Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The increasing American aerial patrols over Cuba, ‘which detected the Russian missile buildup on the island, were used by Cuba and the Soviet Union as evidence of the approaching American attack. By September, still unknown to the public, the crisis began to form, and in October it was in full progress, with the consequences already described.

The ending of the Cuban missile crisis at the end of 1962 may have opened a new era in the world’s history, but it left Latin America still floundering in the same old problems, which became more complicated and insoluble with each passing day. As we have said, these problems can be solved only by obtaining more constructive patterns in the proper priority sequence. On the whole, the role of the United States in Latin America has not been such as to help either patterns or priorities, largely because our concern has been with what seems to be useful or better for us rather than with what would be most helpful to them.

From the point of view of Latin America’s real interests, basic priorities might include six things: (1) more constructive psychological patterns; (2) increased political stability; (3) a greatly reduced birthrate, with emphasis on the quality rather than on the quantity of population; (4) a large increase in the food supply and in the most fundamental needs of human life, such as housing; (5) increased emphasis on light industry, especially processing and semiprocessing of local raw materials; and (6) continued improvements in transportation and communications. This combination of advances could provide rising standards of living and jobs for everyone. In moving in this direction much greater use should be made of local resources, including local capital and local skills, especially those of the present upper classes. This last point will become feasible only if the first two points begin to develop: a better outlook, especially in the upper classes, and a sufficiently stabilized political system so that duress can be put upon those classes to force them to use both their lives and their resources in a more constructive way. This will be possible only if the armed forces of Latin America (and of the whole Pakistani-Peruvian axis) move much more rapidly in a direction they have been moving in already, but too slowly: the direction of increased concern for stronger, more honest, more constructive, and more widely distributed improvements in conditions of living among their own people.

This point of view has already shown itself along the Pakistani-Peruvian axis, in military circles in Pakistan, Egypt, Argentina, and elsewhere; in the royal entourage in Iran; among university youth in much of Latin America. But in all these circles, despite the enthusiasm and energy that make it possible for them to overthrow corrupt and tyrannical regimes, it soon becomes clear that they have little idea what to do once they get into power. As a result, they fall under the personal influence of unstable and ignorant men, the Nassers, the Peróns, and the Castros, who fall back on emotionally charged programs of hatreds and spectacular displays of unconstructive nationalism that waste time and use up resources while the real problems of the whole enormous area go unsolved.

A heavy responsibility rests on the United States for this widespread failure to find solutions to problems all the way from Pakistan to Peru. The basic reason for this is that our policies in this great area have been based on efforts to find solutions to our own problems rather than theirs: to make profits, to increase supplies of necessary raw materials, to fight Hitler, to keep out Communism, and in recent years to fight the Cold War and prevent the spread of neutralism. The net result of our actions has been that we are now more hated than the Soviet Union, and neutralism reveals itself as clearly as it dares through the whole area.

This is, perhaps, more obvious on the Pakistan end of the axis than on the Peruvian end, but is true from one end to the other. Dulles’s insistence on arming the Middle and Near East and seeking to line the area up into a military bulwark against the Soviet Union destroyed the precarious political stability of the area, intensified local rivalries and animosities (as between India and Pakistan or between Egypt and Israel), led to large-scale waste of resources and energies on armament rivalries, divided the armed forces into cliques whose rivalries increased the frequency of military coups, and often entrenched in power reactionary and unprogressive minorities.

The sad thing about all this is that it was so unnecessary. There never was a moment in which the arms of this axis (excluding Turkey and Israel) contributed anything significant to keeping the Soviet Union out of it. Even less so in Latin America. On the contrary, the Dulles efforts to bring both areas into the Cold War in a military way by treaties and armaments have succeeded only in bringing Soviet influences and Communism in by methods of subversion, propaganda, and economic penetration that cannot be excluded by military agreements and armaments.

And at no time did these military agreements and armaments provide any real strength to keep Russia out as a military threat, for at all times that task rested on the deterrent power of the United States and the Western alliance. The sole consequence of the Dulles efforts to do the wrong thing along the Pakistani-Peruvian axis has been to increase what he was seeking to reduce: local political instability, increased Communist and Soviet influence, neutralism, and hatred of the United States.

Although the Dulles period, because it was a crucial period, shows most clearly the failures of American foreign policy in Latin America, the situation was the same, both before and since Dulles, with a possible brief exception in the first administration of Franklin Roosevelt. Otherwise, American policy in Latin America has been determined by American needs and desires and not by the problems of Latin Americans. A brief survey of these policies will show this clearly.

There are four chief periods in United States policy toward Latin America in the twentieth century. The first, a period of investment and interventionism, lasted until 1933 and was basically a period of commercial imperialism. American money came to Latin America as investments, seeking profits out of the exploitation of the area’s most obvious local resources, mineral or agricultural, such as copper, bananas, and petroleum, or as markets for American goods. There was little respect for the people themselves or for their way of life, and intervention by American military and diplomatic forces was always close at hand as a protection for American profits and investments.

The Good Neighbor Policy, announced by President Roosevelt in 1933, reduced intervention while retaining investment. It was partly a consequence of the idealism and progressive nature of the New Deal itself, but was equally based on the fact that the need of Latin America for American investment funds and for the American market, especially in the depressed conditions of 1933, made it so amenable to our economic and commercial influence that there was little need for our use of diplomatic intimidation or the Marines.

The third and fourth stages in America’s Latin American policy, from 1940 to the present, have been concerned with our efforts to involve the area in our foreign policy (not theirs), that is, in the effort to get them as deeply involved as possible in the struggle against Hitler and Japan and, since 1947, in the struggle against the Soviet Union. Both of these efforts have been mistakes (with the possible exception of our relations with Brazil and Mexico in the period following 1940) because the states of Latin America, however dutifully they may have lined up in the Hot War against Hitler or the Cold War against Soviet Russia, contributed little more to victory in these struggles than they would have contributed if they had not been pressured by us to line up at all.