The high degree of interest that greeted a release of documents concerning John F. Kennedy’s assassination shows that his legacy has meaning for Americans more than 60 years after his death.
Less directly but surely, it also shows the importance of Latin America to our country.
Brothers from Time to Time
By David Landau
JFK’s thousand-day presidency was uniquely shaped by the issue of Latin America. It was a paramount issue back then, and it is just as important today. Even before his inauguration in January 1961, preparations were underway for what would become a failed invasion of Cuba. That was JFK’s baptism by fire. On November 18, 1963, in Miami, JFK gave a key speech about the Alliance for Progress, his signature program for Latin America. Four days later he was shot dead in Dallas.
Naturally, all news of his speech vanished in the enormous tragedy of the president’s murder. Today, only the occasional scholar knows of it.
Even so, anyone with an interest in Latin America will get a jolt from JFK’s talk—24 minutes long, the audio file clear and dramatic. With his habitual eloquence, the president posits a future filled with progress and accomplishments. Hearing this talk against the knowledge of six intervening decades can only instill regret for a future that never materialized.
Looking back at the Alliance for Progress today, one easily sees why it failed. The United States and other countries were imbued with a false confidence in the multilateral method: decision-making by groups of nations rather than by one nation alone. In 1961, multilateralism was all the rage in international politics. Today it hangs on in Europe, but it is on defense as it deserves to be; and it makes a good target.
In 2025, the second Donald Trump administration has busied itself confronting a host of dinosaurs that arose in an age of misbegotten idealism. A major behemoth is the US Agency for International Development, or USAID—now widely known to the public via shocking exposés by President Trump’s investigators.
USAID is closely related to Latin America, not just because of its extensive activity there but because USAID, created by an act of Congress in September 1961, was adopted by JFK as a sibling to his Alliance for Progress. A major part of USAID’s portfolio was the implementation of programs that the Alliance would design. JFK had encouraging words for USAID staffers, praising a group of them to their faces as “a source of strength for us.”
The fortunes of the two agencies were soon to diverge. The Alliance had a cumbersome structure, with ideas and programs needing to be coordinated between ten or more national governments, while USAID was a stand-alone with easy connections in the well-funded JFK departments. Before long, USAID teams were running around the globe with development projects, their pockets bulging with cash, while their colleagues in the Alliance were still tying their shoes.
When JFK was gunned down in Dallas, the Alliance for Progress—an enterprise driven by ideas and ideals—lost its reason for being. Without JFK and his crucial personal support, Alliance officials had little motive to resolve the agency’s structural difficulties.
Also, by the end of 1963 Latin America had receded as a policy issue while the Vietnam War was rising rapidly. The distressed Alliance for Progress was deeded to the Organization of American States, which mercifully pulled the plug in 1973.
USAID played a helpful role in the Vietnam War on the humanitarian side, its activities praised by many. In the post-Vietnam atmosphere, with its exaltation of the so-called liberal or antiwar perspective, USAID naturally migrated to policies deemed “progressive,” a euphemism for radical or leftist viewpoints.
By 2025, “transgender” had become an agency byword as USAID managers exported their own lifestyles. An example of such initiatives, uncovered by Trump investigators, was a US$2 million grant to fund “gender-affirming” surgeries in conservative Guatemala.
Today, Trump and his lieutenants encounter in Europe a nest of political correctness disguised as ersatz environmentalism. The world’s purportedly developed societies have for years been gripped by a stubborn distrust of human joy that one can discern in falling birth-rates. Japan is literally evaporating from a catastrophic population drop. Even China, whose very name once conjured teeming masses, is hobbled by the long-term effects of its decades-long one-child policy.
Latin American demographics, by contrast, have boomed. Guatemala alone quadrupled its population between 1964 and 2024. Conservatives naturally find more interest in friendships with countries whose numbers clearly show an exuberant love of life.
In Latin America, the United States has plenty of catching-up to do. Trump is well advised to take charge of the matter by extending his remarkable series of triumphs into an arena from where glory and rewards are sure to revert to the United States.
David Landau is the author of Brothers from Time to Time, a history of the Cuban revolution, excerpts of which appear in the Impunity Observer.
