Abstracts - "Good Neighbor Policy, International Disputes and Latin American Science"
Adriana Minor, El Colegio de México
“Unity is strength: The Carnegie-Guggenheim-Rockefeller Committee for mobilizing artists, scientists, and intellectuals (1941-1945).”
This research (in progress) is about the Committee for Inter-American Artistic and Intellectual Relations, created in 1941 under the auspices of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs and formed by representatives of the Carnegie, Guggenheim, and Rockefeller foundations. A committee that brought together the most important American philanthropic foundations of the time, which were also distinguished by their ventures in Latin America, made sense in the context of World War II to bring its extensive experience, network of contacts, and knowledge of the region to the service of the American government. Its mission was to promote exchanges and relations between the United States and Latin America through study trips for artists, scientists, and intellectuals.
This presentation is based on the minutes of the meetings of this super-committee, held between 1941 and 1945, as well as specific reports and files of some travellers who benefited from this programme. Among the issues to be addressed, in a preliminary manner, are the objectives and expectations of both the committee and the travellers, and a general characterisation of the applications accepted and rejected, as well as the justifications given for them. Finally, some guidelines for further work on the subject in the near future will be indicated.
Gabriel Lopes (Fundação Oswaldo Cruz)
International Health and aviation as a sanitary challenge: cooperation between Brazil and the United States (1938-1944)
We will analyze the new problems of international health regulation related to the transport of vectors and pathogens in the 1930s and 1940s, especially in the context of health cooperation between Brazil and the United States. One event that spurred discussions about the transcontinental transportation of vectors, both by fast ships and airplanes, was the accidental arrival of the Anopheles gambiae mosquito in Brazil from Dakar, the capital of Senegal, causing an unprecedented malaria epidemic in Brazil in the 1930s. Scientists from the Oswaldo Cruz Institute and specialists from the Rockefeller Foundation's International Health Division worked together to solve the health emergency caused by A. gambiae from 1938 onwards. Later, in the 1940s, the need to implement sanitary practices and regulations against the threat of transcontinental transportation of vectors and pathogens arose with the work of the Special Public Health Service (SESP) at Parnamirim Field, a US air base in the state of Rio Grande do Norte, during the Second World War. Documents, scientific articles and reports from the period will be analyzed, exploring how the problems related to the traffic of vectors and pathogens became a central problem in health cooperation between Brazil and the USA, but also an unprecedented health concern.