Contingency and Ritual in Protesting Nelson Rockefeller’s 1969 Presidential Mission to Latin America

In 1969, Richard Nixon sent Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York on a Presidential Mission to Latin America.  Rockefeller was charged with conducting a listening tour designed to formulate a new hemispheric policy to replace the “Alliance for Progress,” a signature Kennedy initiative roundly considered a failure.  Accompanied by an entourage of over forty advisers and support staff, the mission visited twenty countries south of the Rio Grande during four separate trips that summer.  Though its first stops in Mexico and Guatemala proved relatively calm, beginning with the death of a student demonstrator shot by police in Honduras, the mission left a trail of blood in its wake, indelibly marking the Rockefeller Mission as a signature moment of hemispheric tensions.

This paper reengages the Rockefeller mission, questioning the homogenized view of protest that has emerged in the minimal historiography on the mission.  It builds upon research in Rockefeller’s papers, police archives, hemispheric newspapers, and in the thousands of letters written to Rockefeller from across the region during and following his journey.  It first situates these political interventions as ritualized performance operating within a tradition of anti-American spectacle targeting diplomatic tours that had already met figures as diverse as Eleanor Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, and Bobby Kennedy. Secondly, it stresses the contingent spatial and political contours of these manifestations.  By considering middling violence in Quito, spectacular conflagrations and bombings in Buenos Aires, the tense shut down by Brazil’s military establishment and the SDS-led solidarity protests that met Rockefeller at Idlewild Airport after each journey south, the paper seeks to challenge the veneer of hemispheric continuity ascribed to these remonstrations by both opponents and protesters alike, interpreting them instead as localizable gestures articulating claims to dialogical public space.