The Tango War, The Struggle for the Hearts, Minds, and Riches of Latin America During World War II
By Mary Jo McConahay
Mary Jo McConahay was born in Chicago but her parents packed her and her five siblings up to the sunny lands of California before too long. Her father was a navy vet and from what stories I can find of her childhood, he enjoyed traveling because he took his children all across the American West every summer. She came of age in the 1960s, writing through grammar and high school, graduating from Berkeley University in California, and attending Loyola University. In the early 70s, she started as a freelancer in Mexico, which is where her first break as a writer happened. She was working for a small travel magazine when she heard that there was a large number of Americans being held in prison in Mexico City for drug running. She spent weeks doing interviews and sold the story to the Rolling Stone Magazine and that started opening up doors. She became a staff reporter for the Arab News in Saudi Arabia, reporting for the Paris based International Herald Tribune and the London based Middle East Economic digest. However, she couldn't stay away from Latin America and returned there to cover insurgency and warfare (By which we of course mean the fuckery of the US Army School of the Americas, and the aftermath of US foreign policy; which at the time was to coup any government that was to the left of Margaret Thatcher or that wanted its citizens to be something other than serfs to American corporations.) in Central America for over a decade for the Pacific News Service. Her work has appeared in Time, Newsweek, Salon, and dozens of other magazines and papers. Her first book Maya Roads focused on the peoples and rainforests of Central America and was published in 2011. Her second book, Ricochet was about her own experiences in Central America as a reporter. The Tango War is her latest book, focusing on what was going on in Latin America during World War II. It was published in 2018 by St. Martin's Press, one of the biggest English publishers and owned by Macmillan Publishers, a British publishing company owned in turn by Holtzbrinck Publishers out of Stuttgart Germany. Let's get to it.
Latin America doesn't loom large in the narratives of World War II. Except for Brazil, most of the Latin nations didn't send troops to the field, although many Latins did volunteer to fight under the banners of other nations. Some nations such as Argentina are even widely considered to be near allies of the Axis (Fun story. I have an ex-friend we’ll call John. That is not his name. His grandfather was a Nazi who fled to Argentina after the war. He had a son, his son was a communist - which I am sure made family dinners awkward - who immigrated to the US and spied for East Germany. John, who was born in the US, came full circle and last I talked to him he’d spiraled down the Alt-Right rabbit hole. He’s like the Kylo Ren of the NSDAP and I wish there was a hell so he could go there when he dies.). That doesn't mean Latin America sat the war out, however, nor does it mean that the Allies and the Axis powers ignored Latin America. Quite the opposite Latin America was vital for both sides. The Allies needed the vital resources and labor of Latin America, Brazilian rubber, Argentinian beef, Colombian coffee, the oil, and labor of Mexico were all major contributions. The Axis also needed those resources, as Nazi Germany was Mexico's biggest oil customer in the 1930s before the war. The Polish and French campaigns were fueled by Mexican oil for example (And remember, Germany had no oil reserves worth mentioning. It’s nearest continental source was Romania.). Latin America was also full of Axis sympathizers, millions of Germans lived in Brazil alone in enclaves many of which celebrated the Nazi government, showing Nazi films, marching in support of Hitler, and creating private German schools staffed by teachers sent by the Nazi government. This created a hotbed of espionage and deep-seated fears of a fifth column that would either lock Latin American into a neutrality hostile to the Allies or worse declaring for the Axis. While that last fear is debatable in how realistic it might have been, many Latin governments openly flirted with Fascism and regarded it as the wave of the future before the war broke out (This is still true in many places. And after the war, the US had no problem propping up fascist regimes in the name of anti-communism. I don’t really mean to rag on the United States here, but honestly, it’s mostly because this shit gets whitewashed so hard and it’s so important to understand the mess we’re in now, that I feel like I have to drive it home whenever I have a reasonable opportunity.). These ranged from Vargas in Brazil to various Central American dictators.
