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Precarious Paths to Freedom: The United States, Venezuela, and the Latin American Cold War

2017; Duke University Press; Volume: 97; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-3934240

1527-1900

Stephen G. Rabe,

Politics and Society in Latin America

Aragorn Storm Miller of the University of Texas at Austin has written an analysis of US-Venezuelan relations from 1958 to 1968 that is simultaneously baffling and informative. In the aftermath of the popular uprising against military dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1952–1958), the Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy administrations vigorously supported constitutionalism and democratic civic life in Venezuela. The United States celebrated the elections of Rómulo Betancourt (1959–1964), Raúl Leoni (1964–1969), and Rafael Caldera (1969–1974) because these anti-Communists gave their oil-rich nation socioeconomic reform and moderate democratic capitalism. Under the aegis of the Alliance for Progress, the United States provided, between 1961 and 1965, $340 million in loans and credits to underwrite projects like building homes for the urban poor. Presidents Kennedy and Betancourt became fast friends, establishing a direct telephone line between the White House and Miraflores, the presidential palace in Caracas. During the 1960s, the United States also successfully promoted democracy and modernization in Colombia and Costa Rica.Throughout his book, Miller repeatedly laments that the US success story in Venezuela is missing from the historical literature on the Cold War in Latin America. Miller further asserts that unnamed scholars have overemphasized the US embrace of vicious anti-Communist elites by portraying US policy as to make “accommodations with a host of benighted Latin American generals, who in turn manipulated US support to crush the aspirations of the masses of their people” (p. x). But the problem with Miller's basic thesis is that missing from his footnotes and bibliography are a host of books that have highlighted the salutary US role in Venezuela. These studies include surveys of US-Venezuelan relations by Judith Ewell (in 1996) and Stephen Rabe (in 1982). Michael Latham (in 2000), Jerome Levinson and Juan de Onís (in 1970), and Jeffrey Taffet (in 2007) are historians of the Alliance for Progress who have assessed the successes and not just the failures of the massive economic aid program of the 1960s. And Robert Alexander (in 1964) and John Martz (in 1977) are political scientists who demonstrated how Presidents Betancourt and Leoni used US aid to safeguard constitutionalism in Venezuela. Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson preferred what Kennedy tagged as “decent, democratic regimes.” But Kennedy added that the United States so abhorred Fidel Castro's Cuba that it would ally with military dictators to prevent the spread of Communism. During the 1960s, the United States destabilized governments in British Guiana (Guyana), Brazil, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, and Guatemala because it did not judge the constitutional leaders of those countries to be sufficiently anti-Communist.What is new in Miller's study is his excellent analysis of the war between the moderate Left and the radical Left in Venezuela during the 1960s. Young Venezuelans, inspired by the Cuban Revolution, engaged in guerrilla warfare and urban terrorism, creating havoc and suffering in the country. The United States supplied over $60 million in credits and grants for military equipment and training to aid in the fight against the violent Left. Drawing on autobiographies, memoirs, and daily reports from El Nacional, Miller tells a fascinating story of the internal debates between leftist revolutionaries. The Partido Comunista de Venezuela, for example, withdrew from the fight when Moscow, in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, advised Latin American Communists to forego subversive activities. As Miller observes, the collapse of the guerrilla movement in the late 1960s “resulted as much from terminal internal ideological debates and psychological crises as from the growing military capability of its antagonists” (p. 180).Miller's persistent failure to engage other scholars tarnishes, however, the best part of his book. The author avows that Fidel Castro devoted “great resources” and “significant materiel support” to leftist insurgents (pp. 216, 219). He does not, however, explain why the brilliant scholar Piero Gleijeses, who conducted archival research in Cuba, is wrong in arguing in his 2002 book that Castro and Ernesto Guevara focused on promoting revolution in Africa and not Latin America because Cuban leaders feared directly confronting US power. Miller should have also set forth the context of the hostility between Cuba and Venezuela. President Betancourt so despised Castro that he volunteered to participate in the Kennedy administration's assassination plots against the Cuban. Miller also uncritically accepts Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports about Cuban activity in Venezuela. The CIA has a history of fabricating evidence. In 1954, the CIA planted Guatemalan arms in Nicaragua as part of its campaign to destabilize the government of Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. Within CIA archives is a plan to plant Cuban arms in Venezuela. The most damning evidence of Cuban perfidy was the Venezuelan announcement in November 1963 of the discovery of a cache of Cuban arms along the Venezuelan coast. Disaffected CIA operatives Philip Agee (in 1975) and Joseph Burkholder Smith (in 1976) have alleged that the CIA planted the arms.