max paul friedman

Retiring the Puppets, Bringing Latin America Back In:

Recent Scholarship on United StatesLatin American
Relations
Q: Why are there no coups dtat in the United States?
A: Because there is no U.S. embassy there.
Decades of repetition have not diminished the appeal of the old joke in Latin
America, perhaps because history, in the form of U.S. interventions there, seems
to repeat itself so reliably. For some, the joke has a bitter edge. Coming of age
between the twin fates of Guatemalas Jcobo Arbenz and Chiles Salvador
Allendeoverthrown in 1954 and 1973, respectively, with the help of the CIA
a generation of scholars on both sides of the Rio Grande saw the not-so-hidden
hand of the colossus of the North behind much that was dark in twentiethcentury Latin American history: authoritarian government, stifled economic
development, systematic inequality, tragic levels of violence. Recent scholarship
on the circum-Caribbean between the administrations of Franklin Roosevelt
and Lyndon Johnson, however, questions whether this is an adequate account
of how history happens, and seeks to restore the Latin American half of the
equation.
Eleven years ago, in these pages, Mark T. Gilderhus identified an evolving
synthesis in writing on U.S.Latin American relations, one that was generally
critical of U.S. policies.1 Since then, although historians of superpower relations
have refueled Cold War debates with new archival findings, in regard to Latin
America advocates of an orthodox or nationalist position have all but abandoned
the field. It is now unusual to come across a work of history that strongly argues
the merit of U.S. policies in the region or claims these have been designed principally to protect and promote freedom and democracy.2 Scholars attribute the
1. Mark T. Gilderhus, An Emerging Synthesis? U.S.-Latin American Relations since
the Second World War, Diplomatic History 16, no. 3 (1992): 42952, quoted at 452. For
a discussion of the convergence of liberal and radical approaches, see Mark T. Berger,
Managing Latin America: U.S. Power, North American Knowledge and the Cold
War, JILASJournal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 2, no. 1 ( January 1997),
http://www.his.latrobe.edu.au/jilas/journal/vol2_1/Berger.pdf (last accessed 31 July 2003).
2. Unlike that exemplar of the nationalist position and bte noire of the revisionists,
Samuel Flagg Bemis, The Latin-American Policy of the United States (New York, 1943). For an
exception that proves the rule, see Robert Freeman Smiths slender volume, The Caribbean
Diplomatic History, Vol. 27, No. 5 (November 2003). 2003 The Society for Historians
of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Published by Blackwell Publishing, Inc., 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK.

621

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disappointing record to a variety of causeseconomic self-interest, ideological

blinders, the international system, corporatism, racist assumptionsbut they
typically continue to write in the tragic idiom introduced nearly half a century
ago by William Appleman Williams in his critique of U.S. foreign policy.3
This consensus is largely the result of several decades of work by revisionists who persuasively demonstrated how seldom purely defensive nationalsecurity concerns or altruistic motives have driven the making of policy toward
the region. This now-dominant school has been labeled economic determinist
by its detractors, although the studies are usually much richer than that and
generally incorporate multiple factors in their arguments. Historiographical
accounts typically trace the development of revisionism in U.S.Latin
American relations to three principal sources: Williams and his students at the
University of Wisconsin, especially Walter LaFeber and Lloyd Gardner;4 the
world-systems theory developed by Immanuel Wallerstein;5 and dependency
theorists, such as Ral Prebisch, Andre Gunder Frank, and Fernando Henrique
Cardoso (some of whom later modified or abandoned their earliest work as too
schematic).6
By the late 1980s and 1990s, dependency theorists prescriptions for escaping the structure of subordination to the North Atlantic countriesranging
from import-substitution industrialization to socialist modelshad declined in
popularity, but the premises of the dependency model continue to influence
some writing on inter-American relations. The dependentistas explained Latin
American underdevelopment as the product of actions taken in the wealthy
countries, especially the relegation of Latin America to a peripheral role as producer of low-value raw materials and importer of high-value industrial goods.
Luis Fernando Ayerbes Estados Unidos e Amrica Latina: A construo da soberania argues that underdevelopment is not just a feature of the imbalanced international system, but was deliberately and actively maintained throughout the
Cold War by the U.S. practice of undermining all Latin American initiatives
that sought to undertake alternative paths to development or to institute socialWorld and the United States: Mixing Rum and Coca-Cola (New York, 1994), and, for a more measured assessment, Frederick B. Pikes FDRs Good Neighbor Policy: Sixty Years of Generally Gentle
Chaos (Austin, TX, 1995).
3. William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Cleveland, 1959).
4. Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 18601898
(Ithaca, NY, 1963); Lloyd C. Gardner, Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy (Madison, WI,
1964).
5. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System (New York, 1974).
6. For key works in context, see the chapters Research Patterns and Issues and The
Latin American and Caribbean Region in G. Pope Atkins, Handbook of Research on the
International Relations of Latin America and the Caribbean (Boulder, 2001). Currents in revisionism are explored in depth in Mark T. Berger, Under Northern Eyes: Latin American Studies
and U.S. Hegemony in the Americas, 18981990 (Bloomington, IN, 1995). Berger argues that
U.S. scholars have been accomplices in the exercise of U.S. dominance over the regionan
interesting analysis of the connections between government and the academy up to the 1960s,
but a debatable point for the period since the 1970s during the ascendancy of revisionist
interpretations.

