Introduction: Ideology as Strategy
1. Modernization's Heavy Hand: The Triangular Plan for Bolivia
2. Development as Anticommunism: The Targeting of Bolivian Labor
3. "Bitter Medicine": Military Civic Action and the Battle of Irupata
4. Development's Detractors: Miners, Housewives, and the Hostage Crisis at Siglo XX
5. Seeds of Revolt: The Making of an Antiauthoritarian Front
6. Revolutionary Bolivia Puts On a Uniform: The 1964 Bolivian Coup d'État
Conclusion: Development and Its Discontents

During the most idealistic years of John F. Kennedy's Alliance for Progress development program, Bolivia was the highest per capita recipient of U.S. foreign aid in Latin America. Nonetheless, Washington's modernization programs in early 1960s' Bolivia ended up on a collision course with important sectors of the country's civil society, including radical workers, rebellious students, and a plethora of rightwing and leftwing political parties. In From Development to Dictatorship, Thomas C. Field Jr. reconstructs the untold story of USAID's first years in Bolivia, including the country's 1964 military coup d'état.Field draws heavily on local sources to demonstrate that Bolivia's turn toward anticommunist, development-oriented dictatorship was the logical and practical culmination of the military-led modernization paradigm that provided the liberal underpinnings of Kennedy's Alliance for Progress. In the process, he explores several underappreciated aspects of Cold War liberal internationalism: the tendency of "development" to encourage authoritarian solutions to political unrest, the connection between modernization theories and the rise of Third World armed forces, and the intimacy between USAID and CIA covert operations. Challenging the conventional dichotomy between ideology and strategy in international politics, From Development to Dictatorship engages with a growing literature on development as a key rubric for understanding the interconnected processes of decolonization and the Cold War.

Thomas C. Field Jr. is Assistant Professor of Global Security and Intelligence Studies at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.