>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. ^E00:00:05 ^B00:00:21 >> Tracy North: Hi everybody. Good afternoon. Welcome to our talk on Rivalry and Alliance Politics in Cold War Latin America. Thank you so much for coming. My name is Tracy North. I'm a reference librarian in the Hispanic division and the social sciences editor of the Handbook of Latin American Studies. I am pleased to introduce Dr. Christopher Darnton who will be our speaker today. Dr. Darnton is an assistant professor of politics at Catholic University here in DC. He earned his MA and PhD from the Department of Politics at Princeton University. And notably he's a contributing editor to the Handbook of Latin American Studies, where he covers the general government and politics section. Dr. Darnton has earned several research and travel grants and fellowships, which undoubtedly have contributed to the solid literature that he's put forth for international relations of Latin America. Specifically, his research explores connections between domestic and international politics, especially in Latin America and US-Latin American relations. He's particularly interested in how interest groups distort national security policy-making with respect to enduring rivalry, conflict resolution, alliance politic, regional integration, counterterrorism, and state building. At Catholic, he teaches courses on international conflict resolution, comparative foreign policy, Latin American politics, and comparative politics. I'm especially pleased that Dr. Darnton has done a significant amount of research for this book right here at the Library of Congress, in addition to the fieldwork that he has done in Brazil and Argentina and elsewhere. Just a few reminders before I turn the program over to Chris. First of all the book, which is hot off the press from the John Hopkins University Press, is available for sale in the back of the room at the discounted rate of $40. And Chris has agreed to sign the book afterwards, if you're interested. Please note that today's talk is being recorded. So remember that if you ask a question you are giving permission for the Library to record your voice for future viewing on the LC website. If you want to hear about future events sponsored or cosponsored by the Hispanic division, please visit our website at loc.gov/rr/hispanic. And while you're there, sign up for our RSS feed. >> Christopher Darnton: I'm Chris Darnton. I'm an assistant professor of politics at Catholic University in northeast DC, as Tracy mentioned. I am very happy to be here today to talk about my new book on Rivalry and Alliance Politics in Cold War Latin America. I'm especially pleased to be doing so at the Library of Congress, where I have spent a fair amount of time reading published primary documents, memoirs, that sort of thing, in the Hispanic reading room over the last several years. So this is a great pleasure for me and thanks particularly to the Hispanic division, Georgia Dorn, Catalina Gomez, and Tracy North for arranging the talk. So this is largely a book about Latin American foreign relations during the Cold War, during the second half of the 20th century. And I'm going to talk about some historical events, show some photos of leaders hugging one another, that sort of thing. And especially I'm going to spend a fair amount of time talking about the photo on the cover. But for those of you who are interested in more contemporary foreign policy, policy options related to international cooperation, and aren't necessarily Latin Americanists. I'm going to talk a little bit about current policy implications at the end of the talk. And I'd be very happy to answer questions about that afterwards. But I want to start out with some of the really big picture questions before turning to the historical cases. Why is it that some international conflicts last so long? For decades, for generations. Sometimes for centuries. What we call in political science enduring rivalries. The US-Soviet relationship, the Cold War itself, is one example of that. And why is it that some of those conflicts are able to be overcome, sometimes quite quickly when they are? So why do some conflict resolution efforts fail and other ones succeed? In international politics, unfortunately we don't have a lot of answers. We don't have a lot of very good answers. And one of the things that we think we know, one of the largest pieces of conventional wisdom, is that a common enemy should persuade even opposing states to cooperate at least a little bit, at least some of the time. The trouble is most of the time that doesn't work very well. Sometimes a common adversary leads rival states to overcome their conflicts, to cooperate with another. But often it just doesn't. And I address these puzzles, these big theoretical questions through a concrete set of historical cases. I'm looking at the Cold War period, particularly in Latin America. Why the Cold War? It's a fascinating period of time. Particularly when you're looking at the relationships between alliance, alignment, cooperation, and on the other hand, disputes, rivalries, conflicts, and sometimes wars. If we think about the Cold War as -- we'll use a World Cup metaphor -- the United States team playing the Soviet team. Each one choosing up sides, drafting and recruiting other countries to join. And then presenting a collective effort of the Western Bloc versus the Eastern Bloc for a match that dragged on for about 50 years. That's highly misleading. Because the players on both teams do not usually get along with one another, to say nothing of their relationships with the other side. So cohesion and cooperation are very difficult to achieve even among allies. So in other words, we see a lot of little Cold Wars within the larger Cold War. Just to take an example from the Soviet side of things. The Sino-Soviet split develops over the course of the 1950s, 1960s, with the Peoples Republic of China parting ways with the Soviet Union, disagreeing on a number of policy issues. Competing regionally. And escalating to the level of militarized crises. And it took many US decision makers years to figure out that this was going on. Because we were so shocked that a communist wouldn't just automatically be friends with another communist. Right? The idea