Retiring the Puppets, Bringing Latin America Back In : 623

ist or nationalist policies. Whereas the United States flourished under internal
policies that promote a dynamic consumer market at home, protect key industries, guarantee a minimum standard of living for low-income sectors, and preserve respect for civil liberties and the rule of law, Ayerbe writes, Washington
has adopted a radically different posture in its external policies: systematic
violations of human rights, civil liberties, political democracy, and private enterprise in other countries.7 In Latin America, this has taken the form of economic boycotts (which violate the principle of free trade) and the training of
military forces to combat internal foes, with no restrictions on their methods.
By backing the most reactionary, backward, and corrupt sectors and helping to
bloat military establishments, Ayerbe maintains, the United States has contributed to a systematic, regional process of the destruction of social capital
so essential to successful development: that is, the imprisonment, physical
elimination, and exodus of political leaders, trade unionists, intellectuals, and
scientists creates profound structural damage by depriving countries of
skilled administrators, honest politicians, and the creative resources needed for
technological innovation.8
Other recent analyses of U.S.Latin American relations similarly fault the
exercise of U.S. power for Latin American powerlessness, but locate the
problem in ideology and perceptions. Lars Schoultz ascribes both the predilection for interventionism and the recurring policy failures to a 200-year continuity in North American views of Latin Americans as inherently inferior and
assigned to a station beneath the United States.9 Schoultz catalogs arrogant
and inaccurate statements from some of the usual suspects (John Foster Dulles:
[Y]ou have to pat them a little bit and make them think you are fond of them)
and a few U.S. policy-makers generally credited with more sensitivity (Franklin
Delano Roosevelt: You have to treat them like children).10 That such underlying assumptions of superiority have permeated the governmental bureaucracy
at all levels and in all periods is relentlessly demonstrated in Schoultzs work,
and his findings are in line with other analyses of perceptions and misperceptions that also focus on U.S. policy-makers.11 Although such studies often show
a nuanced understanding of the manifold images of the Latin American used

7. Luis Fernando Ayerbe, Estados Unidos e Amrica Latina: A construo da soberania [The
United States and Latin America: The Construction of Sovereignty] (So Paulo, 2001), published in Spanish as Los Estados Unidos y la Amrica Latina: La construccin de la hegemona [The
United States and Latin America: The Construction of Hegemony] (Havana/Bogot, 2001).
Quote from Spanish edition at 292.
8. Ayerbe, Estados Unidos, 294.
9. Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy toward Latin America
(Cambridge, MA, 1998).
10. Ibid., 336, 320.
11. See also John J. Johnson, Latin America in Caricature (Austin, TX, 1993); James William
Park, Latin-American Underdevelopment: A History of Perspectives in the United States, 18771965
(Baton Rouge, LA, 1995); and Frederick B. Pike, The United States and Latin America: Myths
and Stereotypes of Civilization and Nature (Austin, TX, 1992).

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to justify U.S. interventionbandit deserving punishment, damsel in distress,

child lacking discipline, child in need of education and uplift, and so onthey
investigate only the northern half of the relationship. Schoultzs thirteenth
chapter title, Removing the Marines, Installing the Puppets, is representative
of an approach that ascribes all agency to U.S. policy-makers, even as it criticizes their actions.
This tendency to dwell upon the development of policy in Washington has
increasingly drawn the attention of critics and reviewers in recent years. Gilderhus noted that the literature on U.S.Latin American relations was largely
dependent upon the records of the United States.12 Stephen J. Randall, writing
in 1991, acknowledged both the virtues and the limitations resulting from the
almost exclusive preoccupation in U.S.-based scholarship with Washington
policy and policy-makers. Such an approach is enlightening on the U.S. side
but detrimental to understanding inter-American relations, and it sadly bears
too marked a resemblance to the nature of U.S.Latin American policy.13 It is
now standard practice for book reviewers to call attention to the inclusion or
neglect of Latin American sources.14
There have always been a few scholars comfortable working in several languages and committed to writing international history. Friedrich Katz drew on
sources from nine countries in his acclaimed study placing the Mexican Revolution in its international context.15 Thomas Schoonovers comparative studies
of imperialism in Central America are based on research in eight countries.16
Even as the interpretive synthesis identified by Gilderhus grew less controversial in the 1980s and 1990s, however, the field increasingly recognized that
diplomatic histories generally have paid too little attention to Latin American
12. Gilderhus, An Emerging Synthesis?, 429.
13. Stephen J. Randall, Ideology, National Security, and the Corporate State: The
Historiography of U.S.-Latin American Relations, Latin American Research Review 27, no. 1
(1991): 20517, quoted at 206.
14. See, for example, William O. Walker IIIs review of Michael L. Krenns The Chains of
Interdependence: U.S. Policy Toward Central America, 19451954, in The International History
Review 20, no. 2 (June 1998): 46667; Helen Delpars review of Krenns book and of Michael
D. Gambones Eisenhower, Somoza, and the Cold War in Nicaragua, 19531961, among others,
in Latin American Research Review 35, no. 3 (2000): 164, 166; Seth Feins review of Gaddis
Smith, The Last Years of the Monroe Doctrine, 19451993, in Pacific Historical Review 66, no. 4
(November 1997): 620; and Thomas L. Pearcys review of John Major, Prize Possession: The
United States and the Panama Canal, 19031979 in Hispanic American Historical Review 75, no.
1 (February 1995): 13839.
15. Friedrich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the Mexican
Revolution (Chicago, 1981).
16. Thomas Schoonover, Germany in Central America: Competitive Imperialism, 18211929
(Tuscaloosa, AL, 1998); Schoonover, The French in Central America: Culture and Commerce,
18201930 (Wilmington, DE, 2000). Other recent studies in which extensive multinational
archival work proved essential include Jrgen Buchenau, In the Shadow of the Giant: The Making
of Mexicos Central America Policy, 18761930 (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1996); Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 19591976 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002); Daniela
Spenser, The Impossible Triangle: Mexico, Soviet Russia, and the United States in the 1920s
(Durham, NC, 1999); and others mentioned in text below.

