Francesco Davide Ragno
The beginnings of the Kennedy Presidency coincided with a different U.S. approach to inter-American politics. There was a need to respond to the «communist threat» that seemed increasingly imminent after the Cuban Revolution of 1959. To this end, U.S. foreign policy was structured around the so-called Modernization Theory, which formed the basis for a transnational development program for the American continent, the Alliance for Progress. An initiative that, a few months after its launch, many were already declaring a failure.
Driven by methodological insights from transnational history, the research aims to analyze the connections between foreign and domestic policy in South American countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay). The idea is to examine the ways in which Kennedy's thought, transcending U.S. borders, was reinterpreted by political and social actors in South America: this particularly refers to the different families of political parties, trade unions, and Catholic movements that began to have a transnational dimension during those years. Furthermore, the concept of democracy and its variations as articulated by movements in South American countries will be studied: starting from the international debate between ‘formal democracy and substantive democracy’, the appeal of Kennedy's ideals in Latin America encompassed issues of international politics, the role of Castro's Cuba, and, conversely, U.S. anti-communist policies in South America. In this sense, the research analyzes the transnational connections of Latin American anti-communist and anti-American movements with those in Europe. Another area of investigation will be the themes of economic development, whose debates resonated with those prevailing at the time among certain international organizations (such as ECLAC and the IMF). These themes were re-discussed by the political and intellectual class of the time from a transnational perspective of Latin America, seeking to connect the different national experiences.