that there would be these sorts of internal disagreements was a long time in coming. This is particularly true on the US side, and it was especially true, as I argue, in Latin America, where we have, for instance, Honduras and El Salvador. Both US allies fighting a war against one another in 1969. Argentina and Chile, rightwing military dictatorships nearly went to war with one another in 1978. Ecuador and Peru repeated border clashes. One of the great examples is Argentina under the military dictatorship going to war with Great Britain, also a US ally, in 1982 over the Falkland-Malvinas Islands. Causing no end of consternation, I should point out, to the US decision makers who then have to deal with squabbles among their ostensible allies and teammates. This isn't just a Latin America problem as anyone who's familiar with the relationship between Greece and Turkey, for example, already knows. So what I explore in this book. Why is it that so many of these rivalries among US allies in Cold War Latin America persisted for as long as they did? And why is it that in some very, very rare successful cases we actually do see conflict resolution? And there were three successful cases in the Cold War in Latin America. Argentina and Chile, in 1984, overcoming their territorial dispute over the Beagle Channel and signing the treaty of peace and friendship. Honduras and Nicaragua, in 1961, resolving their territorial dispute and the presidents meeting for a summit, renaming a town on the border. And Brazil and Argentina. These are the heavyweights, and this is what I'm going to spend most of my time talking about today. In 1979 and 1980, resolving some of their outstanding disputes over hydroelectric power plants, nuclear programs, et cetera. So those are the three success stories. So why is it that some rivalries persist? Why is it that other ones are resolved at points in time? Big questions. The book presents an argument. So a concrete argument that I've called a parochial interest thesis. And this is not a political science talk, so I'm not going to delve down too far into the minutia. The big argument is this. Rivalries don't just persist passively through inertia. They're actively maintained. And they're actively maintained by particular groups, generally agencies within the government. State agencies, especially the military but not just the armed forces. In many cases, particularly Argentina and Brazil, the foreign ministry is the equivalent of the State Department, the diplomats. Why? Rivalries, these protracted conflicts, not wars but just the low level of conflict, provide benefits for parts of the government apparatus. Budget share for dealing with this threat. Political prestige. Policy influence. And especially organizational autonomy. I'm dealing with the adversary. ^M00:09:59 You leave me alone to solve my problems. As a result, when leaders try to resolve these rivalries, resolve international conflicts, they face resistance. Not so much from the other country but from within their own bureaucracy. Within their own government. Because conflict resolution is a change of policy. It means abandoning these conflicts, and the conflicts are beneficial. They're functional for parts of the government. So when presidents try to resolve these conflicts, they're facing resistance and obstruction from within. The term that I use for this is sabotage. Etymologically sabotage comes from the throwing of a wooden shoe into the gears of 19th century machinery. In order to cause that machine to stop operating, in order to slow down production. It's about labor resistance to management. Thorstein Veblen, a early 20th century economist, refers to sabotage in a beautiful phrase, as the conscientious withdrawal of efficiency. Foot dragging. I'm given orders, but I don't really like the orders. So I'm not necessarily going to disobey, but I'll find ways to resist and prevent the outcome from happening that the leaders want. Occasionally this can just be foot dragging. The most passive example of this, for those of you who are familiar with the Dilbert comic strip. Sabotage is the way of Wally. This is the way of resisting orders that are being given. At the extreme, this can lead to things like military coups in Cold War Latin America. When a president initiates a policy, such as acting friendly towards Castro's Cuba. This is a dangerous move for a president in a democracy in Central America or in South America in the early 1960s. And the military can step in and essentially veto major policy changes. So conflict resolution obstructed from within the government on both sides. That's the line of argument. Now presidents who want to resolve these conflicts that are unproductive have some tools at their disposal to do that. And they employ, what I call, end runs. If you don't trust your bureaucracy to implement a policy, do it yourself. Reach out to the public through public diplomacy, shaping public opinion. Get on the phone or send a telegram. Send a personal letter and reach out to the leader in the other country. Reach out personally to the other head of state. Send a secrete envoy whom you trust to outflank the obstructionists of bureaucracy. Now we have a lot of hero stories in international politics that look very much like that. So think of Anwar el-Sadat's trip to Israel. Think about Nixon going to China. Think about Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy. We tend to think that these heroic efforts by leaders, engagement with adversaries works because we have so many success stories. Political scientists are very skeptical of looking at outliers, of looking at positive cases without comparing them with negative cases. This book is full of negative cases [laughter]. So for all of the success stories that I give, I'm going to spend a lot of time talking about conflict resolution efforts that failed. And I'll come back to the picture on the cover. So these sorts of end runs are creative. They're nice efforts to bring about conflict resolution. It generally doesn't work. To get out of that situation -- it's a very pessimistic story. It tends to tell us that conflicts are going to persist. So how do you ever get successful conflict resolution? What I'm arguing is that you need a combination of two things. Those