 2000): 567–91; for a particularly apposite monograph, see Sergei N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis, and Xue Litai, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). 45. LeΔer, ‘‘Inside Enemy Archives,’’ 120–21. This point is strongly underscored by Westad in The Global Cold War, particularly in the bleak concluding chapter (397–407). 46. Michael J. Hogan, ‘‘The Historiography of American Foreign Relations: An Introduction,’’ in Hogan, America in the World, 159–165 (quotation on 163). This fear is well taken, though thus far document releases from Communist archives have produced important shifts in our understanding of pivotal issues in Cold War history, for Latin America (see, for example, the contributions to this volume by Spenser and Gleijeses) and elsewhere. 47. Regarding such ‘‘fetishization,’’ some foreign relations historians who study Latin America have complained that the editors of journals specializing in Cold War history (see note 22 earlier) excessively prize submissions that discuss newly released documents, and not those merely based on reinterpretations of older sources or on oral histories. One colleague reports that editors bluntly told him not to bother sending a manuscript if it contained no new treasure trove of documents. 48. The following discussion draws heavily on Grandin, ‘‘O√ the Beach,’’ 427–30; Gilderhus, ‘‘An Emerging Synthesis?’’; and Gilbert M. Joseph, ‘‘Close Encounters: Toward a New Cultural History of U.S.–Latin American Relations,’’ in Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.–Latin American Relations, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand, and Ricardo D. Salvatore (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 3–46, esp. 10–13. 49. Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre, xii. 50. Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (New York: Norton, 1984). For an influential statement by a Latin American dependentista on the deformation of inter-American relations during the Cold War, see Ayerbe, Los Estados Unidos y la América Latina. 51. William M. LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard: The United States and Central America, 1977–1992 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 52. Cf. Mark T. Berger, ‘‘U.S. Power, North American Knowledge and the Cold War,’’ Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 2, no. 1 (1997): 41–63, which points up the ‘‘convergence’’ of liberal and radical approaches in the foreign relations literature on the Cold War in Latin America. 53. 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,

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1999), 199. Significantly, in his latest work, a study of U.S. meddling in British Guiana from 1953 to 1969, U.S. Intervention in British Guiana: A Cold War Story (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), which engages in a much more grassroots— and, at times, even cultural and gendered—analysis of the deployment of power, Rabe is much more critical of the White House’s (as well as the cia’s) role. 54. Robert A. Pastor, ‘‘A Discordant Consensus on Democracy,’’ Diplomatic History 17, no. 1 (1993): 117–28, especially 125; also see the critique in Grandin, ‘‘O√ the Beach,’’ 430. 55. Marilyn Young, cited in Dina M. Copelman and Barbara Clark Smith, ‘‘Excerpts from a Conference to Honor William Appleman Williams,’’ Radical History Review 50 (1991): 39–70 (quotation on 69). 56. Gaddis, We Now Know, 178. 57. Marc Bloch, cited in Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, eds., The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—the Stalin Era (New York: Modern Library, 1999), ix. 58. See, for example, my recent edited collection in collaboration with Ann Rubenstein and Eric Zolov, Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico since 1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). 59. Thucydides, cited in Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy towards Latin America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), xii. For a thoughtful critique by a foreign relations scholar of ‘‘the almost exclusive preoccupation in U.S.-based scholarship with Washington policy and policy-makers,’’ which, while ‘‘enlightening on the U.S. side[,] . . . sadly bears too marked a resemblance to the nature of U.S.-Latin American policy,’’ see Stephen J. Randall, ‘‘Ideology, National Security, and the Corporate State: The Historiography of U.S.–Latin American Relations,’’ Latin American Research Review 27, no. 1 (1992): 205–17 (quotation on 206). 60. See Gilbert M. Joseph, ed., Reclaiming the Political in Latin American History: Essays from the North (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), especially the essays in part 1. 61. On the relevance of ‘‘contact zones,’’ see Joseph et al., Close Encounters of Empire, and Joseph et al., Fragments of a Golden Age; also see ‘‘The Nation and Beyond,’’ a special issue of the Journal of American History (December 1999), especially David Thelan’s essay ‘‘The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History,’’ 976–86. Thelan gives particular attention to ‘‘how people and ideas and institutions and cultures move above, below, through, and around, as well as within the nation state’’ (976). Several works by mainstream diplomatic historians underscore the utility of this approach for studies of Latin America and the Cold War’s ‘‘peripheries’’: see Eric P. Roorda, The Dictator Next Door: The Good Neighbor Policy and the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998); Friedman, ‘‘Retiring the Puppets’’; Rabe, U.S. Intervention in British Guiana; and Odd Arne Westad, ‘‘The New International History of the Cold War: Three (Possible) Paradigms,’’ Diplomatic History 24, no. 4 (fall 2000): 551–65; also see Hogan, ‘‘The ‘Next Big Thing,’ ’’ esp. 14–17. 62. The quotation on gatekeepers appears in Melvyn LeΔer’s presidential address to

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the Society of Foreign Relations Historians, ‘‘New Approaches, Old Interpretations,’’ 193; also see Buzzanco, ‘‘What Happened to the New Left?’’ For an e√ective critique of such ‘‘gatekeeping,’’ see Robert Dean, ‘‘Tradition, Cause and E√ect, and the Cultural History of International Relations,’’ Diplomatic History 24 (fall 2000): 615–22. While progress has been obvious in the field as a whole, the newer approaches have manifested themselves more slowly in journals specializing in Cold War studies. Developments are most encouraging in the International History Review and in the field’s premier journal, Diplomatic History. Since about 2000, Diplomatic History has made a concerted e√ort to open itself up to new approaches, first under the editorship of Michael Hogan and then under Robert Schulzinger. In his 2003 presidential address to the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, Hogan referred positively to the journal’s commitment to include more nontraditional topics, such as race and gender studies, as well as ‘‘new theoretical approaches, most notably those borrowed from cultural studies.’’ Hogan, ‘‘The ‘Next Big Thing,’ ’’ 2. Thus far, however, articles showcasing these nontraditional themes and theoretical approaches have largely been restricted to special issues and roundtables. Moreover, responses to these contributions from more conventional foreign relations historians have been skeptical, to put it mildly: Witness the rocky reception new approaches have received in the field’s electronic journal, H-DIPLO, which since 1997 has featured an online discussion of articles published in Diplomatic History. Meanwhile the newer Cold War journals have not done as well as Diplomatic History in integrating new social, cultural, and interdisciplinary approaches into their regular fare. For a preliminary survey of recent work in Cold War cultural history, see Robert Gri≈th, ‘‘The Cultural Turn in Cold War Studies,’’ Reviews in American History 29 (2001): 15–57; and Hogan, ‘‘The ‘Next Big Thing.’ ’’ 63. I can only gesture here to a representative slice of this proliferating literature on American empire and the Cold War. For starters, see Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993); and the new essays by Emily Rosenberg, Frank Costigliola, and others in the revised edition of Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson, eds., Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Also see the following (listed roughly in the order in which they appeared): Frank Costigliola, France and the United States: The Cold Alliance since World War II (New York: Twayne, 1992); Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997); Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Hoganson, ‘‘Adding Currency to Culture,’’ Diplomatic History 25, no. 2 (spring 2001): 329–34; Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, Transmission Impossible: American Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany, 1945– 1955 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999); Mark Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology:

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American Social Science and ‘‘Nation Building’’ in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Andrew J. Rotter, Comrades at Odds: The United States and India, 1947–1964 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000); Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945–2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Robert Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001); Mary Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1946 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006; Maria Hohn, gis and Frauleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Alan McPherson, Yankee No! Anti-Americanism in U.S.–Latin American Relations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); Emily Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Seth Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Jacobs, ‘‘ ‘Infamy’ and Other Legacies,’’ Reviews in American History 32, no. 2 (2004): 239–46; Jana Lipman, ‘‘Guantánamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution, 1939–1979’’ (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2006); Harvey R. Neptune, Caliban and the Yankees: Trinidad and the United States Occupation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); and the works cited earlier in note 61. 64. See, for example, the essays by Joseph, Fein, Zolov, and Bachelor in collections such as Close Encounters of Empire and Fragments of a Golden Age. 65. For a stimulating essay on Latin America’s role during the Cold War as an indispensable laboratory for America’s ‘‘new imperial’’ mind-set under the Bush administration (which is much less indebted to poststructuralist and postcolonial approaches), see Grandin, Empire’s Workshop. 66. This register of analysis has also been lacking in recent high-profile syntheses of the Cold War. As exemplary as Westad’s 2005 synthesis of the global Cold War is, it is weakest for Latin America; even on its strongest terrain—Asia—it rarely transcends general examinations of Third World nationalisms and leaders to engage quotidian struggles at society’s grassroots. Gaddis’s eminently readable synthesis, The Cold War: A New History (released almost simultaneously with Westad’s study), is, by contrast, a history of superpower grand strategy that gives short shrift to the global South, which provided almost all of the victims of the conflict’s intermittent proxy wars. On this point, see the Europeanist Tony Judt’s critique, ‘‘A Story Still to Be Told,’’ The Nation, March 23, 2006.

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67. Gaddis, We Now Know, 285; also see The Cold War, esp. chapter 7 and the epilogue. For a compelling analysis of ‘‘subaltern collaboration’’ with Central America’s authoritarian regimes, see Robert H. Holden, ‘‘Constructing the Limits of State Violence in Central America: Towards a New Research Agenda,’’ Journal of Latin American Studies 28, no. 2 (May 1996): 435–59, esp. 442–46. 68. Grandin, ‘‘O√ the Beach,’’ 430; also see Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre, 17. 69. See, for example, Seth Fein, ‘‘Myths of Cultural Imperialism and Nationalism in Golden Age Mexican Cinema,’’ in Joseph et al., Fragments of a Golden Age, 159–98. 70. See Grandin and Joseph, A Century of Revolution, especially the essays in part 1 (‘‘The First Cold War’’) by Jocelyn Olcott (‘‘Mueras y Matanza: Spectacles of Terror and Violence in Postrevolutionary Mexico’’); Je√rey L. Gould (‘‘On the Road to ‘El Porvenir’: Revolutionary and Counterrevolutionary Violence in El Salvador and Nicaragua’’); and Thomas M. Klubock (‘‘Ránquil: Violence and Peasant Politics on Chile’s Southern Frontier’’). 71. Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough, eds., Latin America between the Second World War and the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); also see their synoptic essay, ‘‘The Impact of the Cold War on Latin America,’’ in Origins of the Cold War: An International History, ed. Melvyn P. LeΔer and David Painter (New York: Routledge, 1994), 293–316. 72. Bethell and Roxborough, ‘‘Conclusion: The Postwar Conjuncture in Latin America and Its Consequences,’’ in Latin America between the Second World War and the Cold War, 327–28. 73. See, for example, Nigel Haworth, ‘‘Peru,’’ in Bethell and Roxborough, Latin America between the Second World War and the Cold War, 170–89. 74. Daniel James, Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine Working Class, 1946–1976 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 34. 75. See, for example, Thomas Miller Klubock, Contested Communities: Class, Gender, and Politics in Chile’s El Teniente Copper Mine, 1904–1951 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998); Karin Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises: Political Cultures and the State in Chile, 1920–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); James, Resistance and Integration; Je√rey Gould, To Lead as Equals: Rural Protest and Political Consciousness in Chinandega, Nicaragua, 1912–1979 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); John French, The Brazilian Workers’ ABC: Class Conflict and Alliances in Modern Sao Paulo (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Jocelyn Olcott, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); and John W. Green, ‘‘Sibling Rivalry on the Left and Labor Struggles in Colombia during the 1940s,’’ Latin American Research Review 35, no. 1 (2000): 85–117. Grandin e√ectively analyzes this new wave of scholarship on the confluence of populist and left formations after World War II in The Last Colonial Massacre, esp. 177–79; also see ‘‘O√ the Beach,’’ 432–33. 76. See, for example, Fidel’s now-classic 1953 trial defense speech, History Will Absolve

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Me, bilingual edition (New York: Center for Cuban Studies, n.d.); cf. Ho Chi Minh, Selected Works, vol. 3 (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960–62), 17–21. 77. The letter, which can be read online at the website of the U.S. National Archives, is cited in Grandin, ‘‘O√ the Beach,’’ 431. 78. For the broader periodization and national variations, see Bethell and Roxborough, Latin America between the Second World War and the Cold War. 79. Bethell and Roxborough, ‘‘The Impact of the Cold War,’’ 313 (italics mine). 80. See, for example, Sandra McGee Deutsch, Las Derechas: The Extreme Right in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, 1890–1939 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Sandra McGee Deutsch and Ronald H. Dolkart, eds., The Argentine Right: Its History and Intellectual Origins, 1910 to the Present (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1993); Frederick B. Pike, Hispanismo, 1898–1936: Spanish Conservatives and Liberals and Relations with Spanish America (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1971); Gould, ‘‘On the Road to ‘El Porvenir’ ’’; and Klubock, ‘‘Ránquil.’’ For a valuable analysis of Central America’s violent authoritarian political culture over a longue durée, see Robert H. Holden, Armies Without Nations: Public Violence and State Formation in Central America, 1821–1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 81. Bethell and Roxborough, ‘‘The Impact of the Cold War,’’ 306. 82. Thomas Mann, U.S. Department of State, 1951. I am grateful to Greg Grandin for bringing this citation to my attention. 83. Bethell and Roxborough, ‘‘The Impact of the Cold War,’’ 312–13. 84. Ibid., 314–15. 85. Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre, 17. 86. Ibid., 181. 87. Ibid., 183–84. 88. Ibid., 183. 89. Ibid., esp. chap. 3 (‘‘Unfinished Lives’’); also see Grandin, ‘‘O√ the Beach,’’ 437–38. The personal testimony that did much to reveal this state terror to the world is Rigoberta Menchú, Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (Mexico City Siglo XXI, 1985). 90. Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre, 186; cf. Aldo A. Lauria-Santiago, ‘‘The Culture and Politics of State Terror and Repression in El Salvador,’’ in When States Kill: Latin America, the U.S., and Technologies of Terror, ed. Cecilia Menjívar and Néstor Rodríguez (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 85–114; Holden, Armies Without Nations; and Holden, ‘‘Constructing the Limits of State Violence,’’ for the determinants of local cultures of repression in El Salvador and throughout Central America. 91. Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre, 185–86. 92. See, for example, Holden, Armies Without Nations, pt. 2; Martha K. Huggins, Political Policing: The United States and Latin America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998); Marguerite Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A De-

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classified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability, rev. ed. (New York: New Press, 2004); Menjívar and Rodríguez, When States Kill; Ariel C. Armony, ‘‘Producing and Exporting State Terror,’’ in Menjívar and Rodríguez, When States Kill, 305–31, as well as the essay in this volume; Sergio Aguayo Quezada, México, 1968: Los archivos de la violencia (Mexico City: Grijalbo-Reforma, 1998), and La charola: Una historia de los servicios de inteligencia en México (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 2001); Leslie Gill, The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); and Juan E. Corradi, Patricia Weiss Fagan, and Manuel Antonio Garretón, eds., Fear at the Edge: State Terror and Resistance in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 93. Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre, 188; also see Grandin’s more recent study Empire’s Workshop, esp. chapter 3, ‘‘Going Primitive: The Violence of the New Imperialism.’’ 94. J. Patrice McSherry, ‘‘Operation Condor as a Hemispheric ‘Counterterror’ Organization,’’ in Menjívar and Rodríguez, When States Kill, 28–56; Menjívar and Rodríguez, ‘‘State Terror in the U.S.–Latin American Interstate Regime,’’ in When States Kill, 3–27; Christopher Hitchens, ‘‘The Case against Henry Kissinger: Crimes against Humanity,’’ Harper’s Magazine, March 2001, 49–74; and John Dinges, The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents (New York: New Press, 2004); also see Blanton’s essay in this volume. 95. See Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre, 189, and ‘‘Living in Revolutionary Time’’; Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror, 42–43; Nancy Caro Hollander, Love in the Time of Hate: Liberation Psychology in Latin America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), quotation on 93. 96. The discussion in this paragraph draws on Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre, 190–91, and ‘‘O√ the Beach,’’ 438–39, as well as on Blanton’s essay in this volume. 97. Viron P. Vaky, Policy Planning Council, U.S. Department of State, to Covey T. Oliver, ara [Latin American Bureau], ‘‘Guatemala and Counter-Terror,’’ March 29, 1968, document 367 in the National Security Archive’s Guatemala collection, published by ProQuest/Chadwyck-Healey. I am grateful to the nsa’s Kate Doyle for originally bringing this document to my attention. 98. Quoted in Nick Cullather, Secret History: The cia’s Classified Account of Its Operation in Guatemala, 1952–1954 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 66. 99. Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre, 191. The notorious cia quote was reprinted in Harper’s Magazine in Christopher Hitchens’s two-part investigative report, ‘‘The Case against Henry Kissinger.’’ See part 1, ‘‘The Making of a War Criminal,’’ February 2001, 33– 58, esp. 53–58 (quotation on 53); and part 2, ‘‘Crimes against Humanity,’’ March 2001, 49– 74 (quotation on 49). 100. This venerable bromide is quoted in Friedman, ‘‘Retiring the Puppets,’’ 621. 101. Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre, 188; and see the discussion in Blanton’s essay in this volume. 102. For example, see Huggins, Political Policing, 135–36. For a recent documentary

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film that details the French contribution to the ideology and practice of counterinsurgent terror, see Marie-Monique Robin’s Death Squadrons: The French School (2003). 103. Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre, 186–87. 104. Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror, quotation on 19; Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre, 15. 105. The literature, both academic and more popular, on ‘‘low-intensity’’ conflict or warfare is quite extensive. For a broad sampling, see Lynn Horton, Peasants in Arms: War and Peace in the Mountains of Nicaragua, 1979–1994 (Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1998); Thomas Walker, ed., Reagan vs. the Sandinistas: The Undeclared War on Nicaragua (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1987); Timothy C. Brown, The Real Contra War: Highlander Peasant Resistance in Nicaragua (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001); Christopher Dickey, With the Contras: A Reporter in the Wilds of Nicaragua (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985); and Philip J. Williams and Knut Walter, Militarization and Demilitarization in El Salvador’s Transition to Democracy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997). 106. Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre, 195–96. On the military’s moderate social measures in Uruguay, see Juan Rial, ‘‘Makers and Guardians of Fear: Controlled Terror in Uruguay,’’ in Corradi, Fagen, and Garretón, Fear at the Edge, esp. 92–93. For militarysponsored social programs in poor Chilean neighborhoods, see Alison J. Bruey, ‘‘Organizing Community: Defying Dictatorship in Working-Class Santiago de Chile, 1973– 1983’’ (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2007), esp. chapter 4. 107. Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre, 189. 108. Ibid., 196; Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 109. The Last Colonial Massacre, esp. 196–97 and the preface. 110. Ibid., 197. 111. See, for example, Weinstein and Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood; Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Kyrill M. Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Ronald Radosh and Mary Habeck, eds., Documents on the Spanish Civil War ; and Haynes and Klehr, In Denial. In a personal communication, Grandin suggests that it is precisely the need of triumphalists to isolate liberalism and democracy from socialism that underlies this spate of new exposés of the espionage and authoritarian nature of the Communist Party of the United States during and after the New Deal and fuels the recent assault on the last great bastion of popular-front mythology, the Spanish Civil War. 112. Jorge G. Castañeda, Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left after the Cold War (New York: Knopf, 1993); David Stoll, Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999). 113. Grandin, ‘‘O√ the Beach,’’ 435; also see The Last Colonial Massacre, 4. 114. See, for example, the more hopeful reformist scenario that Kyle Langley paints for

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Costa Rica under Pepe Figueres, in The Sparrow and the Hawk: Costa Rica and the United States during the Rise of José Figueres (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997). Although Langley may be a bit too sanguine about the extent or staying power of early Cold War reform in Costa Rica, his study illuminates creative strategies of ‘‘non-violent resistance and accommodation’’ in small nations’ struggles against U.S. domination that Grandin’s analysis may elide. 115. Also see Meyer, ‘‘La guerra fría en el mundo periférico: El caso del régimen autoritario mexicano’’; Buchenau, ‘‘Por una guerra fría más templada’’; Fein, ‘‘Myths of Cultural Imperialism’’; and John Mraz, ‘‘Today, Tomorrow and Always: The Golden Age of Illustrated Magazines in Mexico, 1937–1960,’’ in Joseph et al., Fragments of a Golden Age, 116–57. In his provocative essay, Lorenzo Meyer argues that as long as Mexico’s wellentrenched pri was able to guarantee the nation’s stability—which it managed to do throughout the Cold War by means of a well-calibrated strategy that included both repression and timely doses of social reform—the United States tolerated the party’s nationalistic discourse and relative autonomy in foreign policy. In the process, the United States helped perpetuate Latin America’s longest-running authoritarian regime—the ‘‘perfect dictatorship’’—by refraining from making any real criticism of it. For disturbing recent revelations about the dynamics and scope of Mexico’s ‘‘dirty war,’’ see Alberto Ulloa Bornemann, Surviving Mexico’s Dirty War: A Political Prisoner’s Memoir (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007); and James C. McKinley Jr., ‘‘Mexican Report Cites Leaders for ‘Dirty War,’ ’’ New York Times, December 23, 2006. 116. On the challenges attending research on the 1960–1990s period in the aftermath of the Latin American Cold War, see Steve J. Stern, ‘‘Between Tragedy and Promise: The Politics of Writing Latin American History in the Late Twentieth Century,’’ in Joseph, Reclaiming the Political, 32–77. 117. The literature is growing rapidly, and I can cite only a portion of it here. In addition to the essays by Steven Bachelor and Carlota McAllister in this volume (and the broader ethnohistorical projects on which they are based), see Roger N. Lancaster, Life Is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Brown, The Real Contra War ; Ricardo Falla, The Story of a Great Love: Life with the Guatemalan ‘‘Communities of Population in Resistance’’ (Washington: epica, 1998); Deborah Levenson-Estrada, Trade Unionists against Terror: Guatemala City, 1954–1985 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado de Guatemala, Guatemala: Nunca más (Guatemala City, 1998); Comisión de Esclarecimiento Histórico, Guatemala: Memoria del silencio (Guatemala City, 1999); Elizabeth Oglesby, ‘‘Desde los Cuadernos de Myrna Mack: Reflexiones sobre la violencia, la memoria y la investigación social,’’ in De la memoria a la reconstrucción histórica (Guatemala City: avancso, 1999); Daniel Wilkinson, Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala (Boston: Houghton MiΔin, 2002); Linda Green, Fear as a Way of Life: Mayan Widows in Rural Guatemala (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Beatriz Manz, Paradise in Ashes: A Guatemalan Journey

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of Courage, Terror, and Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Steve Stern, ed., Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru, 1980–1995 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998); Orin Starn, Nightwatch: The Politics of Protest in the Andes (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); Daniel James, Doña María’s Story: Life, History, Memory, and Political Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); Peter Winn, Weavers of Revolution: The Yarur Workers and Chile’s Road to Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Rosa Isolde Reuque Paillef, When a Flower Is Reborn: The Life and Times of a Mapuche Feminist, ed. Florencia E. Mallon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Heidi Tinsman, Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950–1973 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Lynn Stephen, Zapata Lives! Histories and Cultural Politics in Southern Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Ulloa Bornemann, Surviving Mexico’s Dirty War ; and Diana Sorensen, A Turbulent Decade Remembered: Scenes from the Latin American Sixties (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). 118. In addition to a number of the works cited in the preceding note, see the case studies in Grandin and Joseph, A Century of Revolution; and Catherine LeGrand, ‘‘The Colombian Crisis in Historical Perspective,’’ Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 28, nos. 55–56 (2003): 165–210 (particularly with regard to local formations of the farc and the eln). 119. For example, see the series of books (‘‘Memorias de la Represión’’) edited since 2002 by the Argentine sociologist and historian Elizabeth Jelin and others, which emerged out of the Social Science Research Council’s long-term project ‘‘Collective Memory of Repression in the Southern Cone.’’ To date, twelve volumes have been produced. Another collaborator in this international interdisciplinary project, Steve Stern, has written a trilogy, under the umbrella title The Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile, which will be published by Duke University Press in 2004–9. The first two volumes are Remembering Pinochet’s Chile: On the Eve of London 1998 (2004) and Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet’s Chile, 1973–1988 (2006). Also see the discussion in Blanton’s essay of the intensely collaborative Memoria Abierta project in Argentina, and other initiatives around memory in the Southern Cone.

THOMAS S. BLANTON

Recovering the Memory of the Cold War Forensic History and Latin America

Few scholarly enterprises are more timely than the one presented in this volume, which promises to accelerate the process of bringing Cold War narratives into Latin American historiography, and even more importantly, Latin American narratives into Cold War historiography. There is a desperate need for this cross-fertilization, not least because Cold War historiography—like the unipolar world—su√ers from a hegemonic problem these days. Latin Americans and scholars of Latin America have major value to add, steeped as they are in the pilot project of unipolar hegemony tried out by the United States in this hemisphere during the Cold War years. In this chapter, I look first at examples of missing Latin American narratives in the prevailing Cold War history discourse, which has been dominated by North American, and to a lesser extent European, voices. Then comes a discussion of the breakthrough in Latin American political and social history provided by the truth commissions of the 1980s and 1990s, in their challenges to the authorities and their privileging of the victims of repression. Next I explore the restoration of evidence sparked by the truth commissions, especially in the form of declassified U.S. documentation, and the impact of this new documentation in countries like Guatemala and Argentina. I also describe the gradual recovery of the archival reality in Latin America as the result of various historical justice e√orts, showing that despite destruction and coverup, evidence and files have survived from a wide range of repressive regimes. Finally, I outline the challenge and opportunity for scholars who now can integrate multiple new primary sources into comparative studies, especially of authoritarian regimes and their interactivity with U.S. policy, while connecting the past with the Latin American present in which hyperactive military power and impunity both persist. Let us begin with the most prominent example of European scholarly impact on the writing of Cold War history. At the 2002 Norwegian Nobel Institute

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symposium on the end of the Cold War, one English scholar proudly pointed to the host, Geir Lundestad, head of the institute and secretary of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, and—clearly eager for another invitation back to the paradise of smoked herring and salad bowls of caviar that is Oslo—remarked that Lundestad’s now-famous notion of the U.S. ‘‘empire by invitation’’ (in contrast to the Soviet empire) was the single substantial European contribution to Cold War historiography at the conceptual level, which otherwise was completely dominated by U.S. scholars. Specifically, Michael Cox of the London School of Economics said that Lundestad’s idea was ‘‘perhaps the most—possibly the only—influential European concept to travel well across the Atlantic.’’∞ Latin Americans might point out that the concept does not travel well across the Caribbean, or certainly the South Atlantic. This is not for lack of nuance on Lundestad’s part, or cultural tunnel vision, or comparisons limited to the bipolar frame—the more typical sins of commission or omission on the part of superpower historians. Lundestad was among the first to call for a new ‘‘international’’ history: ‘‘To use a paradox, the study of American [i.e., U.S.] foreign policy should focus less on America. Instead, more attention should be paid to the many complex ‘local’ factors which in di√erent ways influenced Washington’s policies and/or helped determine the outcome of the events we are studying.’’≤ Lundestad stated that his study of the U.S. empire during the Cold War ‘‘supports the revisionist argument that the American expansion was really even more striking than the Soviet one, [but] it di√ers from revisionist accounts in that it stresses the invitational aspect of much of this expansion. Occasionally the United States did thrust itself into the a√airs of other countries. Yet, the basic pattern, particularly in the early post-war years, was a di√erent one. The rule was that the United States was invited in.’’≥ We should note the use of the word ‘‘occasionally’’ in regard to this ‘‘thrust’’ business. Lundestad is speaking from a European perspective, where indeed the invitational nature of the relationship with the U.S. seems predominant; yet the history of various U.S. Cold War ‘‘thrusts’’ in Europe is still to be written. For example, Marshall Plan administrator and later cia operations chief Richard Bissell revealed in his posthumous memoirs the diversion of the so-called counterpart funds—the 5 percent U.S. share of the local governments’ match in local currency of overall U.S. Marshall Plan funding—for covert operations in Europe.∂ But the internal cia history of its interventions in the French and Italian elections of 1948, to take only one such example, remains classified, despite several cia veterans who spoke on camera about the 1948 operations for cnn’s Cold War series and other documentaries.∑ A more powerful contrast to Lundestad’s formulation of ‘‘occasional thrusts’’

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but mostly ‘‘invitation’’ comes from the Latin American experience. Compare Lundestad, for example, to the description of the U.S. invitation to empire as found in Stephen G. Rabe’s superb study of the Kennedy administration’s Latin America policy: Through its recognition policy, internal security initiatives, and military and economic aid programs, the administration demonstrably bolstered regimes and groups that were undemocratic, conservative, and frequently repressive. Its destabilization campaigns in Argentina, Brazil, British Guiana,and Guatemala had ironic results. Arturo Frondisi, João Goulart, Cheddi Jagan, and Juan José Arévalo respected constitutional processes and praised the Alliance for Progress, while their authoritarian, antiCommunist successors opposed free elections and disdained the idea of social reform. . . . Like Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles, the president and his advisors opted for the short-term security that anti-Communist elites, especially military o≈cers, could provide over the benefits of long-term political and social democracy. . . . During his brief tenure, President Kennedy may have authorized more covert interventions in Latin America than any other postwar president—including Ronald Reagan, who fomented wars in Central America.∏

Reading Rabe (and many other scholars of Latin America), one might say that the invitation to the Empire Ball extended by the U.S. to Latin America was one that required her to be escorted by a sti√-backed colonel wearing sunglasses, who picked her up in a tinted-glass Jeep Cherokee driven by guards, who brought her home after midnight if at all. Consider, for example, the cia’s own assessment, written by its Directorate of Intelligence in 1983, of its 1954 coup in Guatemala, seen as a Cold War triumph at the time. Nearly thirty years later, the cia admitted that the coup had ‘‘ended a decade of economic and social reforms’’ and empowered elites who ‘‘share a tacit understanding that unpredictable and unmanageable political processes—such as free elections and greater popular participation—are inimical to their interests’’ and who therefore ‘‘killed’’ opponents who ‘‘could not be co-opted, silenced or frightened into exile’’ with ‘‘government . . . and rightwing-sponsored use of death squads.’’π A further example of the need for Latin American narratives in Cold War history can be found in the book that dominated the European debate in the 1990s over the Cold War, so much so that Harvard University Press issued an American edition that received significant attention and praise.∫ The Black Book of Communism began life as an entry in the French polemics sweepstakes and displays an extreme unevenness in its research and presentation. The section on Poland and Central Europe, written by two of the most distinguished and entrepreneurial scholars using the newly opened Eastern bloc archives (Andrzej

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Paczkowski and Karel Bartosek), presents a complex, archivally based, historiographically embedded description and analysis of the horrors visited upon East and Central Europe by the Stalinist system. At one point, for example, Paczkowski even comments critically on the overall enterprise of the book: ‘‘Looking at the past only from the point of view of repression risks a somewhat deformed assessment of the Communist system, since even in the most repressive periods the system did have other functions.’’Ω In stark contrast to the sophisticated treatment of Eastern and Central Europe, the Black Book’s section on Latin America is superficial and almost purely polemical. The author, Pascal Fontaine, is described only as a ‘‘journalist with special knowledge of Latin America,’’ but to call the essay journalism is to insult the profession. Fontaine actually has a more distinguished pedigree (as Jean Monnet’s last assistant from 1973 to 1977, an aide to the president of the European Parliament from 1984 to 1987, and a Ph.D.-credentialed political scientist at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris), so one wonders at The Black Book’s cursory credit line; but at least it is consistent with the essay’s own cursory treatment of Latin America. Fontaine’s section consists of three parts, on the Castro regime in Cuba, on the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, and on the Shining Path insurrection in Peru. The author seems to have consulted only a handful of articles and books, mostly published in French; and the Nicaragua section—to note only one of many glaring omissions—does not mention the cia or the Argentines. Indeed, Fontaine puts in quotes the words ‘‘armed incursions of Somocista guards’’ as if to cast doubt on their existence; in the same sentence, he calls these incursions merely a ‘‘pretext’’ for Sandinista repression.∞≠ One can only speculate at the motivations behind giving such short shrift to Latin America. Perhaps one di≈culty for the editors of The Black Book was that the Western Hemisphere has generated a multivolume, multinational work that is the equivalent of a ‘‘black book of anti-Communism.’’ Beginning in Argentina with the collapse of the military junta after the Malvinas War, citizens of Latin America launched ‘‘truth commissions’’ to investigate the human rights abuses committed by military governments in the name of fighting Communism— especially the unknown fates of the desaparecidos (disappeared persons). Argentina’s famous Nunca Más report of 1984 set a precedent for the region, followed by Chile’s Rettig Commission (formally the Commission of Truth and Reconciliation) in 1991, El Salvador’s Commission on the Truth in 1993, and the ninevolume work of Guatemala’s Historical Clarification Commission in 1999.∞∞ Even with the constraints imposed by persisting military power and political compromise (such as amnesty laws for military perpetrators and prohibitions

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on ‘‘naming names’’ of rights abusers), the reports of the Latin American truth commissions stand as landmarks of justice and history. They represent a base line for the new international history of Latin America in the Cold War, especially to the extent that they have created new archives of documentation and testimonies about recent history, both in Latin America and in the United States. By privileging the victims of the violence and exposing the horrors—up to and including a specific finding of acts of genocide, in the Guatemala case, against indigenous peoples in the early 1980s—the commissions a√ected the balance of power in each country toward greater accountability, though in very di√erent ways in each national circumstance. The commissions reached out to victims, to human rights monitors, to international ngos like the National Security Archive, and even to foreign governments for support and for evidence. It was precisely in this vast expansion of the evidentiary base that the commissions moved into the realm of forensics, the art and science of verification of evidence, usually meant in the legal or judicial sense, but here applied to history— using forensic language and methods, exhumation and autopsy, deposition and cross-examination.∞≤ The ultimate achievement, of course, was to break the conspiracies of silence, the airbrushing of history, the willful forgetfulness, the coverup of state terror, in which the Latin American authoritarians were so tragically reminiscent of the Stalinism that they saw as their ideological enemy. It was a Czech writer, Milan Kundera, who remarked at the beginning of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting that ‘‘the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’’ The truth commissions opened political space, both in their own countries and in the United States, especially once the Cold War was over. Another entire book would be required to trace the interactive e√ects of the Cold War’s ending on the motivations of U.S. o≈cials, guerrillas of various political persuasions, incumbent military and authoritarian regimes, and would-be peacemakers in Latin America; but su≈ce it here to say that the opportunity for memory and the struggle against power was seized in Latin America in ways that have not yet come to Russia, and only fitfully across Eastern Europe.∞≥ Only days after the Soviet flag came down for the last time from the Kremlin ramparts, for example, Salvadorans from the government and from the rebels signed peace agreements in January 1992 that included a mandate for a United Nations ‘‘Commission on the Truth’’ to investigate the violence and the impunity in the twelve-year civil war. After interviews with more than two thousand Salvadorans as well as rapid compilation and analysis of thousands of pages of documents previously released from U.S. files under the Freedom of Information Act, the commis-

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sion reported in March 1993 on thirty-two specific cases of gross human rights abuses, named names of the perpetrators (who were barred from future political activity), and established that 85 percent of the violations were the responsibility of state security forces and associated death squads and paramilitary groups.∞∂ The opening of political space also triggered its equal and opposite reaction in El Salvador. Instead of judicial proceedings to follow up the Truth Commission report, the ruling party (which had originally been founded and led by death squad organizers such as Roberto D’Aubuisson) responded by passing an amnesty law that halted any progress toward an independent judiciary, and even freed convicted murderers (two o≈cers who had organized the 1989 assassinations of six Jesuit priests). The El Salvador experience showed that truth is not enough in the face of persisting impunity for the powerful and that information is necessary but not su≈cient to change the balance of power; yet the Truth Commission’s e√ort did change the base line of acknowledgment and settled some contested terrain. For example, while the commission worked in 1992, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense, or eaaf) came to El Salvador and pulled back the veil on one of the most notorious human rights cases, that of the El Mozote massacre. The eaaf began in 1984 as a direct outgrowth of the Argentine truth commission, the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (conadep), which asked for forensic help, attracted noted experts from around the world (such as Dr. Clyde Snow), and began to professionalize the process of exhumation and identification of human rights victims, not only in Argentina but around the world.∞∑ At El Mozote, the eaaf’s exhumations found remains of 143 people in the village, all but 12 of whom were children, all victims of a counterinsurgency sweep in 1981 by the U.S.-trained Atlacatl Battalion. Despite stories and photographs in the New York Times and Washington Post by reporters who personally visited El Mozote and spoke with survivors shortly after the massacre, the U.S. government had roundly denied that a massacre had taken place and continued its military and financial support for the Salvadoran army.∞∏ The El Mozote findings particularly and the Truth Commission’s report generally also opened political space in the United States. The new Clinton administration in 1993 included a number of human rights advocates who had participated in congressional e√orts to wring the truth about Central America from Reagan administration appointees in the 1980s; so new requests from the commission and from Congress for documentation led to President Clinton’s order for a systematic declassification of human-rights-related documentation on El Salvador. The new documents came too late for the commission’s report, but

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they established the primary source base line for all future accounts of Salvador’s conflict, military impunity, human rights abuses, and U.S. policy. Among many other chilling lessons to be found in these documents was proof of the U.S. government’s lies about El Mozote. After the press coverage, the U.S. Embassy sent two o≈cers out to investigate, but because of small-arms fire they actually never managed to land at El Mozote and never interviewed the survivors. Their cable back to Washington was then transformed by assistant secretaries of state Thomas Enders and Elliott Abrams into a flat denial of the massacre, in front of congressional committees, claiming that ‘‘no evidence could be found to confirm that government forces systematically massacred civilians in the operation zone.’’ The denial fit a pattern of U.S. complicity in the bloodshed in El Salvador: support for the military at all costs, the censure and redbaiting of any critics as if they supported Communism, claims that engagement would improve the military’s human rights record, and a consistent failure actually to hold any abusers accountable. Only after the Truth Commission’s reported was the defense minister René Emilio Ponce forced to retire—the declassified record showed Ponce as a long-standing death squad leader and human rights violator. So the struggle for justice in El Salvador continues, but at least now in a much less militarized society.∞π Another lesson from the El Salvador experience dramatically improved the process of getting o≈cial U.S. documents declassified. The El Salvador release had been too late for the truth commission but had been enormously helpful to ongoing accountability e√orts because the U.S. files were so rich in evidence on Latin American military and security forces. So as early as 1994, when talks between Guatemalan insurgents and the government seemed close to an agreement that would include a truth commission (signed in June 1994), human rights advocates and the sta√ of the National Security Archive began filing declassification and Freedom of Information Act requests on Guatemala. One key step was coming to consensus among human rights monitors about a core list of the most important human rights cases, ones that any truth commission would have to deal with. Another major analytical step forward was the creation of a target list of the most important Guatemalan military units and o≈cers over the extended period of the conflict. Between 1994 and 1999, more than 1,200 Freedom of Information Act requests and several hundred more Mandatory Declassification Review requests produced the release from U.S. files of more than 100,000 pages of previously classified documents. Spurring the declassification process were a lawsuit brought by the American wife of a Guatemalan guerrilla who had been murdered and a public scandal in 1995 over a paid asset

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of the cia (Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez), whom the cia knew was involved in that murder and in the 1990 murder of an American citizen named Michael Devine. Prompted by congressional and media attention, as well as by White House sta√ who had been misled by the cia about Alpirez, President Clinton ordered a full review of U.S. intelligence operations in Guatemala, a process that ultimately declassified some six thousand documents and found that cia assets had in fact committed ‘‘assassination, extrajudicial execution, torture, or kidnapping while they were assets.’’∞∫ The U.S. declassifications ultimately produced an enormous file of primary sources for the U.N.-sponsored Historical Clarification Commission in Guatemala, whose work from 1997 to 1999 was subsequently assessed by outside experts as perhaps the most successful commission experience to date. National Security Archive sta√ constructed a computerized database from the Defense Intelligence Agency documents tracking every significant Guatemalan military unit and its o≈cers throughout the decades of conflict, so that when the commission received testimony from victims’ families or from survivors about particular massacres or murders, the commission was able to identify the specific units and o≈cers involved. Combined with the extraordinary spadework already done by the Catholic Church’s human rights o≈ce, as well as by the various associations of families of the disappeared, and with thousands of hours of interviews, the documents enabled the commission to back up its fundamental conclusions, including a specific finding that the Guatemalan army had committed genocide in the 1981–83 period of its ‘‘scorched earth’’ eradication of indigenous Mayan villages, and that the state was responsible for 93 percent of the total deaths in the thirty-six-year conflict. Delivered to the Guatemalan nation with top government o≈cials sitting in the front row, the commission’s findings stunned onlookers with the forcefulness of the language: ‘‘Believing that the end justified anything, army and state security forces blindly pursued the anticommunist struggle, respecting neither judicial principle nor the most elemental ethical or religious values, and thus arrived at the complete loss of human morality.’’∞Ω The new documentation brought a new measure of accountability not only to the Guatemalan army and security forces but also to the U.S. policy that had aided and abetted the slaughter. Only two weeks after the truth commission report, President Bill Clinton participated in a roundtable discussion in Guatemala City with President Alvaro Arzú and a large public audience and expressed o≈cial regret for U.S. policy. Clinton remarked, ‘‘For the United States, it is

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important that I state clearly that support for military forces or intelligence units which engaged in widespread repression . . . was wrong, and the United States must not repeat that mistake.’’ When the National Security Archive’s full database of military unit and o≈cers’ biographies was published on the Web and released in a public briefing in Guatemala City in June 2000, every major newspaper published front-page stories under headlines such as ‘‘A luz 36 años de secretos militares’’ (Prensa Libre), ‘‘Archivo identifica a oficiales guatemaltecos genocidas’’ (Al Día), and ‘‘Los secretos del ejército’’ (El Periódico). The publication restored some of Guatemala’s secret history back to Guatemalans, but it also connected that history to U.S. policy. The featured Web graphic and the frontispiece of the two-volume printed set of data and documents on the Guatemalan military consisted of a photograph from 1965 of two U.S. military advisors standing with the ‘‘Butcher of Zacapa,’’ the notorious Col. Carlos Arana Osorio, who later served as president of Guatemala.≤≠ Subsequently the database provided the basis for what the Economist called ‘‘the first time that senior o≈cers have faced justice,’’ in the 2002 trial that put one colonel in jail for the 1990 murder of the anthropologist Myrna Mack.≤∞ Not long after the 1965 photograph was taken, the former number two in the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City registered a quiet, classified secret, but passionate protest of such partnerships in counterinsurgency. Relying directly on his own experience in Guatemala, Viron Vaky warned U.S. ambassador John Gordon Mein in a private conversation on March 28, 1968, that U.S. policy in e√ect was to ‘‘rationalize murder’’ (within a few months, Mein himself would be assassinated by the insurgents). Vaky then sent a more formal memo to the head of the Latin America bureau. Vaky reported that the whole counterterror approach taken by the Guatemalan army and government, with U.S. support, was having a ‘‘corrosive’’ e√ect on Guatemala because it was ‘‘indiscriminate,’’ ‘‘brutal,’’ and ‘‘has retarded modernization and institution-building’’; ‘‘it says in e√ect to people that the law, the constitution, the institutions mean nothing, the fastest gun counts.’’ Vaky wrote that his own deepest regret was not having fought harder to press these views while he was at the embassy: ‘‘We have not been honest with ourselves. We have condoned counter-terror; we may even in e√ect have encouraged or blessed it. We have been so obsessed with the fear of insurgency that we have rationalized away our qualms and uneasiness. This is not only because we have concluded we cannot do anything about it, for we never really tried. Rather we suspected that maybe it is a good tactic, and that as long as Communists are being killed it is alright. Murder, torture and mutilation

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are alright as long as our side is doing it and the victims are Communists. . . . Is it conceivable that we are so obsessed with insurgency that we are prepared to rationalize murder as an acceptable counterinsurgency weapon?’’≤≤ Vaky’s cry from the heart produced few echoes in the corridors of U.S. power, according to the declassified record. More typical was the performance of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who delivered a speech at the 1976 Organization of American States meeting in Santiago, Chile, calling for all member states to respect human rights—a speech taken as implicit criticism of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and thus cited ever since by Kissinger aides like Assistant Secretary of State William Rogers as evidence of Kissinger’s attention to human rights (as well as in Kissinger’s own memoirs). But when the declassified record emerged from previously closed U.S. files in the 1990s, researchers found the transcript of Kissinger’s face-to-face meeting with General Pinochet on the day before the speech, a meeting in which the American assured the dictator that he was not to take the speech personally, that the intended audience was the U.S. Congress (debating sanctions on Chile for human rights abuses), and that ‘‘my evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going communist. . . . I want you to succeed. And I want to retain the possibility of aid.’’≤≥ In one of the more grotesque ironies of the Cold War, it took Chinese Communist intervention to get the U.S. government even to make an internal classified accounting of the killings committed by Pinochet during and after his September 1973 coup. Kissinger had apparently not even inquired about the scale of the Chilean violence until his November 1973 trip to China, during which Chinese premier Zhou En-lai accusingly told Kissinger that the U.S. was supporting ‘‘slaughter’’ in Chile. (Of course, the Cultural Revolution was just then winding down, after having sacrificed thousands of intellectuals to rampaging mobs, and China was only fourteen years removed from the mass starvation caused by Mao’s policies, so perhaps Zhou believed the best defense was a good o√ense.) Kissinger promptly cabled Washington asking about summary executions in Chile, and the State Department put together a ‘‘fact sheet’’ listing all the figures from public sources (such as the approximately one hundred executions acknowledged by the Chilean government), and four figures marked with asterisks indicating that sensitive intelligence sources had provided them. These included 320 (not 100) summary executions, 1,500 killed overall, 13,500 arrested since the September 11 coup, and 1,500 still in detention. The hard

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numbers seem to have made no di√erence in Kissinger’s policy of support, and he decided not to tell the Chinese they were right about the slaughter.≤∂ The U.S. documents on Pinochet emerged in the 1990s only because of a confluence of pressures very similar to the Guatemala case. The spark came from the Spanish judge Baltazar Garzón, urged on by the Spanish lawyer and former Allende aide Joan Garcés, and helped by the British chapter of Amnesty International when they were tipped o√ by a New Yorker magazine interview with Pinochet while he was in London for medical treatment in October 1998. The resulting warrant produced a six-year legal drama that included house arrest in London, claims of health problems that persuaded the British government to let Pinochet go home to Chile, where he resumed his robust public presence, various and often contradictory court findings in Chile regarding Pinochet’s immunity from prosecution or lack thereof, and a courageous Chilean prosecutor named Juan Guzmán who carried on the task of bringing the dictator to justice. In the most remarkable measure of how things had changed, on the day Pinochet was arrested in London, Chile’s court dockets included only two legal actions against Pinochet and his henchmen for human rights abuses, but by 2003 there were 247 actual indictments on human rights charges, and the number was rising. In the United States, the Clinton administration did not want to back up the Spanish judge’s claims for universal jurisdiction, just in case future charges might be lodged against Americans; but many senior o≈cials did want to contribute to the human rights investigations and to the democratic transition in Chile. Using the precedent of the Guatemala and El Salvador declassifications, plus pressure from the press and from groups like the National Security Archive, the White House overcame cia objections and released more than 150,000 pages in 1999 and 2000, including extraordinary new details on cia covert operations and the U.S. embrace of Pinochet.≤∑ The cause of human rights in Argentina also benefited from the U.S. political dynamic, but the U.S. government was more careful this time. Argentina had been the early leader in Latin America for accountability of the dictators, with the pioneering truth commission e√ort, Nunca Más, that established the facts of at least 8,961 murders and disappearances by the military in the so-called dirty war of 1976 to 1983. Argentina also carried out actual prosecutions of the junta members after the disaster in the Malvinas led to the civilian government of Raúl Alfonsín in 1983. But pressure from the military forced the civilians to grant sweeping amnesties to military o≈cers, despite popular protest led by the Madres and Abuelas of the Plaza de Mayo, who had marched with photos of their

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disappeared loved ones even in the darkest days of the dirty war. Despite the amnesty, groups like the Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (cels) creatively sought alternative grounds for prosecutions, such as the kidnapping of the children of the disappeared, hundreds of whom were brought up by military families and remained ignorant of their actual parentage. When Clinton’s secretary of state Madeleine Albright visited Buenos Aires in 2000, the groups pressed her for a declassification like that on Chile, and she agreed. But over a period that spanned the end of the Clinton administration and the beginning of the Bush term, the State Department bureaucracy carefully limited the terms of declassification just to information on human rights abuses in Argentina— omitting the policy debates in Washington and also U.S. accountability that had been integral to the Guatemala and El Salvador releases. Thus the 4,667 documents that the U.S. government finally disgorged in August 2002 included extensive new details on disappearances, including a thick series of index cards amassed at the time by embassy o≈cer F. A. ‘‘Tex’’ Harris from his hundreds of interviews with the families of victims. The release also included an October 1976 cable from U.S. Ambassador Robert Hill complaining that the Argentine foreign minister, Admiral Guzzetti, ‘‘went to U.S. fully expecting to hear some strong, firm, direct warnings on his government’s human rights practices, rather than that, he has returned in a state of jubilation, convinced that there is no real problem with the USG over that issue.’’ U.S. o≈cials at the time assured Hill that Guzzetti heard only what he wanted to hear, and that the United States had warned the Argentines on human rights. But the transcripts of Guzzetti’s meetings in Washington were not in the 2002 release, and it took a further Freedom of Information Act request by Carlos Osorio of the National Security Archive to get copies released. The actual memcon of Guzzetti’s meeting with Secretary of State Kissinger sounded almost exactly like Kissinger’s earlier meeting with Pinochet. Kissinger told Guzzetti, ‘‘Look, our basic attitude is that we would like you to succeed. I have an old-fashioned view that friends ought to be supported. What is not understood in the United States is that you have a civil war. We read about human rights problems but not the context. The quicker you succeed the better. . . . If you can finish before Congress gets back, the better. Whatever freedoms you could restore would help.’’ This is what passed for a stern warning on human rights in the Kissinger years.≤∏ An even more complex interaction of U.S. policy and Latin American actors occurred in Panama. This is a story we now know largely because a truth commission worked in 2001 and 2002 to document the disappearances and human rights abuses in the two decades of military dictatorship led by generals

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Omar Torrijos and then Manuel Noriega. For example, among the documents found by National Security Archive researchers working on behalf of the Panamanian truth commission were a series of cia reports on the June 1971 disappearance of the Catholic priest Héctor Gallegos Herrera—which almost all observers attributed to the National Guard getting revenge on a leading critic. One cia cable included in its headline the phrase ‘‘General Torrijos e√ort to blame kidnapping on the United States,’’ and a second cable described Noriega’s role in directing press coverage of the case toward a student communiqué blaming the kidnapping on ‘‘North American imperialism.’’≤π Seemingly, these documents provided evidence of a classic nationalistic response, rather than the usual pattern of local military elites working closely with the United States. But the archival record did not end there. When General Torrijos was on his way to Washington in October 1977 to negotiate one of the articles in what would become the Panama Canal Treaty, President Carter’s national security advisor asked the U.S. intelligence community to describe its relationship with Torrijos and whether there was any possibility of foreign intelligence control over Torrijos. The resulting memo of October 14, 1977, written by U.S. Army intelligence and declassified from the Carter Library files, carries President Carter’s handwritten initial ‘‘J’’ at the top, along with the word ‘‘Zbig’’ (for advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski). The memo summarizes a ‘‘three-volume intelligence operational file on Torrijos’’ that began with his recruitment ‘‘(pay $25 per month) as a confidential informant’’ in October 1955, when he was a captain stationed at Tocumen Airport: ‘‘he accepted recruitment because of his low salary but also desired funds for drinking and womanizing.’’ Because of ‘‘lack of production and infrequent reporting,’’ he was dropped in December 1959 but reactivated, again at $25 per month, in January 1960. In 1963 an apparent personality conflict with a case o≈cer produced another cuto√ recommendation, but Torrijos continued on the U.S. intelligence payroll, ‘‘receiving periodic salary increases up to a peak of $300 per month,’’ as well as cartons of cigarettes, bottles of Scotch, and cases of C rations as ‘‘incentives.’’ The memo reports that in March 1969, ‘‘five months after he assumed power in the October ’68 coup, he voluntarily gave up his $300 monthly salary because ‘now that he is a general o≈cer, it is below his dignity to accept it.’ ’’ However, the memo says, he did receive several additional payments as well as an air conditioner in July 1969, and there were no reasons to suspect any foreign intelligence influence or control. The memo closes with a list of other Panamanians previously or currently on the U.S. intelligence payroll, including Noriega.≤∫ One can imagine the comfort Jimmy Carter received from knowing that his

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cosignator on the Canal Treaty had also been on the U.S. payroll, and for decades. Indeed, perhaps this reality played a significant role in the Carter administration’s willingness to ‘‘give away’’ (as the opponents termed it) the Panama Canal, and thereby, ironically, to make the single gesture most respectful to Latin American sovereignty ever o√ered by the United States. Yet the memo that Carter saw also contained complexities and nuances, even about the paid informer role. For example, Torrijos is said to have provided only his own chosen information in his later years rather than fully responding to tasks. Torrijos cut o√ the salary because it wasn’t befitting a general o≈cer. Torrijos had personality conflicts with handlers. The available documentation, although rich in detail, does not answer the question of how much Torrijos gained in his rise to power from the relationship with U.S. intelligence. Did he benefit from a perception of being a chosen partner of the United States? Or did he gain a sense of security that the U.S. would not abandon a cooperative informer? Or did he manipulate the relationship with information most useful for his own rise and detrimental to his rivals? One quickly sees that the basic fact of being a paid informer is only the beginning of the necessary analysis, and such are the problems with secret police files the world over.≤Ω But such files do exist, not only in U.S. archives. The crescendo of truth commissions and the flood of U.S. declassifications garnered most of the headlines in the 1990s, but in many ways the most remarkable recent developments in the forensic history of Latin America consisted of the gradual, intermittent, episodic recovery of the region’s own previously hidden archives. Usually this recovery came in the context of an interactive process with the truth commissions and with the new U.S. documents. For example, the Historical Clarification Commission in Guatemala received no cooperation and no documentation from the Guatemalan military, which claimed it had no surviving archives. Ironically, it was the U.S. documentation that proved this was a deliberate coverup and deliberate destruction of evidence. In April 1994, just at the time that the peace negotiations had guaranteed the forthcoming truth commission on that country’s bitter thirty-six-year conflict, a U.S. defense attaché wrote Washington that one of his local sources, a Guatemalan o≈cer at the southern air base at Retalhuleu, had proposed starting vegetable gardens on the base as a way to supplement the mediocre military food ration, but higher-ups vetoed the plan, because plowing and digging would expose what the attaché concluded was the ‘‘suspected presence of clandestine cemeteries.’’ The source told the attaché that small buildings used as interrogation rooms and pits filled with water used to hold captured suspects had once existed on the base, but they had since been de-

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stroyed or filled in with concrete. The document described the army’s technique of disposing of bodies (and, at times, live prisoners) by flying them over the ocean and pushing them out of a plane: ‘‘In this way, the D-2 has been able to remove the majority of evidence showing that the prisoners had been tortured and killed.’’≥≠ The U.S. defense attaché reported again in November 1994 about a coverup in Guatemala, this time because of the public, journalistic, and especially U.S. attention to the case of the captured rebel leader Efraín Bámaca Velásquez, husband of U.S. lawyer Jennifer Harbury. The attaché wrote that the Guatemalan army high command had ordered military personnel to destroy any ‘‘incriminating evidence . . . which could compromise the security or status of any member of the Guatemalan military.’’ The destruction of documents, holding pens, and interrogation facilities had already been accomplished at the Retalhuleu air base (and the defense attaché writing this message described exactly where those facilities used to exist on the base). Furthermore, the army had designed a strategy to block future ‘‘United Nations investigating commissions’’ from even entering military bases to examine any remaining files.≥∞ But files survived. Only two days before the Clarification Commission delivered its report in February 1999, human rights advocates in Guatemala acquired a particularly extraordinary record, one that would make front-page headlines. A former military man, who said he had participated in the 1994 document destruction but had kept one item for himself, o√ered for a finders’ fee (ultimately $2,000) to hand it over. With mounting excitement and dread, Kate Doyle and her Guatemalan partners examined the brown legal-size ledger, reading the entries listing 183 names, most with photographs either photocopied or taped into the margin, apparently cut or ripped from actual identity cards. The entries under each name gave pseudonyms, memberships in various guerrilla and leftist groups, locations where the individuals were captured, cryptic codes like ‘‘300’’ (which turned out to be summary execution), and occasional clarity (‘‘cayó abatido al oponerse a su detención’’). Comparing the ledger to previous human rights and press reports and to the declassified U.S. record, the analysts concluded that the ledger was a daily log from 1983 to early 1985 of the activities of a death squad—a unit based in Guatemala City in the actual security detail of the country’s president. This squad, the ‘‘Archivos,’’ had begun as a communications and intelligence center for the presidential sta√ and by the early 1980s became the cutting edge of counterinsurgency in the capital. For many of the families of the disappeared, the ledger provided the first confirmation of what had happened to their loved ones. A few of those listed had escaped, one by

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leaping the wall of a nearby embassy, another by informing on his friends (who wound up themselves as entries in the ledger) and thereby ‘‘recovering his liberty.’’ Turning the pages of this death squad diary, one can only wonder at the remorselessness of the bureaucratic jottings, a kind of productivity report so reminiscent of the Nazi and gulag records created by human beings doing systematic evil but somehow justifying it to themselves through o≈cial jargon, following orders, and systematic routine.≥≤ The death squad diary was a one-of-a-kind find, but more of Guatemala’s secret archives soon began rising from the depths, more than anyone could have imagined in 1999. The security forces turned out to have kept records even after the destruction orders, for the same reasons all bureaucracies do so, to regularize their activities, to cover their rears, and to run their systems. In January 2004, investigators for the human rights ombudsman (Procuraduría de los Derechos Humanos, headed by Dr. Sergio Morales) gained access to a concrete-block building containing piles of files stacked from floor to ceiling in places, the residue of the parent bureaucracy of the Archivos death squad itself—the Estado Mayor Presidencial (emp). Pilloried by human rights advocates and abolished in 2003 by a civilian president, the emp had dumped its files unceremoniously in a military warehouse. The ombudsman’s o≈ce sponsored a team of investigators who used digital cameras to photograph the hundreds of thousands of pages in the files, which included high-level documents like the military strategic plan for 1982 as well as mundane material such as the emp’s gasoline purchase logs—yet those purchase entries also listed the names of the drivers of the Jeep Cherokees and other vehicles, including those used by the Archivos. And before the investigative team could even finish the job of putting all the emp document images into a database for analysis and research, the ombudsman became the custodian of an even larger and more challenging collection—the millions of pages, perhaps tens of millions, left behind in bales of files by the notorious National Police after its abolition in 1996 during the peace process. Discovered in July 2005 in four bat-infested buildings among junked police cars at an abandoned military ammunition depot, the National Police archives date back to 1930 and include case files as recent as the early 1990s, with labels like ‘‘Disappeared People 1989’’ and the names of famous victims like Myrna Mack. The size and scope of the National Police archives present an almost overwhelming challenge, initially one of preservation, since the papers are literally rotting; only over time will come access, analysis, and dissertation writing.≥≥ If the Guatemala police files survive to be analyzed, they will join several remarkable success stories in the Latin American recovery of memory and his-

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tory. First to preserve its secret police files was perhaps the most unlikely, the land of the dictator Stroessner, who ruled Paraguay for decades until 1989. But Stroessner’s secret police had arrested and tortured an innocent teacher named Martín Almada, whose wife died of a heart attack while he su√ered in Paraguay’s jails from 1974 to 1978. After Stroessner’s fall, Almada came back from exile to dig up the evidence, using a ‘‘habeas data’’ provision in the new constitution (access to government information about oneself ), a court order from a sympathetic lower-court judge, and tips from a former policeman. In December 1992, Almada and the judge and tv cameras showed up at an obscure police station in the town of Lambare outside the capital, broke open a padlock on a second-floor room, and found what turned out to be 593,000 pages of the secret police’s investigative files. The room held hundreds of ringed archival binders, boxes of tapes from surveillance, fingerprint cards and arrest records for thousands of prisoners, interrogation reports, and even Almada’s own ‘‘rap sheet.’’ Buried outside in the courtyard were scores of identity cards of political prisoners who had been executed. Almada and his cohorts formed a kind of fire bucket line, passing sheaves of paper out of the building and onto borrowed trucks, which carried the files to the Palace of Justice in Asunción, where the collection today resides on the eighth floor, in the custody of the Paraguayan Supreme Court, with the nickname of ‘‘Archive of Terror.’’ Researchers have subsequently found here the original Chilean invitation to Southern Cone countries for the founding meeting of Operation Condor, the dictators’ joint military intelligence project that achieved its greatest notoriety in the 1976 Washington bombing murder of the former Allende o≈cial and Pinochet critic Orlando Letelier. With support from the U.S. State Department and Agency for International Development in the 1990s, the collection has been microfilmed, and a collaboration with the Catholic University of Paraguay and the National Security Archive since 1999 has digitized some 300,000 pages for Internet access.≥∂ Compared to the archival eurekas in Paraguay and Guatemala, the process of archival recovery in Argentina has been slow and grinding, but the ultimate results in the form of accessible raw material may well prove just as massive and important. A Chilean reporter visiting Buenos Aires in 1989, just as thenpresident Carlos Menem issued his controversial pardons of the military perpetrators of the ‘‘dirty war,’’ found the first hints of the flood of evidence to come. Mónica González was chasing the story of Pinochet’s predecessor, General Carlos Prats, who declined to carry out a coup, left Chile, and was subsequently assassinated in Argentina by Pinochet’s thugs in 1974. González found little until a court employee alerted her to the case of Enrique Arancibia Clavel, a

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notorious right-wing Chilean who had to flee Chile in 1970 because of his involvement in bombings, worked for the Chilean state bank branch in Buenos Aires, and was arrested for espionage in 1978 at a time of tension between the two countries. The charges were later dropped, but González found, after pestering the judge for access to the Arancibia files, that Arancibia had been Chile’s intelligence station chief in Argentina, and the dusty court records contained four years’ worth of his correspondence and instructions from Santiago, even identity cards of Chileans who had been disappeared. González read the documents into her tape recorder, since note taking was too slow, made headlines in Chile with her stories, and turned over her transcripts to the Catholic Church’s human rights organization in Chile, the Vicariate of Solidarity, for use in human rights cases. Years later, an Italian judge pursuing Operation Condor assassinations in Europe obtained the full Arancibia file from the Buenos Aires court, as did the author John Dinges and the National Security Archive. Perhaps the most remarkable single document in Arancibia’s file was his July 1978 report to Chile about Argentina’s dirty war, giving a secret estimate from his contacts in Intelligence Battalion 601—the central coordinator of the repression—that the Argentine military had killed 22,000 people between October 1975 and July 1978 alone. The 1983–84 truth commission had only been able to document 8,961 disappearances for the entire 1973–83 period, a number subsequently revised to 9,098; but Arancibia’s contemporaneous report makes clear that the estimates of human rights groups of 30,000 total casualties were more accurate.≥∑ Argentine human rights groups have developed some of the most sophisticated projects in the entire hemisphere for the recovery of memory and archives. They won a law that protects the archives of that pioneering 1983–84 attempt to account for the disappeared, the Comisión Nacional de los Desaparecidos (conadep). The conadep files remain in the custody of a special o≈ce at the Ministry of Justice’s Secretariat for Human Rights, including all the testimonies and denunciations received by the commission. The leading human rights groups have also transcended the usual turf problems and factionalism to join a remarkable e√ort, Memoria Abierta, that is videotaping and preserving the memories of victims and survivors of the dirty war, using the images and sounds to create public broadcasts and school programs. Memoria Abierta also has undertaken to create a common catalog of the various groups’ documentation centers. Most promising of all, the groups persuaded the Province of Buenos Aires in 2000 to turn over to an independent public authority the archives of the intelligence division of the Buenos Aires police that existed from 1957 to 1998, including the dirty war years. Some 3.8 million folios (including eleven volumes of 300

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folios each, covering just the Madres of the Plaza de Mayo) now reside in La Plata, Argentina, in the custody of the Comisión por la Memoria, whose members include dignitaries such as the Nobel Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel. The La Plata archives have funding from the province and cooperation from La Plata University in creating a state-of-the-art facility that seeks to protect the privacy of the victims while holding the perpetrators accountable.≥∏ Archival recovery in Brazil provides in many respects some of the most promising developments in the struggle for memory anywhere in the world. The activist stage, so essential in cases like Guatemala, Argentina, and Panama, where truth commissions, investigative journalists, and human rights activists took the lead, had its parallel in Brazil as well. Subsequently, however, that initiative has matured into a full-fledged academic project in which scholars of archival and information sciences have developed important methods that are pushing into the public domain the files of the former security forces, together with analysis and public access tools. Early insights into the structure of repression in Brazil came from the 1980s activists’ study, modeled on Argentina’s Nunca Más report, called Brasil Nunca Mais. The Brazilian report was largely based on the stolen copy of the Supreme Military Tribunal’s archive, which contained more than ten thousand documents and hundreds of photographs produced by military courts in their judgments against political prisoners during the period of the military dictatorship from 1964 to 1979. But Brazil’s political police—the Department of Political and Social Order, or Departamento de Ordem Politica e Social do Estado, dops or deops—dates back to earlier periods, beginning in São Paulo in 1924 and in Rio de Janeiro in 1934, and lasting into the 1970s (in Rio) and until 1983 (in São Paulo), when the ‘‘democratic opening’’ of that period brought the closure of dops. And the dops archives, especially in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, take the evidentiary base to an exponentially larger universe, containing literally millions of files and thousands of photographs and artifacts.≥π Various national and state archives in Brazil gradually absorbed these materials after the dissolution of deops, but it took an academic’s insights to begin to make them truly accessible and useful. In 1996 Professor Maria Luiza Tucci Carneiro at the University of São Paulo proposed a formal project to inventory the largest deops archive, that of São Paulo. She succeeded in building a joint project, the Projeto Integrado (proin), between the State Archive (Arquivo do Estado, part of the Secretaria de Estado da Cultura) and the university (particularly its department of history). Over the years she has integrated classroom study and graduate training with archival assessment and inventory e√orts, preservation and digitization work, and analytical and scholarly studies of the

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substance of the files. In e√ect, Professor Tucci Carneiro is accomplishing the institutionalization of the struggle for memory, bringing the past alive and training future generations in the often arduous work required to connect memory, justice, and knowledge. Measures of her success include seven master’s theses and four doctoral dissertations produced by graduate students in the proin (as of 2004), a dozen published printed inventories covering particular subjects in the files, and a long-term systematic study of political and ethnic intolerance in Brazil. In addition the proin has built extensive computerized inventories and guides and organized multiple exhibitions and public events based on the deops files.≥∫ The Brazil example signals some of the extraordinary opportunities for scholars that arise from the recovery of archives in Latin America, as well as from the formerly secret files in the hegemon to the north. Documentary recovery has not been as auspicious in Latin America’s other emerging middle power, Mexico. As this volume makes clear, the Cold War took on a special character in Mexico. U.S. relations with Mexico’s ‘‘o≈cial’’ Party of the Institutionalized Revolution (pri) were always circumscribed by the delicate and mitigating realities of proximity, interdependence, and Mexican ‘‘revolutionary nationalism.’’ One searches in vain for the aggressive posture of ‘‘containment and roll back’’ that characterized U.S. policy in the rest of Latin America. Indeed, there was no need for the United States to become heavily involved because the pri state had an e≈cient repressive apparatus of its own, one that was more than able to guarantee its powerful northern neighbor’s concerns regarding national security. By and large, the Cold War in Mexico tended to fizz rather than flash, and atrocities against left-wing opponents never remotely approached the levels reached in Central America or the Southern Cone. It is not surprising, therefore, that following the Cold War, there was much less of a groundswell in Mexico for documentary disclosure and the struggle against impunity. A small but tenacious ‘‘Comité 68’’ has tried without much success to bring the perpetrators of the massacres in Tlatelolco (1968) and Corpus Christi (1971) to justice. Although the Mexican government of Vicente Fox (which defeated the pri in 2000) sanctioned a Ley de Transparencia and set up a commission of inquiry into crimes committed in the past (the Fiscalía Especial para Movimientos Sociales y Políticos del Pasado, or femospp), the research e√orts of the commission have made little headway. The principal reason has been a lack of consistent and easy access to the documents themselves. The archive that was generated by the Intelligence Branch of the Ministry of Interior and deposited in the Archivo General de la Nación has technically been open to the public since 2002. Unfor-

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tunately, the same authorities who organized the materials have carefully regulated access to them, doling out materials page by page and rarely permitting access to complete files. Thus, while access has rarely been denied, the research enterprise has remained fragmentary and next to useless. Mexico’s Ley de Transparencia, modeled somewhat on the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, has primarily facilitated private citizens in their e√orts to obtain information about missing family members, rather than leading to broader veins of historical evidence. Happily, historians of the Mexican Cold War have been well served by the project that the National Security Archive launched at the end of the 1990s on U.S. policy in Mexico. Based on declassified documents from the cia, the Pentagon, the State Department, and other U.S. agencies, the project’s findings have shifted our understanding of the parameters of U.S.– Mexican relations in important and nuanced ways. Most notably, nsa project director Kate Doyle has examined the disconnect between public policy and image and the reality of the bilateral arrangements that were negotiated behind closed doors.≥Ω What has come to light, for instance, is the manner in which Mexico supported Havana but spied on Cuba for the United States; traded with Red China but voted with the United States on the important questions; maintained correct but extremely cautious relations with the Soviet Union; permitted the Mexican Communist Party to operate but harassed, surveilled, jailed, and disappeared its leaders. Ever Janus faced, Mexico consistently managed to reassure U.S. policymakers that Mexico was, at bottom, a reliable ally of the United States. The newly declassified documents, therefore, make amply clear why the United States had no significant military or police assistance program in Mexico and saw no need for one. The ‘‘authoritarian core’’ of Mexico’s political system, as Lorenzo Meyer terms it, was deemed to be strong enough to take care of its own security problems. This is not to say that the United States did not support Mexico’s cold war: it did, but mainly through covert means (e.g., via extensive intelligence support, about which we still know very little) or indirectly (e.g., via support for Mexico’s balance of payments) as part of a broader e√ort to underwrite regime legitimacy. At present, critical dimensions of this transnational Cold War alliance remain hidden in the Mexican archives. All told, the opportunities for Cold War scholarship based on newly recovered archives in Latin America and the United States are immense. Now it is possible to write the interactive history of U.S. policy in Latin America, assessing with primary source evidence the relevance to history of Newton’s third law of motion (for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction). Now it is

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possible to write comparative histories of Latin American repression, of military structures, of national security concepts, of human rights abuses, with evidence from Paraguay, Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, Mexico, and elsewhere. Now it is possible to turn the surveillance state upon itself, using the secret police files to deconstruct the methods and means of repression. These files also potentially provide rich evidence for comparative social history, in the same way that medieval court records have allowed European historians to reconstruct social and economic relations from centuries past. Scholars can look to the international human rights struggle for a powerful metaphor that should spur such e√orts toward comparative and truly international history. Only five years after Pinochet’s arrest in London in 1998 came a new landmark in universal legal jurisdiction, when a Mexican court extradited a former Argentine navy o≈cer and accused dirty war torturer to face terrorism charges in Judge Garzón’s court in Spain. The author John Dinges calls this ‘‘the first case in human rights law of a person arrested in one country being extradited to a second country for crimes committed in a third.’’∂≠ Likewise, the ongoing recovery of archives and memory in Latin America makes possible new landmarks in the universal jurisdiction of history. Cold War history will not be the only field turned upside down with new evidence and new narratives from the South, but Cold War history can perhaps learn the most from Latin Americans, their truth commissions, their exhumations, and their resurrected files. Notes 1. Michael Cox, ‘‘The 1980s Revisited, or the Cold War as History—Again,’’ Paper presented to the Nobel Symposium 2002, Oslo, Norway, June 17, 2002, 5. 2. Geir Lundestad, ‘‘Moralism, Presentism, Exceptionalism, Provincialism, and Other Extravagances in American Writings on the Early Cold War Years,’’ Diplomatic History 13, no. 4 (fall 1989); reprinted in Lundestad, The American ‘‘Empire’’ and Other Studies of U.S. Foreign Policy in a Comparative Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 29. 3. Lundestad, The American ‘‘Empire,’’ 55–56. 4. Richard M. Bissell Jr. with Jonathan E. Lewis and Frances T. Pudlo, Reflections of a Cold Warrior: From Yalta to the Bay of Pigs (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 68–69. 5. See especially ‘‘The Marshall Plan, 1947–1952,’’ episode 3 of Cold War, produced by cnn and Jeremy Isaacs Productions, and the interview transcript with former cia o≈cial E. Mark Wyatt, dated February 15, 1996, at www.gwu.edu/&nsarchiv/coldwar/inter views/episode-3/wyatt1.html.

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6. 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), 196–99. 7. cia, Directorate of Intelligence, ‘‘Guatemala: Prospects for Political Moderation,’’ August 1983, document no. 946 in the National Security Archive Guatemala collection, edited by Kate Doyle and published by ProQuest in the Digital National Security Archive. 8. Stephane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panne, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, and Jean-Louis Margolin, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). 9. Andrzej Paczkowski and Karel Bartosek, ‘‘The Other Europe: Victim of Communism,’’ in The Black Book of Communism, 361–456. Paczkowski’s comment is on p. 375. 10. Pascal Fontaine, ‘‘Communism in Latin America,’’ in The Black Book of Communism, 647–82. The cursory author’s credit line is on p. 858; the ‘‘pretext’’ comment is on p. 668. For contrast, see Ariel C. Armony, Argentina, the United States, and the AntiCommunist Crusade in Central America, 1977–1984 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997). The biographical data included here come from Pascal Fontaine, Europe—a Fresh Start: The Schuman Declaration, 1950–90 (Luxembourg: O≈ce for O≈cial Publications of the European Communities, 1990), 1. 11. For Argentina, see Nunca Más: The Report of the Argentine National Commission on the Disappeared (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1986); Nunca Más: Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre la Deasparición de Personas (Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria, 1984); and www.nuncamas.org/index.htm. For Chile, see Report of the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, 2 vols., trans. Philip E. Berryman (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993); and www.derechoschile.com. For El Salvador, see From Madness to Hope: The 12-Year War in El Salvador: Report of the Commission on the Truth for El Salvador, United Nations Document S/25500, 1993. For Guatemala, see Guatemala: Memoria del Silencio: Informe de la Comisión para Esclarecimiento Histórico, 9 vols. (Guatemala City: ceh, 1999, distributed by f&g Editores); also http://hrdata.aaas.org/ceh. 12. The most useful summary and comparative account of truth commissions, not only in Latin America but worldwide, is Priscilla Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocity: How Truth Commissions around the World Are Challenging the Past and Shaping the Future (New York: Routledge, 2001); also see Greg Grandin, ‘‘The Instruction of Great Catastrophe: Truth Commissions, National History, and State Formation in Argentina, Chile, and Guatemala,’’ American Historical Review 110, no. 1 (February 2005): 46–67. 13. See Tina Rosenberg, The Haunted Land: Eastern Europe after Communism (New York: Random House, 1995), for a superb history of the post-Communist reality in Eastern Europe, informed by the author’s extensive previous experience in Latin America.

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14. From Madness to Hope. 15. Argentina Forensic Anthropology Team, Annual Report 2002, 4–7; the eaaf website may be viewed at www.eaaf.org.ar. 16. The stories appeared on January 27, 1982. For details of the stories and the U.S. government’s attack on the reporters’ credibility, as well as the evident contradictions in government statements, see Raymond Bonner, Weakness and Deceit: U.S. Policy and El Salvador (New York: Times Books, 1984), 337–55. 17. For the best summary of the interaction between the Truth Commission, the U.S. declassification, and the lessons to be learned, see Kate Doyle, ‘‘Documenting War, Peace, and Human Rights in El Salvador,’’ an essay in the National Security Archive reference collection El Salvador: War, Peace, and Human Rights, 1980–1994 (Alexandria, Va.: Chadwyck-Healey, 1996), which contains the 1,384 most important documents in the U.S. declassification and is also available in the Digital National Security Archive published by ProQuest. For the last word on El Mozote, see Mark Danner, The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 304. 18. For an overview of the Guatemala declassification e√ort, see Kate Doyle, ‘‘The United States and Guatemala: Counterinsurgency and Genocide, 1954–1999,’’ an essay in the National Security Archive’s Death Squads, Guerrilla War, Covert Operations, and Genocide: Guatemala and the United States, 1954–1999 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: ProQuest/ Chadwyck-Healey, 2002), a reference collection of the 2,071 most important declassified documents. For the Alpirez investigation, see President’s Intelligence Oversight Board, Report on the Guatemala Review, June 28, 1996, document no. 2064 in the National Security Archive Guatemala collection published by ProQuest (also in the Digital National Security Archive). 19. Summary speech by Christian Tomuschat, coordinator of the Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico, at the presentation of the commission’s report Guatemala: Memoria del Silencio, Guatemala City, February 25, 1999 (Spanish text at www.c.net.gt/ ceg/doctos/tomu0225). Tomuschat called the Archive’s technical assistance ‘‘invaluable’’ in a letter of February 12, 1998, to the Archive. For outside commentary on the commission’s ‘‘extensive’’ use of the documents, see Priscilla Hayner, Unspeakable Truths, 241. 20. For President Clinton’s comments, see ‘‘Remarks by the President in Roundtable Discussion on Peace E√orts,’’ March 10, 1999, Public Papers of the President. For the military database, see Kate Doyle, ed., ‘‘The Guatemalan Military: What the U.S. Files Reveal,’’ National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book no. 32, posted June 1, 2000, at http://www.gwu.edu/&nsarchiv/nsaebb/nsaebb32/index.html. 21. ‘‘The Army on Trial: A Bid to Bring the Generals to Book,’’ The Economist, September 21, 2002, 36, which reported: ‘‘For the first time, the army’s order of battle and methods are being revealed in public . . . pieced together from declassified American documents.’’ 22. Viron P. Vaky, Policy Planning Council, U.S. Department of State, to Covey T. Oliver, ara (Latin America Bureau), ‘‘Guatemala and Counter-Terror,’’ March 29, 1968,

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document 367 in the National Security Archive Guatemala collection published by ProQuest/Chadwyck-Healey. 23. Department of State, Memorandum of Conversation (Pinochet–Kissinger), ‘‘U.S.– Chilean Relations,’’ June 8, 1976, reprinted in Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability, rev. ed. (New York: New Press, 2004), 264–73. As recently as 2004, despite the public availability of the transcript, Rogers characterized the conversation as ‘‘the stern human rights warning Kissinger delivered directly to Pinochet at their only meeting.’’ See Rogers and Kenneth Maxwell, ‘‘Fleeing the Chilean Coup: The Debate over U.S. Complicity,’’ Foreign A√airs, January–February 2004. 24. Zhou-Kissinger Memorandum of Conversation, November 13, 1973, 4:30–7:15 p.m., National Archives, Record Group 59, Department of State Records, Policy Planning Sta√, box 372, quoted and summarized in William Burr, The Kissinger Transcripts: The Top-Secret Talks with Beijing and Moscow (New York: New Press, 1999), 199–200, 215n. The November 15, 1973 fact sheet and November 16 cover memo are reprinted in Kornbluh, The Pinochet File, 182–84. 25. The instructive story of the Pinochet arrest and the Chile declassification is told in detail and with colorful anecdote by the leading outside pressure organizer, Peter Kornbluh, in The Pinochet File, 465–98. 26. For the State Department declassification, see Carlos Osorio, ed., ‘‘State Department Opens Files on Argentina’s Dirty War,’’ National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book no. 73, posted August 20, 2002, at http://www.gwu.edu/%7Ensarchiv/nsaebb/ nsaebb73/index.htm. For the Guzzetti-Kissinger memcon, see Carlos Osorio and Kathleen Costar, eds., ‘‘Kissinger to Argentines on Dirty War: ‘The Quicker You Succeed the Better,’ ’’ National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book no. 104, posted December 4, 2003, at http://www.gwu.edu/&nsarchiv/nsaebb/nsaebb104/index.htm. 27. cia, Intelligence Information Cable, ‘‘Statement by Carlos López Guevara concerning his conviction of National Guard involvement in the kidnapping of Father Héctor Gallegos Herrera, peasant reaction and General Torrijos’s e√ort to blame kidnapping on the United States,’’ June 18, 1971, National Security Archive Panama Collection; cia, Intelligence Information Cable, ‘‘Role of Lieutenant Colonel Manuel Noriega in directing press coverage of kidnapping of Father Héctor Gallegos Herrera,’’ June 25, 1971, National Security Archive Panama Collection. 28. Information Memorandum, ‘‘Subject: Brigadier General Omar Torrijos Herrera,’’ secret/noforn, October 14, 1977, Jimmy Carter Library, nlc-96-158. 29. For a particularly thoughtful examination of the relationships between informers and secret police, see Timothy Garton Ash, The File: A Personal History (New York: Random House, 1997). 30. Defense Intelligence Agency, secret message, ‘‘Suspected Presence of Clandestine Cemeteries on a Military Installation,’’ April 11, 1994. Document 30 in Kate Doyle and Carlos Osorio, eds., U.S. Policy in Guatemala, 1966–1996, National Security Archive

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Electronic Briefing Book no. 11, at www.gwu.edu/&nsarchiv/nsaebb/nsaebb11. Did the Guatemalans learn the ocean disposal method from the Argentines? The former naval o≈cer Francisco Scilingo confessed his role in Argentina’s dirty war air drops to the Argentine journalist Horacio Verbitsky in The Flight (New York: New Press, 1996), esp. 49–56. 31. Defense Intelligence Agency, secret message, ‘‘The Rising Impact of the Bámaca Case on the Guatemalan Military Establishment,’’ November 24, 1994, Document 31 in Doyle and Osorio, U.S. Policy in Guatemala, 1966–1996, at www.gwu.edu/&nsarchiv/ nsaebb/nsaebb11. 32. See Kate Doyle, ‘‘Death Squad Diary: Looking into the Secret Archives of Guatemala’s Bureaucracy of Murder,’’ Harper’s Magazine, June 1999, 50–53; the death squad diary is posted on the Web at http://www.gwu.edu/&nsarchiv/nsaebb/nsaebb15/press .html with related documents and is also included in the National Security Archive Guatemala collection published by ProQuest. 33. On the emp files, see Miguel González Moraga and Claudia Méndez Villaseñor, ‘‘Defensa oculta archivos del emp,’’ Prensa Libre (Guatemala City), January 15, 2004. On the National Police files, see Eduardo García, ‘‘Rescued police files hold Guatemala’s dark secrets,’’ Reuters, July 22, 2005. 34. The most vivid description of the Paraguay archive discovery is in John Dinges, The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents (New York: New Press, 2004), 237–41. For Almada’s own story, see Martín Almada, Paraguay: La cárcel olvidada, el país exiliado (Asunción: Intercontinental Editora, 1993); for the Terror Archive website, o≈cially the Centro de Documentación y Archivo para la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos, of the Corte Suprema de Justicia de Paraguay, see www.unesco.org/webworld/paraguay/documentos.html. 35. This account relies on Dinges, The Condor Years, 233–36. See also Mónica González, La Conjura: Los mil y un días del golpe (Santiago: Ediciones B Grupo Zeta, 2000). The comparison of Arancibia’s estimate to that of the commission’s is made most explicit in John Dinges, ‘‘Green Light–Red Light: Henry Kissinger’s Two-Track Approach to Human Rights during the ‘Condor Years’ in Chile and Argentina,’’ in Argentina–United States Bilateral Relations: An Historical Perspective and Future Challenges, ed. Cynthia J. Arnson (Washington: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2003), 72–73. 36. For information on the conadep files, see the Secretariat website at www.der human.jus.gov.ar. For Memoria Abierta, see www.memoriaabierta.org.ar and www.sites ofconscience.org/eng/memoria.htm. For the La Plata archives, see www.comisionporla memoria.org. 37. For Brazil’s Nunca Mais project, see http://www.dhnet.org.br/memoria/tnmais; for the São Paulo deops, see http://www.arquivoestado.sp.gov.br/deops.htm; and for the Rio de Janeiro dops, see http://www.aperj.rj.gov.br/fs — acervogfundo.asp. For an excellent overview of Brazil’s progress, characterized as ‘‘bastante más avanzado’’ than Argentina’s, as well as a chart summarizing access to the dops archives, see Ludmila Da Silva

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Catela, ‘‘La casa, la calle, el estado . . . : Democratización de la información vs. resguardo de la intimidad,’’ Puentes, August 2000, 54–64. 38. Maria Luiza Tucci Carneiro, ‘‘Oficinas de historia: Uma politica publica de resgate da memoria,’’ presentation with PowerPoint slides at the international encounter ‘‘El Estado y las Políticas de la Memoria: Archivos, Museos y Educación,’’ hosted by the Comisión Provincial por la Memoria, La Plata, Argentina, September 3, 2004. 39. What follows draws on Kate Doyle, ‘‘The Quiet Americans: U.S. Policy in Mexico during the Cold War,’’ paper presented at the conference ‘‘México, América Central y el Caribe durante la guerra fría,’’ November 2002. 40. Dinges, The Condor Years, 246. The Mexican court ruling occurred in June 2003; the Argentine o≈cer was Ricardo Cavallo.

DANIELA SPENSER

The Caribbean Crisis Catalyst for Soviet Projection in Latin America

The discovery and forced withdrawal of nuclear missiles in Cuba in October and November 1962 were dramatic events on a world scale, humiliating for the Soviet Union and traumatic for Cuba. After its debacle in Cuba, the Soviet Union, which considered itself to be the most advanced, if not the only possible, model for society and for the socialist bloc, and the leader of national liberation movements, had to repair its damaged image and legitimacy in the face of leftwing movements and the Third World. This reconstruction of its image and legitimacy as the vanguard of international socialism, decolonialization, and the struggle for the emancipation of nations under Western imperialism was complicated by the growing conflict between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, the two regimes that in the early 1960s were competing to be the representatives of revolution in the world. The central argument of this chapter is that the Caribbean crisis was a watershed for Soviet policy concerning Latin America. Both Cuba and the Soviet Union emerged wounded from the denouement. While the Cubans were worried about the survival of the revolution, the Soviets feared losing Cuba. Although the Soviet Union did not consider the use of force as the most feasible way to achieve socialism, this fear lay at the root of the Soviet Union’s activities when it was confronted by the expansionist policy of Cuba in support of revolution throughout Latin America. The Soviet directorate feared that if it did not support armed combat, Cuba would act independently of the Soviet Union in the Western Hemisphere and would ally itself with the Chinese revolutionaries. Furthermore, it also supported the armed struggle because, at least in the case of Cuba, it seemed to be an e≈cient way to secure power and to weaken the Soviets’ enemy. However, Soviet aid to the armed struggle in Latin America was ambiguous and given in small amounts so that the Soviet Union would not be accused of refusing to support national liberation movements, and cautiously enough to

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avoid provoking U.S. aggression or backlash in any part of the world. The results of their actions were di√erent from what they intended them to be. The natural allies of the Soviet Union in Latin America were the Communist parties, not the guerrilla groups. However, because of the Cuban Revolution, some parties considered armed struggle to be compatible with or complementary to other forms of participation in the politics of their countries. Although the Soviet Union objected to the Communist parties’ adoption of radical forms of combat, it demanded their support for the Cuban revolution. After the crisis in the Caribbean and in order not to lose the battered leadership of the social movements in the region, the Soviet Union adopted a more conciliatory approach toward the Communist parties that chose armed combat, and gave its support to the Cuban political and military leadership, as well as to Cuban intelligence, which were training and advising the combatants in various Latin American countries in the 1960s. The relations between the Soviet Union and the United States restricted the extent of this support. The coexistence that the Soviet Union sought with the United States demanded the preservation of peace to expand the socialist bloc without endangering the international system, which could have caused a world war. The Soviet Union ceased to support the armed struggle in Latin America toward the end of the 1960s. The removal of Nikita Khrushchev from the leadership of the Soviet Union at the end of 1964 undoubtedly played a part in this. However, the end of Soviet support was also due to the fact that armed combat was proving ine≈cient as a way to establish socialism and to weaken the hegemony of the United States in the Western Hemisphere. This chapter focuses on the years 1962 through 1967. Newly accessible documents from European, Cuban, and North American archives shed new light on the aftermath of the Caribbean crisis, revealing Cuba as a more central player in relations with the Soviet Union than had previously been thought. The international conferences held on the occasion of the anniversary of the missile crisis in 1992 and again in 2002 have also aided this investigation. Bringing veterans of the crisis from Cuba, the United States, and the former Soviet Union into contact with scholars and policymakers, these conferences have helped to assemble knowledge of the missile crisis drawn from experience as well as from research in newly declassified documents. Making the Decision Nikita Khrushchev did not wish to unleash a world war when he decided to install nuclear weapons in Cuba. In his memoirs, Khrushchev recalls:

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We wanted Cuba to remain revolutionary and socialist, and we knew Cuba needed help in order to do so. . . . We had no other way of helping them meet the American threat except to install our missiles on the island, so as to confront the aggressive forces of the United States with a dilemma: if you invade Cuba, you’ll have to face a nuclear missiles attack against your own cities.∞

However, the issues of the defense of Cuba and her revolution formed part of the Soviet Union’s party and state ideology and foreign policy that extended beyond Cuba’s borders. The unity and expansion of the socialist camp were important components of the Soviets’ motivation to seek military protection for Cuba. No less significant in the promulgation of Soviet foreign policy was its aim to combine the traditional diplomacy of coexistence between states with an internationalist policy in support of national liberation movements and progressive political organizations, all the while avoiding a conflict between its commitment to revolutionary ideals and its diplomacy. Peaceful coexistence alongside the capitalist system consisted precisely in expanding socialist domains without disturbing the international order. When Khrushchev became the leader of the party and the Soviet state after the death of Stalin in 1953, Soviet foreign policy began to acquire a new revolutionary dimension. Khrushchev advocated fraternal solidarity and internationalism that he contrasted with the colonial policies adopted by the West. Khrushchev believed that the Third World would eventually form part of the Soviet bloc and that the social transformation that this represented would demonstrate to the world, and above all to the United States, that the Communist cause was the wave of the future. Khrushchev firmly believed in the superiority of the Soviet Union over the West and in the inexorable advance of Communism. He considered the stabilization of relations between East and West to be a necessity at the same time as rearmament and political détente, but above all, he believed that socialism was destined to win a military, political, and economic advantage over the United States. Capitalism was doomed to die and was in fact already in its death throes.≤ Moreover, Khrushchev was aware that the Soviet Union had become a nuclear superpower. This reality prompted him to reevaluate the revolution, socialism, and international relations in terms of the Soviet Union’s apparent military equality with the United States. If the North Americans could use the threat of nuclear armaments to contain Communism, why couldn’t the Soviets use the same tactic to contain North American imperialism, o√er shelter from the threat of nuclear war to friends in the colonial world, and force the retreat of capitalism? Khrushchev wanted to use nuclear armaments to gain U.S. recogni-

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tion of the Soviet Union as an equal global partner, and he believed that nuclear parity would allow it to protect national liberation movements, avoiding the intrusion of the United States and European colonial powers.≥ The triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 deeply impressed Khrushchev and awakened his interest in Latin America. The Soviet leaders perceived the Cuban Revolution first and foremost in its anti–North American dimension. In September 1960, Khrushchev expressed the hope that Cuba would become the beacon for socialism in Latin America, since with the United States against Cuba, ‘‘Castro will have to gravitate to us like an iron filing to a magnet.’’∂ With socialist Cuba, the bloc was expanding without having gone to war, which was an ideal form for its peaceful coexistence with capitalism. By 1960, the Soviet Union was exalting the Cuban Revolution, with its agrarian reform and nationalization of U.S. companies, as the sociopolitical model for Latin America. Touting the revolution’s social and economic policies, and not the use of force by which the revolutionary government came into power, the Soviet leadership presented the Cuban Revolution to Communist parties on the continent as the example to follow in their respective countries and the best means to defend against their enemies.∑ After the failure of the invasion of Cuba at Playa Girón in April 1961, some Soviet theorists hypothesized that the United States did not resort to military intervention because of a shift in the balance of power between the socialist and the capitalist camps in favor of the former. To them, this confirmed the possibility of peaceful coexistence, the global crisis in the capitalist system, and the inability of the United States to export counterrevolution to Cuba. But the Soviets’ attitude of optimism changed to one of concern for the safety of Cuba after it was excluded from the inter-American system at the conference held at Punta del Este in January 1962 by the Organization of American States. Then, in February, the North Americans increased their preparations to invade Cuba. In May, Khrushchev decided that the only means of dissuasion would be to transport missiles with nuclear warheads to Cuban territory. In addition, the Soviet leader was ready to assume the risks that economic and military support for Cuba would pose to his policy of peaceful coexistence with the United States. The defeat of Cuba by the United States would mean defeat for the Soviet Union and for Marxism-Leninism. If Cuba fell, ‘‘other Latin American countries would reject us, claiming that for all our might the Soviet Union had not been able to do anything for Cuba except to make empty protests to the United Nations.’’∏ Khrushchev’s decision to install nuclear weapons on the island was made partly to protect the Cuban Revolution from the North American threat and

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partly to correct the global balance of power that was not weighted in favor of the Soviet Union. It was also prompted by the recent weakening of relations with China and the Soviets’ need to strengthen relations with their new ally in the Third World. Additionally, the Soviets would gain space to maneuver to their advantage in other conflicts between the Soviet Union and the United States. The transfer of nuclear weapons to Cuba—in the backyard of the United States— was an act that would give the North Americans a taste of the same medicine that the Soviets had been swallowing since the beginning of the year, when they witnessed the installation of nato nuclear missiles in Turkey and Italy, a move that went hand-in-hand with Kennedy’s decision to continue testing for nuclear weapons. Khrushchev believed that nuclear weapons radically changed international relations and that putting them in place would integrate Cuba into the socialist camp, provoke a general crisis in the global capitalist system, and make the United States vulnerable.π Khrushchev outlined his proposal at the meeting of the Defense Council and with members of the Presidium of the Party on May 21, having rejected the idea that the second U.S. invasion of Cuba would be as badly carried out as the first at Playa Girón: ‘‘In addition to protecting Cuba, our missiles would achieve what the West likes to call ‘the balance of power.’ ’’ The North Americans, having surrounded the Soviet Union with military bases and threatened to use nuclear weapons, would now themselves feel what it was like to be faced by enemy missiles. The weapons were intended not to be used but to threaten and temper the aggressors. It was necessary to remind the North Americans that the Soviet Union was powerful and demanded their respect. It would show the Cubans that the Soviet Union was capable of protecting and defending its revolution and projecting its power in the Western Hemisphere. The operation was a plan to contain the belligerency of the United States toward Cuba. The weapons would be transferred in secret, and their existence would be made public in November, following the U.S. congressional elections and when Khrushchev would be in Cuba to sign the treaty for military defense with his Caribbean partner. In addition, this would silence China’s criticisms of Soviet reformism by demonstrating that the Soviet Union was capable of leading the battle against imperialism.∫ The Humiliation of the Soviets The transfer of nuclear missiles in Cuba was detrimental to the Soviets because ‘‘Khrushchev had not thought things through or prepared backup plans for various contingencies. He badly misjudged the American response, im-

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provised madly when he was found out, and was fortunate the crisis ended as safely as it did.’’Ω To begin with, the key to the success of the operation was the secrecy of the installation of the rockets before they became functional. Anastas Mikoyan, the Soviet deputy prime minister, traveled to Havana at the beginning of November 1962 to try to repair the damaged relations between the Cuban and the Soviet leaders. Having presented failure as success and the withdrawal of the missiles as the strengthening of Cuba’s defensive capacity, he revealed where the planners had miscalculated: ‘‘We proceeded on the assumption, our military had advised us, that under the palm leaves of Cuba the strategic weapons would be safely hidden from air reconnaissance.’’∞≠ Several years later, in his autobiography, Mikoyan referred to Marshal Sergei Biryuzov, the military o≈cial in charge of installing the missiles in Cuba, as a person who ‘‘was not very bright. . . . I myself had seen those palms, and there was no way anybody was going to hide rocket launch sites under them.’’∞∞ In reality, the secrecy of the development and maintenance of the missile operation was one of its weaknesses. The discovery in August of the increase in the supply of military equipment and personnel to Cuba and then, in September, the discovery of the construction of the sites where the missiles would be installed were serious barriers to the operation’s success. Instead of strengthening Cuba, these operations made the island more vulnerable in the event of an invasion by the United States, especially while the missiles were in transit and before their installation in October.∞≤ When the North Americans discovered the presence of new weapons and troops in Cuba, Khrushchev responded by accelerating the speed at which they were delivered and installed. On October 22, Kennedy made public the discovery of the Soviet military preparations in Cuba and the greater possibility of war between the superpowers. Khrushchev, who was in Moscow and in a state of disbelief about what had happened and what was to come, defended the initiative to place nuclear weapons in Cuba as an act whose objective was to intimidate the United States and deter an invasion of the island. On that same day, Khrushchev was firm in his resolve: ‘‘They can attack us and we shall respond. . . . This may end in a big war.’’∞≥ Khrushchev maintained his defiant attitude for some days after October 22 when President Kennedy announced the blockade of Cuba against Soviet ships, which was to begin on the twenty-fourth. Realizing that there was no imminent danger of an invasion of Cuba, Khrushchev saw no reason to discontinue the construction of missile sites or to change the course of the four ships that were

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on the high seas carrying nuclear warheads and the submarines with nuclear torpedoes that were moving toward the Cuban coasts. In condemning the blockade, Khrushchev conveyed the message to President Kennedy that the Soviet ships were not obliged to respect it; at the same time, the armed forces of the Warsaw Pact were put on high alert. Khrushchev wrote a letter to Fidel Castro on October 23, assuring him that the Soviet Union had no intention of turning back. So that the Cubans would not doubt his commitment to defend the island, Khrushchev did not tell Castro that one section of the fleet had already returned to the Soviet Union after being warned by Kennedy. By then, some of the medium-range missiles were already in Cuba and almost operative. Khrushchev tried to improve the Soviet position in this crisis situation by demanding that in exchange for withdrawing the missiles from Cuba, the North Americans should withdraw the nato missiles from Turkey.∞∂ It was not until Khrushchev received a letter from Kennedy on October 25, in which the president demanded total capitulation, and after the Soviet military shot down a spy plane flying over Cuba on October 27, that Khrushchev decided to dismantle the missiles. Military equality in the Caribbean would be unattainable while nuclear war was on the verge of breaking out.∞∑ To save the world, it was necessary to retreat, Khrushchev said on October 28. Nevertheless, while the Soviets, faced with their clear military inferiority in the Caribbean, were dismantling and packing up their weapons, Khrushchev defiantly tried to make his weak position appear strong. The installation of nuclear weapons in Cuba was a response to the continual attacks and acts of piracy in Cuban waters by exiles from the island who were operating from U.S. territory, and the Soviet Union could not abdicate ‘‘our responsibility to give assistance to the Cuban people.’’∞∏ As soon as Khrushchev conceded the withdrawal of the rockets from Cuban soil, he called the pullout a victory. The Soviet government had saved the world from a nuclear catastrophe. The Soviet Union and the forces of socialism, of peace and reason, had triumphed.∞π In the presence of the Czechoslovak allies, Khrushchev declared: We also agreed to dismantle the missiles because their presence in Cuba was essentially of little military importance to us. The missiles were meant to protect Cuba from attack; they helped us to wrench out of the imperialists the statement that they would not attack Cuba, and they thus served their main purpose. Otherwise we can hit the U.S.A. from elsewhere, and we do not need missiles in Cuba for that. On the contrary, their deployment on our territory is safer for us and our technical personnel who look after them.∞∫

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In conclusion, Khrushchev asserted, ‘‘I am of the opinion that we won.’’ Cuba and her revolution were saved. This could not have happened without the missiles. Moreover, ‘‘the proximity of our missiles made them understand, perhaps for the first time, that we have weapons that are at least as strong as theirs. . . . . Now they have felt the winds of war on their own house.’’∞Ω These defiant and self-assuring messages were directed as much toward the Soviet population as to the socialist camp—above all to the Chinese leaders, who had at first viewed the Soviet nuclear initiative in Cuba as an adventure and then as a capitulation. Khrushchev wanted to show them that the solution to the crisis had revealed the fallacy of the Chinese point of view that imperialism was a paper tiger; the Soviet Union had demonstrated that it was a dangerous tiger that could be tamed. Moreover, the resolution of the crisis was ‘‘a classic example of ‘peaceful coexistence,’ which is nothing other than continuous struggle, a series of conflicts, one concession after another. Only through this struggle is it possible to preserve peace and gain advantages at the expense of the imperialists.’’≤≠ But Khrushchev’s most arduous task during the months after the crisis required him to persuade the members of his own party, Fidel Castro, the Cuban government, and the entire world that the Soviet Union was defending peace and socialism, that the resolution of the Caribbean crisis had been not a capitulation but a strengthening of socialism, the Soviet Union, and the defense of the security of Cuba. On October 30 Khrushchev wrote Fidel Castro that the installation of rockets in Cuba had forced Kennedy into the commitment not to invade, and that this had been achieved without a nuclear attack. The independence and sovereignty of Cuba had been strengthened.≤∞ Persuading the Cuban government that the decision to dismantle the missiles had been correct, while at the same time convincing it to allow an inspection to confirm the withdrawal of the nuclear weapons, was a delicate task. At the beginning of November, Khrushchev sent the deputy prime minister Anastas Mikoyan to Havana to placate the Cubans. By then, the presence of the missiles that had originally been sent to strengthen the Soviets’ position in the Caribbean was an obstacle to ending the crisis. The United States was demanding the inspection of the withdrawal of the missiles, which the Cuban government squarely rejected. Mikoyan thus saw the Cubans as an obstacle to the negotiations with the United States, because it would not be until the withdrawal ended that ‘‘we will be able to adamantly oppose overflights, the quarantine, verification by the Red Cross, violations of airspace. At that moment the correlation of forces will change.’’≤≤ Aggravating the damage already done, the United States was also demanding that the IL-28 bombers, which the government considered o√ensive weapons, be

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removed from the island. These planes, no longer used by the Soviet Union, were among the first bombers to be sent to Cuba before the decision to place the missiles. On November 11, Khrushchev, his colleagues, and the military decided to accept the demands of the North Americans. This decision placed Mikoyan in an extremely uncomfortable position because he had assured the Cubans that the planes had not been included in the compromise package between Khrushchev and Kennedy. Aware of the impact that the decision would have, the party secretary had to first convince Mikoyan himself: ‘‘What do we lose and what do we gain as a result of the removal of the IL-28s from Cuba? There are no particular losses; there will be only moral losses for Cuba.’’ Cuba was no less vulnerable without the bombers than it was with them. On the contrary, its safety would be strengthened because the removal of the bombers was precisely one of the conditions for Kennedy’s guarantee not to attack Cuba.≤≥ But in those moments, Khrushchev was looking beyond Cuba and the socialist camp. If the Soviet Union wanted to be the pole of attraction for the progressive countries, ‘‘those which at decisive moments unfortunately do not vote with us in the United Nations on fundamental points,’’ it had to give the appearance of being a pacifist power. Withdrawing the IL-28 bombers from Cuba was a concession made to demonstrate the Soviet vocation for peace.≤∂ Castro’s impulsive attitude jeopardized world peace, and his argument that the Soviet Union wanted to benefit from installing nuclear weapons in Cuba appeared o√ensive in the light of all the material aid that had been given to Cuba and from which the Soviet Union had reaped no benefits: ‘‘This gives us nothing, and this is known to everyone and is known to our Cuban Comrades.’’ Yes, the Soviet Union defended its interests: ‘‘But our interests here were expressed as common revolutionary interests, the interests of the revolution, the interests of the workers’ movement, and Marxist-Leninist teaching. We did it only in the name of that.’’ Finally, Khrushchev asked Mikoyan to explain to Castro that the Soviet Union had not placed missiles in Cuba to defend the socialist camp: The interests of the defense of the socialist camp, and the USSR, as the most powerful socialist state, did not require the deployment of our missiles in Cuba. We possess su≈ciently powerful missiles on the territory of the USSR to ensure this defense, and we can use them against the imperialist aggressor.≤∑

Following the Soviet promise to remove the IL-28s from Cuba, the United States lifted its embargo of October 24 on Soviet ships, and toward the end of November the crisis was apparently over for the Soviets. Again, the Soviets celebrated this step as a triumph for the fulfillment of peaceful coexistence and praised the fact that the two superpowers had the ability to negotiate and make

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verbal commitments. The United States did not insist on the inspection denied by Castro because ‘‘they trust us.’’≤∏ The fact that the North Americans had trusted the Soviets’ word meant that the United States considered the Soviet Union as an equal. The Soviets would have wanted to preserve this achievement of the missile crisis. Carlos Rafael Rodríguez of the National Agrarian Reform Institute visited Moscow in December. Khrushchev took advantage of the opportunity o√ered by the presence of a high o≈cial from the Cuban government to vent his feelings about the Cubans’ lack of enthusiasm for the Soviet decision to install and then withdraw the missiles. Rodríguez remembered such comments from his conversation with Khrushchev as follows: We have also felt a lot of bitterness. . . . We have never declared that the missiles are going to be used to convert Cuba into a launching pad against imperialism. . . . Only fools can claim that we placed the missiles there with the intention of keeping them. . . . We consider that we have achieved a victory for Cuba and for the Soviet Union, that the objectives we had when we placed them there have been achieved. . . . We have retreated tactically, but they have retreated fundamentally. I repeat: we have not retreated on any front, we are not on the defensive anywhere; I insist, anywhere, even in Cuba. We are on the o√ensive everywhere.

