Latin America at war

Latin America at war. Apart from the battle of the River Plate and the Caribbean, where 1,200,000 tons of shipping were lost to U-boats in 1942, the actual fighting took place elsewhere, and Japan's defeat at Midway in June 1942, followed by Allied North African campaign landings that November, marked the end of any serious military threat to the area. The Panama Canal, and Brazil's north-east (the ‘hump’ of land closest to Africa), which were the key elements in the defence of the western hemisphere by the USA, were now safe from attack. Afterwards they became, Brazil especially, important transit points for men and equipment to other combat theatres (see Takoradi air route, for example). For Latin Americans, losses of life and property were small, though by 1944 many were actively engaged in combat theatres. The Brazilian Expeditionary Force served ten months in the Italian campaign, which included heavy fighting; the Mexican 201st Fighter Squadron saw action on Luzon in October 1944 (see Philippines campaigns). In fact 250,000 Mexican nationals served in US forces, of whom 1,000 died, the most from any Latin American country.

Militarily, the actual course of war in Latin America fitted US war planning, which since 1938 had envisaged Germany, not Japan, as the main strategic threat (see also Rainbow Plans). In 1939, the US defence perimeter was extended to Brazil and northern South America but did not include the Southern Cone. The fall of France in June 1940, coupled with the possibility that Britain's navy would be lost, prompted a series of military staff discussions with Latin American nations to secure bases and to develop joint defence plans. Even Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor failed to shake this strategy: winning the war against Germany had priority.

Hemispheric defence was from the beginning an Atlantic defence, and this set the context for Latin America's war. The air bases and a few naval stations from Mexico to Peru saw little action in defence of the Panama Canal. By contrast, the arc of air and naval bases from the Caribbean to Brazil was used extensively in the anti-submarine campaign and to deny German access to food and raw materials in the South Atlantic. This explains why Brazil, the headquarters of US Army forces South Atlantic, received $366,000,000 in military equipment, the lion's share (three-quarters) of all the Lend-Lease aid sent to Latin American nations from late 1941 onwards. By contrast, Mexico received only $39,000,000 in Lend-Lease equipment, the bulk of which was used to bolster internal security, a contrast in which geography played a large part.

The war's impact also depended on the extent to which each nation was able to advance its own national interests. To be sure, this took place in the context of a lengthening US reach, starting with the Lima foreign ministers' conference of 1938, which launched the principle of collective security and laid the groundwork for subsequent agreements on hemispheric defence (see Panama, Rio, andHavana conferences). Later collective security was broadened to include not only arms, but also the financing of capital goods and commodity purchases, and military training missions and cultural exchange. By 1943, as the military threat waned, these became more important along with the deepening impact of US business methods and popular culture among Latin American élites and middle classes.

For the USA, Latin America was the early proving-ground for its emergence as a new superpower, seeking security and influence through a modern alliance system rather than the traditional, and failed, policies of intervention in the Caribbean Basin. For Latin American nations, the war marked the emergence of Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela as rising regional powers, the leaders in terms of wealth, coherence, and prestige. By contrast, Argentina and to a much lesser extent Chile (because it was far from any military theatre) suffered a relative decline. It is these political and economic changes that are perhaps the most interesting aspect of the war in Latin America. Furthermore, the war affected the ways urban labour and the middle classes were being incorporated into politics and the state, in effect accelerating social changes under way for at least a generation.

Brazil bargained hard and successfully for arms and industrial equipment, including the famous Volta Redonda steel works and the beginnings of an oil industry, in return for the air bases Washington required. By 1942, it had priorities to receive equipment, both military and civilian, that hard-pressed US planners were loath to grant, save for the country's political and strategic importance. President Getúlio Vargas had already played a German card (arms and barter trade) with skill to secure advantages from Washington. In 1941 he moved to the status of a close wartime ally despite almost total dependence on the US for energy, spare parts, and markets. Thanks to US arms, Brazil achieved military superiority over its rival Argentina and sent a fighting force abroad. Such was Brazil's prestige that Roosevelt sought a permanent seat for it on the new United Nations Security Council, a move the USSR and UK blocked, to Canada's and France's relief, in 1945 at the inaugural San Francisco conference. (Brazil did receive the first non-permanent seat.) Meanwhile, labour was embraced by the strong state apparatus; the foreign debt was written off; and Brazil's emergence as an economic power in a special relationship with the USA had begun.

