Carlos Fuentes, Richard Goodwin, and the Alliance for Progress Debate That Never Happened

This presentation explores the conflict surrounding the denial of a U.S. visa application for Mexican author and public intellectual Carlos Fuentes. In early 1962, NBC News invited Fuentes to appear on national television to debate Richard Goodwin (a top Latin American advisor to John F. Kennedy) on the merits of the Alliance for Progress. Fuentes had emerged as Latin America’s most celebrated critic of the Alliance for Progress and the debate would likely have galvanized the left and influenced mainstream opinion to be more critical of U.S. efforts to shape Latin American politics. Fearing this outcome, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, Thomas Mann, made sure that Fuentes was denied a visa under provisions of the McCarren-Walter Immigration Act of 1952. Although Mann had asserted that Fuentes was a member of the Communist Party, in reality Fuentes had situated himself as a key interlocutor across several, often conflictive, constituencies: between the Mexican left and the administration of President López Mateos (with which he worked behind-the-scenes as a speech writer); between the various factions on the left (which was rapidly fragmenting along ideological lines); and between Mexico and the United States (where he had come of age as the child of a Mexican diplomat and still embraced the principles of the Good Neighbor Policy). The cancellation of the debate marks an overlooked, missed historical juncture that might have reshaped the terms of public opinion. Yet the conflict between Mann and Fuentes provides a unique portal for examining the significance of Mexico to U.S. foreign policy in the early 1960s, and to access both the left’s relationship to López Mateos as well as shifting dynamics within the left that were reflective of local, regional and global factors. The presentation draws on Fuentes’ personal papers at Princeton University, State Department records, and Mexican sources.