Nelson Ventures in Latin America

longer be measured in terms of military control over colonial territories. The British and European empires proved to be a system far too costly and inefficient. Power would be defined directly in economic terms. It would be based on what one Harvard proponent, Joseph Nye, later was to call «soft power."?

As the War came to an end in 1945, no group epitomized the global outlook of American big business more than the Rockefeller family, whose fortune had been built on a global empire of oil and banking. The family-above all brothers Nelson, John D. III, Laurance and David-whose had financed the War & Peace Studies of the CFR, viewed the victorious end of the War as a golden opportunity to dominate global policies to their advantage as never before.

Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller was to playa discreet and decisive behind-the scenes role in defining those global interests. They were shrewdly redefined from being Rockefeller private interests, into what was called «American national interests." After all, the family had financed the War & Peace Studies for the State Department. .

Nelson Ventures in Latin America Precisely what Isaiah Bowman and his War and Peace Studies colleagues in the US establishment had in mind with their notion of Grand Area and free market development soon became clear. Nelson Rockefeller, one of the primary financial backers of the Council on Foreign Relations War & Peace Studies, wasted no time in taking advantage of the new economic possibilities World War II had opened up for American business.

After the War, while brother John D. Rockefeller III was busy devising new, ever more efficient methods to promote racial purity and depopulation through his Population Council, Nelson was working the other side of the fence. It was in the role of a forwardlooking international businessman interested in making world food production, especially in poorer, less-developed countries such as Mexico, more «efficient." Nelson later called his revolution in world agriculture the Green Revolution. It was revolutionary, but not in the way most people had been led to believe.