Foreign Aid as Foreign Policy: The Alliance for Progress in Latin America

Abstract

In a special address to the US Congress two months into his administration, President John F. Kennedy announced a bold new vision for US – Latin American relations, the Alliance for Progress. At meetings with Latin American leaders in Uruguay later that year, the United States promised to provide $20 billion in aid over the next ten years. Despite high expectations, “the program was not a success” (p. 5). As Chilean president Eduardo Frei would put it, “the Alliance lost its way.” For Jeffrey F. Taffet, this great undertaking foundered on the “inherent conflict between lofty humanitarian goals and a desire to fight the Cold War” (p. 5).In the wake of the Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution, Kennedy feared that Latin America would be the next arena of US-Soviet confrontation. However, Kennedy believed that communism could not take root in nations with healthy economies and a strong middle class. Kennedy’s Alliance proposal drew heavily from modernization theory, a self-congratulatory view of US history and series of proposals designed to remake the world in America’s glorified self-image. Promising to solve the ageless and intractable problem of economic underdevelopment, the “Charles River Group,” a cluster of Boston area academics, laid out a blueprint for action, most notably with Walt Rostow’s 1960 publication, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. Drawing upon this thinking, President Kennedy sought to use US aid to guide Latin America toward progress by raising literacy rates, improving the standard of living, achieving a fairer distribution of income, and reaching the takeoff point for self-sustaining economic development. Certainly there was altruism in the Alliance proposal, but Kennedy’s ultimate concern was with stopping communism. The Alliance’s altruism, Taffet shows, was but a means to this end.The Alliance was never a coherent, centrally controlled program but rather a tangle of bureaucracies tasked with advancing Kennedy’s foreign policy sensibilities. But those laboring for the Alliance could never resolve the program’s core contradiction: the United States said that it wanted to form a partnership of equals, but in practice it had to be a partnership which the United States fully controlled. The US Congress was completely unwilling to surrender decision making over spending to Latin American leaders. “U.S. policymakers did not want to relinquish control, only give the appearance of doing so” (p. 52). Taffet concludes that soon the loftier goals were forgotten and the Alliance became just another “way to push governments to adopt policies developed in Washington,” “simply a way to achieve short-run goals . . . not about promoting reform” (pp. 6 – 7, 93).Taffet focuses on the program in the Latin American nations that received the most Alliance aid, including Chile, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic. “In each case,” Taffet finds, “the United States sent most of its money to deal with short-term political issues” (p. 7). In Chile nearly all Alliance money was spent trying to keep socialist Salvador Allende from winning the presidency. Even CIA spending to sabotage Allende’s electoral efforts was tiny when compared to the sums employed by the Alliance for the same purpose. Failing at its humanitarian goals, the Alliance even failed with its short-term anticommunist agenda: Allende was elected in 1970, despite the United States’ efforts.In Brazil the United States withheld Alliance funds from the national government in an ultimately futile effort to reverse the progressive policies of President João Goulart. To the mind of US ambassador Lincoln Gordon, the greatest threat to Brazilian democracy was Brazil’s democratically elected leaders. After Goulart’s removal in a 1964 military coup supported by the United States, the United States quickly opened up a generous supply of Alliance funding for the highly repressive military dictatorship that followed. US actions in Brazil, Taffet writes, demonstrated that the Alliance had not just lost its way, it had also lost its “moral compass” (p. 8).In the Dominican Republic the Alliance followed a similar historical trajectory. Alliance funding became available only after the United States invaded in 1965 and overthrew progressive reformer Juan Bosch, regarded by US ambassador John Bartlow Martin as a “deep-cover communist” (p. 132).As the failures of the Alliance became increasingly evident, funding dried up, especially given the high costs of President Lyndon Johnson’s ambitious double agenda of building a Great Society while escalating US military involvement in Vietnam. In the end, the Alliance was just “too idealistic for policymakers to implement” (p. 7).Taffet’s research for this volume is heavily tilted toward US holdings — the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and Johnson’s and Kennedy’s presidential libraries — without much from Latin American archives. This concern notwithstanding, Foreign Aid as Foreign Policy should now be regarded as the most important work on the history of the Alliance for Progress.