Abstract

This essay considers the role played by Adolf A. Berle, Assistant Secretary of State from 1938 to 1944, in the US policy toward Latin America during the Second World War. It focuses on aviation and the airbases built by the Airport Development Program, which the Roosevelt administration entrusted to Pan American Airways, for defending the hemisphere and supplying American and Allied forces overseas. Berle believed military and civil aviation to be crucial for both the modernization of the Western hemisphere (with Latin American leaders like Getulio Vargas of Brazil concurring) and US global hegemony in the postwar years.