Cuba, moreover, would ‘‘be a catalyst for a revolution in Latin America. We have put all our e√orts into saving Cuba, so that it can serve as an example in Latin America.’’≤π Contrary to the factual evidence, Khrushchev asserted: ‘‘In transferring the missiles we have foreseen everything, we have known that we were putting ourselves on the brink of war and could even engage in the war itself.’’ Another of Khrushchev’s assertions was that ‘‘now we have a situation in which imperialism is not progressing anywhere, nowhere, even in Cuba. I stress: nowhere.’’ Nonaggression was ensured for the following six years—the two years remaining in Kennedy’s first presidential term and the four years of his second term: ‘‘In these years, the balance of power will be in our favor. Possibly Brazil and other countries will enter into revolution.’’≤∫ All the actions that had been taken were justified: the Soviet Union had saved Cuba, it had not retreated in the face of the North Americans, the international standing of the Soviet Union had grown, it was the North Americans who had been afraid during the crisis, and it was Castro’s fault that the Soviet Union had had to compromise because it was he who had wanted the Soviet Union to use the nuclear weapons.≤Ω But behind the triumphant tone there was a feeling of defeat: Kennedy in-

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sisted that the exchange of the Soviet missiles in Cuba for the nato missiles in Turkey had to remain secret. And Khrushchev had not been successful in obtaining a written commitment from the United States not to invade Cuba. The Soviet Union had been humiliated by the return of the missiles. From then on, it tried to recover its wounded pride by pushing to manufacture its own military equipment and by supporting the movements for national liberation and revolution. The strengthening of these movements potentially weakened the opposing capitalist camp, expanded socialism, and defended the Soviet Union. In reality, the missile crisis of October 1962 not only pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war but also undermined the credibility of the Soviet leaders in the eyes of the U.S. government. Although Cuba would not be invaded and the United States would withdraw its rockets from Turkey, the U.S. government would henceforth see Cuba as a trampoline that the Soviets wanted to use in their plans to change the existing balance of power in Latin America and Africa. The credibility of the Soviet Union in the socialist camp and in the national liberation movements had su√ered a blow, and any future threats from the Soviet Union to confront the United States were less convincing. Additionally, there was an increase in China’s influence on Cuba and other Latin American countries as a result of the missile crisis.≥≠ To sum up the Caribbean crisis, the collision between the three countries resulted in humiliation for the Soviet Union. This was the predominant feeling in the circles of power in the Soviet Union and led to the conviction that the embarrassing withdrawal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba had in fact resulted from the military superiority of the United States, a situation that the Soviet Union would try to correct.≥∞ The crisis also contributed to Khrushchev’s downfall. In October 1964, the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party accused Khrushchev of being an adventurer for insisting that the Soviet Union give military assistance to such faraway countries in Latin America, with little probability of technical-military success. The committee also admonished him for leading the Soviet Union to the point of no return with the discovery of the missiles: Having no other way out, we were forced to accept all the demands and conditions dictated by the U.S.A., including humiliating inspections of our ships by the Americans. The missiles, as well as most of our troops, were withdrawn from Cuba after the U.S. demand. This event also damaged the international prestige of our country, our party, and our armed forces, while at the same time helping to strengthen U.S. prestige. All in all, the missile crisis of 1962 caused serious damage to Soviet-Cuban relations, and in 1964 ‘‘we still feel them.’’≥≤

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The Cuban Trauma The withdrawal of the missiles and the way it was carried out without asking their opinion left the Cubans with the feeling of having been abandoned, creating distrust with the Soviet Union. When the Soviets took back the rockets, Cuba felt more vulnerable than before they had been installed, and feared that the Soviets’ apparent lack of determination to protect their Caribbean partner would allow the United States to take advantage of the situation to launch an attack. The insecurity and fear of such an attack lasted during the following years and influenced Cuban foreign policy as well as its relations with the Soviet Union. Toward the end of 1967, these relations reached a breaking point owing to the accumulation of apparently irreconcilable di√erences between the two countries.≥≥ The conceptual di√erences concerning the meaning of, and the procedure for, Soviet military aid to Cuba became apparent in May 1962, when the initial decision to give the assistance was o√ered. When a Soviet delegation arrived in Havana in June with the proposal to send the rockets to Cuba, Castro saw the possibility for consolidating the defense of Cuba and the socialist camp, but he also saw the inconveniences and dangers. He was worried that Soviet military aid would hurt Cuban pride and create the impression that Cuba was unable to defend itself. Castro wanted the installation of the missiles to be seen as an improvement of the international position of the socialist camp, not as a desperate stratagem on behalf of Cuba to avoid an attack by the United States.≥∂ In 1992 Castro recorded what he then believed: We did not like the rockets. If it had only been a matter of our defense, we would not have accepted the missiles. But don’t go and think that it was fear of the dangers that could have followed from having the missiles here; it was because of the way in which this could tarnish the image of the Revolution, and we were very zealous about the image of the Revolution in the rest of Latin America; and that the presence of the missiles would convert us into a Soviet military base and this in our opinion had a high political cost for our country’s image.≥∑

To harmonize the agreement with Cuban sentiment, the members of the Dirección Nacional de las Organizaciones Revolucionarias Integradas pointed out the need to develop a military agreement and to make it public. On August 11, Aleksandr Alekseev, recently appointed as the Soviet ambassador to Cuba, arrived in Havana with the project for the military agreement. However, Castro did not agree with the text because it made the objective appear to be the defense

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of Cuban territory, while he considered that the objectives should be military cooperation and mutual defense. Confronted by the North American campaign against Cuba, which intensified after August 1962 when the United States detected an increase in the movements of armaments and troops on the island, the Cuban leadership saw the first signs of a crisis. In light of both these circumstances, the Cubans believed it was convenient to immediately publicize the military agreement. For this purpose, Castro sent Ernesto Guevara and Emilio Aragonés to Moscow carrying the text of the military agreement, which the Soviets drafted and the Cubans edited, to make it public, although they accepted that the Soviets would make the final decision.≥∏ Khrushchev agreed to the corrections in the agreement, but not to its immediate publication, preferring to wait until the missiles were operative. Che Guevara and Aragonés argued that the rockets could be discovered before they were operative and that the United States could take advantage of the situation and attack. Khrushchev replied that he was sure that the weapons would not be discovered, or at least not before they were in operation. And if the North Americans were to find out, they would have no alternative but to accept the fact.≥π As we now know, once the missile crisis exploded on October 22, Khrushchev sent Castro Kennedy’s declaration that demanded the withdrawal of the missiles from Cuba. The Cubans considered the demands of the U.S. president to be an ‘‘exceptional interference in the a√airs of the Republic of Cuba, the violation of the norms of international law and of the basic rules that govern the relations between States and a disrespectful, provocative act against the Soviet Union.’’ They rejected ‘‘the presumptuous demands of the North American government to control the consignments of arms to Cuba and its ambition to determine the kind of weapons that the Republic of Cuba can possess.’’≥∫ Castro, who was convinced of the imminence of an attack from the United States, wrote to Khrushchev on October 26 that if the United States bombarded Cuba, ‘‘rest assured that we will resist firmly and decidedly, whatever the kind of attack.’’ Castro wrote this letter with great care ‘‘and some major qualms. Because what I was going to say was audacious and was daring.’’ Castro considered that if this were to happen, then ‘‘it was necessary to fire a complete and total load of nuclear missiles’’ in the conviction that whoever fired the first shot had the absolute advantage. The Soviet Union should not allow the imperialists ‘‘to fire against her the first nuclear attack.’’ At that time, Castro was contemplating the possibility that Cuba could disappear: ‘‘It was our lot to have to pay the price, but at least the world would be liberated from imperialism.’’≥Ω To Khrushchev’s letter, in which he had informed Castro that he was conced-

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ing to Kennedy by withdrawing the missiles in order to save Cuba from an invasion by the United States and to end the conflict in the Caribbean, Castro replied: ‘‘We knew—do not presume that we ignored it—that we would have been exterminated, as you insinuate in your letter, in the case of a nuclear war. However, it was not for this reason that we asked you to withdraw the rockets, not for that that we asked you to give in.’’ To Castro it seemed unacceptable that Khrushchev had withdrawn the missiles without in exchange demanding from the United States ‘‘guarantees that satisfy Cuba.’’ The Yankees should have been forced to debate with us and been brought into the most uncomfortable situation that they had ever been in, because they would have had lengthy arguments with us, the tension would have been lightened a little, and the results would have been di√erent and at least honorable and within the principles and within the most elementary consideration for the country and the agreements that had been made with a people that had not shown the remotest sign of vacillation at that critical time.∂≠

On October 29, Castro publicized the five points of his main conditions for resolving the crisis: the economic embargo must end; the subversive activities against Cuba must cease; the attacks of piracy on bases outside U.S. territory must be prevented; the violation of Cuban airspace must cease; and the U.S. marines must leave Guantánamo. Abandoned by the Soviet Union at the moment of greatest danger to Cuba, Castro announced that he would seek an agreement with the United States in accordance with his own needs, independently from the Soviet acceptance of Kennedy’s commitment not to invade Cuba.∂∞ Various testimonies following the announcement of the Soviet–North American agreement to dismantle and withdraw the nuclear missiles summarize the sentiment of the Cubans. On October 31, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez visited the Czech ambassador in Havana, Vladimir Pavlicek, to inform him of the disastrous e√ect on Fidel and his government of the dismantling of the missiles and of the un decision to carry out inspections in Cuba, and the situation in which they had been placed in front of the Cuban people. In addition, ‘‘the actions taken by the Soviet Union would have a catastrophic e√ect on the position of the ussr, as well as on the whole of the socialist camp and Latin America’’ unless guarantees of nonaggression could be obtained from North America, although nobody in Cuba would believe them.∂≤ The impressions collected by the Hungarian ambassador during the days in which Cuba lived in fear and insecurity for its future were even more expressive. On October 27, when Che was inspecting the military units in Pinar del Rio and

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heard Khrushchev’s message on the radio that the missiles in Cuba were to be dismantled in exchange for the dismantling of the U.S. missiles in Turkey, ‘‘he went mad, threw his beret to the floor and furiously repeated that this was a violation because he had had conversations in Moscow and they had been for something di√erent.’’ From another conversation, János Beck picked up the rumor that Fidel Castro had instructed President Dorticós to handle public a√airs for a month so that he could allow himself su≈cient time to recover from this blow.∂≥ The Cuban people, Beck observed, had lost their respect for the Soviet Union and Khrushchev. For example, in some military units, the opinion could be heard that it would make no di√erence if the North Americans or the Russians arrived because the soldiers would shoot at anyone in self-defense, even if it resulted in their death. Letters expressing feelings of desperation, abandonment, and deception arrived at the Soviet Embassy. Cubans expressed the opinion that both the Soviet Union and the United States were superpowers and that the Soviets were using Cuba as a means to resolve their conflicts with the United States. The exchange of the missiles in Cuba for those in Turkey caused special irritation because it placed the two countries on equal terms. Other voices heard on the streets protested that the Soviets had demanded the removal of the missiles from the bases in Turkey but had ignored those at the military bases in Guantánamo.∂∂ Che Guevara was making no pretenses to Mikoyan when he expressed that an extremely complicated situation had developed in Latin America as a consequence of the crisis. Communists as well as revolutionary groups had been disconcerted by the actions of the Soviets. Several organizations had divided, and new factions had appeared. Criticisms of Guevara arose from his conviction that it was possible to take power in several Latin American countries and to remain there. This opportunity was in danger because of recent Soviet errors, including the exchange of missiles in Turkey for those in Cuba, and the decline of the revolutionary movement in Latin America instigated by the concessions made to the United States. The interests of both camps converged in Cuba. But it was the United States that passed itself o√ in public opinion as the camp that had defended peace against Soviet aggression and achieved the removal of the Soviet base in Cuba. Guevara’s harangue against the Soviet Union concluded: ‘‘Even within the context of all our respect for the Soviet Union, we believe that the decisions taken by the Soviet Union were erroneous.’’∂∑ The Polish ambassador, Leopold Unger, met with Carlos Rafael Rodríguez on

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November 27. Referring to the conversation that had taken place, he informed his ministry that the Cubans felt o√ended by the way in which the crisis had been resolved and that the Soviet Union had made concessions in exchange for nothing and had retreated in the face of the imperialists. Kennedy’s guarantees meant nothing because the economic pressure and the sabotage against the island persisted. The acceptable policy would have been to fight fire with fire. Cuba and the Soviet Union had di√erent points of view on coexisting with imperialism. Although Latin American countries had not experienced the horrors of war, they had experienced the horrors of imperialism, and from this perspective, the result of the Caribbean crisis was to postpone the revolutionary process in Latin America and strengthen the most reactionary circles in the United States and Latin America. According to Rodríguez, the conversations with Mikoyan in Havana were going nowhere because it was impossible to reach an understanding. The Soviet Union lacked a policy for colonial countries and for colonial revolution. The cases of the Congo, Guinea, Algeria, and now Cuba testified to this fact. The Soviet Union did not have an adequate conception of how to help the revolutionary anti-imperialist movements. In addition, the Soviets did not understand the regional political dynamics, believing, for example, that the Central American countries were subjects of the United States without taking into account their formal sovereignty. The fact that the press in neither the Soviet Union nor any other socialist country published Castro’s declaration of November 1, when he spoke of the di√erences of opinion with the Soviet Union, created a bad impression in the Cuban leadership: ‘‘It is a shameful policy to hide the most serious issues from public opinion. It is di≈cult for the Communists to criticize the Soviet leadership, but you cannot refrain from doing so if you want to follow your conscience and be in agreement with history.’’∂∏ The main question for the Cubans at this time concerned the extent to which the Soviet Union was prepared to defend Cuba. And this was unknown. To Cuba this meant ‘‘simultaneously repairing the consequences of the errors of the Soviet policy in Cuban territory and in Latin American territory, and even in Africa.’’ The Cuban experience with the Soviet Union had another implication for its policy toward Latin America: taking the peaceful road to power did not ensure triumph. ‘‘The only future lies exclusively in a very active Cuban policy. It has to respond to the aggressive policy of imperialism with a policy of armed conflict against imperialism.’’ Cuba did not export revolutions, as it was accused of doing; it gave assistance to existing revolutionary movements.∂π In Moscow in December, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez complained to Khrushchev

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that during the crisis the Soviets had not treated the Cubans as representatives of a party and a state. He recalled that the two countries had di√erent interpretations of the reason for the installation of the rockets. Fidel had accepted the rockets as part of a Soviet global strategy that would benefit the socialist camp. In accepting the rockets, the Cubans accepted the danger of atomic destruction: ‘‘Furthermore, I told him that the Comrades who had led the main discussions were convinced that the rockets were there to stay, as part of this global strategy. That the interviews between him and Che and Aragonés had left the Comrades with the impression that there had even been statements from him that more or less expressed that ‘the Yankees are going to shout, but they will have to swallow the rockets.’ ’’ It was for this reason that the decision to withdraw the rockets came as a disorienting surprise and ‘‘had endangered the influence and the prestige of the Cuban Revolution and the socialist character of our country, and so had obliged us to publicly express our di√erences, something that was a bitter decision for Fidel and for all of us; and as a result of this handling of the process he had had to adopt a position that conflicted with the commitment of the USSR.’’∂∫ But the controversy did not stop there: Cuba was unprotected because of the lack of a military agreement with the Soviet Union. The two governments had agreed that Soviet soldiers should remain on the island as trainers and would leave when Cuban troops had been instructed to use the weapons. It was necessary that both the Cuban people and the imperialists know ‘‘that in this case Cuba had the military standing that was necessary to contain any aggression.’’∂Ω Even this arrangement was insu≈cient to alleviate the fear of an attack on Cuba. This continued to a√ect Cuban-Soviet relations, with the Cuban leadership convinced that security continued to depend on increasing the area liberated from U.S. domination in Latin America. The way in which the crisis was resolved in the case of Cuba, Rodríguez continued, gave credibility to the Chinese accusation that the Soviet Union had solved its problems with the United States at the expense of other countries. In early November 1962, the Chinese Embassy in Havana organized large demonstrations to support Cuba and to ensure that the crisis would be resolved without excluding the island. China’s show of solidarity gained supporters in Cuba. It was also China, not the Soviet Union, that emphasized in the press the importance of armed combat in the revolutionary movement in Latin America.∑≠ In January 1968 Fidel Castro was still recalling the crisis of October 1962. In his speech at the meeting of the central committee of the Cuban Communist Party, in the presence of its young members, Castro referred to the early years of the

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relations between Cuba and the Soviet Union: ‘‘At that time we had a very high regard for the Soviet Union, I think more than it deserved.’’ To demonstrate this, he gave a detailed account of the military pact presented by the Soviets and the process for installing the missiles on the island. Regarding the project for the military pact, Castro described it as ‘‘one of the most incredible hoaxes ever written. . . . It was the work of bureaucratic cretins, absolutely impolitic.’’∑∞ The Cubans’ trust in the Soviet Union had been naive; they could not conceive that revolutionary leaders could act in any other way than with impartiality and internationalism. In fact, the crisis never dissipated for the Cubans. The international crisis was resolved, but peace for Cuba remained in limbo. Not one of the five points to guarantee the security and integrity of the island was taken into consideration. No document for nonaggression was signed; and even if the United States never invaded, from then on, its policy for Cuba was to work toward the destabilization of the country and the downfall of Castro and his revolutionary regime. Relations between Cuba and the Soviet Union were permanently damaged.∑≤ After October Although the crisis between the United States and the Soviet Union temporarily abated in November 1962, this was not the case with Cuba and the Soviet Union. The Cuban government had lost its confidence in the Soviet Union, which in turn resented this loss because it was convinced that it had saved Cuba from the aggression of the United States. However, the Soviet Union did not want to lose the expansion of the Soviet bloc in the Caribbean, a region in which the North Americans clearly had strategic and geographic advantages. In January 1963 Khrushchev wrote a long letter to Castro to ensure that the leader did not lose his confidence in the capacity of the Soviet Union to protect the socialist world in the event of a nuclear war. It was known in Moscow that Che Guevara considered the missile crisis to be responsible for weakening the Soviet leadership of the revolutionary movement in Latin America. As a result, however much the Soviet Union wanted to remove all its weapons from Cuba to comply with its commitment to the United States and resolve the crisis within the terms of the deal, it would be unable to do so if it did not want to lose Castro’s remaining support, especially in light of the rumors of renewed North American aggression toward Cuba. From then on, Cuba and Fidel Castro had an important influence on the terms of relations with the Soviet Union. In April 1963, Castro traveled to Moscow to seek a permanent commitment

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from the Soviet Union to defend Cuba militarily, and to negotiate Cuba’s participation in the Warsaw Pact. The Soviets initially rejected both petitions in order to avoid providing Kennedy with an excuse to not adhere to his verbal commitment to refrain from attacking Cuba. The two governments signed various agreements concerning technical assistance for the armed forces and Cuba’s defense system, and for considerable economic aid. In the final communiqué that was signed before Castro’s return in June, the Soviets inserted their guarantee for the nuclear defense of Cuba.∑≥ In January 1964, Castro returned to the Soviet Union, and the Soviets reiterated their commitment to defend Cuba from any aggression with all the means at their disposal. These kinds of pronouncements were intended to calm the feelings of frustration in Cuba and to refute the constant accusations from the Chinese that Moscow had initially taken the risk to support Cuba, only to capitulate when confronted by North American imperialism, thus leaving Cuba at the mercy of the United States. After Brezhnev took control of the party following the fall of Khrushchev in 1964, the Soviets withdrew their commitments to assist Cuba with nuclear weapons. This followed the realization that no verbal declaration could prevent an attack on Cuba, and that in the event of a confrontation with nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union would not respond with another politically humiliating defeat.∑∂ The months following the crisis were di≈cult for Khrushchev, who continued to be concerned because, despite the formidable concessions the Soviets made to North American demands, he had been unable to secure a firm commitment from Kennedy not to invade Cuba. However, a verbal commitment would have little weight while the U.S. aggressions toward Cuba continued to reveal Khrushchev’s weakness to the world. Khrushchev was continually being reminded of the absence of this obligatory commitment. During a conversation with Mr. Trevelyan, the British ambassador in Moscow in March 1963, Khrushchev pointed out that the United States frequently commented that its government was not committed against an invasion of Cuba. These statements, according to Khrushchev, ‘‘are very dangerous and full of deadly consequences, since this can lead to destruction in the confidence—still in its embryonic stage, still tenuous— in the promise, which developed during the settlement of the Caribbean crisis.’’∑∑ In addition to these rumors, Khrushchev continued to be pressured by the United States to reduce the military forces in Cuba as if, according to him, the concessions that had already been made were insu≈cient. In April 1963, Khrushchev met with Undersecretary of State Averell Harriman and Ambassador Foy Kohler. Both questioned Khrushchev about the commitment he had made to

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Kennedy during the crisis to substantially reduce the Soviet armed forces in Cuba. But Khrushchev was unwilling to reveal his military plans—if he did, he would be subjected to further humiliation. Somewhat provoked, Khrushchev replied to Harriman, who had forced the chairman into submission by invoking the pressure put on Kennedy by the hawks to solve the problem of Cuba once and for all: ‘‘The Soviet Union is not accountable to the United States and cannot appear before the world as constantly conceding to American pressure.’’ Khrushchev had no objections to giving the president himself the information, but this would only embolden the president’s critics to demand more, in the understanding that only pressure tactics produced results. Later, in a state of visible irritation, Khrushchev commented: ‘‘If the United States wants normal relations with the Soviet Union, don’t aggravate the issues, don’t ask questions which cause tensions for us, don’t insult our national pride.’’ The Soviet Union wanted friendship with the United States but was ready to act drastically: ‘‘Neither of us wants to start anything over Cuba, but if anything is started, the Soviets have retaliatory power.’’∑∏ Although the military and political circumstances were notably weak, it was important to Khrushchev that in spite of the crisis and the withdrawal of the missiles from Cuba, the United States treat him not as an inferior but as a partner of equal standing: ‘‘At our meeting in Vienna we seemed to have agreed to proceed from the fact that the forces of our states were equal. Well, then, if our forces are equal, then there should also be equal possibilities. Why does the United States forget about this?’’∑π But 1963 was radically di√erent from 1961, and the United States was not willing to reduce the pressure on Cuba. For example, throughout 1963 the Cuban Coordinating Committee of the U.S. National Security Council discussed various undercover operations, such as attacks on Soviet troops in Cuba by Cubans who opposed the regime, and various acts of sabotage, such as attaching mines to Cuban ships.∑∫ Although this tactic was rejected, the president approved of ‘‘inciting Cubans to harass, attack and sabotage Soviet military personnel in Cuba, provided every precaution is taken to prevent attribution.’’ The president ‘‘approved the sabotage of cargoes on Cuban ships and the crippling of ships (through sand in the gears).’’ The invasion of Cuba remained on the agenda as a possibility. John McCone, director of the cia, preferred a plan that, once it had a consensus, would ‘‘remove the Soviets from Cuba and take care of Castro.’’∑Ω While these plans were being discussed, Kennedy was urging Khrushchev to continue withdrawing Soviet troops from Cuba as an important element in

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reducing tensions between the two countries, and because the presence of Soviet forces in Cuba ‘‘can never be regarded with equanimity by the people of this hemisphere and therefore further withdrawals of such forces can only be helpful.’’ This withdrawal was the condition under which the United States would comply with the commitment it had made in October and November of the previous year.∏≠ What the president did not say in public was that he did not oppose the cia plan to solve the Cuban question ‘‘by bringing consistent pressure of every possible nature on Khrushchev to force his withdrawal from Cuba, and then bring about the downfall of Castro by means which could be developed after the removal of the Soviet troops (but not before) and thereafter establish a satisfactory government in Cuba.’’∏∞ The North American government was closely watching the development of the relations between Cuba and the Soviet Union and saw any improvement as an obstacle to the United States’ own intentions. These relations, according to a memorandum from the director of the cia, reached the point at which both sides were willing to live with the di√erences: ‘‘Castro is asserting and declaring his independence of the Soviets. He considers that he is not a satellite but is obviously beholden to the Soviets for economic aid and military assistance.’’∏≤ Another cia memorandum pointed out that it would be convenient for the United States if relations soured to the point where Castro broke away from the Soviet Union, causing the Soviets to withdraw their troops from Cuba, which would facilitate the downfall of the regime, thereby putting an end to Cuban subversion in the hemisphere.∏≥ Nevertheless, the situation developed in another direction: ‘‘The USSR has evidently decided to supply su≈cient economic aid to sustain the Cuban economy at about the current level, and will probably train Cubans in the operation of the Soviet military equipment now in Cuba under Soviet control.’’ Later, contrary to what the cia had anticipated, ‘‘Castro, perhaps owing to Soviet influence, has toned down his inflammatory appeals for violent revolutions throughout Latin America. There is no indication, however, of a basic change in Castro’s determination to promote insurgent movements. In his mind Venezuela in particular continues to be a priority target.’’∏∂ The real issue was that Cuba under Fidel Castro and allied to the Soviet Union was unacceptable to the United States.∏∑ It is not di≈cult to conceive that both Cuban and Soviet intelligence were aware of the subversive intentions of the North Americans, which made it apparent that no agreement between the Soviet Union and the United States could ensure peaceful coexistence between the United States and Cuba. Neither

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Soviet diplomacy in Washington nor economic and military aid to Cuba could give the required assurances. The limitations to protecting Cuba influenced the Soviets’ projection into the hemisphere. Because of the continued aggression from North America, the Soviets felt the obligation to support Cuba materially and politically by increasing trade and public guarantees of protection in the event of an invasion.∏∏ Verbal commitments not to invade Cuba were left up in the air after Kennedy’s death in November 1963. The new administration of Lyndon B. Johnson proved less tolerant of Cuban activism in Latin America than the Kennedy administration, and this increased Cuba’s fear for its security.∏π In light of the Sino-Soviet conflict, the Soviet Union could not abandon Cuba. The confrontation between China and the Soviet Union had convinced the Chinese leaders that the epicenter of world revolution had moved from Moscow to Beijing. The Chinese would liberate Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the same way that they had liberated their own vast territory.∏∫ Thus the Soviet Union, faced with this threat to its leadership of the undeveloped socialist world, had to demonstrate that it was capable of promoting the growth of the socialist camp. Soviet leaders knew that in many countries, Communist parties were not in the revolutionary vanguard and that they would have to connect with the sociopolitical forces that represented the impetus for change.∏Ω In Latin America this energy was found in the armed movement that was directed from Cuba and supported by some of the Communist parties. The Soviet Union and the Armed Struggle It was the attitude toward armed combat as a method of eradicating injustice and confronting imperialism in Latin America that di√erentiated Cuba from the Soviet Union. From the time that the revolutionaries had come to power in 1959, the Soviets had preferred to remain silent on the topic of armed struggle, opting to praise those characteristics of the revolution that undermined the hegemony of the United States in Latin America through structural reform and did not create hostility with the Cubans. Furthermore, armed combat did not conform to the Soviet theory of sociopolitical evolution toward socialism in the Third World countries where the Soviets believed that it was first necessary to unite the urban and rural workers, the so-called petit bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie. By not referring to the issue of armed combat, the Soviet Union remained in a neutral position between the position held by Cuba and that of the majority of the Communist parties that opposed it. By keeping at a distance

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from the armed struggle, the Soviet Union was also able to remain separate from China, which endorsed it.π≠ However, by 1963 the Soviet Union could no longer remain silent. Since 1961 Cuba had intensified its support for, and leadership of, the armed movement, not only in Latin America but across the three continents, thus becoming the vanguard of anticolonialism.π∞ Guerrillas trained in Cuba had begun operations in Venezuela, southern Peru, Argentina, and Bolivia. Between 1,500 and 2,000 Latin Americans had been trained by Cuba between 1961 and 1964, thereby unleashing revolution in Latin America.π≤ It is true that the majority of the Communist parties in Latin America did not agree with the Cuban method of attaining power, although they did not necessarily share the Soviet vision for the progressive role of the national bourgeoisie. Within the parties were those who supported or participated in the guerrilla movement during the first half of the 1960s, although sometimes the leaders of the Communist parties were opposed to the stance taken by their militants or did not know which political line to follow. The confusion arose partly from the ambiguity of the Soviets toward the issue of armed combat, which they did not consider to be the most e√ective route to socialism. However, as relations with Cuba deteriorated after the debacle in October, the Soviets saw that a way to bridge this divide and prevent Cuba from operating in Latin America without their coordination was to support armed struggle. Even if the support was inconsistent and of little monetary value, it reflected the Soviets’ need to compensate for the damage to their credibility as Communist leaders. The Soviet Union needed to demonstrate to Cuba that it was not faltering in its support for revolutionary and national liberation movements and that it was willing to support the Cubans in their eagerness to extend the scope of the revolution. The Soviet Union channeled its economic aid to Communist parties through the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Since 1955 the Latin American parties had been receiving financial aid and support for propaganda. However, after 1963 the Venezuelan Communist Party took the lead in Soviet-backed financial support, leaving the rest of the Latin American parties far behind.π≥ The great leap in financing the Venezuelan party occurred after its involvement in the armed conflict in 1962. Backed by Cuban support, the Venezuelan Communist Party supplied the political and military leadership, as well as the core of fighters. According to Régis Debray, ‘‘the revolution in Venezuela was the focus of a very particular political, material, and financial investment by

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the entire socialist camp, to which we should add Cuba’s considerable emotional and human investment.’’π∂ In 1963 the party received US$500,000 from the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, an increase of 100 percent over the previous year, in comparison with the Chilean Communist Party, which received $200,000. In 1964 the Venezuelan party received $600,000, while the Chilean and Brazilian parties received $200,000 each. In 1965 the Venezuelan party received $800,000, while the Chilean party received $200,000. In 1966 the amounts began to decrease to $500,000 in 1966–71, until they reached $360,000 in 1972.π∑ The increase and decrease in the amounts destined for the Venezuelan Communist Party coincided with the culmination and decline of the party’s participation in the guerrilla movement in Venezuela. Although we cannot exclude the possibility that part of the Soviet financial aid was destined to foment the participation of the Communists in the elections at the end of 1963, the available evidence suggests that the Soviets supported the party’s commitment to armed combat in collaboration with the Cuban intelligence services. In so doing, the Soviets were contradicting the Communist parties that opposed the use of force to gain control in their respective countries. In December 1964 the first public confrontation took place between the radical groups that favored the use of force and the Communist parties that rejected it. At the Congress of the Communist Parties of Latin America, secretly convened by the Cuban party in Havana, Castro criticized the conformism shown by the Communists. However, the Soviets did not reject the use of force, nor did they criticize the Cubans, and proposed a settlement that would allow the local Communist parties to make the decision to use violence in the struggle to gain power in their countries. The congress decided that Cuba should lead the Communist movement in Latin America. Neither China nor its a≈liates were invited, and this was an important triumph for the Soviet Union and the Communist parties on the continent. At the same time, Soviet support for the congress and its initiatives was an indication of the Soviets’ intention to harmonize relations with Cuba. But the cia detected disagreements between the Cubans, the Soviet leaders, and the Latin American Communist parties concerning guerrilla activities, as well as the fact that Cuba was acting independently from the Soviet Union and was aiding guerrillas with the weapons that the Soviets were sending to defend Cuba.π∏ It seems that what the cia had not detected was the fact that for several years the Soviets had already been indirectly supporting the armed struggle in Latin America with logistic assistance. In December 1962, when the head of Cuban

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intelligence turned to the representative of Czech intelligence in Havana for help to ensure that the Venezuelan guerrillas trained in Cuba could return to Venezuela via Prague, the so-called Operation Manuel was initiated to give assistance to Latin American combatants. This involved Czech and Soviet aid to guerrillas, Communist party members, and other revolutionary groups in various countries, enabling them to reach Cuba and return to their respective countries after receiving military training on the island. By April 1966, 639 people had been assisted in this way, including 172 Venezuelans, 73 Argentineans, 77 Dominicans, 63 Colombians, and 48 Guatemalans, among others. In anticipation that this operation would be prolonged, in 1967 Czech intelligence took stock of Czechoslovakia’s role in this assistance. This expectation was based on Castro’s statement at the Tricontinental Conference in Havana in 1966 in which he confirmed that many Latin American countries o√ered conditions that were suitable for armed combat. He also criticized the Soviets for their lukewarm policy toward building a socialist world and for their lack of genuine internationalism, demonstrated by the case of Vietnam, which at the time was under fire from American airplanes. The Cubans considered that the Soviet support for Cuba, for the Communist parties involved in the armed struggle in Latin America, and for the guerrilla movement itself was insu≈cient and did not correspond with the magnitude of the enemy to be defeated and the latent insurgent energy that needed material encouragement.ππ The notable defeats su√ered by the guerrillas and the significant reversals experienced in some Latin American countries not only thwarted the delicate strategies of the Soviet Union in Latin America but also jeopardized these countries’ peaceful coexistence with the United States (e.g., the military coup in Brazil in 1964, and the U.S. military intervention in the Dominican Republic in 1965). Nonetheless, in 1966 the Soviets refrained from showing any inconsistencies with Cuba regarding its support for the armed conflict. While Castro called on the countries of the three continents to intensify their struggles for liberation and Latin American countries to wage insurgent struggle, the Soviet representative expressed solidarity with armed struggles in Venezuela, Peru, Colombia, and Guatemala against the puppets of imperialism. The cia also commented that the tone of the exhortation by Cuba was not congruent with the 1964 Cuban-Soviet agreement that the Communist parties themselves should decide on the kind of struggle they would adopt in their respective countries.π∫ In 1966 Cuba still acted with relative independence from the Soviet Union. The mood at the congress in Havana left Czechoslovakia with no alternative but to continue with Operation Manuel. Czechoslovakia could not a√ord to

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stop, despite the sensitivity of an operation that contradicted the policies of some of the Latin American Communist parties and drew criticisms in the Western press about the country’s sanctioning of militants to pass through Prague. At a meeting in Moscow in June 1967, the Czechs and the Soviets agreed that it was inevitable that they should participate in this activity. Not to do so would cause complications ‘‘that the Cubans would see as a fundamental abdication to helping national liberation movements in Latin America.’’πΩ In spite of this position, the Soviet Union was already pressuring Cuba to cease supporting the armed struggle. The Soviet coercion coincided with the military mission of Che Guevara in Bolivia. The Guevara episode negatively implicated the Soviet Union in both Latin American countries and the United States, which never ceased to consider the Soviet Union as a trampoline for Cuban activism in the continent. The Soviets also feared U.S. intervention, which would again endanger their commitment to protect Cuba from U.S. aggression. Although Castro had not informed the Soviet ambassador in Havana of Guevara’s mission in Bolivia since November 1966, the Soviets must have known about it through the general secretary of the Bolivian Communist Party (bcp), Mario Monje.∫≠ If anyone was a stone in the shoe of the Soviet leadership after the missile crisis, it was Che Guevara, who never ceased to criticize the socialist camp and the Soviet Union for being accomplices of the capitalist world and for their mercenary attitude toward their commercial relations with the Third World. Che did not disguise his criticism of the corruption and ine≈ciency of Soviet society, its lack of generosity toward Third World countries, and its e√orts to influence the direction of the Cuban Revolution. In the same way, the Soviets considered him to be their most dangerous opponent in Cuba and characterized him as pro-Chinese.∫∞ Che Guevara had been in contact with the bcp and Mario Monje since 1964. At least by 1965, Monje was not oblivious to the armed struggle and even briefly entered a training program in Cuba in 1966. It appears that if he did not commit the party or its members to Che’s guerrilla group, it was because he wanted to lead the guerrilla project himself. A person of sinuous style, ‘‘Mario Monje argued that if the revolution took place in Argentina he would carry Che’s backpack, but that in Bolivia it had to be led by a Bolivian, himself.’’∫≤ In January 1967, after an interview with two leaders of the bcp in Havana, Fidel Castro still believed in the possibility of collaboration between Che and the party, but the relationship never jelled. According to Che, the Bolivian Communists led by

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Monje, and Monje himself, were not apt collaborators for the guerrilla movement, either for being traitors or for being ‘‘chicken-hearted.’’∫≥ The Bolivian Communist Party was pro-Soviet, although one sector of the party was prepared to follow the path of insurrection. The party had been involved in guerrilla operations in Bolivia in 1963; however, it appears that neither then nor in 1966–67 was it supported by the Soviet Union, judging from the insignificant amount of funding approved by the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party for its operations in 1964 and 1967: US$24,500 and $50,000 respectively. It is worth mentioning that in addition to the money provided to the Bolivian party in 1967, the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party earmarked $20,000 in 1966 for the Bolivian National Liberation Front, the electoral wing of the Communist party.∫∂ In July 1967 Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin visited Cuba. Kosygin questioned Cuban support for the armed struggle in Latin America and expressed his doubts over the correctness of Guevara’s actions in Bolivia. On this occasion, Kosygin delivered an ultimatum to the Cubans: they must cease to support the guerrillas in Latin America, or the Soviets would terminate aid to Cuba.∫∑ The Cubans rejected this interference by the Soviets and argued that Cuban-Soviet relations were based on mutual respect and independence. But relations with Moscow deteriorated further after the death of Che Guevara in October 1967. The failure of the guerrilla enterprise in Bolivia was added to other failed attempts in Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela and confirmed the doubt that the Soviets had always held concerning the validity of applying the Cuban model for attaining power to other countries.∫∏ The weakness of Cuba in Latin America was also the responsibility of the Soviets; the defeats in the Soviet-supported armed struggle were also their defeats. According to a report submitted by the cia in February 1968, the guerrilla movement supported by Cuba ‘‘has particularly failed in gaining real advantages in the Hemisphere.’’ Despite nine years of e√orts, there was not one guerrilla group that posed a threat to any Latin American government. ‘‘The demise of the project led by Guevara in Bolivia is proof that even when Cuba uses ‘its top team’ it will fail due to the lack of real, popular support for the guerrilla cause,’’ the report stated.∫π After the new crisis in their relations with Cuba, the Soviets reoriented their policy toward Latin America. Faced with the increased control of North America in the hemisphere, the Soviet Union responded by strengthening its relations with Latin American governments that appeared to be progressive. By using economic aid, the Soviets wanted to send the recipients the message that they

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would be able to resist a beating by imperialism. They negotiated new commercial treaties with Chile, Ecuador, Uruguay, and Costa Rica in the understanding that every tractor, every screw, every piece of equipment that was sent to Latin America carried a fragment of truth about the Soviet Union and demonstrated its achievements and those of the socialist system.∫∫ Nevertheless, the Soviet Union could not abandon Cuba. Its defeat would mean triumph for the United States and a loss for the socialist camp at a time when it was su√ering fractures caused by the Sino-Soviet conflict. Unable to openly criticize Cuba, the Soviet Union applied economic sanctions during 1967, which mainly took the form of not satisfying the growing Cuban need for oil. It was the progressive isolation of Cuba from the rest of Latin America and the economic pressures that only the Soviet Union could alleviate that led Fidel Castro to do the unexpected: in August 1968 Cuba justified the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the troops of the Warsaw Pact. In so doing, he was recognizing the Brezhnev Doctrine or the policy of the Soviet government to limit the sovereignty of countries in the socialist bloc whose destinies were interlinked.∫Ω At the same time, Cuba also recognized Soviet leadership in the socialist camp. In exchange for sustained economic aid to the island, the Soviet Union recovered its image as a pillar of socialism in Cuba and the leader of socialism in Latin America and the Third World. Conclusions The Soviet Union wished to improve its relations with the United States, but without forfeiting its influence over the countries that were liberating themselves from colonialism and imperialism. The Caribbean crisis revealed the vulnerability of Soviet leadership. In Latin America, the Soviet Union had to compete with Cuba’s revolutionary politics. From 1962 to at least 1967, the influence of Cuba’s actions on Soviet goals and activities was disproportionate to the geographic size of the island. Suddenly this small country was influencing Soviet policy in Latin America and the relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. Soviet support for armed struggles in Latin America was one of the undesirable consequences of the missile crisis. As a result, not only was the Soviet Union unable to reduce expenditures on defense in the way it would have liked, but its relations with the United States su√ered because of its support for the national liberation movements. The support of the Soviet Union for guerrilla movements alongside the region’s Communist parties was contrary to the Soviets’

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wishes, but it was motivated by the fear that they would also fall under the Guevarist spell, which, in the eyes of the Soviets, too closely resembled the Chinese position. The Soviets did not believe in guerrilla warfare as an e√ective method to weaken the United States and the capitalist regime; however, the armed struggle appeared to be temporarily winning against imperialism, although for the Soviets it entailed a political cost. The Soviet Union terminated its support for the armed struggle in Latin America in the mid-1960s when the weakness of this way of fighting imperialism was revealed. This was after Khrushchev lost power in 1964, and the majority of the Latin American Communist parties rejected armed struggle because of its high social and political costs, the consequences of repression by state and paramilitary forces. The relations between Cuba and the Soviet Union had been damaged not just by the armed struggle alone but by its meager results as a method of reducing U.S. domination in Latin America. The destruction of the guerrilla movement in the 1960s and the shift of Cuban support to Africa sowed the seeds for improving Cuban-Soviet relations. It was not because Cuba had ceased to believe in the armed struggle or because of reconciliation over this issue with the Soviet Union, but because the Soviets could abandon a method of fighting in which they did not believe and which caused unwanted conflicts with the United States. The tensions between the two countries were reduced as a result of the elimination of the guerrillas. The consequences of the Caribbean crisis established the credentials of Cuba as an actor with a global reach. They also confirmed how a small country could change the global scene. Not only did the Cold War impact Cuba; Cuba had an impact on the development of the Cold War. In the long run, the Soviet fear that Cuba would turn to Chinese leadership was unfounded. Castro considered Chinese criticisms of Soviet revisionism harmful because they did not contribute to the unification of the revolutionary movements. Moreover, China could not substitute for the Soviet Union as a provider of the goods and military equipment that the Cubans were redirecting to Latin America, where they considered them necessities. By 1965 Cuba openly denounced Chinese attempts to divide the socialist camp. After this, proChinese factions emerged in Latin America that denounced across the board the Soviet Union, military groups, and the Cuban Revolution. The Soviet Union welcomed the peaceful road to socialism proclaimed by Salvador Allende (1970–73). However, when this peaceful method was defeated in the same way as the guerrilla movements of the 1960s, and when in the 1980s

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the armed struggle in Central America, encouraged by the triumphant revolution led by the Sandinistas, appeared to be successful, the Soviet Union returned to its support of armed struggle. In the same selective and discretionary way as in the 1960s, the Soviet Union gave armaments, guerrilla training, and economic support to movements led by Communist parties. In 1989, two years before its dissolution, the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union still allocated financial and logistic aid to foment the military activities of the Communist parties in Central America, which were battling local oligarchies and North American imperialism. Notes 1. Strobe Talbott, ed., Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament (London: Andre Deutsch, 1974), 510–11. 2. Ibid., 513. 3. Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), 188–229; Jacques Lévesque, The USSR and the Cuban Revolution: Soviet Ideological and Strategic Perspective, 1959–1977 (New York: Praeger, 1978), 4. 4. Cited in Yuri Pavlov, Soviet-Cuban Alliance, 1959–1991 (Miami, Fla.: North-South Center Press, 1966), 8. 5. Lévesque, The USSR and the Cuban Revolution, 71–73. 6. Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, ‘‘One Hell of a Gamble’’: Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy, 1958–1964 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 24–25; Pavlov, SovietCuban Alliance, 36; Lévesque, The USSR and the Cuban Revolution, 39. 7. Anatoly Dobrynin, In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to America’s Six Cold War Presidents (1962–1986) (New York: Random House, 1995), 75–76; Fursenko and Naftali, ‘‘One Hell of a Gamble,’’ 52; Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, 171–73, 182–86, 260; Lévesque, The USSR and the Cuban Revolution, 41–42; William Taubman, Khrushchev: the Man and His Era (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 536. 8. Fursenko and Naftali, ‘‘One Hell of a Gamble,’’ 177–83, 214; Lévesque, The USSR and the Cuban Revolution, 39; Taubman, Khrushchev, 533. 9. Taubman, Khrushchev, 531–32. 10. Fursenko and Naftali, ‘‘One Hell of a Gamble,’’ 294. 11. Cited in Taubman, Khrushchev, 546. 12. Fursenko and Naftali, ‘‘One Hell of a Gamble,’’ 192, 206. 13. Ibid., 241. 14. Ibid., 247–56, 274. 15. Ibid., 259. ‘‘From Trostnik to Comrade Pavlov,’’ October 28, 1962, Archive of the President of the Federation of Russia, declassified in April 2002, English translation by Svetlana Savranskaya, National Security Archive (nsa).

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16. Message from President Khrushchev to President Kennedy, Moscow, October 28, 1962, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, vol. 11 (Washington: U.S. Department of State, 1984), 281; Fursenko and Naftali, ‘‘One Hell of a Gamble,’’ 260. 17. Taubman, Khrushchev, 572–79. 18. ‘‘Minutes of conversation between the delegations of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and the Communist Party of the USSR,’’ Kremlin, October 30, 1962, in the State Central Archive of the Czech Republic, Archive of the Central Committee of the Czech Communist Party, file Antonín Novotn´y, box 193. Obtained by Oldrich Tuma. English translation by Linda Mastalir. 19. Ibid. 20. Khrushchev to Castro, October 30, 1962, document presented at the international conference ‘‘La Crisis de Octubre: Nueva visión política 40 años después,’’ Havana, Cuba, October 11–13, 2002. 21. Ibid. 22. ‘‘Memorandum on the conversation between Mikoyan and the Cuban leaders, Havana, 5 November 1962,’’ Cold War International History Project Bulletin, no. 5 (spring 1995): 101–9, 159. 23. Extract from the protocol number 66 on the session of the Presidium of the Central Committee, November 16, 1962, ‘‘On the instructions to Comrade A. I. Mikoyan,’’ from the personal archive of Dr. Sergo A. Mikoyan. English translation by Svetlana Savranskaya. Cited with permission from Sergo Mikoyan. 24. Ibid. 25. Telegram from N. S. Khrushchev to Comrade A. I. Mikoyan, November 11, 1962, from the personal archive of Dr. Sergo A. Mikoyan. English translation by Svetlana Savranskaya and Adam Mayle. Cited with permission from Sergo Mikoyan. 26. Speech by A. I. Mikoyan to the military advisor of General Pliev’s unit in Cuba, November 21, 1962, from the personal archive of Dr. Sergo A. Mikoyan. Cited with permission from Sergo Mikoyan. 27. Report on the conversation between Comrade Carlos Rafael Rodríguez and Comrade Nikita Khrushchev, in the presence of Comrade Anastas Mikoyan, December 11, 1962, document presented at the international conference ‘‘La Crisis de Octubre: Nueva visión política 40 años después,’’ Havana, Cuba, October 11–13, 2002. 28. Ibid. 29. Pavlov, Soviet-Cuban Alliance, 64. 30. Lévesque, The USSR and the Cuban Revolution, 44. 31. James G. Blight and Philip Brenner, Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba’s Struggle with the Superpowers after the Missile Crisis (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 15, 29. 32. Dmitry Polyansky, rough draft of the report to the plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on Khrushchev’s errors, October 1964, extract, in the Volkogonov Collection, U.S. Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, reel 18, English translation by Svetlana Savranskaya, nsa.

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33. Fursenko and Naftali, ‘‘One Hell of a Gamble,’’ 94–95; Philip Brenner and James G. Blight, ‘‘Cuba, 1962: The Crisis and Cuban-Soviet Relations: Fidel Castro’s Secret 1968 Speech,’’ Cold War International History Project Bulletin, no. 5 (spring 1995): 1, 81–85, 92; telegram from Vladimir Pavlícek to the Ministry of Foreign A√airs, Havana, October 31, 1962, Central Archive of the Czech Republic, Archive of the Central Committee of the Czech Communist Party, file Antonín Novotn´y, box 122, obtained by Oldrich Tuma, English translation by Linda Mastalir; Blight and Brenner, Sad and Luminous Days, xvi, xxi. 34. Fursenko and Naftali, ‘‘One Hell of a Gamble,’’ 187. 35. Fidel Castro Ruz, at the tripartite conference ‘‘The October Crisis,’’ Havana, January 9–12, 1992, cited in Tomás Diez Acosta, Octubre del 62: Un paso del holocausto (Havana, 1999, electronic version), 63. 36. Ibid., 91–92; Blight and Brenner, Sad and Luminous Days, 21. 37. Acosta, Octubre del 62, 86. 38. ‘‘Fragments from the participation of Commander in Chief Fidel Castro at the plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba,’’ January 25–26, 1968, document presented at the international conference ‘‘La Crisis de Octubre,’’ Havana, October 2002. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Fursenko and Naftali, ‘‘One Hell of a Gamble,’’ 291. 42. Telegram from Pavlícek to the Ministry of Foreign A√airs, Havana, October 31, 1962. 43. Telegram from János Beck to the Ministry of Foreign A√airs, Havana, November 29, 1962, National Archives of Hungary, Foreign Ministry, secret file XIX, J-I-j. Obtained from the Institute of the History of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. English translation by Attila Kolontari and Zsofía Zelnik. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 47. Leopold Unger, ‘‘Minutes of a conversation with Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, director of inra, 27 November 1962,’’ Archive of New Documents, Warsaw, Poland, 237, XXII/1090, 1961–63, file 245. English translation by Margorzata Gnoinska. Document presented at the international conference ‘‘La Crisis de Octubre,’’ Havana, October 2002. 48. Report on the conversation between Comrade Carlos Rafael Rodríguez and Comrade Nikita Khrushchev, in the presence of Anastas Mikoyan, December 11, 1962; document presented at the international conference ‘‘La Crisis de Octubre,’’ Havana, October 2002. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. ‘‘Fragments from the participation of Commander in Chief Fidel Castro at the plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba,’’ January 25–26,

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1968, document presented at the international conference ‘‘La Crisis de Octubre,’’ Havana, October 2002. 52. Blight and Brenner, Sad and Luminous Days, 27–28; Fursenko and Naftali, ‘‘One Hell of a Gamble,’’ 342; Pavlov, Soviet-Cuban Alliance, 55. 53. Agreement between the government of the Republic of Cuba and the government of the Soviet Union concerning the increase in technical equipment to the Revolutionary Armed Forces and in the reinforcement of the defense capacity of the Republic of Cuba, Moscow, May 29, 1963, document presented at the international conference ‘‘La Crisis de Octubre,’’ Havana, October 2002; Fursenko and Naftali, ‘‘One Hell of a Gamble,’’ 331–33. 54. Pavlov, Soviet-Cuban Alliance, 56–57. 55. Telegram from the U.S. Embassy to the State Department, March 27, 1963, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963 (hereafter cited as FRUS, 1961–1963), vol. 11: Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath, 301–25, Briefing Papers and Memo Series; Dobrynin, In Confidence, 94; Lévesque, The USSR and the Cuban Revolution, 43. 56. Memorandum from a conversation, Moscow, April 25, 1963, FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. 11, 301–25, Briefing Papers and Memo Series. 57. Editorial note for the letter from Khrushchev to Kennedy, April 29, 1963, delivered through a private channel, FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. 11, 301–25, Briefing Papers and Memo Series. Khrushchev refers to his meeting with Kennedy in Vienna in September 1961. 58. Memorandum from Gordon Chase at the National Security Council to the special advisor to the president for national security, Washington, 3 April 1963, FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. 11, 301–25, Briefing Papers and Memo Series. 59. Memorandum from the Special Assistant to the Army Secretary, Washington, April 9, 1963, FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. 11, 301–25, Briefing Papers and Memo Series; memorandum of the conversation with President Kennedy, Palm Beach, Florida, April 15, 1963, FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. 11, 24, Briefing Papers and Memo Series. There is indeed evidence that following the missile crisis President Kennedy sought a modus vivendi with Castro’s Cuba so as not to risk another U.S.–Soviet confrontation. However, as Piero Gleijeses mentions in the following chapter, the condition was that Cuba cease to be a revolutionary regime, which was never even a remote possibility. It merits mentioning that the recently released documentary Rendezvous with Death (Wilfried Huismann, Germany, 2005) reopens the circumstances of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Based on interviews and previously unknown Mexican sources, the film suggests Cuba’s involvement in Kennedy’s death. This would strongly suggest that the Cuban government did not think much of Kennedy’s rapprochement. 60. Message from President Kennedy to President Khrushchev, Washington, April 11, 1963, FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. 11, 301–25, Briefing Papers and Memo Series. 61. Memorandum of a conference with President Kennedy, Palm Beach, Florida, April 15, 1963, FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. 11, 301–25, Briefing Papers and Memo Series. 62. Memorandum prepared by the director of the cia, John A. McCone, Washington, April 15, 1963, FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. 11, 301–25, Briefing Papers and Memo Series. 63. Memorandum from the coordinator of Cuban a√airs to the Special Group,

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Washington, April 18, 1963, FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. 11, 301–25, Briefing Papers and Memo Series. 64. Memorandum from the President of the Chamber of National Valuations to the Director of the cia, FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. 11, 301–25, Briefing Papers and Memo Series. 65. Summary Report of the Second Meeting of the Permanent Council for National Security, Washington, April 23, 1963, FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. 11, 301–25, Briefing Papers and Memo Series. 66. Memorandum for the archive, December 1963, ‘‘Contacts with Cuban leaders,’’ FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. 11, 301–25, Briefing Papers and Memo Series. 67. Fursenko and Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble, 340, 355. 68. Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 211–12. 69. Lévesque, The USSR and the Cuban Revolution, 67. 70. Ibid., 71–72, 95–96. 71. Claudia Furiati, Fidel Castro: La historia me absolverá (Barcelona: Plaza and Janés, 2003), 429; Régis Debray, Las pruebas de fuego: Las críticas de las armas, vol. 2 (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1975), 19. 72. ‘‘Cuban subversive activities in Latin America: 1959–1968,’’ Special weekly report, cia, February 16, 1968. Document presented at the international conference ‘‘La Crisis de Octubre’’; Furiati, Fidel Castro, 430–31. 73. Until 1943 the financing was carried out by the Communist International (comintern), which was abolished in that year. The figures presented here are from the documents of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that were delivered in 1992 by Boris Yeltsin to the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation for the trial of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. See fond 89, register 38, files 15–56, and the guide to the archive compiled by Lora Soroka, Archives of the Communist Party and Soviet State: Fond 89. Communist Party of the Soviet Union on Trial (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2001). As an example, I cite the funds for the year 1964, and for comparative purposes I have chosen various Communist parties that benefited in that year from Soviet aid: Italy, $5,000,000; France, $1,500,000; Indonesia, $1,000,000; Finland, $650,000; Venezuela, $600,000; United States, $530,000; Chile, $200,000; Brazil, $200,000; Uruguay, $90,000; Colombia, $50,000; Panama, $40,000; Ecuador, $40,000; Costa Rica, $40,000; Paraguay, $30,000; El Salvador, $25,000; Mexico, $25,000; Bolivia, $24,500; Honduras, $20,000; Dominican Republic, $20,000; Nicaragua, $12,000; and Peru, $10,000. 74. 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), 107; Debray, Las pruebas de fuego, 22; Lévesque, The USSR and the Cuban Revolution, 110–11, 123. From then on, as a consequence of the elections in December 1963 and the ensuing defeats and betrayals, the guerrilla groups divided. One group of Communists decided to abandon armed conflict, and another to leave the party. The Venezuelan

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Communist Party decided to lay down their arms at the end of 1965 and adopt the line of ‘‘democratic peace.’’ Were the Soviet leaders an influence on the decision of the vcp to retire from armed combat? See Liza Gross, Handbook of Leftist Guerrilla Groups in Latin America and the Caribbean (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1995), 151–54. 75. Fond 89, register 38, files 6–20. 76. ‘‘Cuban subversive activities in Latin America: 1959–1968,’’ special weekly report, cia, February 16, 1968, document presented at the international conference ‘‘La Crisis de Octubre,’’ Havana, October 2002; Jorge Castañeda, La vida en rojo: Una biografía del Che Guevara (Mexico City: Alfaguara, 1997), 315; Lévesque, The USSR and the Cuban Revolution, 103–5; Furiati, Fidel Castro, 432, 440. 77. Lévesque, The USSR and the Cuban Revolution, 131; Furiati, Fidel Castro, 451–52. 78. ‘‘Cuban subversive activities in Latin America: 1959–1968.’’ 79. Extract from the report ‘‘Collaboration of the Czechoslovak and Cuban Intelligence,’’ Prague, January 11, 1967, in Daniela Spenser, ‘‘Operation Manuel: Czechoslovakia and Cuba,’’ Cold War International History project, e-Dossier no. 7, http:// cwihp.si.edu. 80. Castañeda, La vida en rojo, 420, 466. 81. Lévesque, The USSR and the Cuban Revolution, 109; Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 103; Castañeda, La vida en rojo, 313–14. 82. Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Ernesto Guevara, también conocido como el Che (Mexico City: Planeta, 1996), 643. 83. Ibid. To be able to determine with more certainty the kind of influences the Soviet Union could have exerted on the Bolivian Communist Party, it remains for the Russian archives to reveal the details of the deliberations and decision making at the center of Soviet leadership. 84. Fond 89, register 38, files 7–8; Castañeda, La vida en rojo, 409; Furiati, Fidel Castro, 431, 460; Blight and Brenner, Sad and Luminous Days, xxii. These figures become important when compared with the $600,000 allocated to the vcp for 1964 and $500,000 for 1967. 85. Lévesque, The USSR and the Cuban Revolution, 124; Pavlov, Soviet-Cuban Alliance, 87–88; Blight and Brenner, Sad and Luminous Days, xxii; Furiati, Fidel Castro, 465; Castañeda, La vida en rojo, 467–70. 86. Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, 218. 87. ‘‘Cuban subversive activities in Latin America: 1959–1968’’; Pavlov, Soviet-Cuban Alliance, 87–88. 88. Lévesque, The USSR and the Cuban Revolution, 138–42. 89. Blight and Brenner, Sad and Luminous Days, 141–44; Mark Kramer, ‘‘Ideology and the Cold War,’’ Review of International Studies, no. 25 (1999): 544.

PIERO GLEIJESES

The View from Havana Lessons from Cuba’s African Journey, 1959–1976

Cuba’s role in the world since 1959 is without precedent. No other Third World country has projected its military power beyond its immediate neighborhood. Brazil’s mighty generals sent a small troop to the Dominican Republic in 1965 as the United States’ junior partner; Argentina’s generals briefly helped Somoza’s defeated cohorts in 1980–81; Vietnam’s soldiers never ventured beyond Indochina; China’s military activities outside Asia have been limited to supplying weapons and dispatching a few hundred instructors to Africa. During the Cold War, extracontinental military interventions were the preserve of the two superpowers, a few West European countries, and Cuba. And West European military interventions in the thirty years between the rise of Castro and the end of the Cold War pale in size and daring compared to those of Cuba; even the Soviet Union sent far fewer soldiers beyond its immediate neighborhood than did Cuba. In this regard, Cuba is second only to the United States.∞ For over four decades, Castro has defied and humiliated the United States. In the 1960s the fear of a second Cuba in Latin America haunted U.S. leaders and was midwife to the Alliance for Progress. From the late 1970s through the late 1980s, Havana supported those who fought to bring revolutionary change to Central America. Castro’s vistas, however, extended beyond the Western Hemisphere. The dispatch of thirty-six thousand Cuban soldiers to Angola between November 1975 and April 1976 stunned the world, although small numbers of Cuban troops—a little more than one thousand—had gone to Algeria, Congo Leopoldville (later called Zaire), Congo Brazzaville, and Guinea-Bissau since 1959.≤ In the early 1960s, the Cuban leaders saw similarities between the Algerian revolution against French rule and Cuba’s own struggle against both the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista and the United States. In December 1961, a Cuban ship unloaded a cargo of weapons at Casablanca for the Algerian rebels. It

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returned to Havana with seventy-six wounded Algerian fighters and twenty children from refugee camps. The aid continued after Algeria gained its independence in 1962. In May 1963, a fifty-five-person Cuban medical mission arrived in Algiers. As would be the case for all the missions that followed until 1978, the aid was free. ‘‘It was like a beggar o√ering his help, but we knew that the Algerian people needed it even more than we did, and that they deserved it,’’ said José Ramón Machado Ventura, the minister of public health.≥ In October 1963, when Algeria was threatened by Morocco, the Cubans rushed a special force of 686 men with heavy weapons to the Algerians’ aid, although Morocco had just signed a contract with Havana to buy one million tons of Cuban sugar for $184 million, a considerable amount of hard currency at a time when the United States was trying to cripple Cuba’s economy. Cuba’s interest in sub-Saharan Africa quickened in late 1964. This was the moment of the great illusion, when the Cubans, and many others, believed that revolution beckoned in Africa. Guerrillas were fighting the Portuguese in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique. In Congo Brazzaville, a new government was loudly proclaiming its revolutionary sympathies. And above all there was Zaire, where armed revolt had been spreading with stunning speed since the spring of 1964, threatening the survival of the corrupt pro-American regime that Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy had laboriously put in place. To save the Zairean regime, the Johnson administration raised an army of more than one thousand white mercenaries in a major covert operation that was obvious to all but the U.S. press and provoked a wave of revulsion even among African leaders friendly to the United States. The Cubans saw the conflict as more than an African problem: ‘‘Our view was that the situation in the Congo [Zaire] was a problem that concerned all mankind,’’ wrote Che Guevara.∂ In December 1964, Guevara went on a three-month trip to Africa. In the following February he was in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, which was then, as the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency pointed out, ‘‘a haven for exiles from the rest of Africa . . . plotting the overthrow of African governments, both black and white.’’∑ After a general meeting with ‘‘at least fifty people representing di√erent movements . . . of at least ten countries,’’ Che met separately with the representatives of each movement, and three times with the Zairean rebel leaders Laurent Kabila and Gaston Soumialot.∏ ‘‘[Kabila] impressed me,’’ wrote Che. ‘‘I o√ered him, on behalf of our government, about thirty instructors and all the weapons we could spare, and he accepted with delight. He urged us to hurry, as did Soumialot, in the course of another conversation. Soumialot also asked that the

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instructors be black. . . . The aid was given unconditionally and with no time limit.’’ Che left Dar-es-Salaam with ‘‘the joy of having found people ready to fight to the finish. Our next task was to select a group of black Cubans—all volunteers—to join the struggle in the Congo [Zaire].’’π Two months later, a Cuban column of some 120 men under Guevara began entering eastern Zaire through Tanzania. In a few weeks, a second Cuban column under Jorge Risquet arrived in neighboring Congo Brazzaville at the request of that country’s government, which lived ‘‘in fear’’ of an attack by the cia’s mercenaries; the column would also perhaps assist Che in Zaire. ‘‘It was,’’ Raúl Castro noted, ‘‘a reserve force for Che’s column, which it would join if possible, at the right time.’’∫ Overall, four hundred Cuban volunteers were in Central Africa in the summer of 1965. But Central Africa was not ready for revolution. By the time the Cubans arrived in Zaire, the mercenaries had broken the resolve of the rebels. The story of Che’s column is not one of great battles but one of 120 people thrust into an impossible situation, in a totally alien world, who retained their humanity until the end. Guevara could only preside over the agony of the rebellion until the rebels’ collapse left him no choice but to withdraw in November 1965. In Congo Brazzaville, meanwhile, Risquet’s column saved the host government from a military coup in June 1966 through bluster and diplomacy, without bloodshed. The doctors attached to the column conducted the first vaccination campaign in the country against polio, and 254 young Congolese went to Cuba to study, all expenses paid. In December 1966 the column withdrew, against the wishes of the Congolese government. Risquet understood, and made Havana understand, that there was no revolution in Congo Brazzaville. ‘‘He was able to get us out at the right moment,’’ observed his second-in-command. ‘‘He was flexible.’’Ω The late 1960s marked a period of deepening maturity in Cuba’s relationship with Africa. No longer deluded that revolution was just around the corner, the Cubans were learning about sub-Saharan Africa. In those years—indeed, through 1974—the main focus of Havana’s attention in Africa was GuineaBissau, where the rebels of the Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (paigc) were fighting for independence from Portugal. The paigc was ‘‘the most e√ective of the liberation organizations in the Portuguese African territories,’’ U.S. reports stressed time and again.∞≠ At the paigc’s request, Cuban military instructors arrived in Guinea-Bissau in 1966, and they remained there through the end of the war in 1974. This was the longest Cuban intervention in

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Africa before the dispatch of troops to Angola in 1975. It was also the most successful. In the words of Guinea-Bissau’s first president: We were able to fight and triumph because other countries and people helped us . . . with weapons, with medicine, with supplies. . . . But there is one nation that in addition to material, political and diplomatic support, even sent its children to fight by our side, to shed their blood in our land together with that of the best children of our country. This great people, this heroic people, we all know that it is the heroic people of Cuba; the Cuba of Fidel Castro; the Cuba of the Sierra Maestra, the Cuba of Moncada. . . . Cuba sent its best children here so that they could help us in the technical aspects of our war, so that they could help us to wage this great struggle . . . against Portuguese colonialism.∞∞

Some forty to fifty Cubans fought in Guinea-Bissau each year from 1966 until its independence in 1974. They helped in military planning, and they were in charge of the artillery. Their contribution was ‘‘of the utmost importance,’’ as President Nino, who had been the senior military commander of the paigc, said.∞≤ Just as the only foreigners who fought with the paigc in Guinea-Bissau were Cubans, so too the only foreign doctors were Cubans (with one brief exception), and there were no native doctors until 1968. From 1966 to 1974 there were, on average, seven Cuban doctors in Guinea-Bissau. ‘‘They really performed a miracle,’’ observes Francisca Pereira, a senior paigc o≈cial. ‘‘I am eternally grateful to them: not only did they save lives, but they also put their own lives at risk. They were truly selfless.’’∞≥ The Cubans who went to Algeria, Zaire, Congo Brazzaville, and GuineaBissau were volunteers. They were captivated by the mystique of guerrilla war. ‘‘We dreamed of revolution,’’ one muses. ‘‘We wanted to be part of it, to feel that we were fighting for it. We were young, and the children of a revolution.’’ Fighting abroad, they would defend the revolution at home. ‘‘In all those years we believed that at any moment they [the United States] were going to strike us; and for us it was better to wage the war abroad than in our own country.’’∞∂ The volunteers received no public praise in Cuba. They left ‘‘knowing that their story would remain a secret.’’∞∑ They won neither medals nor material rewards. Once back they could not boast about their deeds because they were bound to secrecy. Nevertheless, as U.S. documents make abundantly clear, U.S. o≈cials knew that Cubans were in Africa—in Algeria, then in Zaire, in Congo Brazzaville, and

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finally in Guinea-Bissau—and yet they paid little attention to it. Robinson McIlvaine, the U.S. ambassador in Conakry, Guinea, from October 1966 through August 1969, remarked, ‘‘The State Department was not particularly concerned with the Cuban presence. It was not a big worry for us.’’∞∏ This complacency, which contrasts starkly with Washington’s reaction to even the rumor of Cuban combatants in Latin America, is explained by the fact that U.S. o≈cials were confident that a handful of Cubans could not be e√ective in distant, alien African countries. In discussing Communist subversion in Africa, the cia barely mentioned Cuba. This helps explain why the United States was stunned by the Cuban intervention in Angola in 1975. ‘‘In the 1960s there was no sense of a Cuban danger in Africa; their intervention in Angola was a real surprise,’’ observed the former State Department o≈cial Paul O’ Neill. During my tenure as Director of Southern Africa O≈ce [of the State Department from July 1973 to June 1975] we were aware that there was some Soviet/East European support for the mpla, but I don’t recall any discussion of a Cuban role before I left. Aside from the Soviet Union, we would discuss the possible role of East Germany. I don’t recall any concern about a Cuban role. Before I left, when people in the Africa Bureau [of the State Department] talked of the Soviet bloc role in Angola, they thought of the Soviets, the East Germans, not of Cuba. I don’t recall that we knew of Cuba’s ties with the mpla, but even if we knew, it didn’t worry us.∞π

These ties had begun in 1965, when Che Guevara had met Agostinho Neto, Lúcio Lara, and other mpla leaders in Brazzaville in a ‘‘historic encounter,’’ as Raúl Castro called it.∞∫ ‘‘We spoke, we discussed,’’ said Lara. ‘‘We wanted only one thing from the Cubans: instructors. The war [against the Portuguese] was becoming di≈cult and we were inexperienced. . . . Guevara promised that he would speak with his Party and his government so that they would send us instructors.’’∞Ω Risquet’s column trained mpla guerrillas in Congo Brazzaville, and several of its members joined the mpla in the Angolan enclave of Cabinda as advisors, instructors, and combatants. There were moments of frustration for the instructors, who had learned their trade in the exacting school of Fidel Castro’s rebel army and now found themselves in a culture with a very di√erent concept of discipline, and there were also warm moments of humanity in that inhospitable forest. ‘‘I looked at them all,’’ wrote the Cuban Rafael Moracén after delivering a particularly severe dressing-down to the mpla fighters in which he had given vent to all his frustrations, ‘‘and I was moved, I felt love for them. . . . They had such dignity that I felt it was worth dying with them if I had to.’’≤≠ Bonds were

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forged. Ten years later, in late 1975, Moracén pestered Raúl Castro to be allowed to return to Angola. ‘‘I am an Angolan,’’ he pleaded.≤∞ In 1966 the mpla withdrew its forces from Cabinda and focused on a new front in eastern Angola along the Zambian border. This meant that there was no reason for the Cubans to remain in the Congo, and they were unable to send instructors to eastern Angola, as the mpla requested, because of Zambian opposition. Over the next few years, until the end of 1974, relations between Cuba and the mpla were friendly but less close, and Cuba’s support for the movement was limited to training a handful of mpla fighters in Cuba and, as the mpla was convulsed by internal strife, to giving unwavering support to the group around Agostinho Neto. The basic outline of what happened in Angola in 1975–76 is well known. When the Portuguese dictatorship collapsed on April 25, 1974, three rival independence movements existed in the country: Neto’s mpla, Holden Roberto’s National Front for the Liberation of Angola (fnla), and Jonas Savimbi’s National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (unita). Although Portugal and the three movements agreed that a transitional government under a Portuguese high commissioner would rule the country until independence on November 11, 1975, civil war erupted in the spring of 1975. In July, Pretoria and Washington became engaged in parallel covert operations in Angola, first by supplying weapons to both the fnla and unita. Then, in late August, South Africa sent military instructors, and the United States sent cia advisors. Cuban military instructors for the mpla did not arrive in Luanda until the end of August, and Soviet aid to the mpla was limited because Moscow distrusted Neto and did not want to jeopardize the salt ii negotiations with the United States. Nevertheless, by September, both Washington and Pretoria realized that the mpla was winning the civil war. It was winning not because of Cuban aid (no Cubans were yet fighting in Angola) or because of superior weapons (the rival coalition had a slight edge, thanks to U.S. and South African largesse) but because, as the cia station chief in Luanda, Robert Hultslander, noted, the mpla was by far the most disciplined and committed of the three movements. The mpla leaders, Hultslander wrote, ‘‘were more e√ective, better educated, better trained and better motivated’’ than those of the fnla and unita. ‘‘The rank and file also were better motivated.’’≤≤ South Africa and the United States were not pursuing identical ends in Angola, but they agreed that the mpla had to be defeated. Pretoria wanted to shore up apartheid at home and eliminate any threat to its illegal rule over Namibia, sandwiched between South Africa and Angola. South African o≈cials were well

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aware of the mpla’s implacable hostility to apartheid and of the movement’s commitment to assisting the liberation movements of southern Africa. (By contrast, unita and the fnla had o√ered Pretoria their friendship.) Although U.S. o≈cials knew that an mpla victory would not threaten U.S. strategic or economic interests, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger believed that success in Angola could provide a cheap boost to the prestige of the United States and to his own prestige, pummeled by the fall of South Vietnam a few months earlier. He cast the struggle in stark Cold War terms: the freedom-loving fnla and unita would crush the Soviet-backed mpla. Thus Washington urged Pretoria, which might otherwise have hesitated, to act. On October 14, South African troops invaded Angola, transforming the civil war into an international conflict. There is a persistent myth that the South Africans invaded in response to the Cuban intervention.≤≥ In fact, the opposite is the case; but because this myth has remarkable staying power—despite the evidence—it merits a little probing. In 1978 the South African Defense Ministry commissioned a study by Professor F. J. du Toit Spies on South Africa’s role in the 1975–76 Angolan civil war and gave him access to the closed government archives. His report was approved by a supervisory committee led by an army general and including representatives from the Ministries of Defense and Foreign A√airs and from academia. It was published as Operasie Savannah: Angola, 1975–1976. A member of Spies’s supervisory committee, Commander Sophie du Preez, also published a book based essentially on the same documentation. To my knowledge, these are the only two published accounts based on South African documents.≤∂ In discussing why South Africa invaded Angola on October 14, Spies and du Preez do not mention Cuba. Let me be clear: Nowhere is Cuba—under any guise—present in their analysis of the South African decision to invade. According to the accounts provided by Spies and du Preez, the Cubans did not figure at all in South Africa’s decision making about Angola until November, more than two weeks after the South African invasion had begun on October 14. Although Spies and du Preez may not tell the entire story, they would have no reason to hide or minimize South Africa’s knowledge of the arrival of the Cuban instructors and the impact that Havana’s actions had on their government’s decisions. Aside from the books by Spies and du Preez, none of the most important accounts of South Africa’s policy in Angola in 1975–76 refer to the Cubans as a motivation for South Africa’s decision to invade.≤∑ The South Africans were not alarmed by the Cubans’ presence in Angola until early November, after they first clashed with them southeast of Benguela on November 2–3. This is not surprising. The Americans, too, were not unnerved by the Cuban presence until November. South African

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policy toward Angola until November 1975 was not influenced by any Cuban action whatsoever. This includes—most emphatically—the decision to invade on October 14. As the South Africans raced toward Luanda, mpla resistance crumbled. The South Africans would have seized the city if Castro had not decided, on November 4, to send troops in response to the mpla’s desperate appeals. The Cuban forces, despite their initial inferiority in numbers and weapons, halted the South African onslaught. The o≈cial South African historian of the war writes: ‘‘The Cubans rarely surrendered and, quite simply, fought cheerfully until death.’’≤∏ As the South African operation unraveled and credible evidence surfaced in the Western press that Washington and Pretoria had been working together in Angola, the White House pulled back. U.S. o≈cials claimed that they had nothing to do with the South Africans and condemned Pretoria’s intervention in Angola. Hence the cry of pain from South Africa’s defense minister, who in 1978 told the South African parliament: ‘‘I know of only one occasion in recent years when we crossed a border and that was in the case of Angola when we did so with the approval and knowledge of the Americans. But they left us in the lurch. We are going to retell the story: the story must be told of how we, with their knowledge, went in there and operated in Angola with their knowledge, how they encouraged us to act and, when we had nearly reached the climax, we were ruthlessly left in the lurch.’’≤π Betrayed by the United States, pilloried as aggressors throughout the world, and threatened by growing numbers of Cuban soldiers, the South Africans gave up. On March 27, 1976, the last South African troops withdrew from Angola. The U.S.–South African gambit in Angola had failed. This dramatic dispatch of 36,000 Cuban soldiers to Angola in 1975–76 ushered in a period of larger-scale operations: 12,000 Cuban soldiers in Ethiopia in early 1978;≤∫ Cuban military missions in the Congo, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and Benin; and, above all, the continuing Cuban presence in Angola, which peaked in 1988 with 52,000 soldiers. I have presented this background about Cuban policy in Africa in order to reflect on Havana’s motivations and on the extent to which this policy was a function of Soviet demands. Before turning to these questions, I must state the limits of my sources. I have done extensive research in the Cuban archives, but I have had access almost exclusively to documents dealing with Cuba’s policy in Africa. Furthermore, I have been unable to interview the key policymakers— Fidel and Raúl Castro. I have, however, examined Cuba’s policy through the eyes of unsympathetic governments—combing through the U.S., British, Belgian,

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and West German archives—and also through the eyes of the East German government, a prickly and di≈cult friend whose perceptions closely reflected those of the Soviet Union. (There are virtually no relevant documents in the declassified material in the Soviet archives.) The best-organized and richest archives that I have examined are those of the United States. Furthermore, I have been highly impressed by the quality and objectivity of U.S. intelligence reports, both those from the cia and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research of the State Department (inr). Finally, I have complemented my archival research with interviews with more than 160 U.S., Cuban, and African protagonists, and I have studied the press of thirty countries from the Western Hemisphere, Europe, and Africa. As I analyzed Cuban foreign policy of the 1960s, I was struck by how close the assessment of cia and inr analysts was to the story that emerges from the Cuban documents themselves, and, indeed, to all the evidence I have seen. And I was struck time and again by the chasm that separates the views of these U.S. intelligence analysts and those of the policymakers. Throughout the 1960s, while U.S. policymakers publicly lambasted Castro as a Soviet puppet, cia and inr analysts were quietly pointing to Castro’s resistance to Soviet advice and his open criticism of the Soviet Union. ‘‘He has no intention of subordinating himself to Soviet discipline and direction, and he has increasingly disagreed with Soviet concepts, strategies and theories,’’ a 1968 intelligence study concluded, reflecting the consensus of the intelligence community. Castro had no compunction about purging those who were most loyal to Moscow or about pursuing economic policies that ran counter to Soviet advice. Soviet o≈cials ‘‘muttered about pouring funds down the Cuban rathole’’ and footed the bill, the State Department noted. Castro also criticized the Soviet Union as being dogmatic and opportunistic, niggardly in its aid to Third World governments and liberation movements, and overeager to seek accommodation with the United States. He made no secret of his displeasure with the inadequacy of Moscow’s support of North Vietnam, and in Latin America he actively pursued policies that went against Moscow’s wishes. cia and inr reports repeatedly discussed Cuba’s motivations in Africa or Latin America, and not once did they suggest that Cuba was acting at the behest of the Soviet Union.≤Ω If, then, we eliminate the Soviet bogeyman, what were the motivations of Cuba’s policy? Occasionally, cia and inr analysts referred to Castro’s ego—‘‘his thirst for self-aggrandizement’’≥≠ —as a motivating factor for his foreign policy activism, but they consistently stressed self-defense and revolutionary fervor as his main motivations. U.S. intelligence analysts acknowledged that Castro had repeatedly o√ered to explore a modus vivendi with the United States—in 1961,

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1963, and 1964. With one fleeting and ‘‘very tenuous’’ exception in October and November 1963, he had consistently been rebu√ed.≥∞ The American response was instead to launch paramilitary operations against Cuba, to attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro, and to cripple the island’s economy. The Cuban leaders concluded that the best defense would be to counterattack, not by attacking the United States directly, for that would be suicidal, but by assisting revolutionary forces in the Third World whenever possible, thereby gaining friends and weakening U.S. influence. As the cia concluded, Castro believed that the survival of the revolution depended on ‘‘ ‘other Cubas’ succeeding. . . . [Castro thought] that the U.S. would ultimately be forced to come to terms with Cuba when it has to deal simultaneously with ‘several’ other revolutionary regimes.’’ When Che Guevara went to Africa in December 1964, this element of self-defense was evident, as U.S. intelligence o≈cers noted. With far more wisdom than Che’s later biographers (particularly Jorge Castañeda, Mexico’s former foreign minister), U.S. intelligence never claimed that Guevara was acting independently of Fidel Castro. On the contrary, inr director Thomas Hughes noted that ‘‘Che Guevara’s three-month trip was part of an important new Cuban strategy.’’ This strategy, he argued, was based on Cuba’s belief that Africa was ready for revolution and that it was in Cuba’s interest to spread revolution there: it would win Havana new friends and weaken U.S. influence on the continent. ‘‘It was almost a reflex,’’ Che’s second-in-command in Zaire remarked. ‘‘Cuba defends itself by attacking its aggressor. This was our philosophy. The Yankees were attacking us from every side, so we had to challenge them everywhere. We had to divide their forces, so that they wouldn’t be able to descend on us (or any other country) with all their might.’’≥≤ But to explain Cuban activism in the 1960s merely in terms of self-defense would be to distort reality—a mistake that U.S. intelligence analysts did not make. There was a second motivating force, as the cia and inr freely acknowledged: Castro’s ‘‘sense of revolutionary mission.’’≥≥ As the head of the cia’s Board of National Estimates told the director of Central Intelligence in September 1963, ‘‘he [Castro] is first of all a revolutionary.’’≥∂ Report after report stressed the same point: Castro was ‘‘a compulsive revolutionary,’’≥∑ a man with a ‘‘fanatical devotion to his cause,’’≥∏ who was ‘‘inspired by a messianic sense of mission.’’≥π He believed that he was ‘‘engaged in a great crusade.’’≥∫ The men who surrounded Castro shared his sense of mission: ‘‘revolution is their raison d’etre.’’≥Ω As Hughes wrote, Castro and his cohorts were ‘‘dedicated revolutionaries, utterly convinced that they can and must bring radical change to Latin America some day.’’∂≠

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History, geography, culture, and language made Latin America the Cubans’ natural habitat, the place closest to Castro’s and his followers’ hearts, the first place they tried to spread revolution. But Latin America was also the place where their freedom of movement was most circumscribed. Castro was, as the cia observed, ‘‘canny enough to keep his risks low’’ in the backyard of the United States.∂∞ This is why fewer than forty Cubans fought in Latin America in the 1960s and why Cuba was extremely cautious about sending weapons to Latin American rebels. In Africa, Cuba incurred fewer risks. Whereas in Latin America Havana was operating against legal governments, flouting international law and facing the condemnation of the governments of the hemisphere, in Africa it was confronting colonial powers or defending established states. Only in Zaire did Cuba help insurgents fight against an independent government, but it was a government that was considered illegitimate by many African states, and Cuba’s intervention was coordinated with Egypt and Tanzania. Above all, in Africa there was much less risk of a head-on collision with the United States. In fact, except for fleeting moments (Algeria in October–November 1963 and Zaire in September 1965), U.S. o≈cials barely noted the presence of Cubans in Africa—until Cuban troops landed in Angola in November 1975. Moreover, the Cuban leaders were convinced that their country had a special empathy for the Third World—well beyond the confines of Latin America—and a special role to play on its behalf. The Soviets and their East European allies were white and, by Third World standards, rich; the Chinese su√ered from the hubris of a great power and were unable to adapt to African and Latin American culture. By contrast, Cuba was nonwhite, poor, threatened by a powerful enemy, and culturally Latin American and African. It was therefore a special hybrid: a socialist country with a Third World sensibility in a world that, as Castro rightly understood, was dominated by the ‘‘conflict between privileged and underprivileged, humanity against ‘imperialism,’ ’’∂≤ where the major fault line ran not between socialist and capitalist states but between developed and underdeveloped countries. These, then, were the dual motivations of Cuban activism in the 1960s: selfpreservation and revolutionary idealism. At times realpolitik clashed with revolutionary duty, and realpolitik prevailed. The Mexican government did not join the U.S. crusade against Cuba, and in return Cuba did not criticize Mexico’s corrupt and repressive regime or support armed struggle there. But at other times, revolutionary duty prevailed. In 1961 Cuba risked de Gaulle’s wrath to help the

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Algerian rebels, and in 1963 it went to the defense of the Algerian Republic, even though this jeopardized an important sugar contract with Morocco. It is impossible to know what would have happened to Cuba’s foreign policy activism had the costs suddenly escalated—that is, had Kennedy or Johnson been willing to consider a modus vivendi with Castro if he abandoned his support for revolution abroad. inr director Hughes wrestled with this question in the spring of 1964: On the one hand they [Cuba’s leaders] are still dedicated revolutionaries. . . . Many would rather be remembered as revolutionary martyrs than economic planners. Yet on the other hand these same men are aware that the current pressing problems demand amelioration that can only be brought by muting the call to revolution, by attempting to reach live and let live arrangements with the U.S., and by widening trade and diplomatic contacts with the free world. Tensions between the two paths, between peaceful coexistence and the call for violent revolution will, continue to exist within the Cuban hierarchy, both within and between individuals, for the foreseeable future.∂≥

In the 1960s, Cuba did not have to choose between realpolitik and idealism, because the United States consistently rebu√ed its attempts to discuss the modalities of a modus vivendi. Realpolitik and idealism ran along parallel tracks as the main motivations of Cuba’s foreign policy. But does this hold true for the 1970s? More concretely, does it help explain the dispatch of Cuban troops to Angola in November 1975? Two di≈culties are readily apparent. First, the argument of self-defense no longer applies, or at least it loses much of its power, because in 1974 the United States had finally concluded that it was in its interest to seek accommodation with Cuba. The conversations that began between the two countries were undertaken at Washington’s initiative. In a secret meeting on July 9, 1975—four months before Castro sent his troops to Angola—Cuban and U.S. representatives discussed what Assistant Secretary of State William Rogers described as ‘‘a series of ideas for a reciprocal, across-the-board improvement of relations’’ leading to full bilateral ties.∂∂ Furthermore, whereas Castro’s fierce independence from the Soviet Union in the 1960s was evident for all to see, by the early 1970s, reeling from the failure of both his revolutionary o√ensive in Latin America and his economic policies at home, Castro had softened his attitude toward the Kremlin. Cuban criticism of Soviet policies ceased, and Havana acknowledged Moscow’s primacy within the socialist bloc. This may suggest that the Cuban intervention in An-

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gola was motivated by Soviet demands, that Cuba was doing the bidding of the Soviet Union. This might seem plausible—until you study the documents. The Cuban intervention in Angola was in fact a sterling example both of Cuba’s independence from the Soviet Union and of Cuban idealism. It is now beyond question that, as a Soviet o≈cial states in his memoirs, the Cubans sent their troops ‘‘on their own initiative and without consulting us.’’∂∑ Indeed, the evidence is so compelling that even Kissinger, who habitually dismissed the Cubans as Soviet proxies, has reconsidered. ‘‘At the time we thought he [Castro] was operating as a Soviet surrogate,’’ Kissinger writes in the final volume of his memoirs. ‘‘We could not imagine that he would act so provocatively so far from home unless he was pressured by Moscow to repay the Soviet Union for its military and economic support. Evidence now available suggests that the opposite was the case.’’∂∏ Perhaps I should rephrase: it is beyond question, but it is still questioned. That Cuba acted independently and challenged Moscow in late 1975 turns established wisdom about the relationship between the superpowers and Third World countries on its head. It may be hard to believe, but it is supported by Cuban and U.S. documents that dovetail with remarkable precision and regularity. Yet even serious Western scholars are tempted to ignore this evidence. Let me give one example that is representative of a whole approach. In a recent book, Odd Arne Westad writes that ‘‘Soviet, Cuban, Western, and South African information gives conflicting versions of the Cuban build-up of troops in Angola.’’ He notes, correctly, that ‘‘Cuban sources claim that up to late December . . . all transport had taken place on Cuban ships and aircraft’’ (more exactly, up to January 9, 1976). He notes that ‘‘Soviet archival documents give a di√erent story, which is—at least in part—corroborated by information from other countries.’’ However, in the relevant footnote, he cites only one Soviet document, a March 1, 1976, report by the Soviet chargé in Luanda. Westad fails to identify ‘‘the information from other countries’’ that corroborates ‘‘at least in part’’ the Soviet ‘‘documents.’’ Although he claims that South African documents give ‘‘a di√erent account,’’ he does not cite any. Most intriguing is Westad’s mention of ‘‘Western . . . information.’’ While he never explains what this information is, or cites it, it is true that the U.S. government has declassified many U.S. documents about the Cuban airlift, which U.S. intelligence services followed very closely. These reports, however, completely support the Cuban version—to wit, that the first Soviet logistical support for the transportation of Cuban troops to Angola was provided on January 9, 1976.∂π Finally, forgetting his own earlier warning that there are conflicting versions, Westad concludes, apparently on the basis of

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his one Soviet document, that between November 1975 and mid-January 1976 the Soviets transported ‘‘more than twelve thousand soldiers from Cuba to Angola.’’∂∫ Westad is a serious scholar. This is what makes his analysis particularly interesting. It reflects the depth of the bias about Cuba that aΔicts even honest scholars. What, then, motivated Castro’s bold and independent move in Angola? Not Cuba’s narrow interests; not realpolitik. By deciding to send troops, Castro challenged Brezhnev, who opposed the dispatch of Cuban soldiers to Angola. Castro faced a serious military risk: Pretoria, urged on by Washington and possibly Paris, might have escalated its involvement, and the Cuban soldiers might have faced the full South African army without any guarantee of Soviet assistance. (Indeed, it took two months for Moscow to provide the needed logistical support to airlift Cuban troops to Angola.) Furthermore, the dispatch of Cuban troops jeopardized relations with the West at a moment when they were markedly improving: the United States was probing a modus vivendi; the Organization of American States had just lifted its sanctions; and West European governments were o√ering Havana low-interest loans and development aid. Realpolitik would have demanded that Cuba rebu√ Luanda’s desperate appeals. Had Castro merely been a client of the Soviet Union, he would have held back. Castro sent troops because he was committed to racial justice. The victory of the Pretoria-Washington axis would have meant the victory of apartheid, tightening the grip of white domination over the people of southern Africa. It was a defining moment: Castro sent his soldiers. As Kissinger himself now says, Castro ‘‘was probably the most genuine revolutionary leader then in power.’’∂Ω Of course, Cuba could not have done what it did in Africa or in Latin America without the economic and military support it received from the Soviet Union or without the shield, however fragile, that Moscow o√ered against U.S. aggression. (For example, although Castro intervened in Angola against Brezhnev’s wishes and sustained the operation for two months without any logistical assistance from the Soviet Union, his soldiers were armed with Soviet weapons, and Havana was able to bear the cost of the intervention because of Soviet aid. Furthermore, had the Soviet Union not existed, Cuba would have been exposed to the likelihood of a U.S. military response and the even more likely threat of a massive South African military escalation that would have crushed the fledgling Cuban contingent.) Cuba’s ability to act was made possible by the existence of a friendly superpower on which it depended for its economic and military lifeline, a situation reminiscent of the fact that Israel’s freedom of maneuver has been made possible by the support of the United States. Nonetheless, for Cuba—as

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for Israel—this economic and military dependence did not translate into being a client. I do not know of any other country, in modern times, for which idealism has been such a key component of its foreign policy. Not the United States (pace the rhetoric of Je√ersonian idealism and Wilsonian idealism).∑≠ Arguably the French revolutionaries for a fleeting moment in 1793; arguably Haiti when President Pétion gave invaluable aid to a desperate Bolívar; arguably the fledgling Soviet Union briefly under Lenin.∑∞ It may also be asserted that a good dose of idealism has characterized the foreign policy of the Scandinavian countries after World War II—I am thinking of their generous foreign aid and their willingness to assist the liberation movements of the Portuguese colonies, Namibia, and South Africa—but this policy did not entail risks.∑≤ I know of no country other than Cuba that for a relatively long period showed so much generosity and courage in its foreign policy. As a paigc leader said, ‘‘The Cubans understood better than anyone that they had a duty to fight and help their brothers become free.’’∑≥ The Cubans treated movements and governments that depended on Cuba’s assistance with a deference that I had not expected when I began my research because I had never encountered it before. I had not believed it possible. Visà-vis the paigc, the mpla, or the government of Angola, Cuba was a powerful benefactor—but it behaved with a sense of respect that may be unique in the annals of nations dealing with their dependent partners. Although the Cubans were in a position to dictate terms, they never interfered and never tried to impose their will on the Africans. The behavior of the Cuban government was matched by that of the Cubans who fought on the ground. Even in Zaire in 1965, the volunteers behaved during nine harrowing months with discipline and commitment, despite their bitter disappointment with the rebels. Throughout, the Cubans showed empathy and sensitivity that set them apart from their socialist allies and their Western foes. If we ask what the Cubans achieved with their revolutionary policy in Africa, the ledger is largely positive. Cuban troops helped restrain Morocco in 1963; in the Congo in 1965–66, they provided valuable aid to the mpla; and they lent decisive assistance to the rebels of Guinea-Bissau in their quest for independence. Obviously the Cubans’ most impressive success was in Angola, where they humbled Washington and Pretoria and prevented the establishment of a government in Luanda beholden to the apartheid regime. And beyond Angola, the tidal wave unleashed by the Cuban victory washed over southern Africa. Its psychological impact, the hope it aroused, is aptly illustrated by two statements

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from across the political divide in South Africa. In February 1976, as Cuban troops were pushing the South African army back toward the Namibian border, a South African military analyst wrote: ‘‘In Angola Black troops—Cubans and Angolans—have defeated White troops in military exchanges. Whether the bulk of the o√ensive was by Cubans or Angolans is immaterial in the color-conscious context of this war’s battlefield, for the reality is that they won, are winning, and are not White; and that psychological edge, that advantage the White man has enjoyed and exploited over 300 years of colonialism and empire, is slipping away. White elitism has su√ered an irreversible blow in Angola, and Whites who have been there know it.’’∑∂ The ‘‘White Giants’’ had retreated for the first time in recent history—and black Africans celebrated. ‘‘Black Africa is riding the crest of a wave generated by the Cuban success in Angola,’’ noted the World, South Africa’s major black newspaper. ‘‘Black Africa is tasting the heady wine of the possibility of realizing the dream of total liberation.’’∑∑ There would have been no heady dream, only the pain of one more defeat, had the Cubans not intervened, defeating Washington, defeating Pretoria, and defying the Soviet Union. The impact was more than psychological. Cuba’s victory had clear, tangible consequences. It forced Kissinger to turn against the racist white regime in Rhodesia and spurred Jimmy Carter to work tirelessly for majority rule there.∑∏ It also marked the real beginning of Namibia’s war of independence. As a South African general writes, ‘‘For the first time they [the Namibian rebels] obtained what is more or less a prerequisite for successful insurgent campaigning, namely a border that provided safe refuge.’’∑π For twelve years—until the New York agreements of December 1988—Pretoria refused to leave Namibia, and Cuban troops helped the Angolan army hold the line against bruising South African incursions into Angola. Little has been written about those years. The major published source is the memoirs of Reagan’s assistant secretary for Africa, Chester Crocker, who explains the outcome—the independence of Namibia—largely in terms of U.S. patience, skill, and wisdom.∑∫ A di√erent explanation emerges from an analysis of newly declassified Cuban and U.S. documents. In April 1987, the U.S. ambassador reported from Pretoria that the South African government was ‘‘implacably negative’’ toward Namibian independence.∑Ω In the following September, the South African Defense Force unleashed a major attack against the Angolan army in southeastern Angola. By early November it had cornered the best Angolan units in the small town of Cuito Cuanavale and was poised to destroy them. But on November 15, Castro ordered the best units of his army and its most sophisticated hardware to Angola. ‘‘By going there [to Cuito Cuanavale] we placed

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ourselves in the lion’s jaws,’’ Castro explained. ‘‘We accepted the challenge. And from the first moment we planned to gather our forces to attack in another direction, like a boxer who with his left hand blocks the blow and with his right—strikes.’’∏≠ On March 23, 1988, the South Africans launched their last major attack against Cuito. Once again, they failed. ‘‘One should ask [the South Africans],’’ Castro remarked, ‘‘why has your army of the superior race been unable to take Cuito, which is defended by blacks and mulattoes from Angola and the Caribbean?’’∏∞ As Castro spoke, hundreds of miles west of Cuito, a large Cuban force was advancing toward the Namibian border. ‘‘At any other time,’’ U.S. intelligence reported, ‘‘Pretoria would have regarded the Cuban move as a provocation, requiring a swift and strong response. But the Cubans moved with such dispatch and on such a scale that an immediate South African military response would have involved serious risks.’’∏≤ The South Africans warned that the Cuban advance posed a ‘‘serious’’ military threat to Namibia and could precipitate ‘‘a terrible battle.’’∏≥ But they gave ground. While Castro’s troops advanced toward the Namibian border, Cubans, Angolans, South Africans, and Americans were sparring at the negotiating table. ‘‘Reading the Cubans is yet another art form,’’ Crocker noted. ‘‘They are prepared for both war and peace. . . . We witness considerable tactical finesse and genuinely creative moves at the table. This occurs against the backdrop of Castro’s grandiose bluster and his army’s unprecedented projection of power on the ground.’’∏∂ Many factors forced Pretoria to accept an independent Namibia, but it would not have happened without the Cubans’ prowess on the battlefield and their skill at the negotiating table. This prowess and skill reverberated beyond Namibia. As Nelson Mandela said, the Cuban victory ‘‘destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor . . . [and] inspired the fighting masses of South Africa. . . . Cuito Cuanavale was the turning point for the liberation of our continent—and of my people—from the scourge of apartheid.’’∏∑ Just as in the 1960s, when the hundreds of Cubans who went to fight in Africa were accompanied by hundreds of technical aid workers, so the thousands of Cubans who went to fight in Angola in 1975–76 were soon joined by thousands of aid workers. And in the 1980s, the tens of thousands of Cuban soldiers who went to Africa were accompanied by tens of thousands of aid workers, while tens of thousands of scholarship students went to Cuba. Throughout, this important aid was provided free of charge or on extremely lenient terms. In July 1991 Nelson Mandela visited Havana and voiced the epitaph to the story

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of Cuba’s aid to Africa during the Cold War. His words set o√ ‘‘a gusher’’ of criticism in the United States. ‘‘We come here with a sense of the great debt that is owed the people of Cuba,’’ Mandela said. ‘‘What other country can point to a record of greater selflessness than Cuba had displayed in its relations to Africa?’’∏∏ Notes 1. This essay is based on my book Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). To avoid long notes, in this essay I cite the sources only of direct quotations. I have based the essay primarily on archival research, interviews with protagonists, and the press of thirty countries in the Western Hemisphere, Europe, and Africa. These sources are explained in Conflicting Missions, 503–14. For a full list of relevant printed sources, see Conflicting Missions, 515–38. 2. In colonial times there were two Congos, one ruled by Paris, the other by Brussels. Upon becoming independent in 1960, both retained the name Congo, to which was added the name of their respective capitals, Brazzaville and Leopoldville. In October 1971 the former Belgian Congo (Congo Leopoldville) became Zaire, and in May 1997 it became the Democratic Republic of Congo. To avoid confusion, in this essay I refer to the former French colony (Congo Brazzaville) as ‘‘the Congo’’ and refer to the former Belgian colony as ‘‘Zaire.’’ 3. José Ramón Machado Ventura, note to the author, Havana, July 12, 1995, 1. 4. Che Guevara, ‘‘Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria (Congo),’’ Dar-es-Salaam, December 1965 or early 1966, 13, Private Collection, Havana. 5. cia, Special Memorandum, ‘‘Implications of Growing Communist Influence in urtz,’’ September 29, 1964, 11, National Security File Country File (hereafter cited as nsfcf), box 100, Lyndon B. Johnson Library, Austin, Texas (hereafter cited as lbjl). 6. Guevara, ‘‘Pasajes,’’ 13–14. 7. Ibid., 12–13, 128, 14. 8. Quotations from cia, O≈ce of Current Intelligence, ‘‘Brazzaville’s Move to the Left,’’ October 30, 1964, 5, nsfcf, box 83, lbjl, and ‘‘Discurso pronunciado por Raúl Castro Ruz en acto por el XX aniversario de la construcción de las columnas de combatientes internacionalistas cubanos que cumplieron misiones en el Congo Brazzaville y el Congo Leopoldville,’’ Havana, November 7, 1985, 7, Archives of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party, Havana. 9. Interview with Rolando Kindelán, Havana, March 11, 1996. 10. ‘‘Policy Planning Memorandum No. 1,’’ enclosed in Department of State to All African Diplomatic Posts, Lisbon, London, Paris, Rome, December 2, 1971, Pol 1 Afr-US, Subject-Numeric Files: 1963–73, Record Group 59, National Archives, College Park, Md. (hereafter cited as na).

