Foundations of the American Century
Page 26
THE DEVELOPMENT OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES IN THE UNITED STATES
Scholarly interest in Latin America has shadowed that of the American state and economic interests and, indeed, has historically expressed itself as being in general support of U.S. aims in the region. According to Helen Delpar, U.S. state interest in the region created a demand for expertise on its economics, politics, and culture. The instrumental character of much of this interest, however, clearly shaped the features of Latin American studies.23 Mark Berger suggests that Latin American studies “has been intimately connected to US expansion in Latin America and the rest of the world” and “facilitated the creation and maintenance of the institutions, organizations, inter-state relations, and politico-economic structures that reinforce and underpin the US hegemonic position in the Americas.”24
Driven principally by concerns internal to the United States, the rise and development of Latin American studies has been sporadic and unsystematic, depending on federal and foundation funding levels.25 Interestingly, however, the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), founded in 1965 in the wake of the exposure of “Project Camelot,” was an organization critical of close academic-state links and associations.26 Equally interesting is that LASA’s first president was Kalman Silvert, who shortly thereafter joined the Ford Foundation as its Latin America program adviser. Silvert, a sociologist, was deeply involved in the foundation’s programs in Chile and in the post–military coup handwringing that Santiago field officers engaged in. Silvert represents an “extreme liberal” position on the military coup and the role of the Ford Foundation as an American organization in Chile. Later in this chapter, a detailed analysis is conducted on the extremely difficult position such liberals found themselves in after September 11, 1973, and how they charted a way forward that was to yield results once the military regime permitted a transition to political democracy.
Americans’ interest in the lands to the south, whether they called it Spanish America, Hispanic America or, from the middle of the nineteenth century, Latin America, began early.27 Only in the twentieth century, with the rise of the modern university, did a specialized field of Latin American studies—focused on history, anthropology, and geography—appear. By the end of the century, Latin American studies was an established discipline. In particular, the period from the 1930s to the late 1970s witnessed the strongest growth of the discipline. Delpar shows how closely academic interest in the region followed such external “threats,” indirectly indicating the symbiotic relationship between knowledge and power.28
Helen Delpar provides compelling evidence of the conscious build-up by the federal government and private foundations of Latin American studies from the late 1950s. Under the 1958 National Defense Education Act (NDEA), the federal government undertook to provide up to 50 percent of the costs of language-based area studies centers. By the mid-1960s, NDEA funds to the tune of over $300,000 sustained several centers of Latin American studies, including at UCLA, Texas, Tulane, Florida, and Columbia. Other federal sources included the Fulbright-Hayes Act, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Science Foundation, USAID, and the Department of Defense. The funds were for a variety of purposes, including graduate language training, research travel, doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships, and conferences across the humanities and social sciences.29
Although the Carnegie Corporation was most active in Latin American studies in the 1950s, it gave way to the far larger Ford Foundation by the 1960s. Nevertheless, CC granted almost $500,000 to fund research and training at Cornell and to ACLS-SSRC to improve research on Latin America. The Joint Committee on Latin American Studies was formed at the request of ACLS-SSRC in 1959 to advance field research, assisting fifty-five individuals over a five-year period. Network building was a key concern of the Joint Committee—both among Latin Americanists in the United States and between them and their counterparts in the region. Sponsoring a survey of the field by Carl Spaeth, of Stanford’s law school, Ford granted $1 million in 1962 to build academic networks lubricated by faculty interchange between selected institutions, including UC-Berkeley and Los Angeles, Harvard, Columbia, Texas, and Minnesota. In 1963, a further $1.5 million went to fund postdoctoral researchers, additional research materials at the Library of Congress, training library specialists, and Latin American studies programs generally and at Cornell, which received $550,000. Millions more were invested by Ford in other Latin American programs at Florida, Texas, Stanford, Tulane, and Wisconsin, as well as at the Brookings Institution and the Joint Committee. The latter received, between 1963 and 1971, $1.3 million, making it the “primary Foundation vehicle for channeling assistance” to Latin American studies.30 Inevitably, Latin Americanists developed a journal for their field, Latin American Research Review (LARR), and a national organization, the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), with full Ford Foundation support—$40,000 and $100,000, respectively.31
The theme—expanded knowledge networks for expanding power—is continued in a later report. Report 000100 of the Ford Foundation gives a very good summary of the core aims of the foundation in its social science programs in regard to Latin America and is worth quoting at length. There are strong echoes of the same concerns as expressed in the case of Africa and African studies. A memorandum by Reynold E. Carlson, a professor of economics at Vanderbilt and Johns Hopkins universities, Ford’s associate director of Latin American programs, and U.S. ambassador to Columbia (1966–1969), provides a hard-nosed reading of Ford’s core concerns.32 He shows the scale of Ford’s support for the social sciences in Latin America from 1960–1966: 25 percent (just over $13m of almost $53m) of all Ford funding in the region went to social sciences between 1960 and 1965; of that, 37 percent ($4.75m) was allocated to economics. He shows that several centers of excellence had been funded across the region, in several countries, including the Getulio Vargas Foundation and the faculty of economics at the University of São Paolo, in Brazil (both also funded by USAID), and the