Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volume XII, American Republics

43. Memorandum From the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs (Goodwin) to President Kennedy¹

Washington March 14, 1962.

SUBJECT

• Historical Genesis of the Alliance for Progress

The statement of the N.Y. Times² that the Eisenhower Administration thought of the Alliance for Progress and you merely named it is wholly inaccurate and will certainly come as a surprise to those Latin American leaders—such as Kubitschek—who desperately tried to get previous administrations to adopt some such policy without success.

1. For the first seven years of the previous administration there was no policy toward Latin America—merely a continuation of old practices, policies and attitudes.

2. In 1960—alarmed by the growing deterioration of the situation in Latin America and under the prodding of Doug Dillon—we supported the Act of Bogota and asked Congress for $500,000,000 to implement it. This Act was a step forward, but a limited step. It was restricted to U.S. assistance in the field of social progress—the construction of schools, homes, waterworks, public health facilities, etc., and it said that Latin American nations must help themselves in these fields. It was a program of social development, and social development only, on a limited scale with the $500 million to be spent over a period of two years and the fund to be mostly administered ($400 million worth) by the Inter-American Bank.

3. The Alliance for Progress, it is true, incorporated the principles of the Act of Bogota, but went far beyond this Act to a new concept of Inter-American cooperation. A few specifics will serve to illustrate this.

a. The Alianza was based on a long-term program of economic development, a program to increase productive capacity, accelerate rates of growth and make a permanent increase in standards of living. It envisaged a decade-long plan of hemispheric development leading to the stage of self-sufficient growth. The entire program of long-term economic development—the keystone of the Alianza—was new to this Administration.

b. The Alianza introduced the concept of long-term planning and programming. This was absent from previous U.S. policies and yet must be considered the basis for today’s development efforts.

c. The entire institutional structure, including the OAS Experts, the Planning Institute, etc.—with the exception of the Inter-American Bank—has been newly created by the Alianza.

d. The stress on social reform as a condition of development aid—although first intimated in the Act of Bogota—has become a matter of central emphasis under the Alianza. It was impossible to demand social reform as a condition of long-term development financing before this, because long-term development financing was not available.

e. The entire program of commodity stabilization is new since our previous policy actually opposed the idea of stabilizing commodity prices.

f. The Alianza was the first to put U.S. support behind programs of economic integration in Latin America.

g. The magnitude of the plans is incomparable—this year we spent approximately three times as much as previous administrations ever spent in any one year.

h. Almost all the political components of the Alianza represent new thought, including our current stress on political democracy (and coldness toward dictatorial governments) and, more important, our basic decision to identify the United States with the progressive democratic forces in Latin American countries.

If the Alliance for Progress had a predecessor it was Brazil’s Operation Pan-America and not the policies of previous administrations. The bitterness of the Brazilian government at our failure to seriously consider Operation Pan-America is the surest evidence of how much things have changed in the last year.

In addition to the specifics of your policies the entire atmosphere of our relations to Latin America, our attitudes, our progressiveness, our receptivity to Latin needs, has shifted dramatically since last January. No one would be more surprised to hear that we were simply following past policies than the democratic leaders of Latin America who have viewed the Alliance—in both public and private statements—as a new breakthrough in Inter-American relations, and the last, best hope of democracy in this hemisphere.

Dick

1. Source: Kennedy Library, President’s Office Files, Goodwin. No classification marking.
2. Reference is to a New York Times editorial of March 13, which read: “It is often forgotten, by the way, that while President Kennedy gave the program [Alliance for Progress] its name, the concepts were enunciated—and the $500,000,000 committed—by the Eisenhower Administration in 1960.”