The Tango War: The Struggle for the Hearts, Minds and Riches of Latin America During World War II

by Mary Jo McConahay
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In The Tango War, Mary Jo McConahay uncovers this neglected, generally unknown history of “the competition between the Allies and the Axis” for land, resources and political dominance in captivating detail. As a veteran journalist traveling worldwide and posted to cover wars in Central America and the Middle East for 30 years, this graduate of Cal Berkeley gives us a "masterful" and compelling rendering by not only describing key events, but by following political and individual persons involved in governing, map-making, aeronautics, rail and road-building, resource-hunting, diplomacy, propagandizing, spying and fighting battles.

McConahay and Maya Sapper

They were escaping, filming and doing things as unheard of as rounding up Japanese Peruvians to deliver to FDRs detention camp in Texas, turning away ocean liners of European Jewish emigrants in Havana or sinking U-boats and Italian submarines in the Caribbean. Over a vast territory in our own hemisphere, “a distance of 6,640 miles from the Rio Grande…to the Argentine Antarctic,” action and human drama roils in the background of her history as smoothly as a Bogart and Bacall script.
This is the book to read if you never did figure out which side of the continent Chile and Argentina are on, where the rubber, oil and Panama Canal are exactly; colonial and imperialist heartlands, heroes and landscapes; what the U.S.A. really did and did not do.

McConahay describes curving Amazons of intrigues, alliances, courageous acts and vile betrayals. In some of the most shocking cases, mass murderers brought along the “Fourth Reich” and its hatred of communists, resolving to settle quietly working for Bayer, Krupp or Volkswagen in Central and South America or backing fascist dictators.

Hollywood film crews and Disney animators explored and exploited the favelas and carnivals of Rio for U.S. PR, whole neighborhoods of urban European Jews bought up and settled in the pampas to raise alfalfa and cattle, celebrating the remainder of their holy days in peace. Who knew?
Same world, different challenges – or is it? Are they? Hear, hear!

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