agencies, organizations that are resisting policy change? They need something else to do. They need to get to their autonomy, their prestige, their budgets, from doing something else. And in Cold War Latin America something else is a very sad story about repression. But one silver lining of this is that, as Latin American militaries and some of the civilian agencies turned from an external focus on rivalry to an internal focus on counter subversion, counterinsurgency, what was often called counterterrorism. This creates a little bit of political space to resolve international conflicts. So these organizations need this alternative mission dealing with a new threat. Relatedly though, you need some kind of resource constraint to force governments to set priorities. Whether you're a family balancing a budget. Whether you're a government. A situation of scarcity forces you to make tradeoffs. To do some things and not others. So if you have both of those factors. Constraints where you have to make tradeoffs among policies and an available alternative mission for these agencies, you can shift. And the agencies that used to resist conflict resolution will get onboard. They no longer have a vested interest in maintaining rivalry. So as I turn to the historical cases, this is the argument. I'm looking for success or failure in conflict resolution. And I'm trying to explain that on the basis of whether there were available alternative missions and whether there were state resource constraints. All right. Does that argument, parochial interest, help us understand what happened in Cold War Latin America? The pattern of conflict and cooperation? I'm going to briefly give an overview of two of the comparative chapters. One on Central America at the end of the 1950s, early 1960s. And one on the Andean countries of South America in the 1980s during the debt crisis. And then I'll drill down into the Argentina-Brazil relationship, where I've done the most work, including some archival research. So let's talk about Central America. What I was interested in -- think about alternative mission. The Cold War comes late to Latin America. Arguably Cold War concerns, anticommunism, were fairly muted in the late '40s, 1950s. But with the Cuban revolution in 1959, this changes. In part inspired by Cuba. In part actively supported by Cuba. A wave of leftist insurgencies springs up around the Caribbean Basin. Everywhere from the Dominican Republic, eventually Venezuela, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, et cetera. Underlying this, we have a number of rivalries, interstate conflicts among US allies in Central America. So [inaudible] may be a little small but Nicaragua and Honduras. Honduras and El Salvador. And Costa Rica and Nicaragua. All maintained rivalries with one another into this period. Much of which dating back to the breakup of Central American Federation in the 19th century with territorial disputes. So my question was, given this new threat, given this alternative mission of counterinsurgency, of facing off against a leftist threat, a Cuban threat in the region, why is it that El Salvador and Honduras failed to cooperate? Why is it that Costa Rica and Nicaragua failed to cooperate? And especially why is that Honduras and Nicaragua actually did cooperate and manage to pull off conflict resolution in the same period of time? Again, the overview. They all had this alternative mission, but the resource constraints were strongest in Honduras and Nicaragua. This was not an alliance of the most threatened or an alliance of the most democratic. This was an alliance of the poorest in a condition of common threat. What did that look like? I apologize for the photo quality. But this is -- the guy in the white suit is Ramon Villeda Morales, President of Honduras. And to his left, your right, is Luis Somoza, who at the time was president of Nicaragua. So they resolved their territorial dispute in 1960. They meet on the border. Exchange an embrace. Sign a joint declaration. Give some speeches. And rename a border town from El Espino to La Fraternidad. They created a town called Brotherhood on the border. You cannot get more symbolic than that. So this actually worked but again, this happy smiling photo of two people dealing with common threats by solving problems is in contrast to the other regional rivalries that did not have such a photo op. That's chapter four [laughter]. ^M00:18:54 [ Pause ] ^M00:18:57 Sorry. Chapter five. Let me fast forward a couple of decades and talk about South America, particularly in the Andes. Here there's four conflicts in the 1980s that I'm talking about. Colombia and Venezuela. Ecuador and Peru. Argentina and Chile. And Chile and Bolivia. Again. Countries maintaining longstanding conflicts, rivalries, territorial disputes with one another. What's interesting about the 1980s for these persistent conflicts -- if you're a political scientist turning to the historical record and looking for resource constraints in the 1980s, everybody goes broke. This leads to hyperinflation with some really horrendous human consequences in places like Bolivia. It involves massive indebtedness. The debt crisis it becomes called. The lost decade. So stagnation, recession, hyperinflation crisis. Everybody's facing resource constraints in the 1980s. So why is it that ^M00:20:00 Chile and Argentina successfully resolve their longstanding territorial dispute over the Beagle Channel? It takes them a little while to figure out where to draw the line in some of the glaciers, but it's another story. Argentina and Chile make a tremendous breakthrough by 1984. In part with the help of mediation from the Vatican to resolve their territorial dispute at the height of the debt crisis. But Bolivia and Chile don't have that kind of breakthrough. Colombia and Venezuela don't. Ecuador and Peru don't until the 1990s. Why is that? Well if everybody's got the resource constraints, the distinguishing factor, the key ingredient that was missing for cooperation had to do with the alternative missions. If you look at what the militaries had been up to, in Argentina and in Chile, prior to this conflict resolution in '84. There was some fairly nasty things. All right. The Dirty War in Argentina. Disappearances of -- depending on who's