From Development to Dictatorship: Bolivia and the Alliance for Progress by Thomas C. Field, Jr. (review)

On 1 May 2013, Bolivian President Evo Morales expelled the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), declaring that “the times have passed” when the United States could use “charity as a fig leaf for manipulation, . . . domination,...[and] subjugation.” Thomas Field’s book provides strong historical grounding for Morales’s action. Field focuses on how the Kennedy administration used development aid to prop up the repressive government of Victor Paz Estenssoro. USAID sent $100,000 worth of military hardware to equip an Indian peasant militia charged with “eliminating” two left-wing union leaders depicted by development economists as “obstacles” to Bolivian modernization.

Based on multiarchival research and interviews with key policymakers and Bolivian labor leaders, Field’s study provides an important critical perspective on the Alliance for Progress (AFP), a large-scale aid program whose underlying goal was to prevent the growth of worker-peasant socialism. Advancing a top-down vision of social change centered on the growth of the middle class, the AFP promoted harsh labor reforms breeding inevitable resistance, which the Kennedy administration helped to suppress through the strengthening of internal security forces. The AFP in turn set the groundwork for an era of coup d’états and military rule, when the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) cultivated close ties with General René Barrientos, who gained infamy for ordering the assassination of Ernesto “Che” Guevara after Guevara came from Cuba to lead a renewed peasant revolt. (On Guevara’s assassination, see Michael Ratner and Michael S. Smith, Who Killed Che: How the CIA Got Away with Murder, New York: Orbis Books, 2011.)

From Development to Dictatorship fits with a growing body of scholarship— for example, Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), and Stephen G. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999)—that challenges triumphalist interpretations of the Cold War and points to the violent consequences of the Cold War in Latin America. The repression in Bolivia is less known than in places like Guatemala and Chile, and so the study is greatly welcome. Field quotes CIA Station Chief Larry Sternfield referring to Paz Estenssoro as a “Nazi” whose inner coterie included ex-Nazis (rescued under the CIA’s Operation Paperclip). The secret police chief, Claudio San Román, ran torture chambers with “skin, blood, arms, legs and blood on the wall” (p. 168).

The Paz regime was so hated it ignited revolt not only among tin miners, whose motives were obscured in stereotyped media depictions, but also right-wing ranchers in Santa Cruz, whom the State Department and media erroneously characterized as “crypto-communists.” These guerillas shot and paralyzed a Green Beret working under the cover of the USAID’s Office of Public Safety.

Estenssoro’s staunchest supporters were liberals such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the Harvard historian and aide to President John F. Kennedy; Teodoro Moscoso, chief AFP administrator; and Ambassador Ben Stephansky. All were also strong advocates of economic austerity measures that led to large-scale job loss and the deterioration of already poor working conditions. Rather than considering these reforms “anti-labor,” they were seen to restore “balance against excessive and anarchical influence” in the unions and to help “get rid of the commies.” Quoting a Bolivian historian, Field writes that Stephansky “liked to fancy himself as an unbiased liberal, and perhaps deep down he was. Between smiles and handshakes, he did more damage than all his boorish predecessors; Texans who smelled like cattle, screwballs who collected lighters and unimaginative bureaucrats” (p. 196).

This depiction brings to mind Alden Pyle’s character in Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American and forgotten critiques of “corporate” liberalism by the Students for a Democratic Society. Field might have discussed this latter phenomenon in greater depth, using the Bolivian case as a...