In the aftermath of WW2, why did FDR’s Latin American experiment end in abject failure?

The Cold War in Latin America is sometimes seen as an inevitable extension of rivalry between two emergent superpowers – the United States and the Soviet Union – in the new geopolitical context created in the aftermath of the Second World War.

But the Cold War antagonism between the US and its southern neighbours wasn’t a foregone conclusion amid the wider ideological conflict. In the decades before the Cold War took hold, the US pursued a markedly different relationship with Latin America that had embraced national sovereignty, tolerated economic nationalism and actively supported the leadership of left-leaning reformers.

As historian Greg Grandin, Professor of History at Yale University, explains on the HistoryExtra podcast, this earlier period shows that more cordial relations were possible, and demonstrates how quickly they were abandoned.

Why Latin America mattered before the Cold War

“You can’t really understand the Cold War unless you understand Latin America’s role in the 1930s and 1940s,” Grandin explains.

During those years, Latin American governments were active participants in an anti-fascist coalition that spanned the Atlantic world. Several countries broke relations with the Axis powers early; they restricted German and Italian influence and aligned diplomatically and economically with the Allies well before the Second World War formally reached the hemisphere.

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This partnership between the US and Latin American governments emerged against a long history of tension. Since the late 19th century, Latin American states had protested a right claimed by the United States to intervene militarily and politically across the hemisphere via the Monroe Doctrine, a claim first articulated in 1823 that purportedly justified intervention in order to protect US economic and military interests.

From occupations in Haiti and Nicaragua, to repeated interventions in Central America and the Caribbean, US power over Latin and Central America had often been wielded as a blunt tool. Until the early 1930s, the powers residing in Washington were keen to hold to that prerogative.

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It was the Great Depression of the 1920s and 30s that changed the calculus. US power on the world stage was weakened, and domestic reform took increasing priority.

The shift in policy that followed under 32nd US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt represented a deliberate attempt to rebuild hemispheric relations on new foundations.

FDR viewed Latin America as central to the global struggle against fascism. His policymakers understood fascism not as a uniquely European threat, but rather a system that could take root wherever economic crisis and political instability converged. So, US support for Latin America, both ideologically and territorially – with the latter’s strategically important resources and stretches of Atlantic coastlines – was seen as pivotal.

FDR’s hemispheric experiment

“Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president in 1932 and inaugurated in 1933, and he presided over an enormous sea change in US policy towards Latin America,” Grandin explains. “For a long time, Latin American states had demanded that the United States give up its claimed right of intervention, recognise the absolute sovereignty of individual nations, and accept that the doctrine of conquest was no longer valid.

“And Roosevelt, because of this recession of US power caused by the Great Depression, concedes. And in doing so, the whole game changes. The whole United States' relationship with Latin America changes completely. There's a sense in which the United States has accepted that conquest is no longer a valid justification for intervention.”

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Just as important to this relationship was how Roosevelt understood reform. “There is also a sense that the New Deal [a series of sweeping US federal programs and public work projects implemented by FDR in the 1930s] is not just a domestic political experiment, but a continental one.”

Across Latin America, governments were attempting to regulate capital, redistribute land, and build developmental states to address extreme inequality. Amid its own substantial change of ideology, Washington didn’t reflexively oppose these efforts.

When Washington backed economic nationalism

When Bolivia nationalised Standard Oil assets in 1937, the US didn’t intervene. When Mexico expropriated foreign oil companies a year later, FDR went further, providing funding for a national steel factory. Brazil received similar backing for industrial development. Such actions were extraordinary given the long-standing US practice of using diplomatic or military pressure to protect American corporate interests overseas.

During the second half of FDR’s presidential reign, as Europe slid toward war, US strategists looked south with growing anxiety. “Their greatest fear was that Latin America could become ‘Spain writ large’,” Grandin explains.

The reference was to the Spanish Civil War and the rise of authoritarian leader Francisco Franco. Many of the social conditions that fuelled fascism in Spain – concentrated land ownership, stark inequality, militant labour movements, and conservative Catholic nationalism – were present across Latin America. US officials feared that repression of reform movements would radicalise politics, opening the door to authoritarian or fascist outcomes.

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Washington feared fascist Europe to the east, fascist Asia to the west, and a potentially fascist Latin America to the south. Preventing that outcome required a deliberate choice. In response, says Grandin, “Roosevelt tilted towards the left in Latin America and supported reformers who were trying to build national developmental states.”

The strategy largely worked. With the major exception of Argentina, “almost every Latin American country eagerly joined the Allied forces.”

But following FDR’s death in 1945, it all changed.

From 33rd US President Harry Truman onwards, and as the Iron Curtain descended across Europe, nationalisation and state-led development in Latin America would come to be treated as existential threats to the US. This was in sharp contrast to the 1930s and early 1940s, when they had been accepted as safeguards against fascism.

From allies to enemies

“The reason why you have to understand that period to understand the Cold War is that it shows how brutal and violent the turnaround was.”

Up until the later 1940s, the US had supported many Latin American countries militarily. “It had sent guns, weapons, tanks, warships, and aircraft,” says Grandin. “It had trained and professionalised Latin American militaries in the name of fighting fascism.”

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By 1947–8, the United States had transformed Latin America’s military capacity. Much of this assistance was delivered through wartime programmes such as Lend-Lease, which dramatically expanded US influence over regional armed forces.

Then, almost overnight, the enemy changed.

“All of a sudden, in 1947, Washington sent a clear signal that the fight is no longer against fascism. It's against the communists.”

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Now, governments and movements that had been wartime partners were reclassified as dangers to hemispheric security.

It was a seismic shift. Before the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) existed, US intelligence in Latin America was handled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In 1947, “[the FBI’s] focus shifted from monitoring right-wing movements to surveilling and repressing left-wing forces. And you see this in one country after another,” says Grandin.

“The violence and abruptness of the shift triggered cycles of polarisation that unfolded through the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.”

Those cycles produced insurgencies on the left, authoritarian regimes on the right, and decades of repression that were later justified as Cold War necessity.

For Washington, it was a reversion to the norm, ending FDR’s experimental approach to Latin American relations.

Greg Grandin was speaking to Danny Bird on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.