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As a followup to my previous book The FBI in Latin America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), I have now published The CIA in Ecuador (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020).
I draw on recently released US government surveillance documents on the Ecuadorian left to chart social movement organizing efforts during the 1950s. Emphasizing the competing roles of the domestic ruling class and grassroots social movements, I detail the struggles and difficulties that activists, organizers, and political parties confronted. I show how leftist groups, including the Communist Party of Ecuador (PCE), navigated disagreements over tactics and ideology, and how these influenced shifting strategies in support of rural Indigenous communities and urban labor movements. I outline the CIA's failure to understand that the Ecuadorian left was rooted in local social struggles rather than bankrolled by the Soviet Union. By decentering US-Soviet power struggles, I show that the local patterns and dynamics that shaped the development of the Ecuadorian left could be found throughout Latin American during the cold war.
Honorable mention for best book by Ecuadorian Studies section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA).
An electronic open access version of the book is available on: