As is well known, the United States post-war ascent as leading hegemonic power was conditioned by opposition it faced from the Soviet Union, the only super power that had attended Bretton Woods but refused to join the IMF when the negotiations were complete. The refusal was driven by Soviet objection to US dominance over the governing of the IMF as well as the
culmination of an increasingly troubled alliance between the two countries, one that had been tenuous since the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, when the United States (along with Britain, France, and Japan) had sent troops in support of the anti-Bolshevik forces who were then ultimately defeated. With the subsequent Soviet transition to communism, relations between the two republics had only deteriorated, particularly in 1933 when the United States refused to. During World War II, the alliance between the two nations had been precarious at best and when the Soviet Union opted out of the Bretton Woods agreement, this was interpreted by the United States as a rupture in the alliance. Shortly after the Bretton Woods conference, and in the name of national security, the Soviet Union began installing client regimes in the Eastern European republics it had occupied during the war and the United States government reacted with
condemnation (even as it clearly maintained its own system of Latin American client regimes for the very same purposes). By the years immediately following the war, President Truman was not only condemning Soviet expansion but also declaring the existence of a Soviet communist threat to the new international order that had been so carefully worked out at the Bretton Woods Conference and the many other United Nations meetings that had surrounded it. Engaging the Soviet Union in direct confrontation was not an option;; what would emerge instead would be a protracted, indirect conflict that would quickly become known as the Cold War, essentially a competition between the two powers to both maintain and expand their respective “spheres of influence.”
With regard to the preservation of post-war US hegemony, Harvey argues that the Cold War played an integral role. As Harvey (2003) points out, it was precisely by declaring itself the defender of freedom against communism and following through with material forms of assistance,
such as the Marshall Plan of 1948 (which would not only provide $12.4 billion in funding for the rebuilding of European infrastructure and revamping of European industry, but also dictate the removal of intra-European trade barriers on the premise of bringing free trade to the region) that the United States exercised and strengthened its hegemonic power among the elites and propertied classes of capitalist nations. In this way, the US became a leader for European elites, winning their allegiance not only through declarations of preserving freedom but also through material assistance to be used in facilitating and expanding processes of capitalist accumulation. At the same time, as Harvey (2003) also points out, while the United States relied heavily on winning and sustaining the consent of the world’s capitalist classes, it also expended a great deal of effort in exercising coercion and moreover, building up its coercion capabilities. At the center of this effort was the formation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a government agency that in the span of less than a decade would become one of the state’s key tools for actively shaping and controlling the political and economic processes in sovereign nations, particularly those that lay within the boundaries of its empire to the south or, in the new Cold War lexicon, its long claimed “sphere of influence.” Before moving into a discussion of the CIA’s specific activities in Latin America, and the implications, effects, and repercussions that postwar US global hegemony held for the region, more generally I devote the next few paragraphs to tracing the early history of the Central Intelligence Agency in order to provide some general sense of how the Agency was conceived, the official purpose and tasks with which it was initially vested, how it grew significantly in size, autonomy, and scope of its authorized activity, and how by the early fifties it formed a sort of key nexus of state and capital interests and was being deployed by these two forces to actually orchestrate and actively assist in the overthrowing of sovereign nation governments that were held to pose threat to US economic and political interests.
As historian Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones (2003) has argued, the CIA was by no means the US’s first foray into international intelligence gathering. Its immediate predecessor had been the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a foreign intelligence service created by President Roosevelt in June of 1942 and headed by Colonel William J. (“Wild Bill”) Donovan, a Conservative
Republican millionaire who had commanded New York’s 69th regiment in World War I and had been a classmate of Roosevelt’s at Columbia Law School. The impetus for establishing the OSS had been the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, an event that had
subsequently been read as nothing less than a profound failure of US intelligence to learn and warn of Japan’s plans. According to Donovan and Navy higher-ups, the attack was also clear justification for the establishment of a peacetime centralized intelligence service that would keep the United States safer in years to come. In the context of a war on Nazi fascism, however, the idea was a controversial one and many, including those at the top, remained ambivalent. President Roosevelt and subsequently President Truman exercised caution: the former never openly supporting the creation of a such an agency and only beginning to gauge the political will to do so at the time of his death in 1945, the latter first expressing resistance to the idea (first disbanding the OSS upon coming to office following Roosevelt’s death before then reinstating it) and then articulating his apprehension around the possibility that the creation of such an agency would lead to the development of a US-American police state akin to the Gestapo state of Nazi Germany. Beyond fears of an imminent totalitarianism, Truman was also preoccupied with the potential outcry from the US public that might accompany the creation of such an agency, the damage that the creation of such an agency could to the country’s international image,
particularly in Latin America, with whom the continuation of alliances and asymmetrical market relations were deemed critical (especially in the event of a new war breaking out).
