Communist Subversion in Latin America, a 1965 sheet of seized arms

Communist Subversion in Latin America is an English U.S. Information Agency sheet, catalog date 24 May 1965, printed as a supplement to Free World. Photographs of seized arms and pamphlets from Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Brazil and Argentina back its claim that Cuba organizes and directs subversion in the hemisphere (NAID 6949259).

What it prints

The archive describes a photo-and-text sheet: piles of ammunition and rifles, bundles of pamphlets, and a framed portrait, each captioned by country. An opening column states the thesis. The country captions follow.

COMMUNIST SUBVERSION IN LATIN AMERICA

Communist subversion, organized and directed by Cuba, is a continuing threat today to the security of all the nations of the Western Hemisphere.

[...]

Since no free nation ever has chosen Communism, the Communists use arms and propaganda to force their way into power whenever possible.

[...]

BRAZIL

At the time of the anti-Communist revolution of Brazil in April 1964, nine Chinese Communist "trade delegates" were arrested and later deported.

[...]

SUPPLEMENT TO FREE WORLD VOL. XIV NO. 6 JUNE 1965

Issuer and audience

The U.S. Information Agency is the issuer of record, in the National Archives series of posters distributed in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. The audience is a foreign public. The source category is "Source blurred: contractors, cutouts, buried disclosure." FRAME holds other printings of the same title for Beirut, in English, French and Arabic, and a Spanish edition.

How to read it

FRAME tags fear appeal, card stacking, name-calling and guilt by association. Its reading is that the piles of seized weapons carry the argument, that loaded words such as "insidious" do the rest, and that the sheet cites no source beyond its own captions and gives no hearing to those it accuses.

One line stands out. The sheet calls the events in Brazil in April 1964 an "anti-Communist revolution" and lists, among its evidence, Chinese "trade delegates" arrested and deported. The event is named in the words of the side the sheet favors, and the reader is not told what happened. The same sheet says "no free nation ever has chosen Communism," a sweeping claim stated as fact.

The sheet does tie two claims to named authorities: it says the Organization of American States "indicted Cuba as an aggressor" over the Venezuelan arms cache, and it quotes Peru's Minister of Government on where a shipment came from. Those are a stronger kind of evidence than a pile of rifles. Five days earlier, by catalog date, USIA had sent a Spanish sheet on the Dominican intervention, Que hacen los Estados Unidos en Santo Domingo, to Mexico City. More of the series is on the U.S. Information Agency posters hub.