The US military considered it very possible that if western Africa fell to the Nazis that Brazil would be open to invasion by air and sea (Interesting, given that even if the Nazis somehow took West Africa, they didn’t have the air or sea lift capacity to invade Britain, let alone Brazil, but okay.). Creating the one nightmare that the US military and political establishment had worked for over a century to prevent, a powerful hostile military presence in the New World (Well obviously, can’t have our not-colonial dominions challenged. Not to detract from the very real threat of the Nazi Regime, but the Monroe Doctrine wasn’t exactly benevolent.). At the very best, an openly Axis aligned South America would have forced the US to focus it's time and resources to the south when they were incredibly needed to the west and east. To this end, the United States government and private interests engaged in a massive propaganda blitz utilizing everyone from Walt Disney to Orson Welles to engage the South American public and elites and pull them onto our side. These same resources were also aimed squarely at the American public to ensure they would consider Latin Americans allies during the war, with Disney creating animated films like Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros for these purposes.
Ms. McConahay provides a good grounding for why the Allies would be concerned, showing that Latin America was home to millions of Germans and Italians, a number of them having only come over after WWI. In Brazil, for example, many of these immigrants lived in enclaves where they spoke their native languages and maintained very close contacts with their homeland. The Germans for example created private German-speaking schools for their children, schools that the Nazi party was only too happy to provide teachers for. So by 1939, there were a number of young men and women in Latin America who had grown up being educated about the greatness of the Nazi party. Nor were the Germans the only ones, the Japanese had a sizable community with varying levels of loyalty to the Japanese Empire. For example, you had plenty of young Japanese Americans volunteered to fight against Japan despite us imprisoning their families without legal cause and on the other, you had a society of Japanese loyalist in Brazil who murdered 23 people for not working to subvert allied effort, several of which they murdered after the Japanese Empire surrendered because they refused to believe that Japan could lose the war! (There were dudes who held out in the jungle for decades, not knowing/believing the war was over…)This provided fertile ground for the Axis espionage services, who provided intelligence that among other things directed U-boats in the battle of the Atlantic and worked to subvert and foul up Latin American efforts to contribute to the Allies. This was so wide-ranging that the Nazis were even able to use movie stars such as Hilde Kruger, who rendered herself untouchable by marrying the grandson of a former Mexican President. She was so successful that when she died in 1991, she had been living in luxury in New York City for years. Ironically Ms. Kruger was sent to the states first despite speaking no Spanish and very little English because she aroused the interest of Joseph Goebbels who wanted her to work very closely with his own Gestapo and Mrs. Goebbels was having none of that (HAHAHAHAHAHA!). Showing that sometimes the wildest of successes happen for the pettiest of reasons.
To combat this the Allies, mostly the United States and the British Empire resorted to means fair and foul. At first, Wild Bill Donovan urged FDR that his OSS be allowed to run counterintelligence in South America. Unfortunately, this ran afoul of empire-building instincts of J Edgar Hoover who insisted that the remit of the FBI be expanded to cover the entire Western Hemisphere. While Donovan was the better spy, Hoover was the better politician and bureaucrat and won out, giving the FBI authority over all of Latin America. Not only was Hoover a lot more heavy-handed than Donovan but his insistence on using standard FBI agents and tactics meant that the Abwehr ran circles around them. The Abwehr was the military intelligence agency of Nazi Germany run by Admiral Canaris (who actually did a lot of work to undermine the Nazi regime from within but that's another review(It very well may be, but this dude… he did enough work he might as well have been a double agent. He was found out and tortured to death near the end of the war.)). Their operations in Latin America were high tech, utilizing such technology as micro-dot (Micro-dot is basically text or images that has been reduced in size to tiny little 1 mm dots. This is done using analogue cameras, and because they don’t use pixels you can use optical means to shrink down a page of text to a .01 square millimeters and read it with a microscope, or do the same with camera images.) or personal radio; and being extremely flexible with field agents being given wide latitude