counting -- somewhere between 9,000 and 30,000 people disappeared by the regime in Argentina. Chile under the leadership of Augusto Pinochet. Some similar repressions. And Chile was, in fact, in the 1980s dealing with an escalating insurgency, whereas Argentina had largely wiped out its insurgency by this point. So the militaries had been rededicating themselves to an internal focus, an alternative mission. So when these resource constraints of the debt crisis show up, the militaries can get out of the way and let the presidents resolve conflict. If presidents had tried to resolve this dispute earlier before the economic pressures were so severe, it wouldn't have worked. And this I argue is in part what happened in the late 1970s when two military dictators meet at an air force base in Argentina. Jorge Videla in Argentina and Augusto Pinochet trying to stave off this military crisis over the Beagle. It doesn't work. The leaders want to resolve the conflict and can't implement it. Can't get it done. By the 1980s, given the economic pressures, they were able to make this work. And if you look at some of the other cases, with Peru and Ecuador, Chile and Bolivia, Colombia and Venezuela. There's a great instance in the chapter where leaders of Colombia and Venezuela meet, I believe in 1981, to propose resolving their territorial dispute. And the militaries on both sides refused to let it happen. Thank you. So presidents are seeking cooperation, but they're often obstructed from within. So those are the overviews. That's chapter four. That's chapter five. Comparative case studies, largely drawing on leaders' memoirs, declassified US documents. Let me drill down for a bit and talk about the Argentina-Brazil relationship. Another one of these longstanding rivalries going back to independence. In fact, when I was first doing fieldwork in Argentina and Brazil, and I would ask people about the rivalry between the two countries. Two of the stock answers that I would get is. One. Well, we never really had a rivalry except in football. Right? This is just about sports. It's just about culture. It was never really all that serious. One of the other stock answers that I would get is to really understand the acrimony between Argentines and Brazilians, you have to go back to the monarchial succession struggles in Castile and Portugal in the 14th and 15th centuries to really get a handle on Cold War conflicts. That was a more frustrating answer because it usually meant that the conversation was going to last for an hour before we could get [laughter] to some other topics. But it was extremely instructive. So I'm approaching this more as a political scientist, to slice into a longstanding conflict. I'm looking for concrete events that I can compare, that I can go in and look at the documents. I'm sorry. This is [inaudible] on the left and on the far right, Augusto Pinochet. These guys never met for the handshake photo op, as far as I can tell with conflict resolution. But they both separately met with the Pope. So two separate photos. So let me turn to Argentina, Brazil. This is the cover of Veja, which is Brazil's leading newsweekly commentary on foreign affairs. This is an issue from 1977. [foreign words]. The failure to meet. The lack of cooperation. The disagreement. You see the national flags going in opposite directions. Summing up the relationship as of 1977. So why? Why can't these countries cooperate? It's the Cold War. They've got common interests. They're both US allies. Why can't they resolve their conflict until 1980? Just to give you a picture of the relationship. This is just a bar chart showing how many treaties each year Argentina and Brazil signed with one another, staring in 1900 and going up through 1999. So a taller spike means we signed an awful lot of treaties. What this shows you is that in the first half of the 20th century, there's not a lot of cooperation going on between the two countries. And then after that you get momentary agreements on isolated issues, but the relationship doesn't change. And the turning point really is 1979 and 1980. This spike right here. Because after that every year new cooperation is being added. This is the foundation. This is the turning point in the relationship. So one of the big questions for me is why not sooner? Why is it that you go from centuries of rivalry, a very quick turning point? And then an escalation and a deepening of cooperation between the two largest countries in South America? Over the course of the 1980s, culminating arguably with the Treaty of Ascension, forming Mercosur in 1991, and a continued economic integration and strategic alliance to the present day? So why did that work? Why did it work in 1980 and why not earlier if it was such a good idea? I'm going to go through some history in reverse chronological order, so I'll be playing rewind a bit. Here's the nice photo op. On the left, Joao Figueirdo, President of Brazil. And on the right we have Jorge Videla, President of Argentina, sharing an embrace upon Figueirdo's visit to Argentina in 1980. That's that spike in bilateral accords and treaties that they signed. It's actually -- it's kind of a romantic picture in some ways. Political cartoonists had a field day with this visit. I can talk more about that taking it a little bit further than the photograph shows. But this cooperation. All right? These guys are resolving their disagreements. They're signing new cooperation treaties on everything from trade in wheat to nuclear cooperation. Conventional defense production cooperation. Consultation on foreign policy. This was really a breakthrough year in the bilateral relationship between Brazil and Argentina. So why? Why 1979, 1980? What had been happening? Well, as I mentioned, over the course of the 1960s and into the 1970s, large parts of the Argentine and Brazilian state were redirecting themselves from international conflict to domestic conflict. Fighting insurgents and suspected insurgents and cousins of suspected insurgents. This was a new alternative mission. And I do not, in any way, want to make light of it. But one of the foreign policy consequences of all of this repression was a shift in the interests of large parts of the state. So that happens over the course of the '60s and '70s. Well