An Intellectual at the service of the United States hegemony

Lincoln Gordon and the Alliance for Progress in Brazil – a case study

Abstract

This investigation aims to analyze the performance of Lincoln Gordon, Brazilian ambassador in the early 1960s and a key player in the Alliance for Progress, as an intellectual articulator of strategies to defend the international interests of the United States in Latin America, during the Cold War. Our research effort is to demonstrate how Gordon made use of the Alliance for Progress as a political instrument for the dissemination of the American political and economic culture and the consolidation of Washington’s hegemony. For such a purpose, we follow the concepts of hegemony and organic intellectual proposed by Antonio Gramsci. Our main source of examination is the book “O Progresso pela Aliança”, published by Gordon himself in 1962 targeting the Brazilian public and aimed at propaganda of the foreign aid program, suggesting the existence of mutual interests between Brazil and the USA, which would facilitate the Alliance’s success in the country, hence the defense of the territory against Soviet socialism. Through a critical and detailed analysis of this material, we came to the important conclusion that Gordon played a crucial role in consolidating the Alliance for Progress in a modernization program linked to the need to create paternalistic relations between the US and Latin American countries, developing American liberal capitalist logic, the system of ideas that defines Gordon’s class position.