Retiring the Puppets, Bringing Latin America Back In : 625

agency. The newer work has not shed any of the fields eclecticism of approach
and interpretation,17 but it does tend to be marked by an attempt to integrate
the actions and perspectives of Latin Americans into an explication of bilateral
or multilateral relations, without losing sight of the fundamental disparity of
power between the North and the South. Rather than a return to earlier nationalist positions, recent work tries to strike a balance by acknowledging the enormous impact of the Western Hemispheres only superpower without ignoring
the role of Latin Americans in shaping their own history.
An important impetus for this change in the direction of the study of
U.S.Latin American relations has been the influence of what should be its sister
field but has sometimes been more of a polyglot distant cousin: Latin American history. As far as most Latin Americanists interested in inter-American
encounters are concerned, the battle between the orthodox and the revisionist
positions ended long ago, leaving few surprises in the latest volleys from revisionists riding out of the hills to shoot the wounded. Rather than explicating
the failures of U.S. policy yet again, scholars working with Spanish- or
Portuguese-language sources and influenced by a careful study of Latin
American history are trying to restore the neglected half of U.S.Latin
American relations to the relationship. Often, this is done by incorporating
Latin American archives.
Not so long ago, the value of foreign sources and perspectives still had to be
defended.18 The debate over whether foreign sources are crucial to the study of
foreign relations seems to have faded, replaced by institutional recognition of
their importance. The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations
(SHAFR) has created two special fellowships designed to foster multinational
scholarship: the Michael J. Hogan Fellowship to promote research in foreign
language sources by supporting foreign-language study, and the W. Stull Holt
Fellowship for travel costs associated with research overseas. Like reviewers
critiques of books lacking Latin American sources, this trend does not reflect
political correctness so much as a new sense of how to be historically correct:
that is, the sense that one cannot provide a full or accurate picture of past relations between two countries by examining only one countrys records, any more
than a court of law could reach a sensible judgment by listening to only the
prosecution or the defense.
Mononational research tends to produce mononational explanations and to
ignore the role of players from countries other than those whose words are
examined. The Cuban missile crisis, for example, which often appears in the literature as a Cold War confrontation between the superpowers or an episode of
17. Gilderhus, paraphrasing Richard V. Salisbury, Good Neighbors? The United States
and Latin America in the Twentieth Century, in American Foreign Relations: A Historiographical Review, ed. Gerald K. Haines and J. Samuel Walker (Westport, CT, 1981), 31134, quoted
at 311.
18. See Sally Marks, The World According to Washington, Diplomatic History 11
(Summer 1987): 26582.

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crisis management lasting thirteen days, looks very different when scholars try
Putting Cuba Into the Cuban Missile Crisis, focusing on Cuban actions and
placing the origins of the conflict firmly in the context of nearly two years of
hostility between the United States and Cuba.19 That putting Latin America
back into U.S.Latin American relations has nothing to do with political correctness or a kind of affirmative action for non-U.S. scholarship should be clear
from the fact that Latin American scholars have no immunity against the narrowing effect of a restricted source base. Ayerbes work, mentioned above, relies
almost entirely on documents from the U.S. Department of State, the Central
Intelligence Agency, the RAND Corporation, and secondary accounts. That
may help explain why the only actor in his inter-American history is the northern colossus, and why events are so undifferentiated.20 Vctor Grimaldis Golpe
y revolucin: El derrocamiento de Juan Bosch y la intervencin norteamericana, the
result of substantial digging in the U.S. National Archives and presidential
libraries, presents a Zolian indictment of the 1965 intervention in which
Dominicans are powerless victims.21
As scholars heed the calls for using Latin American sources or draw on their
own training in Latin American history, their research provides more space for
Latin American actors and agency. Because of this, their findings question some
conventional wisdom about U.S. power, including elements of the revisionist
synthesis that depicted the United States as a regional hegemon, a core nation
to the Latin American periphery, orto take any one of the familiar images
a puppetmaster pulling the strings of puppet leaders, a central planet orbited
by satellites, or the manipulator of client states.

19. The phrase was the title of a recent panel at the Latin-American Studies Association
meeting. Session 600, INT010, 29 March 2003, organized by Peter Kornbluh of the National
Security Archive. Kornbluh has been instrumental in bringing together scholars and participants from several countries, including Cuba, to develop an international history of U.S.Cuban relations during the Kennedy administration. See James G. Blight and Peter Kornbluh,
Politics of Illusion: The Bay of Pigs Invasion Re-examined (Boulder, 1998); and the National
Security Archives Web page on the fortieth anniversary of the missile crisis at
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/cuba_mis_cri/index.htm (last accessed 25 July 2003).
20. For a more nuanced account of how the United States opposed economic nationalism
with varying strategies at different times, see Peter H. Smith, Talons of the Eagle: Dynamics of
U.S.-Latin American Relations (New York, 1996); Stephen G. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area
in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill,
NC, 1999); James F. Siekmeier, Aid, Nationalism, and Inter-American Relations: Guatemala,
Bolivia, and the United States, 19451961 (Lewiston, NY, 1999).
21. Vctor Grimaldi, Golpe y revolucin: El derrocamiento de Juan Bosch y la intervencin
norteamericana [Coup and Revolution: The Overthrow of Juan Bosch and the North American
Intervention] (Santo Domingo, 2000). Even accounts that set out to correct this imbalance
can be hobbled by the difficulty of access to archival records in some countries. On the
dilemma this poses for interpretation, see David Sheinins review of Stephen M. Streeters
useful Managing the Counterrevolution: The United States and Guatemala, 19541961, HDiplo, H-Net Reviews in the Humanities & Social Sciences, November 2001,
http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path = 277481009395463 (last accessed 25
July 2003).