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11. President Luís Cabral, Nô Pintcha (Bissau), January 22, 1977, 4–6. 12. Interview with Joâo Bernardo Vieira (Nino), Bissau, May 1, 1996. 13. Interview with Francisca Pereira, Bissau, April 25, 1996. 14. Interviews with Ulises Estrada, Havana, December 7, 1994, and with Oscar Cárdenas, Havana, December 5, 1993. 15. Interview with Víctor Dreke, Havana, June 26, 1994. Dreke was Che Guevara’s second-in-command in Zaire and headed the Cuban military mission in Guinea-Bissau in 1967–68. 16. Interview with Robinson McIlvaine, Washington, February 5, 1996. 17. Interview with Paul O’Neill, Washington, February 20, 1992. 18. ‘‘Discurso pronunciado,’’ 2. 19. Lúcio Lara, ‘‘A história do mpla,’’ n.d., Private Collection, Luanda. 20. Rafael Moracén, ‘‘Diario de campaña de Humberto Vázquez Mancevo,’’ entry of September 1965, Private Collection, Havana. 21. Interview with Rafael Moracén, Havana, June 21, 1994. 22. Robert Hultslander (cia station chief, Luanda, 1975), fax to Piero Gleijeses, December 22, 1998, 3. 23. For example, Jorge Dominguez, a prominent American expert on Cuba, writes that ‘‘Cuba, the United States and South Africa engaged in a classic action-reaction process of escalation. . . . South Africa . . . was unnerved by the deployment of nearly five hundred [Cuban] military instructors and other military personnel, especially in October [1975].’’ Journal of Cold War Studies, summer 2003, 136. Dominguez overlooks all the available evidence and o√ers none of his own. 24. F. J. du Toit Spies, Operasie Savannah: Angola, 1975–1976 (Pretoria, 1989); Sophie du Preez, Avontuur in Angola: Die Verhaal van Suid-Afrika se soldate in Angola, 1975–1976 (Pretoria, 1989). 25. See Jan Breytenbach, Forged in Battle (Cape Town, 1986), and They Live by the Sword (Alberton, South Africa, 1990); Ian Uys, Bushmen Soldiers (Germiston, South Africa, 1994); Helmoed-Römer Heitman, South African War Machine (Novato, Calif., 1985); Willem Steenkamp, South Africa’s Border War, 1966–1989 (Gibraltar, 1989). 26. Spies, Operasie Savannah, 108. 27. P. W. Botha, April 17, 1978, Republic of South Africa, House of Assembly Debates, Pretoria, col. 4852. 28. Cuban military instructors began to go to Ethiopia in April 1977. There were about 300 instructors by early December, when Cuban troops began arriving. By early January 1978, there were about 900 Cuban soldiers in Ethiopia, in addition to the approximately 300 instructors. The number of troops peaked at 12,000 by late March 1978. See Raúl Castro to Fidel Castro, April 29, 1977, Centro de Información de las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias, Havana (hereafter cited as cifar); MemoConv, Mengistu, Raúl Castro et al., January 10, 1978, 3, 6, Oficina Secreta, 2do Sec., Archives of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party, Havana; minfar, ‘‘Misiones internacionalistas cumpli-

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das por Cuba—1963 a 1991,’’ July 1998, 52–59, Archives of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party. 29. Quotations from ‘‘National Policy Paper—Cuba: United States Policy,’’ draft, July 15, 1968, 16, Freedom of Information Act (hereafter cited as foia); and Department of State, ‘‘Soviet Intentions toward Cuba,’’ March 1965, 3, nsfcf, box 33/37, lbjl. 30. Denney (inr) to SecState, ‘‘Cuban Foreign Policy,’’ September 15, 1967, 4, Pol 1 Cuba, Subject Numeric Files: 1963–73, Record Group 59, na. 31. National security advisor McGeorge Bundy, quoted in Gordon Chase, ‘‘Meeting with the President, December 19, 1963,’’ Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–63, vol. 11, 907. 32. cia, O≈ce of Current Intelligence, ‘‘Cuban Subversion in Latin America,’’ April 23, 1965, 4, nsfcf, box 31/32, lbjl; Hughes to SecState, ‘‘Che Guevara’s African Venture,’’ April 19, 1965, 1, nsfcf, box 20, lbjl; interview with Víctor Dreke, Havana, July 11, 1994. For Castañeda’s assertions, see his Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara (New York, 1997), esp. chaps. 8–9. 33. Denney (inr) to SecState, ‘‘Cuban Foreign Policy,’’ September 15, 1967, 5, Pol 1 Cuba, Subject—Numeric Files: 1963–73, Record Group 59, na. 34. Sherman Kent to Director of Central Intelligence, September 4, 1963, nsc 14510001-10126/205, John F. Kennedy Assassination Collection, Record Group 263, na. 35. Special National Intelligence Estimate, ‘‘Cuba: Castro’s Problems and Prospects over the Next Year or Two,’’ June 27, 1968, 3, National Security Files, National Intelligence Estimate, box 8/9, lbjl. 36. cia, Directorate of Intelligence, ‘‘Cuban Subversive Policy and the Bolivian Guerrilla Episode,’’ May 1968, 3, nsfcf, box 19, lbjl. 37. Special National Intelligence Estimate, ‘‘The Situation in the Caribbean through 1959,’’ June 30, 1959, 3, National Security Archive, Washington (hereafter cited as nsa). 38. National Intelligence Estimate, ‘‘The Situation in Cuba,’’ June 14, 1960, 9, nsa. 39. Department of State, Policy Planning Council, ‘‘Caribbean: Cuba’’ (draft outline), February 13, 1964, 6, nsfcf, box 26/29, lbjl. 40. Hughes to SecState, ‘‘Cuba in 1964,’’ April 17, 1964, 10–11, foia. 41. Special National Intelligence Estimate, ‘‘Cuba: Castro’s Problems and Prospects over the Next Year or Two,’’ June 27, 1968, 3, National Security File, National Intelligence Estimate, box 8/9, lbjl. 42. ‘‘National Policy Paper—Cuba: United States Policy,’’ draft, July 15, 1968, 15 (quoting Castro), foia. 43. Hughes to SecState, ‘‘Cuba in 1964,’’ April 17, 1964, 10–11, foia. Castro’s passionate desire to improve the lot of the Cuban people had been recognized early by U.S. intelligence, which noted in April 1959: ‘‘He is inspired by a messianic sense of mission to aid his people.’’ Special nie, ‘‘The Situation in the Caribbean through 1959,’’ June 30, 1959, 3, nsa. Similarly, Tad Szulc, by far the best biographer of Castro, stressed ‘‘the obsession of Fidel Castro to do away with human, social and economic underdevelopment in

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Cuba. . . . To eradicate underdevelopment . . . was, indeed, Castro’s magnificent obsession from the beginning.’’ Szulc, Fidel: A Critical Portrait (New York, 1987, 593–94). Two more recent works should be noted: Leycester Coltman’s The Real Fidel Castro (New Haven, 2003) has good insights but is marred by too many factual errors; and Ignacio Ramonet’s Fidel Castro: Biografía a dos voces (Barcelona, 2006) is a lengthy interview with Fidel Castro. It is useful as a statement by Castro of his views on a wealth of subjects, but it has no analytical value—the author’s contribution is to ask questions and transcribe the answers. 44. Quoted in Peter Kornbluh and James Blight, ‘‘Dialogue with Castro: A Hidden History,’’ New York Review of Books, October 6, 1994. 45. Anatoly Dobrynin, In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to America’s Six Cold War Presidents (New York, 1995), 362. 46. Henry Kissinger, Years of Renewal (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), 816. 47. See Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 234–36; and Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, 367–69. 48. Westad, The Global Cold War, 236. 49. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, 785. 50. The conventional view of Je√ersonian idealism overlooks Je√erson’s ability to convince himself that the Louisiana Purchase included Texas and West Florida, against all reasonable evidence. It ignores his opposition to the independence of Cuba (fueled by his desire to annex the island), his eagerness to see Haiti crushed (fueled by his fear of its successful slave revolt), and his pressure on General William Harrison to accelerate the acquisition of Native American land in the Northwest, something that could be accomplished only by fraud and violence. The myth of Wilsonian idealism focuses on the president’s rhetoric and his support for the rights of distant European countries but overlooks or grossly distorts his record in the Caribbean and Central America. 51. On Haiti’s aid, which Spanish American and U.S. historians consistently overlook or minimize, see Paul Verna, Pétion y Bolívar (Caracas, 1968); and Piero Gleijeses, ‘‘Haiti’s Contribution to the Independence of Spanish America: A Forgotten Chapter,’’ Revista/ Review Interamericana, winter 1979–80, 511–28. For a comparative assessment of the roles of Haiti, the United States, and England on behalf of Spanish American independence, see Piero Gleijeses, ‘‘The Limits of Sympathy: The United States and the Independence of Spanish America,’’ Journal of Latin American Studies, October 1992, 481–505. 52. The Nordiska Afrikainstitutet of Uppsala, Sweden, has recently published several important volumes on this subject: Iina Soiri and Pekka Pertola, Finland and National Liberation in Southern Africa (1999); Tore Linné Eriksen, ed., Norway and National Liberation in Southern Africa (2000); Tor Sellström, ed., Liberation in Southern Africa— Regional and Swedish Voices: Interviews from Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, the Frontline and Sweden (1999); Sellström, Sweden and National Liberation in Southern Africa, 2 vols. (1999, 2002); Christopher Munthe Morgenstierne, Den-

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mark and National Liberation in Southern Africa (2003). See also Piero Gleijeses, ‘‘Scandinavia and the Liberation of Southern Africa,’’ International History Review, June 2005, 324–31. 53. Interview with Joseph Turpin, Bissau, April 30, 1996. 54. Roger Sargent, Rand Daily Mail (Johannesburg), February 17, 1976, 10. 55. World (Johannesburg), February 24, 1976, 4. 56. My comment about Carter is based on newly declassified documents from the Jimmy Carter Library in Atlanta. I have also benefited from Professor Nancy Mitchell’s pathbreaking manuscript ‘‘Race and Realpolitik: Jimmy Carter and Africa,’’ which will be ready for publication in 2007. 57. Jannie Geldenhuys, A General’s Story: From an Era of War and Peace (Johannesburg, 1995), 59. 58. Chester Crocker, High Noon in Southern Africa: Making Peace in a Rough Neighborhood (New York: Norton, 1992). I am currently writing a book on U.S. and Cuban policy in southern Africa during the Carter and Reagan years. The first results of my research appear in my essay ‘‘Kuba in Afrika, 1975–1991,’’ in Heisse Kriege im Kalten Krieg, ed. Bernd Greibner, Christian Müller, and Dierk Walter (Hamburg, 2006), 469–510. See also my ‘‘Moscow’s Proxy? Cuba and Africa, 1975–1988,’’ Journal of Cold War Studies 8, no. 2 (spring 2006): 3–51. An incorrectly edited version of this article appeared in the spring 2006 issue; the editor has promised me that the full, correct version will appear in the winter 2006–7 issue. 59. Perkins (U.S. ambassador, Pretoria) to SecState, April 17, 1987, foia. 60. ‘‘Transcripción sobre la reunión del Comandante en Jefe con la delegación de políticos de Africa del Sur (Comp. Slovo) efectuada en el minfar el 29.9.88,’’ 16, cifar. 61. ‘‘Conversacion del Comandante en Jefe Fidel Castro Ruz, primer secretario del comité central del Partido Comunista de Cuba y presidente de los Consejos de Estado y de Ministros, con Anatoli L. Adamishin, viceministro de relaciones exteriores de la URSS. Efectuada el día 28 de marzo de 1988,’’ 48, Archives of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party, Havana. 62. Abramowitz (Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Department of State) to SecState, May 13, 1988, 1–2, foia. 63. General Jannie Geldenhuys, Chief of the South African Defence Forces, Star (Johannesburg), May 27, 1988, 1; Defense Minister Magnus Malan, Star, May 17, 1988, 1. 64. Amembassy Brazzaville to SecState, August 25, 1988, 6, nsa. 65. Nelson Mandela, July 26, 1991, Granma, July 27, 1991, 3. 66. Richard Cohen, ‘‘Mandela: A Mistake in Cuba,’’ Washington Post, July 30, 1991, 15; Mandela, July 26, 1991, Granma, July 27, 1991, 3.

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Transnationalizing the Dirty War Argentina in Central America

Toward the end of the 1970s and into the early 1980s, the military regime in Argentina internationalized its apparatus for repression in Latin America. The Argentine military transferred its experience in counterinsurgency to other countries in the region as part of a crusade against Communism in the hemisphere. A final phase of this extraterritorial campaign was the country’s participation in the conflicts in Central America. The Argentine intervention in the region began during the Nicaraguan civil war (1977–79) and immediately afterward provided training in counterinsurgency and military assistance to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The Argentine military program, conducted by veterans of the Dirty War, reached its climax with the organization of the Nicaraguan Contras. The Argentine military played a fundamental role in the cycle of statesponsored violence in Latin America, o√ering Central American counterinsurgent regimes a viable ‘‘parainstitutional’’ model dedicated to the control of internal fronts. Operating on the assumption that they had reached a high level of professionalism in internal security, the Argentines transferred their experience in counterinsurgency to the armed forces in Central America. They gave assistance through military instruction, intelligence, and the sale of weapons. The Argentine military presence in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras— where approximately three thousand former members of Somoza’s National Guard took refuge immediately after the revolutionary triumph in Nicaragua— notably facilitated the formation of an anti-Sandinista army composed of former members of the National Guard.∞ The Argentine crusade was nourished, and at the same time promoted, by a wide transnational network of anti-Communism comprising government and nongovernment actors. The Argentine anti-Communist crusade should be seen as part of a transnational ideological network determined to destroy what was

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perceived as a multifaceted international enemy that threatened Western society. This network combined anti-Communism and a counterrevolutionary project with diverse illegal activities such as drug tra≈cking and money laundering. The transnational anti-Communist component should be thought of as the counterpart to equally transnational revolutionary networks. In this sense each ideological camp achieved an important degree of self-coordination, creating unprecedented structures in the region. These structures played a key role in the conflict between the ideological blocs that characterized the Cold War in Latin America. Argentina, playing its traditionally aggressive role in foreign policy, warned that the government of Jimmy Carter had left a vacuum in the hemispheric antiCommunist struggle in the late 1970s, and took advantage of the opportunity to assume a position of leadership in this fight. In response to what it considered to be a hotbed of Communism, the Argentine military tried to expand its antisubversive extraterritorial campaign in Central America. It did so as an independent force for right-wing repression. The administration of Ronald Reagan, committed to rolling back Communist expansionism, ‘‘bought’’ the clandestine Argentine military program early in 1981. Later that year, Reagan formally authorized the cia to ‘‘support and conduct paramilitary operations against the Cuban presence and Cuban-Sandinista support infrastructure in Nicaragua and elsewhere in Central America.’’≤ According to this plan, the agency would ‘‘work with foreign governments, organizations and individuals to build popular support that will be nationalistic, anti-Cuban and anti-Somoza.’’≥ The collaboration between Argentina and the United States was based on the mutual belief that the so-called Third World was one of the battlefields in the East-West conflict. Both countries maintained that this conflict demanded decisive military action to counterbalance what was deemed to be Soviet expansionism. Indeed, international Communism was believed to be the source of the threats to national security in the hemisphere. Therefore the Reagan administration’s decision to use covert action as the most e≈cient method of destabilizing the Sandinista government coincided with the Argentine objective of secretly forming an army from units of Somoza’s exiled National Guard to carry out guerrilla operations within Nicaraguan territory. This convergence of interests, however, did not mean that Argentina would subordinate its autonomy in foreign policy matters to decisions made by the United States. Rather, cooperation in Central America allowed both countries to advance their respective agendas. While the cooperation between Argentina and the Reagan administration in launching a counterrevolutionary force based in Honduras was rapid and e≈cient, the United States’ decision to support Great Britain in the conflict over the

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Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas) in 1982 a√ected Argentina’s commitment in Central America. The impact of the covert Argentine intelligence program on relations with the United States contributed to the military junta’s strategic decision to invade the islands in the South Atlantic. Because the military leaders in Buenos Aires considered the intervention of Argentine advisors in Central America to be vital to U.S. policy, they falsely presumed that the United States would remain neutral if Argentina occupied the Falkland Islands. Faced with the disappointment of the U.S. decision to cooperate with its nato ally, the Argentine military reduced its participation in the Contra program. Still, a group of Argentine o≈cers continued to train anti-Sandinista forces until the end of 1984, that is, after the fall of the Argentine military regime. The Argentine crusade in Central America was a final step in the creation of formal and informal transnational zones of collaboration and contact.∂ Such contact zones are not located within a defined territory but represent areas characterized by the exchange and circulation of ideas, links, and resources.∑ The creation of Operation Condor in 1975 by Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia (later joined by Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru) represented the first formal collaboration among the countersubversive structures in the region. Established at Chile’s initiative, Condor was an integrated intelligence system devised to combat ‘‘transnational subversive elements.’’∏ This network aimed at coordinating e√orts to launch a multinational o√ensive against leftist organizations, not only in Latin America but also in Europe and the United States. The countries that were integrated into Operation Condor achieved a high degree of cooperation, which was unusual in the region. This cooperation included political assassinations and the kidnapping and ‘‘transfer’’ of political refugees to their countries of origin. Argentina’s participation in the coup d’état in Bolivia in July 1980 represented a further step in the creation of transnational spaces as part of the ideological conflict in the hemisphere. The so-called Cocaine Coup combined East-West geopolitical concerns with matters of strategic regional influence.π In July 1980 the Argentine military participated in the coup d’état led by the commander of the Bolivian army, General Luis García Meza. This intervention was an important step in the process of Argentine military expansion in the subcontinent. According to General Jorge Rafael Videla, Argentina’s de facto president at the time, the armed forces of that country helped to overthrow the civilian government in order to prevent the emergence of a ‘‘Cuba in South America.’’∫ ‘‘It was part of the game of the Cold War,’’ said a high-ranking naval o≈cer. ‘‘We had to do the dirty work in Bolivia.’’Ω This military action was undertaken despite the

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Carter administration’s stated opposition to the interruption of the democratic process in Bolivia. At the end of the 1970s, the unstable situation in Central America stimulated the convergence of anti-Communist actors in support of the armed antiSandinista movement. The multifaceted network of interactions between governments and pressure groups centered mainly on the exchange of information, the mobilization of economic and military resources, and the coordination of operational plans. The result was a formidable transnational political nexus that embraced groups such as the Liga Anticomunista Mundial (lam) and its Latin American chapter, the Confederación Anticomunista Latinoamericana (cal); the network of Cubans exiled to the United States (i.e., the terrorist organizations Omega 7 and Alfa 66, based in Florida); the Italian Masonic Lodge, Propaganda Due (p-2); the Confederación de Asociaciones por la Unidad de las Sociedades de América (causa); the political wing of the Unification Church of Reverend Sun Myung Moon; Central American political parties such as the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (mln) of Guatemala and the Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (arena) in El Salvador; paramilitary organizations such as the Movimiento Costa Rica Libre (mcrl); organizations of the religious Right with headquarters in the United States, such as the Evangelical Extension and the Moral Majority; and economic and business groups of di√erent countries in the region.∞≠ While motivated by a variety of interests, these organizations were united by the common objective of defeating left-wing revolutionary forces throughout the hemisphere. The Argentine Case in the Light of the Cold War Argentina’s decision to extend its influence beyond its borders—at times putting it at odds with U.S. policy—necessitates a reconsideration of the role played by Latin American states in the regional conflicts that took place within the framework of the Cold War. Although much more limited in terms of its reach and resources (and also less well studied), the Argentine case represents the antiCommunist counterpart of Cuban activism in the Third World. The cases of Argentina and Cuba reveal that certain Latin American states designed and carried out forms of intervention in the Third World independently of the great powers. In the process, the Argentine case sheds important light on the dynamics of the Cold War from the perspective of ‘‘Third World country to Third World country,’’ thereby complementing Piero Gleijeses’s chapter in this volume on Cuban intervention abroad.∞∞

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These cases show that the United States and the Soviet Union should not be considered as the only principal, external actors in Central America during the Cold War. By the time of the revolutionary victory in Nicaragua, Soviet foreign policy toward the region was being determined by a combination of pragmatism and ideological considerations. The symbiosis between ‘‘imperial expansionism’’ and ‘‘ideological proselytism’’ dated back to the 1920s, and although it continued under the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev, it was already showing signs of decline.∞≤ If the Soviet Union did not wish to abandon the Sandinista movement, neither was it willing to accept the burden of ‘‘another Cuba’’ in an area of secondary importance to the Kremlin. Ideological considerations were balanced by the concern to prevent a confrontation with the United States in an area that Moscow identified as the strategic ‘‘backyard’’ of North America. In sum, the Soviet Union behaved prudently with regard to the dramatic events in Central America.∞≥ In contrast with the idea held by part of the anti-Communist bloc that ‘‘Soviet expansionism’’ was a source for the revolutionary movement in Central America, Soviet foreign policy toward the region—particularly in Nicaragua—was generally reactive. The Soviet Union increased its economic and military assistance to Nicaragua in response to the aggression financed by the United States. Until the mid-1980s, Soviet military assistance to Nicaragua was limited to defending the revolution against the aggression of the Contras; it did not extend to promoting insurrection in Central America. By contrast, Cuba promoted policies in support of the revolutionary movements in the region, openly contradicting the interests of the Kremlin.∞∂ For its part, the Carter administration emphasized its commitment to abandon what it perceived to be a ‘‘tradition of manipulation’’ of the Third World by the United States; instead it sought to assume an attitude of open cooperation with those countries. This new policy accorded Latin America a di√erent role. The region was selected to serve as a laboratory for a sincere dialogue between North and South, with the United States abandoning what Carter termed as ‘‘that inordinate fear of Communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear.’’∞∑ The key points of this policy were the negotiations for a treaty for the Panama Canal, the commitment to human rights and the democratization of the hemisphere, and the intention to improve relations with Cuba. From the perspective of Washington, Latin America was a ‘‘gray area’’ on the international geopolitical map, and therefore a suitable and safe place for the U.S. government to put this innovative agenda into action.∞∏ Both the Soviet position regarding the region and the human rights policy of

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the Carter administration suggest that the revolutionary phenomenon in Latin America—whether ultimately its triumph or its downfall—was of more strategic and ideological importance to countries such as Cuba and Argentina than to the United States (at least momentarily) and the Soviet Union.∞π In other words, the Kremlin favored a cautious approach toward the revolutionary regime in Nicaragua and the rebel movements in the region, while President Carter based his policies on the perception that the Soviet threat was less intense in the second half of the 1970s and on the possibility of finding a modus vivendi with the triumphant coalition led by the Sandinistas. In contrast, the Argentine military regime maintained a strongly militant attitude toward the anti-Communist struggle. The Argentine government viewed the tension with the United States as a clash between Carter’s lack of political realism (resulting from the moral focus on which his foreign policy was based) and Argentina’s need to combat and destroy a movement of armed struggle backed by Cuba and the Soviet Union. Argentina’s military leaders held that in the 1970s this movement had contributed to bringing their country to the brink of national disintegration.∞∫ In direct contrast with the Carter White House, President Reagan’s ‘‘pragmatism’’ was perceived by the Argentine regime as a sound basis for mutual understanding. There were still discrepancies in the views of the two countries, but their coincidences on international policy nurtured a flexible bilateral relationship. Thus Argentina entered a partnership with the United States in the hemispheric fight against Communism. According to General Miguel Angel Mallea Gil, a close advisor to President Videla and military attaché to the United States in the early 1980s, ‘‘A fundamental U.S. objective was to overthrow the Sandinista regime. Thus . . . when two countries have a common goal, they understand each other much better.’’∞Ω The leaders of the military regime perceived the U.S.–Argentine alliance as the beginning of a new era in which Argentina was to obtain international recognition for its victory over the Communist enemy. The Argentines felt, for the first time in years, that they were recognized as U.S. allies. ‘‘The fight against subversion in Central America marked a period of honeymoon between Argentina and the United States,’’ said a navy o≈cer with direct contacts in the Pentagon. ‘‘It was a time of great prestige for Argentina.’’≤≠ The Argentine intervention against ‘‘international Marxism’’ in the hemisphere was consistent with the generals’ assertion that their country had su√ered ‘‘a Soviet invasion via its Cuban surrogate.’’≤∞ According to one of the most notorious Argentine ideologues of state terror, the country had been a battlefield of an international confrontation that continued in Central America.≤≤ Despite

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the military victory over the Montoneros and the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (erp) toward the end of 1977, the top-level military o≈cials in Buenos Aires believed that the Argentine guerrilla groups operating outside the country posed a threat that needed to be eradicated.≤≥ Consequently they considered military action beyond the nation’s borders to be an essential, final phase in the internal war against armed revolutionary organizations.≤∂ Although the armed forces had largely destroyed the military infrastructure of the Montoneros and the erp, the generals construed the ‘‘subversiveterrorist’’ threat as a complex network of organizations comprising an armed apparatus responsible for military actions and ‘‘a political apparatus of leadership, propaganda and indoctrination.’’≤∑ According to a 1977 army intelligence report, the strategy of the Montoneros and the erp had shifted toward prioritizing political action over armed struggle. This report underscored that the confrontation against the guerrilla organizations continued in the international arena.≤∏ The Argentine military maintained that geographic limits could not be considered an obstacle in the defense of the West. The military high command believed that the risks posed by the advance of Communism in Latin America made it necessary to create a political and military front to defend the hemisphere, one capable of confronting this new type of conflict.≤π Multilateral conventional assistance against external aggression—such as that established by the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (tiar)—was considered inadequate for this new reality. Since the region was faced with the aggression of the ‘‘Marxist Communist International,’’ the concept of national borders was subordinated to the ideological dimension. That is, from the military point of view, the war against Communist armed revolution defined a new kind of confrontation in which geographic boundaries would not circumscribe military operations into separate conflicts. If the Marxist enemy applied a global strategy that ignored the notion of conventional frontiers, the response from the Western bloc would adjust to this new reality.≤∫ As explained, Operation Condor was an initial, multinational response to a perceived threat that went beyond national borders. According to Colonel Manuel Contreras, chief of Chile’s Directorate of National Intelligence (dina), the rationale for this enterprise was to create a formal structure that would allow the countries under attack to respond to an enemy that had developed ‘‘a leadership structure that is intercontinental, continental, regional and subregional.’’≤Ω For the anti-Communist forces, defeating an internationally organized enemy that

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included Marxist terrorists, human rights organizations, political activists, and pro-democracy groups required a new type of regional security agreement. Consistent with this framework, the Argentines decided to fashion a program of continental military expansion that aspired to halt the advance of—and eventually defeat—the revolutionaries in the hemisphere. Argentina’s foreign policy, while strongly motivated by anti-Communist ideology, was also based on clear political and economic pragmatism. A good example of this pragmatism—and of its independence in foreign policy—was the decision of the Argentine military government not to join the grain embargo against the Soviet Union, which was imposed by the Carter administration in 1980 following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Thus, at the same time that the Argentine military embarked on a series of extraterritorial operations viewed through the lens of a global struggle against Communism, they also remained steadfast in their decision to be one of the main grain suppliers of the Soviet Union. Significantly, Argentina’s decision not to join the embargo contributed to the eventual downfall of the sanctions imposed by the United States.≥≠ The ‘‘Intelligence Community’’ Because of the ideological character of the conflict with the revolutionary enemy, the intelligence apparatus of the Argentine military government played a key role in the repressive domestic campaign, and particularly in the extraterritorial projection of the military regime. Toward the end of the 1950s, the new hypothesis that counterrevolutionary warfare demanded a more widespread and sophisticated use of intelligence services than did conventional warfare led to the development of the so-called comunidad informativa, or intelligence community.≥∞ In the 1960s, the emphasis on counterinsurgent warfare and the emergence of the first local guerrilla groups gave the internal intelligence service a strategic role within the military structure. In the following decade, the evolution of the intelligence apparatus led to its transformation into a clandestine arm of the state, with its own logistics, regulations, and functional autonomy. Recently declassified documents from the U.S. Department of State confirm the central role played by the intelligence services in both the domestic and extraterritorial arenas during the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s. The intelligence services, especially the Army Intelligence Battalion 601, exercised an enormous influence over the decisions of the military government.≥≤ This unit had a central role in the compilation of information, a high degree of autonomy,

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and direct access to the ‘‘war bounty’’ obtained from the campaigns of kidnappings and ‘‘disappearances.’’ Therefore Argentina’s extraterritorial activities were, on the whole, designed and implemented by the most violent and wellequipped sector of the military apparatus. Military intelligence paid special attention to the transnational links among insurgent organizations. In particular, the military reports emphasized the importance of the Junta Coordinadora Revolucionaria (jcr), an organization that, according to military documents, was created to ‘‘prolong and awaken Marxist subversion in the 1960s and infuse new objectives and stimuli.’’≥≥ The nucleus of the jcr was formed by guerrilla organizations in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Bolivia.≥∂ The alliance among the guerrilla groups was o≈cially established in 1973, shortly before the military coup d’état that overthrew Salvador Allende in Chile.≥∑ A secret military report stated that to attain its initial strategic objective of a unified revolutionary vanguard movement in Latin America, the jcr established contacts with insurgent organizations in Brazil, Paraguay, Peru, Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic.≥∏ It is worth noting that one of the Task Forces of the Battalion 601 was exclusively dedicated to monitoring groups related to the jcr, and that an analytical section of the battalion was given the task of monitoring any suspicious activities by the Soviets, Chinese, Cubans, and North Koreans in Argentina.≥π The coordination needed for repression, and for the internationalization of the Argentine counterinsurgent apparatus, required the development of autonomous intelligence units that would operate from bases located outside the country, and the establishment of connections with transnational networks. As part of its response to the internationalization of the insurgent apparatus, the Argentine military command authorized the formation of a special intelligence unit, the External Task Force, created as an extension of Intelligence Battalion 601. Its general headquarters was established in Florida, where the intelligence unit coordinated shipments of armaments and military supplies, financial transactions, intelligence operations, and counterinsurgency instruction, all in support of the Argentine counterrevolutionary program in Central America. According to the testimony given to the U.S. Senate Commission on Foreign A√airs by Leandro Sánchez Reisse, a former agent of the Argentine Army Intelligence, the cia—which had kept itself up to date on repressive operations during the Dirty War in Argentina—continued to closely monitor the clandestine activities of Argentina in the United States.≥∫ Using front companies, the Argentines circulated millions of dollars in accounts in the United States, Switzerland, the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands,

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Liechtenstein, and Panama.≥Ω The acquisition of arms and military supplies was undertaken through uno≈cial channels from such diverse sources as East Germany, Great Britain, Taiwan, Thailand, and South Korea. The Argentines also bought armaments from Cuban American suppliers and sent them to Central America through Panama, among other routes.∂≠ The clandestine network created by Argentine military intelligence served, in addition, as a channel for the narcotics trade and money laundering, activities that went beyond the initial objective of deterring the threat of Communism in the hemisphere. The financial entities with which Argentine intelligence agencies were working outside the country were involved in other illegal activities, such as money laundering for Colombian drug dealers, and they also played a key role in the Iran-Contra operation during the Reagan administration.∂∞ Argentine intelligence operations based in the United States also cooperated with the Pilot Center of the Argentine Navy, based in Paris. The aim of this center was to produce propaganda in support of the military regime, collect information on opposition groups in Europe, and infiltrate human rights organizations.∂≤ The Operations in Central America Argentina’s intervention in Central America extended to Nicaragua (during the government of Somoza), El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The Argentine military participated as much in the internal repression in these countries as in the war against the Sandinista regime. Because of institutional links and personal ties with various Central American leaders, as well as the rapid decision to provide assistance to the counterrevolutionary struggle, Argentine military advisors circulated easily from country to country in the Central American region, facilitating the eventual establishment of the anti-Sandinista program. The experience of counterinsurgency in Central America reveals a littlestudied aspect of the Cold War in Latin America: the existence of a hemispheric military culture, resulting from transnational formative processes, both ideological and technical, in which external influences (such as the United States and France) teamed up with local sources for training and ideas. For this reason, it is worth commenting on the importance of influences such as French counterrevolutionary doctrine and U.S. national security policies in the formulation of Argentina’s doctrine of national security—the underlying ideological component of state-sponsored terror. The United States emphasized technical training for ‘‘counterinsurgent’’ warfare and the necessity for the collective defense of the hemisphere against Com-

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munist expansionism. The experience of the United States in the Vietnam War provided an important source of know-how for the Argentine military concerning counterinsurgency techniques.∂≥ The School of the Americas, located in the Panama Canal Zone, played a critical role in circulating technical knowledge for counterrevolutionary war; in addition, it helped establish continental antiCommunist networks consisting of Latin American o≈cials who were trained there in the 1960s and 1970s.∂∂ In spite of this influence, many Argentine o≈cials —referring to the internal conflict in their country in the 1970s—proclaimed that ‘‘the United States did not understand that the subversive war was [fundamentally] ideological.’’∂∑ The influence of the French current of thought has been less studied. The doctrine that was developed during the wars in Indochina (1946–54) and Algeria (1954–62) emphasized a global and ideological focus on the phenomenon of insurgency. In this regard, French nationalist Catholicism exerted a decisive influence on the Argentine military.∂∏ This ideological tendency integrated French military nationalism with the extreme currents of thought of ultraconservative groups such as the Cité Catholique. The messianic undertones of the doctrine de la guerre révolutionnaire reinforced the Argentine military’s perception that the armed forces should play a cardinal role in the political community because of their commitment to the central mission of the state—that is, the promotion of the bien común, or common good. The notion of the common good was closely tied to the theory that conceived of the state as an organic entity responding to the ‘‘order of creation.’’∂π Therefore the mission of the armed forces was to defend the nation from any attempt to undermine the natural moral order. In other words, their mission defined them as the guardians of the ‘‘national being.’’∂∫ Militarily, the French had developed an important body of ideas about, and techniques for, counterinsurgent warfare, especially regarding urban operations, interrogation procedures (including the use of torture), and social control of the population (including the ‘‘disappearance’’ of presumed enemies). In the context of the counterrevolutionary war, torture was viewed as legitimate, given that it facilitated the rapid retrieval of information required to penetrate the clandestine structures of revolutionary organizations. Moreover, torture was seen as a morally acceptable option in view of the threat that subversives posed to the very integrity of the state.∂Ω In places such as the province of Tucumán (where the so-called Operativo Independencia was implemented) and in the city of Buenos Aires, the Argentines modeled the methods used during their counterinsurgent campaigns after those used by the French in Indochina and Algeria.∑≠ The Argentines disseminated this experience with their internal front

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throughout the hemisphere. Many of the Central American o≈cers who had been educated at Argentine military academies (the Colegio Militar and the Escuela Superior de Guerra) in the early 1960s played an important part in Central America’s repressive apparatus and in organizing the opposition to the Sandinista regime. That is, the circulation of knowledge and personal relationships (especially due to the intense personal loyalties resulting from socialization and recruitment) were decisive in the counterrevolutionary alliance in the hemisphere. The Argentines likewise took the methods of counterinsurgency directly to Central America. The practical use of French military doctrine—especially the premise that any distinction between combatants and the civilian population was irrelevant—became evident in the organization and training of the anti-Sandinista army, as, for example, when the Argentine advisors trained the Miskitos in exile in the province of Gracias a Dios in Honduras.∑∞ The transmission of ideas and the construction of networks generated transnational political spaces of considerable influence in the 1970s and the early 1980s. The meetings of the Confederación Anticomunista Latinoamericana (cal) o√er a clear illustration of the existence of these spaces. A brief look at the list of participants at the Fourth Congress of the cal, held in Buenos Aires in 1980, is su≈cient to observe the extent of the transnational network of antiCommunism. The congress was presided over by General Carlos G. Suárez Mason, one of the principal ideologues of Argentine extraterritorial intervention. Among the delegates to arrive in Buenos Aires were the president of the lam, Woo Jae Sung; the Defense Minister for Paraguay, General Marcial Samaniego; the Guatemalan death squad leader Mario Sandoval Alarcón; the Salvadoran death squad leader Roberto D’Aubuisson; the Italian terrorist Stefano delle Chiaie; advisors to the U.S. Republican senators Jesse Helms and James McClure; and representatives from Alfa 66 and the Italian Masonic Lodge Propaganda Due (p-2).∑≤ Di√erent sectors of civil society supported the crusade against Communism, creating a kind of collaboration in which the barriers between the local and the foreign ceased to exist. In general, these groups had a great capacity for mobilizing economic resources. For example, Argentine financiers and businessmen contributed funds to the covert operations of Battalion 601 in Central America, and some of the most important corporations in Argentina, such as Bridas and the Ledesma sugar refinery were involved in the broader extraterritorial campaign.∑≥ Despite the anti-Semitism of the military government, an influential sector of the Jewish community in Buenos Aires gave financial support to D’Aubuisson of El Salvador, one of the most important representatives of the

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extreme Right in Central America. D’Aubuisson was directly associated with paramilitary groups implicated in various political assassinations (among them, that of Archbishop Oscar Romero), and was one of the key links to the Argentine mission in El Salvador.∑∂ Nicaragua After taking power in Argentina in 1976, the armed forces cultivated a close relationship with the regime of Anastasio Somoza Debayle (1967–79). O≈cials in the Nicaraguan National Guard received specialized instruction at Argentine military and police academies; moreover, Argentina sold military equipment to Nicaragua and provided advice to Somoza’s security forces on counterinsurgency. As the popular rebellion against Somocismo intensified, Argentina increased aid to Nicaragua. The Argentine military regime attempted to thwart the downfall of Somoza by providing covert military aid until the eve of the Sandinista revolutionary triumph. At the Conference of American Armies held in Managua in 1977, General Roberto Viola and Admiral Emilio Massera secretly guaranteed Somoza’s government substantial support from Argentina for its e√orts against the guerrillas. The Nicaraguan dictator was confident that a more powerful and reorganized National Guard would defeat the Sandinista insurgents.∑∑ When President Carter withdrew military aid to Nicaragua at the beginning of 1979, Argentina, along with South Africa, Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Israel (which became the principal military supplier for Somoza), took the place of the United States.∑∏ The friendship between the Argentine military and Somoza’s regime continued until the final days of Somoza’s government and beyond, when Argentina supported the remnants of the National Guard in Honduras. As part of the operations to capture political dissidents in the rest of the continent and in Europe, the Argentine military sent agents to Nicaragua in 1978 to identify Argentine guerrillas fighting in the Sandinista ranks. The objective of the commando team from Argentina, which worked in conjunction with Somoza’s National Security O≈ce (osn), was to capture exiled squadrons from the erp and the Montoneros.∑π According to the testimony of an Argentine advisor to the National Guard, the intelligence operations carried out in these years used the same ‘‘nonconventional’’ techniques that had been used in Argentina during the Dirty War, that is, torture, disappearances, and other repressive extralegal activities.∑∫ After the fall of Somoza in July 1979, Brigadier General Rubens Gra≈gna,

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commander in chief of the Argentine air force, commented that the loss of a country to Marxism represented a serious threat to hemispheric security. Gra≈gna emphasized that Argentina should take the lead in defending the Western Hemisphere, since it had triumphed against subversive elements. ‘‘It is a fact that there is no domestic policy without extraterritorial projection,’’ he declared in a speech in September 1979.∑Ω This viewpoint, we have seen, was part of a more general doctrine developed by military sectors with close ties to the intelligence apparatus. These sectors were not ready to abandon the objectives of the Dirty War, even when the ‘‘enemy’’ had been defeated within the national territory. Montonero leaders Mario Firmenich and Fernando Vaca Narvaja surfaced in Managua, joining the triumphant Sandinistas in July 1979. At that time, Firmenich publicly stated that the Nicaraguan revolution ‘‘shows that there is a new situation in the world, permitting us to surmise that for our continent the 1980s will be the decade of liberation and the countero√ensive of the Latin American people.’’∏≠ Firmenich’s flamboyant assertion was not backed by evidence of military strength on the part of his organization (in fact, a countero√ensive in Argentina led to the killing of more than a hundred Montonero cadres later that year). In contrast, a commando team comprising erp veterans demonstrated their active involvement in the revolutionary struggle by killing Somoza in Asunción, Paraguay, in September 1980. The Argentine guerrillas, who had fought alongside the Sandinistas in the final o√ensive against the Nicaraguan dictator, joined the Sandinista security apparatus.∏∞ Following the toppling of Somoza, as a counterrevolutionary force was being organized in Honduras, the Argentines o√ered instruction on counterinsurgency to various groups of former Nicaraguan National Guardsmen in Buenos Aires. The aim of this activity was to create a corps of well-trained men who could act as instructors for the Contras in the Honduran base camps, and then as leaders in the field. The ultimate goal was to penetrate into Nicaragua and create conditions for the growth of an anti-Sandinista insurrection.∏≤ The Nicaraguans and other Central Americans considered the Argentine armed forces to be highly qualified in counterinsurgent warfare. Anti-Sandinista commanders interviewed in Nicaragua emphasized the professionalism of the Argentine instructors, highlighting the military expertise that accompanied instruction in political and ideological warfare. ‘‘The Argentine o≈cers’ ideas had an important influence over the early ideological development of the contra movement,’’ explained a former leader of the Fuerza Democrática Nicaragüense (fdn), the principal anti-Sandinista military organization. ‘‘Much like that of

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the Cubans of Miami, the Argentine influence gave a more ideological tone to the group, a tone of anti-Soviet, anti-Cuban, anti-Communist goals. They began to transform what had originally been nationalistic goals tailored to Nicaragua’s particular historical, social, and cultural situation.’’∏≥ This perspective was echoed in several interviews with former Contra commanders. As one anti-Sandinista commander explained: ‘‘The Argentines emphasized their antiCommunist fervor and their total support of our cause. They blamed the United States for not having prevented Nicaragua from falling into the hands of Communism.’’∏∂ Another Contra commander remarked, ‘‘They spoke of the origin of Communism and of the fact that the Sandinista regime was its cornerstone in Central America, and Nicaragua was the base for its expansion in the region.’’∏∑ In this way, the Argentines imparted a distinctly ideological tone to the antiSandinista movement, thus internationalizing and ‘‘Sovietizing’’ the Nicaraguan conflict. By the end of the 1970s, support for the Sandinistas by various movements for revolution and national liberation, and the participation of foreign states (e.g., Israel and Argentina) in Somoza’s counterinsurgent war, gave the Nicaraguan conflict an important geopolitical dimension. After 1979, the e√orts of outside forces to aid the Contra rebels in their fight against the Sandinista regime accentuated the geopolitical aspect of the conflict. The increase in revolutionary activity in El Salvador and Guatemala, and the growing participation of Honduras and Costa Rica in the regional conflicts, converted Central America, especially Nicaragua, into a proxy for a host of di√erent geopolitical confrontations. Among the most noteworthy confrontations were the conflict between the Argentine military regime and revolutionary organizations like the Montoneros and the erp; the conflict that pitted Israel against the Palestine Liberation Organization (plo); and the conflict that opposed Cubans in exile against the Communist regime of Fidel Castro.∏∏ The role of Israel in the anti-Communist crusade in Latin America deserves at least a brief mention. When the Carter administration suspended all military assistance to Argentina in 1978 in response to the regime’s violations of human rights, Israel exported military equipment to Argentina (from combat planes to missiles and equipment for internal security), and Mossad (the Israeli foreign intelligence agency) sent advisors to train Argentine army o≈cials.∏π Israel also shared military intelligence with the Argentine army—for example, when it alerted Argentina that Montonero combatants were being trained in plo camps in Lebanon for the ‘‘final countero√ensive’’ against the Argentine regime.∏∫ The Israelis cooperated with the Argentines in extraterritorial operations and,

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simultaneously, directly supported the Central American security forces. For example, Israeli military advisors assisted the Argentine military intelligence units that were operating in Bolivia after the military coup in 1980, and the Israeli Embassy in Costa Rica supplied fake passports to the Argentine advisors who were working in Honduras.∏Ω Furthermore, Israel transferred equipment to El Salvador for anti-guerrilla operations and played an important role in Guatemala, where it o√ered advice on intelligence and from 1975 onward served as the principal provider of counterinsurgent technology to the Guatemalan army. Israeli assistance in the elaboration of a counterinsurgency strategy in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras focused on improving the e≈ciency of the local security forces, especially their intelligence activities. According to Israeli instructors, the Central American security forces were ‘‘very emotional and caused unnecessary deaths among the prisoners,’’ so they taught them more e√ective methods of interrogation.π≠ The Israeli role in the Nicaraguan conflict continued with the strengthening of the Contras operating from Honduras. Once Argentina o≈cially withdrew from the anti-Sandinista operation following the Falklands War, the cia fruitlessly tried to convince Israel to take charge of the Contra support program, eventually taking full control itself.π∞ El Salvador In mid-1979 the Argentine army sent advisors to El Salvador at the request of the regime headed by General Carlos Humberto Romero (1976–79), who asked Argentina for intelligence experts specialized in interrogation techniques and the analysis of information. Argentina extended its military presence in this country after the October 1979 civilian-military junta that replaced Romero fell into the hands of the hard-liners and the civil war intensified. Although the most fundamental aspects of the military intervention in El Salvador took place during the government of Reagan, there were already Argentine advisors in El Salvador at the end of the 1970s.π≤ From 1979 onward, Argentina supplied military equipment to the armed forces in El Salvador. According to secret documents from the Argentine armed forces, such transactions would strengthen the relations between Argentina and El Salvador and ‘‘would also contribute to hardening its position in the widening struggle against subversion, alongside other countries in the region.’’π≥ An example of these arms transfers can be found in a document dated February 1982, wherein Argentina’s Central Bank, in accordance with instructions from the commander in chief of the army, authorized the General Directorate of Military

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Industries to export light and heavy weapons, ammunition, and spare parts for military equipment to El Salvador, in the amount of twenty million dollars.π∂ In the fall of 1981, the Reagan administration requested that the Argentine military high command increase its assistance to the Salvadoran armed forces.π∑ The Argentine generals ratified an agreement by which they would receive U.S. intelligence and logistic support for a paramilitary covert operation to cut o√ alleged Cuban-Nicaraguan arms support to El Salvador’s insurgent Frente Farabundo Martí de Liberación Nacional (fmln).π∏ A few months later, General Antonio Vaquero of Argentina announced in an o≈cial statement: ‘‘The strengthening and consolidation of the relations now linking our armies have great importance. The Argentine Army—which along with the Navy and the Air Force, supported by the Argentine nation, defeated terrorism—understands and values the struggle of the Salvadoran Armed Forces and people, and will provide its assistance, as much as feasible, to a friendly nation in a di≈cult situation.’’ In El Salvador, Vaquero said, ‘‘two concepts of ways of life are at stake . . . on one hand, respect for the dignity of mankind—God’s creations—and on the other, terrorism, men at the service of an atheistic, omnipotent state.’’ππ In collaboration with the National Agency of Special Services of El Salvador (ansesal), the Argentines trained Salvadoran o≈cials in the use of counterinsurgency techniques. The South American advisors sought to reproduce the antisubversive strategies employed during the Dirty War in Argentina, namely, the destruction of opposition organizations using paramilitary operatives and methods that worked their way from the noncombatant manpower to the leadership at the center of the organization. The process followed the Argentine pattern: kidnapping, torture, and the summary execution of prisoners after interrogation, even when their political a≈liation was meaningless or incidental.π∫ According to some sources, the Argentines also advised governmentsanctioned death squads with links to the Salvadoran security forces.πΩ The Argentine advisors played a crucial role in El Salvador by sharing their experience in antiguerrilla warfare. ‘‘The Argentines are the only ones in the world who fought an urban guerrilla war and won it,’’ said a death squad member. ‘‘So they’re just naturally recognized as the best.’’∫≠ The case of Argentine involvement in El Salvador is another example of the complex transnational network that served as a support for anti-Communist activities in Latin America—a network that, to a large degree, was handled independently of the United States. One example of this dynamic is the coordination of counterinsurgent activities with narco-tra≈cking and its role in the political arena. For its decisive participation in the brutal uprising in 1980 that

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carried García Meza to power in Bolivia, the Argentine government received ‘‘narco-dollars’’ from Roberto Suárez Levy, the main cocaine dealer in Bolivia and a partner of García Meza. This money was used, in turn, by the high command of the Argentine army to finance some of the military operations in El Salvador.∫∞ Thus the case of El Salvador reveals how the transfer of counterinsurgent technology by the Argentines was sustained by financing at the state level (the sale of armaments) and outside the state (through illegal networks that dominated the narcotics trade in certain countries in the region). Guatemala At the beginning of 1980, an Argentine military mission comprising army and naval o≈cers arrived in Guatemala in response to the request from Romeo Lucas García’s regime for assistance in counterinsurgent warfare. In collaboration with military advisors from Israel and Chile, the Argentines instructed elite Guatemalan forces in advanced intelligence techniques. Argentine military personnel worked with the death squads that were protected by the government, specifically the Ejército Secreto Anticomunista (esa).∫≤ Numerous assassinations by the armed forces and the police at the beginning of 1980 were attributed to this organization, which was a paramilitary unit closely associated with Lucas García himself. In addition, a squadron of Intelligence Battalion 601 based in Guatemala (and also operating in El Salvador and Honduras) collaborated with the military regime in the repression of left-wing organizations.∫≥ The Argentine task force, whose main mission was kidnapping Argentine political exiles in Central America, was directly responsible for the assassination and disappearance of Guatemalan political dissidents. In October 1981, the Argentine and Guatemalan military authorities signed a secret accord to increase Argentine participation in counterinsurgent operations. As part of this agreement, some two hundred Guatemalan o≈cials from the army and the police force traveled to Buenos Aires to receive advanced training in intelligence, including the use of interrogation techniques.∫∂ As in the case of El Salvador, Argentine assistance to Guatemala also included the sale of weapons. When the regime of Kjell Laugerud (1974–78) rejected U.S. military aid because it considered the human rights policy of the Carter administration to be an interference in the country’s domestic a√airs, Argentina, along with Israel and a handful of other countries, significantly increased the sale of military equipment to Guatemala and continued to do so as the two countries strengthened their cooperation.∫∑

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Argentine assistance to the Guatemalan army intelligence service played a decisive role in the military’s success against the infrastructure of the urban guerrillas. In July 1981 the Guatemalan military launched a broad countero√ensive in the capital, where it successfully dismantled the rear guard of the insurgency. Thanks to the technical knowledge acquired from the Argentines and the Israelis, the security forces destroyed a local clandestine network of the Organización del Pueblo en Armas (orpa). The Argentines introduced the use of a computerized system to identify local clandestine guerrillas by tracing telephone calls and ferreting out suspicious use of residential services, like high electricity consumption.∫∏ The Argentine advisors also participated in the devastating rural o√ensive initiated in August 1981. The scorched-earth policy applied between 1981 and 1983 involved a campaign to exterminate the indigenous population unparalleled in Guatemalan history. Interestingly, the expression ‘‘Dirty War,’’ which was widely used to describe the era of the state terror campaign in Argentina, was used routinely in press releases by high-ranking Guatemalan military sta√ from the end of 1981 onward. Army o≈cials used the term to explain to the press that civilian deaths in counterinsurgency operations were an inevitable characteristic of an unconventional military campaign to eradicate the guerrilla movement.∫π Honduras Shortly after the Sandinista victory, Argentine agents began to organize and train the scattered and poorly equipped bands of Nicaraguan National Guardsmen exiled in Guatemala. During the first months of 1981, Argentine o≈cials supervised the transference of Contra base camps from Guatemala to Honduras.∫∫ Colonel Gustavo Alvarez Martínez, chief of the Public Security Force in Honduras (fusep), had o√ered his country to the director of the cia, William Casey, as a base for anti-Sandinista operations. With U.S. assistance, Honduras became a ‘‘safe haven’’ for the Contras and a platform for the war against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.∫Ω Government documents and other sources confirm the presence of Argentine advisors in Honduras immediately after the triumph of the Sandinistas.Ω≠ The presence of Argentine advisors in Honduras between 1979 and 1984 coincided with the development of the national security doctrine under the leadership of General Alvarez Martínez, who was educated in Argentina (Colegio Militar, graduating class of 1961). Although the security force already had a paramilitary

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structure before Alvarez came into power, he was responsible for professionalizing fusep’s repressive structure with the help of Argentine advisors.Ω∞ In this way, Honduras adopted the same unconventional military techniques used in Argentina: clandestine detention centers, disappearances and summary executions, compartmentalized task forces (dedicated to intelligence, interrogations, kidnappings, and executions), plainclothesmen using unmarked cars, operations carried out in broad daylight without interference from the regular security forces, and the liquidation of political prisoners by throwing them out of military airplanes and helicopters.Ω≤ Even if the level of terror practiced by the state in Honduras was very low in comparison with that in El Salvador and Guatemala, from 1980 onward there was a notable increase in these repressive practices. In 1981, with Argentine assistance, Alvarez Martínez organized an elite counterinsurgent unit within the fusep to coordinate repressive activities. The Argentines also trained personnel who would later operate as part of the infamous Battalion 3-16, responsible for the majority of human rights violations in Honduras.Ω≥ Furthermore, Argentine military advisors participated in operations such as the capture, interrogation, and execution of Honduran union and student leaders, those presumed to be Sandinista sympathizers, and refugees from El Salvador. During 1981, Argentine aid to Honduras—in the form of loans, armaments, and training—showed a sustained increase. At the same time, the number of Honduran o≈cials who received training in Argentine military academies (e.g., the Escuela Superior de Guerra and the Escuela de Inteligencia) increased. As relations between the two countries deepened—accompanied by the development of the Contra program financed by the United States—the Argentines and the Hondurans paid special attention to collaboration in the area of intelligence.Ω∂ The participation of Argentine advisors in the development of Honduras’s internal security apparatus and the mission of organizing the remnants of the defeated Nicaraguan National Guard into an e≈cient fighting force against the Sandinistas was an operation approved by the Argentine, Honduran, and U.S. governments. A tripartite agreement signed in August 1981 determined that each of the partners in the counterrevolutionary program would play a defined role: the Argentines would contribute the organization, administration, and military instruction; the cia would supply covert financial aid; and the Honduran government would provide the territory for the operational bases.Ω∑ The collaboration between Argentina and Honduras responded to directives from the top-level military commanders of both countries.Ω∏ During the early

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1980s, Honduras’s state-sponsored program of terror and the Contra operation were shared endeavors. For example, toward the end of 1981, Argentine advisors suggested that former Nicaraguan National Guardsmen should execute the prisoners held by the Honduran security forces in clandestine detention centers and involve themselves in other political assassinations.Ωπ During the period of greatest repression in Honduras, the Argentines provided the technical and organizational resources to keep both the Contra project and domestic state terror running. Conclusion The Argentine plan to combat Communism beyond its national borders did not develop to the degree to which it seemed destined at the beginning of the 1980s. This was due to the United States’ support of Great Britain during the war in the Falkland Islands. Washington’s decision broke Argentina’s commitment to Reagan’s anti-Communist crusade in Central America. Although we can only speculate, if the armed conflict against the British had not intervened, it is possible that the Argentines would have continued to play a central role in the Contra war promoted by the Reagan administration. At any rate, the Argentine operation in Central America was not a marginal undertaking. Although the number of troops sent to the region was relatively low, this was primarily because the Argentine venture was a covert intelligence operation. The crusade in Central America, sustained by a vast intelligence apparatus, was intended to be a far-reaching policy with profound geopolitical consequences for Argentina. This endeavor was independently designed by the Argentine military and directly opposed the policy of the White House during the Carter administration. Still, evidence indicates that U.S. intelligence knew of the anti-Communist activities of the Argentines and, according to certain sources, independently supported them—even before the Reagan administration decided to sign on to the Argentine program in Central America.Ω∫ In spite of President Carter’s e√orts to curtail the power and leverage of the cia, the agency supported a hemispheric network of right-wing government o≈cials and independent players united under a mandate of anti-Communism. The cia collaborated with the Argentine military intelligence service as its operatives established a base of operations in Florida to coordinate the counterrevolutionary program in Central America.ΩΩ This early coordination was critical for the rapid implementation of a U.S.-funded anti-Sandinista operation under Argentine supervision.∞≠≠ If Cuban policy in Africa reflected the revolutionary activism of Havana and

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demonstrated Cuba’s clear objective to expand its influence in the Third World, then the policy of the Argentine military regime demonstrated the articulation between repression on a domestic level and participation in extraterritorial operations aimed at destroying the ‘‘Communist enemy.’’∞≠∞ Furthermore, the direct connection between the policy of counterinsurgency within and beyond borders suggests that it would be more accurate to talk of a Dirty War coordinated on a hemispheric level than of independent wars limited to defined national territories. This vision was clearly articulated by General Ramón Campos in 1979 in a confidential conversation with the U.S. ambassador, in which the general explained that Argentina’s armed forces had defeated subversion on the local battlefield, but that the war continued on a continental level.∞≠≤ Solid evidence of this idea can be found in the transnational networks that articulated the di√erent phases of the counterrevolutionary project (that is, Operation Condor, Bolivia, and Central America). The Argentine military leadership’s principal motivations to launch an extraterritorial campaign were geopolitical, strategic, and ideological. First, the Argentines viewed this e√ort as a continuation of the war that they had fought at home. They were concerned with the emergence of ‘‘other Cubas’’ in the hemisphere. In addition, the military viewed the presence of exiled Argentine guerrillas in Nicaragua as evidence of the continental, concerted nature of the revolutionary apparatus. Although Argentine military intelligence ruled out the possibility of a renewed military o√ensive against the Argentine regime out of Nicaragua, some analysts argued that a Sandinista Nicaragua could serve the exiled Argentine guerrillas as a platform for intelligence operations in South America. Thus, whether justified or not, extraterritorial operations and international cooperation geared to counteract and destroy revolutionary and reform movements in the region served—in the eyes of the armed forces—as a means of self-defense. Interestingly, as Piero Gleijeses points out in his chapter in this volume, Castro’s strategy for defending the revolution from external threats was the promotion of ‘‘other Cubas’’ wherever possible. Second, the military leadership wanted to project Argentine influence internationally, particularly as a means to obtain the prestige and foreign recognition that they thought they deserved for having crushed their domestic insurgency. Decisive participation in a major conflict in the U.S. backyard o√ered the Argentine military the chance to legitimate their anti-Communist war, which had been berated by the international community because of Argentina’s human rights record. A triumph against Communism in Central America would transform an international pariah into a respected nation. As one Argentine naval o≈cer put

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it: ‘‘It is possible that the U.S. military and intelligence services saw that what they could not achieve in Central America had been accomplished by the Argentine, Chilean, and Uruguayan armed forces in their own countries . . . using a successful counterinsurgency model, which was later questioned and discarded as a result of the debate about the disappeared ones. The United States was losing the war in Central America. It was a war that the Americans could not win by themselves. Had they remained alone, there would have been another Vietnam.’’∞≠≥ Third, the Argentines were driven by a fervent anti-Communist ideology, which depicted local conflicts as part of a global East-West confrontation. The Argentine generals displayed a strong, messianic sense of mission. This variety of anti-Communism, though influenced by France and the United States (especially in terms of know-how and technology of repression), had deep roots in local fascism, racism, and illiberal thought.∞≠∂ While the Argentine crusaders sought to defend ‘‘Western and Christian civilization’’ against ‘‘Communist totalitarianism,’’ their messianic endeavor was not driven by idealism—a reality that became evident when the Argentine military turned its counterrevolutionary enterprise into a scheme for personal profit and corruption. Argentina’s exporting of the Dirty War to Central America also needs to be explained by a set of causal factors, both domestic and international. As Gilbert Joseph stresses in his introductory chapter, geopolitical, strategic, and ideological elements are not enough to account for the complex dynamic of the Cold War in Latin America, especially when seen from a Latin American perspective. The transnationalization of the Dirty War was possible because of the ‘‘expertise’’ developed by the Argentine military. Argentines were confident that their counterinsurgent methods worked. As General Alfredo Saint Jean stressed, ‘‘the Argentine armed forces have acquired an internationally renowned expertise in unconventional warfare and they are willing to o√er training and all kind of cooperation to allied countries.’’∞≠∑ This perception was shared by Central Americans, including infamous leaders such as Roberto D’Aubuisson, who repeatedly emphasized their admiration for the Argentines’ success against the guerrillas. While exporting repressive know-how was probably a logical step for a country that had acquired this expertise, the contribution of manpower to Central America might have served as a means to open new venues for experts of the Dirty War who could become a destabilizing force at home.∞≠∏ The expansion of Argentine involvement in Central America coincided with the closing of the Dirty War at home; thus exporting personnel no longer needed in Argentina was a win-win strategy for all parties involved. This is especially true when one considers that the military intelligence services, which played a central role in

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the repression campaign, had become an autonomous force of professional agents who exercised major influence on the government’s political agenda. As a memorandum from the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires noted in 1980, ‘‘the policy-making levels of the goa [Government of Argentina] are prisoners and victims of intelligence services here, particularly the Army’s 601 Battalion.’’∞≠π The kidnappings of dissidents in other countries—as well as the participation of the Argentine intelligence services in the coup in Bolivia—were actions that had important consequences for Argentine foreign relations and showed the extraordinary influence of the intelligence services on the political apparatus of the military government. At the international level, the existence of a vast anti-Communist network was critical for the Argentine venture abroad. The Condor system was a forerunner of the Central American operation. Indeed, Argentine o≈cers in charge of the Central American program (such as Colonel José Osvaldo Ribeiro) played important roles in Condor.∞≠∫ In addition, a transnational entente of antiCommunist forces converged to give a decisive impulse to the counterrevolutionary campaign in Central America. This alliance opposed and sought to annihilate e√orts to address vast political, social, and economic inequalities throughout Latin America. The warfare launched by the Argentine armed forces, not only against guerrilla organizations but also against labor unions, peasant leagues, student organizations, and many other groups in civil society perceived to be part of the ‘‘subversive’’ apparatus, cannot be seen in isolation from the wave of revolutionary activity and popular demands for reform that engulfed the region in the 1970s. The intensification of social conflicts in Latin America is central to an understanding of the dynamics of repression in the region. The Cold War was not ‘‘imposed’’ on these countries, essentially because they responded to local and regional socioeconomic and political dislocations, and their own actions, often independent from those of the superpowers, shaped the nature and pace of the Cold War. Although the United States played an influential role in the battles waged in Latin America, it cannot be considered as the leading external actor in regional conflicts. Argentina and other South American regimes (e.g., the members of the Condor system) engaged in interventionist practices across Latin America and other continents, pursuing their own policy interests even when they did not coincide with those of the United States. To understand the broader relevance of Argentina’s transnational repressive activities, it is important to place them within the historical framework of the global Cold War.∞≠Ω Argentina’s continental expansionism (as well as the

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consolidation of a formidable repressive apparatus in South America) occurred at a time when the Cold War dynamic was transitioning from a failed process of U.S. rapprochement with the Soviet Union, promoted by the Carter administration, to a reintensification of the conflict between the superpowers, encouraged by a belligerent ‘‘Reagan doctrine.’’ The Argentine military stepped in to counterbalance the revolutionary tide in the region exactly at a point when the revolutionary South assumed a decisive role in the Cold War, contributing to the expansion of Soviet influence. The anti-Communist crusade of authoritarian regimes such as Argentina and the aggressive U.S. posture vis-à-vis Soviet expansionism adopted by the Reagan administration—which placed the Contras’ armed struggle at the forefront of the decision to reassert U.S. global power— represented a convergence of foreign policy interests between counterrevolutionary forces in the South and the North. For the United States, Central America became a symbol of its ability to preserve the Western alliance. As President Reagan pointed out, if Central America were to fall under Communist control, ‘‘our credibility would collapse, our alliances would crumble, and the safety of our homeland would be put in jeopardy.’’∞∞≠ As is illustrated by the Argentine case (and can also be seen in cases such as Chile, Bolivia, and Paraguay), the military regimes in Latin America were not peons of the United States or mere proxies in charge of cia operations. On the contrary, examples like the Argentine crusade in Central America reveal a pattern of autonomy that prompts us to reconsider the key notions that until now have structured the analysis of the Cold War in Latin America. To conclude, therefore, it is important to highlight two concepts that emerge from the case presented here. The existence of its own style of anti-Communism, independent of that promoted by the United States, and characterized by local objectives and patterns of repression, as well as by layers of external influences, played a pivotal role in the conflicts of the Cold War in Latin America. The Argentine military regime’s autonomous decision to project itself beyond its borders and assume leadership in the fight against Communism questions the validity of the idea that the bipolar dynamic of the superpowers was the only axis around which conflicts in the region revolved. It creates the need to adopt an analytical perspective that allows us to think outside the rigid framework of bipolarity. An alternative framework is helpful for understanding the di√erent uses of anti-Communism (e.g., the promotion of lucrative illegal activities such as narco-tra≈cking) and the impact that transnational networks had on both insurgent movements and anti-Communist campaigns. Transnational counterrevolutionary networks generated zones of contact and

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cooperation in which state apparatuses, relations between national and international elites, civil society organizations, and economic groups came into play with one another. These transnational networks were sustained by common values and shared discourse, as well as by a fluid exchange of information, knowhow, and resources. The political spaces associated with these networks served state and nonstate actors, simultaneously influencing domestic and international spheres.∞∞∞ Although roughly sketched out in this chapter, such transnational contact zones are important for an understanding of the nature of ideological confrontation in the hemisphere (which played out in terms of both military and intelligence capability). An examination of transnational spaces suggests a more complex Cold War dynamic—territorially as well as organizationally and ideologically—than the dynamic that emerges from studies based on traditional notions of bipolarity. The Cold War in Latin America should not be considered from a centripetal perspective—that is, from the standpoint of an analytical hierarchy where countries in the region are seen only as peripheral actors, ‘‘intelligible only in terms of the impact that center nations have on them.’’∞∞≤ On the contrary, it is more accurate to conceptualize this historical period as part of an overlapping process in which the barriers between the local and the foreign are removed, so that contacts and exchanges between participants and structures produce sedimentary e√ects that must be understood outside the framework of the bipolar conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. The case of the Argentine anti-Communist crusade illustrates the importance of ‘‘decentering’’ the analysis in order to examine the sites of contact where encounters, conflicts, and exchanges between ideologies (e.g., the di√erent tonalities and facets of antiCommunism), technologies (e.g., of terror and repression), and human and economic capital are produced.∞∞≥ As is shown in the case illustrated here, the ‘‘peripheral’’ countries developed plans of action and policies independently from the superpowers and, in this way, shaped the conflicts that characterized the post–World War II period. In this sense, transculturation, transnational dynamics, and geographically demarcated conflicts represent the di√erent manifestations of a multipolar and multifocal confrontation that we are still unraveling. Notes I thank Gil Joseph and Daniela Spenser for their invaluable comments and ideas on this article. 1. This figure is from the un High Commission for Refugees, cable exclusively from Gerald B. Helman to the State Department, December 18, 1979, in the archive compiled

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by the National Security Archive, Nicaragua: The Making of U.S. Policy, 1978–1990 (Alexandria: Chadwyck-Healey, 1991). 2. Executive O≈ce of the President, secret presidential finding from Ronald Reagan, December 1, 1981, in National Security Archive, Nicaragua. 3. cia secret memorandum, ‘‘Scope of cia Activities under the Central America Finding,’’ n.d., in Declassified Documents Reference System (Woodbridge: Research Publications, various years). 4. See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Pratt, ‘‘Arts of the Contact Zone,’’ Profession 91 (1991): 33–39, quoted in Gilbert M. Joseph, ‘‘Close Encounters: Toward a New Cultural History of U.S.Latin American Relations,’’ in Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand, and Ricardo D. Salvatore (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 5. 5. Joseph, ‘‘Close Encounters,’’ 5. 6. John Dinges, The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents (New York: New Press, 2003), chap. 7. See J. Patrice McSherry, Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). Quotation from Dinges, The Condor Years, 10. 7. U.S. Congress, testimony of Leandro Sánchez Reisse before the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, July 23, 1987, 154, in the author’s archives; conversation of the author with former U.S. ambassador (designated to Latin America in the 1980s), June 23, 1993. See Gregorio Selser, Bolivia: El cuartelazo de los cocadólares (Mexico City: Mex-Sur, 1982); Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the cia in Central America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 8. Videla, quoted in Sergio Joselovsky, ‘‘El ejército del ‘Proceso’ y su intervención en Centroamérica,’’ in Humor (Buenos Aires, 1984), 63. 9. Interview by the author with retired admiral Alberto R. Varela, Buenos Aires, August 17, 1993. 10. See chapter 5 of my book Argentina, the United States, and the Anti-Communist Crusade in Central America, 1997–1984 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997). 11. And see Gleijeses’s larger study, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 9. 12. Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 3–5, 280–81. 13. See Danuta Paszyn, The Soviet Attitude to Political and Social Change in Central America, 1979–90 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). 14. Ibid. 15. Speech by President Carter at the graduation ceremony at Notre Dame University, May 22, 1977, in American Foreign Policy Current Documents, 1977–1980 (Washington: U.S. Department of State, 1984), 6–7.

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16. For an analysis of Latin America as a gray zone, see Lars Schoultz, National Security and the United States Policy toward Latin America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 268–307. 17. Paszyn, The Soviet Attitude, 2. 18. Interview by the author with the retired general Miguel Angel Mallea Gil, Buenos Aires, August 18, 1993. 19. Ibid. 20. Interview by the author with the retired captain Carlos H. Raimondi, Buenos Aires, August 4, 1993. 21. General Santiago Omar Riveros, cited in Horacio Verbitsky, La última batalla de la tercera guerra mundial (Buenos Aires: Legasa, 1984), 21. 22. General Ramón Camps, cited in Eduardo Luis Duhalde, El estado terrorista argentino (Barcelona: Argos Vergara, 1993), 81. 23. See, for example, cable from the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires, ‘‘Periodic Rights Trends Reporting,’’ July 27, 1979, in the U.S. Department of State, Argentina Declassification Project, 1975–1984, http://foia.state.gov. 24. Interview with Mallea Gil; Verbitsky, La última batalla, 127. 25. Poder Ejecutivo Nacional, Terrorism in Argentina, Buenos Aires, January 7, 1980. It is important to note that, by the mid-1970s, the prt-erp (prt: Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores) had a strong presence across the country. The organization doubled its membership in 1970–71 and gained increasing popular support as a result of small, propaganda-style guerrilla actions. From 1973—when Argentina elected a civilian government after years of authoritarianism—to 1975, the guerrilla organization experienced an even more dramatic growth. By 1975, the organization boasted between five and six thousand militants drawn from working-class neighborhoods, factories, and universities. There were prt-erp cells in more than four hundred of the most important factories in the Greater Buenos Aires. The organization had a strong presence in many cities and towns across the country, including key industrial centers such as Córdoba. Pablo A. Pozzi, El prt-erp: La guerrilla marxista (Buenos Aires: eudeba, 2001), 21–25. 26. Army General Sta√ (emge), Intelligence Command II (hereafter cited as emge–Jef. II), annex I (Intelligence), to the secret directive of the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, no. 504/77, ‘‘Continuación de la ofensiva contra la subversión en el período 1977/1978,’’ signed by General Roberto Eduardo Viola, Buenos Aires, April 20, 1977, in the archives of the Center for Legal and Social Studies (cels), Buenos Aires. 27. Mark Falco√, A Tale of Two Policies: U.S. Relations with the Argentine Junta, 1976– 1983 (Foreign Policy Research Institute, 1989), 43. 28. Donald C. Hodges, Argentina’s ‘‘Dirty War’’: An Intellectual Biography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 128–29; Verbitsky, La última batalla, 21; Duhalde, El estado terrorista argentino, 81. 29. Quoted in Dinges, The Condor Years, 12. 30. Wolf Grabendor√, ‘‘¿De país aislado a aliado preferido? Las relaciones entre la

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Argentina y los Estados Unidos: 1976–1981,’’ in El poder militar en la Argentina, 1976–1981, ed. Peter Waldmann and Ernesto Garzón Valdez (Buenos Aires: Galerna, 1983), 159; Aldo C. Vacs, ‘‘A Delicate Balance: Confrontation and Cooperation between Argentina and the United States in the 1980s,’’ Journal of Interamerican Studies and World A√airs 31, no. 4 (1989): 33. See Aldo C. Vacs, ‘‘The 1980 Grain Embargo Negotiations: The United States, Argentina, and the Soviet Union,’’ in Pew Case Studies in International A√airs (Washington, 1992). 31. Daniel H. Mazzei, ‘‘La misión militar francesa en la Escuela Superior de Guerra y los orígenes de la Guerra Sucia, 1957–1962,’’ Revista de Ciencias Sociales, no. 13 (2002): 129. Before shifting the emphasis to domestic security, the Argentine armed forces were working principally from a hypothesis based on a conflict with Brazil and Chile. The armed forces therefore mainly focused on collecting information on those countries. Interview by the author with the retired general Eugenio Alfredo Dalton, Buenos Aires, August 6, 1993. 32. U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires, memorandum prepared by Townsend B. Friedman, ‘‘Hypothesis: The goa as Prisoner of Army Intelligence,’’ August 18, 1980, in U.S. State Department, Argentina Declassification Project. The units for military espionage were instructed to maintain a permanent exchange of intelligence with Battalion 601 and to relinquish to it all nonidentified military equipment and documents captured from the guerrillas by the security forces. emge–Jef. II, annex I, to the secret directive of the Commander in Chief of the Army, no. 404/75, ‘‘Guerra contra la subversión,’’ signed by General Roberto Eduardo Viola, Buenos Aires, October 28, 1975, 10, in the archives of the cels. 33. emge–Jef. II, annex I, to the secret directive no. 404/75, ‘‘Resumen de los orígenes, evolución y doctrina del prt/erp y la jcr,’’ signed by Colonel Carlos Alberto Martínez, Vice Chief of Army Intelligence, Buenos Aires, October 28, 1975, 7, in the archives of the cels. 34. Cable from the U.S. Department of State, ‘‘South America: Southern Cone Security Practices,’’ July 20, 1976; report from the Department of State, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, ‘‘South America: Southern Cone Security Practices,’’ July 19, 1976, in the U.S. Department of State, Argentina Declassification Project. 35. Dinges, The Condor Years, chap. 4. 36. emge–Jef. II, annex I, to the secret directive no. 404/75, ‘‘Resumen de los orígenes,’’ 7–9. 37. Memorandum of the conversation with the U.S. ambassador in Buenos Aires, ‘‘Nuts and Bolts of the Government’s Repression of Terrorism-Subversion,’’ August 7, 1979, 8; ‘‘Memorandum’’ from the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires prepared by James J. Blystone; ‘‘Reorganization of 601’’ and ‘‘Organizational Chart of ‘601,’ ’’ February 6, 1980, in the U.S. State Department, Argentina Declassification Project. 38. U.S. Congress, testimony of Leandro Sánchez Reisse, 14–17, 26–27, 34–37, 111. Concerning the activities of Battalion 601 in other countries (Brazil and Peru, for example), see the following memorandums from the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires: ‘‘Conver-

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sation with Argentine Intelligence Source,’’ prepared by James J. Blystone, April 7, 1980; ‘‘Meeting with Argentine Intelligence Service,’’ prepared by Blystone, June 19, 1980; and ‘‘A Source in Argentine Intelligence Services Reviewed the Following Subjects with Me,’’ prepared by Townsend B. Friedman, August 21, 1980, in the U.S. State Department, Argentina Declassification Project. See also the cable from the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires, ‘‘Argentine Citizens Missing in Peru,’’ July 24, 1980, in the U.S. State Department Declassification Project. 39. Testimony of Sánchez Reisse, 18–19, 56. 40. Ibid., 52–54, 140; Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 49. 41. See testimony of Sánchez Reisse, 53–54, 113–15; R. T. Naylor, Hot Money and the Politics of Debt (New York: Linden, 1987), 292; National Security Archive, The IranContra A√air: The Making of a Scandal, 1983–1899 (Alexandria: Chadwyck-Healey, 1990), 89–90, 113. 42. Testimony of Sánchez Reisse, 140; National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (conadep), Nunca Más (Buenos Aires: eudeba, 1984), 133–34. 43. Ramón J. A. Camps, ‘‘Apogeo y declinación de la guerrilla en la Argentina,’’ La Prensa (Buenos Aires), January 4, 1981; David Pion-Berlin and George A. López, ‘‘Of Victims and Executioners: Argentine State Terror, 1975–1979,’’ International Studies Quarterly 35 (1991): 69–71. 44. Walter Goobar, ‘‘Escuela de dictadores,’’ Página 12, August 8, 1993. 45. Interview by the author with Colonel Miguel Angel Li Puma, Buenos Aires, August 18, 1993. 46. See the video documentary directed and produced by Marie-Monique Robin, Death Squadrons: The French School (France, 2003). 47. Alfred Stepan, The State and Society: Peru in Comparative Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 31–32, 37. 48. Interviews by the author in Buenos Aires with the following retired army o≈cers: General Teófilo Goyret, August 5, 1993; General Ernesto Víctor López Meyer, August 4, 1993; and Colonel Horacio P. Ballester, July 28, 1993. Carina Perelli, ‘‘From Counterrevolutionary Warfare to Political Awakening: The Uruguayan and Argentine Armed Forces in the 1970s,’’ Armed Forces and Society 20, no. 1 (1993): 28–29, 40n14; Gustavo Gorriti, ‘‘Beyond the Epics of Failure: The Post-Utopian Left,’’ Journal of Interamerican Studies and World A√airs 36, no. 1 (1994); Mazzei ‘‘La misión militar francesa,’’ 111–15. Sectors of Catholic fascism in Argentina—such as the priest Julio Meinvielle—promoted a strong anti-Communist and anti-Semitic current of thought that was directly influenced by French doctrine and was intertwined with the doctrine of nonconventional warfare against ‘‘subversion.’’ See Julio Meinvielle, in ‘‘Proyecto filosofía en español,’’ http://www.filosofiaorg/ave/001/a059.htm. 49. Mazzei, ‘‘La misión militar francesa,’’ 124–29. 50. Ibid., 112; Pierre Abramovici, ‘‘Argentine: L’autre sale guerre d’Aussaresses,’’ Le Point, June 15, 2001. 51. Acdel Edgardo Vilas, Tucumán: El hecho histórico (‘‘The tactical plan that enabled

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the victory against the People’s Revolutionary Army [erp] in 1975’’), pamphlet, n.d., p. 5; Mazzei, ‘‘La misión militar francesa,’’ 124; Oscar R. Cardoso, ‘‘El último secreto del Proceso: Apéndice sobre la experiencia Argentina,’’ in Christopher Dickey, Con los Contras (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana-Planeta, 1987), 309; Wall Street Journal, March 5, 1985. 52. Interview by the author with Rogelio García Lupo, Buenos Aires, July 30, 1993; Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Andersen, Inside the League (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1986), 11, 75, 107, 147, 264; ‘‘Argentina Redraws the Ideological Map of South America,’’ Latin America Weekly Report, September 19, 1980, 5; Verbitsky, La última batalla, 91–92; Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 43, 46. 53. Nicaragua, Ministry of the Interior, General Directorate for State Security, secret memorandum on the participation of the Argentine armed forces and intelligence services in the aggression against Nicaragua, circa 1984, in the author’s archives; Verbitsky, La última batalla, 93. 54. Memorandum on the conversation at the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires concerning the visit of Roberto D’Aubuisson to Buenos Aires, January 5, 1981, in El Salvador: The Making of U.S. Policy, 1977–1984 (Alexandria: Chadwyck-Healey, 1989); Laurie Becklund, ‘‘Death Squad Members: Over the Edge,’’ in Los Angeles Times, December 19, 1983. 55. Duhalde, El estado terrorista argentino, 118; Roberto Bardini, Monjes, mercenarios y mercaderes: La red secreta de apoyo a los Contras (Mexico City: Alpa Corral, 1988), 103–5. 56. Oscar R. Cardoso, Ricardo Kirschbaum, and Eduardo van der Kooy, Malvinas, la trama secreta (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana-Planeta, 1983), 27; Joselovsky, ‘‘El ejército del ‘Proceso,’ ’’ 63. 57. Christopher Dickey, With the Contras: A Reporter in the Wilds of Nicaragua (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 54–55. 58. Interview with Carlos Alberto Lobo, in Siete Días, March 13, 1983, 74–76. 59. Discourses by Gra≈gna on August 10, September 24, and November 16, 1979, cited in Verbitsky, La última batalla, 83. 60. Quoted in Foreign Broadcast Information Service-Latin America, July 23, 1979. 61. Interviews with Margarita Suzán, aide to Comandante Tomás Borge, in Managua, June 25, 1993, and with a former Argentine guerrilla cadre, name withheld on request, in Managua, June 28, 1993. 62. Interviews by the author in Managua with Abel Céspedes, July 7, 1993, and Mariano Morales, July 7, 1993; interview with José Efrel Martínez Mondragón, in Elisabeth Reimann, Confesiones de un Contra: Historia de ‘‘Moisés’’ en Nicaragua (Buenos Aires: Legasa, 1986), 29, 31 35. 63. Edgar Chamorro, Packaging the Contras: A Case of cia Disinformation (New York: Institute for Media Analysis, 1987), 6–7. 64. Interview with Morales. 65. Interview by the author with Oscar Sobalvarro García, Managua, July 7, 1993. 66. See Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League; and Bruce Ho√man, The plo and Israel in Central America: The Geopolitical Dimension (Santa Monica: Rand, 1988).

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67. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (sipri), World Armaments and Disarmament Yearbook 1979 (London: Taylor and Francis, 1979), 204–5; Edward Schumaker, ‘‘Argentina Buying New Arms,’’ New York Times, June 6, 1982; Ignacio Klich, ‘‘Israel et l’Amérique Latine: La Pari d’un engagement accru aux cotés de Washington,’’ Le Monde Diplomatique, February 1983, 17. See Bishara Bahbah, Israel and Latin America: The Military Connection (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 72–73, 123–24. 68. Juan Salinas and Julio Villalonga, Gorriarán, la Tablada y las ‘‘guerras de inteligencia’’ en América Latina (Buenos Aires: Manguin, 1993), 181. 69. Latin American Weekly Report, September 11, 1981, 1, 5; Salinas and Villalonga, Gorriarán, 142–43; Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 77, 217n79; transcription from the videotaped testimony of Héctor Francés, December 6, 1982, 7, 10, in the author’s archives. 70. Michael McClintock, The American Connection: State Terror and Popular Resistance in Guatemala (London: Zed Books, 1985), 142, 169–71, 187–88, 191–94, 219; Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, 177; ‘‘Israel Adds Itself to the War against Nicaragua,’’ Soberanía, no. 8 (January 1983): 37. 71. Andrew Cockburn and Leslie Cockburn, Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U. S.-Israeli Covert Relationship (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 223; Washington Post, November 14, 1984; Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 8–13. Israel and Argentina collaborated in a U.S. program to send undercover arms to Iran—part of Oliver North’s ‘‘enterprise’’ aimed at reequipping the Nicaraguan Contras. An Argentine air freight company, Transporte Aéreo Rioplatense (tar), which belonged to high-ranking o≈cials in the air force, transported Israeli military equipment to Iran. This military equipment had been sold to Iran by an Israeli cover firm. This account is based on the following sources: contract signed by José María Patetta (tar) and Stuart J. McCa√erty, Miami, July 7, 1981, in the author’s archives; interview with García Lupo; Scott Armstrong et al., The Chronology: The Documented Day-by-Day Account of the Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Contras (New York: Warner Books, 1987), 7–8. 72. Personal communication between the former ambassador to El Salvador, Robert E. White, and the author, February 29, 1996. 73. General Directorate of Military Industries (dgfm), ‘‘Financiación de venta de material bélico a la República de El Salvador,’’ secret memorandum from General Augusto J. B. Alemanzor to the Commander in Chief of the Army, General Leopoldo F. Galtieri, January 18, 1982, in the author’s archives. 74. Central Bank of the Republic of Argentina (bcra), Directorate’s secret session, ‘‘Acta no. ‘S’ 2,’’ February 11, 1982. See also General Directorate of Military Industries, memorandum 624/33, ref.: E.02940/82, February 1, 1982, both documents in the author’s archives. 75. ‘‘Military Diplomacy Tilts Argentine Foreign Policy towards Washington,’’ Latin America Weekly Report, September 11, 1981, 1. 76. ‘‘ ‘Che’ Galtieri Plans His Own Vietnam,’’ Latin America Weekly Report, October 9,

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1981; ‘‘Viola’s Health Wanes and Galtieri Gets the U.S. Seal of Approval,’’ Latin America Weekly Report, November 13, 1981, 1. 77. Quoted in Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, 303, citing Noticias Argentinas (Buenos Aires), February 24, 1982. 78. Becklund, ‘‘Death Squad Members’’; Craig Pyes, ‘‘ ‘The Doctor’ Prescribes Torture for the Hesitant,’’ Albuquerque Journal, December 20, 1983; Duhalde, El estado terrorista argentino, 146. 79. Becklund, ‘‘Death Squad Members’’; Duhalde, El estado terrorista argentino, 120– 21, 128. 80. Quoted in Becklund, ‘‘Death Squad Members.’’ 81. Testimony of Sánchez Reisse, 44. 82. Guardian (London), December 29, 1981; Duhalde, El estado terrorista argentino, 122. 83. Nicaragua, Ministry of the Interior, secret memorandum. 84. On this aspect of the Argentine assistance to Guatemala, see ‘‘Argentina Redraws the Ideological Map,’’ 6; Duhalde, El estado terrorista argentino, 122–23; Alejandro Dabat and Luis Lorenzano, Argentina: The Malvinas and the End of Military Rule (London: Verso, 1984), 80–81. 85. McClintock, The American Connection: Guatemala, 187–88, 191–94; Susanne Jones, The Battle for Guatemala: Rebels, Death Squads, and U.S. Power (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), 120, 195. 86. ‘‘Testing Time for Military Solutions in Guatemala and El Salvador,’’ Latin American Weekly Report, November 6, 1981. 87. McClintock, The American Connection: Guatemala, 245, 263. 88. Dickey, With the Contras, 90–92; Peter Kornbluh, Nicaragua: The Price of Intervention (Washington: Institute for Policy Studies, 1987), 127. 89. Confidential telegram from the Department of State to the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, ‘‘Colonels Alvarez and López Grijalva [Grijalba],’’ May 21, 1981, in the author’s archives. The activities of the Argentine advisors in Honduras (and other countries in the region), as well as their link with the Honduran military, were described in detail by a former agent from the Argentine intelligence (under the pseudonym of ‘‘Carlos’’) to Leo Valladares in a telephone conversation that took place in Buenos Aires in October 1996. Valladares was then the national commissioner for human rights in Honduras. See also the following declassified documents (U.S. Department of Defense, intelligence reports): ‘‘Argentine-Chilean Assistance to Honduras,’’ 1981; Argentine Army Support to Honduran Army,’’ September 24, 1981; and ‘‘Honduran G-2 Enroute to South America,’’ 1982, in the author’s archives. 90. For example, in his testimony before the Penal Federal Court in Buenos Aires in mid-1979, the Argentine intelligence agent Rafael López Fader declared that he was commissioned by his country’s army intelligence command to act as a military advisor in Honduras. López Fader, who remained in Central America until 1983, presented the

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court with various documents to prove his testimony—photographs, a bank statement from Tegucigalpa, and an id card that identified him as a civilian belonging to the Army Intelligence. Juzgado Nacional en lo Criminal y Correccional Federal no. 5, case ‘‘Sivak, Osvaldo Fabio, victim of kidnapping and extortion,’’ testimony of Rafael López Fader, Buenos Aires, August 20, 1996, in the author’s archives. 91. Interview with Víctor Meza, in Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, 224. 92. See the following sources: National Commissioner for the Protection of Human Rights in Honduras, Honduras: The Facts Speak for Themselves (New York: Human Rights Watch/Americas, 1994), 123, 164–65, 227; Americas Watch, Human Rights in Honduras: Signs of ‘‘The Argentine Method’’ (New York, December 1982), 2–19; Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, 226. 93. Interamerican Court for Human Rights, testimony of Florencio Caballero, October 6, 1987; and sworn declaration of José Barrera Martínez, in National Commissioner for the Protection of Human Rights, Honduras: The Facts, 160–99; Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, 224–25; confidential telegram from the U.S. Department of State to the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, ‘‘ATA Program: Evidence in Hernández Case,’’ May 13, 1987, in the author’s archives. 94. Department of Defense, ‘‘Argentine-Chilean Assistance’’; ‘‘Argentine Army Support’’; ‘‘Honduran G-2 Enroute.’’ 95. Roy Gutman, Banana Diplomacy: The Making of American Policy in Nicaragua, 1981–1987 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 57. 96. Interview by the author with an o≈cial from the Argentine Foreign Service, based in Central America from 1981 to 1982, who remains anonymous at his request, Buenos Aires, August 11, 1993. This source confirmed the o≈cial relationship between the Argentine military junta and the Honduran, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan governments concerning the clandestine paramilitary programs in these countries. See the confidential cable from Thomas J. O’Donnell, U.S. Embassy in Nicaragua, to the Department of State, March 1, 1980, in Nicaragua: The Making of U.S. Policy, 1978–1990 (Alexandria: Chadwyck-Healey, 1991). 97. Sam Dillon, Comandos: The cia and Nicaragua’s Contra Rebels (New York: Henry Holt, 1991), 99–101; Linda Drucker, ‘‘A Contra’s Story,’’ Progressive, August 1986, 25– 26; National Commissioner for the Protection of Human Rights, Honduras: The Facts, 133–34. 98. See, for example, the testimony of Sánchez Reisse. 99. Ibid. 100. Chamorro, Packaging the Contras, 5–6; and Dillon, Comandos, 341. 101. Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, 392. 102. Cable from the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires, ‘‘Human Rights: Ambassador’s Session with General Camps,’’ July 26, 1979, in U.S. State Department, Argentina Declassification Project. 103. Interview with Raimondi.

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104. See, for example, Sandra McGee Deutsch and Ronald H. Dolkart, eds., The Argentine Right: Its History and Intellectual Origins, 1910 to the Present (Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 1993). 105. Quoted in El Día (Mexico), March 19, 1981. 106. See the insightful review by Deborah L. Norden of my book Argentina, the United States, and the Anti-Communist Crusade in Central America, 1977–1984, in American Political Science Review 3, no. 2 (June 1999): 463–64. 107. U.S. Embassy, Buenos Aires, ‘‘Hypothesis: The goa as Prisoner of Army Intelligence,’’ Townsend B. Friedman memorandum, August 18, 1980. 108. See McSherry, Predatory States, chap. 7. 109. See, for example, the discussion in Richard Saull, ‘‘El lugar del sur global en la conceptualización de la guerra fría: Desarrollo capitalista, revolución social y conflicto geopolítico,’’ in Espejos de la guerra fría: México, América Central y el Caribe, ed. Daniela Spenser (Mexico City: Porrúa, 2004), 31–66. 110. Quote from Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents: Reagan, no. 19 (May 2, 1983): 614. 111. Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 2–30. 112. Joseph, ‘‘Close Encounters,’’ 13–14. 113. Ibid., 14–16.

SETH FEIN

Producing the Cold War in Mexico The Public Limits of Covert Communications

We live of course in a world not only of commodities but also of representation, and representations—their production, circulation, history, and interpretation—are the very element of culture. In much recent theory the problem of representation is deemed to be central, yet rarely is it put in its full political context, a context that is primarily imperial. Instead we have on the one hand an isolated cultural sphere believed to be freely and unconditionally available to weightless theoretical speculation and investigation, and, on the other, a debased political sphere, where the real struggle between interests is supposed to occur. To the professional student of culture—the humanist, the critic, the scholar—only one sphere is relevant, and, more to the point, it is accepted that the two spheres are separated, whereas the two are not only connected but ultimately the same. —Edward Said, ‘‘Secular Interpretation, the Geographical Element and the Methodology of Imperialism’’

In 1957 Mexico City was the site of funerals for two celebrities, each responsible for the cultural production that marked twentieth-century Mexico: the painter Diego Rivera and the movie star Pedro Infante.∞ It is unsurprising that one of Mexico’s leading newsreels, Noticiario clasa, would feature segments about the passing of these two icons of postrevolutionary culture. But it is surprising that these images would be encountered, decades after their commercial exhibition, not in the Filmoteca of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where one was accustomed to finding forgotten Mexican films, but buried in motionpicture vaults containing the output of the (now defunct) United States Information Agency (usia); that records regarding the newsreels’ production and distribution could best be recovered not through research in Mexico City but through a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of State; and that those who produced Noticiario clasa and its successor productions gave

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them a secret name, Project Pedro, unknown not only to the millions who viewed them but even to the technicians who produced them. Perhaps it is not so surprising, however, if we consider Project Pedro as part of the archive of U.S. empire, an outpost of the formal system of extraterritorial control of information institutionalized and globalized through Cold War. Between East and West, Mexico and the United States After World War II, Good Neighbor discourse became derivative of Cold War strategy, and East-West relations replaced hemispheric essentialism as the international framework for U.S. propaganda in the Americas. Where Latin America had provided a prewar laboratory for the development of the internationalist ideology that globally underwrote the U.S. war e√ort, in the postwar period it became (until the Cuban revolution) a screen onto which U.S. foreign policy and Cold War culture projected extrahemispheric concerns, generated by international relations in Europe and Asia.≤ The Korean War and nsc-68’s globalization of containment changed the Cold War everywhere in every way. In the Americas, for example, until the 1950s the United States Information Service (usis) continued to distribute materials produced for Good Neighbor objectives during World War II. After Korea, usis began to distribute more ideologically charged, anti-Communist materials, but ones that were derivative of foreign policies developed for other areas of the world rather than composed for interAmerican communication.≥ In the 1950s, Washington’s great global fear—from Cairo to Paris, Bandung to Mexico City—was neutrality. This fear produced the idea of the Third World, as it was initially conceived in the decade’s opening years, to take hold—a world between East and West—before its most widely understood meanings moved from political to socioeconomic terms in the 1960s.∂ A principal question posed by usia’s 1956 ‘‘Barometer Study on Public Opinion’’ in Mexico elucidates Washington’s anxieties about the unwillingness of people to choose sides in the Cold War: ‘‘At the present time do you personally think that Mexico should be on the side of the Communist powers, on the side of the anti-Communist powers or on neither side?’’ The aggregate response confirmed Washington’s worries: 71 percent of the 1,455 respondents, from across Mexico’s largest twenty-three towns and cities, answered, ‘‘Neither side.’’∑ Washington’s secret production of Mexican newsreels drew upon both a long history of cross-border involvement in Mexico City’s film industry and contemporary practices of transatlantic cultural Cold War. usia’s secret newsreel work

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in Western Europe, for example, provided an operational model for its work in the Western Hemisphere. Specifically, the agency’s ‘‘newsreel operation in France’’ was the exemplar for initial e√orts in Brazil as well as Mexico. As antifascism morphed into anticommunism and covert international information initiatives replaced public ones, Washington’s two key World War II caballeros, Brazil and Mexico, remained the main mass-media producers and targets for Washington’s inter-American propaganda. Hence, the East-West cultural Cold War reverberated in the Americas, where many of its discursive patterns and international communications techniques had been first rehearsed during the Second World War. This was part of a global sequence in the 1950s: Cold War projects in the Americas would, in turn, provide test cases for determining ‘‘the possibilities and/or limitations of such a [newsreel] program in the Far East or the Near East.’’ New U.S. foreign policies, then, would move from East to West, from Europe through the Americas to Asia as Washington globalized its early Cold War international information interventions in the Korean War’s wake. In Washington’s view, the medium was the message. As Project Pedro’s Washington implementer initially thought about such work in 1954: ‘‘It is my feeling that newsreels in themselves carry a certain credibility as a sort of documentary in the entertainment field. They are presented by ‘less interested’ parties than are presentations by us [usia/usis]. Consequently I consider that in the commercial field this is perhaps the single most important vehicle for carrying our propaganda objectives without its being recognized as such by the viewer.’’∏ This early thinking about the project viewed subsidized Mexican newsreels in transnational terms that would project Washington’s mission into the rest of Spanish-speaking Latin America; Mexican newsreels would provide a region-wide system for audiovisually disseminating Washington’s Cold War throughout Central and South America.π (This never happened, as Project Pedro was produced and distributed within strictly national boundaries.) Concerns about Soviet mass-media incursions that exploited Third World neutralism were both context and pretext for usia’s covert work to transnationalize its film presence in the Americas. Turner Shelton, director of the agency’s Motion Picture Service, explained to its Latin American bureau in 1955 that transnationalized newsreel production in Mexico o√ered a unique opportunity to wage cold war within the Americas as Washington focused its attention elsewhere, even as intelligence about the area ‘‘reports that the Soviet Embassy in Mexico has recently aided in the establishment of a firm for the distribution of Russian films in Mexico and Central America. This is another demonstration of what the opposition is up to, using Mexico as a base for operations. In our dis-

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cussion last October, we agreed on the desirability of using the newsreel device in Brazil and Mexico. The Brazilian program is moving along very well. . . . I think it is highly desirable to proceed with the planning and development of this project for Mexico.’’∫ Consequently, in May 1956, the usia director Theodore Streibert asked the agency’s general counsel to authorize plans for Project Pedro, the agency’s code name for its attempt to take control of a Mexican newsreel. To implement the project, usia turned to an expatriate Hollywood executive, Richard K. Tompkins, who had overseen earlier agency e√orts at covert production of anti-Communist film propaganda in Mexico City, the era’s world capital of Spanish-language filmmaking. As Streibert explained: ‘‘This project involves dealing with a ‘front man’ . . . for purchase of a half-interest in one of the two leading newsreel companies in Mexico . . . and for performance by him of the production aspects of the newsreel operation, including the integration of Agency footages into the reels.’’Ω Washington’s and Hollywood’s complex relations with Mexican film producers between World War II and the Cold War contributed to both the notable opportunities and the limits that Project Pedro encountered in its actual operation in Mexico. Cross-border commercial collaboration forged in the interests of antifascism broke down after the war as the U.S. industry, freed from the coercive structure of instrumental wartime dependence on Washington, sought to contain (or co-opt) its southern competitor’s international growth. However, even as commercial relations became less harmonious, links between Hollywood and the Mexican industry, both behind and on the screen, persisted and facilitated Washington’s anti-Communist mission. Tompkins personified those film industry connections across the antifascist/anti-Communist divide as well as Hollywood’s commercial and political, informal and formal, connections to U.S. transnational and international relations. In the early 1950s, he had operated Latin America’s most important film studio, Mexico City’s Estudios Churubusco, built during World War II by a transnational partnership between Hollywood’s Radio Keith Orpheum (rko), headed at the time by Tompkins’s uncle N. Peter Rathvon and Mexico’s leading mass-media magnate, Emilio Azcárraga Vidaurreta.∞≠ Tompkins’s prior Washington-backed anti-Communist film projects in Mexico—production of two cartoon series and a feature film—had mobilized Mexican resources to reach spectators throughout the Americas. By contrast, Project Pedro focused primarily on Mexican moviegoers. As with those earlier Cold War projects, the impetus for covert control of a Mexican newsreel came from usis o≈cials in Mexico City who sold their plan to the agency’s audiovisual planners

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in Washington. As the new program commenced, the embassy’s top usis o≈cial, Public A√airs O≈cer (pao) Jack McDermott, expressed his enthusiasm to the agency’s film chief: ‘‘I consider this an extremely important project. If it is successful it will reach a highly significant element in Mexico with messages carrying our objectives. I believe that the proposed grant of approximately $68,000 is fully justified in our e√ort to advance U.S. objectives in Mexico.’’∞∞ In fact, Project Pedro’s first-year costs would finally approach $100,000, once Tompkins finally succeeded in obtaining control of an established national enterprise, which was not easily accomplished.∞≤ Project Pedro was part of a wider field of national projects in Latin America— notably in Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, and Brazil (where Washington operated within a national film culture that rivaled Mexico’s in a nation it considered to be of strategic importance). In each of these countries, usia directly aided national newsreels. These nationally distinct programs attempted to compensate locally for what usia neglected to do centrally in the 1950s owing to the relatively minor position Latin America held in the global formulation of U.S. foreign policy. As usia film chief Shelton expressed it to the embassy’s public a√airs o≈cer during Project Pedro’s first months of production: ‘‘One of the principal reasons for establishing the Pedro project was the fact that there is a great dearth of material available here on matters relating to Mexico or, for that matter, Latin America in general. I think you can well understand that the newsreels of the world (and we have access to practically all of them) cover that which is most news-worthy, and it is true, I believe you will agree, that Mexico and Latin America, in general do not occupy a very important place in the overall newsmaking activities of the world today. This, of course, operates as a severe limiting factor on the material with any significance to Mexico which is available to us.’’ Hence, from Washington’s perspective, Project Pedro’s value would be principally not as an outlet for international footage but as a transnational producer of Mexican news within a Cold War frame. ‘‘I think you should use every single means at your disposal,’’ Shelton advised usis in Mexico City, ‘‘to persuade Tompkins to cover as many local happenings as possible which have some significance because this will, of course, enhance the value of the reel. We can, of course, supply a very considerable amount of general news material composed of events that happened around the world, but I believe that the thinking so far has been that we should stick as closely as possible to events having some relation to Mexico and Latin America.’’∞≥ Unlike its other American newsreel relationships, which simply received international footage shot by U.S. companies, Project Pedro involved Washing-

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ton’s covert ownership of a national entity. The particular history of the U.S. presence within Mexican film production—a presence that since World War II mixed commerce and propaganda, Hollywood and U.S. foreign policy—facilitated that intervention. And that history converged with that of commercial U.S. newsreels at home and in the world in the mid-1950s. As Project Pedro began, in the late 1950s, many of the dominant U.S. newsreels were ceasing production, as living rooms replaced movie theaters as the site of audiovisual news consumption. In fact, the two major newsreels that survived into the late 1960s, Hearst and Universal, did so because of usia contracts to produce information for the areas of the world where television had not yet achieved hegemony.∞∂ While they receded nationally, U.S. newsreels also declined internationally throughout the decade. As a usis assessment noted, ‘‘American newsreels are on their way out in Mexico.’’ Between 1955 and 1958 the number of U.S. productions exhibited went from five to two, and the remaining pair, mgm and Universal, were winding down their operations. The embassy concluded that ‘‘for all practical purposes the propaganda impact of American newsreels in Mexico has vanished.’’ This vacuum stimulated Washington’s desire to engineer a Mexican alternative to the commercial representation of its view of the world presented by U.S. companies, since ‘‘Mexican newsreels . . . remain the only e√ective film medium for reaching 35mm [i.e., commercial] audiences in Mexico.’’ As was the case across media and across the world, usia moved in Mexico to work directly in an area where it deemed the commercial presence of U.S. information inadequate to wage cold war.∞∑ Project Pedro developed at a moment of notable national as well as international change in Mexican mass communications. Not only were U.S. newsreels decreasingly visible, but Mexican television production and reception were growing rapidly. Between 1956 and 1958, the estimated number of Mexican television sets in operation more than doubled (from 170,000 to 375,000), as did the estimated audience they served (from 1 million to 2.25 million within a national population of around 30 million).∞∏ usia frequently placed material on Mexican tv but did not directly produce any programs on a regular basis for the tightly controlled monopoly. U.S. corporate sponsorship of Mexican news was, however, present from the outset of tv production in 1950, when General Motors began to underwrite Mexico City Channel 4’s nightly fifteen-minute newscast.∞π Despite television’s rapid development in Mexico, relative to the rest of Latin America, it did not displace motion pictures as the dominant form of audio-

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visual mass communication in the 1950s. Moviegoers encountered eight nationally distributed weeklies that, like the rest of Mexican mass media, were privately owned by members of the political establishment (or their cronies) and depended on o≈cial patronage. Moreover, like the era’s feature films, newsreels operated within the representational parameters established by the state party’s culture.∞∫ This was as much a matter of internal producer behavior as of external state intervention by the censors who worked in the Secretaría de Gobernación (Interior Ministry). Newsreels shared with feature films a close relationship to political power not only behind the screen but on it. There they reconfigured the dominant images as well as messages of narrative cinema, which itself was a regular topic, as newsreels spent much celluloid highlighting the nation’s film industry, particularly the comings and goings of its movie stars. In doing so, Mexican newsreels reproduced the celebrity culture, evident in print and radio as well as film, that transformed popular entertainers into o≈cially sanctioned symbols of national identity and projected politicians, especially the president, in the glamorized language of film culture (see figures 1 and 2). The president’s activities—opening public works projects, attending political functions, meeting with visiting leaders from other nations—dominated Mexican newsreels’ political reporting. The culture of celebrity produced by Mexico’s mass media merged politics and entertainment in the nation’s capital city. If the president was the nation’s political metonym, Mexico City was its geocultural synecdoche. Like so many of the feature films that they preceded on Mexican movie screens in the 1950s, newsreels highlighted Mexico City as a modern metropolis, the showcase of contemporary architecture, cosmopolitan night life, popular entertainment, and, above all else, the mass-culture industries that projected the capital city’s culture nationally as lo mexicano.∞Ω Mexico City was the production site for all of Mexico’s national newsreels, and they all conflated the nation with the capital city.≤≠ Project Pedro’s productions contributed to this overrepresentation of national metropolis. Mexico City simultaneously served as political stage, textbook, and museum, exemplar of modern work, consumption, and leisure. Moreover, Mexico City exercised national cultural authority behind the screen, through the Federal District’s strict regulation of the content and commerce of public entertainment in the country’s largest motion-picture market and singular site of industrial film production.≤∞ As Project Pedro completed its fourth month of production, the embassy’s pao, its top usis o≈cial, indicated how the agency could best provision footage to supplement (less ostensibly political) locally produced material in order to

1. President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines speaking at 1957 Freedom of the Press Day celebration. Noticiario clasa 810 (reproduced at the National Archives).

