Uruguay and the Alliance for Progress

This presentation addresses the impact of the Alliance for Progress foreign aid program in Uruguay during the 1960s. In particular, its focus is the establishment of a national commission for economic planning in Uruguay (the Commission on Investment and Economic Development, CIDE), per the conditions of the Alliance. The CIDE quickly became the center of Uruguayan structuralist economic and social thought, inspired by the Santiago-based Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA/CEPAL). By the mid-1960s the commission had drafted a multi-volume, 10-year development program, complete with proposals for comprehensive agrarian reform, the creation of a central bank, a new industrial and trade policy, and housing reform. However, the reform agenda put forward by the CIDE quickly stalled, as various interests—the country's political class and landed economic elites, among them—resisted the program's implementation. As a consensus around development collapsed and an economic crisis deepened, the Alliance for Progress in Uruguay became associated not with economic development but with a public security program intended to quell social unrest that was growing among both organized labor and student groups. Through the Agency for International Development—an Alliance creation—the United States became intimately involved in “modernizing” Uruguayan police and intelligence forces—most famously exposed through the kidnapping and assassination of AID security specialist, Dan Mitrione, by left wing groups in 1970. In tracing this transformation of U.S. policy in Uruguay, I intend to offer a few tentative explanations for the failure of the Alliance for Progress. This will include a comparison of two discourses of postwar development: that of Latin American developmentalism and dependency, as articulated by ECLA/CEPAL, and the modernization agenda of the Alliance. I will also consider how Uruguayan “exceptionalism” (Uruguay had allegedly consolidated many elements of “development” and “democracy” prior to the 1960s) may have contributed to the Alliance's shortcomings.