This article deals with the politics of Peruvian rural electrification during the Cold War years. In 1964, the inhabitants of the Mantaro Valley established the Cooperativa Eléctrica Comunal del Centro Ltda. 127, with the help of the central government and American aid agencies in the context of the Alliance for Progress. At first, this rural electric cooperative was seen as a legitimate way to channel traditional communal practices through an institution that was seen as modern, capitalist, and Western. However, in the fluid context of Peru's Cold War, electric cooperative development quickly became a heated political battleground. After a “revolutionary” military regime took power in 1968, the armed forces eventually defined the cooperative as an obsolete institution and quickly adopted their own cooperative model, free from any capitalist “vices,” as they sought to implement their own “revolution from above.” While the Cooperativa Eléctrica Comunal del Centro represented a successful combination of local discourse, foreign aid, and modern technology, its history also shines a light on the volatile politics of infrastructural development: as its political and economic meaning changed wildly as different political regimes oversaw its expansion and eventual downfall.

This paper analyses the role played by US economic assistance during the administrations of Jânio Quadros and João Goulart in Brazil (1961–4). It focuses on the negotiation and implementation of financial agreements associated with the Alliance for Progress, President Kennedy's aid programme for Latin America. It demonstrates that the Alliance had a positive impact during Quadros' administration, providing substantial resources to the country and placing economic growth ahead of economic stabilisation as the principal criterion for aid. Circumstances changed, however, when João Goulart became president, resulting in serious funding constraints. The paper suggests that the main reason for this was political, specifically regarding Washington's perception of Goulart's links with communist groups.

This article investigates the introduction of educational television in El Salvador in the late 1960s, an Alliance for Progress project, in light of the preoccupations of the Cold War, the application of modernisation theory, the growing influence of a development community grounded in the social sciences and the Salvadorean elite's particular obsession with communism. The top-down approach used by the military regime to introduce a flurry of changes in the education system was facilitated by the extensive resources provided by international aid agencies and the US government. However, the reforms alienated Salvadorean teachers and fuelled teachers' strikes that are still remembered as pivotal moments in the urban mass movements of the 1970s which preceded the civil war of the 1980s.