2. Dolores del Río at 1957 luncheon honoring Mexican film industry. Noticiario clasa 800 (reproduced at the National Archives).

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project the Cold War in a topical register calibrated for Mexican consumption: ‘‘What then is wanted? In general terms, items that have genuine interest, events that show progress, international cooperation, or with human appeal. What are some of these? Some footage of braceros working under good conditions to o√set the publicity which has shown only the seamy side. Mexicans preferably, or even Latin-Americans, at various cultural, commercial or scholastic pursuits in the U.S. They may be artists, students, researchers, or important visitors. American business firms with branches in Mexico bring Mexicans to the U.S. for training as executives. Footage in this field is ideal to show the benefits of American capital operating abroad.’’ Regarding direct references to the Cold War, Jack McDermott suggested scenes showing Washington working for social progress more than against the Soviet Union: ‘‘Since the Agency is placing heavy emphasis on People’s Capitalism, the Geophysical Year and Atoms for Peace, events related to these broad headings ought to be covered on a regular basis.’’ References to Moscow should respond to specific Soviet information initiatives —for example, ‘‘adverse propaganda regarding [nuclear] fallout’’—or directly dramatize the Kremlin’s work to undermine the U.S.-led cause of world peace: ‘‘Coverage of a un Security Council or General Assembly meeting on those occasions when Russian delegates are shown obstructing the work of peace or arms control are good newsreel standbys.’’≤≤ From Project Pedro’s outset, the embassy constantly demanded more international footage about Cold War concerns elsewhere in the world or production of special material in the United States it deemed of interest to Mexican spectators. For example, in one instance, usis was livid that, ‘‘despite a specific request by wire for coverage on the visit of Cantinflas [Mexican movie star Mario Moreno] to Washington[,] not one foot was received. Cantinflas is a national hero and since he made an obvious hit on his visit, Mexico could have exploited the occasion to great advantage. It is di≈cult to understand why the Agency passed up this opportunity.’’≤≥ Project Pedro unfolded within a deeply developed national film culture that informally as much as formally imposed its own representational rules enforced by the intricate personal and discursive interactions between o≈cial Mexico and commercial mass-culture producers and consumers. Beyond usis’s explicit recognition that waging audiovisual cold war in Mexico meant antineutralism more than it did anti-Communism, McDermott’s request for the agency to supply specific ‘‘message material’’ implicitly expressed a contradiction in Project Pedro’s operation: Mexicanized production—which conformed to state regulation, audience expectations, and business practices—could not produce what Washington considered e√ective propaganda. Indeed, binational relations with

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Mexico presented particular challenges to Washington’s bipolar globality. This was due not only to the centrality of the history of conflict with the United States to o≈cial and popular conceptions of Mexican identity but also to contemporary cross-border issues. Most notably the Eisenhower administration’s 1954 implementation of Operation Wetback (the militarized repatriation of undocumented workers) was a source of public resentment, arguably more significant for Cold War relations than, for example, Mexico’s unwillingness to endorse U.S. diplomacy in Guatemala, preceding the cia’s overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz.≤∂ Producing Project Pedro Tompkins first focused on one of the most well-regarded (if financially shaky) Mexican concerns, España-México-Argentina (ema), producer of the newsoriented Noticiero mexicano and the magazine-format Cine selecciones. Principally owned by General Juan F. Azcárate, a politically well-connected former military o≈cer and diplomat, ema had particularly close relations to the state. While all commercial newsreels in Mexico depended on various levels of o≈cial patronage, the government had directly subsidized ema’s operations since World War II, regularly using Noticiero mexicano as a commercial outlet for o≈cial images and messages not only nationally but also in the United States, where the company had established distribution throughout the Spanishspeaking Southwest.≤∑ An ema product, secretly controlled by usia, could be used to reach Mexicans (and Mexican Americans) within the United States (where the agency was legally prohibited from distributing its materials) as well as in Mexico. ema’s equally impressive history of international distribution southward fit well with usia’s secondary desire that Project Pedro replicate the cross-border circulation of its other anti-Communist Mexican film activities, notably Tompkins’s cartoons and a feature film—Dicen que soy comunista (1951)—made with Washington funds. These had e√ectively drawn on Mexico’s international standing as a major film producer to export U.S. messages through Mexican movies. Likewise, usia believed that ‘‘newsreels with Mexican attribution would have value outside the country and that arrangements for distribution should take into account desirable outlets in neighboring areas.’’≤∏ Tompkins’s agreement with usia demanded that he conceal his Washington connections from his local partners and the host state as well as the Mexican public. It directed him to ‘‘negotiate, in the name of his controlled company, the ‘Dibujos Animados, s.a.,’ and ostensibly as sole interested party,’’ for the right to control ema’s weekly productions.≤π This presented problems, since the deal’s

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structure had to appear to abide by the postwar Mexican law that required majority national ownership in designated industries. Owing to its prominence as the leading producer of national culture and internationally recognized symbol of national achievement, the film industry was, in fact, the first of the sectors legally declared as critical to Mexican sovereignty. Tompkins’s attempt to engage a prestanombre (a Mexican citizen to front for U.S. capital) was a widespread practice, but Project Pedro’s ideological (rather than strictly market) objectives and Washington’s demands that its own control be absolute as well as covert necessitated complicated contractual maneuvers both between Tompkins and his Mexican associates as well as between usia and Tompkins. usia, not Tompkins, would ultimately control production: ‘‘It is clearly understood and stipulated that the U.S. Government shall be the owner-in-fact of the entire 531 shares of stock thus to be acquired, and the use of such ownership and the operation of the Company shall be in accordance with the Government’s wishes.’’≤∫ The agency’s plans for Project Pedro required absolute control of newsreel content. Direct ownership of local production distinguished Project Pedro from usia’s other unattributed newsreel projects. Unlike its extensive Project Kingfish—through which the agency assembled newsreel footage shot by U.S. commercial contractors into productions distributed in Asia and Africa—Project Pedro would produce the Cold War in Mexico. The weight of two decades of national development of an industrial film culture gave rise to this imperial objective and need. To produce e√ective messages for Mexico, ones that would supposedly nudge national discourse toward the United States, demanded both recognition and subversion of Mexican newsreel culture. This duality undermined the deal with ema. Tompkins and Azcárate agreed to financial terms but parted ways over editorial authority. This was the nonnegotiable issue for usia. In search of a new entree to national production and distribution, Tompkins turned his attention to Noticiario Nacional, s.a., a company jointly owned by Gabriel Alarcón, who controlled the mammoth Cadena de Oro network of movie theaters, and the político Luis Manjarrez, senator from the state of Puebla. Underlining the always present connections between politics and privately owned mass communications in midcentury Mexico, Alarcón’s fortunes had grown through his alliance with Puebla’s dominant political boss, Maximino Avila Camacho (1891–1945), who served as secretary of communications and public works in the presidential administration of his younger brother, Manuel (1940–1946), during World War II.≤Ω Less financially sound than ema, Noticiario Nacional was desperate for new capital. The debt-ridden Alarcón welcomed Tompkins’s overture, but the em-

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bassy paused at the additional funds required by its frontman to make the deal.≥≠ Despite the contract’s cost, usis considered the company a more attractive opportunity than ema, because its long-running main product Noticiario clasa was ‘‘the oldest production of its kind in the Republic of Mexico—and the only one locally produced which . . . maintained its ‘news’ tenor,’’ while many of its competitors had shifted to feature magazine formats more suitable for lighter subject matter.≥∞ As much as the quality of its production, usis valued Noticiario clasa’s extensive exhibition, noting that it ‘‘has among the best distribution arrangements of any Mexican newsreel.’’ In arranging access to that national audience, the new agreement between usia and Tompkins reproduced the basic structure of the ema deal but involved a more complex corporate arrangement whereby a separate Mexican company, Impulsora Anahuac, s.a., headed by Tompkins (and which included Alarcón, Manjarrez, and del Villar as o≈cers), would actually own Noticiario Nacional. Meanwhile, that company’s board would be reconfigured in public records to include Tompkins in a seemingly secondary position.≥≤ The covert control that Tompkins achieved over a major newsreel satisfied Washington. usia’s Motion Picture Service’s chief outlined its benefits to the agency’s general counsel, who had to approve the contract: ‘‘Two features in particular distinguish this arrangement from the prior ones in desirability: first, because, for the first time we have a written agreement signed by the indigenous principals that commit them to go forward with the operation; second, because we are dealing through a new ‘holding’ corporation, which . . . is already organized (incorporated), and need only be activated. Additionally it is worthy of note that the newsreel now to be controlled (‘Noticiario clasa’) is considered to be by far the best in Mexico, and it is the one [former pao] Mr. Anderson initially tried to ‘infiltrate’ when he first went to Mexico (the company producing this reel has heretofore been too well o√ financially to be interested in any overtures).’’ Compared to earlier options, Shelton judged that ‘‘ou[r] control (through Tompkins) of the operation will be implemented and strengthened in several ways: As ostensible owner of 50% of the company, and as Chairman of the Board with statutory veto authority of such o≈ce, Mr. Tompkins will be able to exert all practical control on both companies and their operations.’’≥≥ In e√ect, the new system involved a double prestanombre. Tompkins’s company, Impulsora Anahuac, would control Noticiario Nacional, which would ostensibly continue to operate under Alarcón’s leadership. At worst this arrangement risked revealing a link to Tompkins, who was, in any case, a wellestablished member of the Mexican filmmaking community, but his own links

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to usia would remain contractually hidden. An additional advantage of the deal was Cadena de Oro’s distribution of Cine mundial, produced by Productores Unidos, s.a. Emilio Azcárraga Milmo operated Productores Unidos, which was part of his father’s (Emilio Azcárraga Vidaurreta’s) mass-media empire, which had long-standing links of its own to U.S. radio and motion-picture concerns, as well as to Washington.≥∂ Through Tompkins’s arrangement, usia would be able to place footage with Cine mundial as well as with a biweekly regional newsreel, Actualidades del norte, that Alarcón produced for circulation in the eighty theaters he operated in and around Monterrey, Mexico’s northeastern industrial capital.≥∑ Project Pedro commenced operation in February 1957. usis noted that ‘‘it was immediately apparent that Noticiario Nacional had been greatly mismanaged,’’ and the embassy engaged Arthur Andersen and Co. to audit its new enterprise. Surveying local operations, Noticiario Nacional’s (usis-imposed) general manager, Cantwell Brown, determined that increased investment was necessary, since production quality would have to be immediately improved to stabilize the firm’s finances: ‘‘Upon contact with the various advertising agencies who represent the largest volume of potential for the operation, it was found that the reputation of the Company and the popularity of the vehicle itself was so poor that a complete lack of confidence existed.’’ This was a crucial problem, since Mexican newsreels paid fees for exhibition and funded production strictly through sponsorship. Because there were no plans for funding beyond the agency’s initial investment, after which Project Pedro was to function self-su≈ciently, it was imperative that it soon attract new advertisers. Brown outlined a plan for establishing a commercially viable operation that closely related upgrading output on the screen to increasing management’s control behind it. ‘‘Immediate improvement of the content and tenor of the News Reel to enhance its popularity’’ was the key to profitable propaganda. This would allow for necessary ‘‘build up of distribution and exhibition, especially to include more first run houses in Mexico City.’’ However, to begin more e≈cient production of messages, it was immediately necessary to implement ‘‘proper accounting procedures and internal operations,’’ which would require ‘‘personnel changes,’’ including ‘‘a reduction in union payroll’’ and more management control of ‘‘job specification.’’ Also, as production quality rose, Brown planned to raise fees for ads and install a commission system for selling spots that would ‘‘stimulate customer confidence and secure more business.’’ He also recommended development of a 16 mm version of Noticiario clasa for provincial distribution in venues unequipped for 35 mm projection. Finally, and unrealistically, the company intended to lobby the Fed-

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eral District’s authorities to expand the permissible number of ads per reel. While in its first six months of operation Noticiario Nacional lost over 200,000 pesos (US$16,000), the embassy considered the fact that the deficit could now be reliably reported, through its new biweekly accounting practices, as a sign of progress. More impressively, exhibition expanded despite its financial deficits.≥∏ During Noticiario Nacional’s first six months of usis management, it slightly more than doubled its national presence, eventually reaching 288 screens. By the end of 1957, its production was shown weekly in 307 theaters nationally, 53 of which were in Mexico City. Noticiario clasa had added a dozen theaters in the capital, eight of which were first-run outlets that quadrupled the newsreel’s screen time among the city’s leading film venues. The company boasted that ‘‘of these eight 2 are of the best in the City.’’ In addition to the eight movie palaces it obtained through ‘‘agreement with Cadena de Oro,’’ Noticiario Nacional had negotiated ‘‘separate contracts for Palacio Chino and the Versalles,’’ two more leading downtown theaters. Tompkins credited usia’s international footage for Noticiario clasa’s expanded exhibition. Since March, ‘‘foreign material of international origin was inserted,’’ based not strictly on its intended ideological e√ect but in anticipation of ‘‘genuine and universal interest’’ that had palpable public appeal. Brown concluded that ‘‘the vehicle has been improved gradually until now it is of interest to theatergoers, not merely tolerated by them.’’ He calculated that it now ‘‘has a propaganda impact of 1,643,540 persons per week.’’≥π Although usis o≈cials expressed satisfaction at the newsreel’s improved quality and expanded audience, they (correctly) doubted that it would soon pay for itself (even if Tompkins achieved all their recommendations for cutting costs and expanding revenue). The main problem was that only 38 percent of possible advertising time was currently sold, while ‘‘the weekly cost of getting out the newsreel is some $43,000 [pesos] on top of which there was another $8,000 [pesos] to be paid to the four Mexican businessmen who fronted as the operation’s management. If the newsreel sold all of its advertising spots, it would take in only $49,500 [pesos, or US$3,960 ].’’ usis estimated that it would be at least six months until ‘‘even a break-even condition’’ could be achieved.≥∫ In fact, it would never break even. This was a problem for Mexican newsreels generally, not just Project Pedro’s. As Noticiario Nacional reported: ‘‘Federal District decree insertions in the news reel are limited to four spots and one publicity item. This places a definite ‘top’ on potential income from the operation.’’≥Ω The state’s regulation of newsreel ads ensured dependence on extracommercial (usually political) sources of revenue in exchange for representation. Such contrived ‘‘news’’ segments regularly provoked public incredulity and antipathy:

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‘‘The definition of ‘indirect publicity’ appears to be rather flexible, incidentally, and very often the number of such items exceeds by far the o≈cial figure of one. Audiences are extremely sensitive to material of the ‘indirect’ variety, and such items are often met with loud whistles, the Mexican equivalent of the Bronx cheer. But more often than not the patience of the Mexican audience is strained to the breaking point, and the public indulges in the not too diverting, but somewhat consoling, game of trying to guess who paid for what—and did he get his money’s worth.’’∂≠ Just as all Mexican newsreels depended on various forms of o≈cial and uno≈cial subsidies from Mexico City sources, so Project Pedro depended on Washington’s secret payments to meet its costs. In its case, its extracommercial relations produced expanded international coverage that seemed actually to enhance its reception, as long as it did not appear didactically ideological (which, in fact, it rarely did). usia’s o≈cial mission did not include covert operations. Selling democracy secretly was publicly ruled out when the agency was formed in 1953. Nevertheless usia did regularly produce materials without attribution. If publicly challenged, legally it would have to admit its involvement. In fact, its objective in Mexico (and elsewhere) was to work covertly from within apparently sovereign national mass media. usis was aware of the risks this posed to Washington’s very interests in sponsoring Project Pedro, the international image of the United States as a beacon of freedom in the Cold War. The embassy’s pao believed that usia could survive public fallout from the disclosure that it provided unattributed newsreel material to a Mexican firm, but it would have more di≈culty countering revelations of its secret ownership of a Mexican company: ‘‘The fact that the usis in Mexico was in reality the majority stockholder in a firm engaged in the production and showing of newsreels, if it became known, would occasion serious embarrassment to the U.S. Government. The newsreels themselves would be discredited and since the ownership of stock in such a corporation in Mexico is illegal, the corporation itself would be seriously damaged. . . . It is noted that the production of movies is one of the so-called seven restricted industries in Mexico.’’∂∞ To avoid such disclosure, usis assiduously operated Project Pedro as a Mexico City enterprise that abided by local regulations. Regarding Tompkins’s position, Shelton pointed out, ‘‘I think the pertinent point is that as far as Project Pedro is concerned . . . Tompkins is not the majority stockholder. His ownership is exactly equal to that of the other proprietary group. His control is by virtue of tacit agreement and o≈ces held. He does not have ‘stock control’ of the company’s a√airs. Since Mexican nationals own 50% of the stock, the corporate structure is legal and the stock ownership of Tompkins (an American

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national) is fully disclosed. Therefore it would be our thought that disclosure of the Agency’s ‘control’ of Tompkins, except of course as the publicity might a√ect its business success, could not a√ect the corporation.’’∂≤ In Mexico, as much as anywhere else in the world, the agency succeeded in penetrating a locally legitimate national mode of cultural production through implementation of ‘‘gray propaganda,’’ covertly produced and distributed information that did not attribute its connection to the agency. O≈cially, it did not engage in the ‘‘black propaganda’’ (covert misinformation and psychological warfare) that was the domain of the cia (whose international subsidization of intellectuals and mass media is better known to, if still inadequately researched by, historians of Cold War Europe).∂≥ As a former usia deputy director explained in his history of the agency: ‘‘Unattributable material . . . is that which is prepared and disseminated in such a way as to obscure or mislead the audience as to its origins. usia does not engage in this kind of propaganda, leaving it to the Central Intelligence Agency.’’∂∂ In Project Pedro’s case, the distinction was in practice nonexistent. In fact, in one instance, the cia challenged usia to prove that Project Pedro (and another plan, ‘‘Project T,’’ for Tompkins to produce an anti-Communist feature film) were ‘‘within the responsibility boundaries’’ separating the two agencies’ respective missions. In advising Ambassador Robert Hill about how to handle the bureaucratic dispute over ‘‘the two covert film projects of usis in Mexico,’’ McDermott explained that ‘‘the U.S. Government owns no stock nor any interest in a Mexican firm. It has a contract with the American [Tompkins] to supply footage for the newsreel and retains control of the newsreel’s content,’’ but the ‘‘stock ownership aspect . . . no longer exists,’’ owing to Project Pedro’s financial restructuring in August 1958, and therefore did not trespass on the cia’s terrain.∂∑ Project Pedro’s successful competition for national advertising was critical to its operation as a Mexican concern. Its most conspicuous national sponsors were corporate holdovers from Noticiario Nacional’s operation under Alarcón and came from the same Puebla-based economic clique that was closely tied to national politics and economics since Avila Camacho’s presidency during World War II. Banco Comercial Mexicano, owned by Manuel Espinosa Yglesias, and José García Valseca’s publishing empire each sponsored short introductory segments above the newsreel’s title. García Valseca’s Novedades newspaper was a close state-party collaborator that quietly published stories planted by the pri (as well as a key recipient of usia material).∂∏ Mexican newsreels frequently advertised a≈liations to particular print media. ema’s Noticiero mexicano, for exam-

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ple, publicized its alliance with the major daily El Universal. Noticiario clasa’s opening credits announced its alliance with García Valseca’s sports magazine Esto. As was generally the case, the sponsoring publication had no actual editorial role in a given newsreel’s production; it simply paid a fee for the advertising that the newsreel provided. Esto was Noticiario clasa’s second largest sponsor, and the newsreel frequently featured its exploits, as well as those of a≈liated publications, in its ‘‘news’’ segments. Other major Mexican retail and manufacturing concerns—such as Corona Beer, Cadillac shoes, and Pal nail polish— sponsored Project Pedro’s newsreels. Transnational U.S. companies were also regular advertisers, not due to Project Pedro’s covert connection to Washington but because of their commercial interests in Mexican consumption; they advertised with nationally owned reels as well.∂π Coca-Cola was by far Project Pedro’s largest source of advertising revenue. Goodyear, Kodak, and Jeep were among the other prominent U.S. multinationals that regularly purchased Project Pedro advertising spots in Noticiario clasa and its successor productions.∂∫ Some of the principal figures operating behind the screen showed up on it. Noticiario clasa projected segments, for example, about the social activities of the Alarcón and Azcárraga clans.∂Ω One issue conspicuously brought together the international and the national when it showed Emilio Azcárraga V.— the dominant figure in midcentury Mexican mass communication and one of Washington’s key covert collaborators—being named Executive of the Year for 1957 by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Mexico.∑≠ Ambassador Hill’s activities, his appearances with President Ruiz Cortines, and his airport arrivals in Mexico City were the only regularly conspicuous representation of the embassy.∑∞ Project Pedro did subtly intervene in national politics in a way that conformed to general newsreel practices of highlighting favored politicians. Across the two sexenios it spanned, the last third of Adolfo Ruiz Cortines’s administration (1952–58) and the first half of Adolfo López Mateos’s (1958–64), one government figure, greatly favored by U.S. foreign policy, remained Project Pedro’s most prominent national political figure (following the two presidents themselves). usis newsreels regularly featured Antonio Ortiz Mena, Ruiz Cortines’s director of the federal government’s Social Security Institute and subsequently López Mateos’s treasury secretary. Ortiz Mena appeared frequently not only at each president’s side but also o≈ciating independently at public events and meeting with prominent U.S. o≈cials to discuss economic issues between the two neighbors. A proto-técnico (forerunner of the type of politician that came to

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dominate the pri’s last two decades of presidential hegemony), Ortiz Mena’s singular on-screen presence projected Washington’s support for a pro-U.S. politician who it hoped would eventually assume the presidency.∑≤ The intensity of usia’s e√ort to control Noticiario Nacional’s everyday operation matched that applied to maintaining the company’s appearance as a Mexican concern. Just as Noticiario Nacional presented a front for Tompkins’s own domestically registered company, Impulsora Anahuac, the expatriate’s firm provided a Mexican front for usia. Tompkins agreed to clear every single substantive decision about production with the embassy’s usis sta√, who, in turn, regularly informed the agency’s motion-picture chief about actual local production. At least two members of a Newsreel Review Board—comprised of the post’s pao, the deputy pao, information o≈cer, and films o≈cer—reviewed each issue and forwarded a report to Washington. In addition, the embassy shipped a 35 mm print of every exhibited edition to the agency for its own review (unintentionally preserving an audiovisual record of Project Pedro of use to historians). usia also required Tompkins to submit a quarterly ‘‘progress report’’ about the enterprise’s operation that combined ‘‘narrative and statistical’’ assessments.∑≥ usia’s evaluation of Noticiario clasa scrutinized the newsreel’s content as much as its finances. One such report made by Shelton, at the end of 1957, typically evaluated narrative structure and topical content of six consecutive entries. The agency’s motion-picture chief favorably noted the high degree of regularity in form from edition to edition, combining various quantities of sequences comprised of footage about international events, ‘‘supplied by the [usia’s] newsreel pool,’’ with national footage, usually about events in and around Mexico City, which ‘‘included everything from boxing and beauty queens to public works projects.’’ The report further noted: ‘‘Indirectly, it can be said that the U.S. was referred to in at least one story in every issue. A direct reference was made in all but one issue and in one an indirect reference was made. Peaceful uses of atomic energy [were] referred to in three di√erent issues, all three of the stories concerned had an international connotation.’’ There was locally shot footage of ‘‘Ambassador R. Hill arriving in Mexico and later presenting his credentials, and Dr. Milton Eisenhower’s visit to Mexico.’’ Like numerous other such reports, this one judged ‘‘the technical quality of the reel to be good,’’ praising its editing, narration, and overall ‘‘composition.’’ However, the report’s final analysis of ideological impact echoed similarly qualified assessments across Project Pedro’s four years of operation: ‘‘Content-wise the reel would be classified as national in character except for the pool supplied material which would add an occasional touch of international coverage.’’∑∂

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usia dissatisfaction over the lack of locally produced political messages persisted throughout Project Pedro’s operation and continued to generate tensions between Washington and Mexico City over their Mexican newsreels’ content. Two years after Project Pedro began, usia’s exasperated Motion Picture Service director regularly sent the same kind of critique to the agency’s Mexico City proconsul that he had since production began: ‘‘The real program value of projects such as the Mexican newsreel is achieved through materials shot in the local country in support of U.S. objectives in that country. . . . It is not the intent to completely ‘carry’ the reel through stories that we supply. It is for this reason that we have been so insistent that usis work with the local producer to see that materials of program value are photographed in Mexico; and that a usis sta√ member work with the producer on editing and writing the material to insure that we get the maximum benefit from materials photographed.’’∑∑ Unhappy about Project Pedro’s performance during its first ten months of operations, usia ordered both a new audit of its finances and a usis assessment of its ‘‘performance from a non-fiscal point of view.’’∑∏ McDermott supported continuation of Tompkins’s undertaking, even though ‘‘it will require additional subsidization for another year before it becomes completely self-supporting.’’ He blamed the financial failure on ‘‘undue optimism’’ and ‘‘a lack of su≈cient knowledge of newsreel operation here.’’ But the pao believed that Project Pedro’s future ‘‘depends in large measure on Washington,’’ on usia’s ability to provide better footage, not on drastic changes in Mexico City operations.∑π Based on this evaluation, usia continued to fund Project Pedro, making significant new disbursements in the first half of 1958. However, by the summer, unable to pay its bills, including its debt to Alarcón, Tompkins’s Impulsora Anahuac went into liquidation, and Noticiario Nacional released its final issue of Noticiario clasa after two decades of production. But this was not Project Pedro’s last reel. In fact, U.S. o≈cials in Washington and Mexico City saw Impulsora Anahuac’s demise as an opportunity to start a new enterprise from scratch that would draw on the previous year and a half ’s experience as it implemented reforms to improve management and content (and to exchange usia’s position as a secret owner to a potentially less embarrassing role as a secret contractor).∑∫ Despite its shortcomings, Project Pedro o√ered a unique angle of access, otherwise unavailable to the United States in Mexico. In assessing the overall situation of Mexican newsreel production and consumption, as Noticiario Nacional dissolved, usis noted that Mexico o√ered few opportunities for consistent control of any of the nationally run operations, many of which frequently swapped footage ‘‘with European reels—including those behind the Iron

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Curtain.’’ Even if Washington was able to displace such Eastern bloc arrangements, by expanding distribution of its own footage (already regularly accepted by two privately operated concerns, including Azcárraga’s Cine mundial ), ‘‘usis would not, of course, be in a position to control the contents of the entire reels, just as it cannot control the entire contents of newspapers like Excélsior or Novedades or [Azcárraga’s] Radio Station xew or any of the scores of newspapers, magazines and radio stations it deals with’’ in Mexico.∑Ω In fact, broadcast culture, not only radio but also television, provided critical intertexts for Project Pedro’s reformulation. Concerned about declining audience for its Sunday night El mundo en marcha radio show, in 1958 usia commissioned a public-opinion study of the weekly current-events program’s reception. Broadcast from ‘‘Mexico’s leading radio station, xew,’’ in Mexico City, the show was relayed across the rest of the Azcárraga-operated national network of forty-four stations. Its opening and closing motto—‘‘The world marches on!’’—deliberately echoed the similar signature line of the March of Time film series produced by Henry Luce’s communications empire between the mid1930s and mid-1950s. The pseudo-newsreel had had close relations to the Good Neighbor policy, especially with regard to production about Mexico.∏≠ The survey compared audience attitudes toward radio news to competing forms of current-events-oriented mass media. It indicated that radio remained the most influential form of Mexican mass communication about national and international events: informants placed its di√usion ahead of newspapers and its authoritativeness above that of newsreels, which had wide exposure but were viewed more as entertainment than journalism. The report recognized that television’s daily impact would eventually supersede radio’s but had not yet done so, owing to the still-prohibitive cost of receivers. Nevertheless, millions of Mexicans had regular contact with tv culture, and its presentation of current events suggested the same authority that radio commanded. With specific regard to El mundo en marcha, the study concluded that the covertly operated usis radio program, produced under contract by J. Walter Thompson of Mexico, remained a credible source of information even though some respondents complained that certain international events and issues went underreported compared to competing mass media that more critically covered the United States.∏∞ When usis o≈cers in Mexico City reconfigured Project Pedro’s finances and form, they cited its well-regarded radio program by naming its new newsreel El mundo en marcha. In doing so, usis signaled its newsreel’s link to broadcast culture as well as to Luce’s film series. El mundo en marcha was an audiovisual hybrid that brought television-style news production into Mexican movie the-

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aters just as U.S. and Mexican corporate and state interests sought to expand tv in Mexico. Its electronic-inflected introductory soundtrack and its staccato narration contributed to this e√ect. El mundo en marcha’s eventual employment of Telesistema’s ubiquitous newscaster Jacobo Zabludovsky as its editorial director and narrator made explicit the connection between small screen and big, and the link was formal as well as personal. Before El mundo en marcha, Mexican newsreels buried the narrator’s name along with that of the other technical sta√ in the concluding credits. Borrowing from television, El mundo en marcha established its identity as being intertwined with that of its celebrity journalist at each issue’s start. Zabludovsky had been present at the birth of commercial Mexican television in 1950 when he produced and hosted the nation’s first newscast, sponsored by General Motors.∏≤ Too, before going to work for Tompkins in 1960, Telesistema’s star had already performed at the Cold War nexus of Washington and Mexican mass media. In October 1957 he hosted a prime-time Channel 4 special (secretly authored by usia) that used the occasion of the United Nations’ twelfth anniversary to concentrate attention on recent Soviet actions in Hungary.∏≥ By the time Zabludovsky added his name and voice to El mundo en marcha, he had, then, accumulated significant social capital in print and radio as well as tv. The redeployment of that capital by Tompkins on Mexico’s movie screens attracted the host state’s attention. The second-in-command of the Interior Ministry’s o≈ce of cinema a√airs, Carment Báez, privately expressed her administration’s approval of the national newscaster’s appointment: ‘‘We wish to congratulate the R. K. Tompkins Company and the management of the newsreel ‘El mundo en marcha’ for having acquired the services of Mr. Jacobo Zabludovsky as Editorial Director. . . . [My o≈ce] has taken due note of this step and will be collaborating closely with ‘El mundo en marcha,’ which will be held up to the other newsreels as an example of what a good newsreel should be and how to inform the Mexican public properly.’’∏∂ In fact, by the beginning of 1960, El mundo en marcha was widely considered to be ‘‘the leading Mexican weekly newsreel.’’ Its distribution had climbed to 358 theaters nationally.∏∑ Changes on the screen came with changes behind it. R. K. Tompkins y Asociados, s.a., openly owned and operated El mundo en marcha while retaining access to its predecessor’s wide distribution through Cadena de Oro. Alarcón, however, was no longer a partner in production. Tompkins’s new company paid him a flat exhibition fee ($9,000 for the first six months of operation) conforming to usual industry practice. Regarding content, Washington finally agreed in writing to provide ‘‘message material’’ as requested by Mexico City, but it in-

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sisted that Tompkins’s uncle, former rko chief N. Peter Rathvon—who had long experience facilitating Washington’s covert production of foreign films in Europe as well as the Americas—take over everyday management of his nephew’s newsreel.∏∏ This was part of the agency’s e√ort to impose ‘‘closer supervision by usis’’ of Project Pedro to implement ‘‘a planned systematic approach to coverage and use of local stories that can further program objectives.’’∏π The new format’s aggregate success did not, however, resolve the ongoing struggle between Washington and Mexico City over content. Unsatisfied with usia’s response to its general requests for coverage about certain topics, the embassy began making ‘‘hard and specific requests for footage.’’ These solicitations ranged from coverage of activities of prominent Mexicans in the United States—such as a lecture by the historian Edmundo O’Gorman at the University of Indiana, the composer Carlos Chávez’s term as the Charles Eliot Norton Chair in Poetics at Harvard, an Albuquerque concert by the Mexican Symphony Orchestra, the mass-media magnate (and Project Pedro collaborator) Emilio Azcárraga’s reception of an award at Columbia University, and Mexico’s equestrian jumping team’s competition in Washington—to that of specific Cold War geopolitics, including resumption of nuclear testing by the Soviet Union, the crisis over Formosa, the pullout of U.S. forces from Lebanon, and British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s visit to Moscow.∏∫ Evaluating El mundo en marcha’s first three months of operation, Tompkins defended its use of Mexican material and blamed Washington for not supplying su≈cient foreign footage: ‘‘Local coverage has been good, in fact more extensive than competitive reels. The ‘international’ material supplied has been disappointing, both by reason of the material selected and because such timely material as has been provided consistently arrives to hand so late as to be unusable.’’∏Ω Rathvon and McDermott also regularly blamed the agency for a lack of ‘‘message material’’ to interpolate with El mundo en marcha’s local production. But Shelton defended his unit’s work, citing its comparative success elsewhere: ‘‘We have this same kind of project going in numerous other countries all over the world, and in these countries the newsreel is generally considered to be one of the most e√ective of all program vehicles.’’π≠ He advised Rathvon: ‘‘We had always expected that the reel would never carry more than 1/3 international stories, and that at least 2/3 of every issue would be Mexican material.’’ usia had increased its delivery of international footage to ease Project Pedro’s initial reorganization under the former Hollywood executive, but Washington expected a more Mexican-centric Cold War production for the future.π∞ There were, in fact, obstacles to usia’s objectives that were endemic to Project

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Pedro’s operation within the highly regulated Mexican film industry. For one, cost remained an issue. As the embassy’s pao explained: ‘‘The operators, while willing to cover such outstanding events as the Acapulco meeting of the two presidents [López Mateos and Eisenhower], and any items we request within the Federal District, have placed limitations on coverage anywhere in Mexico unless reimbursed for travel expenses.’’π≤ Also, changes in the Federal District’s regulation of newsreel advertising, which in 1959 reduced the number of twentysecond spots from five to four, challenged Project Pedro’s attempts to achieve self-su≈ciency, forcing it to continue to depend on Washington subventions. Summing up these challenges, a year after starting El mundo en marcha, Rathvon reported that ‘‘due to the growing reputation of the reel we might well be able to maintain it on at least a break-even basis were it not for the arbitrary and harassing action of the government of the Federal District in regulating all the news reels and revistas. . . . It is too early to judge our chances of breaking even next year, but you can readily see the di≈culty we would be in without outside support.’’ El mundo en marcha’s production chief suspected that rival print media might have been behind the new e√orts to squeeze the finances of newsreels. In any case, the change forced newsreels to search for more ‘‘informal’’ funding whether from national or, in Project Pedro’s case, international patrons.π≥ Beyond the impact of its commercial regulation, the state’s o≈cial censorship also limited Project Pedro’s editorial autonomy. For example, footage of ‘‘Vice President Nixon’s welcome in Washington following his South American tour was not used by clasa because the Mexican Government film censor’s o≈ce removed all Nixon footage from all newsreels distributed in Mexico.’’ This ban included ‘‘scenes of the Vice President’s reception in Uruguay and Argentina which, though they showed no violence, arrived here after the Lima and Caracas receptions. . . . The Directorate General of Cinematografía informed usis ‘extrao≈cially’ that the footage had been deleted in order to avoid any unfavorable reactions among theatre audiences in Mexico,’’ where Nixon had made a successful o≈cial visit in 1956.π∂ Here was an irony of Mexican mass culture: the authoritarian state’s control of content forced it to anticipate public opinion. Widespread recognition that the state determined what was privately exhibited meant that film censors expected that spectators viewed newsreels as signs of o≈cial sentiment. In this case, as in others, the Mexican state was unwilling to sanction a commercially produced presentation that seemed too pro-American. The pri’s own reliance on anti-Communism in the late 1950s to suppress domestic opposition—for example, by imprisoning dissident labor leaders as foreign-

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directed subversives—demanded that the state perform its Cold War sovereignty through independence from Washington’s foreign policies.π∑ Rituals of pri rule also dictated specific changes. Government censors, for example, banned El mundo en marcha’s experiment with diegetic sound, instead of the usual voice-over narration, in its coverage of Ruiz Cortines’s 1958 Informe (state of the nation) address. usis reported: ‘‘The live sound footage was deleted by the Government’s censorship o≈ce . . . on the grounds that theatre audiences might register disapproval.’’ Apparently it felt the aural e√ect would reduce the president’s aura.π∏ In another case, government censors cut footage of Ambassador Hill’s attendance at the annual commemoration of the Niños Héroes, the legendary boy cadets who sacrificed their lives in defending Mexico City from invading U.S. forces in September 1847. The scene had included important Mexican politicians seated near the ambassador and hence violated ‘‘a Presidential directive forbidding closeups in newsreels of politicians, all of whom seem to be vying for position in the interregnum’’ between López Mateos’s July election and December inauguration. But this was not the only material that state censors deemed beyond the pale for that week’s issue: they also banned footage of devastating floods, prompting a usis o≈cial to comment that ‘‘ ‘newsreel’ is hardly the term to use in describing this kind of product in Mexico.’’ππ His observation revealed also a perhaps half-conscious recognition that ‘‘U.S. propaganda’’ was hardly the term to describe Project Pedro’s output. The state’s quotidian control of content a√ected all Mexican newsreels, not just Project Pedro. But it a√ected Project Pedro di√erently, since its objectives strove for Cold War significance according to Washington’s ideological agenda, not Mexico City’s. Still, the most important force limiting what Project Pedro projected in Mexican movie theaters was not state interventions but public reception. In explaining why so few locally produced Project Pedro segments ventured into Cold War politics, an unusually astute agency analyst pointed out that ‘‘there are very definite limitations on what can be done locally and used to further program objectives. Not the least of these is the suspicion that Mexican audiences have toward local stories carried by their newsreels since almost all such stories are but thinly disguised paid advertisements.’’π∫ Freedom from the need to impose such unpopular stories helped El mundo en marcha achieve its favorable reception, even as its lack of Cold War messages frustrated its Washington benefactors. Hence what had made Project Pedro an increasingly popular product with growing national distribution—how much it combined the best parts of other Mexican newsreels with general-interest international footage— rendered it ine√ective propaganda in Washington’s eyes. While the newsreel’s

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3. Mexican newsreels prominently projected bullfighting and other sports events that often generated ‘‘sponsorship fees’’ for ‘‘incidental product placement, usually a beer or soft drink,’’ such as in this scene. Noticiario clasa 828 (reproduced at the National Archives).

Mexicanized content and form preserved its covert relationship with usia, they also minimized the agency’s influence on production. This communications conundrum frustrated a usia assessor: ‘‘My position has never yet been clearly outlined as to how far usis can control, suggest, or define our stake in this operation, partly due, of course, to the shrouds imposed on our relationship.’’ Of particular concern, as his mid-1960 agency evaluation of El mundo en marcha’s content and form observed, was its seemingly pointless overproduction of trivial segments about social diversions (see figure 3): ‘‘It should also be noted that out of the average reel of 699 feet, 249 feet is on sports—mostly bullfights, local boxing and soccer. Possibly this is due to something in relation to their need for placing their advertising plugs; but to my mind it is definitely a√ecting the use of your clips sent from the United States.’’πΩ Washington never understood why so much of what was shot in Mexico City seemed apolitical. Rathvon explained that the very aspects of El mundo en marcha’s content that usia criticized, namely, its representation of popular

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culture and social amusements, were what provided the newsreel its public credibility: ‘‘The local footage has been predominant and we have won acceptance as a Mexican reel. Although it is not always easy to find entertaining material we have done an increasingly e√ective job. The emphasis on sports and bullfights is not simply filler. It is what the Mexican theatre-goers want and expect.’’∫≠ Message footage had to come from New York, because it could not be adequately constituted from Mexican material. To do this better, McDermott urged Shelton’s Motion Picture Service ‘‘to install an Assignments Editor,’’ as had other usia mass-media branches, to oversee production and distribution of footage for specific usis clients. Such coordination was necessary because ‘‘materials shot in Mexico cannot form the bulk of the reel for program objectives. We have and shall continue to catch any item of program value in Mexico. But there aren’t enough of them to carry the reel week in and week out.’’ The problem regarding ‘‘program objectives’’—that is, Cold War content—‘‘is and always has been the lack of su≈cient program material from your shop delivered in time to be of program value.’’∫∞ This meant specially requested footage, not general material distributed globally, ‘‘since this would be self-defeating in a country like Mexico which is strongly nationalistic, and obviously suspicious of a reel that could be suspected of too much lending from usis.’’∫≤ How much Project Pedro served U.S. foreign policy would remain a baΔing question for its Washington and Mexico City patrons. Despite both its ideological shortcomings and the fact that usia footage ‘‘is also gratefully accepted by other newsreels with no charge,’’ the unusual access Project Pedro provided Washington led the embassy’s pao to ‘‘reluctantly recommend,’’ in February 1959, that Ambassador Hill support subsidizing Tompkins’s operation for an additional year: ‘‘We do control this newsreel as to content and they are pleased to carry what we want. Other newsreels use whatever of the o√ered footage they desire. Such control is good for any special occasion that might arise.’’∫≥ As we will see, it was in fact the broader field of Mexican public culture reproduced by Project Pedro’s competitors that limited usis’s ability to shape Tompkins’s increasingly popular production. Projecting Project Pedro As the struggles between Mexico City and Washington make clear, what appeared on the screen is notable for how closely it conformed to the broader field of Mexican newsreel production. Project Pedro contended with the productionconsumption matrix generated by its intertextual relationship to other Mexican

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newsreels, formal and informal state restrictions regarding content, and its anticipation of the expectations of national spectators. Its form and content converged with more than diverged from that of its competition. As it changed from Noticiario clasa to El mundo en marcha, and as each of those products underwent revisions, Project Pedro never satisfied the aspirations of its U.S. government conceivers. Its success at entering the Mexican newsreel field as a legitimate product of national communication rendered it an inadequate form of antiCommunist propaganda. Here the transnational was at odds with the international; the Mexicanization of U.S. resources within the local environment of political and cultural production in Mexico City diminished Project Pedro’s ability to ‘‘Americanize’’ Mexican mass media and to propagate Washington’s foreign policy. In practice, most of Project Pedro’s e√ect was negative. It controlled what was not seen more than it imposed what was. Across its entire operation, for example, segments about the Soviet Union were notably rare, compared to reports about the competition’s stories. This conformed to the logic of Mexican foreign policy in the late 1950s and early 1960s that ostentatiously touted its international independence from the United States to compensate for Mexico’s rightist policies at home and its increasingly close economic relations with its northern neighbor. Direct references to the Soviet Union appeared only occasionally, such as Khrushchev’s infamous anti-U.S. diatribe at the United Nations in 1961, annual commemorations of Moscow’s suppression of the 1956 Budapest uprising, or images of East Germans fleeing to the West before the Berlin Wall’s construction.∫∂ Regarding U.S. foreign policy, the emphasis was unsurprisingly on nonmilitary, technological achievements and the progress they promised to the rest of the world. Most notable among these was the Eisenhower administration’s Atoms for Peace initiative that sought to erase destructive associations of U.S. atomic power by demonstrating the progressive ends to which Washington intended to direct nuclear energy globally.∫∑ In one of Project Pedro’s few direct references to U.S. military power, El mundo en marcha covered the Acapulco visit of the nuclear submarine Paul Revere, which had recently seen action in Korea.∫∏ U.S. leadership in science was a dominant theme of agency-supplied footage. Following the Soviet Union’s successful October 1957 Sputnik launch, U.S. space exploration became a prominent Project Pedro presence, not simply as a frequent news topic. Noticiario clasa even reconfigured its opening sequence at the end of 1957 to associate its dissemination with satellite communication. Animation depicted a rocket launched from a map of Mexico; the scene then shifted to

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an aerial view of the country, and finally of Earth from outer space as the soundtrack produced wan electronic beeps supposedly emanating from an orbiting satellite. The new title read, ‘‘noticias nacionales e internacionales del satelite,’’ and the newsreel was retitled Satélite, although satellite communication had no role in its distribution.∫π In Sputnik’s wake, the representational practices of U.S. foreign policy centered on extraterrestrial achievement (matching the new orientation of domestic educational and science policy) by depicting the U.S. response, its Explorer satellite, to the Soviet challenge.∫∫ Through outer space, Project Pedro connected Mexican development to U.S.–Mexican relations. El mundo en marcha, for example, prominently featured the opening of a space tracking station in Guaymas, Sonora.∫Ω The segments emphasized the Sonoran installation as a national site of technological advancement operated by Mexicans in the service of world progress. Hence the manned Mercury missions of the early 1960s became a source not only of U.S. advancement but also of Mexico’s, facilitated by technological transfer from the United States. In this case, El mundo en marcha relocalized the Cold War in the provinces and in the U.S.–Mexican borderlands as it remapped Mexico’s place in global history through the nation’s contribution to extraterrestrial exploration as a scientific ally of the United States. In a more terrestrial cross-border moment, U.S.–Mexican relations, transnational capital, and Mexican popular culture converged when, in a spot sponsored by Coca-Cola of Mexico, Noticiario clasa featured the 1957 Little League World Series victory of the Mexican team from Monterrey. Footage of the clinching game was followed by that of a White House reception where the Mexican players met President Eisenhower (see figure 4).Ω≠ International events appeared in usia-supplied newsreel footage described by locally developed narration. Often Third World flash points provided opportunities to represent the United States as supportive of postcolonial nationstates. In the Suez crisis’s wake, for example, Noticiario clasa focused on Ralph Bunche’s role in directing the United Nations’ involvement in resolving the Middle East conflict. Beyond underlining cases where U.S. foreign policy supported decolonization or noninterventionism in the postcolonial world, the mobilization of Bunche’s visage (in Ghana as well as in Egypt and Jordan) sought to demonstrate that the United States was a meritocracy that had produced one of the world’s most famous diplomats, an African American leading the work of the United Nations.Ω∞ Like contemporary overt usia productions distributed globally, Project Pedro also went to great lengths to project progress in U.S. race relations and the professional achievements of African Americans

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4. Monterrey’s 1957 Little League World Series champs’ visit to the White House o√ered a cross-border opportunity for Project Pedro. Noticiario clasa 823 (reproduced at the National Archives).

within the United States. In the 1960s usia propaganda would ‘‘discover’’ the Latino presence within the United States in order to advance its leadership of the Western Hemisphere, but in the late 1950s African Americans still stood for all people of color in the United States in the audiovisual competition for Third World hearts and minds.Ω≤ Other international episodes that threatened U.S. prestige among nations of the so-called nonaligned world could not be entirely erased. In early 1961, for example, Patrice Lumumba appeared as Zabludovsky flatly narrated that the ‘‘ex-Prime Minister of the Republic of the Congo had been shot while trying to escape from prison.’’Ω≥ More typical were seemingly innocuous segments about Laotian peasants struggling against Communist incursions from Vietnam.Ω∂ While it is notable how rarely images from contemporary Cold War battlegrounds appeared, there are instances that jar conventional teleologies. Through the footage distributed globally by usia and interpolated by Project Pedro’s newsreels, we can recover liminal moments in the history of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War and of the power of national forces of production to shape

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the content of Washington’s transnationally produced propaganda. At the outset of 1959, for example, El mundo en marcha critically compared the arrival of ousted Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in Mexico to his initial exile there twenty years earlier. Over images of Cubans denouncing their former leader and proudly displaying a portrait of their new one (Fidel Castro), the narration describes positively the revolution’s triumph.Ω∑ A later segment about Castro’s April 1959 visit to the United States includes footage of prorevolutionary street demonstrations punctuated by a final shot of an English-language sign that states ‘‘We love you Fidel.’’Ω∏ More significant, and predictable, than El mundo en marcha’s initially favorable Castro coverage is its virtual noncoverage of Cuba after U.S.–Cuban relations took a decisively negative turn. The absence of anti-Castro propaganda between April 1959 and April 1961 reveals much about Project Pedro’s local operation. El mundo en marcha neither reproduced Mexican mass media’s generally favorable coverage of the revolutionary regime, including Mexico’s friendly diplomacy with Castro’s government, nor expressed Washington’s increasingly open hostility to Havana. Just as the newsreel’s national operation curtailed negative reporting about Cuba, its usia connection prevented any positive representations. But in the aftermath of the Kennedy administration’s Bay of Pigs fiasco, usis invoked Cold War politics to pressure U.S. multinationals in Mexico to withdraw their ads from competing newsreels that favorably covered Havana. In late summer 1961, the embassy’s pao ‘‘called in all the USA advertising companies and advertisers, and told them he thought it inappropriate that they should be the principal financial support of two Communist-owned newsreels in Mexico; they agreed to withdraw all advertising from those Reels; in redistributing that advertising, ‘Pedro’ received enough financing so that for the first time it showed a profit for several weeks in August and September.’’Ωπ Following its coverage of Castro’s first visit to the United States, El mundo en marcha’s next, and final, mention of Cuba was unavoidable. In the immediate aftermath of the Bay of Pigs invasion, it projected Ambassador Adlai Stevenson defending the United States in the United Nations Security Council against Cuba’s accusations that it had covertly directed the counterrevolutionary invasion.Ω∫ Kennedy’s admission of U.S. involvement, days later, unsurprisingly received no play at all. Coverage of the Cuban Missile Crisis did not produce a dilemma for El mundo en marcha, because by 1962 Project Pedro no longer existed. Long considered cost ine√ective, the program persistently eluded the expectations of the o≈cials who commissioned its production. This was particularly

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perplexing for those who oversaw the program from Washington, since Project Pedro seemed to have the most favorable conditions of all usia’s transnational audiovisual operations: ‘‘The Agency has never been at all satisfied with the finished product—neither as to what it contains or how it handles its content. This is a real anomaly. No one questions the sincere loyalty of the Americans associated with the Reel (Tompkins and his wife, and his uncle, N. P. Rathvon, semi-retired, who used to own rko), and ims sends it more and better footage from New York than any of the 50 or so other Reels in the world that we have working arrangements with. Somehow, at usis level, liaison dissolves and there is no e√ective control or guidance.’’ Motion Picture Service o≈cials speculated about whether or not Project Pedro had been sabotaged by usis o≈cers in Mexico City who possibly resented the direct connections between the Mexican newsreel operations and Washington or the fact that the project was a legacy of an earlier usis regime.ΩΩ While never grasping Project Pedro’s inherent contradictions, derived from the particular context of Mexican state and culture industries, usia did recognize that the endeavor’s demise meant the end of a uniquely positioned outpost of empire: ‘‘Our present situation, organizationally, is ideal, and was achieved over a period of several years at considerable cost and di≈culty, using devious means and four corporate organizations. If the project is killed, these American owners would be unable to operate without our subsidy and would be unwilling to operate in the ‘local manner,’ as described above, and so would sell the Reel. Once sold, the loss would be irretrievable and we could not expect to re-establish our position. Our present Reel has a good local standing and is not known to have any USA Government connection.’’ El mundo en marcha had even recently ‘‘received a commendation from the government’s movie control o≈ce, saying it was an example to the other newsreels of what such a vehicle should be.’’ Although usia regularly provided footage to another Mexican producer, it would never have in Mexico the editorial license, however limited, that Project Pedro provided.∞≠≠ Despite Project Pedro’s declining costs, by the end of 1960 the embassy’s pao, McDermott, had turned against the enterprise. He appealed to the agency’s Latin American area o≈ce in a campaign against the Motion Picture Service’s desire to continue subsidization of Tompkins’s newsreels.∞≠∞ Throughout 1961, McDermott insisted that the Motion Picture Service’s director, Turner Shelton, who believed that Project Pedro was a critical counterweight to ‘‘Communistcontrolled’’ Mexican newsreels, ‘‘go to Mexico himself and investigate thoroughly why ‘Pedro’ is ine√ective (if not actually counterproductive).’’∞≠≤ At the

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same time, McDermott successfully lobbied the Kennedy administration’s new ambassador to Mexico, Thomas Mann, to kill Pedro.∞≠≥ He explained that the newsreel’s failure was due not to usis mismanagement but to the di≈culties of profitably producing propaganda within a Mexican newsreel given local conditions, especially of state regulation. He objected to Shelton’s urgent advocacy of Project Pedro’s continuation: ‘‘Turner makes the point that if this is killed we leave the field to the Commies. Such is not the case. There are seven newsreels in action, two of which [including ema’s] are controlled by the outfit which uses Bloc footage. Two others would continue to use our footage, but at no cost to us. . . . He has a fetish about these classified projects and has probably wasted more money than any other element in the Agency.’’∞≠∂ If, in the end, the local context of its production limited Project Pedro’s impact as propaganda, foreign policy determined the timing of its termination in September 1961.∞≠∑ By then, the Americas lay at the center of Washington’s conceptualization of Cold War public diplomacy. The kind of inattention to the region that had prompted the need to formulate transnational production of propaganda within Mexico was replaced by the Alliance for Progress and Washington’s reassertion of the Western Hemisphere idea as central to its global strategy. Project Pedro, however, stands less between the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations as it does more generally between the 1950s and 1960s in how it allows us to see the transitions under way in Washington’s approach to the hemisphere, between the cia’s overthrow of Arbenz and the Cuban revolution’s overthrow of Batista; between Vice President Nixon’s vexed visit to Caracas in 1958 and President Kennedy’s triumphal tour through the same city in 1962; between the Cold War’s reverberations in the Americas and the Americas as a principal area of Cold War confrontation; between a foreign policy that approached the Third World with a conservative strategy of containment and one characterized by liberal rhetoric advocating social change.∞≠∏ All these changes can be summarized by the change in international communications as film gave way to television or (as McLuhan put it) as the hot gave way to the cool medium for expression and dissemination of the U.S. message in the Americas and in the rest of the world.∞≠π However, while the completion of that transition from large screen to small was most visibly marked by Edward R. Murrow’s appointment as the Kennedy administration’s director of usia (and the simultaneous bestowal of cabinet-level status to that post), its initiation preceded liberalism’s return to the White House. In 1960 the Eisenhower administration developed a regionwide approach to news production for the Americas

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with its inauguration of a weekly fifteen-minute, unattributed newscast produced in separate Spanish and Portuguese and broadcast throughout the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Between Culture and Politics In viewing Project Pedro in a transnational context, as part of the history of the United States within Mexico, we must not conflate the history of the research about the newsreels’ production with their history as culture. What happened behind the screen is only part of the story. Just as important for the scholar of international history, for the scholar of Mexico and the United States, is what happened on the screen and what happened around it. As Edward Said observed about the contemporary study of imperial culture: ‘‘The problem of representation is deemed to be central, yet rarely is it put in its full political context, a context that is primarily imperial. Instead we have on the one hand an isolated cultural sphere believed to be freely and unconditionally available to weightless theoretical speculation and investigation, and, on the other, a debased political sphere, where the real struggle between interests is supposed to occur.’’ Leaving aside the question of whether Said’s own work always followed the project he imagined, it is di≈cult to deny the value of his conclusion that such a division of scholarly spheres does exist and is a false dichotomy, that the political and the cultural ‘‘are not only connected but ultimately the same.’’∞≠∫ Just as the history of these films, distributed weekly between 1957 and 1961, is part of the exogenous history of the United States, it is part of Mexico’s endogenous history: the context in which their meanings were produced, that is, where their public history as culture (not to be confused with their secret history as instruments of cultural diplomacy) was made. To avoid that sphere is to avoid confronting the presence of Infante and Rivera and to ignore how the broader field of Mexican mass culture ultimately determined not only the newsreels’ audiovisual production but also the production of their meanings, of their public consumption. Perhaps we need to posit here a notion of cultural empire without cultural imperialism; that is, echoing Ranajit Guha’s conclusions about colonialism in South Asia, we need to note conceptually the dissonance between imperial institutions and social power on the ground.∞≠Ω Project Pedro’s history demonstrates both the limits of U.S. power in the Cold War as well as the limits to conventional historiographic constructions of that power. History and historiography are, of course, always mutually constitutive.

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So too are the representational machinery of U.S. foreign policies and those polices themselves. If Washington ultimately waged cold war to convince national societies across the globe to follow its leadership, then the production of propaganda cannot be viewed as a mere sideshow, a reel derivative of a more real story or as the soft derivative of hard policies. In other words, the reel is real. And the images projected on the screen reproduced the forces of production behind, around, and in front of it. This is true in the present as well as in the past. In the post–Cold War as in the Cold War, U.S. foreign policy seeks to control the everyday representation of the world transnationally. In the Cold War, bipolarity forced U.S. methods underground, as it feared charges of imperialism while managing its empire in the name of freedom, of anti-Communism and anti-imperialism. In the post–Cold War, unipolarity allows the United States to operate openly as it imposes imperial infrastructure in the name of free markets and democracy. Like the usia’s production of Project Pedro in the Cold War, post–Cold War Washington’s Broadcasting Board of Governors (bbg) has overtly imposed an Arab-language satellite television network for the Middle East, Al-Hurra (‘‘the free one’’), to challenge the popularity of Al-Jazeera and other transnational networks that challenge U.S. foreign policy (while also revisiting earlier covert arrangements, such as Project Pedro, by purchasing access to seemingly independent Middle Eastern media, especially in Iraq). In so doing, it demonstrates the longevity, across the supposed Cold War/post–Cold War divide, of U.S. foreign policy’s desire to engineer information internationally, even as it trumpets free markets as the way to free ideas.∞∞≠ (More recently, in July 2005, the governments of Venezuela, Uruguay, Cuba, Bolivia, and Argentina inaugurated Telesur, their own Latin American public information tv network, also aligned with Brazilian broadcasting, to challenge extraregional corporate news, especially cnn en Español, with transnationalist mass communication organized to counter U.S. hegemony and foster international integration. This has provoked calls for the bbg, the usia’s broadcasting successor, to develop new television programming to challenge Telesur’s anticipated leftist, anti-U.S. orientation.)∞∞∞ As Middle Eastern publics ignore Al-Hurra, Washington is relearning in the post–Cold War what it learned during the Cold War: imperial designs are often frustrated by local receptions. Arjun Appadurai’s observation about methodology for the study of globalization holds true for investigation of Cold War as well as post– Cold War transnational culture when it demands ‘‘examination of how locality emerges in a globalizing world, of how colonial processes underwrite contem-

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porary politics, of how history and genealogy inflect one another, and of how global forces take local form.’’∞∞≤ Keeping such globality in mind, the so-called new international history of the Cold War should not mean—as it too often does—the reification of established historiographies by fetishizing the declassification of new documents overdetermined by existing master narratives. If the Cold War was indeed a global phenomenon, it needs to be studied everywhere in varied ways, by raising new questions about previously understudied social as well as geocultural sites while reading ‘‘old’’ sources with new eyes. Power can only be understood if its study is not presupposed based on a myopic assertion of grand strategy as international history. Yet international history is crucial to understanding grand strategy, since the only way to mark power’s presence is to chart its absence, and the only way to understand its everyday articulation is to look beyond established actors. In other words, it is far from the overrepresented areas of Cold War conflict where the global history of the Cold War needs most to be studied—for example, in the public sphere of various nations—not as a sideshow (a derivative of other, supposedly discrete, military, diplomatic, or economic force fields) but as a main attraction, not necessarily as a subset of U.S. or Soviet or Chinese history, but as Laotian, Ethiopian, or Mexican histories. Such research should foreground new frameworks for contemplating the past, rather than merely mine for new sources (to settle old scores) in already well-drilled topical veins. Of course, one of the ironies of empire is that some of the best sources about life ‘‘out there’’ are stored within imperial bureaucracies. As in Project Pedro’s case, this work might depend on (foia) declassification, but the demand for documents should be guided not simply by muckraking ambitions—overdetermined by calcified historiographies that reify methodological conventionality across political positions—but by challenges about the very definition of Cold War history itself. Accordingly, as we tell new stories from new sources, we also need to examine old ones with new eyes, ones that see beyond both disciplinary and national borders. However, to interpret imperial remnants imaginatively means to read sources from positions beyond where they have been originally produced and conventionally consumed. To do this, Cold War historiography must continue to move not only toward culture but also toward the world. It should, to poach from Chakrabarty, provincialize the United States.∞∞≥ International history must be placed in a transnational frame, one that, in Project Pedro’s case, views the history of Mexico as part of the history of the United States and the history of the United States as part of Mexico.

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Notes A di√erent version of this essay appeared in Diplomatic History 28, no. 5, a special issue dedicated to Walter LaFeber. I thank David Langbart, of the National Archives and Records Administration for help in locating my sources and the State Department’s foia team for their declassification. I also thank my fellow members of the Little Summit— Amy Chazkel, Joanne Freeman, Christopher Hill, and Pablo Piccato—for their keen comments on an initial rendering of this work, Karen Garner for hers about a later one, and Virginie Marier for critical readings of multiple renditions. 1. Noticiario clasa, 834 and 803, Records of the United States Information Agency, National Archives Record Group 306 (narg 306), Motion Picture and Sound Recording Branch (mpsrb). 2. On the role of the Americas in the development of cultural diplomacy, see Frank Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas: U.S. Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). On the Cold War in the Americas, across time, see David Green, The Containment of Latin America: A History of the Myths and the Realities of the Good Neighbor Policy (Chicago: Quadrangle Press, 1971); Stephen G. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of Anticommunism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); and Gaddis Smith, The Last Years of the Monroe Doctrine, 1945–1993 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994). 3. See Seth Fein, ‘‘Everyday Forms of Transnational Collaboration: U.S. Film Propaganda in Cold War Mexico,’’ in Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations, ed. Gilbert Joseph, Catherine LeGrand, and Ricardo Salvatore (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998); and Gerald K. Haines, The Americanization of Brazil: A Study of U.S. Cold War Diplomacy in the Third World, 1945–1954 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1989). 4. On the political idea in its African and Asian contexts, see H. W. Brands, The Specter of Neutralism: The United States and the Emergence of the Third World, 1947–1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). On its development as a social category, see Arturo Escobar, Imagining Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Robert A. Packenham, The Dependency Movement: Scholarship and Politics in Development Studies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Packenham, Liberal America and the Third World: Political Development Ideas in Foreign Aid and Social Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973). 5. ‘‘Barometer Study on Public Opinion: Preliminary Report,’’ 3, usia O≈ce of Research, Country Project Files (1951–64), Box 72, narg 306. 6. ‘‘Newsreel Coverage in Central America,’’ Anthony Guarco to Turner B. Shelton, 1 December 1954, usia Accession 62C185, Box 11, author’s State Department Freedom of Information Act case no. 200004119 (hereafter, sd-foia). 7. ‘‘Newsreel Coverage in Central America,’’ John S. Connolly to Shelton, 30 Novem-

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ber 1954 and ‘‘Mexican Newsreel Project,’’ Oram to Shelton, 12 April 1955, usia Acc. 62C185, Box 11, sd-foia. 8. ‘‘Mexican Newsreel Project,’’ Shelton (ims-usia) to Frank H. Oram (iaa-usia), March 31, 1955, usia Acc. 62C185, Box 11, sd-foia. 9. ‘‘Delegation of Limited Contractual Authority to T. B. Shelton,’’ Theodore C. Streibert to Clive L. Duval, May 11, 1956, ‘‘Mexican Cartoons: Project Pedro’’ folder 2, usia General Counsel’s Motion Picture Rights and Permissions files (hereafter, mprp), narg 306 (mpsrb). 10. On Tompkins and Estudios Churubusco, see Seth Fein, ‘‘Transcultured Anticommunism: Cold War Hollywood in Postwar Mexico,’’ in Visible Nations: Latin American Cinema and Video, ed. Chon Noriega (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). On World War II and Hollywood in Mexico, see Seth Fein, ‘‘Myths of Cultural Imperialism and Nationalism in Golden Age Mexican Cinema,’’ in Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico, 1940–2000, ed. Gilbert Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); and Seth Fein, ‘‘Transnationalization and Cultural Collaboration: ‘Mexican’ Cinema and the Second World War,’’ Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 17 (1998). On the postwar decline in commercial relations between the two industries, see Seth Fein, ‘‘From Collaboration to Containment: The International Political Economy of Mexican Cinema after the Second World War,’’ in Mexico’s Cinema: A Century of Films and Filmmakers, ed. Joanne Hershfield and David Maciel (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1999). 11. McDermott to Shelton, January 30, 1957, ‘‘Mexican Cartoons: Project Pedro’’ folder 2, mprp, narg 306 (mpsrb). 12. See Shelton to McDermott, January 29, 1958; ‘‘Amendment No. 5 (Agreement No. IA-2428) ‘Project Pedro,’ ’’ April 21, 1958, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 13. Shelton to McDermott, May 29, 1957, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 14. Raymond Fielding, The American Newsreel, 1911–1967 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972), 308–9. 15. ‘‘Motion Pictures: Newsreels in Mexico,’’ usis Mexico City to usia, July 11, 1958, 1– 2, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 16. ‘‘Television Facts Summary: Latin America Area,’’ S-42-58, O≈ce of Research, Special Reports 1953–63, Box 15, narg 306. 17. José Luis Gutiérrez Espíndola, ‘‘Información y necesidades sociales: Los noticiarios de Televisa,’’ in Televisa: El quinto poder, ed. Raúl Trejo Delarbre (Mexico City: Claves Latinoamericanas, 1985), 65–66; Fernando Mejía Barquera, La industria de la radio y la televisión y la política del estado mexicano, vol. 1 (1920–1960) (Mexico City: Fundación Manuel Buendía, 1989), 162–95. 18. On the ideological relationship between the Mexican state and mass culture, see Roger Bartra, Blood, Ink, and Culture: Miseries and Splendors of the Post-Mexican Condition, trans. Mark Alan Healey (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Claudio LomnitzAdler, Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism (Minneapolis: Uni-

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versity of Minnesota Press, 2001); and Carlos Monsiváis, ‘‘Notas sobre la cultura mexicana en el siglo XX,’’ in Historia general de México, ed. Daniel Cosío Villegas (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1988). 19. On the transition from countryside to cityscape as the dominant national representation in Mexican cinema, see Jorge Ayala Blanco, La aventura del cine mexicano en la época de oro y después (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1993), 93–107. 20. See Ricardo Pérez Montfort, ‘‘El discurso moral en los noticieros fílmicos de 1940 a 1960,’’ in Los archivos de la memoria, ed. Alicia Olivera de Bonfil (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1999). 21. José Agustín, Tragicomedia mexicana 1: La vida en México de 1940 a 1970 (Mexico City: Planeta, 1990), 136–40. 22. McDermott to Shelton, June 12, 1957, 1–2, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 23. McDermott to usia, May 16, 1957, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 24. This was expressed in Mexican film by the director Alejandro Galindo’s Espaldas mojadas! (Wetbacks!) (1953), the release of which was delayed for two years at the behest of the State Department, which worked to have the film suppressed throughout Latin America. See Fein, ‘‘Transcultured Anticommunism.’’ On Operation Wetback, see Juan Ramón García, Operation Wetback: The Mass Deportation of Mexican Undocumented Workers in 1954 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1980); and Julian Samora, Los Mojados: The Wetback Story (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1971). On U.S.–Mexican relations in the 1950s, see Olga Pellicer de Brody and Esteban Mancilla, Historia de la revolución mexicana, 1952–1960: El entendimiento con los Estados Unidos del desarrollo estabilizador, vol. 23 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1978). 25. See, for example, General Juan F. Azcárate, President ema, to Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, February 24, 1954; and September 2, 1953, expediente 523.3/14; and Carlos González (ema) to Ruiz Cortinés, July 25, 1957, exp. 151.3/1811, Ramo Ruiz Cortines, Fondo Presidentes, Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City. 26. ‘‘Mexican Newsreel Project,’’ Shelton (ims-usia) to Frank H. Oram (iaa-usia), March 31, 1955. On Dicen que soy comunista, directed by Alejandro Galindo, see Fein, ‘‘Transcultured Anticommunism,’’ 93–100. 27. ‘‘Agreement and Terms of Grant between the United States of America and Richard Kelsey Tompkins,’’ June 4, 1956, 2, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 28. Amendment No. 1, Agreement No. IA-2428, October 17, 1956, 1–2, 4–6; and ‘‘Checklist for P.A.O., Project ‘Pedro’ Amendment of 10/17/56,’’ usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sdfoia. 29. ‘‘Motion Pictures: Newsreels in Mexico,’’ July 11, 1958, 3. On Alarcón’s relationship to Avila Camacho, see Andrew William Paxman, ‘‘William Jenkins, the Private Sector and the Modern Mexican State’’ (M.A. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 2002), chaps. 5 and 6; and Wil Pansters, Politics and Power in Puebla: The Political History of a Mexican State (Amsterdam: cedla, 1990), 62–63. 30. McDermott to Shelton, January 18, 1957, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 31. ‘‘Report to Mr. R. K. Tompkins on Operations of Noticiario Nacional, s.a. and

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Impulsora Anahuac, s.a.,’’ from Cantwell Brown, January 7, 1958, 1, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 32. ‘‘Amendment No. 3, Agreement No. IA-2428, ‘Project Pedro,’ ’’ January 31, 1957, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 33. ‘‘Project Pedro: Amendment No. 3 to Grant Agreement IA 2428(1/31/57),’’ Turner B. Shelton to Frank C. Tribbe, February 11, 1957, 2, ‘‘Mexican Cartoons’’ folder 2, mprp files, narg 306 (mpsrb). 34. José Luis Ortiz Garza, La guerra de las ondas: Un libro que desimiente la historia ‘‘oficial’’ de la radio mexicana (Mexico City: Planeta, 1992); José Luis Ortiz Garza, México en guerra: La historia secreta de los negocios entre empresarios mexicanos de la comunicación, los nazis y E.U.A. (Mexico City: Planeta, 1989). 35. ‘‘Agreement entered into by Mr. Emilio Azcárraga M., representing ‘Productores Unidos,’ s.a. and Mr. Luis C. Manjarrez, representing ‘Noticiario Nacional,’ s.a. and Mr. Gabriel Alarcón Chargoy,’’ September 24, 1956, ‘‘Mexican Cartoons; Project Pedro’’ folder 2, mprp files, narg 306 (mpsrb). 36. ‘‘Memorandum on Operations of Noticiario Nacional, s.a.,’’ Cantwell C. Brown, August 28, 1957, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 37. Ibid., 2; ‘‘Report to Mr. R. K. Tompkins on Operations of Noticiario Nacional, s.a. and Impulsora Anahuac, s.a.,’’ January 7, 1958, 5. 38. Unsigned memo to McDermott, September 2, 1957, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sdfoia. 39. ‘‘Memorandum on Operations of Noticiario Nacional, s.a.,’’ August 28, 1957, 1. 40. ‘‘Motion Pictures: Newsreels in Mexico,’’ July 11, 1958, 2–3. 41. ‘‘ocb Paper ‘Principles to Assure Coordination of Gray Activities,’ ’’ McDermott (usis-Mexico) and Winston M. Scott (ocb Designee), November 19, 1957, 2, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 42. Shelton to McDermott, July 22, 1958, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. Underlining in original. 43. See Volker R. Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: Shepard Stone between Philanthropy, Academy, and Diplomacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Christopher Lasch, ‘‘The Cultural Cold War: A Short History of the Congress for Cultural Freedom,’’ in Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History, ed. Barton J. Bernstein (New York: Random House, 1968); Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The cia and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 1999). 44. Thomas C. Sorensen, The Word War: The Story of American Propaganda (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 65. 45. McDermott to Hill, December 10, 1958, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 46. Stephen R. Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s: Modernity, Politics, and Corruption (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1999), 349. 47. On this transnational presence, see Julio Moreno, Yankee Don’t Go Home! Mexican

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Nationalism, American Business Culture, and the Shaping of Modern Mexico, 1920–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 48. ‘‘Report of Gross Income from Space Sales by Category,’’ in ‘‘Report to Mr. R. K. Tompkins on Operations of Noticiario Nacional, s.a. and Impulsora Anahuac, s.a.,’’ January 7, 1958, 12. 49. Noticiario clasa, 834, 848, narg 306 (mpsrb). 50. Noticiario clasa, 802 narg 306 (mpsrb). 51. Noticiario Clasa, 815, 818, 823, 838, 847, 856; El mundo en marcha, 9, 56, narg 306 (mpsrb). 52. On Ortiz Mena’s role in U.S.–Mexican relations under López Mateos, see Olga Pellicer de Brody and Mancilla, Historia de la revolución mexicana, 1952–1960, 259–67; Agustín, Tragicomedia mexicana, 196–200. On his proximity to the pri’s presidential nomination in 1958, see Juan José Rodríguez Prats, El poder presidencial: Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, 2nd ed. (Mexico City: Miguel Ángel Porrúa, 1992), 236. 53. ‘‘pao’s Checklist for ‘Project Pedro,’ 31 January 1957,’’ sd-foia. 54. ‘‘Content analysis of Not. Clasa.’’ Shelton to Garro, December 27, 1957, ‘‘Mexican Cartoons: Project Pedro’’ folder 2, mprp, narg 306 (mpsrb). 55. Shelton to McDermott, March 23, 1959, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 56. Shelton to McDermott, n.d. (c. late January 1958); ‘‘Memorandum of Questions Prepared by Frank Tribbe,’’ n.d (c. late January 1958), usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 57. McDermott to Shelton, January 24, 1958, 2, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 58. ‘‘Amendment No. 6, Agreement IA-2428, ‘Project Pedro,’ ’’ August 11, 1958, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 59. ‘‘Motion Pictures: Newsreels in Mexico,’’ usis Mexico City to usia, July 11, 1958, 3– 4, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. Case 200004119. 60. ‘‘El Mundo en Marcha no. 302, Walter Thompson de México, s.a., Depto. de Radio y Televisión, 17 August 1957,’’ usia Acc. 66a274, Box 91, sd-foia; ‘‘ocb Paper ‘Principles to Assure Coordination of Gray Activities,’ ’’ McDermott (usis-Mexico) and Winston M. Scott (ocb Designee), November 19, 1957, 3, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. March of Time had a long history of collaborating with the U.S. foreign policy in Mexico; see Seth Fein, ‘‘Hollywood, Mexico–United States Relations, and the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, Austin, 1996), 283–90; on Luce’s film operation, see Raymond Fielding, The March of Time, 1935–1951 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). 61. ‘‘A Study of Audience Opinions of the ‘El mundo en marcha’ and Exposure to Advertising Media,’’ November 1958, International Research Associates, S.A. de C.V., Mexico City, File mx5805, Box 74, usia O≈ce of Research, Country Project Files, 1951–64, narg 306. 62. Claudia Fernández and Andrew Paxman, El Tigre: Emilio Azcárraga y su imperio Televisa (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 2000), 162, 54–58. Zabludovsky would continue to be the face of Mexican tv news for decades, hosting the Televisa monopoly’s prime-time broadcasts into the 1990s.

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63. ‘‘ocb Paper ‘Principles to Assure Coordination of Gray Activities,’ ’’ McDermott and Winston M. Scott (ocb Designee), November 19, 1957, 5, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 64. Carment Báez to R. K. Tompkins y Asociados, s.a. de C.V., January 6, 1961, ‘‘Mexican Cartoons: Project Pedro,’’ folder 4, mprp, narg 306 (mpsrb). 65. ‘‘Report on Story Usage, Mexican Newsreels,’’ usis–Mexico City to usia, January 6, 1960, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 66. ‘‘Amendment No. 6, Agreement IA-2428, ‘Project Pedro,’ ’’ August 11, 1958, 5–6; ‘‘30 September 1958 Agreement between usia and R. K. Tompkins y Asociados,’’ sd-foia. In addition to his work in Mexico, Rathvon supervised covertly funded film production in Europe, including a 1956 film, secretly funded by the cia, based on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four ; see Tony Shaw, British Cinema and the Cold War: The State, Propaganda, and Consensus (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), 104–14. 67. Daniel Garcia (ims) to Shelton, November 25, 1958, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sdfoia. 68. ‘‘Motion Pictures: Newsreel Guidance,’’ usis-Mexico, October 9, 1958, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 69. ‘‘Project Pedro: Quarterly Progress Report,’’ R. K. Tompkins, November 14, 1958, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 70. Shelton to McDermott, March 23, 1959, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 71. Shelton to Rathvon, April 20, 1959, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 72. McDermott to Shelton, April 6, 1959, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 73. Rathvon to Shelton, September 10, 1959, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 74. ‘‘Motion Pictures: clasa Newsreel,’’ McDermott (usis–Mexico City) to usia, August 14, 1958, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 75. Agustín, Tragicomedia mexicana, 176. 76. ‘‘Motion Pictures: el mundo en marcha Newsreel,’’ usis–Mexico City to usia, September 8, 1958, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 77. ‘‘Motion Pictures: el mundo en marcha Newsreel,’’ usis–Mexico City to usia, September 26, 1958, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia; El mundo en marcha 56 was the a√ected issue. 78. Daniel Garcia (ims) to Shelton, November 25, 1958, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sdfoia. 79. ‘‘Mundo en Marcha Newsreel,’’ Robert E. Macaulay to McDermott, August 22, 1960, sd-foia. 80. Rathvon to Shelton, May 5, 1959, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 81. McDermott to Shelton, April 6, 1959, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 82. ‘‘Report on Story Usage, Mexican Newsreels,’’ usis–Mexico City to usia, January 6, 1960, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 83. ‘‘Newsreel Contract Amendment,’’ McDermott to Ambassador Hill, February 17, 1959, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 84. El mundo en marcha, 21, 55, 153, 155, 156, 157, narg 306 (mpsrb).

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85. Noticiario clasa, 810, 816 narg 306 (mpsrb). 86. El mundo en marcha, 109 narg 306 (mpsrb). 87. Noticiario clasa, 830 narg 306 (mpsrb). 88. Robert A. Divine, The Sputnik Challenge: Eisenhower’s Response to the Soviet Satellite (New York: Oxford University Press), 1993. 89. El mundo en marcha, 149, 152. 90. Noticiario clasa, 823. 91. Noticiario clasa, 800, 802, 806. 92. On the presence of race in U.S. foreign policy in this period, see Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), chap. 7; Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). 93. El mundo en marcha, 130, narg 306 (mpsrb). 94. El mundo en marcha, 55, 56, 57, 140, narg 306 (mpsrb). 95. El mundo en marcha, 28, narg 306 (mpsrb). 96. El mundo en marcha, 38, narg 306 (mpsrb). 97. ‘‘Project Pedro,’’ Frank Tribbe to Irwin (General Counsel’s O≈ce) October 12, 1961, 1, ‘‘Mexican Cartoons: Project Pedro’’ folder 2, mprp, narg 306 (mpsrb). 98. El mundo en marcha, 140, narg 306 (mpsrb). 99. ‘‘Project Pedro,’’ Frank Tribbe (General Counsel’s O≈ce) to Irwin (igc), July 26, 1961, 2, ‘‘Mexican Cartoons: Project Pedro,’’ folder 2, mprp, narg 306 (mpsrb), underlining in original. 100. Ibid., 2–3. 101. McDermott to John P. McKnight, Jr. (usia Assistant Director, Latin America), September 27, 1960, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 102. McDermott to McKnight, July 5, 1961, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 103. McDermott to McKnight, August 4, 1961; McKnight to McDermott, August 11, 1961, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 104. ‘‘Newsreel Project,’’ McDermott to Thomas Mann, July 18, 1961, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 105. ‘‘Termination Settlement Agreement,’’ September 30, 1961; Murrow to usis– Mexico City, September 26, 1961, usia Acc. 66a274, Box 84, sd-foia. 106. Stephen 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); Michael E. Latham. Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and ‘‘Nation Building’’ in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 107. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964).

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108. Said, ‘‘Secular Interpretation, the Geographical Element and the Methodology of Imperialism,’’ in After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 34. 109. Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). 110. For an analysis of how Bush II foreign policy perpetuates a longer twentiethcentury history of imperial designs, see Walter LaFeber, ‘‘The Bush Doctrine,’’ Diplomatic History 26, no. 4 (fall 2002). On U.S. mass communication and 9/11, see LaFeber, Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism, new and expanded edition (New York: Norton, 2002), chapter 7. On Al-Hurra and U.S. foreign policy, see Seth Fein, ‘‘The Medium Shapes the Message,’’ Yale Global Online, May 7, 2004, http://yaleglobal.yale.edu. On the Pentagon’s use of U.S. contractors, such as the Lincoln Group, to arrange print and audiovisual placement of Washington-made mass media, see Je√ Gerth, ‘‘Military’s Information War Is Vast and Often Secretive,’’ New York Times, December 11, 2005. Greg Grandin has recently shown the instrumental links between U.S. imperialism in Latin America at the end of the twentieth century and in the Middle East at the outset of the twenty-first; see Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006). 111. See, for example, ‘‘U.S.: Nascent Telesur to Be Countered by U.S. Broadcasts,’’ Latin American Weekly Report, July 26, 2005. 112. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998) 18; see also Seth Fein, ‘‘Culture across Borders in the Americas,’’ History Compass (2003), http://www.history-compass.com/ Pilot/northam/NthAm — CulturesArticle.htm. 113. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Di√erence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

ERIC ZOLOV

¡Cuba sí, Yanquis no! The Sacking of the Instituto Cultural México–Norteamericano in Morelia, Michoacán, 1961

On April 18, 1961, one day after a U.S.-sponsored invasion force landed on the shores of Playa Girón, Cuba, in what was ultimately a failed e√ort to topple Fidel Castro’s regime, the Instituto Cultural México–Norteamericano in Morelia, Michoacán, was ransacked and its contents set ablaze by an angry group of several hundred high-school-age student protesters, mostly from the nearby prestigious Colegio de San Nicolás de Hidalgo. This was not the only, nor by any means the largest, protest in Mexico against the United States during the Bay of Pigs invasion. That same day in Mexico City, tens of thousands of demonstrators converged on the downtown square (Zócalo), while in Guadalajara, Puebla, and other provincial cities, pro-Cuban solidarity demonstrations similarly erupted.∞ Across the country, students, teachers, intellectuals, workers, and leftist political leaders angrily denounced the invasion. With accusations of direct involvement by the United States, ‘‘¡Cuba sí, yanquis no!’’ became the battle cry adopted by protesters everywhere. The intensity of this solidarity with Cuba—and the equally intense and often violent reactions triggered in response—indicated more than simply a struggle over the outcome of the Cuban revolution per se. Rather, the explosive conflicts triggered by the Bay of Pigs invasion reflected the release of mounting social and ideological tensions brewing within Mexican society. These tensions were directly related to actions taken by President López Mateos, whose coming to power coincided with the rise of Fidel Castro at the start of 1959 and whose policies and political rhetoric reflected a classic ‘‘zigzag’’ approach that encompassed both a strident nationalism and systematic repression. The Cuban revolution exacerbated and ultimately helped crystallize those ideological tensions, though it by no means ‘‘caused them,’’ as many observers in the United States would later charge. Thus the ‘‘battle for Cuba’’ that erupted in the spring of 1961 was fraught with violence and emotion precisely because it symbolized Mexico’s

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own ideological battleground as the nation disputed the proper course of its revolutionary project, the nature of its leadership role vis-à-vis Latin America, and its relations with the United States at a decisive moment in the Cold War. This essay revisits the protests in Morelia and looks to situate the events surrounding the sacking of the Cultural Institute within the broader political and cultural context of relations between Mexico, Cuba, the United States, and the Soviet Union during this period. For reasons of space, the scope of the present discussion cannot address the full complexities of this historical narrative. A full retelling, for example, would require a broader analysis of the role of the ‘‘new’’ political forces that emerged (on both the right and the left), largely in response to the impact of the Cuban revolution on Mexican political thought. It would also require a careful discussion of the intricate diplomatic balancing act carried out by the Mexican government, which simultaneously defended the Cuban revolution’s right to exist while operating in tandem with U.S. security concerns to suppress and keep track of pro-Cuban activities within Mexico. And it would necessitate a fuller accounting of the strategic goals and tactical decisions made by the Soviet Union, which also played a delicate balancing act in its relations with Mexico during this period. Because the story takes place in Michoacán, the ‘‘cradle of cardenismo,’’ a central aspect of this discussion concerns the role of former president Lázaro Cárdenas, whose ‘‘resurrection’’ as a vocal advocate of the Left was tied directly, though not solely, to events in Cuba. The revolutionary clout wielded by Cárdenas, both within Mexico and throughout Latin America, dramatically raised the stakes of the o≈cial government party’s—Partido Revolucionario Institucional (pri)—position with respect to Cuba. Indeed, Cárdenas’s outspoken presence should be recognized as a leading reason why Mexico bucked U.S. diplomatic pressures in refusing to sever relations with the island. By 1961, his name was publicly shouted alongside the ‘‘Vivas!’’ exclaimed for Cuba and Castro, and throughout Mexico, if not all of Latin America, Cárdenas’s name once more become synonymous with the defense of revolutionary principles and a defiance of U.S. policies toward the region. Thus while for many observers in the United States, the attack on the Cultural Institute signified the manifestation of Soviet-backed subversion—exposing the ‘‘vulnerability’’ of Mexico to Communist takeover—for the Mexican government what was at stake was the containment not of Communism but of cardenismo. By exploring the unfolding logic behind the assault on the institute and o≈cial responses to the attack, we can gain a much fuller appreciation for the ways in which the Cold War was manifested as a struggle for the ongoing

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process of a centralization of authority within Mexico, and the containment of competing nationalist discourses. Containing cardenismo coincided with U.S. Cold War security concerns, despite the fact that the United States viewed the nature of the threat through the strategic lens of global struggle. Mexican Nationalism and the Defense of the Cuban Revolution The inextricable connection that would forever link Mexico with the fate of the Cuban revolution came when Lázaro Cárdenas made the historic decision to attend Cuba’s first July 26 celebration in the summer of 1959, just seven months after Castro’s triumph. Appearing on the podium next to Castro—in a photo that would become a celebrated image for the Left, and a vilified one for the Right in the years ahead—Cárdenas underscored the fundamental similarity between the two nations’ revolutionary processes. ‘‘The agrarian reform in Mexico received the most virulent attacks from the enemies of anti-feudal struggle,’’ Cárdenas reminded his audience. Now Cuba, in attempting to implement its own agrarian reforms, was experiencing a ‘‘defamation that has contributed to the creation of a black legend’’ against Castro’s revolutionary government. ‘‘Their tactic is not new,’’ Cárdenas stressed with evident reference not only to the nation’s former ruling class but to foreign economic interests more generally. ‘‘The adversaries of social reforms used it many years ago against our country.’’ In words that resounded throughout Mexico and beyond, he added, ‘‘We Mexicans know well that revolutions are not imported or exported. We respect the integrity of emancipation movements in other countries, as we have asked for respect for the Mexican Revolution.’’≤ Notably, Cárdenas also summoned the image and language of Good Neighbor diplomacy, quoting Franklin Roosevelt’s policy of ‘‘mutual respect.’’ Latin American nations had the ‘‘right and capacity to live freely and independently, without intervention nor even o≈cial advisement from our [the United States’] part.’’≥ These words ‘‘from the great Northamerican citizen,’’ Cárdenas reminded his audience, ‘‘constitute a testimony and historical commitment.’’∂ In fact, despite his forceful language when speaking alongside Castro, Cárdenas had been careful not to impugn the United States directly. The U.S. ambassador to Cuba, Philip Bonsal, himself found little in the speech to condemn. In a meeting with the former Mexican president shortly afterward, Bonsal noted that Cárdenas ‘‘spoke favorably of the present state of U.S.–Mexican relations and expressed friendly statements toward [U.S.] Ambassador [to Mexico, Robert] Hill.’’ Bonsal further reported that Cárdenas ‘‘expressed appropriately anti-Communist sentiments’’ and quoted him as saying ‘‘that it was essen-

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tial that the peoples of Latin America have the closest and most cooperative relations with the United States, especially in view of the critical state of world a√airs.’’∑ Regarding Cárdenas’s evident support of the Cuban revolution, Bonsal excused these actions by stating somewhat condescendingly that ‘‘as an elderly revolutionary [he] is inclined to take a fatherly attitude toward the foibles, excesses, and mistakes of his younger contemporaries here.’’∏ Bonsal’s remarks, however, failed to anticipate the repercussions of Cárdenas’s trip to Cuba on the Mexican public, as well as for Latin Americans more generally. As ‘‘an elderly revolutionary,’’ Cárdenas had bestowed legitimacy on Castro as the unassailable leader of Cuba’s social transformation. Equally important, by linking Cuba’s battles with those of Mexico, Cárdenas cast himself as spokesman of a movement to see through Mexico’s own unfulfilled revolutionary goals. Writing in an issue of el espectador (which featured on its cover the recently shot photograph of Cárdenas alongside Castro), Jaime García Terrés argued: There is no question that our views have been shaken by the certainty that [with Cárdenas’s speech in Havana] one was listening anew, after so many years of pure bureaucracy, of a socially sterile and mechanized politics, to a voice of a man who, conscious of his national importance, has something to say, and he says it far afield from the old diplomatic formulas of mere courtesy, far away from the cautious and static ‘‘realism’’ that our last regimes have defined and nurtured.π

Cárdenas stood firmly and publicly by the Cuban revolution, even as it grew increasingly radical in response to U.S. diplomatic, economic, and eventually military e√orts to undermine it. This position ultimately played an important role in ensuring Mexico’s diplomatic defense of Cuba within the Organization of American States, in open defiance of the United States. In turn, it catalyzed a mounting ideological divide within Mexican society centered not only on the course of Mexico’s own revolutionary process but also on the nature of Mexico’s alliance with the United States, one that emphasized Pan-American solidarity and friendship in the face of mounting U.S. hegemony over the region. During the Bay of Pigs invasion, this ideological divide became an open breach. A Call to Arms The same afternoon that news of the Bay of Pigs invasion reached Mexico, some five thousand students gathered on the main esplanade of the National University (unam) in the nation’s capital to listen as organizers from the Frente Estudiantil de Defensa de la Revolución Cubana (Student Front in Defense of the Cuban Revolution) provided the latest information and read messages of soli-

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darity from around the country. The most significant of those messages was undoubtedly that of Lázaro Cárdenas: ‘‘We summon you,’’ his message said in a highly formalized Spanish, ‘‘to adopt the most energetic attitude in the face of this cowardly aggression by the imperialists, of which the sister republic of Cuba is now victim.’’∫ Coming from the mouth of one of the nation’s most revered leaders of the Mexican revolution, his words amounted to nothing less than marching orders. Certainly everyone was aware of the significance of this historic moment in the struggle for Latin American independence. Cuba’s future, and perhaps Mexico’s as well, hung in the balance. That afternoon, the auditorium at the School of Economics of unam was transformed into a site of pandemonium as more than one thousand students—‘‘some with arms in hand’’—signed up to fight alongside Castro. Elsewhere on campus and at the Instituto Politécnico Nacional (ipn) across the city an additional fifteen hundred students similarly enrolled to fight.Ω Across the country, hundreds of ad hoc recruitment centers sprang up. Loosely a≈liated with the Partido Popular Socialista (headed by Vicente Lombardo Toledano), these groups of volunteers were dubbed the ‘‘Pancho Villa Brigades,’’ invoking the heroic escapades of the only Latin American invasion of the United States.∞≠ The national media soon carried the sensational news that Cárdenas would leave immediately for the island to ‘‘put himself at the orders of the Cuban people.’’∞∞ Though ultimately prevented from doing so by order of President López Mateos, on the following day Cárdenas faced a crowd estimated at more than thirty thousand people in the central square of Mexico City.∞≤ In an impassioned speech lasting over twenty-five minutes, he brought those present to a hushed, respectful silence. ‘‘Cuba does not need foreign forces to defend it,’’ he declared in obvious reference to the fact that his trip—and that of the brigadistas—had been blocked. ‘‘What Cuba urgently needs is the moral support of Mexico and of all Latin America. We must give her that, because Cuba is in the midst of a struggle of great impact for all of the nations of this continent.’’∞≥ Meanwhile, in Morelia, Michoacán, the Instituto Cultural México–Norteamericano had already been ransacked and burned, an unequivocal sign that the battle over the terms of PanAmerican solidarity was very real indeed. The Cultural Institute in Morelia One of seven existing Binational Centers operating in Mexico and funded by the United States Information Service (usis) in 1961, Morelia’s recently established Instituto Cultural México–Norteamericano played an important part in the

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larger strategy of U.S. cultural diplomacy toward Mexico.∞∂ According to the handbook for country public a√airs o≈cers (cpaos, the people assigned by usia to coordinate cultural relations abroad), the principal objectives of the Binational Centers were to facilitate cultural activities ‘‘as a service to the community[,] . . . as a means of strengthening understanding between the United States and the people of the host country,’’ and to ‘‘demonstrate American interest in local culture.’’ The special value of the Binational Centers lies in their status as autonomous, local organizations and in the fact that their boards of directors and memberships include influential nationals. Because of this local sponsorship, the programs of the bnc o√er the cpao an e√ective means of accomplishing certain usis objectives. This is true especially in those areas in which any overt activities connected with foreign governments are viewed with suspicion.∞∑

In Morelia’s case, the Cultural Institute also provided an important counterweight to the radical nationalist discourse emanating from the prestigious Colegio de San Nicolás de Hidalgo and the nearby University of Michoacán. ‘‘There should be a direct potential advantage to the [country] post, such as the existence of an important university nearby, to justify the creation of a bnc,’’ a later handbook states.∞∏ Morelia clearly met these conditions. Echoing the language of Good Neighbor diplomacy, the goals of Morelia’s Cultural Institute were to provide ‘‘educational facilities so that the neighboring countries of Mexico and the United States might better understand one another in terms of culture, customs, and aspirations.’’∞π To this end, the center hosted a variety of events ‘‘such as concerts, expositions, lectures, theatrical productions, ballet, parties, regional dances, conversation club, library ladies club, chess,’’ as well as other activities.∞∫ Its library, located in a room o√ of one corner of the building’s interior patio, boasted over three thousand books and magazines, in addition to a sizable collection of phonographic records. One of the main functions of bncs generally was the teaching of English, and the Cultural Institute was highly regarded within the community for its rigorous Englishlanguage program. It was common, in fact, for the University of Michoacán and the area’s Normal School (also located in Morelia) to ‘‘send their students and instructors to learn [English] there.’’∞Ω Alfonso Espitia, who taught at the Colegio de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, just around the corner from the institute (and where the protesters who later attacked the building originated), spoke highly of the institute’s language classes: ‘‘We used to say that [in secondary school] they taught us ‘Tarzan English,’ you know really primitive. So, if you truly wanted to

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learn English you went to the Institute.’’≤≠ Thus, as the city’s most visible representation of a direct U.S. presence, the Instituto embodied, materially and discursively, a projection of Pan-American cooperation deemed by usis to be integral to the larger goals of Cold War cultural diplomacy: to forge a set of shared cultural reference points that would facilitate a deeper appreciation of how the pursuit of ‘‘liberty’’ motivated U.S. actions throughout the world. In successfully taking on the propagandizing roles envisioned by usis, however, the institute also became a direct target of anti-American protests. Since its founding in 1955, the institute ‘‘had been stoned . . . by the students’’ on various occasions,≤∞ and supporters of the center acknowledged that there was a ‘‘certain resistance’’ by those who feared the institute ‘‘would be utilized as a center for proselytizing and propaganda.’’≤≤ Advocates for the institute later argued that such resistance dissipated as people ‘‘united to give it their support’’ and once the institute’s ‘‘true purposes were seen, that is, that it was dedicated solely and exclusively to the teaching of the English and Spanish languages and to the organization of cultural events, such as concerts, literary discussions, social evenings, admission-free showings of film documentaries open to the public, etc.’’≤≥ Yet it was only natural that cultural activity became coded according to the residents’ perceptions of the United States as a global power. Thus while the goals and purpose of the institute were to create a cultural bridge that would transcend (and heal) political divisions between the United States and Mexico, while laying an ideological foundation for appreciating the logic of U.S. actions internationally, in practice cultural dissemination through the institute was inherently politicized. Student Activism and the Colegio de San Nicolás de Hidalgo As the first European-founded university system in the New World, the Colegio de San Nicolás was originally established in Páztcuaro, Michoacán, in 1540 by the Spanish bishop Vasco de Quiroga. By the end of the sixteenth century, the Colegio had relocated to Valladolid (present-day Morelia), where it remains. Quiroga’s utopian ideas about protecting and educating the region’s indigenous peoples left an important moral imprint, ideas that were transmitted by the Colegio throughout the colonial period. ‘‘He was a product of the Renaissance,’’ recalled Alfonso Espitia about Quiroga and the milieu of the Colegio. ‘‘And that ideology was passed down to us, it was a seed that’s formed us, the ideology called nicolaismo, after Saint Nicolás.’’≤∂ During the nineteenth century the school became identified ‘‘with radical anticlericalism, socially modern ideas, and re-

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lentless nationalism,’’≤∑ values that would continue to influence the school’s ethos in the twentieth century and especially in the postrevolutionary period, when the Colegio played an important role in the reformist projects emanating from the revolution.≤∏ Students were continuously reminded of their duty to uphold the principles of the nation’s Founding Fathers, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla and José María Morelos, both alumni of the Colegio (Hidalgo went on to become the school’s rector as well). As the Colegio’s ‘‘Juramiento Nicolaita’’ (School Oath) emphasized: To be a nicolaita is to carry in one’s heart the spiritual example of struggle [lucha] and sacrifice, that most beautiful lesson given to us by our father mentor, don Miguel Hidalgo, because only he who gives has the right to receive. Because liberty is not implored, but conquered. . . . We swear to work and to fight [luchar] in the vanguard for the people of Mexico, for its liberty and progress, to hold up high and virtuous always the glorious ‘‘nicolaita tradition.’’≤π

Virgilio Pineda Arellano, a student leader at the Colegio in 1961, described the school’s creed: ‘‘The students believed that they were the vanguard of the people,’’ he reflected. ‘‘We always needed to denounce what was wrong with the government and what was happening in the countryside. For example, when the price of corn went down, we were in front of the government plaza and in the streets denouncing it.’’≤∫ This ethos was furthermore su√used with an antiimperialist Boliviarian nationalism, expressed by Espitia as a duty ‘‘to recover a collective sense of hispanidad, and to confront the Monroe Doctrine, Manifest Destiny, the United States.’’≤Ω If the Instituto Cultural was conceived as a vehicle for disseminating a certain vision of Pan-Americanism—one based in Franklin Roosevelt’s discourse of the Good Neighbor, to be sure, but also grounded in the fundamental assumptions of the U.S. role as ‘‘protector’’ of Latin America—the Colegio disseminated a Latin American vision of Pan Americanism, one that emphasized the heroic anti-imperialism of Hidalgo, Bolivar, Martí—and now Castro. Another crucial factor that shaped the historical context for the attack on the Cultural Institute was the deeply rooted, preexisting tensions embedded within Morelian society between religious conservatives and secular nationalists. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, these opposing social forces had often come into open conflict over questions of land, education, health, and other statesponsored reforms. Michoacán was an important battleground during the postrevolutionary period, and the legacy of those battles engendered a body politic that beneath the surface of a consensual revolutionary discourse was in fact still

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highly contested. Martín Tavira, who taught a course on the Mexican revolution ‘‘using the methodology of historical materialism,’’ recalls the ongoing ideological divisions between the socialist-inflected environment of the Colegio and the more conservative social context of Morelia: ‘‘In that period, it was a very conservative society, and, well, we were seen as dangerous communists; they said we were the enemies of religion and that we were aligned with Lucifer.’’≥≠ The Cuban Revolution in Morelia Similar to what had occurred in other provincial capitals throughout the country after 1959, Morelia became an important center for activity in support of the Cuban revolution. ‘‘We viewed the Cuban revolution as the hope and solution for the problems of Latin America,’’ noted Pineda, echoing a sentiment felt across Mexico and, indeed, Latin America as a whole.≥∞ ‘‘I was really young at the time,’’ Martín Tavira reflected, explaining the energetic response set in motion by the Cuban revolution: There was a lot of political organizing going on throughout the university, which was very politicized. We went to conferences, roundtables, get-togethers, meetings, et cetera, all in order to defend the Cuban revolution. We were very passionate defenders of the Cuban revolution. . . . [Morelia] was one of the most active centers for all of this. There was a lot of information, meetings, and of course in the university we were educating ourselves about the revolution every day. We organized discussions, we argued, and there were conferences, both here and outside of Morelia. At that time . . . before the invasion at the Bay of Pigs, Fidel Castro hadn’t yet declared the revolution as socialist; we still saw the Mexican revolution as democratic and anti-imperialist. We never spoke of the [Cuban revolution] as socialist: it was a revolution to liberate Cuba from foreign monopolies, and a democratic revolution so that the Cuban people had liberty. We spoke about how Cuba . . . was similar to what had happened during the Mexican revolution. But to label the Cuban revolution as communist, well that was a baseless insult.≥≤

Alfonso Espitia further elaborated on the cultural climate that emerged in the context of the Cuban revolution: ‘‘Everyone sympathized with Cuba. We knew the songs of Carlos Puebla, the troubadour of the revolution, by heart. . . . We read Cuban poetry, Cuban literature; we got together to read the First Declaration of Havana.’’≥≥ Proud of their state’s heroic contributions to Mexico’s revolutionary identity during the 1920s and 1930s, and emboldened by Lázaro Cárdenas’s openly criti-

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cal stance against U.S. imperialism in the hemisphere, a delegation of over three thousand students, professors, workers, and peasants headed to Mexico City to participate in the Conferencia Latinoamericana por la Soberanía Nacional, la Emancipación Económica y la Paz (Latin American Conference for National Sovereignty, Economic Emancipation, and Peace) held in Mexico City from March 5 to March 8, 1961. Organized by the World Peace Movement (a group the United States viewed as a ‘‘communist front’’) and referred to at one point as the ‘‘Bandung Latinoamericana,’’ the meeting was headed by three prominent Latin Americans: Lázaro Cárdenas, Domingo Vellasco (Brazil), and Alberto T. Casella (Argentina).≥∂ Pineda, who had traveled to Cuba the year before as an o≈cial delegate to the First International Organization of Youth, led a group of over one hundred students from various divisions of the University of Michoacán and the Colegio. Tavira headed yet another group of students from the youth organization of the Partido Popular Socialista.≥∑ Although the national press imposed (or, more likely, was instructed to carry out) a virtual information blackout with respect to the conference, in Morelia the event made front-page news. The city’s two principal newspapers—El Heraldo Michoacano and La Voz de Michoacán—provided extensive coverage of events and of the role of local activists, including Pineda and Tavira. ‘‘As a whole,’’ wrote Horacio Quiñones in La Voz de Michoacán, ‘‘it can be said that never in history has such a numerous and brilliant group of continental talent been assembled.’’≥∏ Casella, Argentina’s minister of finance and former rector of the University of La Plata, was quoted as saying that the conference ‘‘will give the world, and especially the new government of the United States, a realistic version of the thinking of Latin American countries.’’≥π Describing ‘‘an enthusiasm simply without parallel,’’ where musical groups and ‘‘posters filled with the most diverse slogans’’ provided a festive ambience, another reporter from La Voz de Michoacán appeared genuinely overawed as he sought to convey the powerful emotional and progressive spirit of what clearly seemed a transcendental event: ‘‘The shouts, the cheers, the frequent acclamations impregnated the atmosphere with ‘something’ that is not easy to summarize.’’≥∫ Without question, the emotional and historical ties that bound Mexico, as host of the conference, and Cuba, as the obvious model for Latin America’s future, animated the delegates and provided the event with an underlying axis of solidarity that permeated the meetings. This became apparent on the first day, when flags of the di√erent Latin American nations were paraded during the opening ceremonies. As the flags of Mexico and Cuba passed, ‘‘one heard the resounding and imposing chants of ‘Cuba sí, yanquis no’ ’’ and even ‘‘México sí,

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yanquis no.’’≥Ω The leading role taken by Lázaro Cárdenas as organizer of the conference further highlighted these ties. Describing the spontaneous standing ovation given as he entered to inaugurate the events, La Voz de Michoacán noted that Cárdenas ‘‘has converted into the world’s paladin of human togetherness.’’∂≠ The Cold War, as far as the delegates were concerned, had been forced on Latin America by the United States, which had introduced ‘‘military pacts [that] have burdened our nations with the weight of military arms while placing limits on our sovereignty and economic development.’’∂∞ In an e√ort to build on the energy generated by the events and break through this silence, Cárdenas embarked on a speaking tour from March 14 to 20 that took him to four important states—Querétaro, Guanajuato, Jalisco, and Michoacán—where he helped lead ‘‘meetings and gatherings at which he spoke of the successes of the Cuban Revolution while harshly criticizing the errors and deviations of the Mexican Revolution.’’∂≤ Significantly, he timed his tour to end in Morelia to commemorate the twenty-third anniversary of Mexico’s expropriation of foreign oil companies in 1938. Throughout his tour, Cárdenas spoke forcibly about the need to generate a movement to implement the goals of the recent conference, while denouncing Mexico’s ‘‘monopoly press [prensa grande]’’ for failing to carry the messages of the conference. By reiterating ‘‘a virile defense of the Cuban people,’’ he also underscored in the public mind-set the direct relationship between Mexico, Cuba, and his own leadership.∂≥ A quarter-page announcement of his arrival in Morelia featured a drawing in profile of Cárdenas looking down benevolently on Latin America: ‘‘Cárdenas, who today has been converted into the leader of Latin America, initiates works toward the improvement of all of the Spanish-speaking countries who long for their development, national sovereignty, and peace,’’ wrote the Heraldo Michoacano.∂∂ Several days later, Cárdenas conducted an impromptu interview with a reporter from La Voz de Michoacán at a hotel in Morelia. Accompanied by a small cohort of members from the recent conference, including a number of Cuban delegates, Cárdenas critiqued the recently announced Alliance for Progress as ‘‘ill-timed, since the nations of Latin America have awoken and do not want help but comprehension and equal treatment.’’∂∑ Cárdenas attacked the underlying anti-Communist discourse of U.S. policy toward Latin America, arguing that ‘‘anti-Communism has been a phrase . . . developed to fight against any popular or liberation movement.’’∂∏ Moreover, he emphasized that the full program of the Mexican revolution needed to be implemented ‘‘to carry it through to its ultimate consequences.’’ Nevertheless, he stressed that this should be done nonviolently—for

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the contrary ‘‘would mean the destruction of all that has been created in these last fifty years of Revolution.’’ In sum, Cárdenas’s visit to Morelia tied together the three central themes that set the stage for the attack on the institute less than three weeks later: Mexico’s ties of solidarity to Cuba; the imperialist intentions of U.S. policy toward Latin America; and Cárdenas’s own role as a leader of the movement to ‘‘liberate’’ Latin America—Mexico included—from outside and oligarchic domination. For the students and professors of the Colegio San Nicolás de Hidalgo, their duty to defend the Cuban revolution was fully understood. While Cárdenas reminded Mexicans of their own, still unfulfilled revolutionary aspirations, the heroic unfolding of the Cuban revolution provided a mirror into which young Mexicans were able to gaze and relive, however vicariously, their nation’s history of anti-imperialist struggle. For young political activists, especially, Cuba was the inspiration to imagine a romanticized future of revolutionary possibility for Mexico and beyond. ‘‘The fact that Castro was only thirtythree years when he took power and that most of the leadership was so young, well, that was clearly an inspiration for us,’’∂π Virgilio Pineda later explained. Cárdenas had legitimized that imaginary by explicitly drawing comparisons between the two nations’ revolutionary processes. Thus, in e√ect, not to defend Castro and the Cuban revolution was to go against Cárdenas himself and all that he stood for; it was to condone the ossification of Mexico’s own revolutionary process. When the Cuban revolution appeared threatened with annihilation during the Bay of Pigs, there could be no question regarding where the progressive youth of Morelia—and the nation—must stand. ‘‘For us,’’ Pineda said, ‘‘it was imperative to defend the Cuban revolution and Castro at all cost.’’∂∫ The Sacking of the Cultural Institute Word of the invasion at the Bay of Pigs spread quickly in Morelia. ‘‘Of course we heard everything by radio, and the conservative forces were saying that the Cuban revolution was finished,’’ Tavira remembered.∂Ω On the evening of April 17, a meeting of the entire academic community was held at the Casa del Estudiante Nocolaita, the cultural extension of the Colegio de San Nicolás located two blocks from the Binational Center. A series of planned actions were agreed on, and a recruitment center was established to register local brigadistas.∑≠ By the end of the evening, a ‘‘Sociedad de Amigos de Cuba’’ had also been created, headed by Angel Baltázar Barajas (leader of the Federación de

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Maestros Universitarios), Raúl Galván (leader of the Consejo Estudiante Nicolaíta), Virgilio Pineda (head of the Federación de Estudiantes Universitarios), and two professors—Ramón Martínez Ocaranza and Alberto Lozano Vázquez.∑∞ By all accounts, Morelia that night was brewing with political activity. According to a report filed by an agent of Mexico’s Dirección General de Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales (dgips), beginning around 8 p.m. a group of students from the Colegio took to the streets of downtown Morelia ‘‘shouting ‘vivas’ for Castro Ruz and General Lázaro Cárdenas.’’∑≤ Evidently belonging to a U.S. tourist, a car with Ohio license plates parked in front of the Hotel Virrey de Mendoza ‘‘was stoned.’’∑≥ That same evening, Eugene Kenney, the American executive director of the Cultural Institute, witnessed a group of students painting antiAmerican slogans on the sidewalk; in an ominous sign for Kenney of local authorities’ indi√erence, he later noted that nearby ‘‘policemen in uniform watched but did not interfere.’’∑∂ More significantly, Kenney also claimed to have received the first of what would be several direct warnings: ‘‘Professors at the University of San Nicolás were making plans for an assault on the Institute.’’∑∑ The following morning, the front page of La Voz de Michoacán featured the by-now-famous photograph of Cárdenas and Castro from 1959, over the caption ‘‘Once again they will be together today in Havana’’ (figure 1).∑∏ Describing Cuba as ‘‘attacked by yanqui imperialism,’’ the newspaper highlighted in glowing terms the course of events that had unfolded at the Casa del Estudiante the night before; elsewhere the paper listed the address of the local recruitment o≈ce for brigadistas. Morelia’s second news daily, El Heraldo Michoacano, slightly to the right ideologically of La Voz de Michoacán, likewise publicized in not unfavorable terms news of that day’s planned protests. Featured on the front page was the text of a letter written by the Federación de Maestros Universitarios de Michoacán, which read in part: ‘‘We assert that the Cuban people’s revolutionary struggle has never separated from the common destiny of the nations of Latin America, whose progressive development demands as an essential condition the total liquidation of imperialism.’’∑π Neither paper carried any mention of a rumored attack on the Cultural Institute. The streets of Morelia were already filled with the staccato chanting of ‘‘¡Cuba sí, yanquis no!’’ as ‘‘student brigades ran through the neighborhoods, streets and markets of the city, improvising small meetings at which they explained to the public the problem of Cuba.’’∑∫ At 11 a.m. that morning an overflowing, boisterous crowd of several hundred students and professors (one report cited ‘‘thousands’’) congregated in the interior patio of the Colegio to constitute a General Assembly, as called for by the meeting the night before. Among the announcements was one by Baltázar

1. On the day of the Bay of Pigs invasion, former president Lázaro Cárdenas publicly stated that he would go to Cuba to fight alongside Fidel Castro in defense of the revolution. Anticipating this action, La Voz de Michoacán ran this earlier famous photograph from Cárdenas’s historic visit to the island in July 1959. This time, however, Cárdenas was prevented from going to Cuba by order of President Adolfo López Mateos, who similarly blocked e√orts by the popularly organized ‘‘Pancho Villa Brigades.’’ La Voz de Michoacán, April 18, 1961.

