The FBI in Latin America: The Ecuador Files

Radical Perspectives

by Marc Becker

During the Second World War, the FDR administration placed the FBI in charge of political surveillance in Latin America. Through a program called the Special Intelligence Service (SIS), 700 agents were assigned to combat Nazi influence in Mexico, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina. The SIS’s mission, however, extended beyond countries with significant German populations or Nazi spy rings. As evidence of the SIS’s overreach, forty-five agents were dispatched to Ecuador, a country without any German espionage networks. Furthermore, by 1943, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover shifted the SIS’s focus from Nazism to communism. Marc Becker interrogates a trove of FBI documents from its Ecuador mission to uncover the history and purpose of the SIS’s intervention in Latin America and for the light they shed on leftist organizing efforts in Latin America. Ultimately, the FBI’s activities reveal the sustained nature of US imperial ambitions in the Americas.

Genres: Nonfiction

336 pages, Paperback

Published August 25, 2017

Reviews

[Printed Pages and Coffee · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was something quite out of my normal reading sphere; not because of the intelligence/security subject matter, but due to the perspective and focus on communism and socialism: I don't normally research leftist movements, except how they may have impacted other areas of intelligence and/or security. That said, I really enjoyed this book. It has been exceptionally well researched, and the author's use of FBI files as a documentary record of the Latin America left, through a focus on Ecuador, was well-thought-out and not at all an approach that I've seen before. Fantastic resource for Latin American politics as well as WWII - Cold War communism.