What I Am Reading: "The Tango War" by Mary Jo McConahay

This book was about Allied and Axis maneuvering in Latin America during World War 2 and in the years prior. I will get my complaints out of the way first and say that: while the book had a lot of good information, it wasn't the step-by-step historical treatment that I was looking for when embarking on the subject. I had hoped for a lesson in Latin American political history, and coverage of different countries' governments and resulting international relations during the '30s and '40s. There was some of this, but it was scattered between the different sections, without any effort to summarize or provide a timeline or a big picture. Perhaps this is just an expectation mismatch on my part, but it was still fortunate that I had some background on topics such as FDR's Good Neighbor Policy of not intervening militarily in Latin America.

Anyway, my carping aside, the book is divided into five different sections, covering Allied and Axis relations with Latin American resources, undesirable populations (moving in both directions), espionage, combat involvement, and postwar activities. McConahay is a longtime journalist and she brings the strength of this experience to the book, as it includes interviews with surviving participants in the historical events described. These personal narratives are the focus of several chapters, and lend several of those chapters a considerable emotional weight.

The section on Latin American resources is entitled "the prizes," and covers Allied efforts to secure control of Latin American supplies of oil and rubber, as well as control of aerial transportation infrastructure. All of these were to some extent in the hands of Germany in the years prior to the war; Latin America's booming air travel industry employed German pilots cast off after the Treaty of Versailles. The new invention made the region much more accessible after World War 1, leading to increased tourism and other connections. This opening chapter starts with an item of continuing interest, which is that many South American countries had considerable German populations, some of several generations. They were large enough that, in 1938, the Nazis sent ships to dock in Latin American ports where German citizens could vote on the Anschluss referendum. Anyway, in the skies, US economic and espionage efforts did their best to finish off the two largest airlines: LATI (translation: Italian Transcontinental Airlines) and SCADTA (translation: Columbian-German Air Transport Company), throttling the former's transatlantic flights after the declaration of war and neutering the latter through Pan Am, the company owning it. This chapter also (oddly, as I shall explain below) finishes on a note about the Aztec Eagles, the Mexican pilots who fought in the Pacific theater after Mexico's declaration of war.

Mexico is also the main subject of the chapter on oil, specifically the administration of leftist Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas, running from 1934 to 1940. For several decades prior, oil had been an important subject in domestic Mexican politics, as foreign companies extracted the unrenewable resource while mistreating their workers, and ruling territories with an iron corporate fist. As foreign companies had ignored rules intended to benefit oil laborers during the previous administration, Cárdenas expropriated their holdings in 1938, a move that had broad Mexican support across class divides. In response, the global oil companies enacted a boycott of the Mexican oil sector, and were backed by the diplomatic power of Roosevelt's State Department. At this point, a somewhat familiar character appears: William Rhodes Davis, last seen in Hitler's American Friends supplying oil to the Nazis. Sensing an opportunity, Gray Davis's grandfather swooped in to arrange oil sales from Mexico to Nazi Germany. This was a livesaver for Cárdenas but gave Hitler a considerable amount of an essential resource to fuel (literally) his war machine. As the war drew near, the Roosevelt Administration negotiated an end to the economic hostilities, and Mexico (eventually under President Manuel Ávila Camacho after 1940) formed close economic bonds with the United States, starting the Bracero program to send guest workers to the American agricultural sector, and declaring war on Germany (after Mexican shipping was attacked). This chapter does have a little domestic political discussion - Cárdenas would have liked to deal with republics like France or the embattled Spain (to whom he did send supplies), but these deals couldn’t come together. His political opponents included Falangists inspired by that Spanish fascist movement.

Another natural resource that interested the Allies was rubber, which was reduced in supply after the Japanese occupation of Borneo and other rubber plantation colonies. The US faced a massive rubber shortage and rationing if their supply was not increased in the first years of the war. This, plus the interest of defending the hemisphere from aggression from nearby Vichy Africa, led the US to put considerable pressure on the "fascist-leaning" Getúlio Vargas of Brazil. I read a Vargas biography a couple of years ago, and I think his political arrangements are more complex than "fascist-leaning," but it is sufficient to say that he was an authoritarian populist. Regardless of his leanings, in 1942 he threw in with the Allied cause, with rubber serving the purpose as well of boosting his economy (after coffee and cacao exports to Germany were cut) and monetizing the Amazonia region, previously regarded as a worthless frontier. As Brazilian soldiers were sent to Europe (more on that later), "rubber soldiers" were mobilized to extract rubber from the Amazon, often underpaid and in oppressive conditions. Rubber is difficult to farm, since (as Henry Ford learned the hard way) it requires trees several years old; and clustering these trees on a plantation can lead to the spread of blight.