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Barajas of the Federación de Maestros stating that the faculty union ‘‘has decided to contribute to the cause of Fidel Castro with a day of pay.’’∑Ω Shortly thereafter, in an indication that a tectonic shift was occurring in terms of PanAmerican sentiment, Ramón Martínez Ocaranza, a poet and professor of literature at the Colegio, openly denounced the United States as ‘‘caballeros de la muerte,’’∏≠ literally ‘‘horsemen of death,’’ but a phrase that has several layers of meaning in Spanish. For example, caballero is also the term for ‘‘gentleman,’’ and the phrase itself no doubt evoked a certain apocalyptic imagery. One of the final speakers that morning was Nicandro Mendoza, who would later be singled out as a ‘‘leader’’ in the attack on the Cultural Institute. Mendoza’s biography as a student activist was already well established: as former head of the Federación Nacional de Estudiantes Técnicos, he had led the student strike at the Instituto Politécnico Nacional in Mexico City during 1955–56, for which he was imprisoned on charges of ‘‘disolución social.’’ Following his release from the Lecumberri penitentiary in late 1958, he was in e√ect ‘‘exiled’’ to Morelia, where he resumed his medical studies at the University of Michoacán.∏∞ According to El Heraldo Michoacano, on the day of the General Assembly, Mendoza arrived at the Colegio ‘‘in the company of a large contingent from the School of Medicine and related organizations, hoisting the Cuban flag.’’∏≤ La Voz de Michoacán provides a further description of Mendoza’s actions, noting that his dramatic entrance was accompanied ‘‘by harsh words’’ in which Mendoza ‘‘denounced the North American government and invited everyone present to take to the streets to explain to the public the meaning of struggle [lucha], which in these moments Cuba faced in its fight against imperialism and traitors.’’∏≥ Mendoza has admitted to being present at the meeting, as well as to speaking to the crowd. ‘‘But that was all: I gave my point of view [only briefly] because I was in a di≈cult situation [because of the terms of my exile]. Then the kids, they did their thing.’’∏∂ According to Mendoza, following his presentation, he left the Colegio and went home. When the assembly broke up, however, many of those present flooded into the streets and quickly marched the short distance to the Cultural Institute. It was 12:10 p.m. Morning classes had finished at the institute, and the building was mostly empty. Several Mexican sta√ members, two visiting U.S. citizens (Norvelle Sannebeck, a retired Foreign Service o≈cer, and his wife), Kenney and his wife, and an eight-year-old child were all that remained inside. Outside, a throng of students—‘‘the majority . . . of secondary-school age’’∏∑ —had gathered, many ‘‘armed with every-day implements,’’∏∏ which a U.S. Embassy report later identified as including ‘‘long lengths of iron pipe and cans of gasoline.’’∏π They began

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shattering windows and pounding on the entrance ‘‘to the shout of ‘Cuba sí, yanquis no!’ ’’∏∫ Within minutes, a group broke through the baroque wooden doors and entered the building. A portrait of President Kennedy hanging in the entranceway was taken down and trampled, ‘‘as he is singled out for being responsible for the invasion of Cuba,’’ explained La Voz de Michoacán without apology on the following day.∏Ω An American flag was also set on fire, prompting a brief altercation between a passing U.S. national and a group of students.π≠ Moving beyond the destruction of Kennedy’s picture and the burning of the flag, the mob proceeded to liquidate the institute’s cultural resources, in particular its prized book, record, and film collection. These aspects of the institute embodied its most cherished ideal: that cultural relations would solidify a foundation of Pan-American friendship. Destroying these cultural objects was thus a powerfully symbolic act that underscored the desire by protesters to purge Morelian society of its ‘‘good neighborly’’ association with the United States, which the invasion of Cuba had clearly desecrated. Two massive bonfires were formed, one in the street in front of the institute and the other in the building’s interior courtyard: In bonfires fueled by the assortment of items, there were metal desks, typewriters, a film projector, tape recorder, microphone, sound amplifier, speakers, bookshelves, books, desk-chairs, tables, paper archives, phonographic records, 16mm films, and other objects. One unidentified student rescued the projector and brought it to the School of Fine Arts [in front of the Institute]. Another student, witnessing this, took it back and threw it into the fire.π∞

This last act of retrieval and return is especially striking, for while one student apparently recognized the irrationality of destroying a piece of equipment that might be salvaged, he (or she?) was simultaneously reproached by another protester who insisted on the very rationality of the cultural cleansing. The institute was not looted; it was cleansed through violence. Kenney, who was rumored to be a cia spy (a charge impossible to prove one way or the other), became a special target of this desire to purge.π≤ When a group of students came upon the newly furnished quarters used by Kenney and his wife as an apartment in the rear of the institute, they unleashed their anger by ‘‘turning over beds, mattresses, and bureaus, flipping the gas stove, shattering glass, and causing other destruction.’’π≥ The executive director and other occupants of the institute reportedly fled by ‘‘making their way through the roof to a neighboring house.’’ ‘‘Only this method of escape prevented serious physical harm to them,’’ the U.S. Embassy report later concluded.π∂ Not mentioned in the

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report, however, was the fact that the students had been somewhat discriminating in their assault on personal property. Thus El Heraldo Michoacano pointed out that when confronted by several Mexican employees, ‘‘they persuaded the students not to destroy individuals’ property and that which didn’t belong to the Institute.’’π∑ The attack on the institute had taken less than fifteen minutes. By the time the army arrived, the students had dispersed down the center streets of the city, some in pursuit of the American who had tried to take back the U.S. flag, others in the direction of a local park. A crowd of local residents, alarmed by the sight of the institute in flames, quickly gathered to help extinguish the fires that threatened to engulf the entire building. That evening a massive crowd of students and professors departed from the Colegio, this time to converge on the city’s central square. La Voz de Michoacán described the composition of this crowd as augmented by ‘‘several hundred workers and city employees,’’ as well as ‘‘campesinos and factory workers.’’π∏ ‘‘Amongst those present,’’ El Heraldo Michoacano noted, ‘‘students, both males and females, roused the crowd with cheers and well-known chants such as ‘Cuba sí, yanquis no.’ ’’ππ Addressing the multitude, Martínez Ocaranza, the professor of literature whose visceral words lashing out at the United States had helped set the tone for the assault on the institute earlier in the day, once more summoned language that aimed to annihilate the premise of Pan-American cooperation. In an infamous phrase immortalized in poetic verse, Ocaranza lashed out at the United States as a raza maldita—a cursed race. Ocaranza had written a poem, ‘‘Raza Maldita,’’ the day before, ‘‘motivated by the North American attempt to invade Cuba, and dedicated to [the Cuban poet] Nicolás Guillén.’’π∫ Ocaranza would later note that it was directly influenced by Rubén Darío’s famous ‘‘Oda a Roosevelt,’’ itself written in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, when U.S. hegemony over Latin America became increasingly manifest.πΩ As director of the Soviet Union’s own ‘‘Cultural Institute’’ in Morelia, Ocaranza made little e√ort to hide his embrace of Communism and his explicit ties with the Soviet Union (where he would later travel to receive medical treatment). Yet as Tavira recalls, in 1961 Ocaranza ‘‘didn’t have political influence anymore; he was simply a respected professor. The students liked him, they respected him.’’∫≠ Unfortunately it has been impossible thus far to locate a surviving copy of the poem itself, but its tenor and subject matter quickly became a source of controversy. El Heraldo Michoacano singled out the poem in an article about the day’s events by noting: ‘‘In grotesque fashion, Ramón Martínez Ocaranza read a composition he called ‘poetry’ . . . and that alluded to the North American

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people in especially denigrating terms, which brought him applause from a certain number of those present.’’∫∞ Martín Tavira, who had spoken onstage with Ocaranza that evening, further recalled the incident: Ocaranza read a few verses, which turned out to become quite celebrated. That’s because he said, and who knows—he was quite shaken up, enraged [by the invasion]— but in one verse he referred to the United States as ‘Children of dirty pigs’ [Hijos de puerca en chiquero] and each verse ended with ‘Stu . . . pid!’ [Men . . . so!]. . . . There was a lot of criticism because some people said that the whole idea of ‘razas malditas’ wasn’t exactly a progressive Marxist position. It was more racial: Why ‘raza’ and why ‘maldita’? There aren’t any ‘cursed races’; there was North American imperialism, and that was something that didn’t have anything to do with the North American people.∫≤

For his vitriol and Communist a≈liations, Ocaranza would later be singled out as an instigator and Soviet coconspirator in the attack on the institute. The evening’s demonstration finally ended around 8 p.m. with student leaders urging the audience to sign up ‘‘to fight for Castro in Cuba.’’∫≥ It had been a long day, exhilarating and victorious for some, destructive and menacing for others. Kenney, for one, had furtively left town with his wife on a second-class bus en route to Guadalajara.∫∂ Although no further violence occurred, ‘‘rumors of threats against American nationals continued to circulate in the city.’’∫∑ Interspersed with the celebratory news that the mercenary forces at Playa Girón had been defeated, Cuban state radio broadcast news about the Bay of Pigs protests in Mexico and the sacking of Morelia’s Cultural Institute, hailed in Cuba as victories against yanqui imperialism. The broadcast, which was widely heard in Mexico, validated for many the idea that Mexico’s own revolutionary spirit was alive and well.∫∏ The Ensuing Investigation A scathing U.S. Embassy investigation into the attack on the Cultural Institute highlighted two alarming security issues. The first was that local police and military protection of the institute had been utterly lacking, while local political authorities appeared inexplicably sympathetic to the protesters themselves. The second was the discovery that o≈cials from the Soviet Embassy had in fact been present in Morelia the night before and had evidently met with local Communists involved in the attack the following day. Had there in fact been a broader conspiracy at work, despite the appearance of the attack as a spontaneous pro-

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test of U.S. actions in Cuba? For many in the United States, including at the highest levels of authority, this appeared to be the case. Moreover, the apparent tolerance of such ‘‘Communist activity’’ by provincial political figures tied to the ruling pri raised troubling concerns about the commitment of Mexico as a Cold War ally. From the perspective of the regime in Mexico City, on the other hand, the question was less one of Soviet subversion than of confronting the dangers posed by an unchecked movimiento cardenista. Ultimately, although their interpretation of the causes of unrest di√ered, the two governments shared a fundamental goal: to strengthen the powers of Mexico’s central political authority and security apparatus. Finding a Soviet conspiracy was thus a highly suitable solution for both sides. The direct attack on U.S. citizens and property (the building was technically registered under Kenney’s name) prompted an investigation by the Protection and Welfare O≈ce of the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. Led by the twenty-nineyear-old vice consul Diego Asencio, the team arrived in Morelia a few days later, where they encountered an atmosphere still rife with protest and anti-American sentiment.∫π As Asencio recently recounted in an interview with the author: When we arrived [in Morelia], since I was there to protect American citizens I figured I better arrive sort of openly, and I went in and registered at one of the local hotels. And I would say within about one-half hour or an hour [we] started receiving threatening phone calls. In fact, one of the things that they were saying was that there was going to be a demonstration the next day in the town square and they were going to hang me there. This obviously concerned me a bit, and I called on the mayor and told him about this, and he said that he thought that as soon as the United States stopped its internationally provocative acts all this would go away—and suggested I get the hell out of town. Then I went to see the governor and didn’t have much luck. He also suggested it would be a good idea for me to leave. I told him since I was there to look after American citizens that it would hardly be seemly for me to run out of town.

The investigating team’s encounter of indi√erence if not tacit endorsement of anti-American feelings at the highest levels was reinforced in their interview with Kenney, who was adamant that local and federal authorities had failed to protect the institute from the threat of violence or to halt the students once the attack had commenced. ‘‘No help of any kind arrived,’’ Asencio’s report succinctly notes, based on Kenney’s description of events, a point reiterated many times throughout the document.∫∫ According to Kenney, only after his personal secretary ‘‘called her brother who communicated with General Felix Ireta

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[Viveros], Commanding General of the [21st] Military Zone,’’ did federal army forces finally arrive to restore order.∫Ω Kenney also conveyed to Asencio’s team that he had received several advance warnings regarding a probable attack on the institute. This included a visit that same morning by ‘‘two representatives of the Agente del Ministerio Público Federal . . . [who] advised him that they had been told that the Institute would be attacked at noon.’’ As Raymond Leddy, the interim chargé d’a√aires for the U.S. Embassy who submitted Asencio’s report to the State Department, noted: I pointed out [to Mexican Foreign Minister Tello] that police protection had been utterly lacking, although the authorities most certainly knew of the plans, as is evidenced by the visit of two police agents to the Institute two hours before the attack began—as well as by the notorious fact that no such demonstration could occur in the small town of Morelia without the full knowledge of the authorities.Ω≠

The tardy and limited response by the military, moreover, runs counter to a national pattern of increasing use of the army throughout the 1950s to suppress civil protest and unrest.Ω∞ As La Voz de Michoacán later reported, ‘‘Notably, the army acted with completely good sense, avoiding friction with the students and withdrawing [from the area] immediately afterward.’’Ω≤ Equally surprising, despite being publicly identified in the press for their alleged roles in the violence, high-profile figures such as Nicandro Mendoza and Martínez Ocaranza were never arrested. Nor does there appear to have been a general crackdown in the immediate wake of the protests (unlike the repression that was carried out by security forces elsewhere in the country).Ω≥ Several important factors help to explain these seeming contradictions. First was the expressed tradition of revolutionary politics in Michoacán that imbued public discourse and thus placed public o≈cials ‘‘naturally’’ on the side of Cuba during the Bay of Pigs invasion. Despite its relative tranquillity during the armed phase of the Mexican revolution (1910–20), by the 1930s Michoacán epitomized the conflicts as well as utopian goals heralded by the radical wing of the revolution.Ω∂ That Lázaro Cárdenas was directly responsible for pushing these reforms (first as governor, later as president) further entrenched the state’s open identification as the embodiment of revolutionary nationalism. Thus Nicandro Mendoza not only received refuge in Morelia following his release from prison in 1958 but also discovered in Michoacán’s governor at the time, David Franco Rodríguez—himself a close political ally of Cárdenas—a benefactor and protector. In the aftermath of the attack on the Cultural Institute, Franco Rodríguez called on Mendoza to learn of his role in the melee. ‘‘I told him [that I had done]

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nothing,’’ Mendoza recalled in an interview. ‘‘He answered that, in that case I shouldn’t worry, that nothing will happen. . . . He knew me well, since he had brought me to Morelia. He told me that he had given orders to see that the [institute] would be repaired. ‘I’m not going to accuse anyone, and this is a political matter,’ and that was it.’’Ω∑ A second related factor was the nearly sacrosanct position of the Colegio within Michoacán and, especially, Morelian society. The school’s deep historical links to various facets of Mexican national identity, and the fact that it was a nearly universal gateway for social and political advancement within the state, provided an added normative layer of immunity for students and professors that went beyond the legal rights of university autonomy, common to public universities throughout Mexico. Governor Franco Rodríguez, for instance, was a graduate of the Colegio and the university and thus had close ties to the academic and student community. As Tavira suggested, ‘‘He wouldn’t have dared to arrest anyone for [the attack on the institute].’’ To be a ‘‘Nicolaita’’ was an identity not easily forsworn. Perhaps more to the point, the cultural importance of the Colegio was so pervasive that the political costs of repressing student activism would be unduly high for any o≈cial. A third factor was directly related to the continued influence that Cárdenas exerted on Michoacano political culture. As evidenced by the celebratory coverage in the local media of the Conference for National Sovereignty, Economic Liberation, and Peace, hosted by Cárdenas, and the sensationalist coverage of Cárdenas’s position on the Bay of Pigs crisis, the former president wielded tremendous influence over state politics. Unleashing repression against the proCuban demonstrations in Morelia would have been tantamount to condemning Cárdenas’s own defense of Cuba and would have signaled an important rupture with the legacy of cardenismo in Michoacán. That response was still several years away. Once the influence of Cárdenas was curtailed nationally after 1963 there was a brutal unleashing of state repression at the local level, culminating in the army’s takeover of the Colegio and university in 1966 and the imprisonment of numerous activists, including Ocaranza.Ω∏ If the political authorities resisted challenging the student protesters in 1961 for personal and practical reasons, this should not be taken as a sign of the military’s ine√ectiveness, as Asencio himself soon discovered. The army’s regional commander proved more than eager to demonstrate to Asencio that he was both capable and willing to suppress the student-led disorders, if given the proper orders. Confronted with the indi√erence and outward hostility of the governor and other o≈cials, Asencio sought out the military commander (most

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likely Ireta Viveros), whom Asencio described as ‘‘an old Indian, a general who was from the Cárdenas period.’’Ωπ Asencio informed Viveros about the threatening phone call he received after arriving in Morelia—in which the caller said Asencio would be hung by the protesters in the town plaza. In response, the general invited Asencio to have lunch the next day on the plaza itself, reassuring him that ‘‘the Mexican army will be respected.’’ Asencio recalled what happened next: So we went to lunch, and [the protesters] had orators with a pa system damning everything in sight, and after listening to this for a while [the general] said, ‘‘Have you heard enough?’’ And I said, ‘‘I think so.’’ So he had a line of troops that cleared the plaza, and we sat there having lunch by ourselves, which was kinda fun.Ω∫

The political clout exercised by the United States could not have been clearer: although Asencio was but a young vice consul, the local military commander was eager to impress him with a display of the military’s ultimate control over politics. Obviously the military had the capability to repress the protesters but had chosen or, perhaps more accurately, had been instructed not to exercise that capability. The clearest explanation for this is that Michoacán remained a cardenista enclave at the highest political levels, making it less beholden than other states to the central directives of the pri.ΩΩ Undermining Cárdenas’s political influence both nationally and in Michoacán thus became a central goal of the Minister of Gobernación, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, who shortly thereafter gained the pri’s nomination for the 1964 elections (guaranteeing his presidential victory). Unlike López Mateos, Díaz Ordaz did not identify himself with the Cárdenas wing of the ruling party. With less to lose politically, Díaz Ordaz pursued the more ardent supporters of Cárdenas while establishing dominance over Michoacán politics—both of which he did with a vengeance. Finding a Soviet Smoking Gun Establishing a link between the Soviet Union and ‘‘Communist-inspired agitators’’ was a well-established practice used by the Mexican government when it needed to justify political repression of dissidents. As recently as 1959, several o≈cials from the Soviet Embassy had been expelled following accusations of Soviet logistical support for striking Mexican railway workers. Thus finding a Soviet smoking gun in the case of Morelia was a discovery too good to be true— yet how true was it?

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The question of whether or not the assault on the institute was in fact premeditated—and to what extent, if any, the Soviet Embassy was directly involved, as both U.S. and Mexican o≈cials would later assert—remains one of the fascinating, and still unresolved, aspects of the story. What we know of the story is this: On the same evening that the U.S. Embassy team arrived at a local hotel, Asencio received an anonymous phone call instructing him to review the guest registry from another hotel several days earlier. ‘‘And there I discovered the three o≈cers of the Soviet Embassy,’’ Asencio later explained. ‘‘We tore the page out of the registry.’’∞≠≠ Shortly thereafter, the names of the Soviet o≈cers and their alleged connections to local activists were disseminated nationally by Excélsior, whose anti-Communist credentials were by then well established. According to Excélsior, First Secretaries of the Soviet Embassy Yuri Aleksandrov and Yevgeni Bochkov, and a ‘‘non-diplomatic member of the Soviet Embassy,’’ Valentin Bakulin, checked into the Posada Vista Bella on April 17, the night before the attack on the institute.∞≠∞ Although no further substantiation was provided for the claim, the article stated that the three o≈cials were absent from their hotel rooms between 8:30 p.m. and 1:30 a.m., during which time ‘‘the three functionaries met with the brother of a bureaucrat from the state government, and established contact with communist-leaning student leaders, the same ones who sacked and burned [the institute].’’∞≠≤ Nicandro Mendoza was singled out in the article as ‘‘one of the student leaders interviewed by the Russian functionaries.’’∞≠≥ This charge was echoed by El Heraldo Michoacano, which, in disseminating the story first published by Excélsior, now identified Mendoza as having ‘‘headed the attack against the [institute].’’∞≠∂ The evidence establishing a Soviet presence allowed Mexican and U.S. o≈cials to claim the attack was premeditated and thus to frame the incident as part of a larger Cold War conspiracy. This was a position that served both U.S. and Mexican security aims, but how verifiable was the link itself ? No corroborating evidence beyond the initial claims was ever presented; the ‘‘smoking gun’’ was simply the fortuitous presence of the o≈cials themselves. In fact, none of the reports found in the papers of the Dirección General de Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales (dgips) sent from Morelia mentioned anything about the Soviet connection. A report filed on the morning of April 18, for example, discusses the rampage and other events of the previous day yet fails to note any of the alleged ‘‘interviews’’ between Mendoza and the Soviet o≈cials, as asserted in the Excélsior article.∞≠∑ Asked later about these events, Mendoza emphatically denied the accusations: ‘‘According to the newspaper, I had arrived in the Santa María neighborhood, which tourists frequent, in a car accompanied by one of the diplomats. That’s not true; all of that is false.’’∞≠∏

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One also needs to question the logic underlying the claim itself that the Soviets would receive any possible gain by targeting the Cultural Institute. It is conceivable, even likely, that the three Soviet Embassy o≈cials discussed with local Communist activists the significance of the Cuban situation. However, hatching the idea, much less providing logistical or moral support, for attacking the Cultural Institute seems unlikely.∞≠π Mendoza’s later testimony furthermore suggested another possibility altogether: that the presence of the diplomats was purely circumstantial. As Mendoza relates: Three or four years later there was a banquet held in Morelia, and by sheer coincidence the [same] diplomats were there. They told me that in fact they had been in Morelia back then, but on vacation and not something organized. Because they asked me if I was the one who had gotten mixed up in all of that and I told them that yes, but that I had nothing to do with it [the attack]. . . . I never knew [those o≈cials] before, I only met them afterwards.∞≠∫

As Asencio himself recently argued, ‘‘I’m not about to suggest that they [the Soviet o≈cials] were there to promote an anti-American riot or anything, but there was no question that they were there in immediate juxtaposition to the riot.’’ He added, somewhat flippantly, that ‘‘from the standpoint of our policy [it] was kind of a fun juxtaposition.’’∞≠Ω Notably, before the release of the information about the Soviet presence, the local press in Morelia had interpreted these events as a manifestation of spontaneous outrage, not a Communist conspiracy. Instead, the students were chastised for the wantonness of their destruction. An article printed the following day in El Heraldo Michoacano, for example, blamed ‘‘emotional students propelled by that unstoppable sentiment of youth’’ while simultaneously underscoring that the institute was ‘‘also Mexican and in fact, the name of the Institute begins precisely with the word mexican’’ (figure 2).∞∞≠ As for the alleged role of Mendoza, given his history and close a≈liation with left-wing politics, he was a natural scapegoat. As Virgilio Pineda, who knew Mendoza well, put it: ‘‘Of course, whenever something happened [Mendoza] was the first one to be singled out—because of his background. But I don’t think he had anything to do with the attack on the institute itself. He was just an easy target for the press and the authorities.’’∞∞∞ Asked about the unresolved question of premeditation, Martín Tavira (who was present at the General Assembly the morning of the attack) stated emphatically that it ‘‘wasn’t planned, it was spontaneous on the part of the students.’’ According to his recollection of what transpired, ‘‘The Institute was a target because we considered it a symbol of a North American presence here in Morelia. . . . Look, I believe that it was the

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2. ‘‘Because there is no local [consulate] of the United States in Morelia, the criminal assault was directed at a Cultural Institute by youth who study.’’ ‘‘Cartón de Danny,’’ El Heraldo Michoacano, April 19, 1961, 1.

masses infuriated about the invasion.’’ Tavira continued, ‘‘There was a psychology of the infuriated masses who said with a single voice, ‘let’s go,’ and everyone went and destroyed that thing.’’∞∞≤ Asencio’s later assessment overlaps, without concurring entirely. The attack was ‘‘spontaneous in the sense that it was a reaction to the Bay of Pigs,’’ he said, ‘‘but premeditated in the sense that a bunch of guys decided to go and do it. Whether the Russians were part of that group, well who knows.’’ Realigning the U.S.–Mexican Strategic Relationship Ever since the Cuban revolution, fears were stoked by conservative elements of the U.S. press alleging Mexico’s ‘‘vulnerability’’ to a Communist takeover. Now the recent protests (and evident antipathy by certain o≈cials in the face of U.S.

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concerns) seemed to confirm these fears. A letter by one resident sent to Vice President Johnson on behalf of ‘‘Americans living in Mexico City’’ expressed a sense of frustration and outrage that the United States had failed to respond more forcefully in light of events in Morelia. Accompanied by a news clipping from a California newspaper describing the attack on the Cultural Institute, the letter demanded to know why ‘‘there was no formal protest made by our government’’ following the destruction of the institute. ‘‘The situation is alarming!’’ the letter concludes. ‘‘When are we going to take a stand?’’∞∞≥ This sentiment was echoed in numerous other letters from constituents to their representatives in the United States. ‘‘Is anything being done regarding Communism in Mexico?’’ one letter writer from California asked not long after the protests. ‘‘Will we next have to fortify our southern border because of Communism?’’∞∞∂ Meanwhile in Michoacán a local ‘‘Americans in Morelia Committee’’ was quickly formed. Acting with logistical support from Kenney, U.S. residents ‘‘distributed hand bills and arranged for announcements to be made asserting that the damage to the Binational Center was the result of Communist agitation.’’∞∞∑ Within the U.S. State Department, a similar sense of alarm had also developed. Briefing military o≈cers at the U.S. National War College only three days after the Bay of Pigs protests rocked Mexico, Melville Osborne, the State Department’s newly assigned o≈cer in charge of Mexican a√airs, suggested the current situation in Mexico ‘‘can be interpreted as a powder keg.’’∞∞∏ Osborne noted that the political reemergence of Cárdenas threatened to exploit urban and rural discontent in Mexico precisely at a moment when the Cuban revolution was inspiring by its example a repudiation of traditional hemispheric security alliances: I pointed out [at the War College] the apparent shift in relative strength between the traditionally strong Mexican President and the leftist elements that prey on agrarian discontent and on disillusioned city elements as shown by the boldness of Cárdenas in standing up to López Mateos in a power struggle. I ended with the comment that we could not a√ord to be complacent with regard to Mexico for shifts in power relationships could come within the next five to ten years that could be decisive to our security.∞∞π

Caught o√-guard by the outburst of anti-American sentiment in a country that o≈cially professed its close friendship for the United States, Osborne urgently demanded a comprehensive analysis of the situation. ‘‘What was and still is wanted,’’ he instructed Eugene McAuli√e (first secretary of the American Embassy in Mexico City), ‘‘is not a summary of recent and/or historical events

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but an essay on what makes Mexico tick.’’∞∞∫ The incoming Democratic administration in Washington sidelined Osborne’s request, but a new management style and strategic approach to U.S.–Mexican relations were about to get under way nevertheless. On May 2, Thomas Mann, a career diplomat who would shortly become one of the architects of Latin American policy during the Kennedy-Johnson period, arrived in Mexico City to begin his transition as the new U.S. ambassador to Mexico.∞∞Ω That same day, the investigative report assembled by Asencio was sent to the State Department. That night Raymond Leddy, counselor for the Embassy, visited Mexico’s interior minister, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, explicitly to discuss what had occurred in Morelia. Leddy explained that he had previously met with Foreign Minister Manuel Tello several days before, who had promised Leddy that an investigation was being conducted into the attack. He now presented Díaz Ordaz with a copy (according to Leddy’s report, translated into Spanish) of the embassy’s own investigation. What Díaz Ordaz read was a scathing critique of how local political authorities had permitted the demonstrations and attack on the institute to take place, while security forces failed to act. Such permissiveness had allowed ‘‘Communist elements, under the leadership of identified Communists in Morelia, [to engage] in the wanton and unprovoked destruction of a cultural entity enjoying the open support of both Governments.’’∞≤≠ Díaz Ordaz concurred that the attack was reprehensible, but he cleverly redirected the focus of the critique away from political negligence (with its implicit questioning of loyalties and authority) toward the broader concern of professionalization of the nation’s security forces. ‘‘The elements composing the police,’’ Leddy reported that Díaz Ordaz conveyed to him, ‘‘are inadequately trained, poorly equipped and improperly directed.’’∞≤∞ Coincidentally, Díaz Ordaz informed Leddy, he had been ‘‘going over the same day catalogues of tear gas equipment,’’ and he ‘‘hoped to acquire some such articles of police defense from United States’ companies which manufacture them.’’∞≤≤ In contrast to Foreign Minister Tello, whom Mann described as having an ‘‘ ‘Alice in Wonderland’ approach to the dangers which the Sino-Soviet Bloc presents to the whole inter-American system,’’∞≤≥ Díaz Ordaz clearly spoke the same language of antiCommunism as the United States. He openly denounced ‘‘Communist agitators as ‘the common enemy’ ’’ of both governments, after which Leddy reassured him that the United States was ‘‘well aware of the problems he faces and [is] entirely sympathetic.’’∞≤∂ The Bay of Pigs protests marked an important turning point in the consolida-

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tion of a U.S.–Mexican security relationship that would predominate into the 1960s. What is central to understand here is that while the United States initially showed deep concern and even mistrust toward Mexico for that country’s outward support for the Cuban revolution, ultimately Mexico and the United States shared a common fear of social unrest and the desire for political stability.∞≤∑ For the United States, this unrest manifested itself as Soviet-inspired Communism and thus required closer collaboration between the two nations’ security forces, and a demonstrated willingness to enforce order at the expense of domestic political considerations. For Mexico, on the other hand, the unrest was less Soviet inspired than homegrown and emanated principally from the forces mobilized by Lázaro Cárdenas’s critique of the course of the Mexican revolution. In August 1961 these forces came together in the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (mln), whose nationalist platform promoting economic sovereignty, independent trade unionism, and other reforms posed, for a brief period, a genuine opposition movement to the ruling party. During 1961–63, as the pri launched its bid for the 1968 Olympics and sought to ensure a smooth political transition during the 1964 elections, mln supporters across the country were hounded and imprisoned; by 1964, the reformist movement Cárdenas had inspired had collapsed in the face of repression, internal divisions, and ultimately Cárdenas’s own decision to adhere to the dictates of the pri.∞≤∏ Conclusions In the weeks that followed the assault on the Cultural Institute, letters of protest and at least two di√erent petitions signed by people who had studied at the institute or had taken advantage of its resources were sent to the media and local, state, and federal o≈cials.∞≤π One plea, written by a resident whose ‘‘highest grade of studies is primary school,’’ encapsulated the wider appeal that President López Mateos ‘‘intervene in the prompt resolution of this problem . . . so that we can again enjoy the benefits that the Institute [has] given us.’’∞≤∫ The hegemonic discourse of Pan-American friendship had not been irrevocably shattered, as Ocaranza and others had perhaps believed; the majority of residents in Morelia wanted their institute back. Anxious not to accept the appearance of a symbolic defeat, usis was more than eager to comply. In early 1962 the center was reopened once more under the direction of Eugene Kenney. Prompted by the concern that its present structure was not ‘‘a su≈cient counter to organized Communist bloc activities in the key state of Michoacan,’’ the embassy recommended increasing available resources and, significantly, providing for the

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United States to ‘‘fly [its] flag over [the] building,’’ as a later memo succinctly stated.∞≤Ω The student mobilization set in motion by the Bay of Pigs protests fed into a broader politicization of Morelian society in the months that followed the attack on the Cultural Institute. A conservative backlash inevitably followed, which coincided with the centralization of political authority under President Díaz Ordaz. Together, these twin processes plunged Morelia into a period of extreme political repression for which many paid a direct and heavy price. Alberto Cira, who was a student at the Colegio at the time but had stood clear of the protests, sought to encapsulate the tragic implications of the period for a provincial society torn apart by its own ideological divisions: People didn’t even know what was happening. Everyone was shaken up, scared. This city has always been very conservative and Catholic, and Communism was seen as something coming from the Devil. Some people supported the students, but most were against them. Either way, [the radical protest] wasn’t helpful. People reacted out of ignorance or fear, but it didn’t help the movement any.∞≥≠

As the university system swung sharply to the left under the rectorship of Eli de Gortari, the centralizing forces in Mexico City became determined to bring Michoacán to heel. Franco Rodríguez, the state’s pro-Cárdenas governor, was soon replaced by the anti-cardenista Agustín Arriaga Rivera, who su√ered no qualms in repressing radical elements throughout the state. ‘‘A militant fascist and admirer of yanqui imperialism,’’ one author writes in recalling the period, Arriaga Rivera ‘‘nurtured his spirit in the most ruinous class of McCarthyism.’’∞≥∞ Cárdenas himself quietly succumbed to the authority of the pri political machine by late 1963; his endorsement of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz for president and subsequent silence toward the ensuing repression by the regime marked Cárdenas, too, as a figure of the system.∞≥≤ Meanwhile, the institute continued to be a reference point for anti-American protest. Barely a month after reopening, it was ‘‘painted with tar and lettered as follows: ‘Neither Yankees nor salt. Yankees, we do not want salt and water in the Mexicali Valley. Long live Cuba.’ ’’∞≥≥ Not long after, on the eve of President Kennedy’s visit to Mexico in June 1962, an unidentified group of youths ‘‘possibly of communist a≈liation’’ again attempted to set the institute on fire. This time, however, ‘‘the damage was contained by the ready presence of firefighters.’’ Still, the attackers succeeded in leaving their mark: ‘‘Go Home Kennedy’’ had been painted on the outside walls of the building.∞≥∂ Despite these attacks, the Cultural Institute persevered. The tone conveyed by

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a 1971 usis inspector general’s report is clearly one of triumph rather than setback: ‘‘Having survived two physical destructions by students of the University in Morelia, the bnc . . . is the U.S. ‘presence’ in the heart of the potentially most explosive political region of Mexico.’’ The report concluded, perhaps overly optimistically, ‘‘Today almost any explosion on the part of students will come out of and not be blown into the Center.’’∞≥∑ In fact, the institute was subject to yet another assault in 1980, when fifty-two students succeeded in physically holding the building over a two-day period. Though eventually ‘‘departing peacefully,’’ the students once more left the center ‘‘in disarray,’’ although with ‘‘no damage apparent.’’∞≥∏ The fact that the building’s contents were not destroyed arguably signified a fundamental shift in the ideological valence of the institute’s cultural role in Morelia. Alberto Cira, the institute’s current Mexican executive director, recalls that the students ‘‘were ousted, not rudely or brutally but rather asked to leave. They didn’t do anything more, just stayed [in the building] and then left. And after that some of them even came here to study. The Institute won them over.’’∞≥π Morelians seem eager to forget the unbridled ideological passions of 1961. Except for a cryptic reference to his poem ‘‘Raza Maldita,’’ Ocaranza, for example, skips over in his autobiography the Bay of Pigs events of 1961, and the poem itself was never republished in any of his numerous anthologies. While several participants were willing to recall for me their memories of what had happened, others were less amenable or refused to be interviewed. Perhaps they did so out of embarrassment; recounting an attack on a local symbol of Pan-American friendship that, after all, has endured, and for an American interviewer no less, may have struck people as inappropriate. But there may also be a more fundamental reason: to recall the assault no doubt reminds Morelians of the painful ideological divide that lies not far beneath the surface of an otherwise tranquil community identity. For those who faced physical repression during this period, moreover, there may also exist a lingering fear of possible reprisals. Despite the nearly half century that has gone by, the scabs from this particular set of wounds are still evidently tender. Today the Cultural Institute is an important and integral element of Morelia’s cultural and academic life. On any given day, the center is filled with activity, and the library, more than twice its original size, plays an important role in the educational character of the community. The Colegio de San Nicolás de Hidalgo is still around the corner; many students continue to take English classes at the institute. In fact, it is still called the Instituto Cultural México–Norteamericano de Morelia. There is no U.S. flag flying above or inside the building. Aside from

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the large collection of English-language materials, all that remains of a U.S. presence is a small plaque featuring the institute’s o≈cial emblem, mounted at the building’s entrance: the flags of the two countries, harmoniously crossed as a symbol of enduring Pan-American solidarity and friendship. Notes Funding for research was generously provided by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright–García Robles, and the O≈ce of the Provost of Franklin and Marshall College. I wish to extend my appreciation to the people of Morelia, Michoacán, who supported me in my investigations, in particular to Víctor Vargas of the Universidad Latina de América and Lic. Mónica Vázquez García. Special thanks also go to Michael Manning of the Public Diplomacy Historical Collection in Washington. Earlier drafts of this paper have benefited from the generous comments of Ariel Rodríguez Kuri, Christopher Boyer, Barbara Keys, Van Gosse, David Rains, and the editors of the collection. 1. ‘‘Panorama Nacional,’’ Política, May 1, 1961, 5–22. In Guadalajara the U.S. Consulate and Binational Center were similarly attacked, but without significant damage. In contrast to what unfolded in Morelia, students originating from the University of Guadalajara were repelled not only by local police but by right-wing shock squads organized by students of the Autonomous University of Jalisco. ‘‘Disturbio en Guadalajara,’’ Excélsior, April 19, 1961, a5. For the sake of fluidity, I will be using the terms ‘‘America’’ and ‘‘United States’’ interchangeably, though where possible the latter is preferred. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Spanish are my own. 2. Lázaro Cárdenas, ‘‘Discurso con motivo del VI aniversario de la iniciación del Movimiento Revolucionario 26 de Julio,’’ July 26, 1959, in México y Cuba: Dos pueblos unidos en la historia, vol. 2, ed. Boris Rosen Jélomer (Mexico: Centro de Investigación Científica Jorge L. Tamayo, 1982), 497. 3. Ibid., 498. 4. Ibid. 5. Philip Bonsal (Havana, Cuba) to Department of State, August 4, 1959, rg59, 812.41/ 8-459, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland (hereafter cited as nara). 6. Ibid. 7. Jaime García Terrés, ‘‘Un poco de aire fresco,’’ el espectador 1, no. 4 (August 1959): 32. 8. ‘‘Panorama Nacional,’’ 7. Cárdenas’s original text read: ‘‘Os conminamos para que adoptéis la más enérgica actitud contra la cobarde agresión de que es víctima la hermana República de Cuba en estos momentos, por parte de los imperialistas.’’ 9. Ibid. 10. Although it has been di≈cult to learn more precisely about the history of the

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brigades, this term was used frequently in the Mexico City press, and Lombardo Toledano was publicly associated with their defense. In the end, the brigades were largely ephemeral, as the Mexican Constitution prohibits citizens from joining a foreign army. In 1960 the Partido Popular (pp) underwent a name change to become the Partido Popular Socialista (pps). Founded in 1948 under the leadership of Toledano, during the late 1950s the pp became an important vehicle for political mobilization among broad sectors of Mexican society who felt that the pri was straying from its foundational goals of nationalist state capitalism. Despite Toledano’s essentially collaborative political relationship with the pri, grassroots members of the pp (pps) often embraced the party’s radical discourse in ways that ran counter to the more conservative maneuverings of the party’s national leadership. See Barry Carr, ‘‘The Fate of the Vanguard under a Revolutionary State: Marxism’s Contribution to the Construction of the Great Arch,’’ in Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, ed. Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 326–52. 11. ‘‘Cárdenas a Cuba,’’ La Voz de Michoacán, April 18, 1961, 1. See also ‘‘Declaraciones a la prensa sobre la agresión a Cuba, Mexico, D.F., 18 de abril de 1961,’’ in Rosen Jélomer, Mexico y Cuba, 500–501. Seeking to put an immediate halt to this dynamic, López Mateos ordered the army to prevent Cárdenas from boarding a plane to Cuba. Enrique Krauze, Biography of Power: A History of Modern Mexico, 1810–1996, trans. Hank Heifetz (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 649. 12. Crowd estimates vary, with a high of between 70,000 and 80,000 (cited by Política) and a low of between 15,000 and 20,000 (cited by Excélsior). The pro-government newspaper Novedades placed the crowd at 30,000, while upi estimated 25,000. For descriptions of the protests, see ‘‘Panorama Nacional,’’ Política, May 1, 1961, 5–22; ‘‘Cárdenas Defendió a Fidel Castro Anoche, en un Mitin en el Zócalo,’’ Excélsior, April 19, 1961, a1. 13. ‘‘Panorama Nacional,’’ 11. For the full speech, see Jélomer, Mexico y Cuba, 501–5. 14. Morelia’s bnc appears to have been a ‘‘Class A’’ center, meaning that it received the highest level of funding and attention. usis was also known as the United States Information Agency (usia). In October 1999, following the end of the Cold War, the usia was dissolved as a distinct bureaucratic entity and its duties folded into the State Department. 15. United States Information Agency, Country Public A√airs O≈cer Handbook (Washington: United States Information Agency, 1962), 115–17. 16. United States Information Agency, Country Public A√airs O≈cer Handbook (Washington: United States Information Agency, 1967), 114. 17. ‘‘Si no hay garantias no abrirá el destruido instituto,’’ El Heraldo Michoacano, April 29, 1961, 2. 18. ‘‘Petition to Adolfo López Mateos,’’ May 12, 1961, Gallery 3, Adolfo López Mateos Papers, 559.1/2, Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, Mexico (hereafter cited as agn). The same petition (translated into English) can be found in ‘‘Petitions to Reopen

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Morelia Binational Center,’’ May 19, 1961, rg59, Box 1052, 511.11G3/8-1160, nara. This latter reference will be used for future citations. 19. American Embassy [Mexico City] to Department of State, ‘‘Morelia Binational Center,’’ February 15, 1962, rg59, Box 1052, 511.121/7-761, nara. 20. Alfonso Espitia, personal interview, May 9, 2002, Morelia, Michoacán. At the time of the attack, over five hundred students were registered for language classes, including fifteen from the United States who were studying Spanish (‘‘Petitions to Reopen Morelia Binational Center’’). 21. ‘‘Diplomáticos rusos hablaron con los que destruyeron el Instituto en Michoacán,’’ Excélsior, April 26, 1961, a41. 22. ‘‘Petitions to Reopen Morelia Binational Center.’’ 23. Ibid. 24. Espitia interview, May 9, 2002, Morelia, Michoacán. See also James Krippner, ‘‘Invoking ‘Tato Vasco’: Vasco de Quiroga, Eighteenth–Twentieth Centuries,’’ The Americas 56, no. 3 (January 2000): 1–28. 25. Ana María Kapelusz-Poppi, ‘‘Physician Activists and the Development of Rural Health in Postrevolutionary Mexico,’’ Radical History Review 80 (2001): 38. 26. Ana María Kapelusz-Poppi, ‘‘Rural Health and State Construction in Postrevolutionary Mexico: The Nicolaita Project for Rural Medical Services,’’ The Americas 58, no. 2 (October 2001): 261–83. 27. While it is unclear whether this same juramiento was practiced in 1961, it is safe to presume that a similar discourse of the school’s ‘‘historic responsibility’’ permeated the student body. 28. Virgilio Pineda Arellano, personal interview, May 8, 2002, Morelia, Michoacán. 29. Ibid. 30. Martín Tavira, personal interview, May 9, 2002, Morelia, Michoacán. In 1958, when he was twenty-five years old and finishing a law degree at the University of Michoacán (teaching classes at the Colegio to help pay his way), Tavira ran unsuccessfully as a candidate for diputado from Morelia on the Partido Popular ticket. Later, as secretary general of the powerful Federación de Maestros, Tavira noted that he and the other ranking leadership of the teachers’ organization were all members of the pps, ‘‘not out of any sense of clientelism [corporatismo], but because we shared the same [ideological] leaning throughout the university.’’ 31. Pineda Arellano interview, May 8, 2002, Morelia, Michoacán. Pineda took over the presidency of the Federación Estudiantil de la Universidad Michoacana (feum) in 1960 from Salvador Tamayo. That same year he participated as the ‘‘o≈cial representative’’ of the student body at the First International Organization of Youth, held in Havana. 32. Tavira interview, May 9, 2002. 33. Espitia interview, May 9, 2002. 34. The World Peace Movement was founded in Paris in 1949. In 1952 a Mexican branch of the organization was established under the name Comité Impulsor por la Paz,

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which was later changed to Comité Mexicano por la Paz. For the phrase ‘‘Bandung Latinoamericano,’’ see Horacio Quiñones, ‘‘Trascendencia de la conferencia latinoamericana,’’ La Voz de Michoacán, March 5, 1961, 4. 35. ‘‘Todo Listo para la Conferencia Pro Paz,’’ La Voz de Michoacán, March 5, 1961, a1. 36. Quiñones, ‘‘Trascendencia de la conferencia latinoamericana,’’ 4. 37. Ibid. 38. Francisco López Castañeda, ‘‘¡Paz con libertad!’’ La Voz de Michoacán, March 7, 1961, a1. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. ‘‘Conclusiones de la Conferencia Latinoamericana Pro Paz en el D.F.,’’ La Voz de Michoacán, March 10, 1961, a1. For a perspective from the United States, see ‘‘U.S. Is Denounced by Latin Leftists,’’ New York Times, March 6, 1961, a2; and ‘‘Cárdenas Stirs Political Storm,’’ New York Times, April 26, 1961, a32. 42. Carlos Maciel, El movimiento de la liberación nacional: Vicisitudes y aspiraciones (Sinaloa: University of Sinaloa, 1990), 73. 43. ‘‘Encendido mensaje de Cárdenas al pueblo Michoacano,’’ La Voz de Michoacán, March 19, 1961, a1. 44. El Heraldo Michoacano, March 18, 1961, a14. 45. ‘‘México requiere de una radical transformación de sus sistemas,’’ La Voz de Michoacán, March 21, 1961, a1. 46. Ibid. 47. Pineda Arellano interview, May 8, 2002. 48. Ibid. 49. Tavira interview, May 9, 2002. 50. ‘‘Maestros, estudiantes, oberos y campesinos michoacános protestan por el ataque a Cuba,’’ La Voz de Michoacán, April 18, 1961, 1. 51. The exact role of this organization was never explicitly defined; presumably it would help coordinate solidarity e√orts and serve as a conduit for information. 52. ‘‘Información Telefónica de Michoacán,’’ April 18, 1961. Departamento de Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales (dips), Gallery 2, Box 1980, Folder 16 (‘‘Michoacán, Estado de’’), agn. 53. Ibid. 54. American Embassy (Mexico City) to Department of State, ‘‘Destruction of Mexican-U.S. Institute for Cultural Relations,’’ May 2, 1961, rg59, Box 1052, 511.11G3/8-1160, nara. 55. Ibid. 56. ‘‘Cárdenas a Cuba.’’ 57. ‘‘Los maestros universitarios condenan la intervención de EEUU en Cuba,’’ El Heraldo Michoacano, April 18, 1961, 1. 58. ‘‘Incendiaron el edificio del Instituto Mexicano–Estadounidense de Morelia,’’ La

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Voz de Michoacán, April 19, 1961, 1. One article cited the numbers as ‘‘hundreds,’’ though another states ‘‘several thousand.’’ 59. ‘‘Mitin en San Nicolás donde se preparó la violenta incursión,’’ El Heraldo Michoacano, April 19, 1961, 1. 60. Ibid. 61. Nicando Mendoza Patiño, personal interview, July 14, 2003, Mexico City. Mendoza graduated from the University of Michoacán in 1965 with a degree in medical surgery. Specializing in pharmacology, he subsequently continued his studies at unam, the University of Chile, the University College of London, and the University of London. He was recently appointed chair of the Department of Pharmacology at unam, where he has taught since 1966. See also his biographical entry in Humberto Musacchio, Diccionario Enciclopédico de México, vol. 2 (Mexico: Andrés León, 1995), 1213. 62. Ibid. 63. ‘‘Incendiaron el edificio del Instituto Mexicano–Estadounidense de Morelia.’’ 64. Mendoza Patiño interview, July 14, 2003. 65. ‘‘Incendiaron el Instituto de Estados Unidos,’’ El Heraldo Michoacano, April 19, 1961, 1. 66. Ibid. 67. ‘‘Destruction of Mexican-U.S. Institute for Cultural Relations.’’ 68. ‘‘Incendiaron el Instituto de Estados Unidos.’’ 69. ‘‘Incendiaron el edificio del Instituto Mexicano–Estadounidense de Morelia.’’ 70. According to the embassy investigation, the American was struck simply for ‘‘attempt[ing] to rescue [the flag].’’ ‘‘Destruction of Mexican-U.S. Institute for Cultural Relations.’’ La Voz de Michoacán portrayed the incident in a slightly di√erent light, describing the American as the aggressor for having punched the student burning the flag, ‘‘wounding him in the face, at which point various students set upon the North American with considerable fury.’’ ‘‘Incendiaron el Edificio del Instituto Mexicano– Estadounidense de Morelia.’’ 71. ‘‘Incendiaron el Instituto de Estados Unidos.’’ 72. Information about Kenney is extremely scant. He appears to have been a government-contracted employee, though there is no clear biographical record of his participation in the government. Martín Tavira recalls that there was much talk ‘‘about the famous Eugene Kenney, who was said to be a spy’’ (Tavira interview, May 8, 2002). According to Diego Asencio, in charge of the U.S. Embassy’s investigation of the sacking of the institute, Kenney was well known to Luís Echeverría (second in command after Díaz Ordaz at the Ministry of Gobernación), who ‘‘was not a fan of Kenney’’ (Diego Asencio, telephone interview, January 10, 2003.) Kenney died in July 1982 with his last known residence listed as the Mexican Consulate, Mexico City. 73. ‘‘Incendiaron el Instituto de Estados Unidos.’’ 74. ‘‘Destruction of Mexican-U.S. Institute for Cultural Relations.’’ 75. ‘‘Incendiaron el Instituto de Estados Unidos.’’

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76. ‘‘Incendiaron el edificio del Instituto Mexicano–Estadounidense de Morelia.’’ 77. ‘‘Incendiaron el Instituto de Estados Unidos.’’ 78. María Teresa Perdomo, Ramón Martínez Ocaranza: El poeta y su mundo (Morelia, Michoacán: Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, 1988), 66. Born in 1915, Ocaranza came from the same town in Michoacán as Lazaro Cárdenas, Jiquilpan. He joined the Communist Party in 1934 and taught at the Colegio, from which he had graduated, since 1951. An exhaustive search to locate this poem has unfortunately proven fruitless. 79. Ocaranza, Autobiografía (Morelia, Michoacán: Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, 1981), 19. 80. Tavira interview, May 9, 2002. 81. ‘‘Incendiaron el Instituto de Estados Unidos.’’ 82. Tavira interview, May 9, 2002. 83. ‘‘Incendiaron el Instituto de Estados Unidos.’’ 84. ‘‘Destruction of Mexican-U.S. Institute for Cultural Relations’’; ‘‘Diplomáticos Rusos Hablaron.’’ 85. ‘‘Destruction of Mexican-U.S. Institute for Cultural Relations.’’ 86. Martín Tavira recalls that ‘‘Radio Havana disseminated only a few hours later’’ news of the attack. See also ‘‘Varios rusos provocaron el asalto e incendio en Morelia,’’ Excélsior, April 23, 1961, 2D. 87. Asencio was in Mexico from 1959 to 1962. Following the investigation, he became head of the Protection and Welfare O≈ce; he later became ambassador to Brazil (1983–86). 88. ‘‘Destruction of Mexican-U.S. Institute for Cultural Relations.’’ 89. Ibid. Press reports largely confirmed this account. La Voz de Michoacán, for instance, reported that General Ireta Viveros arrived at the scene at 12:30 (approximately twenty minutes after the start of the tumult) ‘‘accompanied by two o≈cials.’’ Ireta Viveros subsequently called on ‘‘a section’’ of the 51st Battalion, ‘‘which arrived moments later.’’ ‘‘Incendiaron el Edificio del Instituto Mexicano–Estadounidense de Morelia.’’ 90. Ibid. 91. Sergio Aguayo, Mexico 1968: Los archivos de la violencia (Mexico: Grijalbo/ Reforma, 1998); Sergio Aguayo, La Charola: Una historia de los servicios de inteligencia en México (Mexico: Grijalbo, 2002). 92. ‘‘Incendiaron el edificio del Instituto Mexicano–Estadounidense de Morelia.’’ 93. Ocaranza, for example, left that summer for the Soviet Union; Mendoza was allowed to run in the pending elections as a diputado on the pps ticket. (He lost to the pri in an o≈cial vote tally of 24,437 to 585.) A thorough review of arrest reports from the municipal archives in Morelia failed to find any of the names associated with the protests, and interviews also corroborated the lack of any arrests in the immediate aftermath of the attack. 94. See for example, Marjorie Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

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95. Mendoza Patiño interview, July 14, 2003. 96. Pablo G. Macias Guillén, Luces y sombras: Testimonios nicolaitas (Morelia, Michoacán: Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, 1981), 105–216; Martínez Ocaranza, Autobiografía, 107–15. 97. Asencio interview, January 10, 2003. 98. Ibid. 99. During this same period, Jalisco and Puebla also faced a radicalization of politics around the question of support for Cuba, yet in both cases the police and military were unleashed on leftist student protesters. Asencio noted as much in recalling that ‘‘the governor in Puebla was much more supportive than the governor in Michoacan. He was very helpful in showing us around, pointing out that he was fully in control and that nothing was going to happen, and so forth’’ (Asencio interview, January 10, 2003). 100. Ibid. 101. ‘‘Varios rusos provocaron el asalto e incendio en Morelia.’’ 102. Ibid. 103. Ibid. 104. ‘‘Versión de México sobre los sucesos del 18 de abril.’’ 105. ‘‘Información telefónica de Michoacán.’’ (The original papers may have been destroyed, lost, or filed elsewhere.) 106. Mendoza Patiño interview, July 14, 2003. 107. In spite of, or perhaps due to, the fact that the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City was the largest in Latin America, one must keep in mind that maintaining healthy diplomatic ties with Mexico was essential to the Communist bloc’s propagandizing e√orts in the Western Hemisphere. Cole Blasier, The Giant’s Rival: The ussr and Latin America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987), 22–27. 108. Mendoza Patiño interview, July 14, 2003. 109. Asencio interview, January 10, 2003. 110. ‘‘Comentarios del pueblo sobre el incendio de ayer,’’ El Heraldo Michoacano, April 19, 1961, 1. 111. Pineda Arellano interview, May 8, 2002. 112. Tavira interview, May 9, 2002. 113. Elizabeth Harris to Vice President Johnson, May 1, 1961, rg59, Box 1052, 511.11G3/ 8-1160, nara. 114. Letter from Congressman Teague (Calif.) to Dean Rusk, June 30, 1961, rg59, Box 1512, 712.001/6-161, nara. 115. Joint Embassy-usis Mexico, ‘‘Mexican-North American Cultural Institute of Michoacán in Morelia,’’ May 23, 1961, rg59, Box 1052, 511.11G3/8-1160, nara. 116. Melville Osborne (State Department) to Eugene McAuli√e (U.S. Embassy, Mexico City), (‘‘Confidential’’), rg59, Box 9, ‘‘35: Political Reports (General),’’ Mexico Papers, nara.

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117. Ibid. 118. Ibid. Osborne’s letter was never sent. A handwritten note in the margins of the letter indicates that the letter was in fact shown to an embassy o≈cial, Cole, although this may have taken place in Washington. The most obvious explanation for this is likely the fact that a major shake-up in the State Department’s Mexican division was about to occur because of the Democrats’ recent entry into power. In Washington, Osborne was about to be replaced by Robert M. Sayre. 119. Walter LaFeber, ‘‘Thomas C. Mann and the Devolution of Latin American Policy: From the Good Neighbor to Military Intervention,’’ in Behind the Throne: Servants of Power to Imperial Presidents, 1898–1968, ed. Thomas J. McCormick and Walter LaFeber (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 166–203. 120. ‘‘Destruction of Mexican-U.S. Institute for Cultural Relations,’’ May 3, 1961, rg59, Box 1052, 511.121/5-361, nara. 121. Ibid. 122. Ibid. 123. Edwin E. Vallon to Mr. Coerr (‘‘Secret’’), June 7, 1961, rg59, Box 9, ‘‘350: Political A√airs—General,’’ Mexico Papers, nara. 124. ‘‘Destruction of Mexican-U.S. Institute for Cultural Relations,’’ May 3, 1961. 125. Thomas Mann to Robert Sayre, ‘‘Notes on the Mexican Scene (Confidential),’’ June 13, 1961, rg59, Box 9, ‘‘320: Int’l Political Relations (General), Jan–July,’’ Mexico Papers, nara. 126. Maciel, El Movimiento de Liberación Nacional; Olga Pellicer de Brody, ‘‘La revolución cubana en México,’’ Foro Internacional, April–June 1968, 360–83. To the disappointment of his followers, Cárdenas endorsed Díaz Ordaz as o≈cial candidate of the pri for the 1964 elections, thus signaling loyalty to an increasingly conservative political regime Cárdenas himself had helped to consolidate. For a discussion of the contested meanings of cardenismo, see Ilán Semo, ‘‘El cardenismo: Gramática del sobreviviente,’’ Historia y Gráfica 3 (1994): 77–95. 127. ‘‘Petitions to Reopen Morelia Binational Center,’’ May 19, 1961, rg59, Box 1052, 511.121/5-361, nara. 128. Letter to President (from Gerardo Ponce de León), May 3, 1961, Gallery 3 (‘‘Adolfo López Mateos’’), 559.1/2, agn. There were at least two separate petitions to López Mateos asking that the institute be reopened. 129. American Embassy (Mexico City) to Department of State, ‘‘Morelia Binational Center,’’ February 15, 1962, rg59, Box 1052, 511.121/7-761 (1960-63). 130. Alberto Cira, personal interview, May 7, 2002, Morelia, Michoacán. 131. Macias, Luces y sombras, 126. 132. Despite his retreat, Cárdenas is still closely identified with the purest ideals of revolutionary solidarity whether in Morelia or in Havana (where a park is named after him).

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133. Mexico City to Secretary of State, ‘‘Joint Embassy-usis Message,’’ March 14, 1962, rg59, Box 1052, 511.121/7-761 (1960–63). This act of protest referenced an intensifying dispute over salinity levels of the Colorado River which flowed into Mexico from the United States. 134. ‘‘Instituto México–Norteamericano de Morelia, Michoacán,’’ Dirección Federal de Seguridad, 29 June 1962, Legajo 1, Exp. 100-14-3, Hoja 177, Gallery 1, agn. The report noted: ‘‘Students from the University of ‘San Nicolás’ have asserted they had nothing to do with this incident, though they plan a protest for tomorrow at 11 a.m. to denounce the visit by the President of the United States of North America.’’ 135. Binational Centers Permanent Record [File Cards], Public Diplomacy Historical Collection, Washington. 136. Ibid. 137. Cira interview, May 7, 2002.

STEVEN J. BACHELOR

Miracle on Ice Industrial Workers and the Promise of Americanization in Cold War Mexico

You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world’s intrusions into this one. Most of the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there’s cataclysm. . . . Where revolutions break out spontaneous and leaderless, and the soul’s talent for consensus allows the masses to work together without e√ort, automatic as the body itself. And yet, seña, if any of it should ever really happen that perfectly, I would also have to cry miracle. An anarchist miracle. Like your friend. He is too exactly and without flaw the thing we fight. In Mexico the privilegiado is always, to a finite percentage, redeemed—one of the people. Unmiraculous. —Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

In November 1969, three days after Mexico’s Day of the Dead celebrations, members of the state’s secret security agency opened fire on six thousand protesters at Chrysler’s Toluca plant, situated along the southwestern edge of the capital city’s industrial fringe. The violence—the first open strife at a U.S. firm in Mexico since the consolidation of revolutionary rule—left a half dozen critically wounded, two men disabled, and a popular working-class movement targeted for elimination. One of the era’s most dramatic yet least known calls for industrial democracy, the conflict went unmentioned in media on both sides of the border. Nor did attention come in the next days as Chrysler blacklisted five hundred alleged subversives, dispatched guardias blancas (terror squads) to patrol the factory floor, and imposed the firm’s production manager as union head, a post he held for a quarter century before passing it to its present-day occupant, his eldest son. Then followed daily firings, routine reprisals against insubordinates, and two more shootings of supposed ‘‘Communists.’’ Thus began, in workers’ telling, a ‘‘reign of terror’’ directed ironically against working people who sought to secure union democracy and economic security—the very ideals they believed were embodied in the promise of Americanization.∞

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Next to the magnitude and severity of repression seen elsewhere during Latin America’s Cold War, the incidents at Chrysler obviously pale. Ford executives in Argentina, for instance, not only identified dissidents for state authorities during that country’s ‘‘dirty war’’ but also willfully apportioned space at Ford’s Buenos Aires facility to serve as a clandestine detention and torture center.≤ The events at Chrysler also closely parallel the Mexican regime’s familiar protocol for crushing dissent: first ignore, then try to co-opt, and finally, if necessary, violently repress. Indeed, at first glance, the violence that erupted at Chrysler seems but a ripple in Cold War Mexico’s otherwise conventional tale of ‘‘tranquil’’ and ‘‘highly cordial labor relations,’’ a hallmark that proved the basis of Mexico’s ‘‘miraculous’’ postwar economic boom.≥ Nonetheless, the insurgence at Chrysler bears great significance. More than any sector of Latin America’s working class, autoworkers ‘‘represent[ed] the aspirations for change of their societies at large’’ during the postwar years and led the era’s largest and most important battles for economic and social justice.∂ The auto industry also served as the centerpiece of Mexico’s model of import substitution industrialization, an economic strategy widely adopted across Latin America that aimed to reduce dependence on foreign industry through the promotion of domestic manufacturing.∑ The industry also occupied a strategic position in the international economic order that U.S. capitalists and state authorities carved out in the postwar period. In this sense, promoting automobile manufacturing in Latin America accorded well with U.S. foreign policy, particularly the Kennedy administration’s Alliance for Progress, which sought to unleash the power of U.S. capitalism as a means not only of combating Communism but also of remaking the region in the image of the United States.∏ With the 1961 inauguration of the Alliance for Progress (an ‘‘Alliance for Profits,’’ in one contemporary economist’s view), U.S. foreign policy in Latin America widened from a simple strategy of containing Communism to ‘‘one characterized by liberal rhetoric advocating social change’’ through direct U.S. investment.π Perfectly encapsulating this visionary zeal, in 1961 gm president Frederick Donner announced that ‘‘multinational corporations represent a new kind of capitalism’’ that would usher in ‘‘social progress’’ and ‘‘elevate the Mexican nation.’’∫ Despite charges to the contrary, Mexican autoworkers were hardly Communists. Mexican presidents regularly referred to them as loyal pillars of the country’s ‘‘o≈cial’’ (state-subsidized) union movement, celebrating them as ‘‘symbols of the harmony and mutually beneficial relationship that exists between U.S. capital and Mexican labor.’’Ω Henry Ford II called their ‘‘readily apparent success,’’ which included among the best blue-collar wages in the country, a ‘‘crucial

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step in Mexico’s steady advance to modernization.’’∞≠ Even Walter Reuther, an obsessive anti-Communist, deemed Mexican autoworkers his staunchest Latin American ally in his global campaign against the ‘‘red menace.’’∞∞ Today, as neoliberals sing the praises of Mexico’s position in a flourishing global assembly line, the insurgent movement at Chrysler and its violent defeat have been forgotten, even erased. Chrysler executives, for example, o≈cially cling to a spotless, seventy-five-year record free of labor conflict, attributing the era’s multiple protests and factory occupations to ‘‘outside agitators and provocateurs from other firms.’’∞≤ Scholars too have tended to misconstrue the insurgence, Mexico’s largest since the 1930s. Specialists of Mexican labor have either dismissed the insurgence as a brief interruption in the state’s corporatist control over the working class or wistfully romanticized it as an example of valiant but inevitably doomed resistance to the twin behemoths of American imperialism and Mexican authoritarianism.∞≥ Also relying upon a corporatist analytical framework, diplomatic historians have similarly tended to misread working-class politics, which they typically reduce to organized labor’s functional position in Latin American society. These scholars have also tended to posit a false dichotomy between nationalism and cultural imperialism, failing to capture the transnational dimensions of global-local encounters and the complicated, even contradictory, meanings of Americanization in Latin America.∞∂ Thus these works render little if any of the actual political and social substance of the Cold War’s manifold engagements, begetting in the case of Mexico a scholarly literature that the field’s eminent authority contends is plagued by a ‘‘general abstract quality . . . a sense almost of timelessness.’’∞∑ Focusing on workers at the U.S. Big Three (Ford, gm, and Chrysler), this essay goes beyond earlier analyses of Cold War Mexico. It reveals how working people fashioned a popular, democratic movement, born in the promise of the American dream, which challenged the realities of state and corporate dominion over the social forces unleashed by modernity. Foremost it shows how working people borrowed from U.S. institutions, values, and practices in ways that threatened both o≈cial conceptions of Mexican citizenship and key facets of U.S. imperial rule in Mexico. The essay further argues that as this insurgent movement grew in size and intensity and linked the exigencies of the shop floor to broader questions of global economic justice, authorities—long accustomed to paternalist forms of rule—turned increasingly to tactics of violence and repression. Thus, as happened elsewhere in Latin America between 1960 and 1980, repression in Mexico became the elite’s favored tool to crush popular e√orts to democratize industrial and urban life. In this sense, the violence of 1969 at

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Chrysler marked not only the birth of an insurgent movement that would rock Mexico for the next decade. It represented also a fundamental turning point in Mexico and the United States’ postwar political economy, an epochal shift from an economic model of ‘‘cooperative capitalism’’ toward a neoliberal one founded on capital mobility and labor flexibility. Although this economic reordering was formalized in 1994 with the North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta), its roots can be found a quarter century earlier, in the success that state and corporate authorities, relying on means ranging from simple redbaiting to outright terror, had in crushing popular movements meant to democratize economic life. This, then, is the Cold War’s most enduring legacy in Mexico: the triumph, over widespread opposition, of an economic model based on fluid finance capital, deterritorialized markets, and flexible modes of accumulation. Manufacturing Miracles At the 1962 groundbreaking for Chrysler’s Toluca complex, company president Gastón Azcárraga, the brother of the media mogul and Mexico’s richest man Emílio Azcárraga, declared that the site would serve ‘‘not only as a workplace to earn our livings, but as a gathering place to raise our collective standards and become more humanitarian.’’∞∏ The site would soon employ six thousand wage earners, drawn largely from the surrounding colonias populares, then absorbing nearly twenty thousand migrants a month from the countryside.∞π The area also boasted newly inaugurated Ford and gm factories, then their respective firms’ most technologically sophisticated facilities in all of Latin America. The plant openings came on the heels of the passage of the Mexican state’s 1962 Integration Decree, which required all automakers to convert from assembly operations to full-scale domestic manufacturing of motor vehicles by the end of 1964. The heart of the regime’s strategy of import substitution industrialization, automobile manufacturing promised to spark a ‘‘second’’ industrial revolution in Mexico, not unlike that seen in Detroit in the 1920s. Domestic manufacturing, Mexican o≈cials reasoned, would reduce trade deficits by replacing foreignmade goods with those produced domestically. At the time, automobile imports constituted a hefty 10 percent of Mexico’s entire import bill, which was itself growing by nearly 20 percent per annum.∞∫ Motor-vehicle manufacturing also promised to jump-start Mexico’s slowing economy. Between 1949 and 1955, the country’s gross domestic product grew by a staggering 18 percent. Between 1955 and 1959, however, that figure grew by only 7 percent.∞Ω

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For the U.S. Big Three, the Latin American market represented a potentially enormous new market of consumers to counter lagging sales in the United States. There, first-time vehicle buyers had become almost entirely supplanted by replacement-vehicle purchasers, and for the first time in decades, automakers were facing declining rates of profit.≤≠ By contrast, executives predicted that in Mexico the automobile market would expand by an astonishing 5 to 10 percent per year over the next two decades. As U.S. automakers concluded, the Mexican market (and Latin America’s more broadly) was ‘‘essential to our global strategy of capturing market share.’’≤∞ Obviously, such success rested on stable industrial relations, on which automakers prided themselves. Not since the unionization drives of the 1930s, when Mexican workers at the U.S. Big Three won closed shops at their respective firms, had a single labor strike aΔicted the industry. Since then, automobile unions had remained important fixtures within the state-subsidized labor movement, whose leaders were closely allied with the ruling party and possessed a virulent strain of anti-Communism that considered any independent or leftist ideology a ‘‘virus of disintegration’’ demanding immediate eradication. Like virtually all organized labor in Mexico, unions within the automobile industry remained ‘‘under the domination of a small camarilla of trade union leaders’’ who ensured labor discipline and political support for the ruling party.≤≤ Drawn almost entirely from outside the workforce, these entrenched union bosses, known as charros, served as both company-paid overseers of day-to-day shop-floor relations and well-remunerated delegates to the state-controlled, national-level labor confederations.≤≥ Rarely did these union bosses convene government-mandated union assemblies or union elections. They tended to rule instead through informal, paternalistic practices and their close, personal ties to corporate executives and state o≈cials. So successful were their e√orts in stripping unionism of any real strength that a survey conducted at Ford in the early 1960s found that the majority of workers were unaware they even belonged to a union.≤∂ At gm, charros at least held the occasional union assembly, typically using them to trumpet their support for the ruling party. Also, with the control over hiring practices that Mexico’s federal labor law gave union locals, charros fared well in contracting only those who passed background checks into any suspicious political sympathies. Not surprisingly, then, in 1964, just as the auto industry prepared to launch full-scale manufacturing operations, the avowedly anti-Communist International Conference of Free Unions gave Mexico a perfect rating for political and labor stability.≤∑ Similarly, the U.S. State Department—which, as Eric

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Zolov shows in his contribution in this volume, remained greatly concerned about Communist infiltration into local politics—maintained that Communist influence in Mexico’s trade union movement was virtually absent.≤∏ Industrial workers, U.S. o≈cials concluded, acquiesced to the machinations of state-allied labor bosses. This passivity, however, had di√erential consequences. On the one hand, it made for extraordinary labor stability, the pride of automakers and Mexican authorities alike. On the other hand, it translated into what U.S. automakers believed to be an ideologically docile workforce, easily led and manipulated by powerful labor leaders. This, according to U.S. executives, left Mexican wage earners potentially ‘‘vulnerable to demagoguery and Communist influence.’’≤π To counter such vulnerabilities, automakers introduced a multitude of company programs designed to mold wage earners in the image of an idealized ‘‘American’’ workforce. Obviously, in Mexico, where anti-Americanism resided in the bedrock of nationalist sentiment, such initiatives could evince none of Henry Ford’s outright jingoism and bigotry. Instead, his son Henry Ford II accentuated the ‘‘social progress’’ that would come from ‘‘incorporating Mexican working-class and peasant youths into factory activities.’’≤∫ gm president Frederick Donner put the promise of U.S. factories even more plainly: ‘‘Mexico can have the assurance that it will find in gm complete cooperation and reciprocity. Mexicans deserve a better future. Our company will provide that impulse, and Mexico will serve as a dignified example for the whole free world.’’≤Ω In a sense, Donner took his predecessor Charles Wilson’s famed adage a step further: what was good for gm was now also good for the entire world. This corporate impulse took the form of ‘‘good corporate citizenship,’’ a term still used by the Big Three in Mexico. Within the workplace this included wages five times the average, generous welfare benefits, and scholarships for wage earners’ children. The firms also sponsored recreational activities, particularly sports leagues, which according to executives served to ‘‘showcase U.S. sportsmanship and teamwork.’’ They also funded courses in English for their employees, stressing its role as ‘‘the language of the future.’’≥≠ These corporate e√orts extended as well beyond the factory walls. gm, for instance, underwrote the nightly news on the state-owned television channel and sponsored an annual ‘‘Parade of Progress’’ at Chapultepec Park, during which visitors were treated to festivities and the company’s latest lineup of automobiles.≥∞ Ford established a manager of civic a√airs to publicize its ‘‘good corporate citizenship’’ and oversee its multiple outreach projects. These included a national manual arts program for school-age children, meant to ‘‘o√er routes to find one’s vocation.’’ By 1970, a decade into the program, it counted

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750,000 school-age participants and took credit for ‘‘diminishing drop-out rates and juvenile delinquencies in the areas it targeted.’’≥≤ By far Ford’s largest civic project was the Escuelas Henry Ford initiative, begun in 1962. This project represented a commitment by the firm to partner with the Mexican government to ‘‘build primary schools in regions with Ford facilities and to make available the educational resources that will combat Mexico’s deficiencies.’’ By 1967, the program had sponsored more than fifty schools, including five within the Mexico City’s industrial periphery.≥≥ The Big Three also facilitated and encouraged contact between Mexican and U.S. autoworkers. Not only did they uphold the United States as the epitome of progress; each year they sponsored trips for workers to visit Detroit, where they could see that progress firsthand. Executives also teamed with heads of the afl-cio to provide leadership grants, which brought local labor leaders to Detroit for training in union organizing. Automakers also facilitated contacts between Mexican autoworkers and the United Auto Workers (uaw) and its head, Walter Reuther. Reuther was the era’s most visible ‘‘symbol and spokesman for one particularly attractive version of American life.’’≥∂ In automakers’ view, he was the individual most responsible for bringing stability to an industry that had historically been the site of heated rank-and-file activism and labor discord. Reuther reasoned that uaw strength in Mexico would serve both as a bulwark against potential Communist infiltration of the labor movement and as a counter to the creeping threat of ‘‘wage dumping.’’ Without international organizing, Reuther argued, ‘‘we will be isolated and divided, weak and defenseless in the face of the growing power of international capital to exploit us separately.’’≥∑ Reuther’s gospel of the ‘‘politics of productivity’’ and the ‘‘revolutionary power of economic abundance’’ closely paralleled the Kennedy administration’s Alliance for Progress. According to its charter, the Alliance aimed ‘‘to improve and strengthen democratic institutions through the application of the principle of self-determination by the people.’’≥∏ U.S. ambassador to Mexico Thomas Mann, who in 1967 would head the Automobile Manufacturers Association, considered his and the United States’ role to be to determine ‘‘how we can best help promote economic and social progress in Mexico.’’ The ‘‘orderly evolution’’ of American business was subsumed under Walt Rostow’s highly influential ‘‘modernization’’ theory, which teleologically posited that U.S. investments would universally promote a ‘‘collective culture of free will’’ that would propel the developing world through the ‘‘stages of economic growth’’ until it reached U.S. standards. Such notions were so firmly held that, during his o≈cial tour of the United States, only the second by a Mexican president, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz pronounced that Mexico

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was prepared to follow the United States’ lead, since ‘‘Mexico ha[d] now reached its take-o√ stage.’’≥π As pursued by working people in Mexico, however, this supposed takeo√ would bring contradictory and unforeseen consequences. The American Dream à la Mexicana Asked whether he was ever a Communist, Clemente Zaldívar, fired from and blacklisted by gm in 1966 for being a ‘‘militant agitator beholden to Communists,’’ laughed. ‘‘A Communist? Me? Not at all. I don’t even know what that is.’’ Asked whether he was anti-American or anti-Mexican, other accusations levied against him, Zaldívar turned more serious. ‘‘Look,’’ he explained, ‘‘We were never anti-gringo or anti-Mexicano. Yes, we wanted a more American life, but to us that was progress; that was making a better Mexico.’’≥∫ In his twelve years at gm, Zaldívar seemed to possess all the characteristics his employer maintained made a ‘‘good employee’’: ‘‘a√able and anxious to learn, active in community a√airs, and committed to promoting security and wellbeing.’’≥Ω When not putting in overtime hours in the metal finishing department, Zaldívar played on company sports teams (even leading the soccer squad to a city championship), regularly attended English language courses, and participated in the inaugural meeting of the Reuther-headed World Automobile Council. Hailing from Santa Julia, one of Mexico City’s roughest slums, but by 1966 residing in a suburban home on the edge of the capital’s first bedroom community, Zaldívar embodied the ‘‘modernizing’’ impulse promoted by U.S. and Mexican authorities. In 1963, however, Zaldívar emerged as a vocal member of Grupo Democrático, a faction of autoworkers who militated, in their words, to ‘‘revive sindicalismo in order to bring the best benefit to Mexico.’’∂≠ The group, which authorities labeled a ‘‘small minority being directed by Communists,’’ formed in the specific context of the automobile industry’s shift to full-scale manufacturing.∂∞ The 1962 Integration Decree gave automakers just twenty-nine months to convert from assembly to manufacturing operations. This entailed rapid and unprecedented changes in work relations. Productivity skyrocketed more than 100 percent, and the workforce tripled in size between 1960 and 1965.∂≤ With these changes came increased injuries, daily speedups, and closer managerial scrutiny—an environment that workers said was ‘‘more suited to a burro.’’∂≥ In this setting, the industry’s long-standing paternalist strategies of labor control proved ine√ective.∂∂ Zaldívar and others found the reigning charro, Raúl Sán-

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chez del Castillo, to be entirely unresponsive to workers’ changing concerns. By 1963 they had launched a campaign to oust him from o≈ce. Posting notices around the plant, they denounced Sánchez del Castillo’s ‘‘ineptitude and disregard for the rights of workers.’’∂∑ They also urged employees to demand and then attend union meetings, which, when infrequently convened by Sánchez del Castillo, drew less than 30 percent of the membership. ‘‘Now is the time and ours is a movement of transcendence,’’ democratistas proclaimed in August 1963. gm had recently broken ground in Toluca, where in December 1964 it would open Latin America’s largest and most technologically advanced automaking facility, capable of producing twenty thousand vehicles a year. Moreover, union elections were scheduled for that month, giving wage earners an opportunity to vote out of o≈ce their reigning charro, who six months earlier had renegotiated the union contract without any input from the membership. Never had so much excitement surrounded a union election within the auto industry. The democratistas had invited the press to observe, hoping its presence might help prevent electoral fraud. ‘‘Our working-class brothers are counting on us to make this a victory for sindicalismo,’’ they announced.∂∏ Once tallied, the votes revealed the democratistas to be the clear winners. Sánchez del Castillo responded by leading his supporters (primarily employees from the parts warehouse and not the production facility) out of the meeting hall in protest. The next morning, they appeared before federal authorities, denouncing the election as having been conducted ‘‘in a completely disordered and arbitrary way.’’∂π In a rare victory for rank-and-file workers, state o≈cials, after interviewing every wage earner who cast a ballot, ruled the democratistas to be the legitimate winners. Taking Americanizing discourses at their word, democratistas saw meaningful participation in industrial life as the foremost promise of progress. Accordingly, they began articulating new demands that challenged state-controlled unionism. Assuming o≈ce in August 1963, Zaldívar announced to workers that ‘‘unions are for making demands, not supplicating. This union belongs to you; we are your representatives.’’ He also underscored the example of the uaw, whose ‘‘success has come through lengthy union struggle and working-class conquista.’’∂∫ In their first contract negotiations with gm, democratistas made a host of new demands, all of which they explained their counterparts in the U.S. had long enjoyed. For one thing, they insisted on having real contract negotiations, in contrast to the typical closed-door talks presided over by entrenched charros. And the issues they wanted to be placed on the table reached further

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into managerial prerogatives than ever before. For instance, they demanded the right to decide how the transition to full-scale manufacturing would be carried out on the shop floor. Stressing that they knew their departments better than the engineers brought in to supervise the transition to full-scale manufacturing, workers worried that company plans would make their already-burdensome workload ever more onerous. They also asserted the right to participate in setting production quotas, the pace of production, and the percentage of workers employed in di√erent wage categories. These last demands had been inspired by Walter Reuther himself, who not only made available to Mexican autoworkers translated copies of Detroit-area union contracts but also enlisted their help in his project to analyze every contract gm had ever signed worldwide. Studying these, Mexican workers concluded that ‘‘the company is exploiting Mexican labor and taking all the profits to the ‘other side.’ ’’∂Ω As one journalist who covered the emerging movement similarly observed, gm was ‘‘not creating new industry but, rather, taking advantage of new labor in new places.’’∑≠ Democratistas sought to unite autoworkers across the entire industry. ‘‘Look at the power of the uaw,’’ explained one activist. ‘‘We need a single union for the whole industry, like theirs. Only then can we expect to challenge the farce that is charrismo.’’∑∞ As they had done at gm, democratistas leafleted at the city’s other automobile plants, inviting wage earners to join their oppositional campaign. They also began distributing their own newsletter, El Eco, which was designed to counter state-controlled media depictions. The death in July 1965 of Luis Quijano, the charro at Chrysler who had been in charge since 1942, helped their e√orts. In his absence, employees immediately held union elections, which brought to power an insurgent group committed to ‘‘union democracy and social justice.’’∑≤ Once in o≈ce, they reminded authorities that ‘‘we are together making the step to social progress and modernization.’’∑≥ To autoworkers, modernization also meant popular participation in urban life, particularly as Mexico City exploded demographically and spatially in the wake of its economic miracle. In the 1960s alone, nearly two million migrants from the countryside flocked to the capital, making housing one of working people’s most prominent concerns.∑∂ In 1965 autoworkers joined with hundreds of other industrial laborers to call on the government to pass legislation that would require employers with over one hundred employees to provide for their workers’ housing.∑∑ This, they maintained, was not only explicit in the Ley Federal del Trabajo but also implicit in the collective promise of modernization. Rhetorically, U.S. automakers pledged their support for such a plan, promising

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to help employees purchase land around the automobile factories. Still, workers observed that ‘‘all their promises remain in their inkwells.’’ ‘‘The company has lied to us again, so we must address these social issues ourselves,’’ concluded democratistas.∑∏ Pooling their resources, some six hundred union members at gm purchased land in 1965 to construct a workers’ colonia—the first of its kind in Mexico. Nestled in the rolling hills ten miles north of the capital’s city center, the site was ideally suited to workers’ modernizing impulses. The neighborhood bordered Ciudad Satélite, Mexico City’s first bedroom community, constructed for middle-class residents fleeing the irruption of rural poor into the capital. By the time construction of the workers’ colonia began in 1965, the area boasted a Pizza Hut, a Tastee Freez, a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, a Lions Club, and a U.S.-style supermarket. Workers’ plans called for single, unattached homes on large lots, with front and back yards, two-car garages, and spacious greenbelts. These dwellings stood in marked contrast to the unadorned multistory apartment complexes the government was then building for working-class and middle-class residents in the capital. Further reflecting workers’ cosmopolitan sensibilities, the colonia’s tree-lined streets bore names such as Calle Washington, Calle California, and Avenida Norteamérica; the neighborhood as a whole was dubbed Colonia Las Américas. This project also reflected modernization’s highly gendered dimension. Shaped by bourgeois gender ideologies, modernization implied a rigidly defined sexual division of labor, one in which men would fill the ranks of the industrial working class and women would be consigned to the domestic sphere or jobs specifically coded ‘‘female.’’ Exercising vast economies of scale, automobile manufacturers o√ered unprecedented benefits and ‘‘family’’ wages, su≈cient to provide for a dependent wife and children. U.S. automakers, in fact, preferred hiring such workers, believing them to be more responsible and loyal, and they actively promoted a vision that equated modernity with bourgeois notions of motherhood. These ideals, however, clashed with the realities of life in Colonia Las Américas and other newly sprouting working-class neighborhoods in Mexico City’s industrial periphery. As Las Américas was founded outside formal government institutions, state authorities proved reluctant to extend municipal services to the neighborhood. A year after moving in, residents still lacked uninterrupted running water, sanitation services, and electricity—despite making repeated demands for them. This burden obviously fell disproportionately on women, who attended to such concerns while their husbands did wage work

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outside the home. As one female resident recalled, ‘‘We wanted a modern community, but there was nothing modern about all that trash out on the street baking in the sun.’’∑π Like their husbands in the workplace, women in the neighborhood began militating for meaningful participation in controlling the social forces unleashed by modernization. Calling themselves ‘‘Las Madres de Las Américas,’’ the women staged a number of demonstrations, calling on authorities to answer their demands for improved living conditions within Mexico City’s industrial fringe. For instance, in 1967 more than three hundred women assembled on Calle Washington, carrying banners and large barrels filled with rank refuse, and marched to the o≈ce of the mayor, who had consistently refused to meet with the women. Forcing their way into his o≈ce, they proceeded to empty the barrels of garbage. State-controlled newspapers suggested the women were ‘‘surly malcontents’’ who needed better supervision from their husbands.∑∫ Las Madres de Las Américas were hardly the only ones making such demands. They were part of an expanding community movement in the 1970s headed by working-class women. Like their male counterparts in the workplace, such women sought to realize what they considered to be the promise of modernization. Their demands included adequate schooling for the large number of children residing within Mexico City’s industrial fringe. As one female activist explained, the ‘‘insu≈cient number of schools threatens to destroy our families.’’∑Ω For example, in 1973, following a brutally crushed strike at the Ford plant in Tlalnepantla, female residents demanded not only the construction of additional schools but also fundamental changes to Escuela Ford, the largest school in the area. Foremost, they expressed displeasure with the school’s curriculum, which included teaching students that Henry Ford ‘‘was a man of simple pleasures who never flaunted his wealth and who believed that charity would not resolve the problem of misery.’’∏≠ They also found fault with the school’s name. Instead of honoring Henry Ford, parents proposed the school be named Escuela Emiliano Zapata, after the famed revolutionary. In September 1974, parents took their proposal to the municipal authorities, who listened to their request but were unmoved: ‘‘Escuela Ford is the only name the school can have, as Ford paid for its construction.’’∏∞ When, a year later, these same women joined in demonstration with five thousand families from Tlalnepantla, they encountered a far more severe response. Again issuing demands for adequate schools, housing, and municipal services, they faced a contingent of armed soldiers, who beat them with clubs and rifle butts. At least seven women were critically wounded. For working people in Mexico, such responses would

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become ever more common, prompting one participant ruefully to observe, ‘‘We don’t live; we merely survive.’’∏≤ Deep Freeze While healing from the wounds he su√ered at the hands of government authorities in November 1969, Vicente Herrera discovered during his hospitalization that Chrysler had fired him, ending his decade-long tenure with the firm. ‘‘We are no longer in need of your services,’’ his dismissal papers tersely read. Herrera’s injuries, coupled with the firm’s subsequent blacklisting of him, kept him from finding other gainful employment.∏≥ Sadly, Herrera’s story was not unique; although disabled by his injuries, he was otherwise simply one of more than five hundred Chrysler workers fired within days of the shootings at Toluca. The issue that sparked the conflagration was the transfer of more than one thousand wage earners from Chrysler’s Mexico City facility to its Toluca plant, about sixty miles from the city center. The transfers ended the workers’ membership in their Mexico City union and relegated them to the union in Toluca, where their wages were half those previously earned. Moreover, the Toluca plant’s union was controlled by a charro, whom wage earners accused of selling employment spots, personally pocketing union dues, refusing to convene union meetings, and openly collaborating with authorities to remove dissidents. Like their counterparts at gm, however, Chrysler workers’ demands extended to a wide range of concerns, embracing a vision of ‘‘social justice’’ rooted in labor internationalism and Mexico’s 1910 revolution.∏∂ As wage earners explained, ‘‘The fake union is making a joke out of our real union and our Revolutionary heritage. This is not what our Revolution was fought for.’’∏∑ Following the November 1969 shootings, workers planned their next protest for January 21, 1970. The protest included a march by several thousand from the Chrysler plant to the state governor’s o≈ce in Toluca. There o≈cials refused to meet with the dissidents, o√ering instead to respect the outcome of a new union election. Workers met and elected rank-and-file worker Rafael Martínez, whom the company quickly fired and the government subsequently arrested for ‘‘stealing’’ from Chrysler.∏∏ Meanwhile Chrysler organized its own closed-door election, in which Hugo Díaz, the company’s production chief, was declared the union head. State labor o≈cials immediately approved the election and rejected workers’ petitions for an inquiry into voter fraud. Already considered a harsh production chief, Hugo Díaz established a ‘‘regime of repression and terrorism’’ at the two Chrysler plants.∏π Cooperating

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closely with management (of which he remained a member), Díaz hired pistoleros (armed guards) and guardias blancas to combat dissidence. Company soccer teams, which in earlier years had helped foster working-class solidarity, became ‘‘converted into armed shock forces for managers’’ to intimidate and terrorize employees.∏∫ Díaz even established a state police substation within the plant to facilitate the identification and removal of ‘‘militants.’’ Employees also charged that Díaz hired scabs (esquiroles) to apprise him of labor activism among wage earners outside the plant. When, eighteen months after the first shootings at Chrysler, authorities formally responded to the strife, they did so by denouncing the dissidents as ‘‘Communists’’ who were ‘‘threatening the fiber of the Mexican nation.’’ Such claims only served to legitimize ongoing violence being unleashed on workers.∏Ω In 1972, two more shootings occurred at Chrysler’s Toluca plant, both of which authorities refused to acknowledge. Workers responded by mounting more protests, including numerous occupations of the headquarters of the nation’s largest labor confederation. Autoworkers joined with laborers in other strategic mass-production industries. Over the next eight years, they launched what became the largest, most extensive strike wave in Mexican history. Prominent groups within this insurgence included electrical workers, who formed a dissident faction called La Tendencia Democrática (the Democratic Tendency), which brought together workers at some 120 di√erent workplaces, uniting more than 100,000 dissident unionists. Scholars have tended to understand this insurgence in connection with President Echeverría’s apertura democrática (democratic opening), crediting increased labor activism to a change in presidential labor policy.π≠ Under Echeverría, the regime projected an ostensibly ‘‘populist’’ image and welcomed the creation of ‘‘independent’’ unions while simultaneously repressing dissent. For instance, Echeverría repeatedly denounced multinational corporations as ‘‘voracious imperialists [who] foster national dependence’’ while simultaneously dispatching the army to help employers crush opposition.π∞ Among the most violent of these episodes was his use of the army in 1976 to crush a nationwide strike launched by electrical power workers. Autoworkers discerned the apparent political contradiction, labeling the armed men ‘‘o≈cial assassins for Mexican ‘progress’ ’’ who have ‘‘destroyed the companies’ pretensions of bringing social advancement.’’π≤ Within the automobile industry, employers tended to respond to the multiple strikes by quickly o√ering wage increases in order to resume production.