Retiring the Puppets, Bringing Latin America Back In : 627

In some recent work, Latin American leaderseven if they never achieved

the defiance of a Fidel Castronow appear as genuine partners in the relationship, acting with autonomy and pursuing their own interests to the best of
their ability within an asymmetrical framework. In his study of U.S.-Costa
Rican relations, Kyle Longley explains that reading James Scotts exploration of
peasant resistance in Weapons of the Weak suggested to him that weak nations,
too, could engage in similarly creative strategies of nonviolent resistance and
accommodation . . . in their struggle against U.S. domination.22 Longley
immersed himself in the records of Costa Ricas foreign ministry and emerged
with a portrait of postwar leader Jos Figueres as a clever sparrow, taunting,
eluding, and outwitting the North American hawk. Figueres was able to nationalize the banks and utilities, challenge the United Fruit Company and force
a renegotiation of its contract, organize regional opposition to U.S.-backed
dictators Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic and Anastasio Somoza of
Nicaragua, and institute a wealth tax. How did he do all this, yet avoid the fate
of Jcobo Arbenz? Figueress ability came partly from his knowledge of his
opponent: he was familiar with U.S. political culture and knew how to cast his
policies to appeal to Arthur Schlesingers vital center of liberal democrats in
the United States, whom he carefully cultivated, invoking Jeffersonian images
of a nation of yeoman farmers and joking about football while calling for a New
Deal for Costa Rica and firmly expressing his opposition to communism.23 The
latter point seems to have been especially crucial in persuading the Truman and
Eisenhower administrations that Figueress government was on the right side
in the Cold War. Figueres also benefited from a history of cordial relations
between the two countries and from U.S. perceptions of Costa Ricans as democratic, reliable, and white. This account would have looked very different had
the project been approached without Costa Rican archives. Where else would
one discover, as Longley has, that the government of Figueres so carefully measured U.S. opinion of its reform policies that the Costa Rican embassy in Washington monitored editorials in such obscure newspapers as the Leaf-Chronicle of
Clarksville, Tennessee?24 Oftentimes the tail wags the dog, Longley concludes
at one point here, uncharacteristically overstating his case: what his book
demonstrates is that there was no dog and no tail, but two distinct animals like
the ones in his titleone stronger than the other, to be sure, but both engaging in active attempts to pursue their interests.25

22. Kyle Longley, The Sparrow and the Hawk: Costa Rica and the United States During the
Rise of Jos Figueres (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1997), 156; James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday
Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT, 1985). See also Scott, Domination and the Arts of
Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT, 1990).
23. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston, 1949).
24. Longley, The Sparrow and the Hawk, 13233. The embassy staffer forwarding the clipping observed, Pretty small but this is the American heartland.
25. Ibid., 153.

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Like Costa Rica under Figueres, Mexico, by tradition so far from God, so
close to the United States,26 has nonetheless retained a substantial degree of
autonomy from its northern neighbor, the extent of which is assessed by several
recent works centered on World War II. Stephen R. Niblo sees the war as an
opportunity seized by U.S. officials to recoup the influence they had lost during
the 1930s, imposing their will on the Mexican decision-makers by changing
the rules of the game.27 First, the federal government intervened in the U.S.
economy to bolster war production, and an array of new controls and regulations on trade and finance required Mexicans to funnel their business through
the U.S. embassy. Then the administrations of Manuel Avila Camacho and
Miguel Alemn Valdez renounced the Cardenista model of nationalist development, permitting the massive return of foreign capital and adopting U.S.
standards of national income accounting that disregarded issues of inequitable
distribution. Niblo carefully explains the intimate forms of influence exercised
by such ostensibly apolitical actors as the statisticians dispatched to Mexico
City by the U.S. Department of Commerce to impose uniform standards
required by the newly-formed World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
In a subtle analysis made possible by extensive work in the archives of both
countries, he shows how the Mexican government under Lzaro Crdenas
had kept accounts with political implications for nationalist development: for
example, counting investment in new production separately from investment
that was merely speculative capital driving up stock prices or real-estate values
without creating jobs or producing goods or services, and recording the percentage of capital, land, and factories owned by foreigners. The wartime and
postwar harmonizing of Mexicos books meant eliminating such categories,
which did not exist under the U.S. uniform standards, in favor of a simpler
measurement of the gross national product (GNP). This encouraged the redirection of resources toward industries that would boost the overall GNP at the
expense of supporting projects that favored ejidos (communal lands), the peasantry, the poor, and women. Real wages fell, the countryside was starved to feed
export-based production, and the Cardenista system of economic nationalism
crumbled, mirroring the erosion of sovereignty, as loans from U.S.-based
financial institutions proved to be a more powerful force than sending in the
Marines.28
If Niblos account argues that Mexican officials of the post-Cardenista era
readily adopted U.S. policies and undermined their own autonomy from within,
Friedrich E. Schulers study of Mexican foreign policy under Crdenas reaches
26. The quotation is usually attributed to Mexicos last dictator, Porfirio Daz, ousted in
1910.
27. Stephen R. Niblo, War, Diplomacy, and Development: The United States and Mexico,
19381954 (Wilmington, DE, 1995), 285.
28. Ibid., 259, 288. Readers wondering why this account does not focus on the role of
Mexican domestic politics in producing these changes should consult Niblos Mexico in the
1940s: Modernity, Politics, and Corruption (Wilmington, DE, 1999).

