Show description

S. 10 Dulles, the grandson of a former secretary of state, came from Sullivan & Cromwell, the prestigious Wall Street law firm that represented several corporations including the United Fruit Company, which had a monopoly on Central American banana’s production and maintained important investments in the Caribbean and Colombia. S. foreign relations. Dulles was determined to consolidate the United States’ international power and to undermine the standing of the Soviet Union. Despite the fact that, in the 1952 electoral campaign, both he and Eisenhower denounced the “futile” policy of containment against communism, once in power, they followed and expanded Truman’s foreign policy of containment (originally designed by George Kennan, the leading American foreign policy expert on Soviet affairs).

Military” euphemisms were found even for problematic scientific facts. For example, mosquitoes that avoided walls sprayed with DDT were “evasive,” malaria-persistent regions were called “problem areas,” and public acceptance of health interventions was a result of the effective educational work of “sensitization,” or, in Spanish, canalización, which meant to make people comply with malaria eradication measures. The ties between international medicine and politics validated a claim often made by military leaders: that it was necessary to promptly seize a unique opportunity so that prior achievements would not be wasted.

According to State Department, Latin American front organizations provided Soviet fellowships and grants to indoctrinate intellectuals, politicians, and labor leaders. 42 The 1954 events in Guatemala, in which President Jacobo Arbenz confiscated most of the United Fruit Company’s lands and legalized the Communist Party, convinced the Department of State that the communist menace did indeed exist in the Americas, and that a “red beachhead” might appear there and elsewhere. S. S. ”44 This statement strengthened the trend of supporting nonmilitary aid.