what about resource constraints? The debt crisis, as I mentioned, occupies most of Latin America for much of the 1980s. This is usually, if you read any textbook, you'll learn that the debt crisis formally begins in 1982 when Mexico declares a default on its sovereign debt. The crisis had been coming for a long time. And in particular, for Brazil and other oil-importing countries, think back to before Brazil discovered all of its massive offshore oil deposits in the 2000s. In the 1970s, Brazil is a major oil-importing country that's been growing at a clip of 10%, 12% a year, in terms of its economy. The October 1973 oil shocks just throw that wooden shoe into the gears of the machinery. All of a sudden, over the course of the late 1970s, Argentina and Brazil are facing an impending economic crisis. They're having to make tradeoffs and policy priorities that before they didn't have to make those sorts of adjustments. So it's the combination of those two things I'm arguing. The 1970s changed this century's long relationship and enabled this happy moment. So if we only look at the success. If we only look at the photo op, we might think it's all about the leaders. Because Figueirdo comes to visit his Argentine counterpart. This is the first visit by a Brazilian head of state to next-door neighbor Argentina since 1935. Almost half a century earlier. So you'd think this is Sadat to Israel. This is about leadership. It's about creative diplomacy. It's not. Well, that's part of the story. But it's amazing how conditional this outcome is because so many of their ^M00:29:59 predecessors had tried the exact same thing, and it had always failed. So this is 1980. This is the success. I'm going to walk backwards. This is 1972. The two gentlemen in the middle seated are the presidents of their respective countries. The one on the left is Alejandro Lanusse, who's president of Argentina, and on the right is Emilio Medici, President of Brazil. This is March of 1972. Both of these guys heading military regimes. They're being flanked by their foreign ministers with a couple of military personnel in the back. These guys holding the hands to the chin, they do not look happy. They do not look cooperative. This is less of a good photo op. By the way, this is the photo op. This is them signing [laughter] the joint declaration, the joint communiqué in Brasilia in March of '72. So what was the problem? Well, as I walk through in the book, lots of Argentinian -- not very many, I should say. The few scholars who have looked at this episode, Argentine and Brazilian, tend to tell a story that what happened was that the Argentine president went off script during his speech at [foreign word], at the Brazilian Foreign Ministry. And there were a few sentences that had not been preapproved in the earlier working draft. And that these offended Brazilian sovereignty. And as a result the relationship was utterly destroyed, and in fact, relations between Argentina and Brazil soured for years after this incident in March of '72. I have a published article on this and it's part of chapter three, drawing on some classified documents from the Argentine Foreign Ministry archives. And what I'm largely arguing is no matter how skillful of diplomats these presidents were. No matter whether they'd stayed on script or not. At how creative they were at trying to get that photo op. This was doomed. This was not going to work. It was not going to work. And people knew it in advance. It wasn't that there was an accidental gaff and then everything that looked so great was falling apart. You can see in the documents people know that this is not going to lead to any sort of cooperative breakthrough. Why? Well, it's 1972, not 1979, is the short answer. The economies had not collapsed. This is the height of the Brazilian so-called miracle of development. Argentina is not doing terribly bad from a macro economic standpoint at the time. They don't have the kinds of resource constraints that are going to force the state agencies, force the diplomats, force the military officers to play ball. So cooperation, even if the presidents are trying to make it work, is being undermined from within as of 1972. So this is not a happy story. Unless you opposed cooperation in the first place, in which case, this is the outcome that you were pushing for all along. We walk back another decade. These sorts of summits, presidential summits, happen roughly once a decade, 1935, 1947, 1961 a couple of time, 1972, and then 1980. Let's back up another decade; 1961. You can see the military personnel sort of peering over the shoulders. The gentleman on the right is Arturo Frondizi, democratically-elected President of Argentina. The gentleman on the left is Janio Quadros, democratically-elected President of Brazil. So two democracies. And I should point out both of these guys -- this is April of 1961, signing on to John F. Kennedy's Alliance for Progress. Progressive developmentalists. Democratic regimes. It should be all systems go, early Cold War. Right? Lots of common interests. Lots of motivation for cooperation. And in fact, the two leaders meet, have a presidential summit, sign a number of accords, and people are discussing the spirit of Uruguaiana, named after the town in Brazil where the two presidents are meeting on the border. That spirit had a very short life. This is April of 1961. In August, Janio Quadros resigns. And in March of 1962, Arturo Frondizi is overthrown by the military. And after that, nobody in either country is really going to keep cooperation alive. So it was an effort, but it was quickly, quickly put to bed. And certainly everything ends by the military coups in 1964 in Brazil and in 1966 in Argentina. So again, effort at conflict resolution by democratically-elected leaders, both of whom had good relationships with the United States during the Cold War. A number of common interests. Can't pull it off. This is puzzling if we think about it from a US standpoint, where we assume that an elected president calls the shots. But if you think about Cold War Latin America, very few, even elected presidents, but also very few dictators are truly calling the shots. You always have to worry about obstruction and even policy veto coming from within your own government. And