Retiring the Puppets, Bringing Latin America Back In : 629

the opposite conclusion. Crdenas professionalized the diplomatic corps and

nurtured talented federal bureaucrats who were, in Schulers view, better skilled
in international negotiations, more realistic in the evaluation of historical contexts, and more creative in situations than their European and U.S. counterparts.29 Together, a pragmatic Crdenas and a highly capable technocratic elite
were able to play one great power against another, managing most famously to
get away with the nationalization of Mexicos oilfields without provoking U.S.
intervention, while also successfully pursuing Mexican national interests in
relations with more powerful European countries and Japan. Rather than the
dependent victims of an international system, the subjects of Schulers study are
masters of the game.
Mexican officials are also shown to be far better informed than their U.S.
and German counterparts in Mara Emilia Pazs investigation of wartime cooperation between Mexico and the United States. Washingtons eagerness to see
Axis nationals in Mexico closely controlled, and the desire for joint military
operations and rights to station U.S. forces on Mexican territory, gave the
Mexican government a certain leverage, exercised in part by ex-president
Crdenas in his new positions as a key military commander and then minister
of defense.30 Here, too, Mexican sources reveal Mexican agency.
The assignment of agency to Latin American leaders also extends to recent
analyses of Caribbean and Central American dictators long depicted as the
classic puppets of the United States. Two recent studies of Anastasio Somoza
of Nicaragua portray him, not, in the (possibly apocryphal) words of FDR, as
our sonofabitch, but as a more independent figure who amassed great wealth
and power inside his own country in spite of U.S. policies, not because of them.
Paul Coe Clark, Jr., who titles his book a revisionist look not to align himself
with the dependentistas but to announce his challenge to the puppet myth, calls
attention to efforts by U.S. officials to remove Somoza from power after World
War II.31 During the Truman administration, the State Department developed
a policy pushed by Assistant Secretary Spruille Braden of distancing itself from
nondemocratic regimes in order to delegitimize them in the hope that they
would be replaced. This was most notoriously (and unsuccessfully) applied
against Juan Pern of Argentina, but Clark reveals a substantial amount of friction between State Department officials and Somoza, beginning as early as 1943
and culminating in the withdrawal of recognition for about a year in 1947.
Somoza remained in power because he better understood the Nicaraguan polit29. Friedrich E. Schuler, Mexico Between Hitler and Roosevelt: Mexican Foreign Relations in
the Age of Lzaro Crdenas, 19341940 (Albuquerque, 1998), 1. For Mexicos cultural influence
on the United States, see Helen Delpar, The Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican: Cultural Relations Between the United States and Mexico, 19201935 (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1992).
30. Mara Emilia Paz, Strategy, Security, and Spies: Mexico and the U.S. as Allies in World
War II (University Park, PA, 1997), 6.
31. Paul Coe Clark, Jr., The United States and Somoza, 19331956: A Revisionist Look
(Westport, CT, 1992).

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ical landscape than did U.S. officials and was able to make good use of unintentional signs of support, exploiting the dichotomy between what actually was
and what was thought to be Washingtons position regarding the Nicaraguan
dictator.32 As an example, Clark emphasizes that Somozas state visit to Washington in 1939complete with cheering crowds, aircraft streaking overhead,
and a personal welcome from FDR at Union Stationwas merely a rehearsal
for the upcoming visit of the king and queen of England. The implication is
that the Roosevelt administration officials who organized the event did not
mean to express strong support for Somoza. But they cannot have failed to
realize that, rehearsal or no, the pageantry surrounding the visit would send a
clear message to Nicaraguans and all Latin Americans. Clark shows the infighting between State Department officials seeking to encourage democracy in
Nicaragua and the U.S. ambassadors and military officials posted there who
were more susceptible to Somozas charms. At times, the case is argued too
strenuously, as when Clark describes the break in relations as a year-long effort
to dislodge Somoza from power.33 (To evaluate this claim, one need only think
of the energies mustered in genuine U.S. attempts to dislodge other Latin
American leaders at various times in the twentieth century.) Nonetheless,
Somoza clearly maneuvered through this temporary period not merely by being
a compliant puppet.
Michael D. Gambone seeks to assess the degree of Nicaraguas autonomy in
a relationship with the United States he characterizes as between patronage
and partnership, between a state of complete dominance and equality.34 He
does not contest the asymmetry of power between the two countries, but does
argue that Nicaragua remained an independent actor under Somoza. The
interests of the two diverged, for example, over military aid, which the United
States wanted to see used for creating a force to supplement Rio Pact organization for hemispheric defense, but Somoza used as an opportunity to earn
hard currency [by reselling U.S. equipment], to crush signs of internal rebellion, and to extend its influence over Central America.35 Gambone identifies
specific instances of this kind of divergence, and, like Clark, argues that the
Somoza family was able to outfox Washington officials by cultivating personal
relations with diplomats and military officers posted to Somozas capital.
At times, these studies of U.S.-Nicaraguan relations illuminate more trees
than forest. Few revisionists insisted that the exercise of U.S. power always functioned smoothly and without friction, or that there was no room for the expressions of difference. Gambones book provides a close account (based chiefly on
U.S. sources) of negotiations over economic aid to demonstrate Nicaraguan

32. Ibid., 199.

33. Ibid., 174.
34. Michael D. Gambone, Eisenhower, Somoza, and the Cold War in Nicaragua, 19531961
(Westport, CT, 1997), 3.
35. Ibid., 226.

