World War II

World War II, an international conflict that, with the exception of Argentina, brought about a sense of inter-American solidarity unknown before. But the Latin American nations did not quickly commit themselves to the Allied cause. Their leaders did not share the concern of the United States with the developing hostilities in Europe and Asia between 1935 and 1938. Rather, they appeared more concerned with reaffirming President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy that had been initiated in 1933. Given these diverse views, Washington found it difficult to obtain Latin America's cooperation on hemispheric defense before 1940. At the Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Peace held in Buenos Aires in 1936, Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull asked for trade and credit embargoes against the European warring factions. Instead, they received only an innocuous agreement to meet when an emergency arose that affected their common defense. By the time of the Eighth Inter-American Conference of American States in Lima, Peru, in 1938, Austria and Czechoslovakia had fallen to Nazi Germany and China had engaged Japan in a test of survival. Fearing the Western Hemisphere to be in greater danger than in 1936, the U.S. delegation went to Lima seeking a mutual defense pact, but the Latin Americans were not prepared to formulate a plan of action against the Axis powers.

The first collective action to meet the dangers of World War II came at a meeting of foreign ministers in Panama in 1939 following the German invasion of Poland and the outbreak of the European War. The Declaration of Panama proclaimed a safety belt around the Western Hemisphere, extending from 300 to 1,000 miles from the eastern and western coastlines, within which, at least in theory, no belligerent act was to be allowed. After the fall of France in June 1940, the foreign ministers convened a month later in Havana. The subsequent Declaration of Havana decreed that the European colonies in the Western Hemisphere were off limits to the Axis powers and could be occupied by a hemispheric nation pending final settlement of the territory's disposition. Furthermore, any attack upon one hemispheric nation was to be considered an act of aggression against all. By the time of the Havana conference, the United States also had determined its hemispheric military defense policy. A line was drawn at Brazil in order to secure the Caribbean sea routes and the Panama Canal. The Latin American armies would not be raised to the status of a fighting ally, but would act only to meet an external attack until U.S. forces could arrive. Toward that end, agreements placed U.S. military missions in all but Bolivia, to which no mission was ever sent. Subsequently, the Lend-Lease Act of 1941 provided for $400 million in military assistance to Latin America over a three-year period, the bulk of it scheduled to be disbursed in 1943 and later.

Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama immediately declared war on the Axis powers. Meeting at Rio de Janeiro in January 1942, the foreign ministers of all of the Latin American republics recommended that their governments sever diplomatic relations with the Axis nations. Ultimately, Mexico and all of the South American nations did so. Mexico and Brazil declared war on the Axis powers in 1942; Bolivia and Colombia did so in 1943. The ministers at Rio also committed their governments to institute measures to eliminate possible Axis subversion. The most notable measure was the internment and deportation of German, Japanese, and Italian nationals and their descendants to either their homelands or camps in the United States. Unfortunately, many innocent people and political opponents fell victim to the program, and many had their properties confiscated. The Caribbean was the area of the most significant military action. Until late 1942, German U-boats played havoc with Allied shipping in the region. Subsequently, Brazil and Mexico sent troops to the war zones. Throughout the war, Nelson A. Rockefeller's Office of Inter-American Affairs coordinated economic policies. Few Latin American countries benefited from the war because of the loss of European markets. The unimportance of coffee, sugar, and tropical fruits caused severe economic hardship on the Caribbean islands and in Central America. Conversely, the need for Bolivian tin, Chilean copper, and Venezuelan oil brought a measure of prosperity to those nations. Brazil and Mexico also benefited when the United States financed steel mills in those nations. However, no plans for postwar conversion were made, and with Europe in shambles, the Latin Americans did not recover their traditional trading partners after 1945. Allied wartime propaganda also contributed to the demands of the generation of rising expectations. If the Allies were fighting to eliminate tyranny in Asia and Europe, why not put an end to Latin American dictatorships? Political protests along these lines were most evident in Central America near the end of the war.

As postwar planning for the United Nations began to take shape, Washington warned the Latin American states that only those who had declared war on the Axis nations would be eligible for membership in the international organization. The threat prompted Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Chile to declare war in early 1945. Argentina remained reluctant. Argentina's traditional resistance to Washington's dominance of hemispheric affairs was now complicated by its pro-fascist military, which had extended its influence in politics until 1943, when a coup gave it complete control of the government. A large German and Italian immigrant population resided in the nation. Throughout the war, the United States increased the pressure on Argentina. Washington publicly denounced the government for having deserted the Allied cause, froze Argentine gold stocks and tightened shipping regulations, and withheld recognition of President Edelmiro Farrell from March 1944 to April 1945. When the diplomats convened in Mexico City in early 1945 for the Inter-American Conference on Problems of War and Peace, only Argentina was absent. The gathering's major objective was to strengthen Pan-American solidarity for the upcoming meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco. The resultant Act of Chapultepec contained a proviso stating that the Monroe Doctrine secured the American republics against even an American aggressor, a statement that satisfied Argentina and contributed to its declaration of war against Germany and Japan on 27 March 1945.

See alsoPan-American Conferences: Mexico City Conference (1945) .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Harley Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 1939–1945 (1949).

John A. Houston, Latin America in the United Nations (1956).

Stetson Conn and Byron Fairchild, Framework of Hemispheric Defense (1960).

Stetson Conn, Rose C. Engleman, and Byron Fairchild, Guarding the United States and Its Outposts (1964).

Alton Frye, Nazi Germany and the American Hemisphere, 1933–1941 (1967).

J. M. Espinosa, Inter-American Beginnings of U.S. Cultural Diplomacy, 1936–1948 (1976).

Michael J. Francis, The Limits of Hegemony: United States Relations with Argentina and Chile during World War II (1977).

Gerald K. Haines, "Under the Eagle's Wing: The Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration Forges an American Hemisphere," Diplomatic History 1 (1977): 373-388.

R. A. Humphreys, Latin America and the Second World War, 2 vols. (1981–1982).

David G. Haglund, Latin America and the Transformation of U.S. Strategic Thought, 1936–1940 (1984).

Additional Bibliography

Endries, Carrie Anne. "Exiled in the Tropics: Nazi Protesters and the Getúlio Vargas Regime in Brazil, 1933–1945." Ph.D. diss. Harvard University, 2005.

Friedman, Max Paul. Nazis and Good Neighbors: The United States Campaign against the Germans of Latin America in World War II. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Leonard, Thomas and John F. Bratzel. Latin America during World War II. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007.

Peredo Castro, Francisco. Cine y propaganda para Latinoamérica: México y Estados Unidos en la encrucijada de los años cuarenta. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Centro de Investigaciones sobre América del Norte: Centro Coordinador y Difusor de Estudios Latinoamericanos, 2004.

                                 Thomas M. Leonard