Banking on Development: Brazil in the United States's Search for Strategic Minerals, 1945–1953

Abstract

Valentim Getulio Vargas, explained to him in 1942 that 'there are two currents of [US] economic policy. The most prominent one is the Good Neighbor policy ... a departure from that antiquated policy of domination and subjugation.' The other is 'based on commercial and industrial profits, with the same old mentality of exploiting raw materials, which leaves us with holes in the ground and no industries'.1 After the Second World War, the administration led by Harry S. Truman dismantled the Good Neighbor policy, redirected aid elsewhere in the world, and rigidly opposed Communism in the hemisphere, as historians of interAmerican affairs have amply demonstrated.2 The scholarly focus on the demise of the Good Neighbor, however, has deflected attention from the persistence of the current in US policy that so troubled Boucas. Although the new global priorities of the United States during the cold war altered hemispheric political relations, they also intensified the US search for strategic minerals in Latin America. The completion in the 1940s of the United States's long transition from relative self-sufficiency in natural resources to becoming the world's greatest importer3 had a profound effect on the Truman administration's approach to Latin American economic development. In the quest to carry out global designs while accommodating particular national interests, Truman officials made compromises in foreign economic policy which are well covered by the historical literature.4 Yet few scholars appreciate how