to accomplish their goals. Hoover insisted on his agents maintaining the same discipline and standards they used in the US, meaning it wasn't hard to figure out who was working for them. After all when your organization is known for only recruiting young white men and insisting on a haircut and dress code... You're gonna stand out in places like Havana and Lima (Jesus fucking christ…). The price for this was paid mostly in the form of sunk Liberty ships, undelivered cargoes, and dead crews as U Boats would attack ships right up to the coasts of South America. It would take years for Hoover to learn that counter-intelligence work required a certain willingness to relax discipline in exchange for results (Unfortunately he turned that knowledge on the American people.). Unfortunately, Hoover was willing to substitute heavy-handedness and brutality for subtlety and expertise (That is true, and the same is true within the US. What with the FBI assassinating US citizens on US soil. Remember Fred Hampton, comrades.). Ms. McConahay also takes a good hard look at the immoral and darker actions that the US specifically did in South and Central America at the time. While FDR did implement the good neighbor policy and attempted to cut back on meddling in South America's internal politics (honesty forces me to admit that interfering in South American politics is a reoccurring American addiction (One it needs to be broken of to this day. Maybe start going to Fascist Coups Anonymous meetings. I wonder, if Trump loses the election, if he’ll try for a lame-duck autogolpe...)) the war brought the US right back to its old habits and doing even worse. In this case, outright kidnapping Germans and Japanese citizens of South American and Central American countries focusing on community and business leaders. The goal of this was to render the German and Japanese communities in those countries leaderless and break apart their communal cohesion, which would make it easier for Hoover's agents to turn people into informers. Additionally, the men and women kidnapped could be traded for American prisoners of war. This was a going concern at the beginning of the war, as Japan alone had over 12000 American civilians that it had imprisoned and the American government felt it had a responsibility to get those citizens out of danger, a feeling I can't disagree with. What I can disagree with is the fact that many of the people kidnapped were 2nd or 3rd generation immigrants who had never even seen their “home” countries and in some cases didn't even speak the language of those countries (It’s almost like the US is racist or something, and always has been.). To make matters worse, the business community of the United States got involved in drawing up the target list (oh boy) and they were much more concerned with breaking apart the business networks that provided competition to them. So in many cases, these men and women weren't kidnapped because they were working with the enemy but because they were wealthy and providing competition to US companies! While the US government might have been trying to break up spy networks, we were perfectly okay with helping the US business community ensure that Germany would have no remaining business networks in Latin America after the war.
Ms. McConahay provides an unflinching look at the strategies and tactics that the Allies used to keep Latin America out of the Axis camp and to combat Axis operations in those same nations. In doing so, she gives us a look at a part of World War II that is honestly forgotten, not just in the United States but in Latin America as well for the most part. This helps us remember that it was a world war that would determine the course of history for the next century if not more and left pretty much no corner of the world untouched. She also does a good job of showing us how the effects of those actions still affect the world today. This shows us that even though World War II started over 80 years ago, we're still living with it today. That is something we need to remember about our history, it doesn't matter how long ago it was, the odds are we are still living with it and it's effects on our world (We still have Nazis, for example.). The Tango War: The Struggle for the Hearts, Minds, and Riches of Latin America During World War II by Mary Jo McConahay gets an A. Give it a read.
Good evening comrades and non-comrades. If you are reading this, you got to the end of the Review. Frigid is on a well-earned vacation this week and next, but you are in luck! He worked his butt off and pre-wrote next week’s review. Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn and World War II By Robert Matzen. Also recall comrades, that Frigid uses a lot of his precious time (much of what is left to him after hours of wage-labor and the alienation from the value of said labor that he endures under capitalism) reading and writing for this series, and if you enjoy this series and have the means to do so, please stop by patreon and help support the series.