As long as the Royal Navy stayed intact, Argentina held only minor strategic status on the southern shipping routes but this facilitated its following an independent policy. Self-sufficient in petroleum, and with British markets for its beef also intact, Argentina refused to join the US-sponsored Petroleum Pool, and other commodity supply and purchasing agreements. (The US-sponsored Petroleum Pool supplied gasoline, fuel oil, and derivatives to all of Latin America except Argentina, which adhered to a policy of resources nationalism and refused to join. The Pool used rationing and price controls to allocate supplies and protect the area against economic collapse which might result from disruption by enemy action and the competing requirements of the Allied war effort.) Much to Washington's annoyance, it pursued instead a traditional rivalry with the US; retained a military purchasing mission in Germany until 1944; and stayed neutral until March 1945. Some of the officer corps was pro-Nazi, but public opinion was not. If anything, the military looked to settle old scores with Chile or with the UK over the Falklands/Malvinas Islands. For its part, the US misread Argentine neutrality and blundered into boycott and confrontation, which in turn eased the rise of Juan Perón (1895–1974) and his wife Eva (1919–52), populists and nationalists who in 1945 brought the working class into power with them under redistributive economic policies that, as it happened, could not long be sustained. Wartime earnings were squandered on consumption and the purchase of the decrepit British-owned railways.

Mexico predicated its wartime alliance upon the settling of private economic claims, notably by the British and American oil companies whose fields and refineries had been expropriated at the instigation of Mexican oil workers in 1938. Eager to comply, Washington provided loans and credits in the November 1941 settlement, which in turn rapidly cleared the way for military co-operation. (With no strategic interests at stake, the UK did not settle until after the war.) Staff talks had in fact begun in 1940, but Mexico co-operated only passively until the settlement. Although Mexico never became the close ally that Canada did in 1940—there was no Permanent Joint Board on Defense with Mexico, although the USA wanted one—basing and transit rights were granted. The Export-Import Bank facilitated the purchase of equipment for Mexico's steel industry and foreign debts stretching back to the porfiriato (the presidency of Porfirio Díaz at the turn of the century) were paid off. Industrialization through import substitution was reinforced, as were ties between the two private sectors. The revolution was said to have matured. Meanwhile and not unrelated to these developments, tough laws designed to root out Nazi sympathizers were used by the state to curb dissent and stayed on the books for years.

For its part Venezuela emerged from the war with a flourishing petroleum industry and the principle of sharing royalties 50–50 with the foreign oil companies, something which the young oil minister, Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo (who became the father of OPEC—the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), obtained just after the war in December 1945. Ironically, the first enabling legislation had been drawn up by US advisers in 1943 when oil prices were relatively low. (Iran followed suit in 1949 and by the mid-1950s all the world's oil exporting countries had adopted Venezuela's 50–50 tax initiative.) By then the road to a petroleum-based economy and its problems was well established. However, oil wealth also facilitated the emergence of Acción Democrática, the reformist party under Rómulo Betan court, and labour's allegiance to democratic pluralism.

If, in hindsight, Venezuelan profit-sharing was a milestone in Third World resource management and control, pro-Nazi political and economic movements, labelled collectively as the fifth column and much discussed at the time, have declined in historical importance. Fascist tendencies appealing to the middle classes and the right did appear in places: the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionário under Victór Paz Estenssoro in Bolivia, the nationalist government of Arnulfo Arias in Panama, the Francoist sinarquistas in Mexico, the statist Grupo de Oficiales Unidos (to which Perón belonged) in Argentina. But APRA, the more established radical party in Peru, developed a more favourable view of the USA, which for its part saw Nazi manipulation behind all of these movements. German agents were few and easily rounded up; populations of German descent, as in southern Brazil and Chile, were easily monitored or cowed.

In any case, the structures of collective regional security under US leadership, which culminated in the Act of Chapultepec in March 1945, were not fertile ground for fascist movements, especially after Stalingrad. The rise of Soviet power and the great wartime alliance gave space to communist parties in Latin America, and they presented what at that time still seemed an alternative way to incorporate labour and the middle classes in a workable economic system. For the US, there was not much of a leap from leading the alliance against fascism to post-war anti-communism. But it can now be seen that nationalism and social change under capitalism, broadly defined, were more important than fascism or communism in Latin America during the Second World War.

John D. Wirth

Bibliography

Di Tella, G., and Watt. D. C. (eds.), Argentina Between the Great Powers, 1939–46 (Oxford, 1989).
Humphreys, R. A. , Latin America and the Second World War, Vol. 1 1939–1942, Vol. 2 1942–1945 (London, 1981–2).
McCann, F. D. , The Brazilian Alliance, 1937–1945 (Princeton, 1973).
Stetson, C., and and Fairchild, B. , The Framework of Hemisphere Defense The U.S. Army in World War II, The Western Hemisphere, Vol. 1 (Washington, DC, 1960).