The next section of the book is on "the undesirables," and covers Jewish escape to Latin America, as well as the German, Japanese, and Italian populations of the region that the US took an intrusive interest in after the war started. Jews had been secretly present in Latin America since the first days of European colonization, but were only allowed in openly after the region's independence from Spain. As in the United States, immigration was restricted in the days after World War 1, and restriction persisted through the crisis years of increasing antisemitism in Europe (other than Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, otherwise a shitty guy, who let some refugee Jews and Spanish Republicans settle in the Dominican Republic because he wanted more white people). Jews were also the victims of crypto-fascist rabblerousing and fearmongering, such as from Vargas' New State regime that he started in Brazil in 1937. Part of his political support came from the "green shirt" Integralists, Brazil's homegrown fascists (as well as members of the German Brazilian community who were just Nazis). Jews generally could not look to Latin America as a sanctuary, though there were some Righteous Among the Nations who issued visas under the table, or for cash in the case of Guatemalan dictator Jorge Ubico.

Meanwhile, 19 Latin American countries complied with United States requests to intern citizens and residents from Axis countries or those descended from such populations. Some of these Germans, Japanese, and (to a lesser extent) Italian civilians were interned within their own countries’ borders, and some were sent to the United States to camps like Crystal City, Texas. Internees were often held to be exchanged for diplomats or other prisoners in Axis hands, even if the Latin American internees had never been to their country of "origin." Others seem to have been held for Americans or locals to gain control of their business interests. In the case of the Japanese, the majority of internees traded (1800 out of 2200) were from Peru, where President Manuel Prado engaged in a campaign of ethnic cleansing. President Ávila Camacho of Mexico fortunately refused to deport his Japanese Mexican population. Those who ended up in American hands were returned through the very bureaucratically complicated Quiet Passages program, often permanently. These chapters are where several case studies, or personal narratives, were introduced to demonstrate the considerable hardship faced by the victims of these initiatives.

The next section covers "the illusionists," with propaganda and espionage campaigns meant to influence Latin American populations or otherwise serve the war effort. The chapter on propaganda covers a successful and a failed attempt by Americans to project soft power into Latin American culture. Erstwhile President Nelson Rockefeller was appointed by Roosevelt to be the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA) and lead efforts in cultural diplomacy. Rockefeller arranged for Walt Disney and his team of animators to travel on a South American tour; resulting in a considerable output of material that was much more culturally sensitive towards Latin America (and incidentally influenced the Disney color palette forever after when animator Mary Blair was inspired to use much more vibrant colors). Meanwhile, Orson Welles' effort to make an epic film about Brazil did not go well, and his film It's All True was never completed, either due to his own self-destructive spiral or because Rockefeller, the Brazilian establishment, and RKO did not want him to showcase the racial diversity of Brazilian society.

Next comes coverage of espionage operations, framed at first as a duel between plodding bureaucratic cop J. Edgar Hoover and swashbuckling Abwehr chief Wilhelm Canaris, eventual anti-Nazi. This duel largely took place in Mexico initially, where there were many Axis sympathizers between homegrown "gold shirt" fascists, Catholics, and German expats. Hoover and his G-men were not very astute at first, and approached their jobs more like police than spies. The Germans, meanwhile, had the usual roster of dashing playboy operatives and sexy actresses. The Americans were bolstered by "Wild Bill" Donovan and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), freewheeling forerunner to the CIA. Hoover was better at fighting the Washington PR/bureaucratic turf wars, so initially the OSS was not allowed to operate in Latin America; but this didn't stop Donovan from maintaining operations inherited from an industrial spy ring, or analyzing material that came in. After the United States entered the war, the Americans were successful in helping the Mexicans to roll up the German spies, and after the Mexican entry in 1942, the espionage theater shifted south.

