The FBI in Latin America: The Ecuador Files (Radical Perspectives)

“Written by a leading historian of Ecuador and social movements in Latin America, The FBI in Latin America draws on an impressive and far-reaching body of surveillance documents produced by the FBI and the US State Department. Reconstructing the history of Latin American left-wing organizations, Marc Becker provides a new perspective on events in twentieth-century Ecuador and the activities of communist, labor, women's, Indigenous, and broad-based social movements.”

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. Through a program called the Special Intelligence Service (SIS), 700 agents were assigned to combat Nazi influence in Mexico, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina. During the Second World War, the FDR administration placed the FBI in charge of political surveillance in Latin America. 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. Edgar Hoover shifted the SIS’s focus from Nazism to communism. The SIS’s mission, however, extended beyond countries with significant German populations or Nazi spy rings. Ultimately, the FBI’s activities reveal the sustained nature of US imperial ambitions in the Americas.