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But wage increases failed to resolve the endemic class conflict, which revolved around issues more fundamental than remuneration. More often, these disputes were settled through state repression and corporate recalcitrance. For gm workers, this was made painfully clear in 1980 when they launched what would become one of the longest strikes in Mexican history. As participants explained, ‘‘This movement is the direct result of di≈cult relations that began in 1965, when the company and the government assumed an intransigent attitude toward our civic rights.’’π≥ As they did in 1965, autoworkers demanded the right to organize a democratic union at gm’s newest plant, in the northern state of Coahuila, where, once again, a corrupt union boss created a bogus union and signed a collective contract before a single employee had been hired. Following a protracted struggle, authorities succeeded in crushing the movement through intimidation and outright fraud. The movement’s death knell came when company executives and state o≈cials bribed a former union leader to sign doctored documents that acceded to management’s requests. For authorities, what was at stake was uprooting the community strength that the modernizing miracle helped beget. By di√using the limited strength that Mexico City’s working class had amassed over the previous decade, state and corporate authorities merely continued the ‘‘creative destruction’’ that Josef Schumpeter has argued stands at the heart of industrial capitalism.π∂ Desmadre, Dismothernity Roger Bartra has written: ‘‘We can no longer critique Mexican culture in the name of modernity, of a liberal-inspired modernity that raises up the banner of ‘progress.’ We have to critique modernity from the standpoint I call dismodernity, or better yet—taking a cue from desmadre, Mexican slang for disorder— dismothernity.’’π∑ Bartra’s insight applies particularly well to Mexico’s automobile industry, which promised ‘‘social progress’’ but became associated with a labor regime built on repression and human rights violations. Today the popular struggles that marked the late 1960s and 1970s have hardly receded, despite the Cold War’s end and free trade’s triumph. In fact, Ford workers in Mexico City continue to militate for democratic union representation. Exercised numerous times since 1982, Ford’s more recent tactics to crush democratic opposition involve shutting down its plants, dismissing the entire workforce, and reopening its doors with a new workforce (sans dissidents) and significantly lower wages and fewer benefits. For instance, 1990 saw repeated factory occupations, demonstrations calling for legitimate union elections, and even kidnappings and as-

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sassinations of activists. Ultimately, in January 1991, state and corporate authorities conducted their own closed-door union elections, which human rights observers concluded denied ‘‘the fundamental rights of Ford workers to choose their union representatives.’’ Even the Partido Acción Nacional, a right-wing party that rarely condemns multinational corporations, squarely blamed the ongoing violence on Ford authorities.π∏ Just three weeks after the November 1969 shootings at Chrysler, U.S. State Department o≈cials predicted that the coming decade in Mexico would witness an impending ‘‘clash between growing discontent and forces of resistance [that] will result in the overt use of force in support of and against the established political system. And the United States, which is the prime inspiration for those Mexicans who seek change but is also closely linked with what many consider the status quo, may be increasingly vilified by both sides.’’ππ Their words proved prescient. Autoworkers like Vicente Herrera and Clemente Zaldívar, who sought to fulfill both the legacy of the Mexican revolution and the promise of Americanization, faced vilification from both a Mexican regime committed at least rhetorically to revolutionary nationalism and corporate authorities committed to U.S. economic hegemony. Their fates highlight not only what Roger Rouse has called globalization’s ‘‘unresolved tension between ever-more reactionary states and the largely liberatory possibilities opened up by transnational forces and arrangements,’’ but also the violent means to which state and corporate authorities went to stem the promise unleashed by Americanization.π∫ Notes 1. Vicente Herrera, interview by the author, Estado de México, March 4, 1997; Solidaridad (Mexico City), February 1970; El Día (Mexico City), February 2, 1971; Justicia Social, August 1974; Angel Fojo de Diego, ‘‘Estudio de un conflicto industrial: El caso Automex’’ (MS, Centro de Estudios Sociológicos, El Colegio de México, 1973); Kevin J. Middlebrook, ‘‘The Political Economy of Mexican Organized Labor’’ (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1981), 306–7. 2. Larry Rohter, ‘‘Ford Motor Is Linked to Argentina’s ‘Dirty War,’ ’’ New York Times, November 27, 2002, sec. A, late edition. 3. Ian Roxborough, ‘‘Mexico,’’ in Latin America between the Second World War and the Cold War, 1944–48, ed. Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 190. 4. James P. Brennan, ‘‘Clasismo and the Workers: The Ideological-Cultural Context of ‘Sindicalismo de Liberación’ in the Cordoban Automobile Industry, 1970–1975,’’ Bulletin of Latin American Research 15 (1996): 293.

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5. On import substitution industrialization, see Antonio L. Aspra, ‘‘Import Substitution in Mexico: Past and Present,’’ World Development 5 (January–February 1977): 111–23; René Villareal, ‘‘The Policy of Import-Substitution Industrialization, 1929–1975,’’ in Authoritarianism in Mexico, ed. José Luis Reyna and Richard S. Weinert (Philadelphia: ishi Press, 1977), 67–107. 6. Not for nothing was Walt Rostow, chief proponent of modernization theory, a key economic planner of the Alliance for Progress. For a perceptive reading of the teleology embedded in such modernizing narratives, see María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 7. The phrase ‘‘Alliance for Profits’’ is from Clark W. Reynolds, The Mexican Economy: Twentieth-Century Structure and Growth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 186. On the Alliance for Progress, see Stephen Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: JFK Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 8. Also see Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and ‘‘Nation Building’’ in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 8. Quoted in Victor G. Reuther, The Brothers Reuther and the Story of the uaw: A Memoir (Boston: Houghton MiΔin, 1976), 401; and La Prensa (Mexico City), January 12, 1965. 9. El Universal (Mexico City), March 18, 1958. 10. Ford International Archive (hereafter cited as fia), Dearborn, Mich., International File, Accension AR-74-18056. 11. Secretaría de Trabajo y Previsión Social, Registro de Asociaciones (hereafter cited as stpsra), exp. 10/6298, leg. 4, July 1964. Also see Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York: Basic Books, 1995). 12. Leopoldo Silva, interview by the author, Mexico City, October 31, 1996. 13. This points up what Mary Louise Pratt has identified as the scholarly literature’s tendency either to historicize subalterns as the ‘‘victims qua survivors’’ of Western imperialism or to romanticize them as pristine beings seemingly untouched by history. In either depiction, she contends, subalterns are condemned to destruction. See her Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992). 14. Two important exceptions that highlight the ambiguities and contradictions of ‘‘Americanization’’ in Latin America are Julio Moreno, 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); and Michel Gobat, Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua Under U.S. Imperial Rule (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). 15. Peter Smith, ‘‘Mexico since 1946,’’ in Cambridge History of Latin America, ed. Leslie Bethell, vol. 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 83. The literature in this

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vein is vast; representative works include Ruth and David Collier, Shaping the Political Arena (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); and Hobart A. Spaulding, Organized Labor in Latin America: Historical Case Studies of Urban Workers in Dependent Societies (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). An important contribution that transcends such analytical dichotomies is Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine LeGrand, and Ricardo Salvatore, eds., Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.–Latin American Relations (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998). 16. Chrysler de México, Sobre ruedas: La historia de Chrysler en México (Mexico City: privately printed, 1993), 72; Provincia (Estado de México), January 13, 1963. 17. Luis Unikel, La dinámica del crecimiento de la Ciudad de México (Mexico City: Fundación para Estudios de la Población, 1972), 24. 18. Douglas C. Bennett and Kenneth E. Sharpe, Transnational Corporations versus the State: The Political Economy of the Mexican Auto Industry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 100; Clark Reynolds, ‘‘Why Mexico’s ‘Stabilizing Development’ Was Actually Destabilizing with Some Implications for the Future,’’ World Development (1978): 1007. 19. Diario Oficial, August 25, 1962. 20. Jerry Heasley, The Production Figure Book for U.S. Cars (Osceola, Wis.: Motorbooks International, 1977). 21. Ford Motor Company, ‘‘A Study of Automotive Manufacturing in Mexico’’ (Mexico City: privately printed, April 1960); General Motors Corporation, ‘‘General Motors Corporation in the World Automobile Market’’ (Detroit: privately printed, May 1962), 36; Diario Oficial, August 25, 1962. 22. Roxborough, ‘‘Mexico,’’ 190. 23. Corrupt, state-allied union bosses were known as charros after the fondness of the government-imposed union head Jesús Díaz de León for charrería (rodeo). A firstperson account of ‘‘the charrazo’’ (the government’s substitution of independent union heads with compliant labor bosses) is the account by the removed head of the Sindicato de Trabajadores Ferrocarrileros de la República Mexicana, Luis Gómez Z., Sucesos y remembranzas (Mexico City: Editorial Secapsa, 1979). For a historical analysis, see Kevin J. Middlebrook, The Paradox of Revolution: Labor, the State, and Authoritarianism in Mexico (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 107–55. 24. Richard U. Miller, ‘‘Labor Organizations in a Developing Country: The Case of Mexico’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1966), 123. 25. The News (Mexico City), January 26, 1965. 26. U.S. National Archives, Record Group 59, 1960–63, Box 1511, Folder 712.00 (W)/7– 761. 27. Flora Lewis, ‘‘Why There is Anti-Americanism in Mexico,’’ New York Times Magazine, July 6, 1952, 10. 28. fia, International File, Accension AR-74-18056. 29. El Universal (Mexico City), January 14, 1964; Novedades (Mexico City), January 15, 1965.

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30. Noticiero gm (newsletter of General Motors de México), April 1959. 31. Seth Fein, ‘‘New Empire into Old: Making Mexican Newsreels the Cold War Way,’’ Diplomatic History 28 (November 2004): 715n42; also see his chapter in this volume. 32. Ford de México, Apuntes para una historia de la industria automotriz (Mexico City: privately printed, 1977). 33. Secretaría de Educación Pública (hereafter cited as sep), Box 54, exp. IV/161 (IV120/4205), April 1973. 34. Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man, 334. 35. Ibid., 339. 36. Quoted in Saldaña-Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas, 49. 37. Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, National Security File, Country File v. 11, 1/66–2/67, April 14, 1966; Thomas C. Mann, Oral History Interview I by Joe B. Frantz, November 4, 1968. 38. Clemente Zaldívar, interview by the author, Estado de México, July 18, 1997. 39. Noti-gm (January–March 1955). 40. stpsra, exp. 10/6298, leg. 4, August 1962. 41. The News (Mexico City), February 6, 1965. 42. Kevin J. Middlebrook, ‘‘Union Democratization in the Mexican Automobile Industry,’’ Latin American Research Review 24 (spring 1989): 69–93; fia, Industrial Archive, Ford Data Book, unnumbered record from November 1965. 43. stpsra, exp. 10/6298, leg. 4, December 6, 1964. 44. Middlebrook, The Paradox of Revolution, 233. 45. stpsra, exp. 10/6298, leg. 4, September 17, 1962. 46. stpsra, exp. 10/6298, leg. 4, August 21, 1963. 47. stpsra, exp. 10/6298, leg. 4, August 22, 1963. 48. stpsra, exp. 10/6298, leg. 4, November 13, 1963. 49. stpsra, exp. 10/6298, leg. 4, January 5, 1965. 50. Siempre (Mexico City), February 1965. 51. stpsra, exp. 10/6298, leg. 4, July 18, 1964. 52. Justicia Social, August 1971. 53. stpsra, exp. 10/5441, leg. 3, February 1968. 54. Luis Unikel, La dinámica del crecimiento, 24. 55. Expresiones (Tlalnepantla, Estado de México), March 4, 1965. 56. stpsra, exp. 10/6298, leg. 4, February 1965. 57. Irma Vargas, interview by the author, Estado de México, July 20, 1997. 58. Avance (Tlalnepantla, Estado de México), July 12, 1967. 59. El Día (Mexico City), August 26, 1973. 60. sep, Box 54, exp. IV/161 (IV-120/4205), April 1973. 61. Ibid., September 1974. 62. El Día, July 17, 1975, August 11, 1975. 63. Vicente Herrera, interview by the author, Estado de México, August 25, 1997.

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64. Justicia Social (Mexico City), July 1971. 65. stpsra, exp. 10/5441, leg. 3, February 1971. 66. Solidaridad (Mexico City), February 1971. 67. Líder (Mexico City), December 15, 1971. 68. Ibid. 69. El Universal (Mexico City), January 4, 1971; stpsra, exp. 10/5441, leg. 3, January 1971. 70. Jorge Basurto, En el régimen de Echeverría: Rebelión e independencia (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1983); Ilán Bizberg, Estado y sindicalismo en México (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1990). Two notable exceptions are Middlebrook, Paradox of Revolution; and Ian Roxborough, Unions and Politics in Mexico: The Case of the Automobile Industry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 71. El Universal, September 18, 1973. 72. El Día, November 22, 1976; Uno Más Uno (Mexico City), December 17, 1977. 73. Quoted in Valentina Cerda de López, ‘‘Historia de una huelga: gm y la lucha de 106 días’’ (Licenciatura thesis, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1983), 16. 74. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1950). 75. Roger Bartra, Blood, Ink, and Culture: Miseries and Splendors of the Post-Mexican Condition (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 9. 76. Quoted in Dan LaBotz, Labor Suppression in Mexico Today (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 158. 77. United States National Archive, Record Group 59, 1967–69, Pol. 2 Mex., Box 2337, November 24, 1969. 78. Roger Rouse, ‘‘Thinking Through Transnationalism: Notes on the Cultural Politics of Class Relations in the Contemporary United States,’’ Public Culture 7 (1995): 59.

STEPHEN PITTI

Chicano Cold Warriors César Chávez, Mexican American Politics, and California Farmworkers

Few political earthquakes rocked the twentieth-century United States like the one that hit California’s San Joaquin Valley on September 16, 1965.∞ As ethnic Mexican communities throughout the United States celebrated their ties to Mexico in fiestas patrias, a thousand Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans gathered to vote whether or not to strike in local agriculture. Organizers of a group that called itself the National Farm Workers Association (nfwa) distributed strike authorization cards to area residents who arrived at Our Lady of Guadalupe church in the small town of Delano ‘‘in a holiday mood.’’ nfwa leaders had decorated the hall with pictures of Zapata, with the California socialist Jack London’s ‘‘definition of a scab,’’ and with the black thunderbird and red background of the nfwa flag.≤ After a local Mexican musician played an introductory set, the meeting began with a prayer. nfwa o≈cial Gil Padilla then took the stage to explain that Mexicans needed to decide whether to support the Filipino farmworkers who had voted the week before to walk out of local grape fields. Their key complaint was low wages, but the Filipino strikers had also made clear that they demanded the right to a labor union that would represent them in future disputes with California growers. Local Mexican and Mexican American workers, many of them immigrants, rose to support the strike resolution in the church hall. Some recalled participating in the bloody California labor struggles of the 1930s, while others testified about their solidarity with more recent labor activism in Mexico. Reminding the crowd that Mexicans elsewhere had gathered that day to celebrate common national struggles, nfwa president César Chávez urged Californians to remember Father Hidalgo’s sacrifice in bringing down the Spanish empire, and he encouraged local workers to commit to yet ‘‘another struggle for the freedom and dignity which poverty denies us.’’ The workers madly applauded Chávez’s call to strike, and within several days the nfwa had gathered some twenty-seven hundred authorization cards signed by local residents.≥

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The strike in California agriculture reverberated far beyond the fields of the San Joaquin Valley, one of the richest agricultural regions in the world. The conflict would continue until July 1970 and would engage thousands of workers and millions of other residents of the United States, Canada, Europe, and the Philippines who responded to union calls to boycott California grapes to pressure intransigent growers who refused to bargain with union leaders. In time, the strike by the nfwa and the Filipino-dominated union, a group known as the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (awoc), would also transform the direction of the entire U.S. labor movement and the relationship between Mexican Americans and institutions such as the Catholic Church. It would reshape discussions in the United States about Mexican immigrants, who had been represented since the early twentieth century as ‘‘laborers, but never citizens,’’ and who since World War II had often been considered a threat to national security, a group with questionable political allegiance that reminded policymakers that the U.S. border with Latin America remained dangerously porous and open to radical political ideas from the South. Finally, the strike would jump-start the Chicano movement from California to Texas to the Midwest, as young Mexican Americans who identified with the exploited, and insurgent, farmworkers organized their own vibrant challenges to U.S. society in the era of the Vietnam War. In writing a history of the labor pains that birthed modern Latino politics in the United States, I argue here for the importance of Mexican immigrant and Mexican American political agendas in California from the late 1940s until 1970, and argue for the central importance of anti-Communism in framing those agendas. During that era, the grape strikers made clear, Latino residents advanced many civil rights and labor causes. U.S. military involvement in Korea and Vietnam, and church-based religious activism, gave shape to many Latino political struggles, and many Mexican and Mexican American participants worried that Soviet interests might influence domestic developments in the rural United States. Fears of Communist subversives, and unsubstantiated concerns that foreign radicals might enter the United States from Mexico disguised as farmworkers to foment revolution in the United States, helped define the ‘‘immigration problem’’ in the minds of many U.S. residents. Those fears predictably served to legitimize antilabor, and often racist, attempts to block Mexican and Mexican American political advancement during the 1950s and 1960s, but they also inspired anti-Communist attempts to grapple with rural poverty. In California, low-wage Mexican immigrant and Mexican American workers, who benefited little from the much-hyped U.S. postwar economic prosperity, con-

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fronted destructive redbaiting, changes in U.S. foreign policy, the rise of the New Right in California, and the persistence of Mexican nationalism en el extranjero (‘‘outside of Mexico’’). But they also profited from a new interest in civil rights, and in rural poverty, by New Left activists, and they struggled to translate anti– Vietnam War e√orts to farmworker communities. Postwar Americanism Founded in 1962, the National Farm Workers Association had generated tremendous enthusiasm among mexicanos and Mexican Americans in California for nearly three years before its strike declaration in September 1965. Its organizing success depended on the long-standing negligence, even hostility, of traditional labor organizations in postwar California to Mexican immigrants, and to the poverty of farmworkers employed by the enormous agricultural operations that defined seasonal labor relations throughout rural communities of the state’s enormous Central Valley. Most Mexican American political organizations throughout the United States had steered clear of labor issues during the 1950s to focus on voter registration, urban renewal, naturalization, and educational advancement—projects that enabled cooperation with liberal Democrats, which avoided suggesting any political debt to Latin America, and which stressed Mexican Americans’ mainstream aspirations as U.S. citizens. In Texas, the most active Mexican American organization from the late 1940s into the mid-1960s had been the American gi Forum, in which the medical doctor Héctor García and other military veterans stressed that the national allegiance and sacrifice they had shown in battle, and their commitment to ‘‘freedom’’ over totalitarianism, had earned their community the right to equal education in postwar Texas. Prominent contemporary organizations in California such as the Mexican American Political Association (mapa), the Community Service Organization (cso), and Mexican American Democratic Clubs had emerged within the anti-Communist pressures of the Taft-Hartley Act, the Internal Security Act, and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Those organizations drew membership from Mexican American veterans of World War II and Korea and adopted political positions meant to emphasize their allegiance to the U.S. Constitution and their loyalty to Washington. By the early 1960s, as Chávez and other rural Mexican Americans attempted to organize farmworkers, Latino veterans in urban California were making their way into the American gi Forum, which had arrived in California with the thousands of Tejanos who entered the state seeking West Coast jobs during the 1950s and 1960s. Forumeers typically

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contended that ‘‘all Americans should know of the great contributions made by the Mexican-American soldiers. . . . In this way they can better understand today’s brother American and lessen the few remaining stigmas harbored against the Spanish-speaking people to help promote a better democracy for all who live in America.’’∂ Organizations such as cso and mapa represented themselves during the 1950s as politically moderate, devoted to the U.S. Constitution, devoid of Mexican influences, and ‘‘adamantly opposed . . . [to] any form of totalitarianism whether it be Communism or Fascism.’’∑ At the founding convention of the national cso in 1954, Edward Roybal noted that ‘‘in the list of twenty-one men who embraced communism after the Korean conflict there wasn’t a single Spanish name on that list. This is a great tribute to us, the Spanish-speaking people, a great tribute to our American heritage.’’ But Roybal and other Mexican Americans also recognized that charges of Communist a≈liation could be used to repress Mexican Americans’ political involvement. Invoking Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s ‘‘Four Freedoms’’ speech of the previous decade, Roybal urged Mexican Americans to demand their own ‘‘freedom from fear: From the fear that after we get our organization going, that after our children can go into academic life that they will not be dragged down before an unfair un-American committee [huac], and freedom from the fear that after they become teachers that they can teach unesco in the schools of our country.’’∏ Few Latinos in any state adopted a more confrontational political agenda than this one during the mid- to late 1950s, as political groups confronted a national security context that raised suspicions about ‘‘aliens’’ and threatened suspected Communists with deportation or imprisonment.π Before the organization of the nfwa in 1962, only the prominent Mexican immigrant Ernesto Galarza had struggled consistently since World War II to unionize local Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers in California.∫ An ardent anti-Communist who was suspicious of ‘‘reds’’ and devoted to the American Federation of Labor, Galarza urged liberals to see rural California as an important site for addressing Communist infiltration of the United States. He noted that tens of thousands of Mexican immigrants had arrived since World War II as undocumented ‘‘wetback’’ workers in U.S. agriculture, and he speculated that foreign radicals might disguise themselves as members of that migrant workforce in order to cross into the United States. In May 1947, Representative John McDowell, a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, announced that Communists were already arriving en masse from Mexico and that ‘‘thousands of Army planes that could be used for the purpose [of patrolling

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the border] are sitting around idle.’’ Thanks in part to Galarza’s lobbying, the Los Angeles Daily News reported several years later about the ‘‘powerless’’ U.S. Border Patrol o≈cials who recognized that ‘‘alien Communist agents are filtering across the Mexican border. . . . in the guise of farm workers recruited from Mexico to aid in harvesting crops in ripening fields and groves from California to Texas.’’Ω The disinterest of California State Federation of Labor o≈cials in agricultural workers, and in Mexicans, ensured that Galarza would have little success organizing farmworkers, but a new labor organization known as the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (awoc) began to achieve considerable success after 1959 and would leave its mark on the grape strike that broke in 1965. Centered in the Northern California city of Stockton, awoc drew heavily from the e√orts of the liberal Catholic priests Thomas McCullough and Donald McDonnell, who worked closely with both national labor o≈cials and local Filipino organizers. Subsidized by the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (afl-cio), and promoted by afl-cio president George Meany, this rural union’s drive owed its existence to the federation’s involvement with labor movements abroad. According to Franz Daniel, assistant director of organization for the afl-cio, in the immediate aftermath of the Cuban Revolution, afl-cio president George Meany ‘‘just got tired of going to international conventions and being needled by labor people from smaller, poorer foreign countries, who could point out that at least they had organized farm workers, while the American labor movement hadn’t. He set up awoc to get them o√ his back.’’∞≠ Many rural Californians, particularly Filipino immigrants, threw their support behind the new organization, and student activists at UC Berkeley predicted that awoc would destroy the ‘‘caste system’’ and ‘‘feudalism’’ that defined regional agriculture.∞∞ The union’s opponents in turn questioned whether awoc in fact took its cues from foreign governments. In early 1961, Catholic growers joined prominent church o≈cials in California in lambasting the involvement of Fathers McCullough and McDonnell in a labor dispute near the border city of Calexico, California. The priests’ e√orts to help unionize Mexican immigrant laborers, detractors emphasized, amounted to ‘‘communism-in-fact’’ if not ‘‘communism-in-theory.’’∞≤ When California’s most prominent Mexican American community organizer of the 1950s, César Estrada Chávez, decided to leave the Community Service Organization and create the National Farm Workers Association in 1962, he brought to rural labor organizing his own commitment to anti-Communism and entered a social movement field in which questions about patriotism and

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national belonging had proved central to unions since before World War II. As the leading member of the cso during the 1950s, Chávez had opposed the e√orts of Mexican and Mexican American ‘‘radicals’’ whom he believed worked for the Soviet Union rather than the state’s working-class residents. In 1956 he had helped oust a cso member active in the Asociación Nacional Mexicana Americana (anma), a political organization sponsored by the Mine-Mill Union that had been on the attorney general’s ‘‘subversive list’’ since 1952, who had sent other cso members copies of the Communist Daily Worker in the mail. In Los Angeles, Chávez had opposed e√orts by perceived ‘‘Stalinists and Trotskyites’’— apparently Mexican American members of local cio organizations—to take over the cso. He also joined other moderate Mexican Americans who were reluctant to identify with e√orts by cio unionists to abolish the McCarran-Walter Act, the much-hated 1952 law under which many left-leaning activists were persecuted.∞≥ With his liberal, anti-Communist credentials intact, Chávez relied on his vast experience as a community organizer and his many personal contacts throughout rural California to establish a strong nfwa network after 1962. He steered clear of labor unions, defining his e√orts in opposition to an awoc dominated, he believed, by urban outsiders who ‘‘had never seen a potato grow.’’ Chávez trusted his own experience as a farmworker and his contacts with Latino Catholics who had been active members of churches throughout rural California. Organizing among co-religionists and Mexicans, urging forward Catholics devoted to achieving God’s justice on earth, he worked to establish a workers’ credit union and to help farmworkers resolve immigration and welfare problems. Leaders of the association contrasted their own identities as rural Mexican Americans with those of the afl-cio labor leaders who were directing awoc’s e√orts. Urging opposition to the rival union among California farmworkers, Chávez gained hundreds of members at awoc’s expense, and he explained to a friend in 1962 that his strategies mirrored the international scene: ‘‘The real joke is that I have [awoc] where Russia has us. I don’t want neither Peace nor War. And that is a hell of a fix [for awoc] to be in.’’∞∂ In this context, the nfwa summoned potential members with bread-and-butter demands that carried no taint of ideological radicalism: You, who complains about the conditions at work. You, who is unhappy with your wages. You, who wants a better tomorrow for your children. You, who is worried that your wages won’t be enough to support your family.

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You, who sees that your life is di≈cult and your work is draining. You, who demands justice for the worker. You, who asks to be treated with respect and dignity. You, who wants to do something to improve your living conditions. It’s for you! Join your Association.∞∑ While Chávez found in 1962 that California agricultural ‘‘workers are not so hot for strikes and unions as they have come to know them,’’ he followed awoc’s lead in relying heavily on church supporters.∞∏ The decline of left-wing labor unionism in California after World War II had made churches Mexicans’ primary ‘‘point of contact with the whites’’ in many places. Chávez knew, moreover, that despite occasional redbaiting of liberal priests, the clergy’s promotion of anti-Communist purges of left-wing unions in California during the late 1940s had sealed the Church’s reputation for antiradicalism.∞π A handbill distributed to churchgoers in the San Francisco Bay area, for instance, had urged Catholics to ‘‘speak with their priest and learn from him the dangers of voting for the union controlled by the Communist Party and Russia.’’∞∫ Church support of Chávez’s e√orts during the early 1960s enabled the nfwa to stress its own antiCommunist credentials. Farmworker organizers rallied members behind the papal encyclicals that urged workers to enter into associations to work in common. They made clear that their group was an ‘‘association’’ rather than a traditional union, and they expressed hope that Catholic growers in particular would voluntarily treat agricultural employees with greater respect and dignity. Members of the nfwa a≈rmed that ‘‘as Christians and workers we wish to realize the ideals of the Church in our lives and in the world in which we live,’’ and they trumpeted statements by Pope Paul VI about the value of agricultural labor, and about ‘‘the right to demand working conditions in which physical health is not endangered, morals are safeguarded and young people’s normal development is not impaired.’’∞Ω Summoned by these theological calls on behalf of rural Californians, hundreds of clergy—including the Christian Brother Leroy Chatfield, who became Chávez’s right-hand man—worked full-time for the union throughout the 1960s and 1970s, encouraged to do so by the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, by the spirit of liberation theology, and by Chávez’s own interest in ecumenism. Protestants provided even more critical assistance in the early days of the strike. Characteristic was Wayne C. Hartmire Jr., director of the California Migrant Ministry, a group that had struggled to assist farmworkers during their cycles of

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seasonal unemployment. Hartmire argued that ‘‘if the Church is to give flesh to its faith, then Christians must put the institution and their own bodies on the line in support of the workers. It is everyman’s right to expect that the Church in California and elsewhere will be willing to take risks for the sake of a servant ministry to men in need—a ministry that insists on social justice—even at cost.’’ Over the course of the late 1960s, such ideas shaped the emergence of new ecumenical coalitions throughout the country, which worked with the farmworkers to achieve social change. From Seattle to Montreal, a diverse array of religious congregations supported ufw boycotts, and the assistance of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews became critical in places like Washington, where leaders wrote ‘‘letters to Jewish caterers asking them to honor the boycott in their purchases.’’≤≠ ‘‘Huelga, Baby’’ While many outside supporters of the farmworker movement took their cues from religious principles, the nfwa mobilized strikers after 1962 by combining the moral urgency of theological teachings with a Mexican cultural nationalism adapted to rural California. When Chávez urged fellow Mexicans to follow the lead of Hidalgo, Zapata, and other national luminaries to inaugurate a second Mexican Revolution in the state’s fields and orchards, the nfwa charted a new course in Mexican American politics, as other postwar organizations had distanced themselves from Mexican political traditions since the 1940s.≤∞ Farmworker activists at once claimed to take many of their cues from past Mexican struggles, and they demanded attention as aggrieved members of the U.S. national community. News of the African American civil rights movement in the U.S. South shaped those calls. ‘‘How have the Negroes won their battles?’’ a Mexican American farmworker asked other rural Californians in the summer of 1965. ‘‘They have united before the dogs, the fire hoses, police brutality and electric cattle prods. . . . We the farm workers have the same weapons—our bodies and our courage.’’≤≤ Just months before Mexican Americans took their first strike vote, the African American civil rights movement had changed course after riots in Watts highlighted the growing anger of black youth toward a rhetoric of racial integration, and a new discourse of Black Power rejected the equal participation of whites in the movement. By September 1965, the nfwa had begun to draw strength from a parallel interest in ‘‘Brown Power’’ among Mexican Americans, and from African American solidarity with Latino farmworkers in California. New interest in battling race- and class-based discrimina-

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tion prompted the Industrial Union Department of the afl-cio to declare in 1966 that ‘‘Negro militancy has been an unescapable lesson of life to the Mexican people.’’ By early 1967, African American supporters of la causa in Delano were seen marching with signs reading ‘‘Black Power says Huelga, Baby.’’≤≥ The newspaper established by Chávez and other nfwa members in 1964 echoed African American militancy even as it combined religious calls for reform with spirited demands for a new Mexican Revolution among the state’s rural workers. Chávez named the organization’s Spanish-language monthly newsletter El Malcriado, ‘‘the brat’’ or ‘‘the troublemaker,’’ in deference to similar publications popular among Mexican immigrants after 1910 and into the 1920s.≤∂ Taking his cues from the working-class press in Mexico, he included cartoons about social inequality in California agriculture meant to communicate with nonliterate residents of the state, and he even wrote the Mexico City– based artist Rius to inquire if he might ‘‘supply . . . any cartoons pertaining to farm labor’’; Rius encouraged the fwa to use his cartoons from the Mexican press but had little interest in making special contributions to the California e√ort. The farmworker and illustrator Alex Zermeño, who designed El Malcriado’s first cover, instead created the recurring characters Don Sotaco, Patroncito, El Coyote, and other figures to satirize powerful growers and labor contractors. To celebrate the work of the nfwa, Zermeño drew attention to the dirty backroom deals between California’s agribusiness and government elites that had kept ethnic Mexicans and other farmworkers in poverty for decades. His cartoons, like many of the articles in El Malcriado, urged worker militancy in the name of ethnic and national pride, and with the aim of achieving full economic citizenship for rural Californians in the years after 1965.≤∑ Residents of the Central Valley responded. Community institutions and businesses that served Latino farmworkers, including funeral homes and ‘‘little stores all up and down the valley,’’ sponsored and distributed the publication, providing the association another ‘‘foot in the door in all these little towns.’’≤∏ In early 1965, nfwa readers of El Malcriado who worked at a rose nursery in the town of McFarland left their jobs for four days to demand higher wages. When the Tulare County Housing Authority raised its rents from $18 to $25 a month shortly thereafter, the nfwa organized a strike against those monthly payments and a march that forced the local courts to overrule the rent increase. Buoyed by a sense that they were beginning a new civil rights movement in California, sixtyseven Delano grape workers then struck the J. D. Martin ranch in August 1965 to demand a wage increase and union recognition. In the meantime, Filipino members of awoc were expressing their own anger that wages and working

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conditions had not improved despite the abolition of the Bracero Program. Noting that wages for local workers were lower than those paid to imported Mexican workers in the year before, a thousand Filipinos walked out of Delano grape orchards on September 8, 1965, seeking higher rates of pay and union recognition. After the nfwa voted to join them, Chávez’s greatest fear was that involvement in a large strike might transform his young organization into yet another bureaucratic and self-interested Cold War labor union.≤π The religious and nationalist nature of ethnic Mexican rural militancy became clear six months into the grape strike, in March 1966, when the nfwa organized a three-hundred-mile march from Delano to the state capital in Sacramento to publicize union demands and galvanize support among rural workers. In organizing and describing their peregrinación, or ‘‘pilgrimage,’’ Chávez and other unionists emphasized that theirs was a Mexican campaign based heavily on Catholic principles of social justice. Appalled at such a nontraditional approach to unionization, awoc director Al Green refused to support the march and told Chávez that ‘‘this is a trade union dispute, not a civil rights movement or a religious crusade.’’ But as nfwa members set o√ for Sacramento behind the banner of Our Lady of Guadalupe, patroness of the Americas, marchers performed a class politics of mexicanidad that a≈rmed their place within Mexico’s revolutionary tradition. Men like strike captain Robert Bustos proudly displayed large Emiliano Zapata buttons pinned to their shirts and announced that ‘‘if we had him, we’d already have won [the strike].’’ César Chávez a≈rmed that it mattered little whether ethnic Mexican strikers had been born in Mexico or the United States, since ‘‘the Mexican American is also a child of the Revolution.’’ Participants danced at night to a mariachi featuring songs of the Mexican Revolution, such as ‘‘La Adelita.’’ El Malcriado urged strikers to remember ‘‘Father Hidalgo and Emiliano Zapata, and the other great heroes of the past who dedicated their lives to freeing their people from tyranny and injustice.’’ It celebrated the Mexican workers of California ‘‘fighting for justice just as their fathers fought for justice in Mexico between 1910 and 1920.’’≤∫ As unionists marched to Sacramento, where they participated in the largest Mexican American political rally that California had seen since the 1930s, they kicked dust in the eyes of Mexican American activists who had avoided such direct political protests, downplayed any personal connection to Mexico, and a≈rmed the basic soundness of the U.S. political system since World War II. The guiding intellectual statement of the march became the ‘‘Plan de Delano,’’ a twelve-hundred-word call to arms written in Spanish and English by the strike supporter Luis Valdez, whose approach to the civil rights movement had been

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shaped by his 1964 visit to Cuba with other New Left activists in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.≤Ω Read aloud each night to marchers and their supporters at evening rallies throughout rural California, the Plan de Delano brought forth the urgency of contemporary revolution and evoked past calls to arms in Mexico: the Plan de Ayala, the Plan de Iguala, the Plan de San Diego, the Plan de San Luís Potosí, and more. This plan a≈rmed: We are conscious of the historical significance of our Pilgrimage. It is clearly evident that our path travels through a valley well known to all Mexican farm workers. We know all of these towns of Delano, Madera, Fresno, Modesto, Stockton, and Sacramento, because along this very same road, in this very same valley, the Mexican race has sacrificed itself for the last hundred years. Our sweat and our blood have fallen on this land to make other men rich. The pilgrimage is a witness to the su√ering we have seen for generations. . . . Across the San Joaquin Valley, across California, across the entire Southwest of the United States, wherever there are Mexican people, wherever there are farm workers, our movement is spreading like flames across a dry plain. Our pilgrimage is the match that will light our cause for all farm workers to see what is happening here, so that they may do as we have done. The time has come for the liberation of the poor farm worker.≥≠

When Valdez’s text was read aloud to strike supporters in places like Stockton, local journalists reported that ‘‘the language was Spanish but the message was clear—the nfwa has the support of San Joaquin County’s Mexican American community.’’≥∞ In providing a new framework for thinking about ethnic Mexican labor and civil rights, Valdez established a revolutionary language that defined Mexican American youth activism and cultural production over the following decade. The Chicano politics that emerged after 1966 often interpreted Mexican and Mexican American history by way of Cuba, with poster art and murals celebrating the United Farm Workers in ways that sanctified Zapata and other Mexican heroes and visually evoked Che and Castro without linking the farmworkers directly to those Communist icons.≥≤ Many Mexican Americans had expressed hostility toward the leader of the Cuban Revolution since the early 1960s. One Mexican American had bemoaned the course of Cuban politics by 1962, noting that ‘‘the barefaced and bloody mockery which the Cuban dictator has pulled and is pulling by way of treacherous promises about freedom and justice, with which he fools not only the Cuban people, but also the rest of the world, is the greatest farce of our times.’’≥≥ The first Chicano movement mural completed in the United States, painted by Antonio Bernal on Luis Valdez’s Teatro Campesino

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o≈ce in Del Rey, California, included the revolutionaries César Chávez, Malcolm X, Pancho Villa, and Emiliano Zapata, but no contemporary Latin Americans.≥∂ Luís Valdez and other leaders of the farmworker movement expressed great interest in supporting new cultural workers who might help the union define la causa and energize farmworkers and their supporters. Eager to ‘‘devise a way of getting the printed word, the art, out to the people,’’ Chávez convinced priests in the Franciscan Order to donate a million-dollar printing press to the union in 1970, anticipating that ‘‘we can do a lot of work by just giving workers the message through art. . . . Imagine what they’ll do with a poster! They [the workers] will take it and tack it at home and they’ll see it there for the next ten years!’’ As Chávez had hoped, artists who supported the movement created dozens of images in the union’s print shop, including popular images of Zapata alongside the declaration ‘‘Viva la Revolución.’’≥∑ The turn to cultural nationalism, and the representation of the farmworker movement as a Mexican revolutionary cause, eventually alienated many Filipino workers and some Anglo American supporters, but it did draw considerable new support from other segments of the New Left and mobilized the widest coalition of Mexican American support seen in the twentieth century. La causa soon changed the political assumptions, and the political styles, of every major Mexican American organization in the United States. Groups in California such as the cso and the American gi Forum ceased declaring that Latino problems could be resolved within traditional political channels, or simply by urging workers to place greater value on achieving a high school or college education.≥∏ In 1964 the chairman of the American gi Forum had stated: ‘‘We seek that which all people who have a full belly and relative economic security seek. . . . We want to sit at the conference table with our peers, plan and organize . . . for the benefit of the entire community and especially in the areas a√ecting the Mexican-American community.’’ With the farmworker movement, and the Plan de Delano, Mexican Americans reconsidered such political goals and forums. The American gi Forum resolved in 1966 to ‘‘direct all divisions to support the grape strikers . . . in all actions direct or indirect in their e√orts to secure their social economic uplifting.’’ Dan Campos, chairman of the California Forum, urged members ‘‘to participate in the March; provide food or transportation to Marchers; or contribute any source of financial help.’’≥π Solidarity with farmworkers became a matter of great symbolic and actual concern for thousands of ethnic Mexicans in the state after 1965. The grape strike ‘‘achieved a victory for Mexican-American unity,’’ urban residents claimed, and

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many indicated that it had awakened them to problems of discrimination and poverty that they had previously ignored. ‘‘The sombrero will never again rest lightly on the eyes of California,’’ it seemed, and many came to view their racial and national a≈liations di√erently thanks to the nfwa’s march to Sacramento. Supporters in the Mexican American Political Association (mapa), an organization tied to the Democratic Party, now found in rural California a parallel to the Deep South’s racism against African Americans. Members of mapa thus called a photograph of a Delano grape grower with his dog a ‘‘symbol of oppression . . . which has come to symbolize Southern ‘justice,’ [that] is very much in evidence in the Delano strike area.’’ Rural California was Mississippi West, many believed, and Chicanos in the barrios would soon follow African American militants in revolting against the racial discrimination of U.S. institutions. mapa emphasized that ‘‘the entire Spanish-speaking community of the state of California’’ would win their struggles if they emulated ‘‘the negroes in Harlem.’’≥∫ Activists associated with the New Left also rushed to support the nfwa during the summer and fall of 1965. Many young radicals placed faith in the nfwa because it seemed so di√erent from the stodgy afl-cio labor unions that supported the Johnson administration and the Vietnam War. While awoc ‘‘fat cats’’ smoked cigars at union conventions in Miami Beach, the nfwa seemed committed to shaping a mass democratic movement and to ensuring that farmworkers could lead their own organization. The Communist journalist Sam Kushner of the People’s World wrote admiringly about the grape strike, and a member of Students for a Democratic Society (sds) from Berkeley saw in the struggle the beginning of a Latin American revolution in California’s fields: nfwa’s willingness to experiment is a reflection of César Chávez’s attitudes toward conducting a strike and toward organizing. He compares the conduct of the strike to guerrilla warfare (appropriate enough since guerrilla, as he points out, is the diminutive of the Spanish word for war—guerra—and came into use to describe Zapata’s little wars).≥Ω

Other young activists involved in leftist youth organizations at UC Berkeley, San Francisco State, and other colleges and universities in the state met to discuss whether ‘‘César Chávez [is] really a radical . . . or only a good liberal,’’ and whether students ‘‘might become involved in some major fashion that would have a radicalizing influence on . . . the strike.’’ Chávez and other members of the nfwa cultivated the support of those interested in civil rights by speaking at Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (sncc) conferences,

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by receiving hundreds of sympathetic supporters who visited Delano to o√er support, and by creating summer internship opportunities for college and high school students.∂≠ Chávez believed that support was critical because the political and economic strength of local growers made traditional strikes ine√ective in California agriculture. To broaden support for strikers outside the Delano area, and to avoid having the huelga squashed by alliances of growers and local politicians, the organization called for a national boycott of California grapes. That approach became the key to the union’s eventual success in the Delano strike, and pursuing that course resulted from the union’s reading of Cold War legislation intended to curb radicalism in U.S. unions. The anti-Communist Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which had established non-Communist loyalty oaths for most union members in the United States, had also outlawed most boycotts for unions covered by the Wagner Act, the New Deal legislation that protected collective bargaining rights. Because agricultural unions had been exempted from the Wagner Act since the 1930s, leaders of the nfwa learned, the lack of protections for farmworkers had paradoxically given them one significant point of leverage: the chance to halt consumption of California grapes in the nation’s supermarkets without fear of penalty. ‘‘We know that the whole question is a question of power,’’ Chávez later told reporters in explaining the importance of the grape boycott. ‘‘We cannot match our puny power with the tremendous power that can be generated by the growers and the distributors and all the people who are together against us . . . and so we need to have the right to boycott.’’∂∞ Thousands of volunteers helped organize grape boycotts throughout the United States in response to farmworker demands, and participation in ‘‘No Grapes’’ campaigns pitted many Latinos and their supporters against political conservatives who supported the growers. By 1970 the organization would claim boycott committees in thirty-one North American cities and volunteer organizations in over two hundred others, and the boycott would become the primary focus of union attention. The organization’s first target was the Schenley Corporation, the region’s second largest grape grower and producer of popular wines and liquors such as Cutty Sark, Ancient Age, I. W. Harper, Old Charter, Roma, and Cresta Blanca. Holiday sales dropped precipitously because of union pressure, and Schenley recognized the nfwa as the sole bargaining agent in April 1966. Chávez’s attention turned to table grapes, but because consumers could not easily tell which grower produced fruit sold in open supermarket containers, the union would later call a general boycott of that product. Richard Nixon branded that campaign illegal under Taft-Hartley, and California gover-

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nor Ronald Reagan, honorary chairman of the ‘‘counterboycott’’ committee, ‘‘announced that he was eating more grapes than ever, attributed his good health and looks to them, and lost no opportunity in his travels about the country to denounce the boycott as illegal, immoral, and fattening.’’ With conservative Republicans leading the campaign in favor of California growers, the campaign on behalf of the farmworkers ‘‘made bedfellows of New York socialites and Black Panthers,’’ and other members of U.S. society who supported grape pickers as part of a broader commitment to oppose the rise of the New Right.∂≤ Vietnam and 1968 The involvement of activists eager to bring down Nixon, Reagan, and similar Republican enemies nonetheless created new tensions within the nfwa, as nonfarmworker supporters and other outsiders pressed issues and pursued strategies that troubled many rural Californians. Urban activists and boycott volunteers frequently linked their support of the nfwa to a broader critique of the Cold War United States and excoriated the Johnson administration for its handling of the Vietnam War. While leaders of the nfwa expressed private opposition to U.S. involvement in Indochina by early 1966—Chávez would later declare that an antiwar stance was ‘‘the only one that a serious Roman Catholic could take’’—they aimed in the early years of the grape strike to steer clear of open critiques of U.S. foreign policy. Antiwar protesters had disrupted the afl-cio’s annual convention in December 1965, a few months after the Delano strike began, leading seventy-one-year-old afl-cio president George Meany to holler, ‘‘Throw the kookies out!’’ Because Vietnam remained a source of deep division within labor and religious circles, ufwoc (United Farm Workers Organizing Committee) leaders avoided association with the antiwar cause.∂≥ Throwing their lot in with the afl-cio and the Catholic bishops, and with Chávez, most prominent Mexican American political organizations in the United States remained vocal supporters of Johnson and of the Vietnam War until well after 1968.∂∂ The farmworker union’s tacit acceptance of the war in Vietnam also developed from the sensibilities of its ethnic Mexican members. Chávez recognized that most rural Mexican Americans took U.S. patriotism and anti-Communism seriously, and that they looked with suspicion on demonstrations by urban youth against the war. A 1965 Thanksgiving Day parade in East Los Angeles, organized by the East Los Angeles Veterans Council ‘‘in support of America’s fighting men in Vietnam,’’ made such support clear, as attendees heroized Ser-

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geant Isaac Camacho, a fellow Mexican American and ‘‘the first American to escape from the Viet Cong.’’∂∑ César Chávez later recounted: When we started the [Delano] strike, many volunteers were in and out. Some of the volunteers were for ending the Vietnam War above all else, and that shocked the workers because they thought that was unpatriotic. Once, when there was a group more interested in ending the war, I let them have a session with the farm workers. After a real battle, the volunteers came to me astounded. ‘‘But they support the war!’’ they said. ‘‘How come?’’ I told them farm workers were ordinary people, not saints.∂∏

Sta√ed by ‘‘ordinary people,’’ the boycott remained a fragile coalition. Thus, in the summer of 1966, when the city of San Francisco held a Huelga Day to support the recently renamed ufwoc (a merger of the nfwa and awoc, with Chávez as elected president), the farmworker union urged its Bay Area supporters in advance ‘‘to make their signs about the farm worker struggle, not about the war in Vietnam or calls to ‘ban the bomb.’ ’’∂π Chávez and others knew that a≈liation with student and civil rights groups interested in racial justice, in protesting U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and in Marxism threatened also to paint the nfwa red in the eyes of government o≈cials and many consumers. As members of the W. E. B. Du Bois Clubs (supported by the Communist Party of the United States) made their way to Delano to support Mexican and Filipino farmworkers, local fbi informers (many of them likely growers or farm managers) declared that nfwa organizing amounted to ‘‘race hatred,’’ a Latin Americanization of the Black Power radicalism that had captured national attention since the summer of 1965. Many other observers claimed that outside agitators were controlling Chávez and the farmworkers, and a state Un-American Activities Committee reported with alarm that the Soviets had taken note of the labor activities in the San Joaquin Valley. As committee members noted, Pravda’s reporting on the 1966 national convention of the Communist Party of the United States had included mention of the organization’s ‘‘work among the agricultural laborers and national minorities—one million Puerto Ricans and five million Americans of Mexican descent’’—and the fact that after a Mexican delegate pleaded for financial help, ‘‘the convention delegates immediately—right there in the hall—began mustering the means of aiding the strikers.’’∂∫ Convinced that Soviets or Cubans or Black Panthers were behind the Delano revolt, members of the John Birch Society issued the fiercest antiCommunist attacks on the organization after September 1965. In 1966 Gary Allen’s ‘‘The Grapes: Communist Wrath in Delano’’ addressed fears that the

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worker struggle was part of a much larger Communist plot to take over the United States: ‘‘From Selma, to Watts, to Berkeley, to Delano . . . is a straight line on your road to revolution.’’ Allen called union leaders ‘‘revolutionary generals without armies.’’ Chávez was beloved by Communists; Luis Valdez had emerged as ‘‘the Che Guevara of Chávez’s revolution’’; and those actually in charge included Bettina Aptheker, ‘‘the flower of the Berkeley rebellion,’’ and the openly gay poet Allen Ginsberg.∂Ω Even as they depended on the help of young activists associated with the New Left, Chávez and other agricultural organizers accordingly responded that theirs remained a moderate enterprise aimed at achieving ‘‘first-class citizenship’’ rather than social revolution. ‘‘It’s a good old-fashioned American union. We want bread. We want to be paid for our jobs,’’ Chávez declared. He denied any relationship to Communism or socialism. ‘‘To the best of my knowledge none of my associates have a≈liation with Communist or Communist-front groups,’’ he announced during the first weeks of the strike. ‘‘I don’t ask a man his politics or his religion when he comes to work with us. We do warn everyone who comes to help us that we do not want them coming with political hangups or hidden agendas.’’ The fbi, which had begun an inquiry into Communist activity in rural California in June 1965, concluded in early 1966 that while ‘‘it is apparent that there is considerable communist interest in this farm workers strike . . . it appears that, at present, the actual communist influence is only marginal at best.’’∑≠ But such conclusions proved unsatisfactory to union opponents who warned the fbi that the newspaper El Malcriado was revolutionary ‘‘a la Castro’’; to spokespersons paid by California growers who called Chávez a ‘‘little nitwit revolutionist’’ and declared that ‘‘every Communist, every misfit and every traitor flocks to the revolution’’; and to residents of Delano who viewed the strike as an e√ort ‘‘to sow distrust, racial and religious discord and economic disaster.’’ Some farmworkers also considered nfwa organizers radicals or worse. One declared that ‘‘I will not join your Communist outlaw bunch of Puerto Ricans, Russians, Australians, Mexicans that has tried to take over we all by force & violence of destruction. We DiGiorgio workers are well satisfied with our wages. None of us have gone out on strike it was you foreigners & agitators with your ungodliness. We will defeat you in every way we can.’’∑∞ In response to such charges, El Malcriado o√ered to pay a large reward for information leading to the conviction on libel charges of anyone who referred to union members as ‘‘communists’’ or ‘‘communist-led.’’ Such bluster was meant to a≈rm the union’s anti-Communist credentials, but in the end the widespread support of

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religious o≈cials made it di≈cult for ufwoc opponents to convince other observers that the ufwoc was an un-American enterprise. ‘‘It was like calling the Pope a Red,’’ one grower admitted.∑≤ In part because they claimed the support of antiwar Catholics, Chávez and the union made their critiques of U.S. involvement in Vietnam public by the summer of 1966, nearly a full year before Martin Luther King’s April 1967 sermon at Riverside Church in New York urged civil rights activists to confront the war head on. In a 1966 El Malcriado cartoon and editorial entitled ‘‘Your Son and the Draft,’’ the union articulated an antiwar position it hoped would make sense to local farmworkers. The single-frame cartoon featured a grower’s son ready to leave Delano with his new car, a tennis racquet, and a suitcase labeled Stanford University; a farmworker standing nearby embraced his son, who was about to leave on an army bus bound for Vietnam. ‘‘We hope they change the draft laws and make them fair,’’ the newsletter’s editors wrote. ‘‘Actually, we hope that they end the draft completely. War is always bad for farm workers. This present awful mess in Viet Nam is especially bad. We are not even o≈cially ‘at war.’ The draft should not be necessary in peace time. And we wouldn’t have the war or the draft if we didn’t go meddling in other peoples’ business.’’∑≥ Despite this and other antiwar statements, Chávez and the ufwoc issued only muted critiques of the U.S. role in Vietnam until the last months of 1968, as unionists continued to worry that more active opposition to Johnson’s foreign policies would distract from the business of striking and picketing, or that strong antiwar statements would alienate organizations such as the American gi Forum and mapa, and political leaders such as congressmen Henry B. García (D-Tex.) and Edward Roybal (D-Calif.), from la causa. In early 1967, César Chávez began to support the Freedom Budget movement, an e√ort by unionists, civil rights leaders, and antipoverty activists, including luminaries such as Michael Harrington, Martin Luther King, and Reinhold Niebuhr, that challenged U.S. o≈cials to pull out of Vietnam and devote new resources to eliminating domestic poverty by 1975. Chávez was one of only three prominent Mexican Americans to support the ‘‘domestic parallel to the Marshall plan aid given to Europe after World War II,’’ and he wrote the introduction to a Spanish-language pamphlet explaining the proposal. But in most ways, the union shunned the antiwar limelight.∑∂ The escalation of anti-Vietnam protests and the new militant Chicano youth activism that accompanied those events set a new stage for farmworker political organizing in 1968. As Mexican American and other activists made strident public demands for an end to Vietnam, some declared their a≈liation with the

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North Vietnamese as Third World people, and tens of thousands participated in mass marches to protest both the high casualty rates of minority soldiers abroad and the Cold War logic that supported U.S. imperialism in Southeast Asia and Latin America. Many such protests linked the cause of California farmworkers with e√orts to cease military aggression abroad. One Chicano writer summoned his carnales, or ‘‘blood brothers,’’ to recognize that ‘‘the government that seeks to induct you into military service is the same one that allows and promotes discrimination in employment, low wages for farm workers, one-sided and prejudicial educational programs, urban redevelopment, and a thousand other oppressive conditions.’’ And then, they ask you to go defend and perpetuate this system with your life. Qué creen que somos? [What do they think we are?] burros? Those Gabachos even ask you to impose this system of oppression upon the people of Vietnam, Santo Domingo, Bolivia, and many other countries, as well as upon our own people. Hermanos, the peoples of those countries are not our enemies. Our enemies are the racists and greedy gabachos [white people], and their Tacos [Mexican American ‘‘uncle toms’’], who grow richer every day on the sweat, tears, yes, and on the blood of chicanos, blacks, and other minorities. our war for freedom is here not in Viet Nam.’’∑∑

In this new context, Ernesto Galarza and others warned that increased military spending threatened Great Society programs. ‘‘As long as the priority in our nation is on war and killing,’’ he emphasized, ‘‘Mexican Americans and all other children will su√er.’’ Many more decried the use of nonwhites as ‘‘carne de cañón’’ (cannon fodder) and declared that the war ‘‘is a direct attack on us.’’ Students took the lead in antiwar protests, as two former ufwoc organizers, Ramses Noriega and Rosalío Muñoz, established the National Chicano Moratorium Committee in Los Angeles, one of the nation’s most active antiwar organizations. On September 16, 1969, Muñoz declared his ‘‘independence of the Selective Service System’’ and ‘‘accuse[d] the government of the United States of America of genocide against the Mexican people.’’ The following August, some thirty thousand ethnic Mexicans demonstrated against the war in a Los Angeles rally organized by the Moratorium Committee.∑∏ But as Vietnam radicalized young Chicanos and pulled Mexican American organizations into new debates about national service, and about the racial discrimination of draft boards and other U.S. institutions, the ufwoc struggled to channel New Left energies into the grape boycott without losing the support of more moderate consumers throughout the United States. Chávez focused

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considerable attention during and after 1968 to retain the mantle of labor radical and religious leader in ways that would appeal to a wide array of ethnic Mexican audiences—both farmworkers and urbanites—as well as non-Latinos. This meant opposing calls by some Chicano activists for violent revolt against the U.S. system, calls inspired by an urge to identify with Latin American revolutionaries in Cuba, Bolivia, and elsewhere. Reies López Tijerina, a Mexican American Pentecostal minister and former farmworker who idolized Castro, had emerged as a leading spokesperson for new and dynamic e√orts to retake lands and power in the United States stolen by ‘‘gringos’’ in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Tijerina, whom historian Rodolfo Acuña later called ‘‘a mixture of Don Quixote and Ché,’’ told supporters in New Mexico that ‘‘Castro put the Gringos o√ his island and we can do the same.’’ Aligning his movement with broader anticolonial struggles, he argued that Mexican Americans in the Southwest like ‘‘most nations are against the United States.’’ Anticipating the escalation of global struggles by U.S. racial minorities and residents of the Third World, Tijerina predicted that ‘‘there will be a great destructive war, and when it comes to that day, we will not be blamed.’’ Shocking established Mexican American organizations by urging Chicanos to ‘‘kill the Gringos,’’ Tijerina earned the wrath of ufwoc leaders by criticizing the union for allowing non-Mexicans, such as head counsel Jerry Cohen, to take leadership positions. ‘‘These [Jewish] people have been exploiting the Chicanos for a long time,’’ Tijerina argued.∑π While Tijerina’s call to arms and oppositional rhetoric inspired many young Mexican Americans during the late 1960s, they also galvanized opposition to revolutionary Brown Power. On the political right, Tijerina’s activities inspired the creation in California of the Spanish Surname Citizens for George Wallace.∑∫ Political moderates and many leftists also became troubled by Tijerina’s demands. Faced with the New Mexican leader’s anti-Semitism and idealization of violent struggle, and aware that some farmworkers, frustrated with the slow pace of the strike, had shown new interest in taking up arms against California growers and labor contractors, Chávez in 1968 dedicated himself to a≈rming the importance of nonviolent resistance in civil rights e√orts. The union had quietly foregrounded that philosophy since 1965, proclaiming in El Malcriado at the beginning of the strike that ‘‘we will never use violence against people or property.’’ The union had drawn supporters on the basis of that message, including one Northern California Rabbi who called Chávez ‘‘a modern day, non-violent Emiliano Zapata.’’∑Ω But farmworkers and union o≈cials involved in the nfwa and awoc knew that California agriculture had seen great violence between workers since the early twentieth century, and by 1968 some activists supported a

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measure of retribution against ‘‘scabs’’ who crossed union picket lines. Larry Itliong, the most prominent Filipino labor leader in the strike, noted that while he supported nonviolence as a political philosophy, he also knew firsthand that the threat of bodily injury could prove useful in labor disputes. Remembering earlier strikes involving Filipino workers, Itliong admitted that ‘‘if somebody point[ed] a strikebreaker [out] to us, we just, no questions asked, [took] him in the alley and beat the shit out of him. That’s what we used to do. . . . It scared them, it scared them.’’∏≠ Nonviolence as a political tactic had been debated in the union since the beginning of the grape strike, but it took on far greater importance in response to Tijerina. In February 1968, Chávez undertook a twenty-five-day fast in a Delano gas station, which began with his statement that ‘‘violence is exploding today, not only in the dark alleyways and midnight streets, and in the hearts and minds of people, it is out in the open market place and is being planned in the public forum. Maybe we here in Delano can light the first small candle that in turn will dispel the darkness of fear, hatred, and distrust that has descended on America and on the world.’’∏∞ He declared that his was an act of Catholic penance, not a hunger strike, intended to refocus the movement’s energies. More than three weeks later, Chávez had lost forty pounds but had gained new support throughout the United States. Martin Luther King had telegrammed to commend him ‘‘for your bravery, salute you for your indefatigable work against poverty and injustice, and pray for your health and continuing service as one of the outstanding men of America.’’∏≤ Newspapers such as Los Angeles’ La Opinión, the leading Spanish-language daily in the United States, had opined against Tijerina’s ‘‘militant doctrines’’ while lauding Chávez’s commitment and the cause of the farmworkers as being critical to Mexican American fortunes. The New York Times journalist Homer Bigart later wrote admiringly about ‘‘Cesar Chávez, the gentle, introspective, sad-eyed director of the California grape strike,’’ and called him ‘‘totally unlike . . . the fiery Tijerina.’’∏≥ As Chávez and others in the farmworker movement distanced themselves from Tijerina and other revolutionaries who seemed to represent violent struggle, they appealed to liberal Democrats rather than Third World internationalists in 1968. This meant keeping a distance from Latinos who declared their ‘‘natural bond of solidarity with all the peoples of the world struggling for liberation,’’ or with young Central Americans in San Francisco radicalized by their reading of Che Speaks. It meant instead claiming centrists such as the presidential candidate and anti-Vietnam spokesman Robert F. Kennedy as primary allies.∏∂ The alliance between Chávez and Kennedy angered many Chicano activists who saw the

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Democratic Party as a key source of Mexican Americans’ problems, but Chávez’s willingness to work with Kennedy and other party leaders undoubtedly did bring Mexican Americans new national attention. Kennedy’s March 1968 campaign speech to ten thousand Mexican American supporters in Los Angeles stressed ‘‘peace in Vietnam,’’ the importance of farmworker unionization, and the creation of new opportunities for urban residents that would allow ‘‘young Mexican Americans not only to be heroic soldiers, but also great engineers, educators, men of science.’’ In the meantime, aligning himself with Kennedy gave Chávez a platform for criticizing new Chicano cultural nationalists who seemed to abandon labor- and class-based critiques and downplay the possibility of interethnic cooperation.∏∑ In the view of Chávez and many of his supporters, a nonviolent commitment to pursuing social justice after 1968 remained both a radical and a reasoned response to conditions in California agriculture. ‘‘I think we’re as radical as they come,’’ Chávez declared in 1969. ‘‘I think that we’re more radical than many groups that have the title of being radical. . . . A guy who very quietly . . . says ‘I’m not afraid not to have any income’ and then goes out and begins to work full time using all his energies and talents, completely devoted to a cause without deviating one fraction from it but just doing the necessary sacrifices, it would be hard for anyone to convince me that that’s not more radical than all the other talk. That’s really radical. . . . You can’t stop people like that.’’∏∏ In 1968 the union decided to pull back from its operations in rural California and push harder to organize a national boycott of California grapes, an e√ort meant to pressure the recalcitrant growers who had refused to hold union elections and had at times denied the existence of a strike in regional agriculture. Roughly two hundred farmworkers traveled to cities throughout the United States and Canada to urge consumers and stores to boycott the fruit that year. They picketed stores, spoke with shoppers, and distributed handbills explaining the grape strike, and appealed, in their words, ‘‘to the conscience of the American people’’ in nearly every major city of North America, emphasizing that a nonviolent approach to the agricultural conflict required the support of everyday consumers.∏π From 1968 to 1970, Chávez and the California farmworkers became darlings of those who saw the ufwoc as inheritors of a much celebrated liberal and faithbased tradition of political organizing. The organization relied on enthusiastic support from labor unionists interested in civil rights, and from antiwar activists who linked justice in California’s fields to ending U.S. involvement in Vietnam. After the assassination of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968, prominent members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the

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Democratic Party provided the union strong support. Coretta Scott King stood behind the ufwoc, a≈rming that African Americans and Mexican Americans ‘‘have the same problems, we are all part of that part of society that has been exploited’’; and Ethel Kennedy and Edward Kennedy returned frequently to California after 1968 to remind Democrats of Bobby Kennedy’s contribution to the farmworker movement and to support union organizing and legislative e√orts.∏∫ They also confronted the California administration of Governor Ronald Reagan, and members of Lyndon Johnson’s cabinet, who had not responded to the union’s requests for support. In May 1968, for instance, three hundred union supporters burst into the San Francisco Hilton to interrupt a speech by U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, carrying signs that decried the ‘‘U.S. Department of Injustice’’ and chanting ‘‘Don’t Buy Grapes.’’ In October forty union supporters in New York City, including city councilman Ed Koch, demonstrated outside Nixon’s campaign headquarters on Park Avenue to protest the Republican candidate’s support of California growers, and after Nixon’s November election the union urged supporters to send the President-elect mashed grapes in envelopes addressed to the White House.∏Ω But the distance that the ufwoc established between itself and the rhetoric of many protesters in 1968 also earned the union the distrust of many Latinos and others. Typical was David Sánchez of the Brown Berets, a Chicano youth organization created in Los Angeles and modeled on the Black Panthers, who made clear in 1969 that members of his group both ‘‘admire[d] César Chávez for his advocacy of nonviolence’’ and insisted that radical change required a readiness to solve political problems ‘‘by any and all means necessary.’’ ‘‘If those Anglos in power are willing to [give Chicanos their rights] in a peaceful and orderly process, then we will be only too happy to accept this way,’’ he told the journalist Rubén Salazar of the Los Angeles Times. ‘‘Otherwise, we will be forced to other alternatives.’’π≠ Che and Tijerina remained powerful, positive symbols of resistance for many Latinos in the Vietnam era. At the same time, other Latinos worried that ufwoc activities would be enough to bring violent bloodshed to rural parts of the state. In the agricultural town of Salinas, California, the region’s leading Spanish-language newspaper, edited by a Cuban American exile committed to overthrowing Castro, worried openly about pro-ufwoc statements by Oakland’s Black Panther Party, an organization that he believed was likely controlled by Fidel himself. Despite Chávez’s e√orts to distance himself from such revolutionary violence, detractors in the John Birch Society continued after 1968 to accuse the ufwoc of ‘‘adding revolutionary racism to labor agitation’’ and of seeking ‘‘control of America’s food supply.’’ Those who resisted

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the grape boycott and continued to purchase California fruit were deemed heroes in the fight for free enterprise and democratic governance. ‘‘The Housewives [who refused to boycott grapes] have proved what a few alert citizens can do to keep ‘agrarian reform,’ Communist style, from getting a foothold in our country,’’ wrote the western director of public relations for the John Birch Society in December 1968. Moreover, the John Birch Society o≈cial declared, ‘‘ ‘We shall overcome’ translates to Spanish as Venceremos—the battle cry of Fidel Castro’s Communist revolution in Cuba.’’π∞ Not surprisingly, it was the Nixon administration that gave farmworkers and their supporters a new cause around which they could rally within months of the beginning of the Republican’s first term. Union protests of the war escalated at the end of 1968 when leaders discovered that the Department of Defense had purchased over two million pounds of grapes to send to Vietnam, nearly quadrupling the 571,500-pound average of the previous two years. The vice president of ufwoc and others accused Nixon of bailing out the growers who struggled to sell their grapes because of the union boycott, and he called the dod purchases ‘‘another form of federal subsidy for anti-union growers who would destroy the e√orts of the poor to build a union.’’ Chávez and other activists responded in 1969 and 1970 with the ‘‘Grapes of War’’ campaign, a new e√ort to link the boycott with the antiwar movement by way of the military-agricultural complex. ‘‘Government sources [are] subsidizing scab grapes,’’ Chávez claimed, and farmworker supporters picketed military bases in Sacramento and Fort McPherson, Georgia, and even at the U.S. Embassy in faraway Bombay, India, where sta√ members Susan and Jim Drake organized a delegation of antiwar activists.π≤ The union organized a Moratorium Day in Delano, and its pamphlets insisted that ‘‘the United States military forces have no right to move in and begin destroying a segment of people involved in a civil war.’’ Boycott volunteers at grocery stores throughout the United States and Canada urged consumers to recognize that buying California grapes meant supporting grower e√orts to put down Mexican and Filipino farmworkers, as well as Nixon’s war e√orts in Southeast Asia: ‘‘Don’t help the Pentagon bust the grape strike!’’π≥ In this context, Chávez emerged by 1969 as a major antiwar spokesperson on the West Coast. The movement against U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia had gathered much greater support among Mexican Americans, creating new divisions within groups such as the American gi Forum. It also prompted the creation of groups such as the ‘‘Americans of Mexican Descent, Mothers for Peace’’ in Sacramento, which wrote Governor Ronald Reagan and federal o≈cials, saying that ‘‘the Mexican American mothers of America supply the largest

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percentage of young men to the service because our families are larger than the average American family and because all too often, we are financially unable to send our sons to college which would keep them out of the Draft. We contend the war is merely an excuse to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.’’π∂ Chicano soldiers in Vietnam wrote Chávez letters of support and promised to protest the serving of grapes in Indochina. Nearly two years after the start of the ‘‘Grapes of War’’ campaign, when the union declared a new strike in the Northern California lettuce fields of the Salinas Valley, antiwar protests became even more useful to the movement when the ufwoc discovered that Dow Chemical— producer of napalm and defoliants—was one of the major investors in Salinas Valley agribusiness.π∑ With this in mind, Chávez spoke at a major rally against the war in Los Angeles in 1971. ‘‘What causes our children to take up guns to fight their brothers in lands far away?’’ he asked the crowd. ‘‘Thousands and thousands of poor, brown and black farm workers go o√ to war to kill other poor farm workers in S.E. Asia,’’ a problem that Chávez claimed had emerged from the social violence haunting rural California. ‘‘All the growers carry gun racks and guns in their trucks,’’ Chávez said, and ‘‘the police all carry guns and use them to get their way. The security guards (rent-a-cops) carry guns and nightsticks. The stores sell guns of all shapes and sizes.’’ Mexican masculinity had also created an appetite for war among some Mexican Americans, Chávez argued. ‘‘Some husbands prove to their children that might makes right by the way they beat on their own wives. . . . Most of us honor violence in one way or another.’’ Facing a culture of violence in rural California and struggling to end the war in Vietnam, the union president declared that ‘‘nothing less than organized, disciplined non-violent action that goes on every day will challenge the power of the corporations and the Generals.’’π∏ Such talk not surprisingly confirmed the union’s reputation as an unAmerican organization among its many detractors during the last two years of the grape strike. When Chávez’s oldest son, Fernando, declared himself a conscientious objector in April 1969, the organization received at least one angry letter from a Mexican American serviceman who called the union president and his son ‘‘the lowest Mexicans that I have ever heard of ’’ and declared that ‘‘your son doesn’t have the balls to spend 2 years of his life for the freedom you and the rest of your family enjoy.’’ππ A group called the Consumer Rights Committee, funded by California growers and directed by the advertising company that had shaped the conservative Republican Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, directed e√orts to fight the grape boycott throughout the United States and Canada. Growers noted that many ‘‘old-line Communists’’ had involved

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themselves in the grape strike, and they accused Chávez of adopting ‘‘a racist approach’’ and of ‘‘leaning heavily on revolutionary symbols from historic Mexican class struggles.’’ The Mexican American Alfred Ramírez, a staunch ufwoc opponent, decried ‘‘Chávezi Communazi Forces,’’ linked Chávez to the Black Power spokesperson Stokely Carmichael, and sold bumper stickers reading ‘‘Heil Hitler or Huelga! The Message Is the Same.’’ The grower and union nemesis John Giumarra Sr. imagined California’s rural labor struggle in international terms: ‘‘What do I do if Ho Chi Minh comes in and says, ‘I represent your workers?’ Do I let him in? Do I make my people join his union? It’s the biggest snowjob, the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.’’π∫ American Revolutions Tens of thousands of U.S. residents believed that Chávez and the ufwoc were anything but a hoax by 1970, when an independent marketing firm reported that millions had boycotted grapes in support of California farmworkers. The coalition that had gathered around the union since 1965 brought many labor and church groups together for the first time, inspiring wonder in some observers. After one farmworker march in Texas, the president of the state afl-cio marveled that ‘‘organized labor and the church marched beside a rag-tag army of students, many of whom were anti-clerics, most of whom thought labor was getting too fat, and it has done all of us good.’’ At a 1969 march near the U.S.Mexico border, the African American civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy declared that ‘‘I am a Mexican American too. I grew up on a farm, only we did not pick grapes, we picked cotton. We made cotton king. My father and mother were not adequately paid for their labor but I’ll be dogged if we’re not going to see you’re adequately paid for your labor.’’ Others saw in the farmworkers a measure of hope for the labor movement, or for the Catholic Church, which had done little for decades to work on behalf of Latinos and other U.S. residents marginalized by racism or social class. Liberal faith in Chávez and the farmworkers was ratified with a labor victory in the spring of 1970, when representatives of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops finally brokered the first agreement between the ufwoc and California growers. Bringing 85 percent of the state’s crop under contract signaled a resounding victory for the union, but it was followed within days by a new set of complications when lettuce growers in the Salinas Valley made clear that they had negotiated sweetheart deals with Teamster Union o≈cials to keep the ufwoc out of Northern California lettuce. The new round of fights with growers

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that began in mid-1970 and escalated with the renegotiation of the 1970 grape contracts three years later pulled Chávez and the union into an intensely violent decade defined by di≈cult public relations and rampant labor violence. Growers and Teamsters redbaited the union and at times physically assaulted ufwoc members in the name of anti-Communism. In 1973, Teamsters armed with bats and chains screamed at opposing ethnic Mexican unionists, ‘‘You support the Communist Party!’’ and to priests, ‘‘You should be dressed in red, not black!’’ Hundreds of farmworkers and ufw organizers risked physical assault by union opponents convinced of the union’s Communist sympathies during the early 1970s, but many of those same organizers also soon heard similar accusations from their own union leaders. With the end of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Chávez and his executive board became more fearful of leftist sta√ members— nearly all of them non-Latinos—who they suspected were trying to use the union to foment an openly violent encounter between growers and workers in rural California. Worried about radical infiltrators, Chávez and other union leaders carried out a massive sta√ housecleaning from 1975 to 1977. In working to purge Marxists from the union, ufw leaders echoed the anti-Communist e√orts of the cso in the 1950s and followed more recent Chicano organizations such as the Brown Berets, whose leader David Sánchez took a strong stand against Maoists in that group. But those tactics soon threatened to destroy the union from within and cripple its outside support. Redbaiting brought the union considerable critique from the political Left after 1975. Dennis Ryan, an Iowa City ufw boycott volunteer, wrote various U.S. magazines to declare that ‘‘César Chávez has become a fascist dictator of the ufw and is now making statements that sound like . . . fascist, anti-communist labor fakers.’’ Marc Grossman, a confidant of Chávez, responded that ‘‘many people joined in support of the ufw for their own purposes. We now say if any s.o.b. comes in with his own political or social agenda and tries to impose that agenda on the union, we will kick him out.’’ The ufw entered the 1980s in worse shape than it had been in the early 1970s, but the organization’s reputation as a thoroughly American and antiCommunist outfit enabled many past members, including some who had been purged, to make important new inroads in other U.S. religious and labor organizations. After the bishops agreed to mediate the labor dispute with growers in 1969, many Latino Catholics, emerging as a significant demographic force throughout the country, had been radicalized in their local parishes. The change was most evident in Southern California, where immigration from Latin America had transformed Los Angeles into the largest archdiocese in the U.S., and

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where groups of Latinos issued new demands. Protesting the Church’s o≈cial stand on the Vietnam War, demanding greater support for the farmworkers, and seeking greater resources for barrio churches, a group called Católicos por la Raza stressed that ‘‘to identify and fight the problems of the Church is to serve Her.’’ They confronted their city’s conservative, anti-Communist cardinal Francis McIntyre, a leader who since 1948 had ousted liberal priests, opposed Vatican II, and come under increased attack for his failure to stand beside clergy who marched in favor of the civil rights movement. Members of Católicos por la Raza rallied on Christmas Eve 1969 on the steps of McIntyre’s newly built and opulent St. Basil’s on the west side of Los Angeles. As o√-duty sheri√s attacked the group, the archbishop instructed the congregation inside to sing ‘‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’’ ‘‘to drown out the noise of protest,’’ and he subsequently compared the demonstrators to ‘‘the rabble at Christ’s crucifixion’’ who deserved forgiveness ‘‘for they know not what they do.’’ Pressure from Católicos por la Raza led to McIntyre’s retirement a month later, and ethnic Mexicans in other states who were inspired by the farmworkers soon proved themselves just as successful in changing their churches. At the consecration of the former migrant farmworker Patricio Flores as bishop of San Antonio, Texas, Chávez spoke out in favor of the democratization of the Catholic hierarchy. While television audiences in Los Angeles and Mexico City watched, Chávez, Bishop Sergio Méndez Arceo of Cuernavaca (who had condemned the government’s role in Tlatelolco), and the ‘‘large numbers of la raza’’ in attendance ‘‘applauded enthusiastically’’ that an ethnic Mexican had been named bishop, a further sign that the ufw revolution was reshaping more than rural labor relations. By the 1980s, activists involved in the ufw grape strike and boycott from 1965 to 1970 were proving instrumental in providing ‘‘sanctuary’’ to Central American political refugees fleeing U.S.-sponsored violence in El Salvador and Guatemala. The politicization of religious clergy and laity in the United States by ufw campaigns, and the attention that those campaigns drew to Latinos, and to the U.S.-Mexico border region, helped define that critical response within the domestic United States to U.S. Cold War activities in the Reagan era. In no small part because its anti-Communist protagonists had built vital coalitions with religious and community groups, the grape strike and boycott reshaped and reanimated the U.S. labor movement in the years after 1970, when many U.S. residents who were committed to improving the economic and political rights of working people a≈rmed that ‘‘labor’s real glory days are still ahead.’’ Thanks to the attention that Chávez and other union leaders paid to

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organizing the unorganized, reaching out to Latinos in the United States, and working cooperatively with faith-based communities, student groups, and civil rights organizations, the ufw led many new e√orts to reenergize labor’s ranks. As revolutionaries who had come of age during the Cold War, members of the farmworker movement expanded and deepened the reach of the afl-cio. One major e√ort to organize domestic workers in California began in 1977 in the backyard of Chávez’s house, and the former ufw members who pursued that cause relied heavily for the next two decades on training and resources from the farm labor union. Other former ufw members proved critical to the urban and suburban unionization drives of the 1980s and 1990s that targeted Latino janitors and other service workers. Following a model defined among California farmworkers after 1965, leaders of the Justice for Janitors campaign declared that union representation and fair treatment were basic civil rights, and they promoted alliances with churches, Latino organizations, and other civic institutions to draw attention to janitors’ often forgotten work at places like Apple Computer, Intel, and other high-tech firms. With this in mind, afl-cio president John Sweeney called farmworkers ‘‘the moral center of the labor movement’’ during the 1990s, and he urged member unions to follow the ufw’s example in developing new organizing campaigns. As Mexican Americans, Mexican immigrants, Central American refugees, and others rallied on behalf of this ‘‘new labor movement,’’ their e√orts, in the words of Mike Davis, have made places like ‘‘the Los Angeles area the major R&D center for 21st-century trade unionism.’’πΩ Following the ufw’s established model, many labor organizers now emphasize that the nation’s low-wage workers still dream of higher pay, full U.S. citizenship, and real democracy on the job site. Most union leaders continue to distance themselves from any taint of radical influence and claim to speak from within U.S. national culture, from a common Americanism and a deep respect for the U.S. political system. As the ufw launched its own new unionization drives, announced plans to construct hundreds of a√ordable homes for farmworkers, and ran electoral campaigns to send sympathetic politicians to Sacramento and Washington during the early twenty-first century, its leaders became increasingly interested in their organization’s long forty-year history. Although millions of other U.S. residents, both immigrants and the native born, claim little comparable understanding of the group’s political struggles, union and civil rights activists know full well that the rural revolt begun in September 1965 continues to shape Latino futures in the United States.

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Notes 1. Several terms used in this essay deserve clarification. I refer to ‘‘Mexican Americans’’ to denote U.S. citizens of Mexican descent, and to ‘‘Mexican immigrants’’ to refer to mexicanos in the United States who remained Mexican nationals. ‘‘Ethnic Mexican’’ is the umbrella term that refers to both Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants. ‘‘Latinos’’ include ethnic Mexicans and other U.S. residents of Latin American descent. The labor organization discussed at great length in the following pages merits a note of its own, since it went by di√erent names at di√erent times. The group started by César Chávez began as the Farm Workers Association (fwa), and members later called it the National Farm Workers Association (nfwa); the organization was renamed the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (ufwoc) when it merged with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee; and for more than thirty years it has been called the United Farm Workers (ufw). 2. In colorful early-twentieth-century prose, London had excoriated scabs, whom he called ‘‘a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a water-logged brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue . . . a traitor to his God, his country, his wife, his family and his class.’’ See Eugene Nelson, Huelga! The First Hundred Days of the Great Delano Grape Strike (Delano: Farm Worker Press, 1966), 26. 3. Agenda of September 16, 1965, in ufw President’s Collection, Wayne State University, Box 13, Folder 20; Jacques Levy, César Chávez: Autobiography of La Causa (New York: Norton Books, 1975), 184; Eugene Nelson, Huelga, 26. 4. Edward Roybal, text of speech in the Minutes of the Founding Convention, Community Service Organization, March 20, 1954, in Herman Gallegos Papers, Green Library, Stanford University, Box A-16; Senate Resolution No. 204, June 11, 1957, State Journal, in Herman Gallegos Papers, Box A-13; letter from Ed Levin ‘‘to whom it may concern,’’ n.d., in ufw Presidential Papers, Box 2, Folder 2; Raúl Morín, Among the Valiant (Alhambra, Calif.: Borden, 1963), 11. 5. ‘‘What Is the cso?’’ (pamphlet), in Herman Gallegos Papers, Box A-13. 6. Minutes of the Founding Convention of the cso, March 20, 1954, in Herman Gallegos Papers, ‘‘Letter from Marion Gra√ ’’ file. 7. The film Salt of the Earth, for instance, a chronicle of Mexican American labor and civil rights activism in southern New Mexico, had led to the 1953 deportation of the Mexican actress Rosaura Revueltas and threats of violence against the miners who participated in the film’s production. Accusations by the Catholic Legion of Decency that the film endorsed violent revolt ensured that it would screen in only ten theaters nationwide. For more on union e√orts involving Mexican Americans, and opposition to Left-led unions from the 1930s into the 1950s, see Zaragosa Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 8. The discussion of Galarza’s career in the National Farm Labor Union, later known

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as the National Agricultural Workers Union (nawu), draws from Stephen Pitti, The Devil in Silicon Valley: Race, Mexican Americans, and Northern California (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 9. Washington Daily News, May 22, 1947; Los Angeles Daily News, February 19, 1951. 10. Joan London and Henry Anderson, So Shall Ye Reap: The Story of César Chávez and the Farm Workers’ Movement (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1970), 46. 11. Student Committee on Agricultural Labor, ‘‘Why Care about Farm Labor?’’ (unpublished pamphlet, 1960), in Social Protest Collection, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, Carton 10, Folder 15. 12. Letter from William F. Rogers to Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco, January 9, 1961, in Donald McDonnell Papers, Archives of the San Francisco Archdiocese, Menlo Park, California, Box 2, File ‘‘1961.’’ 13. Chávez activity report, March 21, 1956, in Fred Ross Papers, Green Library, Stanford University, Box 1, Folder 23; Ross activity report, July 30, 1957, in Fred Ross Papers, Wayne State University, Box 2, Folder 18. 14. Letter from Chávez to Ross, August 7, 1962, in Fred Ross Papers, Wayne State University, Box 3, Folder 9. 15. El Malcriado, December 1964. 16. Letter from Chávez to Ross, August 7, 1962, in Fred Ross Papers, Wayne State University, Box 3, Folder 9. 17. Walter Rochs Goldschmidt, As You Sow: Three Studies in the Social Consequences of Agribusiness (Montclair, N.J.: Allanheld, Osmun, 1978), 67. 18. ‘‘La Verdad’’ (pamphlet, [1947?]), in Ernesto Galarza Papers, Green Library, Stanford University, Box 13, Folder 7. 19. Farm Worker Association Statement of Purpose, in Herman Gallegos Papers, Box 3, Folder 5. 20. National Advisory Committee on Farm Labor, Farm Labor Organizing, 1905–1967 (New York: National Advisory Committee on Farm Labor, 1967), 50; Margaret Rose, ‘‘From the Fields to the Picket Line: Huelga Women and the Boycott, 1965–1975,’’ Labor History 31, no. 3 (1990): 287; ‘‘Birmingham, a City,’’ Commonweal, May 17, 1963, 212–13. 21. The organization’s Mexicanist politics did not encourage the nfwa’s interest in working with the Mexican state or with contemporary institutions in Mexico. California farmworkers had commonly blamed Mexican o≈cials for sending low-wage braceros to undermine wages and working conditions in California since the end of World War II, and nfwa leaders knew that Galarza had tried unsuccessfully to form political alliances with Mexican labor unions during the 1940s and early 1950s. El Malcriado, April 15, 1965. 22. The Movement (San Francisco), August 1965, 1. 23. Andrew Kopkind, ‘‘Poverty Politics in California,’’ New Republic, February 18, 1967; Ralph Guzmán, ‘‘Mexican-Americans on the Move,’’ Agenda 2 (July 1966): 1–8. 24. Letter from Chávez to Ross, March 23, 1965, in Fred Ross Papers, Wayne State

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University, Box 3, Folder 12; Carlos Reyes Guerrero, ‘‘Silent No More: The Voice of a Farm Worker Press, 1964–1975’’ (Ph.D. diss., Claremont Graduate University, 2003), 100. 25. Letters from Chávez to Eugene Nelson, December 10, 1964, from Eugene Nelson to Chávez, December 26, 1964, and from Eugene Nelson to Chávez, January 9, 1965, in ufw President’s Collection, Part 1, Box 46, Folder 10. 26. Guerrero, ‘‘Silent No More,’’ 100. 27. Jerald Barry Brown, ‘‘The United Farm Workers Boycott and Grape Strike, 1965– 1970: An Evaluation of the Culture of Poverty Theory’’ (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1972), 122–25. 28. San Francisco Chronicle, April 7, 1966; Dinuba Sentinel, March 24, 1966; San Francisco Chronicle, April 7, 1966; Bakersfield Californian, March 19, 1966; El Malcriado, March 17, 1966. 29. Van Gosse, Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of a New Left (New York: Verso, 1993), 183. 30. ‘‘Plan de Delano,’’ El Malcriado, March 17, 1966, 11, 14. 31. Stockton Record, April 4, 1966. 32. George Vargas, ‘‘A Historical Overview/Update on the State of Chicano Art,’’ in Chicano Renaissance: Contemporary Cultural Trends, ed. David R. Maciel, Isidro D. Ortiz, and María Herrera-Sobek (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000), 201. 33. El Excéntrico (San Jose), October 5, 1962. 34. Vargas, ‘‘A Historical Overview,’’ 197. 35. Transcript of boycott organizers’ meeting in Seaside, September 24, 1970, in Jacques Levy Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University, Box 3, Folder 2. 36. Letter from Héctor B. García of the American gi Forum to Fay Bennet, January 5, 1959, in National Sharecroppers Fund, Wayne State University, Series I, Sub-series C, General Files, Box 5, Folder 5. 37. ‘‘Augustín ‘Teen’ Flores, National Chairman of the American gi Forum,’’ MexicanAmerican Review (San Diego), December 1964; resolution of the American gi Forum, February 19, 1966, in nfwa Papers, Wayne State University, Box 5, Folder 6; letter from Dan Campos to American gi Forum, March 18, 1966, in nfwa Papers, Box 5, Folder 6. 38. Voice of the Spanish-Speaking People, March 1, 1966. 39. sds Regional Newsletter (San Francisco), January 24, 1966. 40. Ibid., February 6 and 22, 1966. 41. Notes on a Delano press conference, April 9, 1969, in Jacques Levy Papers, Box 3, Folder 4. 42. nfwa leaders relied heavily on young activists a≈liated with Students for a Democratic Society and similar organizations to picket grocery stores throughout the United States that stocked California grapes. London and Anderson, So Shall Ye Reap, 137, 160– 61; ‘‘A Singular Success,’’ Bay State Banner, August 6, 1970, 4. 43. Letter from Chávez to Local Board No. 101, August 4, 1969, in ufw President’s Collection, Box 26, Folder 12.

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44. Albert Vetere Lannon, Fight or Be Slaves: The History of the Oakland–East Bay Labor Movement (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2000), 150. 45. Voice of the Spanish-Speaking People, November 11, 1965. 46. César Chávez, 197. 47. Un-American Activities in California: Reports, committee report (Sacramento: State Printing O≈ce, 1961), 61–62. 48. Ibid.; telegram to J. Edgar Hoover, March 14, 1966, in fbi file on César Chávez and United Farm Workers et al.; ‘‘The Periscope,’’ Newsweek, March 14, 1966. 49. Gary Allen, ‘‘The Grapes: Communist Wrath in Delano,’’ American Opinion, June 1966, 12. 50. John Barbour, ‘‘The California Grape Boycott: Bitter War with No End in Sight,’’ San Jose Mercury-News, January 25, 1970, 1f; Gerard E. Sherry, ed., Farm Labor Problems (the Anguish of Delano) (1966); ‘‘Memorandum regarding proposed march sponsored by Congress of Racial Inequality,’’ March 10, 1966, in fbi File on César Chávez and United Farm Workers et al. 51. Letter from ‘‘a resident wishing for a friendly settlement’’ to Vizzard, October 19, 1965, in James L. Vizzard Papers, Green Library, Stanford University, Box 29, Folder 10; Fresno Bee, May 19, 1966; Harry Bernstein, ‘‘Fears of ‘Witch Hunt’ in Grape Strike False,’’ Los Angeles Times, July 24, 1966; union postcard, author unknown, in Fred Ross Papers, Stanford University, Box 12, Folder 1. 52. Harry Bernstein, ‘‘Duel in the Sun: Union Busting, Teamster Style,’’ Progressive, July 1973, 17; confidential memo of the Los Angeles fbi, January 21, 1966, in fbi File on César Chávez and United Farm Workers et al. 53. El Malcriado, August 26, 1966. 54. César Chávez, preface to ‘‘Presupuesto de Libertad’’ (unpublished pamphlet, 1967), in Bayard Rustin Papers, Yale University, Microfilm Reel 14. 55. La Raza Yearbook, May 11, 1968, quoted in George Mariscal, Aztlán and Viet Nam: Chicano and Chicana Experiences of the War (Berkeley: University of California, 1999), 188. For an excellent account of Chicano opposition to the Vietnam War, see Lorena Oropeza, Raza Si! Guerra No! Chicano Protest and Patriotism during the Viet Nam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 56. People’s World (San Francisco), May 13, 1967; The Forumeer, August 1971; ‘‘Porque nos oponemos a la guerra en Indochina’’ (flyer, 1971), in ‘‘San Jose State Folder,’’ Cambodia–Kent State Strike Collection, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; La Palabra de MASC, December 18, 1968; El Vocero (San Jose), April 1972, May 1972; Mariscal, Aztlán and Vietnam, 188, 196–97. 57. Richard Gardner, Grito! Reies Tijerina and the New Mexico Land Grant War of 1967 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 214; Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: The Chicano’s Struggle toward Liberation (San Francisco: Canfield Press, 1972), 241; Brown, ‘‘The United Farm Workers Grape Strike and Boycott,’’ 176–77. On nationalism and internationalism in the Chicano movement, see George Mariscal, Brown-Eyed Children of the Sun: Lessons

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from the Chicano Movement, 1965–1975 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005). 58. ‘‘Spanish Surname Citizens for Wallace,’’ press release, February 22, 1968, in ufw President’s Collection, Part 1, Box 47, Folder 7. 59. Davis (Calif.) Enterprise, April 11, 1966. 60. Jacques Levy, interview with Larry Itliong, April 4, 1969, in Jacques Levy Papers, Series I, Box AV, Tape 3. 61. El Malcriado, September 15, 1965; ufw Press Release, February 23, 1968, in ufw President’s Collection, Box 5, Folder 7. 62. New York Times, March 11, 1966; El Malcriado, March 15, 1968; London and Anderson, So Shall Ye Reap, 184. 63. La Opinión, February 29, 1968; New York Times, April 20, 1969. 64. ‘‘Chicanos and the Draft,’’ El Alacrán, March 29, 1970, 4. 65. La Opinión, March 25, 1968; Margo Hornblower, ‘‘Picking a New Fight,’’ Time, November 25, 1996, 64–65; Brown, ‘‘The United Farm Workers Grape Strike and Boycott,’’ 177. 66. Levy, interview with Chávez, February 3, 1969, in Jacques Levy Papers, Series I, Folder 1. 67. Ronald B. Taylor, ‘‘The Boycott and the NLRA,’’ The Nation, May 12, 1969, 591–92. 68. London and Anderson, So Shall Ye Reap, 153, 165, 184; Rose, ‘‘From the Fields to the Picket Line,’’ 285–86; ‘‘Mrs. King Supports César Chávez,’’ Sacramento Observer, December 24, 1970. 69. Teletype memorandum from San Francisco fbi O≈ce to fbi Director, May 30, 1968, in fbi File on César Chávez and United Farm Workers et al.; teletype from New York fbi O≈ce to Director, October 25, 1968, and teletype from Pittsburgh fbi O≈ce to Director, November 25, 1968, in fbi File on César Chávez and United Farm Workers et al. 70. Rubén Salazar, ‘‘Brown Berets Hail ‘La Raza’ and Scorn the Establishment,’’ Los Angeles Times, June 16, 1969. 71. Rex T. Westerfield, ‘‘Sour Grapes: The Move to Control Our Food Supply,’’ American Opinion, December 1968, 54, 66. 72. Brown, ‘‘The United Farm Workers Grape Strike and Boycott,’’ 139–40; New York Times, June 27, 1969; ‘‘Demonstration at Fort McPherson,’’ November 5, 1969, in fbi File on César Chávez and United Farm Workers et al. 73. ‘‘How Long Must the War Go On?’’ (flyer, October 1969), in ufwoc Papers, Wayne State University, Box 10, Folder 30; ‘‘Planned Demonstration by Sympathizers of ufwoc,’’ memorandum, August 12, 1969, in fbi File on César Chávez and United Farm Workers et al. 74. Letter from Americans of Mexican Descent, Mothers for Peace to Ronald Reagan, October 15, 1969, in ufwoc Papers, Box 10, Folder 30. 75. ‘‘O√ Dow,’’ flyer, in fbi File on César Chávez and United Farm Workers, et al.

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76. Chávez speech at Exposition Park, May 2, 1971, in ufw President’s Collection, Part 2, Box 1, unfiled material. 77. Letter from Fred Jaso to Chávez, May 1969, in ufw President’s Collection, Box 3, Folder 2. 78. Consumers’ Rights Committee, ‘‘The Public’s Stake in the Anti-consumer Grape Boycott,’’ n.d., in Victor Salandini Papers, Green Library, Stanford University, Box 11, Folder 1; ‘‘Farmers Organize New Group to Defeat Chávez Movement,’’ October 2, 1970, in Alfred Ramírez, Planned Famine in America? A Letter to an Employee of the Purex Corporation (privately published pamphlet, 1970); Barbour, ‘‘The California Grape Boycott.’’ 79. Mike Davis, Magical Urbanism: Latinos and the Reinvention of the U.S. City (New York: Verso, 2001), 145.

