ginastera’s bomarzo in the united states and the impotence of the pan-american dream 467

Láinez and Ginastera received congratulations, including a personal accolade from

Humphrey. Although the vice president found Bomarzo “difficult, discordant and
different,” he added—in “good-neighborly fashion,” as Time magazine put it—“it
has distinction.”50 Likewise, Bomarzo was hailed as a cultural triumph for
Argentina. One critic for the Argentine magazine Panorama gloated that now “the
diplomatic world of Washington was on notice that . . . [Ambassador] Algosaray
wasn’t content to just discuss steers, credit, and industry; rather [he] represents a
country that also knows how to export art and civilization.”51
If Argentina would no longer be known as “the land of beef and wheat,” as
some journalists in the United States were wont to describe it,52 what did the
presence of so many Washington politicos at Bomarzo’s premiere mean?
Humphrey’s case is revealing: his loyalties had been repeatedly strained over
Johnson’s Latin American policy and his advice routinely overlooked.53 Clearly
the vice president and his fellows had sat through a “difficult and discordant”
work to applaud hemispheric solidarity—on their feet, yet. Nevertheless, at the
time of the premiere, Onganı́a’s military regime, which presumably contradicted
U.S. notions of “democracy” and “progress,” had been in power in Argentina for
a year. Just what sort of “solidarity” was being applauded?

* * *
To consider this question, we need to backtrack to June 1966, when General
Juan Carlos Onganı́a overthrew the weak but legally elected government of Arturo
Illia. According to various commentators, Onganı́a had been emboldened by the
military overthrow of a constitutional government in Brazil two years earlier.54
The United States had reacted to that event by casting aside its democratic prin-
ciples and recognizing the Brazilian dictatorship just twelve hours after the coup,
claiming that the previous government had been unduly susceptible to commun-
ism.55 Later that year, the United States also recognized a military government in
Peru.56 Clearly, as historian Robert Packenham has concluded, the United States
“no longer [sought] to punish military juntas for overthrowing democratic
regimes.”57 More significant was U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic in
April 1965, a country that, precariously close to Castro’s Cuba, was seen to be on
the verge of a communist takeover. Humphrey, initially excluded from discussion
on the invasion, was unable to deter Johnson from sending in the Marines.58
Such actions further tarnished U.S. credibility in Latin America, at least insofar
as it could claim that democratic, rather than merely anticommunist or business-
friendly ideals lay at the heart of “hemispheric solidarity.”
In reporting on Argentina, sectors of the U.S. press whitewashed similar
inconsistencies. On June 24, 1966, when Illia’s government was in its final
throes, Time ran a column under the snappy heading, “Argentina: Where the