Conclusion

2018 ◽  
pp. 214-220
Author(s):  
Thomas Tunstall Allcock
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Regional Integration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Assistance ◽  
Strategic Vision ◽  
Richard Nixon ◽  
Alliance For Progress ◽  
Global Affairs ◽  
Regional Agenda

If Lyndon Johnson’s administration witnessed a dwindling of the energy and optimism of the early days of John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, then his successor would preside over its disappearance. Johnson’s attempts to promote regional integration were the last significant effort of an era characterized by the belief that the United States could further its own interests by encouraging Latin American modernization and economic development through various forms of aid and assistance. Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon, whose experiences during his ill-fated tour of 1958 had helped prompt the Eisenhower administration’s belated interest in Latin America, would abandon the idea of hemispheric development almost entirely. Despite some claims to the contrary during the 1968 election campaign, the region did not play a significant role in the strategic vision of global affairs of Nixon and his chief foreign policy adviser, Henry Kissinger, and the Alliance was not part of their plans. As Nixon stated bluntly: “Latin America doesn’t matter.” To an even greater degree for the new administration than for its predecessors, stability was the key; few promises of economic assistance were forthcoming, and repressive governments would be embraced even more readily than in the Kennedy-Johnson era. “So unambitious as to be embarrassing,” was the stark assessment of Nixon’s regional agenda in the ...

Alliance for Progress

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen G. Rabe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Economic Growth ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Marshall Plan ◽  
Assistance Program ◽  
Alliance For Progress ◽  
The 1960S

On March 13, 1961, President John F. Kennedy announced the Alliance for Progress, an economic assistance program to promote political democracy, economic growth, and social justice in Latin America. The United States and Latin American nations formally agreed to the alliance at a conference held in August 1961, at Punta del Este, Uruguay. U.S. delegates promised that Latin America would receive over twenty billion dollars in public and private capital from the United States and international lending authorities during the 1960s. The money would arrive in the form of grants, loans, and direct private investments. When combined with an expected eighty billion dollars in internal investment, this new money was projected to stimulate an economic growth rate of not less than 2.5 percent a year. This economic growth would facilitate significant improvements in employment, and in rates of infant mortality, life expectancy, and literacy rates. In agreeing to the alliance, Latin American leaders pledged to work for equality and social justice by promoting agrarian reform and progressive income taxes. The Kennedy administration developed this so-called Marshall Plan for Latin America because it judged the region susceptible to social revolution and communism. Fidel Castro had transformed the Cuban Revolution into a strident anti-American movement and had allied his nation with the Soviet Union. U.S. officials feared that the lower classes of Latin America, mired in poverty and injustice, might follow similarly radical leaders. Alliance programs delivered outside capital to the region, but the Alliance for Progress failed to transform Latin America. During the 1960s, Latin American economies performed poorly, usually falling below the 2.5 percent target. The region witnessed few improvements in health, education, or welfare. Latin American societies remained unfair and authoritarian. Sixteen extra-constitutional changes of government repeatedly unsettled the region. The Alliance for Progress fell short of its goals for several reasons. Latin America had formidable obstacles to change: elites resisted land reform, equitable tax systems, and social programs; new credits often brought greater indebtedness rather than growth; and the Marshall Plan experience served as a poor guide to solving the problems of a region that was far different from Western Europe. The United States also acted ambiguously, calling for democratic progress and social justice, but worried that Communists would take advantage of the instability caused by progressive change. Further, Washington provided wholehearted support only to those Latin American governments and organizations that pursued fervent anticommunist policies.

scholarly journals Latin America: Demographic Dynamics and the Migration Processes Transformation

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-140
Author(s):  
N. Yu. Kudeyarova
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Central America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Regional Integration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
Migration Activity ◽  
Mass Migration ◽  
The Caribbean

Latin America is one of the high level migration activity regions. The mass migration flows are the part of the Western Hemisphere South nations history for more than a century and a half. Both the structure and direction of that flows have been significantly transformed during that period. While being the transatlantic flows recipients at the end of the XIX – beginning of the XX centuries, the Latin American States turned into donors of human resources in the second half of the XX century due to the profound demographic transformation. The aim of this paper is to analyse the demographic transformations impact on the emigration mobility models development in Latin America and the Caribbean countries. Demographic changes were manifested in different ways in countries with a large share of European migrants and those that were not affected by mass migrations flows at the turn of the XIX – XX centuries. The Central America countries and Mexico have experienced the most profound population explosion that subsequently affected the intensity of the migration movement to the United States. The paper examines the main migration directions of Latin America and the Caribbean residents, identifies two basic mobility source areas that demonstrate different strategies via different destination countries choice. While the United States has become the leading destination country for Latin American migrants, accounting for 93% of migrants from Central America and Mexico, the South American migration is mostly intraregional. The largest regional integration associations migration policies implementation reflects this difference. Spain has become a significant extra-regional migration destination for South America. At the end of the second decade of the XXI century, global economic transformations affect the migration dynamics of Latin American subregions, producing powerful migration crises and local tensions.

Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration

1957 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 404-406
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Assistance ◽  
Development Fund ◽  
Special Fund ◽  
And Migration ◽  
American Nation ◽  
European Migration

The Council of the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM) held its fifth session in Geneva, October I–10, 1956; prior to the session the nine-nation Executive Committee held a private session beginning on September 20. After adopting the Director's progress report, a final 1956 movement program of 126,160 Europeans, and a budget of $44.5 million, the Council approved the 1957 plan for resettlement of 122,000 European migrants at a cost of nearly $44 million. Delegates from ten nations pledged contributions amounting to $680,680 for a special fund of nearly $1 million established by the Council for assistance to refugees and migration services. The ICEM Director, Harold H. Tittmann, reported the decline in 1956 of movements to Latin America, and suggested the possibility of increased migration to Colombia, which had accepted relatively few European migrants. A United States delegate (Walter) announced that the United States was prepared to allocate part of its $15 million Latin American Development Fund to promote land settlement programs in Latin America. He stated that the United States could not originate such programs, but required a Latin American nation to make land available for resettlement of migrants and a migrant-sending European nation to contribute its share of financial and economic assistance. In accordance with the United States offer the Argentine delegate said his government would set aside 70 plots of land to assist immigrants in the Melchior Romero colony near Buenos Aires. In addition, 23,000 hectares of land owned by the Banco de la Naoion and located in various parts of the country would be earmarked for other projects.

Latin American American Literature

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rose Phillips
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin America ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Latin American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Indigenous Populations ◽  
United States Government ◽  
South American ◽  
Alliance For Progress

Latin American literature is a broad and heterogeneous category composed of voices from many countries spanning two continents. In the United States, more attention has been given to Cuban, Chicano/a, and Central American literatures than to writers from other South American countries. This article tries to remedy this disparity by focusing on the presence and influence of literature from South American countries, among them Colombia, Peru, and Argentina. The Latin American Boom was one of the most important literary movements that introduced Latin American literature into the United States and the broader international scene. After the revolution of 1959, Cuba began to offer opportunities for writers and artists from all over Latin America who wanted to pursue their intellectual or artistic interests. One of the reasons the United States government established the Alliance for Progress was to counter Cuba’s influence on Latin American intellectuals. The insidious program Alliance for Progress had a darker side that supported repressive military regimes across Latin America that were responsible for the death, torture and disappearance of thousands of South American citizens. At the same time, it did facilitate the translation and publication of Latin American novels; making them available to the American public. As a result, the works of Colombian, Peruvian, Argentine and Chilean writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar, Jose Donoso, Manuel Puig, and Mario Vargas Llosa were published and widely read in the United States. South American literatures have developed a strong presence in the United States such as Andean literature and literature of exile. Since the 1980s, indigenous populations of Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador have migrated legally or extra-legally to the United States, whether in search of better opportunities or to escape the violence of their home countries. These vibrant Andean populations have contributed to expanding the Andean Archipelago of literature. Similarly, high numbers of Argentines went into exile during the military dictatorship of 1976 to escape government violence and repression. Scholars such as Yossi Shain affirm that exiles expand the borders of the country by creating a diaspora that continues to interact with their compatriots in their home country and with those spread throughout the world. One example is Luisa Valenzuela, an Argentine writer, who continued to be committed to resisting the dictatorship while in exile. Her work is engaged with the process of writing, and how the exile experience influenced her work and her identity.

Latin American Realities

Worldview ◽  
1958 ◽  
Vol 1 (6) ◽  
pp. 4-7
Author(s):  
William V. Shannon
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Vice President ◽  
The United States ◽  
Revolutionary Change ◽  
Marked Contrast ◽  
Richard Nixon ◽  
The Past ◽  
Personal Qualities

In 1943, Vice President Henry Wallace made a triumphal goodwill tour of Latin America and received tumultuous acclaim from large audiences everywhere. In 1958, Vice President Richard Nixon made a comparable trip through Latin America and his reception ranged from indifference to indignity.The marked contrast between the two journeys is a fact of major concern for Americans. The decisive difference does not lie in die respective personal merits of Mr. Wallace and Mr. Nixon, although these personal qualities have some importance. Nor is it that Latin America in the past fifteen years has entered a quickened state of revolutionary change, although that is also true. The fundamental difference is not that Latin America has changed in the past fifteen years but that the world role of the United States has changed.

Military Aid to Latin America in the U.S. Congress

1964 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-404 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Francis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin America ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Assistance ◽  
Congressional Hearings ◽  
American Military ◽  
Military Aid ◽  
War Effort

Over the last thirteen years the United States has provided almost five hundred million dollars in military aid to Latin America. This program has continued undaunted despite the fact that the justification for the undertaking — as shown by testimony of U. S. congressional hearings — has undergone such a wide fluctuation that today's purposes are quite different from yesterday's. To understand the present program it is helpful to explore the peculiar evolution of this program of aid.During World War II there was cooperation between the United States and Latin-American military forces. Two states, Mexico and Brazil, donated forces which saw combat. The chief contribution of Latin America to the war effort, however, was in the realm of economic assistance to the United States war machine.

