A Short Essay on Latin America #7

By the time of the Great Depression Latin American exports had become a staple of the various component nations’ economies. The consequences of the many links between the economies of Latin America and the economy of the United States was the as the United States suffered, so did the rest of the Western Hemisphere, and the rest of the world for that matter.¹ In turn, The Great Depression was the economic context for the rise of Fascism in Europe, with concurrent reverberations of extreme rightist political ideology in Latin America.²

In her article The Change in the Discourse of US-Latin American Relations from the End of the Second World War to the Beginning of the Cold War (1995), Margarita Lopez-Maya points out that at the end of World War II there were Latin American countries who still held “unacceptably high pro-Nazi tendencies,” most notably Argentina.³ But the inclination towards Fascism began in Latin America at about the same time that Fascism was on the rise in the rest of the world, perhaps due the fact that Latin American, long the colony of a European power, had often subject to European continental politics.⁴ Nevertheless, as pointed out by Stanley G. Payne, in his monograph entitled A History Fascism, fascism surprisingly never took hold in Latin America to the extent that it did in Europe.⁵

The “surprise” of fascism not taking hold is likely due to the aggressive way that the United States economically and politically intervened in Latin American, turning the tide away from the Fascist ideology where it had hegemonic power.⁶ Nevertheless, the Nazis were trying exceedingly hard to establish their presence in Latin America, as noted by Max Paul Friedman in his Private Memory, Public Records, and Contested Terrain: Weighing Oral Testimony in the Deportation of Germans from Latin America during World War II. According to Friedman, “the Nazi party had created a special unit for the recruitment of German expatriates…” [and], “the members of the…[ unit] …did create the impression of having united the German communities of Latin America solidly behind Hitler.”^{7 8}

Despite the Nazi push for power and influence in Latin America, the United States’ implementation of the “Good Neighbor Policy,” which emphasized “helping” Latin America through financial investments as opposed to armed intervention.⁹ What this meant for Latin America is illustrated well by Mora (1998) in the context of how the United States dealt with the nation of Paraguay. Mora argues that “between 1937 and 1945 Washington had employed foreign aid to ‘purchase’ nominal Paraguayan alignment in its power struggle against Germany.¹⁰ Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, therefore, improved Latin American relations and turned the quelled the small tide of rising Fascism in Latin America.

This fact, that Fascism was a quelled “rising tide” in much of Latin America should sufficiently explain why, after World War II, many high ranking Nazi officers found a temporary refuge in the nations of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay at the end of the war. There was a Nazi underground in each of these nations and there was sympathy for Fascism because of many of the same issues that were affecting the rest of the world during the Great Depression, an economic condition that made an extreme right wing philosophy appealing to many.¹¹ There were many enclaves sympathetic to the “cause” of Nazism at the war’s end, which was perhaps the only weakness of US policy in combating Nazism in Latin America.¹²

1 Skidmore, Thomas E. and Peter H. Smith, Modern Latin America, Oxford University Press, 1997.

2 López-Maya, Margarita. “The Change in the Discourse of US-Latin American Relations from the End of the Second World War to the Beginning of the Cold War.” Review of International Political Economy 2.1 (1995): 135-149.

3 Lopez-Maya, 137.

4 Payne, Stanley G. A History of Fascism, 1914-1945, [S.l.] Routledge, 2000.

5 Payne, 340.

6 Mora, Frank O. “The Forgotten Relationship: United States-Paraguay Relations, 1937-89.” Journal of Contemporary History 33.3 (1998): 451-473.

7 Friedman, Max Paul. “Private Memory, Public Records, and Contested Terrain: Weighing Oral Testimony in the Deportation of Germans from Latin America during World War II.” The Oral History Review 27.1 (2000): 1-15.

8 Friedman, Max Paul. “Specter of a Nazi Threat: United States-Colombian Relations, 1939-1945.” The Americas 56.4 (2000): 563-589.

9 “The definite policy of the United States from now on is one opposed to armed intervention.” Edgar B. Nixon, ed. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Foreign Affairs: Volume I, 559-60.

10 Mora, 455.

11 Friedman, Max Paul. Nazis and Good Neighbors: The United States Campaign Against the Germans of Latin America in World War II. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

12 Fernandez Artucio, Hugo. The Nazi Underground in South America. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, Inc, 1942.