LATIN AMERICAN ECONOMIC NATIONALISM AND UNITED STATES-LATIN AMERICAN RELATIONS, 1945-1961(1)

The United States has been attempting to contain or quash economic nationalism in Latin America for over a century. However, in the 1950s, Washington's effort to stem economic nationalism in the Western Hemisphere proved especially crucial as Washington increasingly relied on Latin America for strategic minerals, economic investment, and trade to promote prosperity in the United States and fight the Cold War overseas. Moreover, Washington officials feared economic nationalismcould be co-opted by communist movements in the region. Significantly, Washington efforts to fight economic nationalism in the 1950s included a new technique: U.S. economic assistance. Two important case studies, Guatemala and Bolivia, show that Washington used significant amounts of economic assistance policy to contain or decapitated governments that simultaneously pursued a revolutionary and economic-nationalist agenda. Although only one nation, Cuba, in Latin America gravitated into the communist bloc in the 1960s, Washington's policy of fighting economic nationalism in the 1950s proved to be a failure as the U.S. policy of using economic assistance to create a propitious environment for foreign private sector investment only increased the already-wide gap between the wealthy and the non-elites in the region. This widening gap between the elites and the popular sectors did not bode well for Washington's long-term goal of pro-United States stability in the region.