• Kennedy compared the Alliance to the Marshall Plan but he knew that Congress would never appropriate anything remotely comparable to the funds that were required to rebuild Western Europe after World War II.
• From the point of view of Latin American nationalists, the Alliance was never able to overcome its identification with "Yankee imperialism."
• The Alliance for Progress was at best a “noble failure,” according to Latin American expert Joseph Tulchin.
• The Alliance depended primarily on private investments.
• Skyrocketing birth rates, failed efforts at economic diversification, and continued concentration of wealth all prevented the achievement of economic growth rate goals.
• Economic aid actually made repressive regimes richer and more powerful.
• American business interests did not share the president's contempt for the corrupt elites that
controlled the economies and governments of Latin America.
• Even stalwart JFK supporters like Arthur Schlesinger called the endeavour “oversold”
• Ultimately the $20 billion only amounted to $10 per person.
• Despite spending more than a billion dollars in its first year, not a single Latin American nation committed itself to a comprehensive development program.
• Stephen Rabe concludes that the AFP represents “a notable policy failure of the 1960s, superseded only by the U.S. debacle in Vietnam.”
• Theodore Sorenson argues that “reality did not match the rhetoric”.
• American business interests continued to be more concerned about the safety of their private investments in Latin America and far less troubled about promoting social and political reform.
• It is estimated that only 2 percent of economic growth in 1960s Latin America benefited the poor.
• Stephen Rabe notes ironically that the late 1950s was the ‘twilight of the tyrants’, as ten ‘military dictators fell from power’, while during the 1960s, sixteen ‘extra-constitutional changes of government shook’ Latin America and led directly or effectively to rule by the military
• Michael Gambone refers to the 1960s as the ‘apogee of military power in Latin America’.
• Escalating tensions between the US and Cuba, particularly the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, undermined much of the credibility of Kennedy's claim that the US was acting without self-interest in Latin America.
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