U.S. Presidents and Latin American Interventions: Pursuing Regime Change in the Cold War

Abstract

Arguments don’t come much clearer than in this book. Casting his net over U.S. efforts to overthrow governments in Latin America from 1954 to 1989, Michael Grow asks why and rejects the two “standard scholarly explanations . . . : U.S. national-security concerns and U.S. economic interests” (p. x). Rather, playing a key role were “three entirely different factors — U.S. international credibility, U.S. domestic politics, and lobbying by Latin American and Caribbean political actors” (p. xi).Skeptics will doubt that Grow can dismiss security and economic motives in favor of these “softer” ones. But he successfully shows that these overlooked factors may, in some cases, have been decisive. In the strongest cases, all three are obvious and convincing. In 1965, for instance, Lyndon Johnson imagined the assault on Santo Domingo by allegedly Castro-trained rebels to be part of a worldwide test of U.S. resolve. Simultaneously agonizing over the Vietnam escalation, LBJ saw the two as part of the same struggle. He also complained about the pressure he felt from Republicans to avoid “another Cuba.” And in this case Dominican right-wingers actually cabled Washington for an intervention against the rebels.Some successful arguments are more surprising, for instance that John Kennedy cared about British Guiana “almost exclusively as a domestic political problem” (p. 69). The reader will also learn much about the role of neighboring states in welcoming intervention, such as fellow Central Americans in Guatemala’s case, Grenada’s Caribbean peers in 1983, and the U.S. media campaigns waged by Manuel Noriega’s opposition before the invasion of Panama.At other times, the evidence lags. Often, Grow has plenty of circumstantial evidence that the president feared losing elections by appearing soft on communism, but finds little to no direct evidence that Latin America was the source of the concern. In Guatemala, to be sure, Dwight Eisenhower was pressured to “live up to . . . campaign promises” to be tough on communism, but Ike never said that his decision to sponsor a coup was motivated by this domestic issue (p. 23). The same applies to Nicaragua, where Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan never expressed a domestic political fear tied specifically to the Sandinistas.More important than the hits or misses, however, is the conceptual confusion. Grow draws too sharp a distinction between overall strategic interests and national security fears. He does not take into account that the Cold War widened the definition of “national security” to include everything outside the Soviet bloc, so that if Guatemala went pink, that was U.S. national security, not merely credibility. And so when U.S. intelligence saw Cheddi Jagan, the ruler of tiny British Guiana, as a “potential security threat,” they meant a threat neither to their credibility nor to their own borders but to something in between (p. 67). In one sentence, Grow posits a difference between “military defense” and “strategic goals,” but that difference was infinitesimal during the Cold War (p. 108). Similarly, Grow sees the third factor, about Latin American advocates of intervention, as a separate issue while in reality it overlaps with several others. Collaborationists always had economic interests or political self-interest in mind and so were no different from U.S. presidents.Potentially most serious, however, is that the author fails to properly insert these motivations into the larger ideology of anticommunism. Ideology is barely discussed. Yet U.S. anticommunism contained many elements that Grow rejects or champions: the assumption that any economic reform was prompted by international communism, the fear of the domino effect, the inability to see communism’s attraction for the poor. Only by understanding the ideological nature of anticommunism can we grasp how U.S. policy makers could ignore the lack of evidence of threats against their economic interests or national security and believe that any communist influence must, somewhere down the chain, threaten them.The author’s sources are almost all English-language secondary sources and published primary documents. They are up-to-date, including the latest presidential tapes and Foreign Relations of the United States volumes, but exclude archival work and any work in Spanish. For the first two arguments, these sources might be enough. But to assess the influence of Latin American actors without even consulting Spanish-language sources is suspect.The book is similar to Stephen Kinzer’s 2006 Overthrow in that both explore precedents of Bush-era “regime change.” Grow’s book is not so much about unintended negative consequences, and limits itself to Latin America and to the Cold War period, and though its writing is efficient and crisp, it does not attempt popularization. It is more analytical, however, and better moves forward the debate about the causes of U.S. intervention by asking too-often-overlooked questions about credibility, domestic politics, and Latin American agency.