Preferred Citation: Rock, David, editor. Latin America in the 1940s: War and Postwar Transitions. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1994 1994. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ ft567nb3f6/ Latin America in the 1940s War and Postwar Transitions Edited by David Rock UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles Oxford © 1994 The Regents of the University of California Preferred Citation: Rock, David, editor. Latin America in the 1940s: War and Postwar Transitions. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1994 1994. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ ft567nb3f6/ Contributors CORINNE ANTEZANA-PERNET is a member of the Department of History, University of California, Irvine. She is working on a doctoral dissertation on the growth of the women's movement in Chile. RUTH BERINS COLLIER is associate professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, and coauthor (with David Collier) of Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America . JOSEPH COTTER is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His Ph.D. dissertation was entitled "Before the Green Revolution: Mexican Agricultural Policy, 1920–1949." PAUL W. DRAKE is chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. His books include Socialism and Populism in Chile, 1932–52 . E. V. K. FITZGERALD is professor of economics at the Institute of Social Studies, the Hague, Netherlands. Among his books is The Political Economy of Peru, 1956–1978: Economic Development and the Restructuring of Capital . JOHN D. FRENCH is assistant professor of history at Duke University, and author of The Brazilian Workers'ABC: Class Conflict and Alliances in Modern São Paulo . DANIEL LEWIS is a former lecturer in the Department of History, University of California, Santa Barbara. His Ph.D. dissertation was entitled "A Political ― xii ― and Economic History of Grain Farming in Buenos Aires Province, Argentina, 1914–1943." FERNANDO LOPEZ-ALVES is assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His published articles include "Explaining Confederation: Colombian Unions in the 1980s." DAVID ROCK , the editor of this volume, is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His books include Argentina, 1516–1987: From Spanish Colonization to Alfonsin . IAN ROXBOROUGH is professor of sociology at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. Among his books is Unions and Politics in Mexico . ROSEMARY THORP is a fellow of St. Antony's College and lecturer in economics at the Institute of Economics and Statistics, University of Oxford. She is coauthor (with Geoffrey Bertram) of Peru, 1890–1977: Growth and Policy in an Open Economy . ― xiii ― Acknowledgments This book was conceived during a conference at the University of California, San Diego, in early 1986 in which a group of specialists reviewed and discussed recent scholarship on modern Latin America. Among the conclusions of these discussions was that the 1940s, the period coinciding with World War II and the beginning of the Cold War, represented a crucial historical bridge in modern Latin America, but that many of the features of this period remained unknown, ignored, or forgotten. Thanks to the support of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) of New York, in December 1987 a second interdisciplinary group of Latin Americanists met at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to arrange a collaborative research project on Latin America in the 1940s. This meeting became the prelude to a third conference in Santa Barbara in December 1989, at which the decision was made to prepare papers with a view to eventual publication. The participants in the project have changed over time although, as I hope the introduction acknowledges, several past participants who were unable to submit papers for this volume had an important part in shaping and defining the issues it addresses. I am particularly grateful to Charles Bergquist, Leslie Bethell, and Joseph Love. I owe a heavy debt to Paul Drake, who as a member of the Joint Committee on Latin American Studies of the Social Science Research Council gave me enormous assistance in raising the funds for the two conferences in Santa Barbara and in advising on the selection of participants. In 1989, Valpy ― xiv ― Fitzgerald, who replaced Drake on the Joint Committee, had a similarly helpful role. I must thank the three staff members of the SSRC with whom I had contact during the planning, execution, and follow-up phases of the project: Joan Dassin, Silvia Raw, and Eric Hershberg. At the University of California, Santa Barbara, my home campus, I received additional support and funding from the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. A willing group of graduate students provided indispensable assistance during the two conferences in Santa Barbara. I should mention in particular Daniel Lewis (now a contributor to this volume), Karen Mead, and Jan Sallinger-McBride. Anthony O'Regan assisted me in the final stages of editing the papers. DAVID