Retiring the Puppets, Bringing Latin America Back In : 631

independence of action. But there seems to have been fundamental agreement

between the two sides, with some routine haggling over the details. For
example, Luis Somoza is shown taking advantage of his friendship with U.S.
Ambassador Thomas Whelan in order to drive a wedge between Washingtonbased aid officials and the U.S. mission in Managua, thereby securing a halfmillion dollars for housing construction when Whelan prematurely announced
the project to the press as a fait accompli. But it turns out that the relevant U.S.
agency had already reached an internal decision to fund the project, which was
desired by all sides. There is less here than meets the eye, especially in the
context of firm Nicaraguan support for the CIAs exile invasions of Guatemala
in 1954 and Cuba in 1961, both sides eagerness to suppress leftist dissent, and
the failure of the Somoza family to challenge the United States on any substantial issues in this period. There may be a stronger case to be made for
Somozas independence, perhaps by making use of Nicaraguan archives, but
agency and independence are not the same thing.36
Nevertheless, works of this nature successfully challenge the notion of U.S.
policy as a deus ex machina, with the United States somehow responsible for
all developments in bilateral relations, even when the country in question is
ruled by a friendly dictator. Jos Gilberto Quintero Torres questions whether
Venezuela merely served as a U.S. satellite during the dictatorship of Marcos
Prez Jimnez from 1952 to 1958. Prez Jimnez was praised by John Foster
Dulles as a model leader, since he created a favorable investment climate, and
Eisenhower awarded him the Legion of Merit. Yet Quintero Torres demonstrates that the Venezuelan government, and especially its armed forces, pursued
a strategy of relative autonomy within an asymmetrical relationship in a variety
of ways.37 Venezuelan officials turned to European suppliers of military equipment and training to diminish their reliance on the United States, refused to
cooperate with plans that envisioned U.S. occupation of the Venezuelan oilfields in the event of a crisis, and developed a doctrine of national defense
instead of subscribing to the U.S. doctrine of hemispheric defense. Prez
Jimnez even refused a request to provide a token number of troops for the
Korean War. All of this represented, within a limited range of possibilities
and without denying the basic coincidence of interests between the two
governments, an autonomous construction independent of U.S. influence in

36. Knut Walters substantial The Regime of Anastasio Somoza, 19361956 (Chapel Hill, NC,
1993) does this successfully in making a revisionist argument of another kind: that Somozas
staying power was the product, not only of repression, but of his strategy of state-supported,
export-led growth, which yielded income that could be used for patronage and helped achieve
consensus among dominant sectors of society. The book is an impressive internal Nicaraguan
history, not a history of U.S.-Nicaraguan relations. In fact, the near-absence of the United
States as a factor in Somozas rule is one of the rare weaknesses of the study.
37. Jos Gilberto Quintero Torres, Venezuela-U.S.A.: Estrategia y seguridad en lo regional y
en lo bilateral, 19521958 [Venezuela-U.S.A.: Strategy and Security in Regional and Bilateral
Relations, 19521958] (Caracas, 2000).

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military relations, best understood as neither completely cooperative nor

competitive.38
Updating the revisionist synthesis to reflect Latin American agency does not
mean denying that the United States has had a tremendous degree of influence
of the course of events in the region. John H. Coatsworths Central America and
the United States has more to say than earlier treatments about the first half of
the relationship, in terms of both various attempts by Central American leaders
to counterbalance U.S. dominance and the transformations of Central American societies produced by interactions with the United States. But his conclusions are very much in line with the revisionist consensus: he refutes the
orthodox claim that revolutionary movements are produced by outside agitators and instead ascribes the isthmian history of violence and instability to close
U.S. support for local elites, which allowed them to be especially intransigent
in defending their privileges while discrediting them further to nationalist
reform movements.39
Like the Somoza of Clark and Gambone, Rafael Trujillo is the subject of two
books that depict him as a clever manipulator of U.S. officials, rather than
a willing servant of United States governmental and financial interests.40
Michael R. Halls Sugar and Power in the Dominican Republic assigns equal significance to Dominican interests as influential, and occasionally predominant,
factors in determining hemispheric relations.41 Dominican and U.S. elites
engaged in a dance of reciprocal manipulation over the two crucial concerns
in the Caribbean context: sugar imports and the alleged communist threat.42 In
Halls telling, Dominican elites inflated the communist menace in order to argue
that they needed a higher sugar quota to provide income for defensive efforts.
When they were successful, they then used the profits not to fight communism
but to preserve a hierarchical social order and line their own pockets.43
Meanwhile, Washington sought to use possible changes in the sugar quota as
both incentive and deterrent in seeking reform from Trujillo, with limited
38. Ibid., 2.
39. John H. Coatsworth, Central America and the United States: The Clients and the Colossus
(New York, 1994). Walter LaFebers touchstone account, Inevitable Revolutions: The United
States in Central America, 2nd ed. (New York, 1993), while having less to say about the strategies of Central American political leaders, also placed responsibility for continually recurring
revolts on U.S. support for Central American elites and the preservation of an inequitable
economic system based on the export of cash crops. Using a traditional diplomatic-history
approach of examining the records of midlevel U.S. government officials and the Council on
Foreign Relations, Michael L. Krenn reaches similar conclusions about the contradictions
between praising democracy and economic development while aiding dictators and supporting a system of raw material production. See Krenn, The Chains of Interdependence: U.S. Policy
Toward Central America (Armonk, NY, 1996).
40. Raymond Pulley, The United States and the Dominican Republic: The High Price
of Caribbean Stability, Caribbean Studies (October 1965): 30.
41. Michael R. Hall, Sugar and Power in the Dominican Republic: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and
the Trujillos (Westport, CT, 2000), 1.
42. Ibid., 1.
43. Ibid., 141.

