"Critique of Stanley E. Hilton's "Brazilian Diplomacy and the Washington-Rio de Janeiro 'Axis' during the World War II Era

Historians neglected the impact of World War II on Latin America, in part because the issues related to it-raw materials, air transport bases, inter-American conferences-appeared pale stuff compared with massive seaborne invasions, air battles, and rumbling tank campaigns, and partly because the appropriate documentation was tightly restricted for years under classifications ranging from confidential to top secret and was widely scattered. In regard to Brazil the situation began to change in the early 1960s when some U.S. government records were opened on a restricted basis and the families of President Get~lio Vargas and Foreign Minister Oswaldo Aranha allowed researchers access to their collections. As restrictions have fallen away in an increasing number of archives, historians have moved from an insufficiency to a plethora of documents. This means that definitiveness is not likely to be the hallmark of scholarship on the subject for some time to come. My work on Brazil's foreign and military policies during the Estado Novo (1937-1945) was done in that spirit and with the hope that it would point the way to some of the many topics that needed further study. In the six years since the publication of The Brazilian-American Alliance, 1937-1945 (Princeton, 1973), there has not occurred the sort of stampede that would warm a scholar's heart. In Brazilian Diplomacy and the Washington-Rio de Janeiro 'Axis' during the World War II Era, Stanley Hilton offers an alternate interpretation to the one he says I presented.' Though I would have

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• Brazil and 'Latin America

  Open Access•Leslie Bethell•Journal of Latin American Studies•2010

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