Temptations and Demonstrations: Resource Nationalism and US Responses in 20th-Century Bolivia

In a pattern that predated and survived the Cold War, U.S. policy in Latin America has sought to constrain or eliminate state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the energy and minerals sectors. Inseparable from the effort to combat resource nationalism in twentieth-century Latin America was a concerted campaign to manage Latin Americans’ perceptions of nationalized industries. In the case of Bolivia, which saw major resource nationalizations in 1937 and 1952, the campaign included extensive propaganda activities under the auspices of the U.S. Information Agency, CIA, and other institutions, designed to discourage further nationalization. U.S. officials also viewed Bolivia’s nationalized minerals and hydrocarbons industries as threats to the hemispheric order, and thus also sought to influence foreign publics’ perceptions of those industries. This paper applies performance theory to hemispheric relations, arguing that U.S. diplomats were acutely sensitive to perceptions of nationalized industry among various audiences in Latin America, and that audience perception was often deemed just as important as the actual record of SOEs. U.S. propaganda campaigns involved a variety of spectacles—usually subtle and mundane, sometimes dramatic and overt—which sought to help Latin American populations resist the “temptation” of nationalization and to prevent nationalistic resource policies from spreading via “demonstration effects.” At the same time, the campaigns sought to showcase the alleged accomplishments of U.S. private industry. These propaganda efforts were mostly unsuccessful, in the sense that they failed to erode most populations’ support for nationalistic resource policy through “soft power” means. Instead, varying levels of coercion would be necessary to contain the spread of resource nationalism, and even then would succeed only partially and temporarily.