sentiments.
“Yankee” interference had become onerous during the period leading up to the 1946 general election in which Spruille Braden, briefly the American ambassador to Buenos Aires, and then assistant secretary of state for Latin America, openly campaigned against Perón. With characteristic panache, Perón had turned the American’s interference around to his favor, appealing to nationalist sentiments with counter-slogans suggesting that the election was not between Argentines at all, but a case of “Braden or Perón.”
Many Argentines took umbrage when the Truman administration began lobbying for a hemispheric “mutual defense treaty” between the United States and its Latin American neighbors. Nevertheless, such a treaty, an outrowth of the recently announced “Truman Doctrine” of hard-line global containment of Soviet Communism, was signed in Rio de Janeiro in 1948 amid speeches extolling pan-Americanism. Latin American Communists denounced the U.S.-sponsored “brotherhood” as a warmed-over update of the old Monroe Doctrine, claiming that it gave Latin America to the colonialist interests of “Wall Street and the ‘capitalist monopolies.’” In effect, the Rio Treaty gave Washington the right to intervene militarily in neighboring states “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Ernesto remarked on the Rio conference and wrote an entry for
panamericanismo
in a notebook.
During the early 1950s, Ernesto’s strongest political emotion was a deep-seated hostility toward the United States. “In his eyes, the twin evils in Latin America were the native oligarchies and the United States,” Dolores Moyano recalled. The only things he liked about the U.S. were its poets and novelists. “I never heard him say one good thing about anything else,” Moyano said. “He would disconcert both nationalists and Communists by being anti-American without subscribing to either of their points of view. With much bad luck, since my mother was American, I would often rally to the defense of the United States. I was never able to convince him that United States foreign policy was, more often than not, the bumbling creature of ignorance and error rather than the well-designed strategy of a sinister cabal. He was convinced of the dark princes of evil who directed every United States move abroad.”
In the Latin America of the postwar years, there was plenty of evidence to nurture such perceptions. Ernesto was coming of age at a time when the United States was at an imperial apogee, aggressively pursuing its own economic and strategic interests in the region. In the anticommunist atmosphere of the Cold War, U.S. support of right-wing military dictatorships—Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Manuel Odría in Peru, and Marcos Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela—at the expense of outspoken nationalists or left-wing regimes was rationalized in the name of national security.
While Soviet expansion in postwar Europe was the main focus of alarm in Washington, by late 1950, the new Central Intelligence Agency felt sufficient concern about the hemispheric threat posed by Communism to prepare a secret assessment entitled
Soviet Capabilities and Intentions in Latin America
. “With respect to Latin America,” the report said, “the objective ofthe U.S.S.R. must be presumed to be to reduce support of the U.S. as greatly as possible until the sovietization of the area becomes possible and its resources become available directly to augment Soviet strength.” The CIA was especially concerned about the potential for coordination between pro-Soviet Latin American Communist parties and Moscow if a war broke out between the two superpowers. It noted the potential for Communist exploitation of existing anti-American sentiments, commenting that already in Argentina “the Communists, playing upon Argentine isolationism, found
“Yankee” interference had become onerous during the period leading up to the 1946 general election in which Spruille Braden, briefly the American ambassador to Buenos Aires, and then assistant secretary of state for Latin America, openly campaigned against Perón. With characteristic panache, Perón had turned the American’s interference around to his favor, appealing to nationalist sentiments with counter-slogans suggesting that the election was not between Argentines at all, but a case of “Braden or Perón.”
Many Argentines took umbrage when the Truman administration began lobbying for a hemispheric “mutual defense treaty” between the United States and its Latin American neighbors. Nevertheless, such a treaty, an outrowth of the recently announced “Truman Doctrine” of hard-line global containment of Soviet Communism, was signed in Rio de Janeiro in 1948 amid speeches extolling pan-Americanism. Latin American Communists denounced the U.S.-sponsored “brotherhood” as a warmed-over update of the old Monroe Doctrine, claiming that it gave Latin America to the colonialist interests of “Wall Street and the ‘capitalist monopolies.’” In effect, the Rio Treaty gave Washington the right to intervene militarily in neighboring states “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Ernesto remarked on the Rio conference and wrote an entry for
panamericanismo
in a notebook.
During the early 1950s, Ernesto’s strongest political emotion was a deep-seated hostility toward the United States. “In his eyes, the twin evils in Latin America were the native oligarchies and the United States,” Dolores Moyano recalled. The only things he liked about the U.S. were its poets and novelists. “I never heard him say one good thing about anything else,” Moyano said. “He would disconcert both nationalists and Communists by being anti-American without subscribing to either of their points of view. With much bad luck, since my mother was American, I would often rally to the defense of the United States. I was never able to convince him that United States foreign policy was, more often than not, the bumbling creature of ignorance and error rather than the well-designed strategy of a sinister cabal. He was convinced of the dark princes of evil who directed every United States move abroad.”
In the Latin America of the postwar years, there was plenty of evidence to nurture such perceptions. Ernesto was coming of age at a time when the United States was at an imperial apogee, aggressively pursuing its own economic and strategic interests in the region. In the anticommunist atmosphere of the Cold War, U.S. support of right-wing military dictatorships—Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Manuel Odría in Peru, and Marcos Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela—at the expense of outspoken nationalists or left-wing regimes was rationalized in the name of national security.
While Soviet expansion in postwar Europe was the main focus of alarm in Washington, by late 1950, the new Central Intelligence Agency felt sufficient concern about the hemispheric threat posed by Communism to prepare a secret assessment entitled
Soviet Capabilities and Intentions in Latin America
. “With respect to Latin America,” the report said, “the objective ofthe U.S.S.R. must be presumed to be to reduce support of the U.S. as greatly as possible until the sovietization of the area becomes possible and its resources become available directly to augment Soviet strength.” The CIA was especially concerned about the potential for coordination between pro-Soviet Latin American Communist parties and Moscow if a war broke out between the two superpowers. It noted the potential for Communist exploitation of existing anti-American sentiments, commenting that already in Argentina “the Communists, playing upon Argentine isolationism, found
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