The FBI and United States counter intelligence networks in Latin America

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Beginning with his inauguration as United States president in 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) marketed the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other American republics as a cornerstone of his “Good Neighbor” policy. This was not a time, however, during which the United States ignored political developments in Latin America. Only a couple years after proclaiming the Good Neighbor policy, FDR directed the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to act as a political intelligence agency to investigate first Nazi and then communist groups, both domestically in the United States and internationally in Latin America and beyond. This clandestine activity made a mockery of the central tenets of the Good Neighbor policy, and highlights the reality that even during the best of times the United States never relaxed its imperial grasp on Latin America.

Sub Track

• History and Historiography

Chair

• Victor Silverman, Pomona College

Individual Presentations

• Oil, the FBI and the U.S. Security Complex in Venezuela 1935-1947 - Miguel R Tinker Salas, Pomona College

• The FBI in Ecuador - Marc Becker, Truman State University

• The FBI, Puerto Rico, and the Nationalist Party - Margaret M Power, Illinois Institute of Technology

Discussant

• J. Patrice McSherry, Long Island University, Universidad Alberto Hurtado