The CIA on Latin America

ABSTRACT A mythology has grown among scholars that during the early years of the Cold War the CIA was so preoccupied with a perceived Soviet threat that except for highly exceptional events such as the 1954 coup in Guatemala the agency largely ignored Latin America. In this narrative, it took the 1959 Cuban revolution to bring the region front and center in its imagination (but even then, still only as a pawn of the Soviet Union). A review of CIA documentation, however, indicates that from its beginnings the agency dedicated a significant amount of attention to the region. Not only does the material that the CIA’s case officers and their agents generated challenge our assumptions about the agency’s presumed priorities, it also highlights the value of a largely unexploited source to understand domestic developments in Latin America in the early post-World War Two period.