In the last five years, renewed interest in United States diplomatic relations with Argentina during World War II has generated several studies, prominent among these being Michael J. Francis’s The Limits of Hegemony (1977) and Randall Woods’s The Roosevelt Foreign Policy Establishment (1979). No offense to these two authors, but Gary Frank’s pithy little study is better than either. It recognizes that United States– Argentine relations during the 1940–45 period were inextricably entangled with United States–Brazilian relations and Brazilian-Argentine relations. Bluntly, one has to analyze the whole before the pieces really make sense.
This is, in fact, the task set out in Struggle for Hegemony, and this book is basically a sound research effort. Frank is probably the first researcher to gain access to the Argentine Foreign Office Archives for the post-1940 period, and he has done a careful job with the Oswaldo Aranha and Getúlio Vargas papers at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas in Rio de Janeiro. It has long puzzled this author why so many books on United States–Latin American policy have been published by authors who have seen nothing except United States State Department papers. Frank’s Struggle for Hegemony aptly demonstrates that multiarchival research remains the best way to go.
No work is without flaws, and in this one, a number stand out. Frank has gone to Argentina and Brazil, but for United States documentation, he depends almost entirely upon the Foreign Relations of the United States series. As a result, his discussion of such topics as the pre-Pearl Harbor United States–Brazilian and United States–Argentine arms negotiation is, at best, inadequate. A few afternoons in Washington, reviewing the materials in the National Archives, Record Group 38, would have been of inestimable assistance. As for Argentina, for some unknown reason, Struggle for Hegemony simply ignores the April 1945 Avra Warren Mission, which resulted in the de facto reestablishment of United States–Argentine relations. The Argentine papers dealing with this event are in Mueble: “Guerra E.E.U.U. y los países del Eje,’’ Expediente 26, Tomo III, Actitud de la República Argentina y la Misión Avra Warren. These records are currently lodged in a former police barracks on Avenida Vélez Sarfeld in the capital. The archivists there sometimes display enigmatic attitudes toward gringo researchers, so perhaps these papers were unavailable to Professor Frank. For students interested in making critical judgments concerning the issues, however, review of these papers, I believe, is essential.
Thus, Struggle for Hegemony is hardly the last word on World War II United States–Argentine–Brazilian relations, but its trifocus of diplomatic relations sets the ground rules for future historical debate. Loudmouths who prefer to analyze all events in terms of this or that theory, while giving archival sources a wide berth, will have to move on to other topics.