universities of Buenos Aires, Cordoba, and Tucuman, in Argentina.33 However, he laments the dearth of sociologists and political scientists, as opposed to economists, in Latin America. The problem, he argues, is that “sociologists are suspect characters at best,” adding that in the regional context, they also tend to work within a “Marxist frame of reference,” making them “doubly suspect.” Yet “social development” is the “new frontier,” constituting the increasing integration and participation of all classes in national life, especially as Latin America moves from a “traditional agrarian, hierarchical, oligarchic, and paternalistic society into one which is urban, industrial, contractual, and, hopefully, democratic.” How can Ford “participate in the process and perhaps to a small degree accelerate the transition,” particularly its “direction and rate of change”? Carlson also asked how the process might proceed in an “orderly and evolutionary” manner, with sufficient flexibility to “accommodate the stresses and strains being generated.”34 Transitions generate “tension points” that, unless “identified at an early stage… will be compounded, generate heat and create situations which cannot be resolved within the existing political and legal institutions” (emphasis added). The role of the sociologist of development is fourfold: identify “tension points”; “isolate the factors contributing” to them; devise methods “to eradicate, or at least substantially alleviate, these tensions”; and develop a sense of the costs of such alleviation strategies. “The task of a social scientist is not to offer normative judgments but to indicate the available solutions and to alert the decision-makers of their respective costs.”35 This is a classic statement of social scientists as apolitical technocrats and is riddled with American assumptions about what constitutes a “good,” “democratic” society—one without suspect Marxists, revolutionary upheavals, and unmanaged, disorderly change. In the final part of his memorandum, Carlson suggested that American social scientists needed to collaborate more with their Latin American counterparts, because “points of tension are not always am
enable to quantitative analysis,” leading to misidentification of tension points and their sources, as well as of alternative solutions to tension resolution. Even “basic research” was fundamentally focused on the tasks identified above: the lack of adequate social statistics—on population, urbanization, and agrarian reform, for example—meant grave problems in diagnosing social ills with significant political effects.36
Given the focus of Project Camelot on Chile, Carlson’s report shows how closely aligned was Ford’s thinking with official U.S. state thinking—first, a state-private shared approach to social science as an aid to preserving and advancing American “national” interests, and second, the conversion of social scientists into sources of intelligence ahead of possible future military or other interventions to ensure that societal problems were resolved within the “existing political and legal” order, in which the United States had strong and well-established vested interests.
Inevitably, however, given the crises of American society and power in the 1960s, there were severe tensions and disturbances to the knowledge networks established by the American state and foundations. This had been the case with both African and Asian studies. LASA was born in 1965 with the alarm bells of Project Camelot ringing in its ears. Still, Latin Americanists, especially those associated most closely with the “establishment,” were, in the main, fairly conservative: they had been appropriately critical of the Cuban revolution’s trajectory after 1959 and sought ways to oppose communist expansion through channeling foreign aid for capitalistic economic development. It fell to the likes of William Appleman Williams and C. Wright Mills, radical academics from outside Latin American studies, to write the books that inspired the younger, radical generation of scholars to challenge LASA’s elitism, its proximity to the U.S. government, and its failure adequately to challenge American intervention in the Dominican Republic and the blockade against Allende’s Chile.37 New organizations—including the North American Congress on Latin America—were formed to protest against LASA and condemn America’s domination of the region. They did not receive Ford funding.38
PROGRAMS IN CHILE
According to Valdes’s fascinating account of the Chicago boys, the Ford Foundation exhibited naïveté, ignorance, and neutrality in their programs of funding Chilean social science. This is despite his examination of some of the rich archives available at Ford and Rockefeller. Valdes’s attention is largely on the University of Chicago’s Department of Economics and the reports to ICA that its stalwarts submitted. However, my reading of foundation documents challenges Valdes’s and suggests that he appears to accept at face value what the foundation representatives themselves suggested about their roles in Chile.39
As noted earlier, U.S. state strategy was to undermine and replace dependency theory. Dependistas—of various tendencies—promoted nationalistic capitalist economic-development strategies based on state-led industrialization, high tariffs on imports, import substitution, welfare states, and so on.40 The practical implementation of this theory meant restrictions on U.S. trade with Latin America and Chile, high taxes on foreign investment, occasional nationalization of foreign investment, fixed exchange rates, and laws restricting the repatriation of multinational corporation profits.
ECLA championed dependista thought, which had been developed by Raul Prebisch, a former central banker from Argentina who headed ECLA from 1951. In order to undermine ECLA, seen as too left wing by the American state, the United States engaged in a two-pronged strategy: first, through the Organization of American States and second, through funding free-market economics via the ICA-inspired University of Chicago–Catholic University of Chile linkage.41 Both RF and FF backed the ICA/ USAID program for many years. RF and FF also backed economics at the University of Chile, which was more attached to dependista schools of thought and supplied economists to various governments of the center and left, including Eduardo Frei in the mid-to-late 1960s and Allende in the early 1970s. However, it is important to note that the economics faculties of both universities were not monolithic—each featured economists (both faculty and students) from other schools of thought.
