Rebecca Herman on ‘Cooperating with the Colossus’
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 18 November 2022
⏱️ 46 minutes
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Summary
Today, the U.S. military maintains around 800 bases in installations around the world with around 75 of those in Latin America, including perhaps its most notorious in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But it wasn't always this way.
To learn more about this fraught and understudied history, Lawfare managing editor Tyler McBrien sat down with Dr. Rebecca Herman, assistant professor of history at UC Berkeley, to discuss her new book, “Cooperating with the Colossus: A Social and Political History of US Military Bases in World War II Latin America.” They discussed how the U.S. went from its good neighbor policy of the 1930s to nearly 200 military bases on sovereign Latin American soil by the end of the war, and the thorny questions of legal jurisdiction, labor rights, and gender relations that arose from those new sites. They also got into how, in Prof. Herman's words, although national sovereignty and international cooperation are compatible concepts in principle, they're difficult to reconcile in practice.
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| 1:08.0 | What's really interesting in the high political story here is that the fact |
| 1:12.0 | that the United States was also concerned about maintaining goodwill, |
| 1:16.0 | made basing a really powerful and lucrative bargaining chip for Latin American leaders. |
| 1:22.0 | So when the US approached them for this particular form of cooperation |
| 1:28.0 | that they knew would be really contentious and really unpopular, |
| 1:32.0 | that put leaders in Latin American in a position of saying, |
| 1:34.0 | okay, if you want bases, you're going to have to provide us with some kind of a quid pro quo. |
| 1:40.0 | Some leaders were super successful in doing that, |
| 1:42.0 | Toli Ovargas in Brazil, was able to get the United States to really finance a lot of his agenda for Brazilian development, |
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