Para ler a América Latina: Tad Szulc, as relações interamericanas e a política externa dos Estados Unidos (1955-1965)

This research examines Tad Szulc's writings and performance (1926-2001) in inter-American post-war relations. He was an American intellectual relevant to inter-American relations in the second half of the twentieth century. He was a press professional linked to The New York Times. He made an itinerant journalistic coverage that crossed America writing on key issues of politics at the time: development; nationalism and communism. He spoke with heads of state, bureaucrats and intellectuals, and worked closely with state and private initiatives across the continent, including governments, large corporations and intelligence services. His journalistic work and books published between September 1955 and May 1965. He examines the sociopolitical analyzes that the journalist formulated of the region and the foreign policy of the United States, his trajectory with private institutions, administrations and government agencies in the States United States and Latin America. In that period, Szulc wrote more than one thousand five hundred articles, articles, reviews and travel reports and launched five books on Latin America. These publications are the central sources of research. In addition to these, this work examines a roll of periodicals, diplomatic dispatches, intelligence reports, official speeches and memoir books. This research investigates the role of the United States' international correspondence for inter-American post-war relations. It mobilizes recurrent interpretations for this question that emphasize the correspondents as: interpreters of Latin American reality; critics of internal and external politics; tentacles of US political, military, and economic power; agents of Latin American governments and interests. The thesis argues that all these roles are simultaneous and that the correspondent is a mediator with his own interests. The thesis examines Tad Szulc's performance in relation to the United States' foreign policy towards Latin America during the Cold War. His mutable positions from support to criticism the actions of the Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson administrations in the region. It analyzes his interpretations of Latin America in dialogue with American and Latin American intellectual propositions. The thesis traces the intellectual and professional trajectory of this liberal journalist inquiring his ties with media, political, diplomatic and business circles. It examines his texts and images presenting a Latin America in an rapid process of development and his links with Latin American governments and the American foreign policy of scientific, technological and financial support to the region. It analyzes his interpretation of a Latin America that has been freed of dictatorships since the end of World War II and his condemnation of Latin American nationalism and the support of the Eisenhower administration for dictators in the name of anti-communism. It examines Szulc’s approach to the Kennedy administration's modernizing interpretations that Latin America was on the verge of a social revolution because of its deep social problems. It scrutinizes his war against the Cuban Revolution in texts and actions with Cuban counterrevolutionaries, the White House and the CIA. It analyzes the contradictions of Tad Szulc’s endorsement of Johnson's policy of supporting Latin American dictatorships as a way of guaranteeing anticommunist regimes and the profits of US companies.