VICTORIA LANGLAND

Birth Control Pills and Molotov Cocktails Reading Sex and Revolution in 1968 Brazil

Shortly after the 1968 Brazilian release (and box o≈ce success) of the Hollywood film Bonnie and Clyde, the real-life version hit the national press in the form of Sílvia, an attractive blonde university student and bank robber, said to sport stylish bangs, miniskirts, a 45-caliber machine gun, and surgical gloves. For months a string of assaults on banks and armored cars in the cities of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Belo Horizonte had headlined the newspapers and confounded the police. Some believed the thieves were linked to an international criminal cartel, while others thought they must be domestic ‘‘terrorists’’ of either the Left or the Right, because since the 1964 imposition of military dictatorship, underground armed opposition groups and right-wing vigilante squads had recently appeared on the scene.∞ In either case, the wave of bank robberies provoked considerable alarm and no small degree of prurient curiosity about the ‘‘mysterious blonde’’ reported to have participated in some of them. The media’s interest in this Brazilian Bonnie only further increased in November of that year, when a young man was arrested following the latest such robbery. According to the police, he not only admitted to having participated in the event but also revealed the robbery’s political raison d’être by exposing the involvement of the regime opponent and Communist leader Carlos Marighella and a blonde woman named Sílvia. With this confession, both the revision of the previous months’ many holdups and an intensified and decidedly sexualized scrutiny of Sílvia began. From rumors of a triangular romantic relationship between her, Marighella, and another woman, to colorful descriptions of her physical appearance, mass media coverage of Sílvia focused predominantly on her sexuality. Reporting on police e√orts to identify her, for example, Veja magazine evoked a sirenic figure: The shape and measurements, the dimples and legs of a blonde they’ve never seen are being permanently and rigorously analyzed by investigators from a suburban pre-

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cinct. In Marechal Hermes, Rio de Janeiro, the police have already reached the conclusion that the young woman Sílvia, wanted as an assistant to Carlos Marighella in bank robberies, has ‘‘round legs,’’ and ‘‘smooth arms,’’ is tall and ‘‘very cool.’’ . . . The suburban investigators have also discovered that the blonde assailant has a ‘‘slightly hoarse’’ voice, is ‘‘very pretty,’’ and uses a wig. ‘‘Why do women like that have to get involved in this rubbish?’’ asks a desolate young police o≈cer, who says he already knows ‘‘even the girl’s brand of perfume.’’≤

While the magazine’s playful description of the investigators’ vigor may owe much to journalistic flair, the sentiment of erotic pursuit that pervades this passage exemplifies the broad wave of sexualized representations of militant women that marked 1968 Brazil. Nor were such portrayals confined to media productions. Following the early morning raid of a prohibited meeting of university students, for example, the police held a press conference to show o√ the ‘‘subversive’’ materials they had apprehended. There they directed journalists to tables loaded with careful displays of Molotov cocktails, slingshots, Communist literature, knives, a few pistols, and, among all of this, several boxes of birth control pills.≥ Soon thereafter, when police invaded the dormitories of the University of São Paulo, they repeated the scene with more contraceptive contraband.∂ The display of the pills provided a double message to the attentive journalists and their readers: not only did young women get involved in these confrontational and dangerous activities (for only women take birth control pills), but they came prepared to do more than just discuss politics. In the vision of the police-sponsored press conference, Molotov cocktails and female student sexuality posed equally alarming risks to the established order. The stories of dangerous and alluring revolutionaries such as Sílvia or ‘‘sexual subversives’’ like those at the raided student meeting highlight my central premise here: that the Cold War in Brazil was marked by profoundly gendered battles. Particularly throughout the internationally turbulent year of 1968, as students and others proposed radical social and political transformation, their e√orts provoked and resulted in specifically gendered and sexualized concerns. Thus political struggles involving youth, especially female youth, repeatedly became characterized in latent or explicitly sexual ways. Shortly after the March 1968 police shooting and death of the student Edson Luis de Lima Souto and the resulting intensification of student mobilizations, a variety of materials depicting images of armed and sexually provocative women began to appear in mainstream, middle-class publications like the photo magazines Manchete and Realidade and newspapers such as the Jornal do Brasil and the Estado de São Paulo. Meanwhile members of various state security forces, as well as other federal

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o≈cials, alluded—sometimes privately, but also publicly—to the supposed sexual promiscuity of politically active students.∑ They made such statements in reference not only to women like Sílvia who were directly involved in armed leftist activities but also to those who participated in the relatively more moderate university-based student movements. In short, women’s sexuality as a political issue and sexualized views of women political activists merged as one. Indeed, within the context of cold warriors’ fears that an international Communist movement furtively labored to undermine social and cultural traditions as a step toward political and economic domination—an e√ort that only seemed confirmed by the wave of youthful protests that burst forth across the globe that year—birth control pills could appear as explosive as Molotov cocktails. The combination of increased political participation by female students with the radicalization of student politics and strategies, especially their recent turn toward violence, created serious social and political anxieties. Moreover, changes in the sexual behavior of these young, middle-class, and predominantly white women, especially their burgeoning use of birth control pills—a product with a particularly racialized history in Brazil—added fuel to the fire of these social and sexual issues. Thus, in part, we need to see the many references to fears of unrestrained female sexuality as one particularly graphic expression of these social anxieties, and thus as a window onto the gendered dimensions of the Cold War in 1968. At the same time, however, these sexualized representations must also be understood as a repressive response to the internal dissent o√ered by students and members of the underground opposition. In other words, the production of these images (verbal and pictorial) was not only an expression or reflection of Cold War attitudes but also a recurring salvo in the struggle between the student movements and the military and media cold warriors—a resounding voice in their violent ‘‘dialogue.’’∏ As Seth Fein has eloquently argued about Mexican newsreels secretly produced by the U.S. government during the 1950s, representations must be seen as inhabiting an indivisible cultural and political sphere. ‘‘If ultimately Washington waged Cold War to convince national societies around the globe to follow its leadership, then the production of propaganda cannot be viewed as a mere sideshow, a reel derivative of a more real story or as the soft derivative of hard policies. In other words, the reel is real.’’π So too must the sexualized responses to women’s political activism in 1968 Brazil be seen as inseparably cultural and political, produced in an attempt not only to limit oppositional political activism itself but also to shut down the very political identities that allowed for such activism. Moreover, far from being merely repre-

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sentational phenomena, these depictions of political women can be seen to have had important material consequences, influencing the treatment of women political prisoners and contributing to the late-1968 military crackdown on opposition activities. After briefly explaining the rise of the student movements and the armed underground in Brazil in 1968, I trace the participation of women within these interconnected movements and examine the issues and debates around young people’s increased sexual experimentation. Young men and women provoked considerable public discussion both through their increasing use of violent tactics and through their challenging of sexual boundaries. The sense of social apprehension unleashed by these new behaviors found expression in mainstream media representations of women activists, and so later in the essay I examine several sets of relevant images, from descriptions of student meetings to published clothing advertisements. The messages behind these images also appear in the personal testimonies of formerly incarcerated women, o√ering evidence of the physical dimensions of this symbolic struggle. Meanwhile the resulting climate of intense sexual and political anxiety helps explain the events precipitating the December imposition of Institutional Act No. 5. In fact, it is only through a gendered understanding of the period that we can adequately comprehend the deepening of authoritarian rule and the intensification of military repression. I conclude by suggesting that the Brazilian case is not unique, as sex and revolution marked the way women activists were read across many Cold War terrains. The Student Movement and the Armed Underground On the morning of October 13, 1968, Brazilians awoke to find two astonishing headlines competing for attention in the national newspapers. In one, news of the police raid of the aforementioned student meeting, the Annual Congress of the União Nacional dos Estudantes (une, National Union of Students) in Ibiuna, São Paulo, hit the front pages with a bang. Early reports initially proclaimed over 1,200 arrested, while the capture of nationally recognizable figures like the student leaders Vladimir Palmeira and José Dirceu, and the dismal photographs of masses of wet and miserable students, only added to the already dramatic elements of the disastrous student gathering.∫ At the same time that students in the interior of São Paulo state were facing arrest, in the second big story that day, a U.S. Army captain living in the city of São Paulo met sudden death. A Vietnam veteran, Captain Charles Chandler died instantly when an

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unidentified man sprayed his car with machine gun fire as Chandler backed out of his driveway. Before fleeing the scene, the attacker scattered leaflets that left little doubt of the political motivation behind the killing. Proclaiming to have served ‘‘revolutionary justice’’ against a war criminal currently training counterrevolutionaries in Brazil, the flyers marked his death as the work of the underground armed Left. Although coincidental, the simultaneity of these two events highlights the intensity of this period in Brazil, in which both the aboveground student movement and the growing underground armed organizations provoked considerable consternation among government o≈cials, who began to see little di√erence between the two. Military o≈cials repeatedly proclaimed that students were uniquely susceptible to ‘‘outside’’ influences, and that an international Communist movement was behind the recent spate of student demonstrations. In one internal document, agents stated: The successive agitations that are causing tumult in the student area around the country, causing serious threats to the culture and education of young people, are the consequences of a subversive plan previously elaborated by the Communist Party. . . . Communist elements . . . infiltrated into [the student organizations] are promoting intense political propaganda.Ω

In fact, two days after Chandler’s death, the secretary for public security, Heli Lopes Meireles, proclaimed an explicit connection between Chandler’s murder and the une congress. ‘‘Because the language used in the publications we apprehended in Ibiuna was similar to that in the pamphlets found near Chandler’s body, they [the students] could be implicated in this criminal assault,’’ he declared.∞≠ In fact, the une and its leaders played no part in the Chandler murder. Instead those responsible hailed from the Vanguarda Popular Revolucionaria (vpr, Popular Revolutionary Vanguard), an armed group that, according to Thomas Skidmore, ‘‘hoped that by ‘executing’ (their term) Chandler they would dramatize the U.S. role as the indispensable prop to the military regime.’’∞∞ Nevertheless, Brazilian (and some U.S.) o≈cials continued to associate Chandler’s death with the student movement.∞≤ Notwithstanding Meireles’s error in blaming the une for Chandler’s death, there nevertheless existed a subtle relationship between the aboveground, if illegal, university organizations like the une, and the new underground movements of the Left such as the vpr and the organization headed by Carlos Marighella, the Aliança de Libertação Nacional (aln, Alliance for National Libration). While in the 1950s and early 1960s the illegal but fully functioning

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Brazilian Communist Party (pcb) served as the principal leftist organizing force in Brazil, beginning in 1961 and intensifying after the 1964 coup, a plethora of subdivisions emerged as members critiqued their party’s lackluster response to the military’s usurpation of the presidency and disagreed on how best to confront the new situation. In addition to the vpr and aln, scholars have calculated that leftist activists formed at least thirty-seven underground organizations in this period, of which all but a handful advocated armed struggle as a means to end military rule and usher in socialism.∞≥ These organizations, along with the aboveground student groups, constituted the two main and often reciprocal channels through which young people opposed the military regime in 1968. Both foci of political activity were multiple and variable, and neither can be collapsed into the other. Nevertheless, important ties existed between the two. Some students organized simultaneously for their clandestine organization and their student group; others left school to dedicate themselves full-time to underground activity; still others involved themselves only in university-level activity but accepted and even supported the influence of those from the clandestine groups. As the historian and former student activist Daniel Aarão Reis Filho has noted, ‘‘It would be di≈cult, in 1968, to find a student leader who was not associated with a leftist party.’’∞∂ Such alliances were extremely fluid, with many young people claiming a≈liation with several di√erent organizations over time, and often also acting in concert with other groups. Although specific information about membership within these organizations is, for obvious reasons, nearly impossible to determine, the sociologist Marcelo Ridenti has used judicial records to make quantitative estimates about the various groups of people accused of participating in an underground group.∞∑ From these records we learn that roughly 30 percent of those tried for participation in clandestine leftist organizations were students. If one adds to that figure individuals who had just left school (because they either graduated, took a leave, or dropped out) and, on a smaller scale, high school students, the figures approach 50 percent, and within certain groups the percentage reaches even higher.∞∏ While the new militant organizations on the left must be recognized as more than purely student-based movements, students nevertheless formed a primary foundation of support. In fact, students created some of these clandestine organizations, such as the Rio de Janeiro/Guanabara–based Revolutionary Movement of October 8 (mr-8), so named in honor of Che Guevara, killed on October 8, 1967. This group had its origins around 1966, when several slates of candidates for leadership in student organizations throughout various states, including Guanabara

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and Rio de Janeiro,∞π began campaigning as ‘‘Dissidents,’’ in other words, dissenting members of the pcb. Throughout 1966 and 1967 the Dissidents grew significantly in size and influence within the student movement. When fierce state repression later eliminated most university-based student organizations, the Dissidents from Rio de Janeiro and Guanabara (di-rj and di-gb, respectively) transformed themselves into mr-8.∞∫ As the example of mr-8 makes clear, a highly porous border divided underground leftist organizing and aboveground university-level activity. While the majority of those involved in student demonstrations of 1968 did not participate in the clandestine armed contingents, their e√orts within the more overt, albeit often illegal, student movement constituted an important part of the opposition struggle, one that grew significantly from 1964 to 1968 both in size and in militancy. Clearly not everyone who was involved in the student movement agreed on the tactic of armed struggle: at the largest protest march of 1968, nicknamed the ‘‘March of the 100,000,’’ factions within the crowd competed with each other in chanting, ‘‘Only an organized people can defeat the dictatorship’’ or ‘‘Only an armed people can defeat the dictatorship.’’ Nevertheless, candidates from the clandestine organizations were routinely elected into leadership positions, and the most famous and revered student leaders of 1968 all belonged to clandestine parties. The ties between the underground movement and the student movement ran deep. Women Students in Love and War Women students participated actively in both the clandestine armed movements and the university-based student mobilizing. As occurred with other social movements of the 1960s, contemporary gender expectations contributed to male students’ assuming the bulk of public leadership positions; thus of the ‘‘famous and revered’’ student leaders mentioned earlier, all but a few were men. Nevertheless, within the expectations of Brazilian middle-class society at the time, the extent and profundity of young women’s political participation were radical indeed. Within the larger political scenario of military rule, women were virtually nonexistent in the military itself, and they played little role in national politics, save for moments when they rea≈rmed their positions as wives and mothers. One important example of this was the pre-coup, pro-military ‘‘March of the Family, with God, for Liberty.’’ Although publicly portrayed as a demonstration led by housewives, later investigation found the event to have been heavily organized by a conservative (and male-directed) think tank.∞Ω In con-

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trast, returning to Ridenti’s research, of those accused of participating in the clandestine leftist organizations in general, 16 percent were women, while for those suspected of armed guerrilla activity in particular, the figure is actually higher: 18.3 percent.≤≠ These women were predominantly students. Among female defendants for whom an occupation was listed, 73 percent were either students, teachers, or college-educated professionals.≤∞ As for the universitybased student movements, photographic evidence and oral histories testify to women’s ample participation, while quantitatively, a reasonable estimate can be made from the mass arrests at the October 1968 une congress in Ibiuna.≤≤ Of the 712 student prisoners, 156, or 22 percent, were women.≤≥ In contrast, of the approximately 300 participants at the 1966 une congress, 30 of them, or 10 percent, were women.≤∂ Judging only by participation in these congresses, this represents an overall increase in participation between 1966 and 1968 of 137 percent for students in general, and a whopping 420 percent for female students. Thus 1968 in Brazil witnessed not simply an immense rise in student mobilization but a veritable explosion in the political participation of young women. As young people as a whole became more involved in violent political action, so too did women. As noted, the figures for women charged with participation in leftist guerrilla groups are actually higher than for those accused of involvement with the clandestine Left in general. It must be noted that these figures do not apply exclusively to 1968 but incorporate 1969 and the early 1970s as well, when the bulk of armed actions took place. Nevertheless, the organization and training for these maneuvers began in the late 1960s, and by 1968 some groups (like that of Carlos Marighella and ‘‘Sílvia’’) began staging bank robberies and other expropriatory actions to fund their future activities. By 1968, then, one can see a developing climate of increased clandestine violence—one that includes female as well as male participants—even if most of the actions would not take place until the following years. Throughout 1968 activists within the aboveground university-based movement also began to adopt a decidedly more aggressive strategy, of which women students were definitely a part. Since 1964 the police had gradually begun using more drastic means to quiet dissenting students, and by 1968 they were employing mounted cavalry, tear and nausea gas, electrically charged nightsticks, water cannons, and gunfire. Whereas in 1966 and 1967 students generally sought to avoid the mounting physical repression unleashed against them by police, in 1968 they made a tactical decision to confront the state security forces as best they could. The sociologist Maria Ribeiro do Valle argues that this change on the

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part of the student movement did not come lightly but stemmed from a prolonged internal political discussion, one especially influenced by the March 1968 shooting death of the student Edson Luis de Lima Souto. In the historic reconstruction of the dynamic episodes of ’68 emerges violence. . . . The students act, increasingly, in the direction of a revolutionary violence for the radical transformation of society, while the hard-liners [of the military regime], [use] all the weapons at their disposal to reclaim and redefine the ‘‘revolution’’ of ’64. . . . The beginning of this ‘‘combat’’ between these two opposing conceptions of revolution takes to the streets in March of ’68.≤∑

Thus after March 1968 students began deliberately arming themselves for street protests with makeshift weapons like Molotov cocktails, rocks and corks hurled in slingshots, or simple sticks and stones, while others stationed themselves in high-rise buildings in the cities’ downtown areas, from which they could throw heavy objects. In her research, Martha Huggins reveals that student demonstrators also scattered marbles on sidewalks to trip up police and even armed themselves with iron spears and tear gas.≤∏ And at least one newspaper noted that students also took to breaking up old acetate records, as the pieces could be ‘‘thrown great distances with precision.’’≤π A June 1968 student flyer demonstrated students’ concerted e√orts in this direction as it encouraged its readers: If there is repression, get into the fights. Throw paper weights, bottles, sticks and stones. But act in groups, because when we’re organized we do things better and with more security.≤∫

This sentiment is also echoed by Olga D’Arc Pimentel, a student leader in 1968 from the city of Goiânia, who later recalled: We decided to change tactics. You’re going to oblige us? Then let’s go, now everyone is going to go prepared. And we all did. The girls with bags underneath the skirts of their uniforms, full of rocks. Then when the army would start to line up, there came that rain of rocks. It was crazy.≤Ω

Changes in tactics by both the students and the police made student demonstrations after March 1968 increasingly fierce events. In all, the year witnessed twelve deaths during street demonstrations: four students, seven bystanders, and one police o≈cer.≥≠ Although this change in tactics certainly represented a shift for the student movement in general, the fact that female students actively participated in the

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transformation proved even more unusual, for they had not traditionally engaged in much countero√ensive before this time. Only four years earlier, for example, on the day of the coup, a mixed group of students and artists went to the une building in Rio de Janeiro to try to protect it from imminent attacks. While some of the men armed themselves with weapons, it fell to the women of the group to bring first-aid supplies, hidden inside their purses, in case anyone was hurt.≥∞ We can compare that to the women Olga recalled who carried rocks under their skirts, or to the June 1968 U.S. Embassy reports of young people who brought sticks rolled up in newspapers and the ‘‘unusually large number of girls [who] took part, many carrying stones in [their] handbags.’’≥≤ The increased use of violence by students was a change for all of them, but for women it was a particularly marked di√erence. Besides becoming more politically militant, students in 1968 began breaking down boundaries with another kind of activity as well: sex. As for young people in other parts of the world, the climate of cultural and political change in the late 1960s led to considerable questioning of long-standing values concerning sexuality, while the technological advance of the birth control pill allowed young couples to act on their beliefs with much less risk of pregnancy. As the historians Maria Hermínia Tavares de Almeida and Luiz Weis have noted: A good number of the young people who entered the university after the late ’50s had to confront in their skins and souls the question of fidelity and of sex before marriage—in short, ‘‘free love,’’ to use an expression which even then was beginning to become clichéd. . . . The 1960s in Brazil witnessed a peculiar conjuncture. On the one side, power was forcefully taken over by a portion of those Brazilians for whom ‘‘the dissolution of customs’’ was part of an insidious subversion engineered by the international communist movement. On the other, for the children of the post-war baby boom who were reaching adulthood, the order of the day was ‘‘questionings,’’ as we also used to say, of the disdainfully labeled ‘‘bourgeois marriage,’’ understood as the supra-sum of hypocrisy and of the inequality of erotic opportunities between the sexes.≥≥

From this perspective, the political dimensions of these seemingly personal sexual choices were apparent to all. That this striving against hypocrisy did not necessarily result in the equal freedom of sexual expression sought by progressive young women is made clear by the fact that even within the Left, old sexual standards died hard, or not at all. Many young male activists echoed the student Vinícius Caldevilla, who later admitted: ‘‘Many of us embarked on ambiguous projects, dating some ‘pretty’

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girl from the Paineira or Paulistano [Country] Club and at the same time carrying on burning passionate a√airs with colleagues from the university, political militants.’’≥∂ Nor is this to say that all or even most university students were engaged in more open sexual activities. Marília Carneiro remembers the advice of her friend Heloísa Buarque: ‘‘We have to act like we put out for guys, but we don’t have to put out for guys.’’≥∑ Even if these explorations did not constitute the sexual revolution that some people either feared or hoped for, 1968 nevertheless marked a moment of broad sexual questioning, one felt throughout society. This can be seen in the sexual audacity of plays like the tropicalist Roda Viva, which included a shocking scene between a guardian angel and Our Lady, or in the lyrics of the controversial Caetano Veloso song, ‘‘It’s Prohibited to Prohibit’’: The mother of the virgin says no / And the announcement on tv / And it was written / On the gate / And the teacher lifts his finger / And besides the door there’s the doorman / Yes / And I say no / And I say no to no / And I say it’s prohibited to prohibit.

Whether most young people actually engaged in socially forbidden sexual behaviors or simply debated the nature of these taboos in song or discussion, sexual boundaries that had previously been honored, or at least tolerated, were suddenly in flux. Within the Cold War context alluded to by Tavares and Weis, these new sexual ideas and behaviors of young people provoked vociferous public debates and fears. A flurry of articles on topics such as sex education, abortion, birth control, and the wearing of bikinis filled the pages of newspapers and magazines. In ‘‘Nudism and Sex: Is the World Implanting a New Morality?’’ (an article in Manchete magazine), for example, the authors lamented this new ‘‘revolution of sex, . . . a type of atomic bomb, of highly explosive material, destined to destroy society and subvert customs.’’ Like the numerous analyses of heightened student political activity at the time that pointed to deleterious ‘‘foreign’’ influences as a causal factor, the source of this revolution, the article argued, was the advertising and media images emanating from the more industrialized countries. Their e√ects were felt the world over, especially by the young: The young people who scorn or pretend to scorn everything else, come back to this [sexual pleasure]. Many dispense with devoted feelings and dedicate themselves to brief relations, in the style already called snacks [in English in original], an analogy to quick meals taken at luncheonette counters. Before sex was the slave of love. Today it’s love which tends to become the slave of sex.≥∏

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Exaggerated or not, such articles were not uncommon and reflected the profound sense of unease that young people’s sexual explorations provoked. Unsurprisingly, much like the question of women’s participation in violent political action, with sex too a considerable discrepancy existed between expected behavior for men and women, expectations intimately tied to the social and racial background of the protagonists. As noted, even within the Left, sexual standards varied greatly for men and women. Female students’ sexual experimentations threw into disarray not only gendered values but constructions of class and race as well. Virginity until marriage, for example, was imperative for middle-class daughters, while their brothers’ sexual experiences were both tolerated and accepted—so long as they limited themselves to certain social classes of women. And in racially stratified Brazil, this generally meant women of color. Thus Alfredo Syrkis, an underground activist in this period, later recalled unabashedly the dawning recognition of his own privileged and exploitative role when it came to sex: Until a short while ago, my sexual life was limited to the holy hand job and sporadic adventures with the little domestic maids in my building. One of them, an agile black woman with large breasts, took my virginity from me not long ago. . . . My last ‘‘alienated fuck’’ was near the end of ’68. . . . I remember a conversation with Minc one day. . . . [He said] ‘‘What’s good is for us to have sex with our girlfriends, with someone we like.’’ At the time the statement sounded perverse to me. ‘‘Man, our girlfriends are someone we have to respect, we can’t screw them like that . . . as if they were a whore or junk,’’ I thought. But as time passed it began to make sense. It was one of those spheres of the revolution that we have to make happen inside of ourselves. On that evening, already half sloshed, I decided that having trysts with the maids was counterrevolutionary.≥π

Syrkis’s ‘‘alienated’’ experiences parallel Anne McClintock’s analysis of class and gender in Victorian England, where domestic workers played similarly significant roles in defining the boundaries of gender expectations and appropriate female sexuality. Explaining that elite children grew up learning to recognize important class di√erences through the female figures they encountered in the home, particularly their mothers and maids, McClintock notes that sexual distinctions and class distinctions went hand in hand. While mothers may have held ultimate authority for household a√airs, to their working-class nannies fell the responsibility for the day-to-day care of children, including disciplinary actions and, not uncommonly for their male charges, some form of sexual initiation as well. Hence, she argues, ‘‘The Victorian splitting of women into

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whores and Madonnas, nuns and prostitutes, has its origins, then, not in universal archetype, but in the class structure of the household.’’ In short, she adds, ‘‘gender is not a separate dimension of identity to which one adds, accumulatively, the dimension of class. Rather, gender is an articulated category, constructed through and by class.’’≥∫ Her observations help illuminate a similar situation in Brazil, where poor, black, female domestic workers were (and still are) a mainstay in middle- and upper-class homes, and where, in 1968, to be a middle-class woman implied, among other things, whiteness and sexual abstinence. The burgeoning sexual consciousness and behavior of young women students did not simply shake up societal notions of what young people (or even simply women) should or should not do, but, more specifically, threatened social expectations of middle- and upper-class women. For these privileged daughters to flirt with sexual ‘‘promiscuity’’ threatened established ideas of gender, race, and class. In fact, the history of birth control in Brazil intimately connects with race, class, and revolution. One cannot understand what it meant for female university students to start taking the birth control pill and using other forms of contraception without first recognizing this background. Despite much internal debate, the military regime allowed the introduction of family planning programs in Brazil via a variety of U.S. agencies, most especially through the Sociedade Civil do Bem Estar Familiar no Brasil (bemfam, the Society for the Welfare of the Family in Brazil), begun in 1965 with private funds from a branch of International Planned Parenthood.≥Ω Hoping to avoid ‘‘new Cubas,’’ many of these programs primarily targeted the poor, brown-skinned residents of the Northeast, where, it was thought, there were too many people and too few resources, breeding the conditions for Communist rebellion. After a 1967 newspaper exposé accused U.S. evangelical missionaries of sterilizing hundreds of indigenous Amazonian women, the Brazilian Congress created a parliamentary commission to study family planning. Although the report was never finished, the interviews undertaken, published several years later, reveal a definite linkage between family planning, racism, and fears of political instability bred by material inequalities. Said the director-treasurer of bemfam, Glycon de Paiva, for example: My problem is to avoid the aggravation of this situation [of excess population impeding development]. Those people are not influencing the country’s economy. Those people are weighing down entirely on the shoulders of others. Something needs to be done to enrich society. And I can’t conceive of that enrichment when the country an-

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nually, via the uterus, receives 2.6 million new people to do what with? . . . What wage-earning ability can I give to these uneducated individuals, with a reduced vocabulary of 250, 300 words? Those people seem to me to be heavy on the social system. They’re weighing down the Brazilian economy like waste. I’m not going to kill them. I just want biology to do it.∂≠

While this 1967 brand of eugenics did not become federal policy—indeed, it was not until 1977 that the national government would institute any form of state-sponsored family planning—it does reflect prevailing ideologies among powerful advocates of birth control.∂∞ In this vision, poverty could best be controlled not through e√orts at wealth redistribution or social welfare policies but via the gradual eradication of poor people themselves. The recent African national wars of liberation and the Vietnam conflict loomed large in this view as examples of the political instability wrought by ‘‘excess’’ population. Hence the medical professor Samyr Hellou told the committee: I see this as a worldwide plan. . . . In my understanding, the liberation movements of the underdeveloped world have been verified through demographic explosion. . . . We know that in the continents where a demographic explosion—and here we’re all afraid to use that expression—has been verified, most of the inhabitants are comprised of people twenty-five years old or younger. . . . These liberation movements are undertaken precisely by those young people. . . . How do we block this movement of people in the underdeveloped world? It seems to me that it’s through controlling the birth rate, preventing the demographic explosion. . . . I don’t see any other finality for controlling birth rates. Why do it in an underinhabited country except to impede the demographic explosion and facilitate its slow and gradual occupation by foreign groups?∂≤

Not only did Hellou see family planning as a way to prevent the revolution of young people, but in his final question he makes a subtle reference to Brazil’s history of encouraging European immigration in an attempt to ‘‘whiten’’ the population. This racist underpinning to his plan of blocking reproduction across the underdeveloped world merely uncovers what is latent in Paiva’s statement, and the two together help us understand the racialized nature of the debates around birth control. Paradoxically, while bemfam and others would make some inroads in promoting family planning among the northeastern poor, where birth control would first take o√ was among the predominantly white, wealthy, young women of the urban centers, as they had both access to, and the financial means for, oral

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contraceptives. Not only did this fact throw into question racist assumptions about white women’s supposedly reserved sexuality and leave unresolved the ‘‘problem’’ of black birth rates, but, as we have seen, urban students’ questioning of sexual norms and their concomitant participation in increasingly militant political activities went hand in hand. In this context, the introduction of oral contraceptives, rather than curbing potential revolution, seemed to promote it on numerous levels, while the racialized elements of white women’s behavior magnified their transgression to new levels. In short, women students in 1968 Brazil were breaking many boundaries. They became more politically active, including taking a role in violent political action in both the clandestine movements and the student movement. They also began to question certain sexual taboos, whether via heated discussion of the merits of virginity, marriage, and so forth, or through the actual step of acquiring oral contraceptives and initiating sexual activity. And by 1968, these same young women, with their male colleagues, picked up the discourse of revolutionary change. The sense of social apprehension unleashed by these new behaviors found expression in media representations of women activists. Radical Women in Print and Image The Hollywood movie Bonnie and Clyde became such an overwhelming sensation in Brazil in 1968 that, besides filling theaters, it also spurred unprecedented sales of berets, fabrics, and 1930s-style clothing. The Arthur Penn film, in which Faye Dunaway plays Bonnie Parker, an attractive blonde woman who abandons her waitressing job and elderly mother to join Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) for a life of sexual adventure, bank robberies, and police shootouts, owes much of its success to the anxieties of, and parallels with, life in 1968 Brazil. Like Bonnie, many young women were actually and metaphorically leaving their families behind as they rejected middle-class feminine values of domesticity, passivity, and obedience, choosing instead to involve themselves in increasingly violent political mobilizations. The social concerns this spurred can be read not only in the success of the movie but in the myriad and multiple ways in which renderings of radical women activists began to appear in the mainstream press. These images were decidedly sexual. Thus journalists looking for a good story and police seeking to admonish parents and their rebellious children described une gatherings as lascivious spaces, unsupervised and unrestrained, where female sexuality was at once a potentially dangerous weapon and a source of vulnerability. At the same time, fashion spreads and advertisements pro√ered

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fantasies of two types of provocative women: those who were armed and slightly dangerous, or those unarmed, seemingly innocent young women whose persecution by o≈cial-looking men marked them as tantalizingly subversive. When actual female participants in the armed struggle were reported, this eroticized preoccupation only continued. In these ways, the press and police marshaled constructed images of the sexualized woman to combat radical politics. Students who attended gatherings like the 1968 une congress found themselves not only subject to arrest but also the focus of much speculation regarding their sexual behavior. Major activities like une congresses and the occupation of university buildings meant that male and female students slept overnight in unsupervised locations, sometimes for a week or longer. Journalists who covered these events invariably reported on the nighttime arrangements, often alluding to their impropriety. Thus in Ibiuna great mention was made of the fact that, owing to lack of space, some students were found sleeping in an unused pigsty (the congress took place on a farm). Perhaps more shocking was the police report on those who avoided the pigsty: ‘‘Boys and girls were piled up together in the house, sleeping in canvas beds or on the floor.’’∂≥ Even Security Secretary Meireles chimed in, declaring that at the une congress ‘‘there was total promiscuity. Boys and girls lived in the same tents, in the same pigsties [and] barnyard.’’∂∂ Dismissing criticism from the parents of women students that they su√ered police mistreatment in jail, he sco√ed: ‘‘Don’t worry, parents, because we didn’t abduct your daughters. If they were taken prisoner, it’s because they were at the Congress.’’∂∑ At another overnight occurrence, students took over the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of São Paulo, where they remained for several weeks, forming study and discussion groups and holding impromptu courses on current events. A reporter who visited the students gave scant attention to these academic activities but duly described ‘‘the hotel’’—the fifth-floor classroom where students slept stretched out on the floor or on tables pushed together. Furthermore, the reporter cautioned, ‘‘Not everyone sleeps in the hotel. Some scatter about the building seeking more tranquil places with their girlfriends.’’∂∏ To emphasize this idea, an accompanying photograph showed a young couple sitting on top of each other on a single chair with the caption ‘‘During the occupation there aren’t just courses and discussions. There’s also enough time for romance [para namorar].’’∂π In the context of cold warriors’ suspicion of the student movements as being uniquely vulnerable to Communist influence, such a focus on students’ supposed amorous activities signaled further, and complementary, reasons for alarm. Sometimes stories about students’ sexual lives mushroomed into their own

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news. At the same São Paulo occupation, students held a press conference to announce that they had uncovered a spy for the Department of Political and Social Order (dops, a major arm of the state security forces) in the form of an attractive female student named Heloísa Helena Magalhães. Nicknamed the ‘‘Golden Apple,’’ and said to possess a police id card that certified her abilities with pistols and revolvers, she was supposedly discovered only after having become a short-lived girlfriend to the São Paulo student leader José Dirceu. Students at the press conference claimed that she had been forced into spying by powerful dops agents who took advantage of her rural upbringing and assumed naiveté; hence, the students declared, they decided to personally ‘‘return’’ her to the care of her parents. Representatives of dops, meanwhile, denied the tale, claiming that although she had done small bureaucratic jobs for them, her closer involvement with the student movement was entirely her own doing. What is most significant here is not so much why Magalhães became a spy, but the media frenzy that surrounded her and the general way she was presented in the press: namely, as a young woman who slept her way to Dirceu. This not only helped to confirm the image of student gatherings as places of sexual promiscuity but also served to highlight the dangers of unrestrained female sexuality. As Magalhães’s nickname—the Golden Apple—suggests, her sexuality was clearly a form of entrapment, a weapon she used to snare the beguiled, and unsullied, Dirceu. Of course, we must also read Magalhães’s story as one in which she herself was at risk. Parents often worried that their daughters’ political activities would get them into sexual trouble. Their concerns were not unfounded, given that sexual activity presented di√erent consequences to women than men, most acutely in the form of pregnancy, but also in the continued social stigma (even within the Left, as we saw) for sexually active women. That parents ought to better supervise their daughters’ activities clearly seems to be part of the message the police were trying to send when they displayed birth control pills to the press. Army Chief of Sta√ Antonio Carlos Murici made a similar type of warning when he told the Jornal do Brasil in 1970 that young women typically got involved in subversive activities by way of young men who, after winning them away from their families, would ‘‘incriminate’’ them so that they could not return.∂∫ In the same interview, Murici branded ‘‘young terrorists’’ as being very promiscuous and categorically stated that rates of venereal disease and illegitimate births among them were high. That such a vision of women activists permeated beyond military leaders’ press statements is evidenced by the reaction of women’s families to their activities. Violeta, a woman who left the student movement to go underground

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with her leftist organization, recalled the reaction of her mother when she told her she was leaving: I spent more than seven months preparing my departure from my family, because I was and am a person who’s very tied to the family. My mom said I was going to end up coming home pregnant and penniless. I said I wasn’t going for that, but to do politics. Except that I did return penniless, fleeing from the police and pregnant.∂Ω

The unequal consequences of sexual activity for women notwithstanding, in visions of this type, oft repeated, women’s political motivations and aspirations become subsumed and erased by a focus on sex. From the display of birth control pills at the une conference to the idea that women joined clandestine groups via love a√airs, the message sent by the police and press at once dismissed women’s political activities as poorly disguised sexual acting out while also, contradictorily, proclaiming that their political activities and sexual activities inevitably intertwined, thus warning parents and others to be wary of this double-pronged danger. In addition to these kinds of news stories, societal concerns about the rise of militancy and sexual activity among young white females began to be expressed in the realm of the imaginary as well. Beginning around April 1968, just as student protests were heating up in Brazil and around the world, sexualized portrayals of armed and/or persecuted women inundated the pages of Brazilian magazines. At the same time that reports of student activities decried the violence in which young people participated, stories and advertisements in the mainstream press began to freely reproduce violent fantasies against young female bodies. That these images suddenly appeared helps demonstrate the prevailing climate of social and political upheaval, and a closer reading of the imagery of these publications facilitates our understanding of representations as a form of repressive response, one that helped fashion the space from which actual female activists would also be read. As we will see later, this popular imaginary vision would have material consequences for women activists and for Brazilian society as a whole. Faye Dunaway’s performance in Bonnie and Clyde clearly inspired some of these media representations, such as the fashion spread ‘‘Bonnie Attacks in São Paulo.’’∑≠ A half-dozen models—all white and most blonde—grace the pages, bedecked not simply in the allusive wool berets and neck scarves of the movie’s costuming, but more importantly, holding that most conspicuous of fashion accessories: the steel pistol. The strategic placement of guns in manicured white hands and near red-

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lipsticked mouths creates a provocative asymmetry between feminine vulnerability and the latent threat of violence. The casual attitude of the Bonnie in figure 1 sends signals of seductive power. In figure 2, although the pistol-packing women stare commandingly at the camera, the reader is reassured that power can easily become helplessness, despite the gun, as the women raise their hands and their weapon in coquettishly wide-eyed fright, surprise, or surrender. And in a clear reference to the contemporary, in figure 3, a masculinized Bonnie, armed and wearing a three-piece suit, gazes protectively at her companion. Sporting the middle-class version of the hippie style—long hair, beads, and no bra, though with perfectly matching pumps—the second figure seems naively oblivious to her surroundings. This combination blends movie-inspired nostalgia for the past with commentary on the present: the armed radical and the hippie were two increasingly common figures, both associated with young students. Figures reminiscent of the Bonnie Parker character came up in other places, too. In an advertisement for Castrol motor oil (figure 4), the bereted young woman eases a drop of oil into her rifle.∑∞ It ‘‘reduces wear and tear,’’ she explains to the attentive gangster-looking man in the background. Far from being menacing, her weapon is converted directly into a phallic sexual symbol, one further emphasized by the single drop of lubricant and the man’s sultry stare. The Bonnie Parker–like figure flirts with subversion much in the same way that she flirts with the man. Other scenarios strayed from the Bonnie-as-bank-robber image and instead conveyed a decidedly revolutionary look, such as an advertisement for Mazelle, a brand of fabric (figure 5).∑≤ ‘‘Mazelle declares war on common things,’’ reads the dripping red gra≈ti. The by-now ubiquitous anti-dictatorship slogans painted on city walls around the country are here converted into a playful backdrop for this bourgeois rebellion. Like the models in the Bonnie in São Paulo fashion spread, these poster girls are carefully made up in the coifed and pantyhosed style of the feminine, middle-class woman, yet their grip on the black metal machine guns adds an air of sexual danger and mystique. Again, they pose no actual threat, as the ‘‘war’’ they declare is not against any system or anyone (any man), but on rather ‘‘common things.’’ In addition to these advertisements featuring sexy, armed women, media images in 1968 emphasized another kind of insurrectionary fantasy: that of the persecuted woman. In this scenario, the attractive and usually blonde women, while unarmed, are still portrayed as somehow transgressive, meriting both their pursuit and capture.∑≥ In figure 6, we have no doubt why the trench-coated man with the machine gun would stalk these two women: they are clearly

1. The Bonnie Parker image inspired fashion spreads like this one. Manchete, May 11, 1968.

2. The caption in the lower right-hand corner assures readers that while the revolver is only a toy, the hats are for real. Manchete, May 11, 1968.

3. Past and present blend in this 1930s-style vision of two contemporary figures: the armed radical and the hippie. Manchete, May 11, 1968.

4. This Bonnie Parker combines sexy armed robbery with prudent home economics. Realidade, April 1968, 10.

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labeled ‘‘contraband’’ and look as if they have just emerged from the wooden crates behind them. As illicit goods, they are at once prohibited and in great demand. The red-haired woman on the left is dressed in a seeming Parisian style and French colors, and the blonde woman wears the green and yellow of Brazil. ‘‘Contraband: you don’t need to go look for it on the other side of the ocean,’’ the caption tells us. By the time this ad was published (November 1968), not only had the May 1968 student uprising in France ignited comparisons with student activities in Brazil, but by then government complaints of ‘‘outside influence’’ on Brazilian students (by the likes of Herbert Marcuse, Che Guevara, international Communism in general, and so forth) were well known. These miniskirted French and Brazilian young women symbolized the intrigue surrounding women student activists as well as the fantasy of physical intervention: the armed man will reclaim them both, hijacking them back for the nation. A similar motif can be seen in a series of advertisements produced for Karibê, a clothing line (figures 7–8).∑∂ Again young, middle-class, blonde women are pursued by quasi-o≈cial-looking men. In this case their subversive crime seems to be dressing elegantly. According to the text, not only are they to be identified by their stylish clothes, but the military-sounding name given to the search for them is ‘‘Operation Elegance.’’ ‘‘You can ‘pursue’ these Karibê creations in the stores,’’ states the text at the bottom of the page. ‘‘In Operation Elegance, with Karibê it’s mission accomplished!’’ The comparisons with contemporary events are unmistakable. At the same time that these advertisements were appearing in magazines, dops o≈cers aggressively pursued student and underground leaders, infiltrating their meetings and keeping close tabs on their activities. In fact, by this point the ‘‘pursuit’’ of suspected subversive students and others was becoming not only a common occurrence but a decidedly menacing one as the state security forces began implementing a systematic practice of torture against political opponents. Although the bulk of tortures and deaths occurred in 1969 and the early 1970s, after the state intensified its authoritarian powers and the armed guerrilla movements increased their activities, these practices had their origins in the early postcoup period. The historian Thomas Skidmore writes: ‘‘Government torture of political suspects in the Northeast, for example, had begun within days of the 1964 coup, well before any guerrillas appeared. It recurred thereafter and intensified in 1968.’’∑∑ Nor was the public unaware of these occurrences. Before the later imposition of strict censorship rules, in 1968 accusations of torture still made it into the press, such as the April cover story in Última Hora, in which two brothers showed the burns they received from electric shocks, and told of being held incommunicado and tortured for seven

5. In this revolutionary-looking advertisement, the models declare war against ‘‘common things.’’ Manchete, May 11, 1968, 177.

6. The blue, red, and white of the woman on the left and the green and yellow of the woman on the right suggested recent comparisons with French and Brazilian student unrest. Manchete, November 23, 1968, 133.

7. Images of persecuted women appeared in this series of fashion advertisements. Note the shoulder holster on the man with the pointer. Realidade, May 1968, 41.

8. Here the detective tells the conductor, ‘‘Come on, man! It’s impossible not to notice them; they’re superelegant!’’ Realidade, June 1968, 33.

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days at an army barracks.∑∏ Meanwhile opposition politicians like Márcio Moreira Alves tried to publicize the abuses by reading denunciations and evidence of torture into the public record at congressional meetings.∑π By the end of 1968, Amnesty International had marked Brazil as a country requiring special attention. Coming directly from this context appeared a series of ads published successively in May, June, and July 1968 (figures 9–11).∑∫ ‘‘They want to put an end to Marieta,’’ ‘‘Marieta was ravished,’’ and ‘‘Marieta is su√ering terrible pressures,’’ read the three captions. The photographs evoke a clandestine criminal world in which gangster types threaten the fictional Marieta with a pistol in their hide-out or torture her with machine-shop tools. Meanwhile the accompanying text explains that the young, blonde Marieta, ‘‘the symbol of women’s good taste,’’ refuses to renounce her love for Bergamo, a brand of furniture. Despite the best e√orts of an anonymously labeled ‘‘them,’’ including ‘‘bribery, threats, pressures, kidnapping . . . She resists it all. Such is the power of love.’’ Here again we see a woman portrayed as becoming involved in a violent underground world because of a love a√air—be it metaphorically with the masculine-sounding ‘‘Bergamo,’’ or more literally with a material object, with furniture and its consumption. Perhaps more significant, however, are the influences from contemporary events and the eroticized manner in which Marieta’s imminent physical su√ering is displayed. The climate of intimidation and torture confronting political activists in 1968 had so permeated mainstream culture that the very premise of these ads reflects it. The specific language of the text also draws from what was quickly becoming a new shared vocabulary. In the second advertisement, for example, Marieta is described as incomunicável, or incommunicado. In the growing system of state-sponsored torture, keeping suspects isolated from family or lawyers for the first several days became standard practice, as they could be tortured and interrogated before their colleagues realized they had been detained, and hence could reveal information about upcoming meetings that would lead to further arrests. As understanding of the situation grew, words like incomunicável became a part of daily life, and activists soon learned to organize heavily in the early days after an arrest in order to minimize this period of abuse. Finally, I must call attention to the sexualized way in which Marieta’s torture is portrayed. Because she is surrounded by men, vulnerable and dressed in a very feminine style, the reader is asked to see her plight not as criminal or even significant but as provocative and alluring. This pervasive eroticization of women’s militant actions and even of the reprisals against them would haunt women activists and deafen others to their political voices.

9. This series of advertisements shows the fictional character Marieta su√ering increasingly severe maltreatment for refusing to renounce her love for Bergamo furniture. Realidade, May 1968, 20–21.

10. Marieta manages to sneak a note to ‘‘Bergamo,’’ saying that her own liberty does not matter, and ‘‘the most important thing is that you continue in the boldness of your lines, your perfect finishing, your resistance and durability.’’ Realidade, June 1968, 20–21.

11. In the final scene of the triptych, sadistic fantasies are unleashed on Marieta, but the power of love enables her to ‘‘resist bravely.’’ Realidade, July 1968, 20–21.

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While these advertisements arose from within the broader Cold War context of revolutionary underground organizations and aboveground student movement opposition to the military regime, at the time they were first published, no women had yet publicly participated in an armed revolutionary action. That would first happen on August 1, 1968, when Renata Guerra de Andrade, a member of the vpr, helped to hold up a São Paulo bank. By the time the holdup took place, a space within the popular imagination from which to understand Renata and the others who followed her had already been carved out. Tropes with which to read them had already been created. In fact, life really did imitate art, or at least mass culture, as not only did this same intense focus on female activists’ sexual desirability remain, but the women themselves became as anonymous and caricatured as the models in the magazines. While male revolutionaries became household names, most of the women (there are one or two notable exceptions) who participated in armed movements received nicknames such as the ‘‘Bela do Terror’’ (Beauty of Terror), the ‘‘Loura dos Assaltos’’ (Blonde of the Assaults) and the ‘‘Loura da Metralhadora’’ (the Machine Gun Blonde). Even within the Left, the image of the blonde revolutionary woman became a lasting one. Fernando Gabeira (one of the best-known figures involved in the armed struggle, as his memoirs were dramatized in the film Four Days in September) later remembered the influence this image played in his decision to join the underground movement: The newspapers stimulated our fantasies. They published gaudy descriptions [of clandestine life]: young men with nerves of steel (we still made it onto the police pages then); blondes who’d pull a machine gun out of their colorful wraps.∑Ω

Renata Guerra de Andrade herself later commented: ‘‘The most talked-about action was the robbery of the Banco Mercantil of Itaim. Because I appeared in that one, people saw me. That was where I turned into ‘the blonde terrorist.’ The funny thing is that I was never blonde.’’∏≠ Renata was a brunette who used a black wig, but reports still repeatedly described her as blonde, as if the Faye Dunaway image were too firmly ingrained to see her otherwise. Moreover, although the newspapers repeatedly published her picture with the caption ‘‘a bela do terror,’’ she claimed, they never stated just what terror she was supposed to have sparked. ‘‘The accusations made against me in the newspapers were really very few. The big deal really was the fact that I was a woman. . . . I never, never was accused of having done anything. Fundamentally my case was about my having been one of the first women to be discovered.’’∏∞ Following the by-now-well-established pat-

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tern, Renata’s political beliefs or actions did not merit discussion; instead it was her desirability and her (imagined) blondeness that attracted attention. Congruent with the outward political showdown taking place in Cold War Brazil, a gendered crisis was occurring below the surface. As women activists challenged a host of sexual, racial, class, and gender boundaries, they sparked deep-seated concerns within the state, their parents, and the middle class more generally. These anxieties ultimately found expression in fantastical media portrayals of activist women. Thus for several months in 1968, a rush of heavily sexualized images of armed and/or persecuted women suddenly began appearing in magazines and newspapers. Such images both paralleled interpretations of currently active women students and helped to create a template from which to read the armed actions that were soon to follow. Propagated in 1968, these popular conceptions of politically active women would arise again in genderspecific torture and abuse of women political prisoners by the state security forces. Indeed, it is only through this kind of gendered understanding of the period that we can adequately comprehend the deepening of authoritarian rule and intensification of military repression beginning in December 1968. Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words By examining personal testimonies of women who were incarcerated, we can see that the same tropes used for explaining and minimizing women’s activism in the pages of newspapers and magazines in 1968 found their way onto their bodies and lives in the cells of political prisons. ‘‘Though pain has no gender, sexual di√erence became important in the torture chamber,’’ wrote Jean Franco.∏≤ Speaking of the Argentine case, she argued: ‘‘Whereas the torture of men often presented them with the challenge to behave like a man and die or to become like a woman to survive, the treatment of women prisoners was rooted in sadistic fantasies.’’∏≥ Sadistic fantasies may indeed have inspired the torture of some or even many women prisoners in Brazil, but I want to demonstrate that the particular forms of abusive treatment they received stemmed not from the individual psychoses of their torturers but from a much more systemic fantasy— the ‘‘normal’’ way these politically active women were already read and understood within mainstream Cold War society. We have seen that, above all, women’s political activities were interpreted in sexual ways, from eroticized visions of women with guns in fashion magazines to assumptions that female students got involved in politics via the attentions of

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men. The same held true with female prisoners. One woman explained the way security o≈cers perceived them: ‘‘Either you came to politics as an apprentice, because you had a husband or a boyfriend, or you came to sleep with everyone, to see if you could catch someone. Or, then, because you weren’t really a woman, you were a dyke, a lesbian, that whole story.’’∏∂ Women’s political ideologies, aspirations, and even self-will went unacknowledged, and the only possible explanation for their activities was a deviant sexuality. Thus, much like the ‘‘Machine Gun Blonde’’ of the newspapers, many former female prisoners later recalled that their own names and identities were seldom used, substituted instead by particularly sexual appellations. ‘‘Terrorist Doll!’’ the soldiers would scream at one woman as they passed by her cell.∏∑ ‘‘They use an expression which is constant,’’ stated another. ‘‘They don’t use your name, they always use puta comunista [communist whore].’’∏∏ In this way the women’s alleged sexual and political deviancy were discursively combined. Moreover, as explained by the former political prisoner Shizuo Osawa, who as a Nikkei (a Brazilian of Japanese descent) experienced particularly racialized treatment, blonde women were singled out. In an interview with the historian Je√rey Lesser, Osawa said, ‘‘I su√ered a lot. . . . That was the problem. . . . When they began talking about a Japanese [involved in the armed struggle], then any Japanese who fell into their hands would pay for the actions of all of them. Like the blonde woman, who created that myth of the blonde bank robber, then any blonde who fell into the police’s hands was lost: they were tortured more.’’∏π That Osawa would have noticed the treatment extended to blonde prisoners attests to the fact that a physical characteristic such as blondeness was noted and probably discussed. If we understand blondeness in this context as both a racialized and a sexualized characteristic—that is, as a shorthand designation of white female sexual availability and desirability, an idea emphasized in the magazine images, nicknames, and descriptions of women activists like Renata Guerra de Andrade —then the singling out of blonde women prisoners signifies a further example of women’s overall sexualization. Indeed, the sexuality of female activists in general became a focus for emotional, physical, and psychological abuse. Women and men both su√ered naked beatings and varying forms of genital torture, but women’s sexuality often became the primary focus of abuse, a situation intensified by the fact that torturers and prison guards were nearly exclusively men. One woman tells of being nicknamed the ‘‘fiancée’’ of one of her torturers. In the extensive passage quoted here, we can see how her treatment at the soldiers’ hands emphasized her powerlessness not only as a prisoner but also as a woman surrounded by men.

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The soldiers would come to the cell and scream ‘‘Terrorist Doll.’’ They said they were going to throw some dice to see who would be the first in line. One night, passed out from exhaustion and the parrot’s perch [a form of torture], I fell asleep in the cell. Suddenly, in the dark, an uproar on the stairs, screaming inside the station. I woke up with them already invading, turning things over, swearing, one already giving blows, another tying me up with a cord. They took me up the stairs. . . . And there were already some guys touching my body with their hands, saying they were going to marry me. One of them became my fiancé. . . . It was a crazy scene, a corridor full of soldiers on both sides, me passing by with that band [of men]. The guy grabbing on to me said, ‘‘I’m going to marry her,’’ and suddenly they began to hum the wedding march, the soldiers themselves, ‘‘la la la la la la la la la la la,’’ and me passing by as the torturer’s fiancée to be raped in the torture room upstairs. . . . Him holding on to me, he and the others touching me, grabbing me. My breasts, my hips, everything, for me to believe that upstairs would be the rape. Suddenly they threw me in a room. There were twenty of them there, I don’t know how many. It was all set up. The electroshock machine, the chair. . . . When I went in the torture room my ‘‘fiancée’’ tore o√ my clothes and, naked, they tied me to the chair and poured water on my body to augment the e√ect of the electroshock.∏∫

The woman’s story calls up patterns recounted by other survivors as well. Threats of rape and gang rape were constant in women’s recollections, and though many women are loath to discuss these experiences, it is clear that many soldiers went beyond threats. Emotional and psychological jokes about women’s desirability and social eligibility also occurred with considerable regularity. Torture focused on women’s sex in terms of motherhood as well—pregnant women were beaten on the abdomen in attempts to dislodge their fetus, and other forms of abortions and miscarriages were induced. One woman recalls a torturer placing electroshock wires inside her vagina and announcing, ‘‘Now you’re going to give birth to electricity.’’∏Ω In short, the overwhelmingly predominant emphasis on activist women’s sexuality in public spaces like media reports and police statements to the press parallels the way they were perceived and treated within the confines of political imprisonment. The social anxieties discussed so far had another impact beyond that experienced by individual women; they also played an important role in one of the most significant developments of military rule: the imposition of Institutional Act No. Five (ai-5, Ato Institucional Número 5). Announced on Friday, December 13, 1968, ai-5 marked the most authoritarian regulation the regime would ever decree, a radical extension of four previous institutional acts. With this

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measure, the president could intervene in states and municipalities, bypassing the limits set in the Constitution. He could also declare a state of siege without the approval of Congress. The political rights of any citizen could be suspended for ten years; any municipal, state, or federal elected o≈ce could be revoked; and habeas corpus rights for political prisoners were immediately abolished. Finally, ai-5 granted the president the power to suspend congresses, legislatures, and councils of any branch of government at any time and for an indefinite period. President Costa e Silva immediately did so through Supplementary Act Number 38, which shut down the National Congress. For students this change meant the all-out persecution of suspected subversion, so that by the end of 1969, most aboveground student organizations had been virtually shut down, and more students than ever turned to clandestine struggle as their only political option. The immediate cause behind the act lay in a defiant vote by the Chamber of Deputies on the day before, in which that body rejected a petition to revoke the parliamentary immunity of congressional deputy Márcio Moreira Alves. Alves, a former journalist recently turned politician, formed part of a vocal opposition group within Congress that had for many months been highlighting particular abuses of the regime, criticizing them from the floor of Congress, reading reports of their activities into the congressional record, and so forth. Their combination of rhetorical banter and incessant interruption of majority members’ speeches made them a rather unpopular coterie within the staid chamber and earned them the nickname ‘‘the Immature Group.’’ While undoubtedly annoyed, military leaders originally tolerated this group until November 1968, when they began attempts to prosecute Alves for speeches he had delivered months earlier. His comments, they stated, were ‘‘highly o√ensive to the Armed Forces and [delivered] with the obvious intent of demoralizing them, aiming to struggle against democratic order and national institutions.’’π≠ Under the recently established National Security Law, an insult to the Armed Forces constituted a crime punishable by suspension of political rights and imprisonment.π∞ Yet because congressmen enjoyed parliamentary immunity from such prosecutions, for the government to seek punishment, Congress would have to vote to suspend his immune status, a by no means simple proposition despite the legislature’s weakened state. By ‘‘o√ering up Alves’ head,’’ as so many deputies and journalists phrased it, the chamber would be risking its own skin too, setting a dangerous precedent for individuals’ removal. Or, as one deputy put it, ‘‘Damocles’ sword would hang over all our heads.’’π≤ To understand how this congressional showdown arose and why Alves’s words proved so threatening to the military requires closely examining the speeches in

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question while remembering the highly charged atmosphere of the time. Alves delivered these statements in response to the August 29 invasion of the University of Brasilia, in which federal police openly dragged students and professors out of their seminars, beating them in the hallways and destroying classrooms and laboratories. At the time, the violence provoked a national outcry, and in the days that followed, many congressmen from both the pro-government and opposition parties denounced these events and called for investigations. Many signed a formal protest. Thus Alves was not alone in his denunciations. Indeed, some of these speeches were downright vitriolic. Congressional deputy Oswaldo Zanello called the police ‘‘inhuman and savage, barbarous and bestial,’’π≥ while Deputy Father Vieira inveighed: If yesterday the shameful blot of slave ships stained our consciences, today we are humiliated and ashamed by the Dantesque portrait of military garrisons, where beasts imbued by hate and drugged with vengeance and sadism brutally step on students and children. . . . [Meanwhile] the government, like Pilate, cynically washes its hands and says it’s not guilty of the innocent blood spilt profusely in our public plazas and universities.π∂

The speech Alves delivered on September 2 at first appears to be only one vehement protest among many—one that, save for its striking symbolism, was not much di√erent from those that came before or those that followed. As a member of the Education Commission, which was presently studying muchneeded reforms of the university system, Alves began by saying, ‘‘The continued violence practiced against students and against universities has made any kind of debate about higher educational reforms utterly impossible.’’ Pointing to a photograph from the Jornal do Brasil of a soldier’s boot smashing a University of Brasilia laboratory, he proclaimed, ‘‘This is the exact portrait of the current government’s university policy.’’ Like others who had spoken that day, Alves voiced his concern that those who ordered and carried out the atrocities be made responsible, punctuating his call by listing a string of similar events for which no one had ever been punished and directing to the ‘‘leaders of government’’ nine lists of questions the regime needed to address. Besides asking who was responsible and who would be punished, Alves’s last string of queries proved most provocative: ‘‘When will the hemorrhage of the Nation be stopped? When will troops stop machine-gunning people in the street? When will a boot, busting down the door of a laboratory, stop being the government’s proposed university reform?’’π∑ Although provocative, his words do not appear more of an a√ront than those of other speakers that day.

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Rather, as Alves continued his verbal protests that day and revisited the issue on the following morning, his direct appeals to women and his veiled references to military sexuality ultimately provoked the generals’ outcry. To close his comments on September 2, Alves read into the congressional record a letter that had been published in the newspaper Correio Braziliense. Written by ‘‘the Mothers and Wives of Brasilia,’’ who claimed that ‘‘the hour has come for us to make public our agony and disgust at the scenes of savagery and unspeakable violence that once again have bloodied the University of Brasilia,’’ they too denounced the aggression and called for peace. ‘‘What we Mothers and Wives have always wanted is simply to see our sons and husbands studying and working in peace and safety within a Brazil that pays attention to the protests of an idealistic and intelligent youth,’’ they wrote. In addition to reading the text of the letter, Alves ensured that all 168 names of the women who signed, many among them the wives of congressional deputies in the pro-government arena party, were also recorded. Judging by the enthusiastic applause that followed, his speech, far from appearing scandalous to his fellow congressmen, enjoyed an exceedingly warm reception.π∏ Although rhetorically powerful on its own, Alves’s reading of the women’s letter and names gained added significance the following day when he returned to the theme. In contrast to his first oration, in which he requested that the government do something about the violence, in the latter speech Alves directed his concerns to ‘‘the people,’’ especially women. Acknowledging that ‘‘all the social classes’’ rejected the recent violence, and that women had begun to take more active roles in its denunciation, he encouraged them to go a step further. With Independence Day fast approaching (September 7), an important holiday usually marked by heavily militaristic parades of soldiers, boy scouts, and schoolchildren, Alves suggested that people refuse to participate, in a ‘‘boycott of militarism.’’ More importantly, he alluded to extending the protest to a sexual boycott of military men, stating: Still speaking of women, this boycott can also spread to the girls, those who dance with the cadets and date the young o≈cers. [They must] refuse entrance into their homes to those who threaten the Nation; they must refuse to accept those who keep silent, and, thereby, serve as accomplices. Dissent in silence advances nothing. . . . It is possible to resolve this farce, this ‘‘democratatorship,’’ through a boycott. While those silent ones don’t speak out, any and all contact between civilians and military personnel should cease, because only in that way will we make this country return to democracy.ππ

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Newspapers the following day mentioned some of the deputies’ speeches, including Alves’s and Father Vieria’s, but paid little attention to any of them. Two days later, however, unbeknownst to Alves, Army Minister General Aurélio de Lyra Tavares complained to President Costa e Silva about Alves’s words. Fifteen days after this, the other two arms of the High Military Command—the ministers of the air force and navy—reiterated these complaints. Meanwhile copies of Alves’s speeches (with a few slight but significant modifications) circulated among the barracks.π∫ While Alves su√ered no immediate action, he quickly surmised from the threats and curses of anonymous callers that his comments had provoked strong reactions, and he and his wife began carrying guns and hired a security guard for their home.πΩ Finally, on November 6, a petition signed by the three ministers reached the Judiciary Committee of the Chamber of Deputies, requesting that Alves’s parliamentary immunity be revoked, and a protracted battle with the Congress began. Of all the damning speeches delivered during those days, the military found only Alves’s so o√ensive that they sought to try him for it. Why? Maria Helena Moreira Alves argues that hard-line military o≈cers who were already planning to increase authoritarian controls ‘‘found the speech particularly useful for their purposes . . . [as it] was bound to elicit a furious emotional response in the barracks, thus preparing the ground for widespread military support for a new show of force. That such preparation was their intention is indicated by the fact that the hard-line o≈cers made thousands of reprints of the speech and had it distributed in all the barracks in the country.’’∫≠ Thomas Skidmore concurs, stating that hard-line military o≈cers sought an excuse to remove Alves and other antigovernment congressmen of whom they had long disapproved. ‘‘His speech, so unimportant in itself . . . gave the hardline military an opportunity to radicalize o≈cer opinion against the castelistas’ fragile constitutional structure.’’∫∞ Márcio Moreira Alves himself similarly says that he was simply the pretext for the military ‘‘to grab whatever portions of dictatorial power they had neglected to seize in 1964.’’∫≤ Judging by past events, however, the military had many other methods of increasing its control, such as forcibly removing troublesome congressmen from o≈ce or imposing new institutional acts and supplementary laws. Perhaps they never considered that their request would meet with such resistance from the other opposition members in Congress and assumed that the whole a√air would be handled quickly and quietly. But this does not explain why, once the storm of protest within Congress and the press arose, the military continued to press for this drastic measure. Nor should one assume that the military might have been afraid that people would

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actually take Alves’s suggestion to boycott the September 7 celebrations seriously, as the proceedings against him did not begin until weeks after the Independence Day parades were long over (and well attended). Whether or not his other suggested boycott was followed is, of course, impossible to confirm. Rather, it was Alves’s words themselves—delivered within the context of intense sexual anxiety we have just examined—that transgressed the invisible boundary between accepted criticism and dangerous insubordination. ‘‘The question of whether a clear act of insubordination has occurred is not a simple matter, for the meaning of a given action is not given but is socially constructed,’’ writes James Scott.∫≥ And in this moment of heightened political and sexual anxieties around youth, the specter of a congressional deputy proposing such an emasculating a√ront to the military became intolerable, regardless of whether or not the boycott ever materialized. Alves’s very suggestion that women should withhold sex from their military companions struck directly at the soldiers’ masculinity and, consequently, their political authority. Thus, while for Thomas Skidmore, Alves’s speech may have seemed ‘‘so unimportant,’’ a gendered understanding of August 1968 suggests that it actually proved quite powerful. Only within a context of heightened sexual anxiety could his words have had the impact they did. Thus, after weeks of debates, an attempted filibuster, and an ensuing extension of the congressional session, on December 11 the chamber president moved to end discussion and call the vote the next day. Newspapers that morning fully expected the measure to revoke Alves’s immunity to pass, with most estimates guessing the vote would be around 190 to 170. Whether from conviction or intense party pressure, most majority deputies pledged to support the measure. What happened instead shocked everyone; at the last minute, in an intensely ritualized procedure, the deputies denied the request. The discussion had been closed the day before, and only three people were allowed to speak: the majority leader, the minority leader, and Alves. Following their brief words, the deputies one by one entered a booth and cast a secret ballot. With 369 deputies voting, the process took two hours and forty minutes—the slowest in the chamber’s history. Despite the periodic cheers when well-known opposition figures cast their ballots, once the votes began to be counted, the floor—and the gallery of over one hundred visitors—fell deathly silent. Within ten minutes of counting, the regime’s loss already started to become clear. One hundred seventy-eight votes were needed to defeat the measure, and as the total reached 150, everyone in the house rose to his or her feet. When the figure hit 178 a cry arose, as people began cheering, laughing, and hugging each other. A young woman in the gallery

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started to sing the national anthem, and others immediately joined in. Soon the song swept over the house, and over the clanging bell of the majority leader, who in vain demanded silence. The final results: 216 votes against the measure, 141 for it, and 12 blank votes—a resounding victory for Congress and a symbolic defeat for the military.∫∂ While the deputies congratulated one another, Alves slipped quickly into hiding. The night of December 12 passed tensely as people braced themselves for the government’s response. President Costa e Silva held late-night meetings with military o≈cials, members of congress and the cabinet while radio and television stations received specific orders prohibiting them from reporting on the case or the ensuing crisis. Military and police forces were ordered into an immediate state of alert, and armored tanks moved briefly onto Brasil Avenue in Brasilia, then were quickly withdrawn. One army commander told journalists they were simply troops returning from military exercises, but an inside source admitted ‘‘a small problem with military discipline.’’∫∑ Such a climate lasted well into the next day as the closed-door meetings continued, until, that evening, Minister of Justice Gama e Silva read an o≈cial announcement over the radio and put an end to the speculation and rumors. ‘‘Clearly subversive acts,’’ he proclaimed, ‘‘stemming from the most distinct cultural and political sectors, prove that the juridical instruments which the victorious Revolution granted to the Nation for its defense, development and well-being, are serving as the means to combat it and destroy it.’’∫∏ With this, the military government promulgated Institutional Act No. 5, plunging the nation into a period of even deeper political, cultural, and military repression. Conclusion The pattern I have attempted to demonstrate—whereby the political actions of young women came to be seen nearly exclusively in sexual terms—is rooted firmly in the historical situation of 1968 Brazil. In a moment of already intense political and cultural upheaval, when military leaders and other cold warriors repeatedly expressed fears that an international Communist movement sought to undermine the nation through its youth, middle-class female students began to challenge many previously held boundaries. They involved themselves in radical political action—including violent action—and began exploring and exploding social proscriptions against sexual experimentation. The social anxieties this spurred can be read in the sudden rush of media images involving armed, alluring women, whether in advertising constructions made from artists and

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models or in fantastical descriptions of real-life women. These many references shed light on the gendered dimensions of Cold War fears that both provoked and reflected this response, exposing the sexually loaded climate that helped lead to ai-5. In such a context, the mocking speech delivered by Márcio Moreira Alves threatened the masculinity and authority of the military institution itself, and the generals responded with force, shutting down Congress and instituting the most brutal period in the fifteen-year history of their regime. At the same time, gendered and sexualized representations served as an important repressive tool in cold warriors’ responses to the radical political transformations proposed by young activists. Emphasizing young women’s political activities as both stemming from, and resulting in, deviant sexuality at once silenced their political voices, distorted the meaning of their movement, and alerted parents and others to be doubly cautious about their potential involvement. Moreover, women activists were increasingly imprisoned and tortured in these years, and their physical treatment inside the cells paralleled their representations outside: objectified into sexually deviant creatures, their sexuality became the primary focus of physical and emotional abuse. Despite the specificity of the Brazilian situation, this general manner of reading women sexually was not specific to the Brazilian Cold War but faced radical women activists in many areas. One need only consider the fetishization of the female members of the Black Panther Party, the erotic speculations around Che Guevara’s colleague Tania, and much of the media coverage surrounding Patty Hearst to recognize that Cold War battles had gendered and sexualized hues, inseparably cultural and political, with far-reaching consequences. Notes 1. See, for example, ‘‘Isso é um assalto (político?),’’ Veja e Leia, October 23, 1968, 18–19; and ‘‘O novo bandido,’’ Veja e Leia, November 6, 1968, 22. 2. ‘‘Pernas de Loira,’’ Veja e Leia, November 27, 1968, 18. 3. Zuenir Ventura, 1968, o ano que não terminou: A aventura de uma geração (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira, 1988), 35; and Fernando Gabeira, O que é isso companheiro? (Rio de Janeiro: codecri, 1979), 85. 4. Arquidiocese de São Paulo, Brasil Nunca Mais: Um relato para a história, 20th ed. (Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, 1987), 136. 5. I use the term ‘‘state security forces’’ as a shorthand way of describing the multiple and changing law enforcement bodies that involved themselves with the student movement, such as the federal police, the militarized police, the various branches of the armed

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forces, and special repressive organizations such as dops (Departmento de Ordem Político e Social) and the São Paulo–based doi-codi (Departamento de Operações Internas– Centro de Operações de Defesa Interna). When appropriate, I specify which agency participated in a particular action, but to speak about the general attitude of these forces together, I employ the phrase ‘‘state security forces.’’ For more information on the roles of these various forces, see Martha K. Huggins, Political Policing: The United States and Latin America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998). 6. I refer here to Maria Ribeiro do Valle’s argument that conflicts between students and police throughout 1968 amounted to a violent form of dialogue, mediated through the press, a result of the political impossibility of other forms of expression. Maria Ribeiro do Valle, 1968, o diálogo é a violência: Movimento estudantil e ditadura militar no Brasil (Campinas: Editora da Unicamp, 1999). 7. Seth Fein, ‘‘From New Empire to Old: Making Mexican Newsreels the Cold War Way,’’ Diplomatic History 28, no. 5 (November 2004): 745–46. 8. See, for example, ‘‘Polícia prende Vladimir e mais 1239 no Congresso da ex-une,’’ Jornal do Brasil, October 13, 1968, 1. 9. Estado de Guanabara, Secretaria de Segurança Pública, Departamento de Ordem Política e Social, Divisão de Operações, Serviço de Buscas, Seção de Buscas Especiais, Informe No. 192, Assunto: Movimento Estudantil, 28 de junho de 1968, in Departamento de Ordem Política e Social, Setor Estudantil, Pasta No. 38, Arquivo Público do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (hereafter cited as dops, Pasta No. 38, aperj]. 10. ‘‘Polícia paulista liga Congresso da ex-une a terrorismo e assassinato,’’ Jornal do Brasil, October 16, 1968, 12. 11. Thomas E. Skidmore, The Politics of Military Rule in Brazil, 1964–1985 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 87. 12. According to Veja, William Wight, U.S. consular-general in São Paulo, proclaimed a connection between the two. ‘‘O terror condenou o Americano à morte,’’ Veja, October 16, 1968, 25. 13. See Daniel Aarão Reis Filho and Jair Ferreira de Sá, Imagens da Revoluçøao: Documentos políticos das organizações clandestinas de esquerda dos anos 1961–1971 (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Marco Zero, 1985); Marcelo Ridenti, O fantasma da Revolução Brasileira (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade Estadual Paulista, 1993); and Mita Arquidiocese de São Paulo, Perfil dos atingidos, vol. 3, Projeto ‘‘Brasil: Nunca Mais’’ (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1988). 14. Daniel Aarão Reis Filho and Pedro de Moraes, 68: A paixão de uma utopia, 2nd ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Getulio Vargas, 1998), 26. 15. It is obvious that accusations against individuals for participation may or may not reflect their actual involvement; that the state security system could not successfully have prosecuted all clandestine groups or all types of members within them evenly; and that, in general, judicial records are clearly not transparent indicators of clandestine activity.

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Nevertheless, Ridenti’s painstaking analysis of these thousands of pages of documents is without doubt the most comprehensive set of figures we have for understanding these underground and often short-lived organizations. 16. Ridenti, O fantasma da Revolução Brasileira, 204–6. 17. In 1966 the city of Rio de Janeiro lay within the small state of Guanabara, while the state of Rio de Janeiro encompassed the much larger surrounding area. This system was changed in 1969, consolidating the two regions into one state called Rio de Janeiro, with its capital the city of the same name. 18. di-rj and di-gb were separate student organizations, and it was actually di-rj that created mr-8 in 1969. But when the state security forces shut down the organization and publicly announced the end of mr-8, di-gb rebaptized itself with the same name in a concerted e√ort to demoralize the government. 19. Solange de Deus Simões, Deus, pátria e família: As mulheres no golpe de 1964 (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1985); Maria Inês Salgado de Souza, Os empresários e a educação: O IPES e a política educacional após 1964 (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1981). 20. Ridenti, O fantasma da Revolução Brasileira, 196–206. 21. Ibid. 22. Again, this is not necessarily the best indicator of female student participation more generally, since women students were probably less able than their male counterparts to travel away from home to a secret location, for many days, unsupervised, and among colleagues of both sexes. If anything, I would expect higher percentages of women in the other une-related activities where overnight travel was not required. Nevertheless, the Ibiuna figures point to a real degree of dedication on the part of the female students who attended. 23. ‘‘Polícia paulista liga Congresso da ex-une a terrorismo e assassinato,’’ Jornal do Brasil, October 16, 1968, 12. 24. Arthur José Poerner, O poder jovem: História da participação politicá dos estudantes brasileiros, 4th ed. (São Paulo: Centro de Memória da Juventude, 1995), 270. 25. Ribeiro do Valle, 1968 O diálogo é a violência, 24. 26. She cites an October 1968 memorandum of the U.S. Agency for International Development for this information. See Huggins, Political Policing, 142. 27. ‘‘A passeata, antes dos tiros,’’ Correio da Manhã, October 24, 1968, 11. 28. ‘‘Nota dos Estudantes ao Povo de Guanabara,’’ June 1968, in dops, Pasta No. 38, aperj. 29. Olga D’Arc Pimentel, in Aarão Reis and de Moraes, 68: A paixão de uma utopia, 153. 30. Nilmário Miranda and Carlos Tibúrcio, Dos filhos deste solo: Mortos e desaparecidos políticos durante a ditadura militar. A responsabilidade do Estado (São Paulo: Fundação Perseu Abramo, 1999), 543. 31. Heloísa Buarque de Holanda, Impressões de viagem: CPC, vanguarda e desbunde, 1960/79 (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1981). 32. Telegram from American Embassy, Rio de Janeiro, to Secretary of State, June 19,

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1968, Subject: Student Demonstrations, Subject-Numeric File 1967–1969, Political and Defense, Political A√airs and Relations, Brazil, 13-2, State Department Central File, Record Group 59, National Archives at College Park, College Park, Md. (hereafter cited as sdcf, rg59, nara). 33. Maria Hermínia Tavares de Almeida and Luiz Weis, ‘‘Carro-zero e pau-de-arara: O cotidiano da oposição de classe média ao regime militar,’’ in História da vida privada no Brasil: Contrastes da intimidade contemporânea, ed. Lilia Moritz Schwarcz (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1998), 399. 34. Ibid., 370. 35. Ventura, 1968 O ano que não terminou, 37. 36. ‘‘Nudismo e sexo: Os jovems estão implantando uma nova moral?’’ Manchete, December 14, 1968, 146. 37. Alfredo Syrkis, Os carbonários: Memórias da guerrilha perdida, 3rd ed. (São Paulo: Global, 1980), 101–2. 38. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 87–95. 39. Délcio da Fonseca Sobrinho, Estado e população: Uma história do planejamento familiar no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Rosa dos Tempos, 1993); Sonia E. Alvarez, Engendering Democracy in Brazil: Women’s Movements in Transition Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 40. Fonseca, Estado e população, 110. 41. Such a view did, in fact, become state policy in São Paulo in the early 1980s, however. Under Governor Paulo Maluf, the Pró-Família program was created to distribute birth control pills to women in poor neighborhoods. The governor’s special advisory committee on community issues ‘‘further suggested that people of color should be the primary targets of state population policy—or else the Black population would come to predominate electorally and otherwise in the state of São Paulo’’ (Alvarez, Engendering Democracy, 183). 42. Fonseca, Estado e população, 111. 43. ‘‘O Congresso interrompido,’’ Veja e Leia, October 16, 1968, 15. 44. ‘‘Polícia paulista liga Congresso da ex-une a terrorismo e assassinato,’’ Jornal do Brasil, October 16, 1968, 12. 45. Ibid. 46. Dirceu Soares, ‘‘A Faculdade está ocupada,’’ Realidade, August 1968, 56. 47. Ibid. 48. Cited in telegram from Boonstra, American Embassy, Rio de Janeiro, to Secretary of State, Washington, Subject: Political Prisoners, July 22, 1970, Subject-Numeric File 1970– 1973, Political and Defense, Political A√airs and Relations, Brazil, 29, sdcf, rg59, nara. 49. Ana Maria Colling, A resistenica da mulher à ditadura militar no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Rosa dos Tempos, 1997), 51. 50. Printed in Manchete, May 11, 1968, 92–95.

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51. Printed in Realidade, April 1968, 10. 52. Printed in Manchete, May 11, 1968, 177. 53. Printed in Manchete, November 23, 1968, 133. 54. Printed, respectively, in Realidade, May 1968, 41; and June 1968, 33. 55. Skidmore, The Politics of Military Rule in Brazil, 125. 56. Telegram from American Embassy, Brasilia, to Secretary of State, April 24, 1968, Subject: Torture Accusations Apparently True, Subject-Numeric File 1967–1969, Political and Defense, Political A√airs and Relations, Brazil, 13-2, sdcf, rg59, nara. 57. Márcio Moreira Alves, A Grain of Mustard Seed: The Awakening of the Brazilian Revolution (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Press, 1973), 17. 58. Printed, respectively, in Realidade, May 1968, 20–21; June 1968, 20–21; and July 1968, 20–21. 59. Gabeira, O que é isso companheiro?, 86–87. 60. Luiz Maklouf Carvalho, Mulheres que foram à luta armada (São Paulo: Editora Globo, 1998), 37. 61. Albertina de Oliveira Costa et al., eds., Memorias das mulheres do exilio (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1980), 208. 62. Jean Franco, ‘‘Gender, Death, and Resistance: Facing the Ethical Vacuum,’’ in Fear at the Edge: State Terror and Resistance in Latin America, ed. Juan E. Corradi, Patricia Weiss Fagen, and Manuel Antonio Garreton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 107. 63. Ibid., 109. 64. Colling, A resistenica da mulher, 84. 65. Maklouf Carvalho, Mulheres que foram à luta armada, 93. 66. Colling, A resistenica da mulher, 84. 67. Shizuo Osawa, interview by Je√rey Lesser, Rio de Janeiro, January 25, 2002. Many thanks to Je√ Lesser for generously sharing this portion of his interview with me. 68. Maklouf Carvalho, Mulheres que foram à luta armada, 94. 69. Ibid., 56. 70. Flamarion Mossri, ‘‘Comissão concede dia 10 liçenca contra Márcio,’’ Jornal do Brasil, December 8, 1968, 36. 71. I refer here to the first Law of National Security of March 11, 1967, not to be confused with the September 29, 1969, National Security Law. For more information on this legislation, see Maria Helena Moreira Alves, State and Opposition in Military Brazil (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), 118. 72. Unírio Machado, in Anais da Câmara dos Deputados, vol. 35, November 1968, 83. 73. Brasil, Congresso, Anais da Câmara dos Deputados: 2a Sessão Legislativa Ordinária da 6a Legislatura, sessões de 2 a 6 de setembro de 1968, vol. 23 (Brasilia, 1968), 130. 74. Ibid., 570. 75. Ibid., 159–65. 76. It is not clear in the congressional record who decides how the events are recorded

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and on what basis, but following each speech there is a small note about the floor’s response. In most cases the note reads (very good). Sometimes it might say (very good, very good), and in extreme cases it says (very good, very good, applause). Following Alves’s speech of September 2, 1968, the marks read (very good, very good, applause, the speaker is complimented), leading me to believe that it enjoyed quite a resounding reception. 77. Anais da Câmara dos Deputados (Brasilia), vol. 23, 423–33. 78. The copies read, ‘‘the girls who dance with the cadets and frequent the young o≈cers.’’ The substitution of ‘‘frequent,’’ a word typically used to describe visiting stores or restaurants, for the more general word ‘‘date’’ seems an allusion to prostitutes or mistresses, and hence a more obvious reference to withholding sex. 79. Alves later claimed that the delay was caused by the visit of Queen Elizabeth to Brazil in October. ‘‘It might, after all, seem unbecoming to . . . start a major political crisis while the government was playing host to such a universal symbol of stability and lawful rule as British royalty.’’ Alves, A Grain of Mustard Seed, 14. 80. Alves, State and Opposition in Military Brazil, 94. 81. Skidmore, The Politics of Military Rule in Brazil, 80. 82. Alves, A Grain of Mustard Seed, 1. 83. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 205. 84. ‘‘Câmara nega a licença e canta Hino Nacional,’’ Jornal do Brasil, December 13, 1968, 5. 85. ‘‘Militares prevêem para hoje edição de Ato Institucional,’’ Jornal do Brasil, December 13, 1968, 4. 86. Preamble to Institutional Act No. 5.

CARLOTA MCALLISTER

Rural Markets, Revolutionary Souls, and Rebellious Women in Cold War Guatemala

On a Sunday morning in early July 1979, Guatemalan army troops drove a truck into the weekly market of a small rural Mayan village called Chupol, intending to forcibly press any young men they could find there into military service. Having successfully accomplished such missions in the past, the soldiers were surprised by the resistance they encountered on this occasion. As they began their roundup, women wielding large sticks and torches surrounded the truck, throwing rocks and threatening to kill the intruders if they did not leave Chupol at once. Local leaders of the Committee for Peasant Unity—the political wing of Guatemala’s largest guerrilla group, the Guerrilla Army of the Poor—had organized the women’s action as a forceful repudiation of the Guatemalan state’s incursions into indigenous communities. The action achieved its purpose: fearing for their lives, the soldiers retreated without any new conscripts, leaving the triumphant Chupolenses alone to celebrate. Is this event part of the Cold War? Some events that took place in Guatemala do appear in standard Cold War histories: for example, the 1954 overthrow of Guatemala’s democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz, planned and backed by the cia, has been called ‘‘one of the best known and most important episodes in Washington’s Cold War policies.’’∞ This description of the coup, however, implies that it counts as a Cold War event only because high-level American government policymakers participated in its planning and execution, painting the Cold War as a kind of strategy game for the world’s best and brightest men. Several excellent recent histories of Guatemala lay out the realworld consequences of this game by documenting the profound reshaping of everyday life under the U.S.-backed anti-Communist regimes that ruled the country after 1954.≤ But with the exception of Greg Grandin’s recent account of peasant mobilization in the Alta Verapaz, even these works do not include people like Chupol’s angry women as players in Cold War geopolitics.

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Yet as R. G. Saull has argued, the Cold War was waged not only between the superpowers but also through worldwide struggles over the constitution of social and economic life.≥ Ideologically committed to the separation of the state from the sphere of production, U.S. cold warriors saw their struggle against Communism as one to expand the reach of the invisible hand of the market around the globe. In classical economic theory, the market is a ‘‘coordination device’’ for resolving transactions among buyers and sellers possessed of different interests in the form of a price that both parties judge as fair.∂ In a perfect market system, American cold warriors imagined, the pricing mechanism would advance U.S. interests without requiring Americans to exercise actual political authority by ensuring that everyone’s interests were best served by capitalism. Victory over Communism, therefore, depended on opening markets around the world. To function, markets need buyers and sellers with access to what Michel Callon calls ‘‘calculative agencies.’’ To calculate, he argues, agents require on the one hand the information necessary to evaluate their interests in economic terms, and on the other the will to interact with one another as well as with the objects of their transactions exclusively in the service of economic interests.∑ For Callon, calculative agencies are properties neither of individual psyches nor of particular cultural configurations, but rather of a ‘‘web of relations and connections’’ that establishes certain contingencies as the kind of certainties about the state of the world and the nature of actors that can be used in calculations.∏ This web of relations includes not only other human beings but also the nonhuman objects and spaces, such as physical marketplaces, with and within which the market operates. Callon’s insistence on the embeddedness of market economics in real-world markets is helpful for considering how Chupolenses became agents of Cold War struggles. Modernization theory, which identified the so-called Third World’s rural area as the market’s essential outside, linked cold warriors in Washington to poor rural peasants in countries like Guatemala by locating the vanguard of the battle against Communism in their calculative agencies. To incorporate Third World rural people into the theoretical space of the perfect market system, would-be modernizers had to create the material and social conditions necessary for making market-based calculations. In the process, they radically transformed the rural areas in which they intervened. In some places, such as Chupol, these transformations allowed rural residents to discover and act on interests quite di√erent from those that modernization theory imputed to them. I seek here to explain this phenomenon by tracing the relationship between

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Chupol’s marketplace and ‘‘the market’’ of Cold War modernization theory. The market where Chupol’s women staged their uprising was the product of a series of engagements between the local, the national, and the global to which cold warriors came late. Cold warriors’ attempts to make this place operate according to the laws of ‘‘the market,’’ however, did not so much misconstrue this history as create the conditions under which new engagements between these di√erent levels became possible, incorporating the women into Cold War games by marking their distance from Washington and its policymakers. Stories like that of the uprising are critical to understanding the history of the Cold War, I argue, because they show that it is also necessarily Guatemala’s—and Chupol’s— history. Third World Cold War: Development as Anti-Communism The notion of the ‘‘rural area’’ as a discrete space governed by a distinct social and economic logic is an artifact of the mid-twentieth-century reconfiguration of global relations of power that set the Cold War in motion. After World War II, Arturo Escobar argues, a new field, development economics, emerged to explain the inequalities in wealth between national economies that persisted in defiance of the predictions of classical economic theory. By introducing the evolutionary notion of ‘‘development’’ into economic theory, this new science framed agrarian regions as historically backward spaces, grouping poor nations into a single Third World that had to overcome its own rural nature, and locating the knowledge necessary to do so in wealthy First World nations.π The development paradigm, for Escobar and other development critics, thus recuperated colonial relations of power from the collapse of the colonial system by making continued interventions in the Third World’s ‘‘rural area’’ a scientific necessity.∫ Such interventions, James Ferguson argues, in turn worked like an ‘‘anti-politics machine’’ on Third World rural areas, producing ‘‘alongside the institutional e√ect of expanding bureaucratic state power . . . the conceptual or ideological e√ect of depoliticizing both poverty and the state.’’Ω The invention of the anti-politics machine coincided with the emergence of the United States as a superpower and helped the United States to consolidate its superpower status. Development critics, however, rarely remark on the Cold War roots of the development paradigm. Escobar, for example, argues that Cold War geopolitics was one of the factors that ‘‘lent legitimacy’’ to the development paradigm, rather than a constitutive feature of that paradigm.∞≠ In their concern to demonstrate that the actual antipolitical e√ects of development interventions

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virtually never correspond to those intended by development planners, these studies dismiss the explanatory value of understanding the motivations behind development planning in general. For Ferguson, who does not mention the Cold War, the ‘‘logic’’ of development ‘‘transcends the question of planners’ intentions,’’ geostrategic or otherwise.∞∞ Planners’ intentions, however, should be considered one of the anti-politics machine’s integral mechanisms. Development economics, as Timothy Mitchell shows, depended on the prior formation of ‘‘the economy’’ as the domain comprising the material substrate of all other varieties of human endeavor— politics, society, religion, and so forth.∞≤ In its inert materiality, the economy ‘‘became arguably the most important set of practices for organizing what appears as the separation of the real world from its representations, of things from their values, of actions from intentions, of an object world from the realm of ideas’’—the separations necessary for making economic calculations.∞≥ The economic sciences, including development economics, perform these separations by structuring interventions in the economy. Enacted in the anti-politics machine, development planners’ intentions and their notions of intentionality are thus critical for enabling calculative agencies in the Third World’s rural areas.∞∂ The Third World rural calculations enabled by the anti-politics machine, in turn, enact a Cold War agenda, as Walt Rostow explains in his canonical 1960 treatise on modernization theory, The Stages of Economic Growth: A NonCommunist Manifesto. For Rostow—who served in the Kennedy (1961–63) and Johnson (1963–1968) administrations in addition to theorizing about the Cold War—moral transformation is the key to bringing poor nations to ‘‘take-o√,’’ the shift from dependence on agriculture to dependence on industry. For takeo√ to happen, governments must construct the ‘‘social overhead capital, most notably in transport,’’ that will lay the foundations for industrial society,∞∑ but Rostow was considerably more interested in ‘‘the view taken of human motivation’’ in agrarian societies (149). To reach take-o√, ‘‘men must come to be valued in the society not for their connexion with clan or class . . . but for their individual ability to perform certain specific, increasingly specialized functions’’ (19). Likewise, man must cease to ‘‘regard his physical environment as virtually a factor given by nature and providence, but [rather] as an ordered world which, if rationally understood, can be manipulated in ways which yield productive change’’ (19). Finally, ‘‘the population at large must be prepared to accept training for—and then to operate—an economic system whose methods are subject to regular change’’ (20). Eventually, these transformations will bring former agricultural societies into the ‘‘age of high consumerism’’ (134). By enabling

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calculative agencies, development brings the Third World’s rural areas into ‘‘the market’’ of high capitalist theory. In producing this link, development becomes anti-Communism and vice versa: ‘‘The test of our own economies—and of the non-Communist world as a whole—lies not in the Soviet economic performance, but in our ability to fulfill the ambitions of our own peoples,’’ Rostow notes (103). The final purpose of modernization, therefore, is to ‘‘demonstrate that the underdeveloped nations— now the main focus of Communist hopes—can move successfully through the preconditions into a well-established take-o√ within the orbit of the democratic world, resisting the blandishments and temptations of Communism’’ (134). Any rural place where calculative agencies can be made to operate should thus be understood as a space under U.S. geopolitical influence. Guatemala as Cold War Showcase Guatemala was ripe for modernizing in the 1950s: it was an agrarian society whose wealth derived from the export of a very limited range of agricultural commodities (co√ee, bananas, and to a lesser extent cattle, sugar, and cotton). This plantation economy formed in the late nineteenth century, when German entrepreneurs showed Central America that co√ee could be an immensely profitable crop. Liberal governments seeking to take advantage of this windfall introduced a series of legal reforms that ‘‘forever altered rural life’’ in Guatemala in three ways.∞∏ First, changes in property law transferred ownership of much of Guatemala’s best land—its fertile coastal piedmont and lower highlands—from indigenous communities to foreign and Ladino (nonindigenous Guatemalan) entrepreneurs, who consolidated their holdings into a small number of vast estates. Second, coercive measures including labor laws to prevent ‘‘vagrancy’’ among the propertyless ensured that newly dispossessed indigenous communities would provide a steady stream of workers for the new plantations. Third, the abolition of colonial protections for indigenous communities permitted Ladinos to take up residence in these communities, where they quickly seized control of municipal government and used it to mobilize indigenous labor. In just a few decades, these policies concentrated 72 percent of Guatemala’s arable land in the hands of 2 percent of landowners—the least equitable distribution of land in Latin America—and channeled the rhythms of rural indigenous life into a cycle of forced seasonal migration from the highlands to the tropical coast.∞π Thus Guatemala in the 1950s was also an agrarian society in the Rostovian sense that much of its capital was reproduced by unfree rural labor (itself reproduced

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in noncapitalist peasant households) and that much of its surplus was wasted on reproducing ascriptive social identities. The doomed Arbenz government sought to build the Guatemalan nation by introducing programs to liberate the rural area from these phenomena. Building on the reforms of his predecessor, who had abolished forced labor and introduced new educational programs aimed at the indigenous population, Arbenz introduced an agrarian reform law in 1952. This law, Decree 900, aimed to reverse Guatemala’s rural ‘‘backwardness’’ by expropriating land left fallow by large landholders and giving it in usufruct to tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and agricultural laborers, transforming them into petty agrarian capitalists and potential customers for Guatemala’s fledgling industries. Other initiatives included extensive investment in transportation infrastructure, including a new highway to the Atlantic (a route previously served only by railroad) and a new Caribbean port.∞∫ On the surface, these programs were eminently compatible with plans like Rostow’s for development. Indeed, according to Jim Handy, Arbenz’s economic initiatives were largely ‘‘based on the recommendations made in an International Bank for Reconstruction and Development [the World Bank’s predecessor] survey,’’ of which Rostow might well have approved.∞Ω Nonetheless, Arbenz’s reforms raised multiple red flags in the United States and among Guatemalan elites. In a country politically dominated by large landowners, and where the largest landowner was the U.S.-owned United Fruit Company, both Decree 900 and the new infrastructure, which competed with the United Fruit Company’s prior monopoly on transportation along these routes, directly attacked entrenched national and transnational interests.≤≠ The prominent position Arbenz granted to José Manuel Fortuny, leader of the Communist-a≈liated Guatemalan Workers’ Party, and particularly to Fortuny’s role in writing Decree 900, raised fears about the government’s plans for the future.≤∞ Decree 900’s establishment of new peasant and community organizations to oversee expropriations and its granting of usufruct rather than title to the land it redistributed—measures that Fortuny intended as a means of ‘‘introduc[ing] a progressive element into a capitalist reform’’—gave weight to their fears.≤≤ Finally, the geopolitical moment also worked against Arbenz, for China’s peasant revolution had recently ‘‘stirred deep misgivings in Washington policymaking circles’’ by suggesting that Communists could find a foothold in susceptible rural hearts and minds as well as on the European front lines.≤≥ Arbenz’s attention to agrarian matters was thus perceived as a sign that his nationalism was a front for the most dangerous sort of internationalism: in a 1953 report to the National Security Council, the Bureau of

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Interamerican A√airs characterized Decree 900 as a law ‘‘designed to produce social upheaval.’’≤∂ Fears about Arbenz’s intentions helped frame the 1954 coup against his government as a world-historical anti-Communist triumph rather than the overthrow of a particular regime and made Guatemala’s need for modernization seem imperative. In 1955, members of the U.S. House of Representatives sought development aid for the post-coup government by arguing that Guatemala was ‘‘a political, social, and economic laboratory,’’ whose fate ‘‘will be a major factor in determining the future course of Latin American a√airs.’’≤∑ Rostow himself recognized that keeping rural areas free of Communism required not merely a shift in attitudes toward marketing but also ‘‘a change translated into working institutions and procedures’’ for marketing.≤∏ In the wake of the coup, Guatemala became a ‘‘pilot project’’ for the introduction of such institutions and procedures to the Third World: between 1954 and 1960, Guatemala received 15 percent of all U.S. foreign aid to Latin America.≤π The aid served two purposes: first, strengthening Guatemala’s internal security forces to increase their vigilance against potential Soviet interference; and second, implementing developmental policies designed to create ‘‘a climate in which Communism will not thrive.’’≤∫ The post-coup government’s plans for creating this climate in some ways resembled Arbenz’s plans for creating a nation: the showcase project of the late 1950s, for example, was the Inter-American Highway (the name of the Pan-American Highway in Central America), a road Arbenz had planned to build until the United States cut o√ aid to his government in 1951.≤Ω Likewise, although the new regime restored most of the land expropriated under Decree 900 to its previous owners, it also implemented its own, more limited, agrarian reform. Under U.S. guidance, however, the strategy these tactics served had changed: post-coup development sought to build markets, not national industry. The new government channeled its infrastructural investments through the private, not the public, sector, and the majority of those who received land under its agrarian reform were ‘‘relatively well-o√ Ladinos’’ already making capitalist use of the land.≥≠ Greg Grandin argues that the post-coup closure of political space and reversal of Arbencista dreams deeply alienated peasants in the Alta Verapaz region from the post-coup state, eventually driving them into peasant-based insurgencies.≥∞ I wish, however, to add nuance to this account by suggesting that the post-coup anti-Communism also had productive e√ects. A novel set of institutions and programs that targeted the rural area and specifically the moral and social life of its inhabitants through interventions in education, housing, literacy, commu-

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nity development, and public health emerged alongside the repression of Arbenz’s policies and supporters.≥≤ Poorly funded in comparison with the state’s large infrastructural projects, these entities nonetheless had an ambitious purpose, namely, disciplining Guatemala’s rural agencies for the new economy. The Socio-Educativo Rural, which trained rural teachers to educate their charges in hygiene, nutrition, crochet, and the like, exemplified such interventions, working to ‘‘change the negative attitudes of our people for favorable attitudes.’’≥≥ Stephen Streeter has argued that most of these programs were profoundly unsuited to Guatemalan rural life and soon petered out.≥∂ Nevertheless they helped frame rural Guatemala as a discrete space with distinct interests, and thus as a place demanding particular kinds of intervention. Under certain conditions, as I will show for Chupol, such attentions did not alienate rural Guatemalans from the state but instead incorporated them far more tightly in its networks. The Cold War Church and Indigenous Guatemala The Catholic Church responded to the anti-Communist demand for intervention in the rural area more successfully than the state, for its historical claim on Guatemala’s hinterland was far stronger than that of the central government. During the conquest of Mesoamerica, the Church had secured its place in the Spanish Crown’s new territories by a≈rming that Indians had souls that required spiritual guidance. As the Indians’ ‘‘defenders,’’ clergy were the only nonindigenous people regularly permitted to live in indigenous communities under colonial law. The Church thus ‘‘e√ectively was the state in rural areas’’ for hundreds of years.≥∑ At the time of the coup, the Church’s ability to assert this claim on the rural area was weak, for nineteenth-century liberal regimes had stripped the Church of its Guatemalan privileges and properties, imposing ‘‘perhaps the longest and most severe restriction that the Catholic Church has su√ered in Latin America.’’≥∏ By the 1950s, few clergy remained to administer the sacraments outside Guatemala City, and few Guatemalans missed receiving them. With fanatically anti-Communist Archbishop Mariano Rossell y Arellano at its helm, however, the Church’s situation was gradually improving. In the 1940s, Rossell had begun to seek new social relevance for the Church by creating new entities for the cultivation of anti-Communist—and, with Arbenz in power, antigovernment— sentiment.≥π One was Catholic Action, a movement originally founded by Pope Pius XI to encourage laypeople to help the Church spread the Good Word as a means of counteracting the corrosive forces of modernity, Protestantism, and

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secularism. Subsequent popes had held up Catholic Action as a bulwark against Communism as well. Following their lead, Rossell issued a pastoral letter in 1946 urging all Guatemalans ‘‘who feel the waves of evil striking Nations in order to drag them into the abyss, and who long to consecrate their lives to the good cause’’ of their nation’s salvation, to join the movement.≥∫ Without a strong institution behind it, however, Catholic Action initially found few joiners. Rossell’s influence improved during the campaign leading up to the coup against Arbenz. In 1953 Rossell sent the revered image of the Black Christ of Esquipulas, Guatemala’s most visited pilgrimage site, on an anti-Arbenz excursion around the countryside, and in April 1954 he issued a pastoral letter calling explicitly for a ‘‘sincere crusade against Communism.’’≥Ω After the coup, such activities allowed the Church to claim it had played an important role in Arbenz’s undoing, showing Rossell that he could best serve God and himself by using the Church’s pastoral techniques to serve Cold War plans for Guatemala. Conveniently for Rossell, the lone reminder of the Church’s glorious past in 1950s Guatemala happened to be the rural phenomenon of indigenous spirituality. Catholicism had retained some of its sway over Indian souls even after the Church itself abandoned indigenous communities: in the absence of clergy, indigenous people simply transformed the lay fraternities, or cofradías, that had traditionally cared for saints’ images into ‘‘Indian institutions that served chiefly Indian purposes.’’∂≠ The cofradías presided over costumbre (custom), a nominally Catholic religious practice that replaced priests with an indigenous gerontocracy and emphasized agricultural rites over the orthodox liturgy.∂∞ Much like the colonial Church, moreover, the cofradías also exercised their authority in political matters, collecting the indigenous labor that municipal governments demanded, but resisting these demands when they became excessive. Under their power, indigenous people gained a measure of protection from liberal impositions, but also a means of a≈rming their dignity as spiritual beings in the face of soulless Ladino rule. Rossell decided to enlist indigenous souls as well as rural hearts and minds for take-o√, transforming the Church into an essential partner for the post-coup state. In a lecture at the Third Catholic Congress on Rural Life, held in Panama in 1955, Rossell acclaimed rural life as ‘‘one of the principal aspects of the titanic struggle now waged by the militant City of God . . . against the diabolical city now incarnate in the seduction of Communism.’’∂≤ During the colonial period, he argued, the peasant and the Church had forged an alliance for the defense of Indian lands; liberal attacks on Church lands were in fact designed to facilitate their attacks on Indian lands. The Communists had used agrarian reform to try

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to win Indian loyalties away from the Church, and had almost succeeded, because a ‘‘peasant without land is already halfway and unconsciously within the orbit of Communist seduction.’’∂≥ But when ‘‘the divine spell of a crucifix [the Black Christ of Esquipulas] reconquered an entire nation’’ in spite of such ruses, it revealed the continuing allegiance of peasants to the Church.∂∂ Warning that land distribution in post-coup Guatemala was still not exactly ‘‘Christian,’’∂∑ Rossell concluded that the Church would have to resume its role as defender of the Indians to keep rural Guatemalans on the right track. The post-coup government rewarded the Church in the 1955 constitution by restoring its rights to own property and provide religious education.∂∏ The Vatican was likewise disposed to help Rossell minister to Guatemala’s Cold War spiritual needs by sending new religious personnel to expand the Church’s institutional reach. Foreign clergy had begun to arrive in Guatemala in the late 1940s in response to the Vatican’s call for Catholics in wealthy nations to ‘‘save Guatemala from Communism,’’∂π but after the coup, this trickle became a flood. In the early 1940s, religious personnel in the country numbered 120 in total, virtually all Guatemalans; by 1966 there were 531 priests, 96 monks, and 805 nuns in Guatemala, of whom 434, 96, and 705, respectively, were foreigners.∂∫ To accommodate the influx, new dioceses and parishes opened throughout the country, mostly in the rural, indigenous communities Rossell had identified as the front line of the battle against Communism. The predominantly European and North American priests sent to minister to indigenous communities, however, had little notion of what they would encounter there: ‘‘They did not understand the cultural or religious reality of the places they were sent to work. . . . Their idea of the pastoral was entirely spiritual,’’ charges one account of their arrival.∂Ω Many reacted violently: the indigenous misery and Ladino racism that prevailed in the highlands as well as what they saw as costumbrista paganism appalled them. Worse still, they felt that the Church’s long-standing practice of accommodating costumbre was complicit in the lamentable state of Guatemala’s rural a√airs. Their solution to these problems was to bring Rossell’s Catholic Action movement to indigenous Guatemala. Kay Warren argues that Catholic Action is premised on a set of oppositions between body and soul, external and internal worlds, and material and spiritual phenomena.∑≠ For the foreign priests, costumbre exhibited an imbalance along all three of these axes, privileging the bodily pleasures of drink and sex; the external world of processions and display; and the materiality of fireworks, candles, and flowers in worship. By inverting these emphases, they trusted, Catholic Action would turn indigenous souls

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inward and upward, modernizing the procedures through which they made their spiritual choices and curing the spiritual confusion that kept them poor.∑∞ To reach indigenous souls, however, the priests first had to break the earthly power of the cofradías by leveling the material distinctions that costumbre had institutionalized among indigenous people and between indigenous people and Ladinos. Clergy used their international connections to channel a flow of funds and training into modernizing their communities’ economies. North Americans often had links with usaid, which gave funds to cooperatives, peasant leagues, and credit providers; and to the Peace Corps, which provided training and labor for specific local projects such as the construction of schools. Europeans brought substantial funding from the Christian Democrats as well as Misérior, the German bishops’ grant-making foundation, to their community projects.∑≤ By the late 1960s, priests in many communities were deeply involved in parishioners’ e√orts to set up agricultural cooperatives, savings and loans institutions, community betterment committees, peasant leagues, and rural schools and markets. In just two decades, such interventions substantially improved material conditions in many highland communities. Harnessing modernization to evangelization served the Church’s purposes well: in the decades after the coup, the growth of Catholic Action was ‘‘almost prodigious,’’∑≥ while the power of the cofradías waned. By reconstructing the domain of indigenous religious belief, moreover, the priests wrought a revolution in aspects of indigenous life now defined as external to religion. To replace the gerontocracy, the priests had singled out particularly worthy members of Catholic Action as ‘‘leaders’’ of their communities in a political as well as spiritual sense. By 1967, usaid had trained 74 rural Catholic Action members to organize agriculture-related ‘‘interest groups,’’ and the Christian Democrats had trained some 160 more.∑∂ Formed by initiatives that required literacy skills as well as competence in Spanish, these leaders tended to be younger and have more formal education than costumbrista authorities and were thus better equipped to deal with Ladinos on Ladino terms. As Ricardo Falla has shown, the earliest, most enthusiastic, and most prominent indigenous Catholic Action converts also tended to be those who worked as traveling merchants rather than those more committed to working the land.∑∑ In overthrowing the spiritual authority of the cofradías, therefore, Catholic Action also lent authority to political and economic behaviors quite foreign to those sanctioned by costumbre, radically transforming the grounds on which indigenous identity was constructed. In thus opening up the rural area to Cold War evangelization, ironically, Rossell lost control over the Guatemalan Church. Schisms began to open, on the one hand between members of religious orders and the regular clergy, and on

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the other between international theologies and the traditions of Guatemalan Catholicism. At the Vatican II Council, the Guatemalan bishops voted against most proposed reforms,∑∏ and their response to John XXIII’s new charter for the Church was to issue familiar warnings about Communism and calls for a land reform based on the God-given right to private property.∑π Nevertheless the bishops could not prevent foreign arrivals from following the Church’s ever more progressive theological inclinations. Religious, whose funding came from their orders rather than a parish, were particularly disinclined to respect the political limits the regular hierarchy sought to impose. In the early 1970s, the Jesuit Landívar University began to o√er courses in Bible study inspired by liberation theology to rural indigenous leaders identified through church networks. In the mid-1970s, members of Guatemala City’s Jesuit Center for Research and Social Action began to travel to the highlands departments of Chimaltenango and the Quiché, forming similar study groups with local Catholic Action leaders outside regular parish and diocesan activities, sometimes against the wishes of local priests and bishops.∑∫ In 1978 the members of one of these study groups, based in Santa Cruz del Quiché, came together to form the Committee for Peasant Unity (cuc), the group that later organized Chupol’s market uprising. Robert Carmack describes the cuc as ‘‘more ideological than any previous Indian organization had been.’’∑Ω The cuc’s first newsletter supports this assertion, calling the group ‘‘an organization of all workers in the countryside, of individuals, associations, leagues, committees who want to fight valiantly to get rid of oppression, using our strength united with the forces of all the other exploited people of Guatemala.’’∏≠ Indeed, although the cuc represented itself as an autonomous grouping, the national leadership of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor participated in the decision to create the organization. However, neither socialist ideology nor clandestine guerrilla ties made the cuc less indigenous: on the contrary, the organization essentially gave political form to the ambit for indigenous political action that Catholic Action had carved out. In the cuc, indigenous soul-searching led to action on indigenous economic reality, bringing the Catholic Church’s appropriation of modernization theory full circle. State, Church, and Market in Cold War Chupol Chupol, one of sixty-four cantons or hamlets that make up the rural hinterland of the township of Chichicastenango in the highland department of the Quiché, is an eminently rural place. The canton’s population is entirely indigenous and, as Chupolenses put it simply, ‘‘poor,’’ two characteristics strongly associated with

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rural residence in Guatemala. Chichicastenango is also a classic example of what Mesoamericanists call the ‘‘ceremonial center’’ pattern of settlement, meaning that most Chichicastecos, including Chupolenses, live on ancestral plots of land where they grow corn and other subsistence crops, traveling to the township’s small urban center only on market days or ritual occasions. Maxeños, as indigenous Chichicastecos are called, are thus even more ‘‘rural’’ than indigenous people in other communities. Chupol’s historical distinction among its rural neighbors, moreover, was its extreme remoteness from urban life: four or five hours’ walk from town, Chupol is one of the cantons farthest geographically and culturally from the center. For modernization theory, places like Chupol represent the market’s final frontier. The impact of development interventions on Chupol, however, reveals Chupol’s relationship with the market to be older and more complex than a modernization theorist might imagine. Arbenz’s reforms had virtually no e√ect on the canton—the township of Chichicastenango witnessed no petitions for land under Decree 900—and few Chupolenses remember Arbenz’s name or his presidency.∏∞ Two factors account for this failure to take advantage of agrarian reform. First, although Chupolenses are by no means rich in land—indeed, archival records reveal they have long complained about land shortages—they live in a community where small landholdings are the norm. Chichicastenango is one of Guatemala’s largest townships, but also one of its highest and coldest. Much of its territory lies above two thousand meters, and daytime temperatures range from 12 to 18 degrees Celsius (53.6 to 64.4 degrees Fahrenheit) year-round.∏≤ The crops that thrive in such a climate are corn, beans, and apple trees, not tropical exports. For nineteenthcentury agrarian entrepreneurs, therefore, the highlands of Chichicastenango were simply not worth the trouble of stealing: no properties large enough to be a√ected by Decree 900 were ever formed within the township, so that Maxeños were spared the massive dispossession experienced by indigenous communities elsewhere in the country.∏≥ Second, although many Maxeños were at some point forced to join the massive seasonal migrations to the coast to harvest export crops, they always had another—vastly preferred—moneymaking option available to them: petty trade. Located in the center of Guatemala’s western highlands, Chichicastenango has hosted one of the most important markets in the region since before the Conquest, and Maxeños themselves have long served as the region’s designated traveling salesmen. Even in 1937, dark days when agents of the plantations were, in ethnographer Ruth Bunzel’s words, waiting ‘‘like a multiple Circe’’ with loans and liquor to entrap Maxeños into debt labor,∏∂ at least half of the township’s

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men described their profession as ‘‘trader’’ (comerciante) on o≈cial registers.∏∑ Being a trader in those years meant traipsing for hundreds of kilometers around the mountains with up to 150 pounds of goods on one’s back, so the preference that Maxeños felt for trading over plantation work was not due to its relative ease. Rather, as Chupolenses who have engaged in both kinds of labor note, the virtue of trading is that it gives one the freedom to determine one’s own pace and schedule. Paradoxically, therefore, Chupolenses’ prior experience with marketing may have left them indi√erent to Arbenz’s attempts to make them agrarian capitalists and thus to the abrupt termination of these e√orts. Cold War modernization, in contrast, articulated with this experience to produce profound changes in Chupol. Its first e√ects were entirely unintended: the Cold War came to the canton in the form of the Inter-American Highway, which was built through the community in 1956 for reasons to do with Chupol’s terrain, not Chupolenses’ needs. But simply by virtue of lying in the highway’s path, Chupolenses suddenly gained access to a means of transport for their goods other than their own backs, one that further improved when third-class bus lines began to run on the highway in the mid-1960s. The village’s merchants found their formerly Herculean trading trips significantly eased and discovered both new places to sell and new goods—mostly cheap, industrial manufactures like shoelaces, disposable pens, plastic toys, et cetera—in the capital city, now only two hours away. By expanding their commercial possibilities, the InterAmerican Highway thus definitively freed Chupolenses from hated plantation work. Rushing in droves to take advantage of this opportunity, many men had accumulated what they call ‘‘capitals’’ (capitales) in goods they claim were worth up to 15,000 quetzals (then, US$15,000) by the mid-1970s. Instead of hiking around the highlands, moreover, these men spent most of their time in the capital, where they were forced to learn Spanish to engage with the Ladinos and indigenous people from other linguistic communities they encountered while peddling their wares. Chupolense salesmen who experienced these changes felt themselves liberated not only from the threat of the plantations but also from the chains of prejudice and ignorance they believed had hampered the development of their historic genius for trading. They describe the import of these changes in terms that would make a modernization theorist proud. ‘‘Here [in the capital] it depends on one’s own spark,’’ one salesman told me. ‘‘You have to be brave enough to say, ‘Will you buy from me? I have a cheap watch. . . .’ And you have to know what price to put on things.’’ ‘‘Now there’s respect between indigenous people and Ladinos,’’ another explained, ‘‘because everyone comes here for the same thing:

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to buy.’’∏∏ To the extent that Chupolenses were ‘‘penny capitalists,’’ Cold War development interventions transformed them into exemplary Rostovians, honing their ability to calculate their own and others’ interests in market terms.∏π More deliberate than the highway’s construction were the Church’s interventions in Chupol. Chichicastenango, owing to its central location and relative proximity to Guatemala City, was one of three parishes in the Quiché that maintained a priest throughout the liberal era. After the 1954 coup, it became something of a regional showcase for the revitalized Church. In 1955 the parish’s status was raised to ad nutum Santae Sedis, meaning that its priest could be dismissed or moved only by the pope. By the late 1950s, it had three priests in residence. An executive committee for Catholic Action formed in 1954, and as might be predicted for a community of traveling merchants, parish membership in Catholic Action grew quickly.∏∫ Chupolenses say that true religion arrived in the canton in the 1960s, when a Spaniard named Father Felipe González became parish priest. According to Sebastián, a prominent Catholic Action leader from the canton next to Chupol and the son of an important cofradía member, Father Felipe explained the purpose of the Christian life. Unlike those who preached only sterile doctrine, Father Felipe spoke about racism and poverty, telling his flock that all people were children of God, made in his image, and that out of respect for God’s dignity and justice, ‘‘It is not possible that we let them discriminate against us.’’ Other Chupolenses echo Sebastián, saying that the priest taught them that ‘‘we are all children of God; we all have rights,’’ and that to please their Father they would have to claim those rights. As important as his pastoral message for bringing religion to Chupol was Father Felipe’s decision to construct four ‘‘missionary centers’’ (centros misioneros) in the parish’s rural area, to hold regular masses for the rural area’s Catholic Action converts. He chose Chupol as the site of one of these centers; its new church would welcome parishioners from seventeen neighboring cantons. Chupolense Catholics believe that their canton earned this honor by converting to Catholic Action more quickly and enthusiastically than the rest of the township.∏Ω Cristóbal, another Chupolense Catholic Action leader who was appointed to the committee that organized the construction of the center, recalls that ‘‘in Chupol the Catholics were always asking for masses . . . but they had to hold them in private houses.’’ But Chupolenses realized that the center also served as a remedy for the marginality imposed on Chupolenses by their distance from town. Its construction was thus an act of justice as well as a reward for just behavior, as

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Cristóbal’s wife, Ana, whom Father Felipe placed in charge of building materials, explained to me. Since the Father worked here [in Chichicastenango], and a representative from each canton had to come on Saturdays, the Father thought, the people who are old . . . can’t stand [the trip], they can’t come here anymore, so the Father thought it would be better for us to make a center so that for the people who can’t come to Chichi anymore, they can go there, to the center.

