Buenas Vecinas?

Abstract

During World War II, US–Latin American relations were shaped by the noninterventionist Good Neighbor policy and the projection of soft power via US government-orchestrated public relations and propaganda campaigns. This included extensive film and radio propaganda overseen by the US Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA) and disseminated throughout the region. One dimension of that campaign involved radio propaganda aimed specifically at women, who were regaled with stories of heroic Latin American women and carefully curated female perspectives on life in the United States during wartime. In much of this material, the United States was presented as a dominant yet gentlemanly hemispheric partner, offering Latin America protection and material abundance in exchange for loyalty and deference. As the war wound down, such propaganda took a sharp turn toward the Cold War, when Good Neighbor chivalry gave way to more strident rhetoric, prefiguring a return to US interventionist politics of the prewar era.