Nevertheless, in September of 1945 and amid congressional urging, Truman tasked Secretary of State James Byrnes with developing a “comprehensive and coordinated foreign intelligence program for all federal agencies” (in Jeffreys-Jones, 2003, 32). By then the
contradiction of a purportedly free and open society engaging in covert intelligence gathering had been papered over with the caveat that such activity would carry no domestic police power (that would be left to the Federal Bureau of Investigation) and would be restricted to the collection of foreign intelligence only (thus making the implicit but important contention that while liberal democratic principles had to be preserved within the nation’s borders and with respect to the
nation’s own citizenry, the potential imposition of an illiberal virtual US “police state” on “other” citizenries of the world – in the name of US security – was less egregious).
Ultimately, the plan that won the support of both the State department and Truman came from one Admiral Sidney Souers, who proposed the creation of one central intelligence agency (separate from the State Department) to be controlled by the president through a military dominated National Intelligence Authority and empowered with the capacity to “perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence as NIA may from time to time direct” (quoted in Jeffrey-Jones 2003: 34). As the planning of the CIA got underway, Truman created an interim Central Intelligence Group (CIG) in 1946, with Souers as its inaugural director overseeing a staff of eighty. Souers was quickly succeeded by Lieutenant General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, who increased the staff from eighty to a little over eighteen hundred, one third of which worked overseas.
The Central Intelligence Agency was officially created by provision of the National Security Act, passed into law by Congress on July 26, 1947. In the CIA provision, the NIA proposed by Souers became the National Security Council (NSC), which was, true to Souer’s plan, predominated by members of the military. Also in keeping with Souer’s plan, the CIA director was to be a presidential appointee but was subject to Senate approval. Further, the provision stipulated that the director or deputy could be of the military, as long as one of the positions was held by a civilian (a point that had fostered much debate between the military and the State department in the months leading up).
In the first six months of its existence, the CIA concentrated its activities on espionage and generating predictions. Amid new levels of apprehension regarding reported forays into propaganda production among Soviet allies in October of 1947, however, provisions were quickly made for the CIA and the State Department to enter into the production and dissemination of pro- United States propaganda in targeted countries. Additionally, by December of 1947, the NSC issued a directive authorizing the CIA to engage in “psychological warfare,” an area of combat that had emerged as a category during World War II, and according to Jeffreys-Jones, involved,
“for example, the issuance of unattributed publications, false attribution, forgery, and the secret subsidization of publications” (Jeffreys-Jones 2003, 50).
