Alliance for Progress or Alianza Para El Progreso? A Reassessment of the Latin American Contribution to the Alliance for Progress
Porzecanski, Roberto
2005
- Submitted in partial fulfillment of the degree Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Abstract: This thesis argues that the origins of the Alliance for Progress, despite having been extensively studied and written about, have not been portrayed with full accuracy. I argue that this was the case because students of the Alliance have approached it largely as ... read morea policy of the United States government, what, in turn, resulted in a series of conclusions that misrepresented the origins of the Alliance for Progress by assigning the wrong relative importance to the different factors that played a role in its creation. By redefining the Alliance as what it really was, an inter-American policy, and approaching the study of its origins, including its Latin American origins, I reassess the origins of the Alliance for Progress. I show that, contrary to what it is generally believed, the Alliance's main purpose was not only or even mainly to prevent the spread of communist revolutions and Soviet infiltration in Latin America but to genuinely pull the region out of economic, social and political despair. I also demonstrate that the most important characteristic of the Alliance's nature was not its magnitude as a foreign aid program but the revolutionary features of its policy prescriptions. As a consequence, I establish that the Alliance's most important conceptual foundation was not a new theory of foreign aid in the United States but the rich, sophisticated and influential Latin America structuralist school of thought. Moreover, even regarding its dimension as a major foreign aid program, I show that the original idea about the need for a more engaged participation of the United States in inter-American affairs, accompanied by a more generous commitment of funds, also originated in Latin America.read less
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