tries on every continent. Yet, the mission of the attaché changed little; it remained that of providing intelligence on foreign militaries.

In the pre-World War II period, Latin America received little attention from the War Department. Short of funds during the depression and having little or no interest in the hemisphere, the U. S. had a very limited attaché presence in the Americas. In the 1930s for instance, there were only ten attaches stationed in all of Latin America; and these served primarily in Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico. Central America had only two attaches who traveled between five countries and wrote occasional dispatches to their superiors. In contrast, the U. S. had many times that number serving in most European embassies. ²

Like the rest of the world, the situation in Latin America changed greatly in the 1940s and 1950s. The area became, in the words of political scientist Peter Smith, a “battleground and prize in the conflict between communism and capitalism. ” ³ Launching an anticommunist crusade, the United States institutionalized military alliances with nations of the region, offered to collaborate with authoritarian and military regimes as long as they were anticommunist, and encouraged friendly governments to crush internal “subversives. ”

Compared to the pre-World War II attachés based in Europe, attachés in Latin America faced a much more challenging environment. The complex situations these attachés faced stemmed in part from Latin American militaries’ involvement in politics. ⁴ Linda Rodríguez has correctly observed that a person cannot comprehend the nature of Latin American armed forces unless one realizes that they function, to a greater extent than most other militaries, within a political system. ⁵ The drive of many Latin American militaries toward professionalization in the pre-World War II period and governmental willingness to use the military to control rebellions, strikes, political dissidents, and rural and urban mass movements had the long-term effect of politicizing Latin American armed forces. The wave of military coups between 1920 and 1950 reflected this politicization. By the time U. S. attachés arrived in great numbers in the early 1950s, the majority of hemispheric countries were either ruled or influenced to a great extent by the military.

As a general rule, the Pentagon had little interest in military innovation from Latin American countries long considered backward. While it was true that attachés still needed to report on the combat capabilities of hemispheric militaries, they did so in order to assess whether or not these countries could aid in the defense of the Americas against a Soviet attack, and later in the 1950s and 1960s, to consider the question of whether the military was vulnerable to communist subversion.

-2-