From Development to Dictatorship: Bolivia and the Alliance for Progress in the Kennedy Era

During the most idealistic years of John F. Kennedys Alliance for Progress development program, Bolivia was the highest per capita recipient of U.S. foreign aid in Latin America. Nonetheless, Washingtons modernization programs in early 1960s Bolivia ended up on a collision course with important sectors of the countrys civil society, including radical workers, rebellious students, and a plethora of rightwing and leftwing political parties. In From Development to Dictatorship, Thomas C. Field Jr. reconstructs the untold story of USAIDs first years in Bolivia, including the countrys 1964 military coup détat.

Field draws heavily on local sources to demonstrate that Bolivias turn toward anticommunist, development-oriented dictatorship was the logical and practical culmination of the military-led modernization paradigm that provided the liberal underpinnings of Kennedys Alliance for Progress. In the process, the book explores several underappreciated aspects of Cold War liberal internationalism: the tendency of development to encourage authoritarian solutions to political unrest, the connection between modernization theories and the rise of Third World armed forces, and the intimacy between USAID and CIA covert operations. At the same time, the book challenges the conventional dichotomy between ideology and strategy in international politics, and it engages with a growing literature on development as a key rubric for understanding the interconnected processes of decolonization and the Cold War.