The Alliance for Progress anchored U.S. Cold War strategy in Latin America in the early 1960s, and policymakers nowadays still cite it as a model of success. Even so, the origins of the Alliance remain contested. Some scholars have attributed it mainly to the Kennedy administration, others to the Eisenhower administration, and still others to Brazilian President Juscelino Kubitschek, whose Operation Pan-America led to the 1960 Treaty of Bogotá. This article outlines the terms and stakes of the ongoing debate among scholars and U.S. decision-makers; it also emphasizes agenda-setting rather than regional power asymmetries to explain how Brazil influenced U.S. policy. Finally, drawing on archival research in the Brazilian and Argentine Foreign Ministries and the Organization of American States (OAS), as well as on published Latin American policy documents and U.S. congressional records, the article shows that Kubitschek created partnerships with Argentina and Colombia and built a Latin American consensus within the OAS, thereby establishing the range of U.S. foreign policy options and setting the inter-American agenda.

Can public diplomacy help resolve protracted international conflicts? Both rationalist and constructivist traditions identify significant domestic obstacles to international peacemaking. However, Robert Putnam's concept of “reverberation” implies that diplomats can expand their adversaries’ win-sets for cooperation by engaging foreign publics. This paper analyzes a most-likely case, with archival evidence: Argentine Ambassador Oscar Camilión's unsuccessful quest for Argentine-Brazilian rapprochement in 1976–77. Although the two countries later overcame rivalry, public diplomacy contributed negligibly to this success: internal Argentine divisions created mixed messages toward Brazil, Brazilian leaders launched a competing public relations operation, and these two currents obstructed and nearly terminated Camilión's mission. This case illuminates the paradoxes of Argentine foreign policymaking under military rule and offers a cautionary tale for scholars and practitioners of public diplomacy and conflict resolution.

Documentary Evidence in Case StudyResearch and the Debate over U.S. Entry into World War II 84 and Andrew Bennett warn, "The possibility of erroneous interpretation of the signiªcance of archival documents is enormous"; they lament the absence of research that "provides an adequate discussion of the problems of weighing the evidentiary worth of archival materials." 3 Larson, similarly, observes that critics "complain that case studies are unscientiªc because history can say anything you want," but "there is no guidebook for political scientists on how to use primary sources."4 Two important contributions, by Marc Trachtenberg and Scott Frisch et al., focus, respectively, on assessing and interpreting individual documents' content in the context of public sources and scholarly literature, and on measurement and data collection (particularly for future quantitative analysis).5 Both volumes are especially good on the inductive component of archival research (how documents help reframe questions, theories, and assumptions) and on the practical one (the nuts and bolts of visiting an archive and working with documents and staff). Nevertheless, George and Bennett's point stands: political scientists need more guidance on how (and how not) to use archival materials and other primary documents for inferences and hypothesis testing.The central problem is that for all the careful articulation of what Trachtenberg calls "the architecture" of a debate-that is, the concrete empirical questions that would yield leverage on broader theoretical argumentsthere is virtually no explicit attention to what I would call the "architecture of the sources."6 Even when both sides of a debate accumulate textual evidence, they generally have not speciªed how this selection of documents relates to other available sources and to the empirical questions they seek to address. This opacity with respect to source selection handicaps authors' and readers' ability to make successful inferences from those sources. Scholars regularly dispute interpretations of individual texts, but the main problem that I address in this article is a structural one: the multiple-stage selection process Archives and Inference 853.

This paper analyzes the development of cooperation between Argentina and Brazil from their initial rapprochement of 1979 to the construction of Mercosur in 1991. It presents an account of cooperation that emphasizes the power and organizational interests of the armed forces and that challenges the prevailing emphases on democratization and neoliberalism. In doing so, it addresses a methodological problem for qualitative research in international relations: What can be done if our theories of why cooperation occurs affect our perceptions of when it begins? Conventional explanations of Argentine–Brazilian cooperation may be biased toward what historian Herbert Butterfield called “Whig history,” which sees in past events associations that exist only in the present. These tendencies can alter our periodization of cases, omit or falsely reject important causal variables, and too readily confirm our preferred hypotheses, but they can also be corrected.

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