largely, I argue, that's what was going on here. I should clarify -- as far as I can tell, nobody in either country threatened a coup against these guys because of the Brazil-Argentina cooperation. But separately, as part of their attempt at bilateral cooperation, both of them had met with Che Guevara. And Quadros had actually given the guy a medal. This was anathema to the armed forces in both of these countries. So they had good relationships with Kennedy but not good enough for the military to refrain from referring to you as a communist in terms of your relationship with Cuba. So again, nice photo op doomed. Doomed effort at conflict resolution. This brings me back to the cover of the book. This is the photo from the lower half of the cover. This originally appeared in The New York Times in May of 1947. It's an Associated Press photo. This is Juan Peron on the right and Eurico Gaspar Dutra of Brazil on the left. What's happening in this picture? Arguably you can often judge a book by the cover. These two presidents of their countries both democratically-elected, despite the military paraphernalia. They're untying a ribbon. They're on a bridge. They're on a bridge that goes between Uruguaiana in Brazil and Paso de los Libres in Argentina. Here's the amazing thing. This is 1947. Two countries have been independent for a century and a half. This is the first bridge between the two largest countries in South America, and they share a border. So, you know, from the 18 teens or 1820s with Brazilian independence until 1945 to '47, there's a river and there's no bridge. By the end of World War II, they finally build a bridge. And this is the photo op for dedicating it. So what's the context here? This is the early Cold War. Lots of common interests. Both of these guys serious anticommunists. There's interest with economic development, trade integration. They're both democracies. They both got a pretty good relationship with the Truman Administration, by the way. This is May of 1947. What does the Truman Administration want from Latin America at the beginning of the Cold War? They want a Rio treaty, Rio in Dutra's Brazil later that year. So they're looking for an anticommunist alliance of Latin American countries to side with the US in the Cold War and both of these guys, as heads of state, are very much onboard. Peron, in particular, is thrilled to be back in the US's good graces after that nasty bout of Argentine neutralism during the Second World War. The Truman Administration is trying to reintegrate Argentina into the Inter-American community. So again, we get an effort at conflict resolution. It makes sense. There's some nice pomp and circumstance. They don't sign anything else. They can't reach agreement. They can't change the political relationship. Why? Well, if you read Argentine historians, they say it's because the two guys didn't get along with one another personally. And if you read Brazilian scholars, they tell you it's all US meddling. The US was trying to divide and conquer Latin America and obstructed Argentine-Brazilian cooperation. As you can tell by now, I don't really agree with either of those theses because I blame the Argentines and the Brazilians for the failure to cooperate rather than the US. This isn't just my opinion. This is actually drawing on archival documents from the Brazilian Foreign Ministry, in particular. Where you can see that the Brazilian diplomats do not want cooperation to occur. They do not trust Peron. They do not trust Argentina. And any sort of conflict resolution effort is going to be obstructed from within, even if presidents try to make it happen. So the photo ops don't tell the whole story. And the successful cases don't tell the whole story. You need to look at the negative cases. Look at the failures in comparative perspective, and that's largely what the book does. By way of conclusion, I want to zoom back out from the particular narratives in Argentine-Brazilian relations and talk about the lessons. Public policy lessons for ^M00:40:00 the United States, in particular. First of all, one of the really remarkable things that I learned in doing the research for this book is just how little leverage the United States has over our allies in terms of foreign aid. In terms of coercion and pressure. If you think of an alliance as a united front and you think that the leader of that alliance is calling the plays, it doesn't really work. Central America in the late 1950s, in part it did because these countries were so small. Because they were so dependent economically, a small amount of US military assistance could make a huge difference in a country's decision-making. But with Argentina, with Brazil, even as early as the 1040s, the US had very little leverage to influence these countries' foreign policies. Also, there's a number of unintended consequences when the US tries to aid its allies and to encourage them to resolve conflicts. So for instance, the Camp David Accords, Israel and Egypt. The US has been pumping billions of dollars in foreign aid into both Israel and Egypt since then, as a carrot, as an incentive for cooperation. Those sorts of efforts have a number of unintended consequences. When you aid allies, it tends to fuel arms' races among your allies. And also as I've been arguing, if resource constraints help you incentivize conflict resolution, then, if you start giving more resources you're removing the incentive for conflict resolution. Unintentionally. I'm not at all arguing that the US was ever trying to prevent cooperation within Latin America during the cases that I'm looking at. So is that just a Cold War Latin America story? This is earlier this month. This is President Barak Obama at West Point giving his commencement address. Those of you who read the text or saw the speech. He's calling for a renewed wave of counterterrorism partnerships, particularly in the Sub-Saharan Africa, in the Middle East. Five billion dollars or so in US aid, special forces training, regional cooperation against common threats posed by local insurgencies affiliated with al-Qaeda. I argue in chapter six and to some extent in chapter seven of the book. We've seen similar things before because this has some very strong parallels with Cold War Latin America. Where the US