https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads
To combat this the Allies, mostly the United States and the British Empire resorted to means fair and foul. At first, Wild Bill Donovan urged FDR that his OSS be allowed to run counterintelligence in South America. Unfortunately, this ran afoul of empire-building instincts of J Edgar Hoover who insisted that the remit of the FBI be expanded to cover the entire Western Hemisphere. While Donovan was the better spy, Hoover was the better politician and bureaucrat and won out, giving the FBI authority over all of Latin America. Not only was Hoover a lot more heavy-handed than Donovan but his insistence on using standard FBI agents and tactics meant that the Abwehr ran circles around them. The Abwehr was the military intelligence agency of Nazi Germany run by Admiral Canaris (who actually did a lot of work to undermine the Nazi regime from within but that's another review(It very well may be, but this dude… he did enough work he might as well have been a double agent. He was found out and tortured to death near the end of the war.)). Their operations in Latin America were high tech, utilizing such technology as micro-dot (Micro-dot is basically text or images that has been reduced in size to tiny little 1 mm dots. This is done using analogue cameras, and because they don’t use pixels you can use optical means to shrink down a page of text to a .01 square millimeters and read it with a microscope, or do the same with camera images.) or personal radio; and being extremely flexible with field agents being given wide latitude to accomplish their goals. Hoover insisted on his agents maintaining the same discipline and standards they used in the US, meaning it wasn't hard to figure out who was working for them. After all when your organization is known for only recruiting young white men and insisting on a haircut and dress code... You're gonna stand out in places like Havana and Lima (Jesus fucking christ…). The price for this was paid mostly in the form of sunk Liberty ships, undelivered cargoes, and dead crews as U Boats would attack ships right up to the coasts of South America. It would take years for Hoover to learn that counter-intelligence work required a certain willingness to relax discipline in exchange for results (Unfortunately he turned that knowledge on the American people.). Unfortunately, Hoover was willing to substitute heavy-handedness and brutality for subtlety and expertise (That is true, and the same is true within the US. What with the FBI assassinating US citizens on US soil. Remember Fred Hampton, comrades.). Ms. McConahay also takes a good hard look at the immoral and darker actions that the US specifically did in South and Central America at the time. While FDR did implement the good neighbor policy and attempted to cut back on meddling in South America's internal politics (honesty forces me to admit that interfering in South American politics is a reoccurring American addiction (One it needs to be broken of to this day. Maybe start going to Fascist Coups Anonymous meetings. I wonder, if Trump loses the election, if he’ll try for a lame-duck autogolpe...)) the war brought the US right back to its old habits and doing even worse. In this case, outright kidnapping Germans and Japanese citizens of South American and Central American countries focusing on community and business leaders. The goal of this was to render the German and Japanese communities in those countries leaderless and break apart their communal cohesion, which would make it easier for Hoover's agents to turn people into informers. Additionally, the men and women kidnapped could be traded for American prisoners of war. This was a going concern at the beginning of the war, as Japan alone had over 12000 American civilians that it had imprisoned and the American government felt it had a responsibility to get those citizens out of danger, a feeling I can't disagree with. What I can disagree with is the fact that many of the people kidnapped were 2nd or 3rd generation immigrants who had never even seen their “home” countries and in some cases didn't even speak the language of those countries (It’s almost like the US is racist or something, and always has been.). To make matters worse, the business community of the United States got involved in drawing up the target list (oh boy) and they were much more concerned with breaking apart the business networks that provided competition to them. So in many cases, these men and women weren't kidnapped because they were working with the enemy but because they were wealthy and providing competition to US companies! While the US government might have been trying to break up spy networks, we were perfectly okay with helping the US business community ensure that Germany would have no remaining business networks in Latin America after the war.
Ms. McConahay provides an unflinching look at the strategies and tactics that the Allies used to keep Latin America out of the Axis camp and to combat Axis operations in those same nations. In doing so, she gives us a look at a part of World War II that is honestly forgotten, not just in the United States but in Latin America as well for the most part. This helps us remember that it was a world war that would determine the course of history for the next century if not more and left pretty much no corner of the world untouched. She also does a good job of showing us how the effects of those actions still affect the world today. This shows us that even though World War II started over 80 years ago, we're still living with it today. That is something we need to remember about our history, it doesn't matter how long ago it was, the odds are we are still living with it and it's effects on our world (We still have Nazis, for example.). The Tango War: The Struggle for the Hearts, Minds, and Riches of Latin America During World War II by Mary Jo McConahay gets an A. Give it a read.
Good evening comrades and non-comrades. If you are reading this, you got to the end of the Review. Frigid is on a well-earned vacation this week and next, but you are in luck! He worked his butt off and pre-wrote next week’s review. Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn and World War II By Robert Matzen. Also recall comrades, that Frigid uses a lot of his precious time (much of what is left to him after hours of wage-labor and the alienation from the value of said labor that he endures under capitalism) reading and writing for this series, and if you enjoy this series and have the means to do so, please stop by patreon and help support the series.
https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads
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