2011 Theses Bachelor's

"Bad Neighbor": US-Argentine Relations in the 1940s

Josephson, Amelia

As US forces were sorting through Nazi-era archives in Berlin in 1946, they received
a cable from the Undersecretary of State for Latin American Affairs, Spruille Braden.
Braden had an unusual request: immediate priority was to be given to unearthing
documents that proved collaboration between the Nazis and the military government of
Argentina. The documents, Braden instructed, were to be compiled into a “Blue Book” and
had to be ready before Argentina’s presidential elections in February of 1946, in time to
embarrass Juan Perón, the heavily favored presidential candidate and Braden’s personal
and diplomatic rival. The year after this request, Spruille Braden’s diplomatic career had
ended and with it, some say, the country’s non-interventionist “Good Neighbor” policy for
Latin America—a nonbinding pledge first articulated by Franklin Roosevelt that the US
would refrain from intervention in the domestic affairs of the Latin American countries.