was trying to encourage regional cooperation against common threats. And most of the time it didn't work. And even when it did work, we were dealing with often dictatorships and human rights abuses. So I think that there's actually some value beyond just the fascinating history, diplomatic history, of Cold War Latin America. I think there's a certain contemporary policy relevance to looking at these cases. How to get conflict resolution. Why conflict sometimes persist. And looking at the unintended consequences of US foreign policy in regions beset by insurgency and regional conflict. I think it's not just a historical story. I think there's a number of lessons that we can draw from that to deal with counterterrorism today. With that, I will conclude. Thank you very much for coming. I look forward to taking your questions about the book, about the project. And I guess there's copies of the book for sale as well. So if you feel a burning need to pick one up, by all means do so. And I'd be happy to sign that for you, if you'd like. Thank you very much for attending -- [applause]. Yeah. ^M00:43:49 [ Inaudible Comment ] ^M00:44:30 Great. Absolutely. Thank you. Of course this varies. All right? Not all non-democratic regimes in Latin America are created equal. So the level of power-sharing. For instance, in Brazil under the military regime from 1964 to 1985, military presidents are being selected from within the elites of the armed forces and can readily be replaced when one loses favor. When you do have a [inaudible] dictatorship and at the real extreme would be Anastasio Somoza, Junior, in Nicaragua. So I spent a fair amount of time wrestling with that case. A large part of the authority depends on the support of the national guard, and that national guard supports you as long as their pockets are lined. So if you remove a lot of the payoffs to the national guard, you lose the support. So I think whether it's an individual dictator, whether it's in Argentina under the Proceso from 1976 through 1983, power-sharing and bickering between the army, the air force, and the navy over who's going to be president. Who's going to get which share of the repressive duties? So I think basically that all of those struggles are there. And there's a quote that I love from Joseph Schumpeter that I use as the front list piece to one of the chapters. And Schumpeter argues that no monarch or group of dictators is ever absolute. Right? Because you always have to -- this is the Bob Dylan line, right? You always have to serve somebody. That somebody varies by country. It varies by type of regime. But I have yet to see a case where anybody had such full control but they didn't have to look out for internal support within the government. At least within Cold War Latin America, and that could vary if you look at the US. Thank you. Great question. Other questions? Yes. ^M00:46:26 [ Inaudible Question ] ^M00:46:57 Have things changed? I think the pattern of conflict and cooperation in the hemisphere has changed dramatically. I don't think that has very much to do with the United States. I think it has to do with domestic changes within Latin America. The consolidation of democracy. The emergence of a solid middle class. The ascendance of regional integration. All has led to a great deal of conflict resolution and cooperation within Latin America. As far as the US's ability to call the shots, to impede, or help out these sorts of cooperations. I'm not sure how much soft power we really have. And I'm not sure to the extent that the US has a wallet of soft power. I don't think we're pointing it at Latin America. If US soft power were enough to encourage cooperation, why didn't it work in the late 1940s? We'd just won the Second World War. Fascism was out. Communism hadn't really gotten there. And why don't Argentina and Brazil, for instance, cooperate in the 1940s? By the time you get to the late 1990s and then the 2000s, with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Latin American leaders are feeling frustrated by the United States. They're looking for alternative leadership. Brazil's trying to provide some of that. Venezuela under Chavez was trying to provide a good deal of it. And so I really don't see international affairs in the Americas, even today, as being directed or heavily influenced from above. I just -- I don't think that soft power is there. Cultural attractions sure. Economic attraction absolutely. But does that dictate foreign policy? I don't see it. Thank you. Other questions? [inaudible] Let me tackle the two parts of the question. One. Is the Falklands a resolved conflict now? According to most of the Argentines with whom I've talked about this, I have to say no. Right? Politically this is still very much an issue for Argentines. In fact, arguably the level of nationalism associated with this as a territorial issue is higher now than it was in generations past. The opportunity for a diplomatic settlement was greater before the '82 occupation than afterwards because now you have the fallen heroes of the Malvinas and everything. So it's harder to walk these back once there's been that level of escalation. So why was there that level of escalation in '82? I think it had an awful lot to do with internal politics within the regime. And in particular, one of the points that I make -- at the level of individual agencies within the state, who benefits from particular missions? In one of the arguments that I make about Argentina and also about Chile was that the army was doing the bulk of the internal mission. And the navy and the air force were partially frozen out. Well who pushes for the Falklands' invasion? Who pushes to occupy the Malvinas? Who pushes to escalate the Beagle Channel between Argentina and ^M00:50:00 Chile? Generally it's the navy that's pushing the hardest for this as part of its internal power struggle. As part of its organizational interest. And the navy didn't have a dog in the fight with Brazil, for instance. Right? So when the army resolves the conflict with Brazil, it doesn't face that level of objection. You try to resolve a conflict with Chile in the 1970s, the navy objects. And in part, I mean this gets a little bit of insight to [inaudible]. The succession struggles that eventually elevate Leopoldo