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

This four-stage chronology of American policy toward Latin America ignores completely the significant change that has occurred in the history of Latin America itself during the twentieth century, chiefly in the 1950’s. This is the shift in emphasis in Latin American history, especially in the history of political disturbances and governmental changes from the superficial coups d’état that were prevalent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the profound economic and social upheavals that first appeared in Mexico in 1910 and were followed in the 1950’s by the revolutions in Bolivia, Cuba, and elsewhere. The failure in coincidence between the stages of the history of American policy and the stages of the history of Latin America itself is a fair measure of the irrelevance and futility of our policy. That this failure continued into the 1960’s was clear in Washington’s joy at the military coup that ejected the left-of-center João Goulart government from Brazil in April 1964, for that government, however misdirected and incompetent, at least recognized that there were urgent social and economic problems in Brazil demanding treatment.

No real recognition that such problems existed was achieved in Washington until Castro’s revolution in Cuba forced the realization. As a consequence the Alliance for Progress should be regarded as the North American reaction to Castro rather than its reaction to Latin America’s real problems. This helps to explain why the achievement of the Alliance for Progress has been so limited.

In its early announcement, by President Kennedy during his second month in office, the projected Alliance for Progress seemed more hopeful than any earlier United States reaction to Latin America’s problems had been. It accepted the idea of central economic planning for the Latin American nations and the role of state intervention in investment and economic life, both of which had been rejected by the Eisenhower Administration. To these it added two other basic assumptions: that Latin America be required to take steps to help itself and not merely expect grants from the United States and, also, that social improvements, such as better housing, increased literacy, and improved social amenities, be regarded as intrinsic parts of, or even prerequisites to, purely economic expansion, and not be considered, as hitherto, to be incidental consequences of such expansion.

The formal agreement for the Alliance for Progress was signed by all members of the Organization of American States except Cuba, at Punta del Este, Uruguay, on August 17, 1961. Its aims and attitudes were admirable, but required implementation and organizational features that were not covered in the Charter itself and have largely remained deficient since. Its preamble said, in part, “We, the American Republics, hereby proclaim our decision to unite in a common effort to bring our people accelerated economic progress and broader social justice within the framework of personal dignity and personal liberty. Almost two hundred years ago we began in this Hemisphere the long struggle for freedom which now inspires people in all parts of the world.… Now we must give a new meaning to that revolutionary heritage. For America stands at a turning point in history. The men and women of our Hemisphere are reaching for the better life which today’s skills have placed within their grasp. They are determined for themselves and their children to have decent and ever more abundant lives, to gain access to knowledge and equal opportunity for all, to end those conditions which benefit the few at the expense of the needs and dignity of the many.”

These were fine words, and the specific detail to fulfill them was generally recognized. The latter included “a substantial and sustained growth of per capita incomes at a rate designed to attain, at the earliest possible date, levels of income capable of assuring self-sustaining development, and sufficient to make Latin American income levels constantly larger in relation to the levels of the more industrialized nations.… In evaluating the degree of relative development, account will be taken not only of average levels of real income and gross product per capita, but also of indices of infant mortality, illiteracy, and per capita daily caloric intake.” The minimum desirable rate of economic growth was stated to be 2.5 percent per capita per year. It was, perhaps unrealistically, stated that economic progress should be made “available to all citizens of all economic and social groups through a more equitable distribution of national income, raising more rapidly the income and standard of living of the needier sectors of the population, at the same time that a higher proportion of the national product is devoted to investment.” This aim to redistribute income and achieve simultaneously higher consumption and higher investment is, of course, impossible except in the most advanced industrial societies that have already reached such levels of consumption of material goods that further increases in consumption increase problems rather than solve them. To add to this rather confused idea of the process of economic development, the Charter immediately added, “Special attention should be given to the establishment and development of capital-goods industries.”

Other desirable goals listed in the Charter included “replacing latifundia and dwarf-holdings by an equitable system of land tenure,” “to maintain stable price levels, avoiding inflation or deflation and the consequent social hardships and maldistribution of resources,” “to strengthen existing agreements on economic integration,” and “to develop cooperative programs designed to prevent the harmful effects of excessive fluctuations in the foreign exchange earnings derived from exports of primary products. …” Among the social goals were “to eliminate adult illiteracy and by 1970 to assure, as a minimum, access to six years of primary education for each school age child in Latin America,” “to increase life expectancy at birth by a minimum of five years, and to increase the ability to learn and produce, by improving individual and public health.... to provide adequate potable water supply and drainage to not less than 70 percent of the urban and 50 percent of the rural population; to reduce the mortality rate of children less than five years of age to at least one-half of the present rate; to control the more serious transmittable diseases, according to their importance as a cause of sickness and death …,” and so on.

The methods of achieving these desirable goals were only incidentally established in the Charter. The participating Latin American countries were required to formulate, within eighteen months, long-term development programs that would include improved human resources through education and training, a reform of tax structures (including adequate taxation of large incomes and real estate), laws to encourage investment both foreign and domestic, and improved methods of distribution to provide more competitive markets. The drawing of such programs in areas that lacked adequate statistical information and had few trained economists was a considerable obstacle to carrying out the Charter, and only a handful of programs were approved in the first three years of the Alliance.

As part of the Charter the United States offered “to provide assistance under the Alliance” amounting to $20 billion, of which half was to come from the government and half from private sources, over a ten-year period. Nothing was said in the Charter as to the nature of this assistance, but the government’s share has been generally in the form of credits, the least helpful type of such foreign assistance, and the amount of such assistance has not, as might appear at first glance, amounted to $2 billion a year in new moneys, since private American investments in Latin America already amounted to many hundreds of millions a year and aid from the United States government was almost equally large, so that the total of additional assistance promised by the Alliance was roughly about two-thirds of a billion dollars or less each year.