In the second half of the 1930s, confidential information from and concerning Latin America reaching Washington promoted the suspicion, and ultimately the conviction, that the security of much of Latin America, and by extension that of the United States, was imperiled by the Axis powers. Officials in Washington were convinced that the Axis menace to the Western Hemisphere was not in the form of a direct military threat, but rather through the use of propaganda and subversion. Such concern – based in part on fascism's appeal to Latin America's elites – was aroused particularly by the efforts of the Axis powers to organise their own national communities in Latin America into instruments of their foreign policy and by the simultaneous mounting of a propaganda campaign intended to win over public opinion in the Americas and to weaken the support for democracy.1