Asymmetry and Agenda-Setting in U.S.-Latin American Relations: Rethinking the Origins of the Alliance for Progress

Abstract

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.

Setting the Regional Agenda: A Critique of Posthegemonic Regionalism

“…This period could, then, be a “hard case” for our arguments. As recent historical scholarship has noted, however, Latin American actors were adept at using the Cold War framework, including the interamerican system, to advance their own domestic and foreign objectives (Harmer 2011; Brands 2012; Darnton 2013). “Securitization” altered the priorities of interamerican cooperation, but it neither eliminated the broader agenda of regionalism nor reduced the use of regionalism to legitimize domestic agendas.…”

“…They were also crucial to the Pan-American movement. Pan-Americanism has often been treated as a mere political instrument of the United States, but more recent scholarship on interamerican relations demonstrates that Pan-Americanism also provided a venue to negotiate and balance U.S. hegemonic aspirations (see Darnton 2013; Friedman and Long 2015; Scarfi 2016). We show that it also entailed a “social” component—addressing public health, education, and labor, among other issues—as early as the 1900s.…”

Think Tanks, Business and Civil Society: The Ethics of Promoting Pro-corporate Ideologies

“…He also pursued an aligned but independent foreign policy, to promote what he called Operation Pan America (OPA) to increase cooperation. The initiative was an important marker that pushed the US towards a new approach in relation to Latin America (Darnton 2012;Weis 2001). The Kennedy administration thereby sought to combine negative or obstructive measures with specific forms of economic development, seeking to secure Latin American countries from Soviet influence (Hakim 2011).…”

It’s not the size, it’s the relationship: from ‘small states’ to asymmetry

“…Situating these studies within asymmetrical relationships will make this clear, while also helping to avoid overstating the influence of small states. For example, material asymmetries may be partially offset in disparities in attention, political will, and perceptions, with real effects for both agendas and outcomes (Womack, 2016;Shin et al, 2016;Darnton, 2012). This is the essence of Keohane's admonition, oft-cited by small-state scholars, but seemingly ignored elsewhere, that 'If Lilliputians can tie up Gulliver, or make him do their fighting for them, they must be studied as carefully as the giant ' (1969: 310).…”