Retiring the Puppets, Bringing Latin America Back In : 633

success. Then came the Cuban Revolution, the U.S. embargo, and the threemillion-ton Cuban sugar-quota windfall that could now be redistributed
among other countries. Eisenhower sought to reduce the Dominican share of
this windfall to prod Trujillo toward reform, but the dictators allies in Congress, acquired through years of strategic bribery and blackmail, prevented him
from doing so. The limits of Dominican power were ultimately demonstrated
when a group supported by the CIA assassinated Trujillo in 1961; afterwards,
the Kennedy administration continued to use the threat of a reduction in the
sugar quota to pressure Dominicans not to accept the attempt by Trujillos son
Ramfis to succeed his father. Halls use of primary and secondary sources from
both countries permits him to portray a bilateral relationship and the development of policy as an interactive process.
Eric Paul Roordas The Dictator Next Door, dealing with the first half of
Trujillos regime, displays great sensitivity to the multiple lines of influence
emanating from each country, rather than writing a one-sided or even simple
bilateral study.44 Even more than the self-interested leader portrayed in Sugar
and Power, here Trujillo presides over a regime in conflict with substantial U.S.
interests: The Dominican Republic became a difficult place to do business, a
querulous participant in negotiations, and a major cause of Caribbean disquiet,
including genocide, war scares, and assassinations.45 Yet Trujillo managed to
hold onto and increase his power during these years, partly by persecuting first
Fascists and then Communists (real and imagined), and partly by astutely recognizing how to appeal to certain sectors in the United States. The familiar
story of Trujillos payola-led development of a Dominican lobby in the U.S.
Congress is fleshed out here through the use of Dominican archives. But
Roorda goes far beyond a fuller accounting of such schemes. Drawing on Homi
Bhabhas concept of mimicry as a form of colonial resistance,46 and writing with
admirable clarity, Roorda explores Trujillos use of symbols designed to make
U.S. officials feel a certain affinity with him. To disarm his critics, Trujillo deliberately invoked the language of Roosevelts Good Neighbor policy (mutual
respect, affectionate reciprocity), dubbed his agricultural policy the Dominican New Deal, and nominated Roosevelt for the Nobel Peace Prize. The construction of the enormous Columbus lighthouse at Santo Domingo (finally
completed in 1989), presented as an emblem of inter-American unity, was such
an irresistible project that even State Department officials firmly opposed to the
dictator, such as Sumner Welles, supported it. Roorda persuasively describes
Trujillos exploitation of the cultural difference between the striped pants
diplomats, who tried to remain aloof, and the gold braid U.S. military offi44. Eric Paul Roorda, The Dictator Next Door: The Good Neighbor Policy and the Trujillo
Regime in the Dominican Republic, 19301945 (Durham, NC, 1998), 237.
45. Ibid., 2.
46. Homi Bhabha, Of Mimicry and Men: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse, in
October: The First Decade, 19761986, ed. Annette Michelson, Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp,
and Joan Copjec (Cambridge, MA, 1987), 31725.

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cers, who felt a common bond: the Marine-trained dictator shared their criteria of progress, their comportment, and such symbols as uniforms, medals, and
weaponry. . . . Their participation facilitated the continuation of the imperial
link between the two countries, albeit on Trujillos terms. In this way, [W]hat
began as mimicry became mastery.47
There are signs that Roordas sophisticated contribution may be a harbinger
of future trends in the field: the successful blending of foreign and domestic
sources and cultural and political approaches to international relations, written
in a clear-eyed, nonideological style. Leading Latin Americanists have been
calling for a broader understanding of political history as integrative history
that combines the material and the cultural. They acknowledge that our attention is properly fixed on the exercise of power, but that that power does not
emanate only from Maos gun barrel or from the actions of the state; it is contained in symbols, identities, language, and everyday practices.48
A marvelous collection of essays shows the potential for moving in this direction. Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.Latin
American Relations draws inspiration from a number of sources, including Mary
Louise Pratts concept of the contact zone.49 Here, international encounters
are played out among actors as diverse as individuals, states, corporations, technologies, and ideologies, in a process that is not the simplified, one-way creation of hegemony, but is marked by negotiation and exchange, collaboration
and resistance, adaptation and imitation. Five incisive theoretical chapters
explain and ten empirical studies explore how these insights can breathe life into
the field. In her contribution, for example, Catherine C. LeGrand revises dependentista assessments of the United Fruit Company (UFCO). She begins by revisiting Colombias banana-growing region, where Gabriel Garca Mrquez had
vividly compared UFCOs arrival to a devastating hurricane wiping out everything in its path.50 Her research in local archives and oral history interviews
revealed a very different picture of the banana enclave: as a place of cultural
exchange and contested power, where deep-rooted local traditions and beliefs
survived UFCOs introduction of international capitalism even as local elites
increased their contacts with North America and Europe and the cash economy
fueled corruption throughout society.51 Michael J. Schroeder seeks to under47. Roorda, Dictator Next Door, 19091.
48. Gilbert M. Joseph, ed., Reclaiming the Political in Latin American History: Essays from the
North (Durham, NC, 2001).
49. Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand, and Ricardo D. Salvatore, eds., Close
Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations (Durham,
NC, 1998); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York,
1992).
50. Gabriel Garca Mrquez, Cien aos de soledad [One Hundred Years of Solitude] (Buenos
Aires, 1967).
51. Catherine C. LeGrand, Living in Macondo: Economy and Culture in a United Fruit
Company Banana Enclave in Colombia, in Joseph, LeGrand, and Salvatore, Close Encounters,
33368, quote at 356. For a broader (if less thick) description, see Thomas F. OBrien, The
Century of U.S. Capitalism in Latin America (Albuquerque, 1999).