ROCK SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA ― 1 ― Introduction David Rock The central theme of this book is the relationship between the "global shocks" of the 1940s, induced by World War II and the onset of the Cold War, and the political development of Latin America. First, the 1940s brought the Latin American republics into a new international order in which old ties with Western Europe crumbled and sometimes disappeared while relations with the United States assumed greater importance than ever before. Second, many parts of Latin America in the 1940s, especially in 1944–1946, witnessed an unprecedented, though not entirely uniform, shift from conservative or authoritarian rule toward democracy and the rapid growth of labor unions. By the end of the decade, however, the infant democratic movements had all collapsed, labor was in disarray, and conservatives were once more in power. The chief aim of our inquiry was to establish and to illustrate the extent to which international and domestic political changes were linked. A second aim—since the 1940s wereso crucial to the formation of the contemporary world, at least until the recent demise of the Cold War—was to measure the long-term impact of these changes in Latin America. Some of our early discussions, for example, suggested that this period represented a vital historical watershed in that it produced the intense opposition between popular and authoritarian forces which later became one of the chief distinguishing features of Latin American politics. Finally, we intended to compare the democratic experience of the 1940s with that of the 1980s and to explore the extent to which the failures of the earlier period offered lessons for the later. ― 2 ― During the initial planning of the project in 1986, Joseph L. Love addressed one of the main aspects of the political transition of the 1940s, as he linked the collapse of the democratic movements in Latin America toward the end of the decade with the beginnings of the Cold War. "The Rio Treaty of 1947," Love wrote, the OAS [Organization of American States] Treaty of 1948, and the pressure by the U.S. to outlaw domestic Communist parties—all these steps seem to have been part of an American Cold War strategy with major influence, for example, on the internal politics of Brazil and Chile. The United States' 'disinterest' in the region in the latter 1940s...has to do not only with the requirements of European policy but with the judgment that the region was now 'under control,' in terms of dealing with Communism. Furthermore, the onset of the Cold War was surely related to the end of the 'democratic opening.' (letter of July 19, 1986) During subsequent stages of the project, both during the preconference of 1987 and the full conference of 1989, several contrasting and divergent viewpoints emerged: some participants expressed their skepticism over the importance of this period, but others called it "a crucial decade." A second striking difference of opinion lay between those who minimized the external global shocks as a factor in political change in Latin America and therefore emphasized "internal trajectories," and those, like Love, who regarded the changing international environment of this period as critical. In a preliminary statement during the meeting in 1987, Paul W. Drake characterized the 1940s as "regressive and conservative." Comparing regime changes over the period he found little to support the view that there were regionwide trends toward enhanced political participation and social reform or that the United States actively encouraged such trends. Drake noted a few "political openings" around 1945 but emphasized their brevity and their eventual failure. Except in Argentina under Juan Perón and in Guatemala under Jacobo Arbenz, Drake saw this decade as a period of relative political inertia in which the populists and democrats generally fared badly. Drake illustrated these observations by the examples of Chile and Peru. In both countries, populism emerged in the 1930s; the 1940s, by contrast, saw the consolidation of antipopulist, "ideologically cooling" regimes emphasizing growth at the expense of redistribution and reform. Labor unions re- ― 3 ― mained weak, and reformist forces ended the decade less powerful and effective than at the beginning. At most a mere "nudge to the left" occurred in 1944–1947 in the "artificial climate" at the end of World War II. In another preliminary statement in 1987, Ruth Berins Collier, citing the examples of four Latin American nations, presented a second, broadly simi-lar view. She argued that except in Peru, Argentina, and in lesser degree Venezuela, reformist efforts, and the political incorporation of "popular groups," predated the 1940s. During the period 1943–1946, which marked the high point of the popular front movements in Latin America, the Communist parties of Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, and Chile abandoned their confrontations with conservative regimes and attempted to arrest and contain popular pressures.