The priest chose the site for the church, on top of a hill by the side of the highway, because there was already a costumbrista prayer chapel there, and because he ‘‘saw that this place was a center,’’ according to Ana. The diocese put up the money to buy the land, and Father Felipe called on all the cantons that would use the center to contribute money and labor to the project. Catholic Action members from all seventeen cantons heeded the priest’s call: old and young, men and women, built the center together. (Costumbristas insist that even they participated, although both Ana and Cristóbal deny this claim.) To give Chupolenses their due, however, a church was not enough. Indeed, according to Cristóbal, the construction of the church was only a pretext for building a market: ‘‘Father Felipe would say, don’t think you’re just going to stay like this, life will get harder in the future and so you have to build yourselves a market here, so you can do your marketing here in Chupol.’’ Building the market was undeniably a stroke of genius on the priest’s part, for it provided an ecumenical space in which costumbre and Catholic Action could engage. At first only Catholics were willing to open stalls in this market, but as others in the community began to see people shopping in it, they came too. ‘‘Now, it’s for everybody, not just Catholic Action, but everybody. It’s a center,’’ Ana pointed out. Provided with a physical market in which to engage one another, Chupolenses could engage in market relations at home as well as on the road. Insurgent Modernizers: Chupol’s Market as Revolutionary Center In constructing a space for ‘‘the market’’ in Chupol, however, Father Felipe transformed Chupolenses’ relationships with the other spaces in which they participated. In a township with a ceremonial center, life is supposed to revolve around urban space, where power is concentrated. In the 1930s, Maxeño authority, as described by the ethnographers Ruth Bunzel and Sol Tax, was embodied in the fourteen cofradías that cared for Chichicastenango’s church and performed services for the Ladino municipality through the institution of the

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indigenous mayoralty. In the cofradías, Bunzel claims, church and state were united, a union physically represented in the architecture of Chichicastenango’s central plaza, where the indigenous municipality is separated from the church only by a narrow street.π≠ On Thursdays and Sundays, this plaza also hosts Chichicastenango’s market. When Tax and Bunzel were doing fieldwork, no rural Maxeño, and few rural Maxeñas, would have voluntarily missed a market day, however long the walk to town. Even Maxeños with no stand in the plaza used it as a place to shop, socialize, hear community news, and drink. For both ethnographers, the township’s convergence on this space of power represents the ur-Maxeño moment. Tax claims that ‘‘just as the town is more than a town, so Sunday is more than a Day; it is a multitude of climaxes, a sort of temporal nerve-center of the scattered organs of Chichicastenango life.’’π∞ Likewise, for Bunzel, the central dynamic of Maxeño life is this market-driven alternation ‘‘between the monotony of the canton and the excitement, joyfulness, and color of the town, for [the town] is more than a center; it is the heart through which all life in the region flows.’’π≤ But for whom did this heart beat? Archival evidence suggests that Chichicastenango’s primordial rhythm—and thus the town’s symbolic importance— is in many respects an artifact of the nineteenth-century liberal reforms that allowed Ladinos into indigenous communities. Correspondence between the Quiché military governor’s o≈ce and the Ladino municipality in Chichicastenango from the late 1800s reveals that Maxeños, like their indigenous counterparts across the highlands, employed a wide variety of foot-dragging techniques to resist the new demands the liberal reforms placed on their labor, including sabotage, petitioning for release, and running away. In Chichicastenango, however, the easiest way to escape was to hide in the township’s inhospitable rural area behind the back of the indigenous mayoralty. Correspondence between Juan Rodríguez, the Ladino mayor of Chichicastenango for several terms between 1880 and 1900, and the military governor of the Quiché testifies to the success of this tactic. In 1883, for example, Rodríguez complained that he was unable to finish a cattle census: ‘‘The town is extremely large, and worse so because of the coldness and indi√erence presented by the Naturals’ Authority, from whom I should have some hope of support, but find none.’’ In 1885 his lieutenant wrote that he asked the indigenous mayoralty to gather two hundred men to work on the railroads, despite the military governor’s order: ‘‘Now that it is around four in the afternoon I have gone back to ask this same Mayoralty if said people were already gathered; they have answered me that only those they have already collected, who number forty, will go.’’ The

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indigenous mayoralty could protect its constituents as long as it could keep the rural area safe from prying Ladino eyes. Rodríguez recognized this in 1897 when he explained his many defeats in his struggles with indigenous authorities by complaining about the size and climate of Chichicastenango’s rural extensions.π≥ Such uses of rural space for thwarting the rapacious demands of Chichicastenango’s Ladino authorities suggest that the urban center was in fact the arena of state and Ladino, not Maxeño, power. For Maxeños, indeed, the plaza represented a threat as well as a meeting place, for plantation agents and Ladino o≈cials haunted such spaces. Pace Bunzel and Tax, therefore, it seems that Maxeños’ 1930s journeys through the ‘‘heart’’ of Chichicastenango could be as frightening as they were life giving, and likewise that Maxeño canton life was less ‘‘monotonous’’ than carefully protected against outsiders. Chupolenses were thus rural inhabitants of a place where rural residence constituted an act of resistance to state control. In opening a new space for Chupolenses to exercise their calculative agencies, Father Felipe’s market allowed them to incorporate this act of resistance into their calculations. Laboring on the center, Chupolenses and their rural neighbors found themselves voluntarily working to fulfill their own most pressing needs instead of being forced to toil on Ladino and state projects that brought them no benefit. With their labor, moreover, they managed to transform what had been one rural place among many into an alternative temporal and spatial ‘‘nerve center’’ to Chichicastenango, in this case an entirely indigenous center that allowed indigenous people to prosper while permitting only a minimum of other distinctions to prevail among them. For Sebastián, the head of the center’s construction committee, the center made the racist legacy of the nineteenth-century liberal reforms visible: Here in the center we are all equal, no one is greater and no one is less, but all people are the same. So why—because then I understood—when you go to the civil registry in Chichi [and say], ‘‘Sir, I’ve come to register a birth certificate,’’ [they answer], ‘‘All right, wait for me outside for a bit, outside please.’’ So then you’re out there, standing, in the sun. And then sometimes other people come, who are Ladinos: ‘‘Come in sir, how can we help you? Please, sit down.’’ And all the while, you stand there. Maybe you have to wait there for an hour, an hour and a half, and then you go in again: ‘‘I already told you, sir, that you should wait for me for a bit. I told you, wait for me, please!’’ . . . As though we weren’t people! So that’s when I understood that it’s true, they haven’t taken us into account. . . . As though one were worth more and the other less!

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By bringing Chupolenses into ‘‘the market,’’ modernization helped them to become better capitalists. By building a market in Chupol, however, modernization mediated by evangelization helped them to challenge the racist foundation of Guatemalan agrarian capitalism. Thus, Cristóbal notes, ‘‘a very combative religion began’’ in Chupol. The devastating earthquake (7.5 on the Richter scale) that struck Guatemala’s highlands on February 4, 1976, helped Chupolenses transform this new understanding of their interests into a project that would further them. In Chichicastenango, 40 percent of the township su√ered material damage in the earthquake;π∂ in Chupol, which lies close to the earthquake’s epicenter, most residents’ houses —one-room adobe structures with tile roofs—fell down, and many families su√ered human losses. Two weeks after the disaster, Chichicastenango’s municipal council formed an emergency commission to deal with the ‘‘grievous situation’’ the earthquake had caused.π∑ Father Felipe, a member of the commission, proposed that Chupol’s church serve as a center for aid distribution and named Sebastián as ‘‘warehouse-keeper,’’ thereby cutting both the municipal government and the army out of Chupol’s reconstruction. The church’s conversion into an aid warehouse confirmed Sebastián’s claim that the center represented and promoted the welfare of the community as a whole, regardless of religious or other di√erences. Asked to draw a mural depicting the community’s history, Chupolense participants in a 1999 churchrun mental-health workshop—only some of whom were Catholics—represented 1976 as a stream of objects, including clothing, metal roofing sheets, corn, cooked beans, nails, and boards, issuing from the doors of a church. Sebastián also used his new position of authority to strengthen this claim, following the example set by the center’s construction and organizing people into collective work groups. The somewhat plaintive comments of one costumbrista participant in the mental-health workshop suggest how the process of rebuilding the community inexorably swept Catholics and costumbristas alike into Sebastián’s network: ‘‘They asked for our help. They built houses collectively [en común] . . . what could we do but join?’’ Meanwhile Sebastián’s growing influence over the center made him a target for other parties interested in gaining access to communities like Chupol. Shortly after the earthquake, the Jesuits invited Sebastián to participate in one of their liberation theology seminars—which he found very inspiring—and he later joined one of the study groups organized by indigenous Catholic Action leaders in Santa Cruz del Quiché. In 1978 he was invited to the cuc’s inaugural meeting, which he failed to attend because, ironically, he was on a sales trip. In turn,

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Sebastián transmitted his evolving political commitments down the new hierarchy the center had created. The list of early cuc members in Chupol is essentially a list of prominent Catholic Action members, topped by those who worked on the church construction committee. At first, according to Cristóbal, the cuc was little more than a ‘‘joining bonus’’ (promoción de entrada) for Catholics. It is not clear that even Sebastián himself initially knew of the cuc’s ties to guerrillas, but in any case its political agenda was kept clandestine: ‘‘When we spoke about the cuc, the organization of the cuc, we didn’t, shall we say, identify it as the cuc,’’ Cristóbal notes. Indeed, early cuc proselytizing hardly di√ered from Father Felipe’s preaching: ‘‘People came and spoke, always about the Bible, but also about injustices and why they were this way.’’ Early cuc meetings also took place in church buildings, either the center or a prayer chapel in a neighboring canton. Following Father Felipe in linking spiritual questions to earthly problems helped the new organization assume the mantle of ecclesiastical authority. On the advice of the cuc’s national leadership, Sebastián also turned to ecumenical developmentalism as a way of reaching out to non-Catholics. We looked for the way to get in with people. The first idea they gave us was [to ask] how do we make friends with people? So what are the community’s problems? For example, at that time, like right now, in April, May, and June, is when the chickens have accidents. Ay! Tons of chickens die! So [the cuc] gave us shots to vaccinate the chickens. We charged people money for the shots, but only three cents a person. But the money we collected wasn’t for the organization, but for the community. If we gathered 20, 30, 40 quetzals, we gave it to the Betterment Committee for the community’s benefit. So then we can explain to people that we’re not taking this money, but rather leaving it here.

Drawn by such economic appeals, Chupolenses flocked to the cuc: within a year, almost every household in the village had joined. Asked now why they chose to participate, most Chupolenses simply state, ‘‘The organization helps the poor,’’ or ‘‘The organization defends our rights,’’ phrases that speak to the organization’s success in linking its own interventions to Father Felipe’s sermons. The cuc’s decisive appropriation of Chupolense hearts and minds, however, came when it chose the market Father Felipe had built to stage its defense of indigenous, rather than divine, interests. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the Guatemalan army began to recruit the soldiers it needed for its increasingly bloody counterinsurgent campaigns by kidnapping indigenous men. Chupol’s center, built precisely at this moment, had inadvertently provided the state with a

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convenient place to find conscripts: in the early 1970s, a number of Chupolense men who are now in their fifties were kidnapped in the market and forced to do military service. Chupolense cuc leaders began to argue that defending the rights Father Felipe had helped the community discover meant keeping the army out of Chupolenses’ hard-won gathering place, an argument that once again spoke to both costumbristas and Catholics. But it was women who felt the imperative to defend Chupol’s market most powerfully, because they experienced the army’s attacks on the market as attacks against their households. In Chupol, labor is strictly divided by gender: women work in the home, while men cultivate the corn their family eats as well as providing their household with the cash it needs for other foodstu√s, clothes, and so forth. Men’s part in this exchange has higher value and is more di≈cult to replace: men are considered the ‘‘heads’’ (ujolom racho’ch) of a household whose other members are imagined as a body needing guidance. As heads, men also own their family’s property, even when that property is part of their wives’ inheritance rather than their own. Thus woman-headed households tend to suffer economically. As their families’ heads, moreover, men are also their households’ political representatives to the outside world. Speaking to strangers and expressing definitive opinions in their presence make Chupolense women uncomfortable, and until the late 1980s, women did not attend community meetings. Even now that women do participate, community authorities (all men) tend to silence them or dismiss their opinions. Without someone to represent them, women are targets for men’s aggression. Men who go on sales trips even for weeks at a time may be physically absent, but they are morally present in the sense that they are doing their part for the household economy. Men who left for a year or two to labor for the Guatemalan state, in contrast, e√ectively abandoned their families. Beginning with their kidnapping, moreover, the Guatemalan army deliberately brutalized its conscripts. Kept in their barracks by real and threatened violence, new recruits learned first that they had the right to kill and second that they had no choice but to kill when so ordered. Indigenous recruits received additional training designed to shame them about, and distance them emotionally from, their indigenous roots, and thus to make them capable of ‘‘murdering people like their own families,’’ as one informant reported to Michael McClintock.π∏ Chupolense women felt that the army’s violent and racist indoctrination techniques not only made it di≈cult for men to come home but also disposed them to be abusive toward their families if they did. Maneuvers like the market uprising thus allowed the cuc to claim that within

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its embrace, ‘‘No one was greater, and no one was less,’’ fulfilling, as neither modernizers nor the Church had been able to, the market’s promise. In helping women use the market to take action against the state as women, the cuc advanced the decay of the gerontocracy that Catholic Action had set in motion. More importantly, it demonstrated that any su≈ciently organized group, no matter how weak and politically unprepossessing its individual members, could defend its own interests. Perhaps it is this sense of empowerment that makes memories of this cuc action so pleasurable for Chupolenses: men and women alike snicker gleefully as they recall how the intruders ‘‘left with their tails between their legs that day.’’ Among Chupolense women, the uprising is also constitutive of their sense that they are subjects possessed of the rights whose existence Father Felipe had revealed. When asked why they joined the organization, women cite its struggle against forcible recruitment as well as its work on behalf of the poor. This particular struggle, in the words of one woman who participated in the uprising, was ‘‘a fight against discrimination against women,’’ not least because it allowed women, for the first time, to behave as political actors. In short, to the extent that Chupolenses were something other than penny capitalists—namely, Catholics, indigenous people, and gendered members of households—modernization made them de facto enemies of capitalism. The matrix of Chupol’s market transformed Cold War anti-Communism into Cold War revolutionary action. Despite the triumph of the uprising, Chupolenses, like hundreds of thousands of other rural Guatemalans, su√ered enormously for their involvement in the Cold War. Shortly after the uprising, the cuc and the Guerrilla Army of the Poor o≈cially merged, incorporating almost every Chupolense, willing or not, into an organization whose goal was immediate military action. For many, guerrilla warfare—or logistical support for guerrilla warfare, which is what the rural indigenous ‘‘social base’’ generally provided—represented a further extension of the rural politics they had developed over successive Cold War interventions. Nevertheless, U.S. cold warriors and their Guatemalan friends had another means of ensuring their calculations would prosper when the market failed to do so: genocidal violence. The soldiers returned to Chupol’s market in late October 1981 and stayed for good: Chupol’s church was used as an army base and ‘‘killing center’’ until 1985, and almost two decades later, a platoon of soldiers stationed in a new base just o√ the highway still occupies Chupol. The army’s counterinsurgent tactics against Chupolenses included wholesale massacres of men, women, children, and old people, as well as the systematic rape of women, indiscriminate violence that inverted and made a mockery of the egali-

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tarian forms of popular mobilization represented in the uprising. ‘‘Liberated’’ by Cold War modernization, Chupolense intentions were not free to determine the consequences of modernizing interventions any more than their oppressors’ intentions had been able to; Chupol’s oppressors, however, had the power to enforce their intentions on their side. Conclusion Rostow had an explanation for ‘‘failed’’ cases of modernization like Chupol. In a 1961 address, o√ended by rural hearts and minds in Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, and the Congo that refused to feel and think as he had intended them to, he blamed ‘‘the e√orts of the international Communist movement to exploit the inherent instabilities of the underdeveloped areas of the non-Communist world.’’ππ As I have shown, however, Rostow’s charge does little to explain why Chupol’s angry mothers behaved as they did. Any influence the ‘‘international Communist movement’’—if the cuc or the Guerrilla Army of the Poor can even be described in these terms—had on these women was both very recent and highly mediated by local histories and local leaders at the time of the uprising. It was not the instability of Chupol’s situation, moreover, that allowed these organizations to disrupt Rostow’s plans, but on the contrary certain very durable features of that situation. Instead, the key to understanding Chupol’s flouting of Rostow’s expectations can be better located in the nature of those expectations. In Rostow’s calculations, the ‘‘rural market’’ figured as an abstract economic entity, devoid of empirical content and thus subject to laws Rostow had already mastered. The uprising happened in Chupol’s rural market, however, because it was a concrete historical formation. By building a market in Chupol, the Cold War Church helped Chupolenses further their nineteenth-century projects for escaping the racialized Guatemalan state, despite or even through Cold War e√orts to shore up that state. As Rostow might have wished, this market helped Chupolenses ‘‘understand,’’ in Sebastián’s words, their own reality, but what they understood was that indigenous people were worth the same as Ladinos and deserved the same treatment. Equipped with this understanding, they could also bring it to bear on oppressive relations among indigenous people, like those between men and women. For Cold War calculations to take e√ect in Guatemala, the uprising shows, those making the calculations had to account for the interests of the soul and the family as well as the pocketbook, allowing those interests to become not only Guatemalan but also indigenous, and thus something for which they failed

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to account. Cold warriors like Rostow set this process of understanding in motion at the price of mastery over its outcome. Notes The research for, and writing of, this essay were supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Fulbright Institute for International Education, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada. I am grateful for the comments of Elizabeth Ferry, Sarah Hill, Daniela Spenser, Gilbert Joseph, and two anonymous reviewers for Duke University Press. 1. Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 111. 2. See Stephen M. Streeter, Managing the Counterrevolution: The United States and Guatemala, 1954–1961 (Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 2000); Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944– 1954 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); and especially Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); as well as Charles D. Brockett, ‘‘An Illusion of Omnipotence: U.S. Policy toward Guatemala, 1954–60,’’ Latin American Politics and Society 44, no. 1 (2002): 91–126. 3. Richard Saull, ‘‘El lugar del sur global en la conceptualización de la guerra fría: Desarrollo capitalista, revolución social y conflicto geopolítico,’’ in Espejos de la guerra fría: México, América Central y el Caribe, ed. D. Spenser (Mexico City: Porrúa, 2004). 4. Michel Callon, ‘‘Introduction: The Embeddedness of Economic Markets in Economics,’’ in The Laws of the Markets (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 3. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 12. 7. Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 74–75. 8. See also James Ferguson, The Anti-politics Machine: ‘‘Development,’’ Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: Why Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard, eds., International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 9. Ferguson, Anti-politics Machine, 256. 10. Escobar, Encountering Development, 34. 11. Ferguson, Anti-politics Machine, 255. 12. Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 82.

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13. Ibid., 6. 14. There were, of course, Third Worldist, Marxist, and Marxian critiques of development that had other developmentalist goals—import substitution industrialization, for example. Opinions are divided about whether to consider these essentially variations of modernization theory or alternatives to it. I do not engage these theories here, however, because I am not addressing nationalist e√orts to develop, which tended to be grounded in such theories, but rather First World to Third World interventions, which almost never were. 15. W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 26. 16. David McCreery, Rural Guatemala, 1760–1940 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 161. McCreery provides a detailed account of this history. 17. Jim Handy, Revolution in the Countryside: Rural Conflict and Agrarian Reform in Guatemala, 1944–1954 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 82. 18. Ibid.; Gleijeses, Shattered Hope, 155–56. 19. Handy, Revolution in the Countryside, 39. 20. Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1982). 21. See Nick Cullather, Secret History: The cia’s Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952–1954 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999). 22. Gleijeses, Shattered Hope, 151. 23. Melvyn P. LeΔer, The Specter of Communism: The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1917–1953 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994), 87. 24. Cited in Cullather, Secret History, 35. 25. Cited in Streeter, Managing the Counterrevolution, 137. 26. Ibid., 149. 27. Ibid., 109. 28. Operations Coordinating Board, Analysis of Internal Security Situation in Guatemala (Pursuant to nsc Action 1290-d), June 1, 1955, Record Group 59, Box 19, State Department Participation in ocb, National Archives, College Park, Md., 5. 29. Streeter, Managing the Counterrevolution, 121. For the cuto√ of U.S. funding, see Gleijeses, Shattered Hope, 227. 30. Streeter, Managing the Counterrevolution, 144, 152. 31. Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre. 32. Ibid., 143. 33. Diario de Centroamérica, Desarrollo integral de las comunidades rurales en Guatemala (Guatemala City: Editorial del Ministerio de Educación Pública, 1956), 15. 34. Streeter, Managing the Counterrevolution, 156. 35. McCreery, Rural Guatemala, 130. 36. Richard Adams, Crucifixion by Power: Essays on Guatemalan National Social Structure, 1944–1966 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970), 269.

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37. Gleijeses, Shattered Hope, 213. 38. Mariano Rossell y Arellano, Carta pastoral del excelentísmo y reverendísimo Señor Don Mariano Rossell Arellano, Arzobispo de Guatemala, sobre la Acción Católica (Guatemala: Tipografía Sánchez and de Guise, 1946), 1. 39. Mariano Rossell y Arellano, ‘‘Carta pastoral del 4 de abril de 1954,’’ in El calvario de Guatemala: Paginas de horror y crimen (Guatemala City: Tipografía Nacional, 1955), 321. 40. McCreery, Rural Guatemala, 137. 41. Kay Warren, The Symbolism of Subordination: Indian Identity in a Guatemalan Town, 2nd ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), 87. 42. Mariano Rossell Arellano, Conferencia del excelentísimo y reverendísmo Monseñor Mariano Rossell Arellano, Arzobispo de Guatemala, en el Tercer Congreso Católico de la Vida Rural el 21 de abril de 1955 en la Ciudad de Panamá (Guatemala City: Tipografía Sánchez and de Guise, 1955), 2. 43. Ibid., 19. 44. Ibid., 15. 45. Ibid., 2. 46. José Luis Crea, ‘‘The Process and the Implications of Change in the Guatemalan Church’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, 1988), 127. 47. Cited in Diócesis del Quiché, El Quiché: El pueblo y su iglesia, 1960–1980 (Santa Cruz del Quiché: Diócesis del Quiché, 1994), 37. 48. Adams, Crucifixion by Power, 283. 49. Diócesis del Quiché, El Quiché, 49. 50. Warren, Symbolism of Subordination, 105. 51. Ibid., 96. 52. Diócesis del Quiché, El Quiché, 62. 53. Ibid., 39. 54. Brian Murphy, ‘‘The Stunted Growth of Campesino Organizations,’’ in Adams, Crucifixion by Power (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970), 473. 55. Ricardo Falla, Quiché Rebelde (Guatemala City: Editorial Universitaria de Guatemala, 1978). 56. Adams, Crucifixion by Power, 290. 57. Episcopado de Guatemala, Carta pastoral del Episcopado guatemalteco sobre los problemas sociales y el peligro comunista en Guatemala (Guatemala: Unión Tipográfica, 1962). 58. See Yvon LeBot, La guerra en tierras mayas: Comunidad, violencia, y modernidad en Guatemala (1970–1992) (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1992); and María del Pilar Hoyos de Asig, Fernando Hoyos ¿Dónde estás? (Guatemala City: Fondo de Cultura Editorial, 1997). 59. Robert Carmack, ‘‘The Story of Santa Cruz Quiché,’’ in Harvest of Violence: The Maya Indians and the Guatemalan Crisis, ed. R. Carmack (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 51.

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60. Comité de Unidad Campesina, ‘‘Presentación,’’ Voz del Comité de Unidad Campesina: Periódico informativo del cuc, April 15, 1978, 1. 61. A group of Chupolenses did participate in a claim on a finca in neighboring Tecpán, but they did not lead the drive to file the claim and were marginalized by the group of Tecpanecos who did. At one point the Tecpanecos even tried to exclude the Chupolenses from participating. See Carlota McAllister, ‘‘Good People: Revolution, Community, and Conciencia in a Maya-K’iche’ Village in Guatemala’’ (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2003), 220–21. 62. Municipalidad de Santo Tomás Chichicastenango, Diagnóstico y Plan del Desarrollo del municipio de Santo Tomás Chichicastenango (Guatemala City: funcede, 1995), 16. 63. As in, for example, Alta Verapaz, as described in Grandin’s The Last Colonial Massacre, where the land is ideal for co√ee growing and where indigenous communities had been almost entirely stripped of their land and their inhabitants converted into a propertyless rural proletariat by the end of the nineteenth century. 64. Ruth Bunzel, Chichicastenango (Guatemala City: Editorial José de Pineda Ibarra, 1981), 42. 65. Censo de Vialidad, Primer semestre 1937, Legajo 2087, Archivo General de Centroamérica, Guatemala City, Guatemala. 66. This essay is based on a total of seventeen months’ fieldwork in Chupol and with Chupolenses in Guatemala City, conducted in several periods over the years between February 1997 and January 2001, as well as on archival research. The primary method I used during fieldwork was participant observation; I lived with a Chupolense family and took part in all manner of community activities, including those organized by di√erent churches and popular organizations as well as more familial events. I also conducted a survey of twenty-five households, as well as numerous informal interviews and fewer formal interviews. Only some of the interviews are taped, in accordance with the expressed desires of my respondents. All comments attributed to Chupolenses within this essay come from interviews or conversations that took place during the time of my fieldwork. All the names of my interlocutors, except for Sebastián, who gave me permission to use his name, have been changed. 67. Sol Tax, Penny Capitalism: A Guatemalan Indian Economy (Washington: Smithsonian Institute of Social Anthropology, 1953). 68. Diocésis del Quiché, El Quiché, 42n. 69. I have no quantitative data that could support or challenge this assertion because I was denied access to parish archives. 70. Bunzel, Chichicastenango, 210. 71. Sol Tax, ‘‘Notes on Santo Tomás Chichicastenango, 1947’’ (microfilm, University of Chicago Library Microfilm Collection), 815. 72. Ibid.

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73. All correspondence in Jefatura Política 2 (El Quiché), Box 11b (Chichicastenango), Archivo General de Centroamérica, Guatemala City, Guatemala. 74. Benedicto Revilla, Guatemala: El terremoto de los pobres (Madrid: Ediciones sedmay, 1976), 73. 75. Actas municipales de Chichicastenango, 129–76 (quotation on p. 120). 76. Ibid. 77. W. W. Rostow, ‘‘Guerrilla Warfare in Underdeveloped Areas,’’ in The Viet-Nam Reader: Articles and Documents on American Foreign Policy and the Viet-Nam Crisis, ed. M. G. Raskin and B. B. Fall (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 110.

DANIELA SPENSER

Standing Conventional Cold War History on Its Head

Over the last decade or so, studies of the Cold War have mushroomed globally. In from the Cold hopes to contribute to this ongoing intellectual ferment. Yet rather than proposing new paradigms for Cold War history—in this case, for Latin America—the volume shifts the focus of attention away from the bipolar conflict, the preoccupation of much of the so-called new Cold War history, to showcase research and discussion centering on the grassroots, where social, political, and cultural conflicts actually brewed. Thus the contributors focus their attentions on villages and towns both above ground and ‘‘underground,’’ on statehouses and diplomatic boardrooms manned by Latin American and international governing elites, on the relations among states regionally, and only rarely on the dynamics between the two great superpowers themselves. In the process, the volume seeks to contribute more generally to the study of the Cold War in the global South. The book reinforces Odd Arne Westad’s claim ‘‘that the most important aspects of the Cold War were neither military nor strategic, nor Europe-centered, but connected to political and social development in the Third World.’’∞ So what do we now know after we have incorporated Latin America more meaningfully into Cold War studies? Bringing the study ‘‘in from the cold,’’ as it were, we have taken pains to transcend dichotomizing paradigms of interpretation while including often marginalized human subjects at the fulcrum of the story. We have placed national interests, state policy, and the international economy into the political-cultural realm, in which the state’s power is deployed or contested through representations, symbolic systems, and new technologies, recognizing that the exercise of power not only flows from the policies and interventions of states but also works through language and symbolic systems in everyday practices. This collection contributes to a conceptualization of the Cold War that is

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attuned to the logic of Latin American history and does not merely replicate the standard timeline of the postwar world. Unlike Europe and Asia, which were engulfed in the hardening of bipolar conflict following the breakdown of the wartime alliance, during the war and its aftermath some parts of Latin America experienced a democratic spring that featured participation by labor and the Left in politics, social and economic improvements for the poorer sectors of society, and heightened popular expectations for state-administered economic justice and national inclusion. Initially the United States encouraged this democratic e√ervescence, but as the Cold War gathered force elsewhere, the reifying logic of the conflict began to harden in Latin America as well. The democratic resurgence was aborted by direct or indirect pressure from the United States and by the repression exercised by local elites. Local elites were well practiced in marginalizing society’s lower strata and now sought to benefit politically and economically from a close alliance with the United States in an era promising an unprecedented expansion of the international economy. What followed were new cycles of radical and revolutionary projects and repression as elites and popular classes participated in local, regional, and national political contests over land, labor, and the control of markets, natural resources, and state power. These struggles and the leftist and rightist ideologies that fueled them transcended national borders and attracted the attention of one or both of the superpowers. Whereas the United States sought to contain the popular upsurge in Latin America, which was encroaching on U.S. interests, the Soviet Union saw the popular struggles as an opportunity to weaken its adversary in its own backyard. The result was an international civil war that pitted the United States against the Soviet Union and opposed di√erent views of social citizenship and of the shape that the state’s relations to society should take. This contest between revolutionary and counterrevolutionary forces could become ferociously violent, but its most gruesome and well-documented details are not a principal focus of this volume. What the book does demonstrate is the degree to which Latin America became part of the history of the United States, and the United States part of the history of Latin America, with the Soviet Union alertly poised in the background, ready to capitalize on opportunities that might arise. The essays collected here draw on a variety of new sources culled from oral testimonies and truth commissions, and from the archives of the superpowers and their satellites—major actors like Cuba, Argentina, and Brazil—but also from repositories in countries such as Mexico, whose role in the Latin American Cold War is less easily categorized. Unfortunately, the release of new documents has often led prematurely to claims of ‘‘new’’ histories of the Cold War (most

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notably where the history of Communism and espionage is concerned), e√ectively fetishizing the process of documentary disclosure in order to reinforce existing master narratives.≤ The volume’s contributors believe that the Cold War as a global phenomenon should be studied in a variety of ways, particularly by raising new questions about understudied social and cultural subjects and by reading ‘‘old’’ and ‘‘new’’ sources alike with fresh eyes. That said, we recognize that the declassification of documents under pressure from civil society in both Latin America and the United States has had an enormous impact on the shift of power inside the countries concerned. Declassification has helped to bring assassins to justice, advanced accountability for human rights abuses, restored memories of the ravaged past, and thus brought back to Latin Americans histories that had been denied by secrecy. The ongoing recovery of archives and memory in Latin America has made possible new departures for a truly global understanding of Cold War history. The declassification of new documents has also been an eminently democratic process, since many of the formerly secret findings have been digitized and are now accessible on the Internet. New documents have helped to redress the balance between fact and myth regarding the involvement of the Soviet Union in Latin America. The Soviet archives have demonstrated that the Soviet Union was rather oblivious to the Western Hemisphere until the outbreak of the Cuban revolution in 1959. After its victory in World War II and the expansion of its influence in eastern, central, and southern Europe, the Soviet Union still showed less interest in Latin America than it had after the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution.≥ The Kremlin cautiously approached Cuba’s revolutionaries, knowing full well the geopolitical realities in play. Indeed, it was not until the disastrous émigré invasion at Playa Girón, in April 1961, that Soviet perceptions about U.S. strength in Latin America changed. The placement of long-range missiles in Cuba in the summer of 1962 stemmed from the belief that a global shift of power in favor of the Soviet Union and socialism had occurred. The missile crisis of October 1962 unfolded as it did because the Soviet Union sought to act on that assumption. The United States, of course, refused to accept the presence of nuclear arms and the extension of Soviet military power in its ‘‘backyard.’’ Was the world on the brink of war in October 1962? It was, but not solely because of the Soviet Union. Newly released Cuban documents and the encounter in 1992 (on the thirtieth anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis) between Robert McNamara, former secretary of defense, and Fidel Castro have revealed that after the United States gave Khrushchev an ultimatum to withdraw the weapons, the Soviet leader ordered their evacuation without remonstrations. At

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the time, Khrushchev—and McNamara—were unaware that Cuba’s political and military leaders would have ordered the use of the missiles had the United States invaded the island, and had the Soviet military personnel stationed there possessed the key and given it to the Cubans to activate these nuclear weapons. The manner in which the Soviets withdrew the arms left a profound scar on Cuban-Soviet relations while bolstering Cuba’s determination to defend itself by any means available. Indeed, Cuban support for armed conflict in Latin America during the 1960s should be seen as one of the consequences of the Caribbean crisis. The other unexpected outcome was the humiliation of the Soviet Union before the entire world because it was forced to renege on its previous pledge to defend Cuba militarily. Contrary to the traditional historiography, Soviet documents, particularly those from the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, show that following the crisis, the Soviet Union supported armed conflict in Latin America owing to its fear of losing Cuba—or, worse still, the fear that Cuba might turn to the Chinese Communists for aid. The Caribbean crisis and its aftermath illustrate the degree to which Cuba could act independently of the Soviet leadership, as well as the limits of that autonomy. Cuba continued to support armed struggle in Latin America until the Soviet Union began to tighten the screws on its supply of oil and other goods that were fundamental to the Cuban economy. But if it could not support liberation movements in Latin America, Cuba was determined to step up its involvement in Africa. We now know from the cia and the intelligence branch of the State Department that when U.S. policymakers lambasted Castro as a Soviet puppet, Castro openly criticized the Soviet Union’s limited aid to Third World governments and liberation movements. Aided as well by newly released East European sources—Czech, German, and Hungarian—we have come to appreciate that the Soviet Union joined the Cuban e√ort to support liberation movements, not the other way round. One of the new chapters in the story line of the Cold War is Cuban involvement in Africa for reasons of self-defense, idealism, and racial justice. It also confirms Cuba’s independence from Moscow. As long as Washington persisted in its aggression against Cuba, the best defense was not to counterattack, which would have been suicidal, but to wage an o√ensive elsewhere in the Third World, gaining friends and eroding U.S. influence in the process. Thus Cuba defended itself by attacking its aggressor, not where it was strong, in Latin America, but where it was weak, in Africa. Cuba was vulnerable and had to be cautious, but it enjoyed an enormous prestige among the opposition forces struggling against

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colonial or illegitimate governments in Africa, where there was significantly less risk of clashing directly with the United States. The Cuban intervention—or ‘‘revolutionary mission’’—in Africa had unexpected windfalls. In helping to win the war in Angola and Namibia and by preventing South Africa from dominating the region, the joint success of Cuban, Angolan, and Namibian troops humbled the United States and weakened the apartheid regime in South Africa. This is not to say that Cuba could have expended this formidable e√ort without the economic and military support it received from the Soviet Union or without the shield, however fragile, that Moscow extended against the U.S.’s aggression. Nonetheless this economic and military dependence did not translate into being a Soviet client, at least not in Africa. Parallel to Cuba’s spreading of revolution, Argentina transnationalized its apparatus for repression to stymie it. Despite Argentine military aid to the regime of Anastasio Somoza, in 1979 the Sandinista revolution triumphed in Nicaragua. The fall of the Somoza dynasty, believed to have occurred because a weak and inept Carter administration let it happen, convinced the Argentinean military that hemispheric security was in grave danger. Even though the Argentine military government had defeated insurgent groups within Argentina itself, it believed that the insurgents’ existence beyond the nation’s borders required attention as well. For the Argentine military caste, Communism and subversion were global phenomena that had to be eradicated, no matter their location, for the sake of the common good and preservation of the moral and social order. In the process, Central America—particularly Nicaragua—became a center for diverse geopolitical confrontations, pitting the Argentine military against the guerrilla organizations it had defeated at home but confronted in Central America, Israel against the Palestine Liberation Organization, and Cubans in exile against the regime of Fidel Castro. In its crusade to transnationalize the dirty war, the Argentine military exported arms, counterinsurgency doctrine, and expertise in the practice of state terror. To advance its goals, the military counted on a well-constructed network of like-minded Latin American, North American, and Asian anti-Communists, and also on conservative sectors of domestic civil society. In the process, the military established a wide international network, which included the sharing of logistical information and the ideas and techniques of counterinsurgency war, as well as an illegal trade in arms, drugs, and money laundering independent of the United States. From the experience of French counterinsurgency warfare in Algeria and the U.S. experience in Southeast Asia, Argentina’s generals adopted

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the lesson that any distinction between combatants and the civilian population should be erased and that national borders had to subordinated to the ideological dimension of the East-West confrontation. The enormous military power that went into combating the insurgency typically proved stronger than the ideology, willpower, and strength of insurgent left guerrilla movements. The Cold War was fought on many fronts. Whereas the first part of the book traces the ‘‘Latin Americanization’’ of the conflict on the state level, the second part focuses on everyday contests over culture and the representation of the Cold War in Latin America. Here, too, without denying the geopolitical dominance of the superpowers, the contributors focus attention on other actors who have hitherto been marginalized in the historical record. Several authors examine in rich detail a transnational cultural and labor history of the Cold War. The period we now know as the Cold War era was often violent and traumatic in Latin America; an account of the way events have been represented, lived through, and remembered is a critical part of that story. In reengaging the Cold War in Latin America, this volume gives particular attention to the hegemonic projects that were a significant component of the United States’ antiCommunist crusade. Clearly these e√orts did not always produce the desired results. It was easier for the United States to militarily topple governments it did not like than to win the hearts and minds of a nation’s population through cultural and labor diplomacy or modernization projects. The United States used culture industries to promote its economic and diplomatic initiatives and to convince Latin Americans that the ‘‘American way’’ was the best route to the future. In Mexico, for instance, the United States was concerned about the unwillingness of the governing elite to explicitly choose sides in the Cold War, as well as with the Soviet Union’s attempts to exploit Third World neutralism in the local mass media. To counter both, Washington deployed the United States Information Agency to make its presence felt through the medium of film. Project Pedro was the agency’s initiative to take control of a Mexican newsreel in order to propagate Washington’s anti-Communist mission in Latin America. The newsreel began operations in February 1957, showcasing the United States’ leadership in science, its support for decolonization and nonintervention in the postcolonial world, and the progress it was making in domestic race and ethnic relations. Thus newsreel programs focused on the professional achievements of African Americans and on initiatives to improve working conditions for Mexican braceros, even as they took the Kremlin to task for undermining the U.S.-led cause of world peace. Even so, the project failed in its mission, in part because Mexico’s authori-

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tarian but nationalistic state exercised substantial control over the content of newsreels and banned footage it deemed unfavorable to Mexico’s image. Furthermore, the Mexican media were not amenable to negative representations of Cuba, and anti-Castro propaganda was deemed unacceptable—all of which compromised Washington’s ideological agenda. But the most important factor that limited the project’s impact in Mexican movie theaters was not state intervention but public reception. Mexican audiences were suspicious of stories that smacked of paid advertisements, demanding content that was authentically Mexican and largely apolitical. Representations of popular culture and social amusements made the newsreel credible in the public eyes, whereas the ‘‘message’’ footage that came from New York and infused programs with the desired Cold War content did not play with Mexican theatergoers. Ultimately the Mexicanization of U.S. resources in the political and cultural environment of Mexico City diminished Project Pedro’s ability to Americanize Mexican mass media and propagate Washington’s foreign policy. The project was abandoned in 1961. It may not have been a coincidence that as Project Pedro played out unsuccessfully, the Cuban revolution was exerting an enormous influence on the Mexican population, quickening the pace of internal political developments there. Witness the anti-American riots that took place in Morelia, Michoacán, and other Mexican cities when Cuba was attacked by a U.S.-orchestrated force at Playa Girón (the Bay of Pigs) in April 1961. At that moment, the young and energetic island revolution served as an invidious comparison for Mexicans, indicting the cynical regime that had emerged out of their own revolution. Mexicans’ spontaneous defense of Cuba’s revolution in Morelia was simultaneously a critique of the Mexican revolution’s unfulfilled promises and an implicit endorsement of Mexico’s own democratic spring during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas in the 1930s. Thus the sacking and burning of the Instituto Mexicano–Norteamericano, in Lázaro Cárdenas’s home state of Michoacán, gave vent to popular outrage at a moment when the former president and Mexican revolutionary icon had himself become a vocal supporter of the Cuban revolutionary process. The sacking of the cultural institute in Morelia highlights the fact that the Cold War narrative for Latin America reads di√erently when viewed through a local lens. From the U.S. government perspective, the attack on the institute reflected the expansion of the Soviet Union in the Western Hemisphere following the successful Cuban revolution. From the perspective of people in Morelia, the attack was motivated by long-standing national sentiment, catalyzed and radicalized by the Cuban revolution, not by Communism. The people who

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attended classes in the institute were rather ambivalent about its destruction: probing into the memory of the event revealed the sentiment that not everything American was associated with imperialism. The institute itself symbolized upward social mobility at a time when closer association with North American commerce and industry, and Mexico’s identity as a stable and reliable neighbor and ally, were regarded to be part and parcel of Mexico’s ‘‘miraculous’’ postwar economic boom. Without question, the unleashing of U.S. capitalism after World War II was a strategy of combating Communism and refashioning Mexico and Latin America in the image of the United States; but that was not apparent or troubling for most Mexicans, who even today regard the period nostalgically as a ‘‘golden age’’ of postwar consumption. The virtues of the American way of life were di√used in many di√erent ways throughout Latin America in the era of the Alliance for Progress, not least through labor diplomacy. Repeatedly, U.S. industrial and agricultural entrepreneurs, with the support of their government, encouraged Mexican employees on both sides of the Rio Grande to embrace American values and liberalism. Their initiatives touted good salaries, decent housing, welfare benefits such as company pensions, employee training, paid holidays, and education for workers’ children—all of which were intended to forestall labor conflict. Whether they were autoworkers at a Chrysler plant in Mexico or farmhands in California, Mexican workers took these messages to heart. However, when the promises made by employers did not necessarily materialize into tangible or sustained benefits, workers organized to demand their fulfillment. This course of action surprised management and set workers on a collision course with their American employers and the Mexican authorities, for in the Cold War era, labor insurgency was automatically labeled as Communist. Rather than redressing labor demands, American employers of the 1960s embraced the Mexican practice of creating employer-controlled unions and dismissing labor leaders as Communists. Such company unions o√ered no real representation and brought their members few benefits. A U.S. automobile manufacturer in Mexico City stood by in 1969 as workers were shot defending the American dream that employees had been encouraged to nurture at the workplace. Whether the rhetoric of democracy and freedom was embraced by autoworkers in Mexico City, or Mexican laborers in rural California, U.S. governments and employers found it di≈cult to live up to the values and promises trumpeted at home and abroad during the 1960s. The Bracero Program, implemented from 1942 to 1964, became yet another transnational arena in the Cold War and was disbanded in the face of serious ethno-racial and labor concerns on

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the part of agricultural workers. The labor contract program that brought Mexicans into California’s fields had a negative impact on rural wages in the U.S. Southwest, as Mexican men were willing to work for less than domestic workers, to the great benefit of regional employers. Under such conditions, the growers were able to avert unionization by discontented workers and even turn the new arrivals into strikebreakers. All the while, the U.S. government portrayed the Bracero Program as a model of anti-Communism and hemispheric unity, emphasizing that Mexican guest workers were taught the methods of modern agriculture that would serve to build a more modern and democratic Mexico. Ultimately, however, deplorable working conditions and the e√orts of the workers’ dynamic Chicano leadership, which appropriated the ideological discourse of the U.S. government for the benefit of the rank and file, sealed the fate of the Bracero Program. In their quest for better working conditions in California’s fields, rural workers came together under the able leadership of César Chávez. Using Mexican cultural idioms and icons, even as they mingled with domestic antiwar protesters and benefited from an increasing popular consciousness for ethnic and racial equality, California’s agricultural workers furthered their goals by organizing around the principles of civil rights, ethnic diversity, and the well-being of an expanded American society. Predictably, in keeping with their Cold War mind-set, government o≈cials and employers reflexively characterized the farmworkers’ e√orts and other protest movements of the day as Communist. Nevertheless, given the antipathy directed toward the Bracero Program, which, the farmworkers alleged, betrayed the interests of working people on both sides of the border, its cancellation was relatively easy. For their part, right-wing opponents of the program used the specter of Communists crossing the U.S. border as another argument for its abolition, one that also enabled them to discredit the multicultural and multiracial labor movement at home. Throughout Latin American history, the political Right in power has often been merciless with the opposition. The tenets of the Cold War provided repressive governments with unique opportunities to defend their rule. The manner in which the Brazilian military regime handled student and urban guerrilla movements showcases other Cold War–era uses of cultural representation and power —particularly the masculine state’s repression of women’s resistance and political participation. Whereas in the authoritarian milieu of Mexico and the more ‘‘liberal’’ political culture of the United States demands from below were labeled as Communist, under Brazil’s dictatorial military regime of the 1960s, confrontations between the state and its opponents were also represented in gen-

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dered and sexualized terms. In a strait-laced environment of traditional gender and sexual propriety, the military government and mainstream media regarded the participation of young women in student politics and guerrilla movements as a breakdown of society’s moral and social norms, which threatened the authority of the regime. Seen in these terms, good women turned bad through sex; they engaged in public a√airs because of depravation. Stigmatized accordingly by the press, they ‘‘deserved’’ and received brutal treatment upon incarceration. This eroticization of the actions of women militants and the perverse punishments meted out to them were meant to deafen others to their political expression and to smear the opposition to military rule as being part of an international Communist conspiracy that sought to morally undermine the nation through its youth. Unlike Mexico, which began implementing its revolutionary reforms before the Soviet Union existed, the nations of Central America attempted to bring about structural economic, social, and political changes when the Cold War climate was engulfing the world and its polarizing logic was transforming the region. Frustrations emanating from aborted reformist projects fueled revolutionary movements, which were often influenced by the Cuban revolution and aided by the Fidelista regime. The Soviet Union occasionally assisted these movements with logistical support and military training. The United States, in concert with local elites, reacted to the political e√ervescence in Central America in di√erent ways at di√erent times. Counterinsurgency measures were combined with modernization projects to urbanize and integrate local populations into the global market, emphasizing models of good citizenship. However, most modernization projects did not bear the expected fruits, in part because they were not delivered in the form of a comprehensive financial package, such as the one featured in the Marshall Plan, which brought the European economy back to its feet after World War II. Given the enormous economic, social, and ethnic disparities within countries, and given the prevalence of undemocratic and repressive governments, the money delivered failed to alleviate the needs of the population or, worse, did not reach the targeted sectors at all. The result was that social and political discontents continued to simmer, despite the e√orts to advance modernization and construct good citizens. In the final chapter of part III, we encounter a scenario of Cold War resistance and repression in a Maya village in Guatemala during the late 1970s; here indigenous women armed with sticks, rocks, and torches stood up to soldiers who had arrived to press the village’s young men into military service. These women and men, conscious of their rights and their capacity to resist encroachment on

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them, represent another unanticipated outcome of the development strategies designed by Cold War architects to contain Communism. In their e√orts to integrate rural Guatemala into the capitalist world system according to the logic of the Alliance for Progress, theorists of modernization failed to foresee that the construction of the Pan-American Highway next to the village, or the creation of a local market, could endow the villagers with a di√erent worldview from the one they envisioned for them. Thus ‘‘high modernist’’ development planners in the United States and Guatemala were neither prepared nor equipped to understand how indigenous culture and a suddenly more socially oriented Catholic Church could transform both marketplace and religion into tools for challenging the terribly exploitative and racist structures of Guatemala’s dominant society and economy. Of course, the other face of the Alliance for Progress was Cold War security, reflected in an escalation of arms shipments and military training. Ultimately, when Guatemala’s counterinsurgency war heated up in the late 1970s and the state came calling for indigenous conscripts to fight the guerrilla units that had been organized in the area, the Maya women’s mobilization for dignity and resistance proved futile. As scholars take stock of the trajectory of the Latin American Cold War in this and other recent works, what remains to be done to understand it better? To begin with, we need to explore other Cold War arenas as systematically and creatively—locally, nationally, and transnationally—as we have done for Mexico and some parts of Central America and the Caribbean. Here I have in mind high-profile hot spots such as the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Grenada; relatively neglected cases such as Venezuela, Bolivia, and Peru; and the entire region subsumed by the Operation Condor network. What remains to be done is defined not by geography but by the depth of inquiry and research. We need to get a better hold on the specificity of Latin America in the global Cold War. When we examine di√erent societies’ positioning in the bipolar conflict, the roles—enthusiastic, ambivalent, and inadvertent—played by Latin American governments and elites, and also by diverse components of the political opposition, in the complex and changing trajectory of the conflict will emerge more clearly. Ideological a≈liations were often tempered by historical contingency, making strange bedfellows and pitting actors against one another for temporary advantage in confrontations that were otherwise beyond their capacity to influence. In our e√ort to continue exploring local cold wars in as much specificity and depth as some authors have undertaken in this book, we must incorporate a burgeoning testimonial literature in Mexico, Central America, and the Southern Cone that documents the dynamics of guerrilla movements and

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dirty wars, enables an analysis of women in arms as comrades and sexual partners of men in arms, and furthers new studies of the role of the family and of personal interactions and bonds in such extraordinary times. Nor should we cease to pay attention to ethnicity and religion, variables that Cold War ideologues often attempted to deny or minimize, but which were central to many political and social movements in Latin America and the rest of the Third World.∂ The history of the Latin American Cold War will also profit from a deeper understanding of the multiple connections and networks, horizontal and vertical, linking relevant actors and agencies within the region and beyond. For example, we desperately lack a study of Cuba’s role in Latin America that possesses the same depth as Gleijeses’s treatment of Cuba’s mission in Africa. Here the dearth of Cuban sources has been a major impediment, but this obstacle might be partially overcome by oral histories and the identification of alternative primary sources in the countries involved. Similarly, despite several recent studies, the full extent of the transnational network of right-wing repression that was Operation Condor still remains to be teased out by historians. Finally, much research needs to be done to bring the study of the Soviet Union’s projection in Latin America up to the level that has been reached for Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, but only for Cuba in the Western Hemisphere. The material is plentiful in Soviet archives and those of its former Eastern European allies. However, we need to avoid the misconception that the Soviet system was a monolith obeying one iron chain of command. We need to better understand the institutional dynamics of the Soviet bureaucracy, particularly the functioning of its foreign policy apparatus, which was distinct from, and often subordinate to, the Committee for State Security (or kgb, in its Russian acronym), but lacked coordination with it. By learning from our colleagues in the field of Soviet studies, we will better equip ourselves to distinguish slogans from reality and to appreciate that there was competition among the state and party agencies, with each one asserting its primacy in the state.∑ We have yet to explore the richness of the archives in the former Soviet bloc, which presently manifest greater openness than the Russian archives, and certainly the Cuban archives. Here Piero Gleijeses’s research in the archives of the former German Democratic Republic represents a most promising start. The first round of research in the Eastern European archives shows, for instance, that although the Soviet leadership held sway over each country of the bloc and required its acquiescence to a broader unity, there was no unanimity with regard to the countries’ attitudes toward the Third World.∏ After all, the aid that each ally was required to deliver came at the expense of its already undernourished

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national economy. Furthermore, when deliveries of aid in military hardware were discovered by the Western press or intelligence services, the reputation of these Eastern governments su√ered in the West, with whom they traded and maintained diplomatic relations. Thus we may find that not all Warsaw Pact countries were willing to share the burden of aid to the Latin American national liberation movements. Research in the Bulgarian as well as the Soviet and Czechoslovak archives has shed light on arms deliveries to, and intelligence training in, Sandinista Nicaragua and the other isthmian countries engulfed in the guerrilla wars of the 1980s.π That is hardly surprising. What needs to be established in such research is the negotiation that went on behind closed doors between Central America’s guerrilla, Communist, and labor leaders and the political-military branches of each Eastern European government. Only then will we better understand the cycles of Soviet and Eastern bloc engagement with Latin America in relation to major Cold War watersheds such as the Vietnam War and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and vis-à-vis the very di√erent regimes that Brezhnev and Gorbachev, Nixon and Reagan, represented. A particularly valuable source surfaced in the 1990s: a fond (record group) 89, which was created in the Russian State Archives of Contemporary History (rgani). The documents that make up this record group include yearly transfers of monetary aid to worldwide Communist parties and some leftist labor unions between 1955 and 1989. This important source has yet to be explored for most of the Latin American countries, although it has yielded some useful material for Chile.∫ Of course, there still remains the unique opportunity to interview key actors from the Cold War era, such as Nikolai Leonov, vice director of the kgb between 1983 and 1991, vice director of the Department for Analysis and Information between 1973 and 1982, and second in command of the kgb’s Department for Latin America between 1968 and 1972. Interviewed in 1998 in the Centro de Estudios Públicos in Santiago de Chile, Leonov’s testimony underscored that Latin America was not a place where the Soviet Union sought to provoke a revolution but rather ‘‘a hunting ground rich in opportunities for e√orts that might be carried out against the United States.’’Ω Chile under the Unidad Popular government, for example, provided an opportunity to show the world that socialism could triumph via the ballot box. In 1971 a substantial amount of Soviet aid to Chile reflected that optimism. By 1973, however, fear of Allende’s demise had replaced such confidence, and the weapons and financial aid that had been earmarked for Chile were canceled.∞≠ Another glimpse into the kgb, which is otherwise closed to researchers, is the recently published second

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volume of Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin’s smuggled handwritten notes from the intelligence bureau’s archives. The notes showcase Soviet intelligence priorities around the globe, including Latin America, and reveal the understanding that, ultimately, the course of world history would be determined in the Third World.∞∞ It should come as no surprise that In from the Cold constitutes more than a detached narrative and analysis of the Latin American Cold War. If the contributors’ essays sympathize with, and occasionally betray a touch of moral outrage for, the victims of repression, it is because the e√ects of the Cold War in Latin America were often devastating. When seeking reform or revolution, Latin American countries responded to local and regional socioeconomic and political dislocations, which the superpowers tried to turn to their advantage with greater or lesser success. Whereas the Soviet Union no longer exists and the old bipolar conflict is over, the legacy and consequences of the defeat of the era’s nationalist reformers and revolutionary Left is manifest in Latin America today. Indeed, can we even say that the Latin American Cold War has ended? There is certainly continuity between the Cold War and post–Cold War period in the unsettled state of U.S.–Cuban relations. These relations respond as much to the lobbying of Miami’s Cuban community as to the U.S. government’s unswerving opposition to the hemisphere’s last (and greatly diminished) Communist regime. And the United States has manufactured a new enemy in the person of the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, for today, as during the Cold War, U.S. foreign policy seeks to control the flow of capital, goods, and labor, only now in the name of global civilization. Its unipolar dominance allows the United States to operate relatively freely, imposing an imperial infrastructure in the name of free markets and democracy while labeling actors that stand in its way rogue nations, terrorists, narcotra≈ckers, antidemocrats, and harborers of weapons of mass destruction. The Cold War also continues in memories of a ravaged past—memories that fester in large part owing to the fact that many of the bosses of once-formidable security forces still enjoy a measure of immunity, notwithstanding e√orts by victimized families to bring such perpetrators to justice. All in all, the Latin American Cold War failed to solve the social, political, and economic problems over which its right- and left-wing participants contended. In material terms, the majority of countries in the hemisphere ended up as poor as they were before the conflict. The global struggle impoverished the region even further, for the manner in which superpower antagonism played itself out in Latin America dealt a serious blow to popular democracy and the defense of

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human rights. Without the Cold War, Latin America would be a very di√erent place today. Notes 1. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 396. 2. See John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003). 3. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive II: The kgb and the World (London: Allen Lane, 2005), 4. 4. Westad, The Global Cold War, 400; and see the chapters in this volume by McAllister and Pitti. 5. Moshe Lewin, The Soviet Century (New York: Verso, 2005), 348–49. 6. Daniela Spenser, ‘‘Operation Manuel: Czechoslovakia and Cuba,’’ Cold War International History Project e-Dossier no. 7, 2003, http://cwihp.si.edu. 7. See, for example, Jordan Baev, ‘‘Bulgaria and the Armed Conflict in Central America, 1979–1989,’’ unpublished paper, 2001. 8. Lora Soroka, comp., Archives of the Communist Party and Soviet State: Guide to the Microfilm Collection in the Hoover Institution Archives; Fond 89: Communist Party of the Soviet Union on Trial (Palo Alto, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 2001); and see the series of articles published in Estudios Públicos by Olga Ulianova, Eugenia Fediakova, Arturo Fontaine Talavera, and Ximena Hinzpeter Kirberg, which can be consulted at http:// www.cepchile.cl. 9. Nikolai Leonov, ‘‘La inteligencia soviética en América Latina durante la guerra fría,’’ Estudios Públicos 73 (summer 1999): 39. 10. Ibid., 56. 11. Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive II, 1–24.

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Archives argentina Argentina Center for Legal and Social Studies, Buenos Aires (cels) brazil Arquivo Público do Estado do Rio de Janeiro —Departamento de Ordem Política e Social cuba Archives of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party, Havana Centro de Información de las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias, Havana (cifar) europe Archive of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party Archive of New Documents, Warsaw, Poland National Archives of Hungary State Central Archive of the Czech Republic g uat e m a l a Actas Municipales de Chichicastenango, Guatemala Archivo General de Centroamérica, Guatemala City, Guatemala mexico Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City (agn) —Dirección General de Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales —Ramo Presidentes Adolfo López Mateos —Ramo Presidentes Adolfo Ruiz Cortines

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Secretaría de Educación Pública (sep) Secretaría de Trabajo y Previsión Social–Registro de Asociaciones (stpsra) u n i t e d s tat e s Archives of the San Francisco Archdiocese, Menlo Park, California —Donald McDonnell Papers Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley —Cambodia–Kent State Strike Collection —Social Protest Collection Beinecke Library, Yale University —Jacques Levy Papers Binational Centers Permanent Record (File Cards), Washington —Public Diplomacy Historical Collection California State Archives, Sacramento, California —Earl Warren Papers Ford International Archive, Dearborn, Michigan (fia) Green Library, Stanford University, Stanford, California —Ernesto Galarza Papers —Fred Ross Papers —Herman Gallegos Papers —James L. Vizzard Papers —Victor Salandini Papers Jimmy Carter Library, Atlanta, Georgia Library of Congress, Manuscript Division —Volkogonov Collection Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, Texas (lbjl) —National Security File, Country File —National Security File, National Intelligence Estimate National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland (nara) —Country Project Files, Motion Picture and Sound Recording Branch, Record Group 306 —Country Project Files, Motion Picture Rights and Permissions Files, Record Group 306 —Country Project Files, O≈ce of Research, Special Reports 1953–63, Record Group 306 —Country Project Files (1951–64), Record Group 306 —John F. Kennedy Assassination Collection, Record Group 263 —National Security File, National Intelligence Estimate —Pol 1 Afr-US, Subject-Numeric Files: 1963–73, Record Group 59 —Pol 1 Cuba, Subject-Numeric Files: 1963–73, Record Group 59

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—State Department Central Files, Record Group 56 —State Department Central Files, Record Group 59: Mexico Papers, 1960–63, 1967–69 —State Department Central Files, Record Group 286 National Security Archive, Washington (nsa) —Archive of the President of the Federation of Russia —Argentina Declassification Project, 1975–84 —Guatemala Collection —Panama Collection University of Chicago Library, Microfilm Collection Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan —Fred Ross Papers —National Sharecroppers Fund —National Farm Workers Association (nfwa) Papers —United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (ufwoc) Papers —United Farm Workers Presidential Papers

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Contributors

Ariel C. Armony is the Audrey Wade Hittinger Katz and Sheldon Toby Katz Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor of Government at Colby College. His areas of expertise include democracy and democratization, civil society, citizenship, and interAmerican relations. He is the author of The Dubious Link: Civic Engagement and Democratization and Argentina, the United States, and the Anti-Communist Crusade in Central America, 1977–1984. Steven J. Bachelor is an assistant professor of history at Fairfield University. He received his Ph.D. in history at Yale University and is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Miracle to Maquila: Mexico in the American Century. Thomas S. Blanton is the director of the independent nongovernmental National Security Archive at George Washington University, Washington, and the series editor of the Archive’s Web (CD, book, and microform of declassified documents). He is the author of White House E-Mail: The Top Secret Computer Messages the Reagan-Bush White House Tried to Destroy (1995), the coauthor of The Chronology (1987), and a contributor to Litigation under the Federal Open Government Laws and Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons since 1940 (1998). Seth Fein teaches international and transnational history at Yale. His book Transnational Projections: The United States in the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema is forthcoming from Duke University Press. He is now working on a book and a film about television and U.S. foreign policy in Latin America in the 1960s. Piero Gleijeses is a professor of American foreign policy at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. His publications include Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976, which was awarded the 2003 Robert Ferrell Prize of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations; Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954; and The Dominican

428

contributors

Crisis: The 1965 Constitutionalist Revolt and American Intervention. He is currently writing a book on Cuban and U.S. policy in southern Africa from 1976 to 1994. Gilbert M. Joseph is the Farnam Professor of History and International Studies, and the recent director of Latin American and Iberian Studies at Yale University. His most recent books are Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico Since 1940, coedited with Anne Rubenstein and Eric Zolov (2001), and Reclaiming the Political in Latin American History: Essays from the North (2001)—both published by Duke University Press. He is currently working on a book that examines transnational lives and cultural encounters in the American Century. Victoria Langland is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Davis. She is currently finishing a book manuscript entitled ‘‘Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and Collective Memory in Authoritarian Brazil’’ and is a coeditor, with Elizabeth Jelin, of Monumentos, memoriales y marcas territoriales (Siglo XXI, 2003). Carlota McAllister is an assistant professor of anthropology at York University in Toronto, Canada. She is currently preparing a book on her work in Chupol entitled ‘‘The Good Road: Conscience and Consciousness in a Postrevolutionary Guatemalan Village’’ and beginning new research on environmental activism in the Chilean Patagonia. Stephen Pitti is a professor of history and American studies and the director of the Ethnicity, Race, and Migration Program at Yale University. He is the author of The Devil in Silicon Valley: Race, Mexican Americans, and Northern California (2002) and is working on a biography of César Chávez that will be published by Yale University Press. Daniela Spenser is a senior researcher at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social in Mexico City. Her recent edited books include La Internacional Comunista en México: Los primeros tropiezos (2006), En busca de una nación soberana: Las relaciones internacionales de México, siglos XIX y XX (2006), and Espejos de la guerra fría: México, América Central y el Caribe (2004). She is currently writing a book on the early years of the Mexican Communist Party. Eric Zolov is an associate professor of history at Franklin & Marshall College. He is the author of Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture (1999) and coeditor of Rockin’ Las Americas: The Global Politics of Rock in Latin/o America (2004), Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico Since 1940 (2001), and Latin America and the United States: A Documentary History (2000). His current research focuses on the impact of the Cuban revolution on Mexican political culture and U.S.-Mexican relations during the ‘‘long 1960s.’’

Index

Aarão Reis Filho, Daniel, 313 Abernathy, Ralph, 298 Africa, 10, 98, 105, 112, 120, 122, 181; communist subversion in, 116 African Americans, 198–99, 295, 386; civil rights movement, 280, 298 Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (awoc), 274, 277–79, 281–82, 285, 292 Alarcón, Gabriel, 181–83, 186–87, 189, 191 Albright, Madeleine, 58 Alekseev, Aleksandr, 88, 102 Alfa 76 (terrorist organization), 138, 145 Algeria, 26, 112–13, 115, 122–23, 144, 385 Aliançã de Libertação Nacional (aln, Alliance for National Liberation, Brazil), 312–13 Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (arena, El Salvador), 137 Allen, Gary, 288–89 Allende, Salvador, 105, 142, 393; parliamentary solution of, 25 Alliance for Progress, 26, 202, 224, 254, 259, 388, 391 Almada, Martín, 63 Álvarez Martínez, Gustavo, 152–53 American Federation of Labor, 22, 276; and Congress of Industrial Organizations (afl-cio), 277–78, 281, 285, 287, 298, 301, 359 American gi Forum, 275, 284, 290, 296 Americanization, 197, 253, 255, 261, 268 Amnesty International, 332

Angola, 112, 117–19, 123–28; Cuban intervention in, 118, 385 Anti-Communism, 21, 24, 135, 137, 145, 179, 204, 216, 224, 240, 257; crusade, 4, 134, 139, 148, 154, 158, 386; ideology, 141, 156; Mexican film activities and, 180; mission, 174; network, 144, 157; pri and, 193; propaganda, 174, 186, 197; purges, 279; revolutionary action, 37; triumph, 356. See also Communism Aptheker, Bettina, 289 Aragonés, Emilio, 89, 93 Arana Osorio, Carlos, 55 Arancibia Clavel, Enrique, 63–64 Arbenz, Jacobo, 16, 23, 25, 350, 355–56, 362–63 Argentina: apparatus for repression, 134, 142; crusade in Central America, 136, 156, 158; foreign policy, 141; guerrillas, 140, 146, 147, 155; human rights abuses, 58; intelligence agencies, 143, 149, 152, 155; military and counterinsurgency assistance by, 143, 146, 149, 151, 153, 385; military regime, 136, 139, 141, 148–49, 150–52, 155, 158; Peronism, 21; U.S. collaboration with, 135, 139 Armed movement, 99, 105 Army Intelligence Battalion 601 (Argentina), 64, 141–42, 145, 151, 157 Arriaga Rivera, Agustín, 242 Arzú, Álvaro, 54 Ascencio, Diego, 232–34, 236–38, 240 Asociación Nacional Mexicana Americana (anma), 278

430

index

Authoritarianism, 19 Autoworkers, in Mexico, 253–59, 260–68 Ávila Camacho, Maximino, 181 Azcárraga, Gastón, 256 Azcárraga Milmo, Emilio, 183 Azcárraga Vidaurreta, Emilio, 174, 183, 187, 190, 192 Baltázar Barajas, Ángel, 225, 228 Bank of Reconstruction and Development, 355 Bartra, Roger, 267 Batista, Fulgencio, 112, 200 Battalion 3-16 (Honduras), 153 Bay of Pigs, 9, 200, 214, 217, 222, 225, 231, 233– 34, 238–40, 242–43. See also Playa Girón Beck, János, 91 Benin, 119 Bernal, Antonio, 263 Bethell, Leslie, 20–22 Big Three (Ford, gm, Chrysler), 255, 257–59 Binational Centers, 218–19, 225, 239 Black Book of Communism, 49–50 Black Christ of Esquipulas, 358–59 Black Panthers, 287–88, 295; party, 344 Black Power, 280–81, 288, 298 Bolivia, 1980 military coup, 136, 149, 157 Bolivian Communist Party, 102–3 Bolshevik Revolution, 383 Bonnie and Clyde, 308, 322, 325 Bonsal, Philip, 216–17 Bracero Program, 282, 388–89 Brazil, turbulence in 1968, 309–11, 315, 322, 329, 343 Brazilian Communist Party (pcb), 313, 314 Brazil Nunca Mais report, 65 Brezhnev, Leonid, 95, 125, 138, 393 Brezhnev Doctrine, 104 Brown, Cantwell, 183–84 Brown Berets, 295, 299 Brown Power, 280, 292 Bunche, Ralph, 198 Bunzel, Ruth, 362, 365–66 Bustos, Robert, 282

Cabinda, 116–17 Caldevilla, Vinícius, 317 Calexico, 277 California: Migrant Ministry, 279; State Federation of Labor, 277 Campos, Dan, 284 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 215–18, 222–27, 233–35, 239, 241–42, 387 Caribbean crisis, 14, 77–79, 84, 87, 92, 95, 104– 5, 384. See also Cuban Missile Crisis Carmichael, Stokely, 298 Carneiro, Marília, 318 Carter, Jimmy, 15, 59–60, 127, 135, 137–39, 141, 146, 151, 154, 158, 385 Casablanca, 112 Casella, Alberto T., 223 Casey, William, 152 Castañeda, Jorge, 28, 121 Castro, Fidel, 5–6, 13, 21, 83–86, 88, 97, 100–102, 104–5, 112, 115–16, 119–23, 125, 127–28, 155, 214, 215, 218, 222, 225, 228, 283, 295–96, 383– 84; attempt to assassinate, 9, 121; with Lázaro Cárdenas, 216–17, 226–27; declaration of November 1, 1962, 92; Khrushchev and, 89, 90; regime, 50, 94, 148, 385, 390; as Soviet puppet, 120, 384; travel to Moscow, 94–95; visit to United States in 1959, 200 Castro, Raúl, 114, 116–17, 119 Catholic Action, 357–61, 364–65, 368–69, 371 Catholic Church, 64, 274, 298, 357, 361, 391; hierarchy, 22; human rights o≈ce, 54, 64 Central Africa, 114 Central America: armed struggle in, 106; counterinsurgency regimes in, 19, 134; counterrevolutionary campaign in, 157; right-wing regimes in, 27; U.S. policy, 15 Central American Peace Accords, 5 Central Committee of the Communist Party (Soviet Union), 87, 100, 103 Central Intelligence Agency (cia), 14, 16, 22, 24–25, 48–49, 54, 59, 96–97, 100–101, 113, 117, 135, 152–54, 186, 202, 350, 384; Board of National Estimates, 121; international

index history, 28; spying of, 229; view of Castro and Che, 120–22 Central Valley, 275, 281 Chamber of Commerce (U.S.), in Mexico, 187 Chandler, Charles, 311–12 Chatfiel, Leroy, 279 Chávez, César, 273, 275, 277–82, 284–300, 389 Chávez, Fernando, 297 Chávez, Hugo, 6, 394 Chicanos, 7, 291; as activists, 290, 292–93; leadership by, 389; movement of, 274, 283; as soldiers, 297 Chichicastenango, 361–62, 364–68 Chile: human rights abuses, 56–58; 1973 coup, 56 Chilean Communist Party, 100 Chimaltenango, 361 China, People’s Republic of, 8, 56, 77, 87, 93, 99, 100, 105, 355 China and Soviet Union confrontation, 98 Chrysler Corporation, 253–56, 262, 265–66, 268, 388 Chupol, 350–52, 357, 361–65, 368–72 Cira, Alberto, 242–43 Cité Catholique, 144 Citizenship, 4, 19, 23, 258, 382, 390 Ciudad Satélite, 263 Civil do Bem Estar Familiar no Brasil (bemfam, Society for the Welfare of the Family in Brazil), 320–21 Clandestine detention centers, 153–54 Clark, Ramsey, 295 Clinton, Bill, 52, 54, 57–8 Coca-Cola, 187, 198 Cohen, Jerry, 292 Cold War: cultural diplomacy during, 219; evangelization, 360; historiography, 17, 47–8, 205; history, 17, 47, 49, 68, 97, 205, 381, 383; modernization, 363, 372; studies, 8, 12, 18, 28, 381 Colegio de San Nicolás de Hidalgo (Mexico), 214, 219–20, 222, 225, 230, 234, 243 Colegio Militar (Argentina), 145, 152

431

Committee for Peasant Unity (Comité de Unidad Campesina, cuc, Guatemala), 350, 361, 368–70, 372 Committee for State Security (kgb), 392–94 Communism: conspiracy of, 237, 390; in Guatemala, 24; infiltration, 258–59, 276; international movement, 310, 312, 343, 372; system of, 50; struggle against, 141, 145, 351, 358, 359. See also Anti-Communism Communist Party of the United States, 288 Community Service Organization (cso), 275– 78, 284, 299 Confederación Anticomunista Latinoamericana (cal), 137, 145 Confederación de Asociaciones por la Unidad de las Sociedades de América (causa), 138 Conferencia Latinoamericana por la Soberanía Nacional, la Emancipación Económica y la Paz (Latin American Conference for National Sovereignty, Economic Emancipation, and Peace), 223, 234 Congo Brazzaville, 112–15, 119, 199 Congress of the Communist Parties of Latin America, 100 Consumer Rights Committee, 297 Contras, 15, 134, 138, 147, 149, 158; commanders, 148; in Honduras, 152, 154; program of, 136 Contreras, Manuel, 140 Costa e Silva, Artur, 338, 341, 343 Costumbre (custom), 358, 365 Counterinsurgency: model for, 156; operations, 151–52; regimes, 24–25; warfare, 144, 385 Crocker, Chester, 127–28 Cuba: economy, 113; foreign policy, 88, 123; government, 84, 86, 94, 126; intelligence, 100–101; invasion, 82, 229; policy for Africa, 114, 122, 126, 155, 384, 392 Cuba and Soviet Union, relations of, 87, 93–94, 97, 101, 103, 105, 384 Cuban Communist Party, 93 Cuban Coordinating Committee, of U.S. National Security Council, 96 Cuban Missile Crisis, 8–9, 77–78, 80–94, 102, 104, 200, 383. See also Caribbean crisis

432

index

Cuban Revolution, 4, 23, 28, 78, 80, 93, 102, 105, 203, 277, 283, 383, 387, 390; in Morelia, 222, 225 Cuito, 128 Cultural history, 17, 19, 29 Cultural imperialism, 255 Cultural Institute, 215, 219, 221, 226, 228, 230– 33, 237, 239–40, 242–43 Culture and power, 18, 203 Czech intelligence, 100–101 D’Arc Pimentel, Olga, 316 D’Aubuisson, Roberto, 145–46, 156 Davis, Mike, 301 Debray, Regis, 99 Decree 900 (Guatemala), 355–56, 362 De Gortari, Eli, 242 Delano, 273, 281, 285–86, 288–89, 293, 296; Plan de Delano, 282–84 De Lima Souto, Edson Luis, 309, 316 De Lira Tavares, Aurélio, 341 Delle Chiaie, Stefano, 145 Democracy, 20, 204, 262; industrial, 253; liberal, 12, 23; popular, 394; social, 22–24, 28; transition to, 27 Democratic Party (U.S.), 285, 294–95 De Paiva, Glycon, 320 Departamento de Ordem Politica e Social do Estado (dops or deops, Brazil), 65, 324, 329 Department of Defense (U.S.), 296 Dependency theory, 14, 19 Desaparecidos (disappeared persons), 25, 50, 57–58, 62 Devine, Michael, 54 Díaz, Hugo, 265–66 Díaz Ordaz, Gustavo, 235, 240, 242, 259 Dinges, John, 64, 68 Dirceu, José, 311, 324 Dirección Federal de Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales (dgips, Mexico), 226, 236 Directorate of National Intelligence (dina, Chile), 25, 140 Dirty War (Argentina), 134, 142, 146–47, 150, 152, 155–56

Donner, Frederick, 254, 258 Doyle, Kate, 61, 67 Du Preez, Sophie, 118 Du Toit Spies, F. J., 118 Eastern Europe, 7, 13–14, 50–51, 392 East and West: conflict of, 12, 135, 156, 386, 393; relations of, 79, 136, 172 Echeverría, Luis: apertura democrática, 266 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 16, 49, 113, 180, 193, 197–98, 202 Eisenhower, Milton, 188 Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (egp, Guerrilla Army of the Poor, Guatemala), 350, 361, 371–72 Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (erp, Argentina), 140, 146–48 Ejército Secreto Anticomunista (esa), 151 El Mozote massacre, 52–3 El Salvador: armed forces, 150; civil war, 5; security apparatuses, 25 Escobar, Arturo, 352 Escuela de Inteligencia (Argentina), 153 Escuela Superior de Guerra (Argentina), 145, 153 España-México-Argentina (ema), 180–82, 186, 202 Espinosa Yglesias, Manuel, 186 Espitia, Alfonso, 219–22, 225 Estado Mayor Presidencial (emp, Guatemala), 62 Ethiopia, 119 External Task Force (Argentina), 142 Falkland Islands War (Islas Malvinas), 50, 57, 135–36, 149, 154 Federación Nacional de Estudiantes Técnicos (Mexico), 228 Federal Bureau of Investigation (fbi), 22, 288– 89 Filipinos, as farmworkers, 277, 282, 284, 288, 293, 296 Firmenich, Mario, 147 First Declaration of La Havana, 222

index

433

First International Organization of Youth, 223 Ford, Henry, 264 Ford, Henry, II, 254, 258 Ford Motor Company, 254–59, 264, 267–68 Fortuny, José Manuel, 355 Franco, Jean, 335 Franco Rodríguez, David, 233–34, 242 Fraternities (cofradías), 358, 360, 365 Freedom of Information Act (foia), 51, 53, 58, 171, 205 Frente Estudiantil de Defensa de la Revolución Cubana (Student Front in Defense of the Cuban Revolution, Mexico), 217 Frente Farabundo Martí de Liberación Nacional (fmln), 150 Fuerza Democrática Nicaragüense (fdn), 147 Fukuyama, Francis, 13

Grossman, Marc, 299 Guanabara, 313–14 Guantánamo, 90–91 Guatemala: civil patrols, 26; civil war, 5; death squad diary, 61–62; National Police archives, 62; 1954 coup, 16, 23, 49; postwar democratic spring, 21; right-wing regimes, 27; security apparatuses, 25; social democratic revolution, 28; as state, 372 Guerra de Andrade, Renata, 334–36 Guerrillas, 26, 53, 99, 101, 113, 115, 135, 149, 285; groups, 61, 78, 141–42, 315; movements, 100– 101, 103, 105–6, 152, 329, 386, 389–91 Guevara, Ernesto (‘‘El Che’’), 89, 90–91, 93–94, 283, 289, 295, 313, 325, 344; in Africa, 113–14, 116, 121; in Bolivia, 102, 103 Guinea-Bissau, 112–16, 119, 126, 119

Gabeira, Fernando, 334 Gaddis, John, 12–13, 16, 18–19 Galarza, Ernesto, 276–77, 291 Galván, Raúl, 226 García, Héctor, 275 García Márquez, Gabriel, 3 García Meza, Luis, 136, 151 García Terrés, Jaime, 217 García Valseca, José, 186–87 General Motors Corporation, 176, 191, 254, 256–58, 260–63, 267 Geopolitics, 11, 156 German Democratic Republic, 112, 120, 143, 392 Gilderhus, Mark, 9 Ginsberg, Allen, 289 Gleijeses, Piero, 138, 155, 392 Globalization, 172 Goldwater, Barry, 297 González, Felipe (priest), 364–65, 368–71 Good Neighbor, 172, 190; diplomacy, 216, 219, 221 Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, 187 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 393 Gordon Mein, John, 55 Gra≈gna, Rubens, 146–47 Grandin, Greg, 4, 9, 22–24, 26–27, 350, 356

Harbury, Jennifer, 61 Harriman, Averell, 95, 96 Harrington, Michael, 290 Hartmire, Wayne, 279–80 Hellou, Samyr, 321 Helms, Jesse, 145 Herrera, Vicente, 265, 268 Hill, Robert, 58, 186–88, 194, 196, 216 Hogan, Michael, 14 Honduras, 134–35 House Un-American Activities Committee (huac), 275, 288 Hughes, Thomas, 121 Human rights, 138, 395; abuses of, 52, 53, 57, 58, 68, 148, 153, 268 il-28 bombers, 84–85 Imperial culture, 18, 203 Infante, Pedro, 171, 203 Institutional Act No. Five (ai-5, Ato Institucional Número 5), 337–38, 343–44 Instituto Cultural México-Norteamericano, 214, 218, 221, 243, 387. See also Binational Centers; Cultural Institute; Morelia Instituto Politécnico Nacional (ipn, Mexico), 218, 228

434

index

Inter-American highway, 356, 363, 391 Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (tiar), 140 International Conference of Free Unions, 257 International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Soviet Union), 99, 106, 384 Iran-Contra scandal, 15, 143 Ireta Viveros, Félix, 233, 235 Israel, 126, 148–49 Itlion, Larry, 293 Jesuit Center for Research and Social Action, 361 John XXIII (pope), 361 John Birch Society, 295–96 Johnson, Lyndon B., 98, 113, 123, 203, 239, 253, 285, 287, 295 Junta Coordinadora Revolucionaria (jcr), 142 Kabila, Laurent, 113 Kennedy, Edward, 295 Kennedy, Ethel, 295 Kennedy, John F., 16, 49, 82–86, 89, 92, 95–97, 113, 123, 200, 202–3, 229, 242, 254, 259, 353; death, 98; Johnson period and, 240; portrait, 229 Kennedy, Robert F., 293–95 Kenney, Eugene, 226, 228–29, 231–33, 239, 241 Khrushchev, Nikita, 78–87, 89, 91, 95–97, 105, 383–84; Castro and, 83–84, 89–90; downfall, 87; at United Nations, 197 King, Coretta Scott, 295 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 290, 293–94 Kissinger, Henry, 25, 56, 58, 118, 124–25, 127 Kodak, 187 Kohler, Foy, 95 Korean War, 172–73, 274, 276 Kosygin, Aleksei, 103 Kundera, Milan, 51 LaFeber, Walter, 15 Landívar University, 361 Lara, Lucio, 116

Laugerud, Kjell, 151 Leddy, Raymond, 240 LeΔer, Melvyn, 10–14 LeoGrande, William, 15 Leonov, Nicolai, 393 Letelier, Orlando, 63 Ley Federal del Trabajo (Mexico), 262 Liberalism and socialism, 28 Lombardo Toledano, Vicente, 218 Lopes Meireles, Heli, 312 López Mateos, Adolfo, 187, 193–94, 214, 218, 227, 235, 239, 241 López Tijerina, Reies, 292–93, 295 Lozano Vázquez, Alberto, 226 Lucas García, Fernando Romeo, 151 Luce, Henry, 190 Lumumba, Patrice, 194 Lundestad, Geir, 48 MacCone, John, 96 Machado Ventura, José Ramón, 113 Madres and Abuelas of Plaza de Mayo, 57–58 Magalhães, Heloisa Helena, 324 Mallea Gil, Miguel Ángel, 139 Malvinas war (Falkland Islands), 50, 57, 136, 149, 154 Mandela, Nelson, 128–29 Manjarrez, Luis, 181–82 Mann, Thomas, 202, 240, 259 Marcuse, Herbert, 329 Marighella, Carlos, 308, 309, 312, 315 Marshall Plan, 22, 48, 290, 390 Martínez, Rafael, 265 Martínez Ocaranza, Ramón, 226, 228, 230–31, 233–34, 241, 243 Massera, Emilio, 146 Maxeños, 362–63, 366–67. See also Chichicastenango; Chupol McCullough, Thomas, 277 McDermott, Jack, 175, 179, 186, 189, 192, 196, 201–2 McDonnell, Donald, 277 McDowell, John, 276 McIntyre, Francis, 300

index Meany, George, 277, 283 Méndez Arceo, Sergio, 300 Mendoza, Nicandro, 228, 233–34, 236–37 Menem, Carlos, 63 Mexican American Democratic Clubs, 275 Mexican American Political Association (mapa), 275–76, 285, 290 Mexican Americans, 273–78, 280, 282–84, 290– 92, 294–98 Mexican Communist Party, 67 Mexican Revolution, 216, 222, 224, 265, 268, 282 Mexico: authoritarianism, 255, 268, 386–87; government, 215, 259; postrevolutionary culture, 171 Meyer, Lorenzo, 67 Michoacán, 214–15, 220–21, 233–35, 240, 242, 387 Middle East, 10, 20, 204, 392 Mikoyan, Anastas, 82, 84–5, 91–2 Missile crisis. See Cuban Missile Crisis Mitrokhin, Vasili Nikitich, 394 Money laundering, 143, 385 Monje, Mario, 102–3 Monroe Doctrine, 6, 221 Montoneros, 140, 146–48 Moon, Sun Myung, 138 Moracén, Rafael, 116–17 Morales, Evo, 7 Moreira Alves, Márcio, 332, 338–44 Moreira Alves, Maria Helena, 341 Morelia, 214–15, 218–19, 222–25, 232, 234–43. See also Michoacán Moreno ‘‘Cantinflas,’’ Mario, 179 Morocco, 113, 126 Mossad, 148 Movimiento Costa Rica Libre (mcrl), 138 Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (mln, Guatemala), 138 Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (mln, Mexico), 241 Movimiento Popular para la Liberación de Angola (mpla), 116–19, 126 Mozambique, 113, 119 Muñoz, Rosalío, 291 Murici, Antonio Carlos, 324

435

Namibia, 117, 127–28; Cuban intervention in, 385 Narcotics trade, 143, 151 National Agency of Special Services of El Salvador (ansesal), 150 National Agrarian Reform Institute (Cuba), 86 National Chicano Moratorium Committee, 291 National Farm Workers Association (nfwa), 273–83, 285–89, 292 National Front for the Liberation of Angola (fnla), 117–8 National Guard (Nicaragua), 134–35, 146, 153 National liberation movements, 77, 80, 87, 102 National Security Archive, 9, 23, 25, 51, 53–55, 57, 59, 63–64, 67 National Security Council (U.S.), 96, 355 National Security Law (Brazil), 338 National Security O≈ce (osn, Nicaragua), 146 National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (unita), 117–18 Neoliberalism, 27, 255 Neruda, Pablo, 3 Neto, Agostinho, 116–17 New Deal, 21, 286 New Left, 23–24, 28, 275, 283–85, 289, 291; historians, 14, 16, 18–19; revisionism and, 12, 16 New Right, 275, 287 Nicaragua, civil war in, 5, 134 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 290 Nixon, Richard, 286–87, 295–96, 393 Noriega, Manuel, 59 Noriega, Ramses, 291 North America Free Trade Agreement (nafta), 256 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (nato), nuclear missiles in Turkey and, 81, 83, 87, 91 North Vietnam, 120 Noticiario Nacional, 181–84, 186, 188–89 Nunca Más report (Argentina), 50, 57 O’Gorman, Edmundo, 192 Old Left, 20, 23–24 Olympics (1968), 241 Omega 7 (terrorist organization), 138

436

index

O’Neill, Paul, 116 Operation Condor, 25, 63–64, 136, 140, 155, 157, 390, 392 Operation Elegance, 329 Operation Manuel, 101 Operation Wetback, 180, 276 Organización Revolucionaria del Pueblo en Armas (orpa, Guatemala), 152 Organization of American States (oas), 56, 80, 125, 217 Ortiz Mena, Antonio, 187–88 Osawa, Shizuo, 336 Osborne, Melville, 239 Padilla, Gil, 273 Palestine Liberation Organization (plo), 385 Palmeira, Vladimir, 311 Panama Canal, 60, 138, 144; Treaty of, 59 Pan-American friendship, 220, 221, 229, 230, 241, 243–44 Pancho Villa Brigades, 218, 227 Paraguay: Archive of Terror, 63 Partido Africano da Independencia da Guiné e Cabo Verde (paigc), 114–5, 126 Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo (pgt), 23–4, 355 Partido Popular Socialista (Mexico), 218, 223 Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Mexico), 28, 66, 194, 215, 232 Pastor, Robert, 16 Paul VI (pope), 279 Pavlícek, Vladimir, 90 Peace Corps, 360 People’s Republic of China, 8, 56, 77, 87, 93, 99, 100, 105, 355 Pereira, Francisco, 115 Pérez Esquivel, Adolfo, 65 Pilot Center of Argentine Navy, 143 Pineda Arellano, Virgilio, 221–23, 225–26, 237 Pinochet, Augusto, 56–57, 63, 68 Pius XI (pope), 359 Plan de Delano, 282–84 Playa Girón, 80–81, 214, 383, 387. See also Bay of Pigs

Popular liberalism, 29 Populism, 29 Portugal, 117 Prats, Carlos, 63 Pretoria, 117–19, 125, 127–28 Project Pedro, 172–77, 179, 181, 183–94, 196–205, 386–87 Projeto Integrado (proin, Brazil), 65–66 Propaganda, Inter-American, 173 Propaganda Due (P-2), 138, 145 Public Security Force (fusep, Honduras), 152– 53 Puebla, Carlos, 222 Putin, Vladimir, 6 Quiché, 361, 364, 366, 368 Quijano, Luis, 262 Quiñones, Horacio, 223 Rabe, Stephen G., 16, 49 Radio Keith Orpheum (rko), 174, 192, 201 Ramírez, Alfred, 298 Rathvon, Peter N., 174, 192–93, 195, 201 Reagan, Ronald, 6, 15, 52, 135, 149–450, 154, 158 Reuther, Walter, 259, 262–63 Revolutionary Movement of October 8 (mr-8, Brazil), 313–14 Revolutionary movements, 138 Ribero, José Osvaldo, 157 Rio de Janeiro, 65, 314, 317 Ríos Montt, Efraín, 3 Risquet, Jorge, 114–15 Rivera, Diego, 171, 203 Rockefeller, Nelson, 19 Rodríguez, Carlos Rafael, 86, 90–92 Rodríguez, Juan, 366–67 Rogers, William, 123 Romero, Carlos Humberto, 149 Romero, Oscar, 146 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 216, 221, 276 Roosevelt, Theodore, 6 Rosel y Arellano, Mariano, 357–60 Rostow, Walt, 259, 353–55, 372–73 Roxborough, Ian, 20–22

index Roybal, Edward, 276 Ruiz Cortines, Adolfo, 187, 194 Russian State Archives of Contemporary History (rgani), 392–93 Ryan, Dennis, 299 Sacramento, California, 282 Saint Jean, Alfredo, 156 Salinas Valley, 297–98 Sánchez, David, 295, 299 Sánchez del Castillo, Raúl, 260–61 Sánchez Reisse, Leandro, 142 Sandinistas, 6, 106, 147, 155, 393; Communism and, 148; regime, 50, 139, 143, 145, 148; revolution, 138, 385 Sandoval Alarcón, Mario, 145 San Joaquin Valley, 273–74, 283, 288 São Paulo, 65, 309, 311, 323–25, 334 Savimbi, Jonas, 117 Secretaría de Gobernación (Interior Ministry, Mexico), 66, 177 Secretaría de Inteligencia del Estado (side, Argentina), 25 Senate Commission on Foreign A√airs (U.S.), 142 Serviço Nacional de Informações (sni, Brazil), 25 Shelton, Turner, 173, 175, 182, 185, 188, 192, 196, 201–2 Sino-Soviet bloc, 240; conflict within, 98, 104 Socialism, 77, 79–80, 84, 87, 104, 289 Somoza, Anastacio, 112, 146–47, 385 Soumialot, Gaston, 113 South Africa, 117–18, 125–28, 385; parliament of, 119 Southeast Asia, 10, 20, 291 Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 294 Southern Cone: counterinsurgency regimes in, 19 South Vietnam, 118 Soviet bloc, 79, 94, 392, 393 Soviet embassy: in Cuba, 91; in Mexico, 173, 231, 235–37

437

Soviet Union: armed forces, 96; bureaucracy, 390; conspiracy, 232; diplomacy, 98; expansionism, 135, 158; foreign policy, 79, 138; government, 13, 83; humiliation, 77, 87; intelligence agencies, 97, 394; leadership, 78, 80, 92, 99, 104, 384, 392; mass media incursions, 177; power, 14, 383; records, 8; system, 48, 392 Soviet Union and Cuba, relations of, 15, 77, 82, 84, 87, 94, 97 Soviet Union and United States, relations of, 4, 10, 81, 90, 96, 104, 159, 382 Soviet Union military support: in Chile, 393; in Cuba, 88; of guerrilla movements, 101, 103–4; in Latin America, 77–78, 99, 101, 103, 105–6; of mpla, 116; in Nicaragua, 138; in Venezuela, 99 State Department (U.S.), 22, 56, 58, 63, 116, 120, 141, 239, 257, 268, 384 Stockton, California, 277 Stoll, David, 28 Streibert, Theodore, 174 Stroessner, Alfredo, 63 Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (sncc), 285 Students for a Democratic Society (sds, Berkeley), 285 Suárez Levy, Roberto, 151 Suárez Mason, Carlos G., 146 Suez crisis, 198 Sung, Woo Jae, 146 Syrkis, Alfredo, 319 Sweeney, John, 301 Taft-Hartley Act, 275, 286 Tanzania, 114 Tavira, Martín, 222–23, 230–31, 234, 237–38 Tax, Sol, 365–66 Teamsters Union, 299 Tello, Manuel, 233, 240 Tendencia Democrática, 266 Third World, 11, 14, 16, 77, 79, 81, 98, 102, 104, 120–22, 135, 137–38, 155, 172–73, 198–99, 202, 291, 293, 351–53, 356, 381, 384, 386, 392, 394

438

index

Tlalnepantla, 264 Tompkins, Richard, 174–75, 180–86, 188–89, 191–92, 196, 201 Torrijos, Omar, 59–60 Tricontinental Conference, 101 Truth commissions, 47, 50–51, 60; Argentina’s National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (conadep), 52, 64; Chile’s Retting Commission, 50; El Salvador’s Commission on the Truth, 50, 52–53; Guatemala’s Historical Clarification Commission, 50, 54, 60–61; Mexico’s Fiscalía Especial para Movimientos Sociales y Políticos del Pasado (femospp), 66 União Nacional dos Estudantes (une, National Union of Students, Brazil), 311–12, 315, 317, 322–23, 325 Unidad Popular (Chile), 393 United Auto Workers (uaw), 259, 261–62 United Farm Workers (ufw), 280, 283, 299, 300–301 United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (ufwoc), 287–88, 290–92, 294–99 United Fruit Company, 355 United Nations, 198; Security Council, 200 United States: aggression, 78, 95, 102, 125, 385; alliance with Argentina, 139; backing of antiCommunist regimes, 15, 350; capitalism, 254, 388; citizens, 228, 232, 274–75; cold warriors, 351–52, 371; cultural diplomacy, 15, 219; declassified records, 15, 47, 53, 56, 61, 67; development model, 15; economic prosperity, 274; evangelical missionaries, 320; 48; flag, 230, 243; foreign aid, 22, 356; foreign policy, 9, 14, 19, 22, 48, 173, 175, 194, 196–98, 204, 275, 285, 287, 356, 394; government, 6, 12, 52, 56–57, 87, 138, 181, 185, 310, 387–89; hegemony, 24, 98, 203–4, 217, 231; imperialism, 6, 12, 14, 48–49, 59, 172, 223, 225, 291; intelligence agencies, 22, 54, 59–60, 120–21, 124, 128, 155–56; interests, 6, 118, 351, 382; labor movement, 274, 290–91, 293–301; limits of power, 203; Mexican autoworkers

and, 253, 256–59, 260–63; military aid, 22, 26, 151; military intervention, 101; patriotism, 287; policymakers, 15–16, 119, 384; political system, 282, 301; press, 238; propaganda, 172, 194; rapprochement with Soviet Union, 158; residents, 274, 298, 300–301; science leadership, 197, 386; security concerns, 216; society, 274, 287; South Africa gambit, 119 United States and Cuba, relations of, 5, 123, 138, 200, 394 United States and Mexico: border region, 298, 300; Cold War alliance, 28; relations of, 198, 216, 240; security concerns, 241 United States and Soviet Union rivalry, 4, 10, 81, 159, 382 Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (unam), 171, 217–18 U.S. Agency for International Development (usaid), 63, 360 U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in Mexico, 187 U.S. Congress, 6, 15, 52 U.S. Constitution, 276 U.S. Department of Defense, 296 U.S. embassy: in Argentina, 58, 157; in Brazil, 317; in El Salvador, 53; in Guatemala, 55; in Mexico, 228–29, 231–33, 236, 239 U.S. Information Agency (usia), 171, 173–76, 180–86, 188–92, 194–96, 198–201, 204, 219, 386 U.S. Information Service (usis), 172–77, 179, 182–87, 189–91, 194–96, 200–201, 218, 220, 241, 243 U.S. Senate Commission on Foreign A√airs, 142 U.S. State Department, 22, 56, 58, 63, 116, 120, 141, 239, 257, 268, 384 Vaca Narvaja, Fernando, 147 Vaky, Viron, 25, 55–56 Valdez, Luis, 283–84, 289 Vanguarda Popular Revolucionaria (vpr, Popular Revolutionary Vanguard, Brazil), 312–13, 334 Vaquero, Antonio, 150

index Vatican II Council, 361 Vellasco, Domingo, 223 Veloso, Caetano, 318 Venezuelan Communist Party, 99–100 Videla, Jorge, 26, 136, 139 Vieira (priest), 339, 341 Vietnam War, 7, 12, 15, 26, 101, 144, 156, 199, 274, 285, 287–88, 290–91, 297, 300, 321, 393 Viola, Roberto, 146 Wallace, George, 292 Warsaw Pact, 83, 95, 104, 393 Westad, Odd Arne, 124–25 Western hemisphere, 16, 50, 77–78, 81, 112, 120, 147, 173, 199, 383, 387, 392 Williams, William Appleman, 14, 16

439

Wilson, Charles, 258 World Automobile Council, 260 World Peace movement, 223 World systems theory, 19 World War II, 3, 4, 10, 19–20, 22, 126, 172–74, 176, 180, 275–77, 279, 282, 290, 352, 383, 390 xew (radio station), 190 Zabludovsky, Jacobo, 191, 199 Zaire, 115, 122, 126 Zaldívar, Clemente, 260–61, 268 Zanello, Oswaldo, 339 Zermeño, Alex, 281 Zhou En-lai, 56

Gilbert M. Joseph is the Farnam Professor of History and International Studies and the recent director of Latin American and Iberian Studies at Yale University. Daniela Spenser is a senior researcher at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social in Mexico City. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data In from the cold : Latin America’s new encounter with the Cold War / edited by Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniela Spenser. p. cm. — (American encounters/global interactions) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-8223-4102-4 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-13: 978-0-8223-4121-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Latin America—History—20th century. 2. Cold War—Influence. I. Joseph, G. M. (Gilbert Michael) II. Spenser, Daniela. f1414.2.i53 2007 980.03%3—dc22 2007029293