Ambivalent Neighbor: Mexico and Guatemala's 'Ten Years of Spring,' 1944–1954

Scholarly discussion of the Cold War in Latin America has long focused on the loud repercussions of international conflict rather than on the more subtle ways in which Latin Americans came to terms with global politics. Latin Americanists began by analyzing U.S. plots to thwart progressive and socialist Latin American governments as supposed beach-heads of Soviet-style Communism in the Western Hemisphere, particularly Guatemala (1951-1954), Cuba (since 1959), Chile (1970-1973), and Nicaragua (1979-1991).¹ They then assessed the role of U.S. corporations and Latin American elites in fomenting an anti-Communist, pan-American ideology. Only recently, however, have everyday forms of engagement with the Cold War attracted our attention. In Mexico as in Guatemala, and in Brazil as in Cuba, the specters of Soviet influence and U.S. intervention helped shape political discourses that legitimized brutal repression of dissent and delegitimized popular protest movements.²

This article analyzes one type of such more subtle engagement with the Cold War: the position of the Mexican state vis-à-vis the explosive clash between Guatemala's so-called "Ten Years of Spring," an experiment in social democracy (1944-1954) and U.S. anti-Communism. Just as Renata Keller has shown with regard to Mexico's posture toward revolutionary Cuba, the Mexican government defended the abstract principle of national sovereignty in Guatemala—the right of each nation to choose its own form of government without outside interference. This posture gave the governing elite an opportunity to polish its nationalist credentials and thus camouflage the anti-Communism of a ruling party, the Partido de la Revolución Institucional (PRI)—a party had reduced to mere lip service the revolutionary ideas it supposedly embodied. At the same time, the Mexican government did not do much to assist a Guatemalan experiment modeled in many ways after its own blueprint, the Constitution of 1917, even though the "Ten Years of Spring" broke a long chain of dictators in cahoots with foreign-owned coffee and banana interests. This chain included strongmen such as Rafael Carrera and Justo Rufino Barrios in the nineteenth century as well as Manuel Estrada Cabrera and Jorge Ubico in the twentieth. The Mexican government also refrained from any moves that would have jeopardized its relationship with the United States.³ Notwithstanding genuine initial sympathies with the democratically elected Guatemalan government, the anti-interventionist rhetoric of the Mexican government sought to legitimize a pro-U.S. position in the Cold War. Aside from defending the national interest—an interest best served by the absence of U.S. military action in the circum-Caribbean—Mexican foreign policy in the Cold War thus served an important purpose in building and preserving a nationalist political culture crucial to the ruling party. It therefore does not fit neatly into neo-realist conceptions of foreign-policy formulations.⁴ In the process, Guatemala's experiment in social democracy did not get the help from Mexico that its government would have desired.

Focused on a decade that coincided with the beginning of the so-called Mexican miracle, this analysis challenges one of the few remaining holdovers from the old "Revolution to Evolution" paradigm:⁵ the idea that the Mexican government translated economic growth and political stability into an independent international posture. As this article will demonstrate, the government pursued a feeble balancing act between popular support for Latin American revolutions and ex-President Lázaro Cárdenas on one side, and U.S. pressure and the conservative business elite on the other. It also sought to mediate conflict between rivaling factions within the Mexican governing elite. An analysis of Cold War-era foreign policy therefore decenters the Mexican intellectual Enrique Krauzés formulation of the "imperial presidency." It also reveals the agency of a number of key political and economic pressure groups.⁶ Rather than the decision of one man in the presidential residence of Los Pinos, the making of Mexican foreign policy was the result of a compromise.

The Formulation of Mexican Foreign Policy in the Cold War Era

As the Cold War divided regions and people...