Ford was itself the subject of some political controversy in Chile, provoking a strike by the “Marxist teachers’ union” at its oldest “normal” school in 1969, because the Ford grant required a foundation representative on the school’s reform project board. In addition, Ford had become overly identified with the Christian Democratic Party and administration of Frei (1964–1970) and with the institutions most associated with that party and regime, such as the Catholic University, the Barnechea Center, and the National Research Council (CONICIT).42 In his report on the activities of Ford’s Santiago office in 1970, Peter Bell also noted the “moderate” character of the Frei administration and its worthy attempts at “far-reaching economic and social change,” despite its failure to deliver on most of its promises. As “our office was understandably attracted to the liberal, technocratic, and reformist approach of the Christian Democratic Government… we provided grant support” for its reform programs in education and agriculture and in regional and urban planning.43 This, of course, rather stretched Ford’s stated policy of remaining nonpolitical. It was in line, however, with official but covert U.S. support, via the CIA and other state agencies, for Frei’s presidential election campaign in 1964.44
The meaning of “political” for Ford requires some clarification. While policy-oriented research was supported by large grants, Ford tried to steer away from openly party-political activity by social scientists. Policy-oriented research was defined as nonpolitical and technocratic: it could and would form the basis of policy-related advice to official policy makers. However, electoral activity, partisanship, and ideological warfare with opponents in or beyond the academy was treated with some suspicion, particularly from the left but also, later, from the right. Ford wanted, in effect, to transplant into Chile an “American” model of the policy-oriented social scientist: one who could serve any mainstream political party or administration by providing “objective” advice based on certified professional expertise that eschewed ideology and politics. The implication was that objective, impartial, and scientific knowledge was possible, desirable, superior, and the only basis of developing a modern state, polity, society, and economy. Party politics, on the other hand, was motivated by power and hence corrupt and divisive, a source of instability. At the heart of this analysis lay the experience of the United States itself in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when American elites were themselves involved in a “search for order,” an end to partisan struggles, “pork-barrel” politics, and the “tyranny of the majority.” It is in this narrowly defined sense that Ford and other American foundations claimed to be nonpolitical. Hence, their hopes and plans for a “pluralist” and professionalized Chilean social-scientific community were not seen as in any way “political”—the exercise of influence to affect outcomes. They were seen as “technical” adjustments and developments necessitated by the objective requirements of “modernization.”
Ford funding for projects in Chile totaled $22.5 million between 1960 and 1970, according to Peter Bell. By 1970, Ford was funding “approximately half of all Chileans now studying for their doctorates in the United States.”45 Some $3 million had been granted directly to the (private) Catholic University and $3.3 million directly to the (state) University of Chile.46 In addition, there was a $10 million convenio, or collaboration, between the University of California and the University of Chile, principally in the hard sciences and engineering.47 Bell conceded that Ford had granted no funds to the “Communist-led State Technical University,” despite its having twice the number of students as the private Catholic University.48 Other Ford officials also acknowledged that the foundation had created few, if any, fellowship opportunities for Marxist or communist scholars.49 This is, of course, quite instructive of Ford’s intentions of building the basis of complementarity, under the guise of pluralism, of academic institutions
and outlooks in Chile, specifically Santiago, which Bell refers to as “the Geneva of Latin America,” given its concentration of international organizations’ regional offices.50
The objectives of Ford in Chile in the field of economics are discernable from the vast quantities of reports, memoranda, and correspondence generated by Ford officers in Santiago and New York. The archives constitute a remarkably clear record of Ford’s aims and strategy in the field of economics’ development—focused on building networked, complementary institutions in Santiago, the hub of a regional network serving the whole of Latin America—educating economists, training students and faculty, and reproducing the “model” across the region. Alongside these strategies developed the language of pluralism, which was also subject to a very specific meaning for Ford officers. In this case, “pluralism” was not meant to be harshly competitive and selfish but to generate scholarly debate and discussion among social scientists, especially economists, who might disagree on the role of the state or the market in economic policy but who could debate the issues and agree to disagree. That is, pluralist debate was to be based on a common foundation of theoretical, methodological, and analytical techniques and professional development, which unified the experts despite their differences of political opinion. Economics was a science beyond politics and ideology, and modern scholars of that science had to operate accordingly. Ford’s pluralism, then, was a truncated pluralism: it was not as competitive as the theory would suggest. The second point is that it excluded Marxists and communists: the pluralist spectrum, for Ford, included principally the Chicago boys on the right and “mainstream” dependistas on the left. This constituted an attenuated pluralism that drew boundaries on the kinds of economics and economic development that was desirable: fundamentally capitalistic, with a debate about the roles of states and markets.