Another important expansion of CIA capabilities, came in 1948, when the eruption of massive riots in Bogota, Colombia following the assassination of Liberal presidential candidate, Jorge Eliécer Gaitan fueled domestic criticisms that the CIA had failed to predict an event that had posed threat to the US-American delegation in Bogota at the time of the riots for the Ninth Inter-American Conference. When it came out that there had been no intelligence failure (inaugural CIA director Roscoe Hillenkoetter would testify that the Agency had in fact issued a warning to the State Department that had gone unheeded) and thus no weakness in the overall intelligence structure of the agency, a campaign was soon launched to instead fortify the CIA’s covert operations capabilities to prevent such riots. By June of 1948, the National Security Council issued NSC 10/2, a directive which created a new covert operations unit – the Office of Policy Coordination – which was prohibited to underwrite “armed conflict by recognized military forces” but was authorized to organize and implement “propaganda;; economic warfare;;
preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, and evacuation measures;; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerillas and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world” (Jeffreys-Jones 2003, 55-56)
The creation of the Office of Policy Coordination was a watershed moment for the CIA. Another key development in the formative years of the CIA came in 1949 with the passage of the Central Intelligence Act. Even before the events in Bogota, powerful elements had been issuing serious criticisms of the CIA’s capabilities and Truman had appointed an investigation committee, which returned with a slew of recommendations that were then debated by Congress in closed hearings. The resulting Central Intelligence Act essentially granted a new level of congressional authorization and extrajudicial capacity to the Agency, permitting it to disregard immigration laws in order to recruit a maximum of one hundred defectors per year and allowing its director to draw upon secret funds and engage in financial transactions without reporting them to Congress (as
other federal agencies were required to do). As Jeffreys-Jones (2003) describes it, whereas the original provision for the creation of the CIA had obligated the CIA director to protect secrets pertaining to methods and sources, the law of 1949, “gave him the power to create secrets to protect” (Jeffreys-Jones 2003, 60). With the passage of the law, CIA covert operations expanded greatly in a short period of time. Between 1949 and 1952, the Office of Policy Coordination increased the number of personnel at its disposal from 302 to 2,812 (with an additional 3,142 contracted overseas) and its available funds shot from $4.7 million to $82 million. Much of this went to propaganda efforts but also facilitated the CIA ventures into new sorts of activities and operations;; these included the acquisition of air transport facilities and its provision of financial assistance to the British for what was to be a failed attempt at overthrowing the communist regime of Albania in 1949.
As Jeffreys-Jones demonstrates, the real expansion of the CIA’s covert operations would come during the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 1952, Eisenhower ran for president on a campaign that criticized Truman’s foreign policy as dangerously complacent, overly focused on the defensive containment of Soviet communism and sorely lacking in offensive initiatives that would “wrest control from the Kremlin.” During his first year in office, Eisenhower developed a foreign policy agenda – dubbed the “New Look defense policy” – that purposefully sought to avoid the cost and large-scale casualties of massive military interventions by replacing them with increased nuclear airstrike capability and the more frequent and comprehensive use of unconventional warfare, to be achieved in part through the covert operational arm of the CIA. Indeed, having worked extensively with OSS during WWII as Allied Supreme Commander, Eisenhower had come to office an ardent proponent of the CIA, and as part of his “New Look” policy the Agency would expand its scope of operations and activities in critical ways that would have implications for the future. Specifically, Eisenhower strongly advocated and supported the development of psychological warfare (or psywar), which soon rose to the status of a science and sanctioned the introduction of assassination into US foreign policy when he advocated the CIA’s elimination of Fidel Castro and Dominican dictator, Raphael Trujillo (both to be discussed below).
Further, under Eisenhower, the CIA moved more definitively into the territory of instigating, aiding, and participating in coups of governments deemed as posing a threat to US Cold War objectives. The first of the CIA-backed coups would be the well-known case of the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq in August 1953 (see Blum 2003 for a detailed account). Covert intervention in Iran would be quickly followed by what would take shape as a steady stream of replications in Latin America over the next several decades. In the following section, where I turn to the implications of US post-war hegemony for Latin America, a review of these events will form part of the focus.
3.3 From Anti-Fascism to Anti-Democracy: A Change in Policy Toward Latin America
Turning now to post-WWII relations between the United States and the non-industrialized independent republics of Latin America the questions that section seeks to address is: how did this post-war globalization of US hegemony play out in this particular region? Given that the ethnographic context of this dissertation is Ecuador and in light of the preceding sections on US empire in Latin America what did the exercise of US imperial power look like in Latin America in the post-WWII/Cold War era?
As historians have illustrated, in the years following the war’s end, the United States moved quickly to institutionalize the Latin American alliance that had emerged during the war, quickly re-designating it as an alliance against communism (Grandin, 2006;; O’Brien, 2007). In 1947, President Truman touted the “Inter-American System,” which he claimed, had become “steadily stronger for half a century” (in Grandin 2006, 39). That same year, the delegates from United States and the Latin American republics attended the Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Continental Peace and Security, held near Río de Janeiro, Brazil. As Jeffreys- Jones (2003) argues, for the US, the aim was to establish a hemispheric anti-communist
collective defense agreement. For Latin American republics, securing economic aid on the order of the Marshall Plan concurrently being administered in Europe and Japan was the objective. In the end, the Conference yielded a commitment from the Latin American republics to a