Gultieri, even though he was not from the navy, he depended on naval support. And so this was an active issue. So I think it very much had to do with bureaucratic politics. But the point is taken that just because the economy tanks doesn't mean resolve all of your conflicts immediately across the board. It depends on the organizational interests that are in play. I can also say that [inaudible response] -- the Falklands-Malvinas issue is a bit of an outlier when you're looking at Latin American conflicts. I just have to admit that upfront as well. Thank you. Other questions? Yes. ^M00:51:09 [ Inaudible Question ] ^M00:51:13 [ Pause ] ^M00:51:16 Thank you. Patriotism, nationalism, public opinion, sentiment. When I started this project as a doctoral dissertation a great many years ago, that was exactly my working hypothesis. I thought I was going to look at these conflicts. I was going to find hatred and nationalism and ideology and misperception. And that conflict resolution was going to be a story about intergroup reconciliation, drawing on the fundamental principles of social psychology. It took me a couple of years to figure out that I was barking up the wrong tree. At least for the Cold War Latin American conflicts. Generally, public opinion had very little to do with foreign policy-making. Elites are making decisions, largely in a vacuum, isolated from the people. And as the previous question had mentioned, many of these issues, even when there's a territorial dispute between Costa Rica and Nicaragua, Colombia and Venezuela, these are usually not pieces of territory that are imbued with what Ron Hassner at Berkeley calls a sense of sacred space, of indivisibility. This is not East Jerusalem. This is not Cashmere. The Malvinas for the Argentines have taken on some of these overtones after '82. But most of these conflicts -- this is not being driven by the public square demanding national objectives. Most of this was being done by elites. And as all those failed conflict resolution efforts show, the elites in these countries are willing to sit down and talk and propose agreements. If this was really being driven by hatred, I mean look what Carter had to do to get Israelis and Egyptians at the same table. These folks are coming to the table of their own accord. Right? So I think a lot of those more psychological obstacles were not there for most of these conflicts that I've looked at. I think it's a very persuasive line of argument. I just didn't see it hold up in these cases. Thank you. ^M00:53:09 [ Inaudible Question ] ^M00:53:22 Absolutely. For the Argentine-Brazilian relationship. The largest source that I was drawing on was fieldwork in the Argentine Foreign Ministry archives in Buenos Aires and the Brazilian Foreign Ministry archives in Brasilia. Looking particularly at secret or confidential cable traffic between their embassies in the other country and headquarters. And looking at what happens before these meetings. What interests are at play? Did they think than an agreement is going to happen? What's their assessment of the state of the economy? How were the relations going with the United States? So all of this is being covered in a confidential fashion. So chapter three, which is the biggest chunk of the book, is drawing on those archival documents in Brazil and Argentina. So that's where I can get the finest grain analysis. For the other chapters, necessarily I'm not in the archives in all of these countries around the hemisphere, as great as that would be. So often I'm drawing, for instance, looking at Central America in the late 1950s, declassified US documents. Because folks from SOUTHCOM, folks from the State Department, are sitting down and talking with leading generals in Honduras. And they're talking with the president of El Salvador. And you get these declassified memcons, the memoranda of conversation about how serious of a threat do they face? So it turns out we have the Somozas in 1961 saying oh my God, we're going to be -- this is going to be the next Baptista. We're doomed. We're going to fall. We need better weapons. US give us better weapons. So you get this sense and the State Department basically said no. So you can see these fairly frank exchanges that give you a good sense of the inner-workings of civil-military relations and domestic politics in Central American countries by looking at the US side of things. So that's largely what I would draw on. And wherever possible, also, and this is one of the things where the Library of Congress helped out tremendously -- anybody who's ever written a memoir, any of these decision-makers, right? We get their records and most of those are here. One of the greatest ones. I mentioned the 1961 Argentina-Brazil summit with its Quadros and Frondizi democratically-elected. These guys. Quadros' foreign minister, Alfonso Arinos de Melo Franco, writes in his memoirs that shortly after the -- during the summit, the Argentine president said yes, we can agree to this great accord. And the fourth Argentine foreign minister says but isn't the president going to consult? And Frondizi says consult with whom? I'm the president. And later Quadros, President of Brazil, is talking to his foreign minister, and he says a president should never have to submit himself to something like that. Right? Frondizi was facing tremendous domestic pressure, tremendous tutelage. Anything he did could be vetoed by the military. And Quadros said yeah, this is dooming cooperation. And we get that out of Alfonso Arinos' memoirs, a copy of which exists downstairs in the basement. So those are tremendously revealing, although when possibly, you want to cross-reference those with the archival documents as well. Thank you. ^M00:56:40 [ Inaudible Conversation ] ^M00:56:58 I was trying to tread fairly carefully with my use of Malvinas and Falklands earlier [multiple speakers]. It's a term that -- soccer war or football war for the 1969 struggle between El Salvador and Honduras. It's not about that. It's a catalyst rather than cause. But the terminology I think is worth using because otherwise nobody knows what you mean. So I'm happy to use the term but a label isn't an explanation. ^M00:57:28 [ Pause ] ^M00:57:32 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov. ^E00:57:37