Throughout South America, the Germans maintained a radio network as part of Operation Bolívar, an effort to pass intelligence back to Germany and track Allied shipping for purposes of U-Boat attacks. This was the result of coordination between Canaris's Abwehr and the much more orthodox SD, led by Reinhard Heydrich. The FCC's Radio Intelligence Division helped to track these signals and put the radio operators out of business, though their intel did lead to a few tough years in the Battle of the Atlantic.

Speaking of the latter, this is one of the two subjects covered in the section on "the warriors," Latin American contribution to the fighting itself. That being said, this item merely has Latin America as a setting; as one of the first major naval actions of the war was a British flotilla chasing down the pocket battleship the Admiral Graf Spee, serving as a commerce raider in the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, and bottling it up in the River Plate. The Uruguayans, neutral but sympathetic to the British, eventually required the trapped German ship to depart, at which point its captain chose to scuttle it. Following this major surface engagement, the South American coast continued to be the site of considerable submarine warfare, as was the entire Atlantic during the first several years of the war. This is presented through a case study, following a Liberty Ship and the U-Boat that eventually sank it.

The other aspect of the fighting covered is the Brazilian Expeditionary Force, 25,000 Brazilian soldiers sent by President Vargas to fight in Italy. There is the fun detail that the prior Brazilian overseas deployment was in 1648, when Brazilians were part of a Portuguese force to drive the Dutch out of Angola. The BEF, given the insignia of "The Smoking Cobras" after an alleged remark by Hitler that the Brazilians would fight "when snakes smoke," was commanded by João Mascarenhas, and fought at the Gothic Line in Italy, held by the Germans and the Salo Republic in 1944-45 after Italy surrendered. Though they were thrown into the fighting before they were prepared with proper training and combat supplies, they achieved several notable successes, especially in occupying the city of Barga and taking Monte Castello, after several tries and heavy casualties. The Brazilians worked well with Italian partisans, sharing a bit of a Latin and Catholic cultural connection. Though some of their officers would go on to serve in future dictatorships, the BEF is not alwas well-remembered in Brazil today, and couldn't even form a veteran association of their own until the '70s. (Side note: this section is where I think the Aztec Eagles’ coverage belonged).

In the final section of the book, "The End Without an End," McConahay covers the "ratlines" used by Nazis to escape to South America, and how their fascist legacy has carried on through successive generations of Latin American politics. Ratlines, many of which were operated out of the Vatican, took Nazis and their sympathizers and collaborators (such as Croatian Ustashe) to South America. With some of the funding coming from Operation Bernhard, a counterfeiting scheme intended to destabilize the British economy, the Vatican under Pope Pius XII spirited away these fascists under the view that they were ideological allies in the fight against Bolshevism, and that their input would be needed in future world affairs. This proclivity dates back to the Church's Italian cohabitation with Mussolini, as each provided the other with legitimacy. The church cooperated with the Red Cross to provide the documentation of Catholicism and statelessness that Nazis needed to sneak to South America. As is well known, many took the ratlines to Argentina, where the Peron government had longstanding economic ties to the Axis, opposition to the British (Falklands) and Americans, and desired industrial expertise.

The last chapter deals with the continuing impact of these elite sympathies for and abetting of fascism, as reproduced in the atrocities and human rights violations that plagued Latin American countries in the decades since World War 2. McConahay again uses personal stories of those who suffered at the hands of Nazi-like repression in Chile after Pinochet's coup, and in other contexts. Interviews with optimistic descendants of the dead and missing close the book on a strong emotional note, and really serve to connect the history of several decades ago to more recent echos. For example, in Argentina's dirty war, Jews made up 12% of the victims despite only being 1% of the population

As you can tell from my copious note-taking, this book did cover a lot of interesting ground. However, as noted, I don't think it was as comprehensive as it could have been; some of the topics I pursued further on Wikipedia and found a lot more information and context. For example, Operation Bolívar was the subject of a fairly brief chapter that mostly focused on the radio activities; but left uncovered was the HUMINT provided by various cabinet officials and other high-level politicians in some South American countries. Political details like this would be interesting to investigate further, but maybe it was my fault for coming to the book looking for a political history (and hoping for the Chilean Popular Front, the only successful coalition other than France and Spain). The human moments were very visceral, however, and served to remind us that history (and the policies pursued by our government) doesn't just live on the page. It actually happened to real people, some of whom are still with us despite the passage of years.