Retiring the Puppets, Bringing Latin America Back In : 635

stand civil conflict in Nicaragua in the age of Augusto Sandino as a function of

cultural patterns of violence in the Segovia mountain region, rather than a tale
of either mere banditry or nationalist resistance to Marine invasion.52 Thomas
Miller Klubock explains the unexpected effect of the Braden Copper Companys
intrusive attempt to regulate its workers leisure time and sexuality to encourage a stable, married workforcetriggering not accommodation but an explosion of labor militancy.53 Other chapters take as their subjects marriage and
divorce, painting, film, and health programs.
The way these topics are handled, with care and always with attention to
questions of evidence, should reassure any reader of this journal who may still
wonder what cultural history is doing in its pages. For some time now, the image
of diplomatic history (and Diplomatic History) as a walled city, its besieged
defenders pouring cold water on the work of the innovative hordes below, has
been out of date. The profession now rewards high-quality integrative work
with book contracts, faculty positions, and prizes.54 To be sure, some scholars
of U.S. foreign relations still bristle at this approach, objecting that the new
cultural history at best distracts us from analyzing the states pre-eminent role
in determining events while we focus on colorful trivia, and at worst yields
studies that obfuscate the mechanisms of power.55 But power, in all its forms, is
at the center of these studies. The editors of Close Encounters have also worked
hard to prevent a clutter of postmodernist jargon from blocking the view.
One can, nevertheless, find studies that revel in it. Cynthia Webers Faking
It: U.S. Hegemony in a Post-Phallic Era delights in wordplay, beginning with
the fact that Castro literally means I castrate. 56 Where another scholar might
have done no more with this observation than to indulge in, say, a jibe at John
F. Kennedy (who once famously claimed to have performed this operation upon
Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis), Weber takes Castros name
as inspiration into hemispheric relations, along these lines:
52. Michael J. Schroeder, The Sandino Rebellion Revisited: Civil War, Imperialism,
Popular Nationalism, and State Formation Muddied Up Together in the Segovias of
Nicaragua, 19261934, in Joseph, LeGrand, and Salvatore, Close Encounters, 20868.
53. Thomas Miller Klubock, From Welfare Capitalism to the Free Market in Chile:
Gender, Culture, and Politics in the Copper Mines, in Joseph, LeGrand, and Salvatore, Close
Encounters, 36999.
54. See, for example, some of the recent winners of the SHAFR Bernath Book Prize: Mary
Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 19151940 (Chapel
Hill, NC, 2001); Joseph Henning, Outposts of Civilization: Race, Religion, and the Formative Years
of American-Japanese Relations (New York, 2000); Jessica Gienow-Hecht, Transmission Impossible: American Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany, 19451955 (Baton Rouge,
LA, 1999); and Roorda, Dictator Next Door.
55. Robert Buzzanco, What Happened to the New Left? Toward a Radical Reading of
American Foreign Relations, Diplomatic History 23, no. 4 (1999): 575607. For a judicious
assessment of the problems and potential of the new approaches, see Emilia Viotti da Costa,
New Publics, New Politics, New Histories: From Economic Reductionism to Cultural
ReductionismIn Search of Dialectics, in Joseph, Reclaiming the Political, 1731.
56. Cynthia Weber, Faking It: U.S. Hegemony in a Post-Phallic Era (Minneapolis, 1999),
23.

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Because a castrator requires an object, a denotative reading of Castros name

produces a castrating/castrated dichotomy that might structure U.S.-Cuban
relations. . . . Castration, according to [Roland] Barthes, is contagious. In
such a structure, Castro the castrator cannot escape becoming Castro the
castrated. This denotatively derived structuring device can explain many
aspects of U.S.-Cuban relations and should not be discarded.57
Maybe not. The book does have an argument to make: that U.S. interventions
in the Caribbean are caused by various forms of castration anxiety among its
leaders. It seems likely to appeal to students of queer theory already comfortable
reading sentences such as The Caribbean Sea/See/Screen resists American
advances by making Americas difference known to those who (re)read/(re)view
it, rather than to more traditional students of U.S.Latin American relations.58
This is the unfortunate outcome of a writing strategy that confirms in the
breach the value of the Close Encounters commitment to clarity and sober
analysisunfortunate, because just as examinations of the racial views inherent
in the perspectives of U.S. policy-makers are now widely accepted, gender
analyses still controversial in some quarters are making an indispensable contribution, as several rather less self-amused studies have shown.59
Two trends in the recent literature hold promise for renewing a field that
was acquiring a certain sameness. Restoring Latin America to the equation in
terms of both agency and archives while turning to culture for a fuller understanding of the scope of the political has helped bring us studies of interAmerican relations that measure up to the richness of the subject. Given the
ferment taking place throughout the field, we are likely to see a flourishing of
such work in the future.

57. Ibid., 23.

58. Ibid., 138.
59. See, for example, Robert D. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold
War Foreign Policy (Amherst, MA, 2001); K. A. Cuordileone, Politics in an Age of Anxiety:
Cold War Political Culture and the Crisis in American Masculinity, 19491960, Journal of
American History 87, no. 2 (September 2000): 51545; Emily S. Rosenberg, Revisiting Dollar
Diplomacy: Narratives of Money and Manliness, Diplomatic History 22, no. 2 (Spring 1998):
17798; and Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked
the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, CT, 1998), the argument of
which is more balanced and sensitive to multicausality than its title (and some critics) suggest.