The Foreign Service Journal, May 2013

48 MAY 2013 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL For Latin Americans, Castro’s insurgent model offered something new: an asymmetrical approach that could not easily be countered by the overwhelming military superiority of the United States. something new: an asymmetrical approach that could not easily be countered by the overwhelming military superiority of the United States. Castro was a charismatic leader who had stood up for social justice and against the United States in the name of independence. Soon after taking power, he brought operatives from other Latin American countries to Cuba for ideological and guerrilla warfare training, then offered them help as they returned to their homelands to engage in sabotage and terrorism to establish Marxist governments. The Peace Corps Is Born In response, Kennedy undertook three initiatives designed to counter Soviet expansionism generally, and to engage Castro head-to-head in the Americas with a vision of progressive demo- cratic reform against violent revolutionary upheaval. The most enduring of these was the Peace Corps. In November 1963 I was enrolled in the A-100 Basic Officers Course, in which two-thirds of the men were military veterans, when the news broke that JFK had been fatally shot in Dallas. Soon thereafter, my wife, Dorcas, and I were off with our infant son to Quito, where I was to serve as an FSO on detail to the Peace Corps staff. As one of the poorer countries in the hemisphere, Ecuador was also a prime candidate for assistance under the Alliance for Progress. Peace Corps Volunteers there registered mixed success. Those trying to complete a physical project, such as a footbridge to link an isolated community with a feeder road, were often frustrated. But those who worked to change the “invisible” lives of Ecuadorians through teaching or developing credit unions, for instance, often left more lasting effects. By living at the level of their counterparts, frequently in con- ditions of hardship, many volunteers broadened the image of the United States in a region where, for many, military interventions had been the most vivid symbols of U.S. interest. Perhaps the greatest achievement of the Peace Corps was one envisioned by its founders, but given only tertiary prominence as an objective: the impact on the United States and, particularly, on our style of diplomacy. In my last two overseas assignments, in Guatemala and Santo Domingo, ex-PCVs held some 40 percent of the officer positions in the diplomatic missions. Looking back, I see a similar outcome in the massive assis- tance program that was the Alliance for Progress. Launched just one month after the Bay of Pigs, it was the most ambitious U.S. program of foreign assistance in the Americas before or since. An Uneasy Alliance Its results fell short of its primary objectives: accelerated eco- nomic development and democratic reform. In the first instance, expectations were unrealistically heightened, based on the suc- cess of the Marshall Plan in bolstering economies and halting a slide in Western Europe toward communism. Because Europe already had a rich reserve of human capital in place with organizational, technical and professional exper- tise, the task there, while daunting, was a good deal easier. The economic challenge in Latin America was different: to build vibrant and prosperous economies where none had existed, rather than rebuilding economies devastated by war. The democratization objective also eluded U.S. policy in the Americas until late in the Cold War, as the overwhelming focus on security fostered a tolerance for undemocratic governance. Between the mid-1960s and the late 1980s, military regimes came to govern a majority of Latin Americans through coups that were justified to counter Marxist insurgencies, without objection and sometimes with support fromWashington. In one respect, though, the Alliance for Progress contributed substantially to the resurgence that many Latin American econo- mies experienced after the Cold War. By the early 1990s, 16 out of 18 finance ministers in the largest Latin American economies had lived and studied in the United States, often under educa- tional programs of the Alliance. They served elected govern- ments that had emerged during the previous decade, in part because military governments had failed to manage their econo- mies well, and U.S. policy had come to oppose authoritarian governments of both the left and the right. Conditioned by their experience in the United States, these leaders enacted market- oriented reforms focused on international competitiveness.