Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Mendes, Dana Matthew

Titel

“Not Our Victory”: Military Assistance and U.S. Strategy in Colombia, 1953-1960

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2024

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The subject of this thesis is U.S. military assistance to Colombia during the Eisenhower administration, and my purpose is to examine how U.S. officials conceived of military assistance’s role in achieving U.S. strategic objectives, and how U.S. military advisors attempted to implement that vision. I first argue that the roots of U.S. strategy in Latin America are misunderstood as either a drive for imperial dominance or myopic anticommunism, and can be better understood as the intersection of a Cold War strategy that emphasized creating democratic-capitalist partners, and a long-term U.S. impulse to “uplift” other societies, especially those in Latin America. Second, I argue that senior civilian and military officials held conflicting ideals of what security meant, and how best to achieve it, a conceptual incoherence which underlay a tumultuous transition in military assistance’s purpose from supporting a strategy of hemispheric defense to internal security. Finally, I examine the ground-level activities of the U.S. Army Mission to Colombia, which I claim was only loosely directed from Washington, showing the interaction between partner desires, advisor’s instincts, and centrally-managed U.S. policy to challenge previous conclusions about the nature of U.S. military advising mission. This thesis uses primary source documentation from the Presidential Libraries, U.S. National Archives, the United States Army Heritage and Education Center, and the U.S. Army Center for Military History.