Getting Started

2020 ◽  
pp. 19-48
Author(s):  
Stephen G. Rabe
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Learning Experience ◽  
Security Issues ◽  
Richard Nixon ◽  
Alliance For Progress ◽  
Fact Finding ◽  
Latin American Thought ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
American Thought

This chapter outlines the state of inter-American relations in the middle of the Cold War. President Richard Nixon came to office in 1969 in the aftermath of the Alliance for Progress, the ambitious ten-year, $20 billion economic aid program announced by President John F. Kennedy in March of 1961. Nixon had strong views about the shortcomings of the Alliance for Progress. Unlike Henry Kissinger, who had limited familiarity with Latin American thought, culture, and society, Nixon judged himself knowledgeable about Latin America. Nixon directed Kissinger to develop a comprehensive review of the U.S. policies toward Latin America. Kissinger then threw himself into the exercise with enthusiasm, perceiving the review of trade, investment, aid, and security issues as a learning experience. Nixon also dispatched his political rival and Kissinger's mentor, Governor Nelson Rockefeller (R-NY), on a fact-finding mission to Latin America.

The First Alliance for Progress? Reshaping the Eisenhower Administration's Policy toward Latin America

2014 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Tunstall Allcock
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Vice President ◽  
Eisenhower Administration ◽  
General View ◽  
Modernization Theory ◽  
Fidel Castro ◽  
Richard Nixon ◽  
Alliance For Progress ◽  
Latin American Countries

The Eisenhower administration's policy toward Latin America is typically viewed as a failure. The general view is that by ignoring calls for increased economic aid and undermining governments suspected of harboring Communist sympathies, U.S. policymakers allowed relations with Latin American countries to deteriorate so much that Vice President Richard Nixon was almost killed during a goodwill tour. Belated efforts were then made to improve relations, but only the rise of Fidel Castro in Cuba and the Kennedy administration's embrace of modernization theory—the argument goes—saw a genuine change in U.S. attitudes. Using a wide variety of sources, including rarely studied personal papers and newly released oral histories, this article demonstrates that even before the Nixon trip a small group of experts on Latin America were determined to adjust attitudes in Washington. Understanding their impact and achievements casts fresh light on the policies of the Eisenhower administration and the nature of hemispheric relations in the subsequent decade.

Sorting Out the Mixed Economy

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy C. Offner
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
New Deal ◽  
The United States ◽  
Business Associations ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
The Road ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The New Deal

In the years after 1945, a flood of U.S. advisors swept into Latin America with dreams of building a new economic order and lifting the Third World out of poverty. These businessmen, economists, community workers, and architects went south with the gospel of the New Deal on their lips, but Latin American realities soon revealed unexpected possibilities within the New Deal itself. In Colombia, Latin Americans and U.S. advisors ended up decentralizing the state, privatizing public functions, and launching austere social welfare programs. By the 1960s, they had remade the country's housing projects, river valleys, and universities. They had also generated new lessons for the United States itself. When the Johnson administration launched the War on Poverty, U.S. social movements, business associations, and government agencies all promised to repatriate the lessons of development, and they did so by multiplying the uses of austerity and for-profit contracting within their own welfare state. A decade later, ascendant right-wing movements seeking to dismantle the midcentury state did not need to reach for entirely new ideas: they redeployed policies already at hand. This book brings readers to Colombia and back, showing the entanglement of American societies and the contradictory promises of midcentury statebuilding. The untold story of how the road from the New Deal to the Great Society ran through Latin America, the book also offers a surprising new account of the origins of neoliberalism.

Geo-Economic Competition in Latin America: Brazil, Venezuela, and Regional Integration in the 21st Century

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guilherme Casarões
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Regional Integration ◽  
Free Trade Area ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Competition ◽  
Integration Model ◽  
Trade Area ◽  
Complex Processes ◽  
The Us ◽  
New Institutions

The institutional framework of Latin American integration saw a period of intense transformation in the 2000s, with the death of the ambitious project of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), spearheaded by the United States, and the birth of two new institutions, the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). This article offers a historical reconstruction of regional integration structures in the 2000s, with emphasis on the fault lines between Brazil, Venezuela and the US, and how they have shaped the institutional order across the hemisphere. We argue that the shaping of UNASUR and CELAC, launched respectively in 2007 and 2010, is the outcome of three complex processes: (1) Brazil’s struggle to strengthen Mercosur by acting more decisively as a regional paymaster; (2) Washington’s selective engagement with some key regional players, notably Colombia, and (3) Venezuela’s construction of an alternative integration model through the Bolivarian Alliance (ALBA) and oil diplomacy. If UNASUR corresponded to Brazil’s strategy to neutralize the growing role of Caracas in South America and to break apart the emerging alliance between Venezuela, Argentina, and Bolivia, CELAC was at the same time a means to keep the US away from regional decisions, and to weaken the Caracas-Havana axis that sustained ALBA.

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