The United States and the Caribbean Legion: Democracy, dictatorship, and the origins of the Cold War in Latin America, 1945--1950 (Dominican Republic, Nicaragua)

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, Truman administration officials were presented with a unique “window of opportunity” in that the absence of an external geopolitical threat to U.S. interests in Latin America allowed the State Department to pursue policies aimed at promoting democracy in the region. Those democratization efforts included a marked attempt to distance the United States from unsavory authoritarian regimes in the region, particularly the dictatorships of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua.; The Trujillo and Somoza regimes were also the primary targets of the Caribbean Legion, a loosely organized, multinational group of political exiles and adventurers dedicated to the overthrow of Caribbean dictatorships in the late 1940s. This dissertation examines U.S. attitudes and responses toward the Caribbean Legion, within the broader context of the evolution of Washington's policy toward democracy and dictatorship in Latin America. U.S. perceptions of the Legion were influenced by the changing attitudes of U.S. policymakers toward Latin American authoritarianism; in both cases, the policies pursued were largely conditioned by the presence or absence of a perceived extra-hemispheric threat to U.S. interests in the region.; The United States ultimately came to oppose the Caribbean Legion's efforts to topple the Trujillo and Somoza regimes, as the Legion's antidictatorial crusades coincided with the emergence of the Cold War as the dominant feature of inter-American relations. After mid-1947, the geopolitical imperatives of waging the Cold War took precedence over efforts to promote democracy in the region, and dictators such as Trujillo and Somoza were once again valued as vital allies in the global struggle against communism. Truman administration officials therefore viewed the Caribbean Legion as a destabilizing force that threatened to deprive the United States of two of its staunchest anti-communist allies, disrupt hemispheric unity, and create conditions of political and social instability that could be exploited fortuitously by the international communist movement.