Supermercado USA

This chapter focuses on the first formal effort to use American-style supermarkets as anticommunist weapons. In 1947, Nelson A. Rockefeller launched a for-profit development corporation with the avowed purpose of raising living standards and dampening communist political leanings in Latin America. Rockefeller’s most ambitious—and most profitable—effort was a series of supermarkets opened in Venezuela beginning in 1947. The story of Rockefeller’s Venezuelan supermarkets is remarkable for several reasons. They were intentionally paired with a simultaneous (though unsuccessful) effort to industrialize Venezuelan agriculture. They were the first profitable international venture in American-style supermarketing with an avowed anticommunist purpose. They were also, as the chapter details, met on occasion with violent rebuke from Latin American citizens who refused to accept the notion that Yankee capitalism was morally superior to alternative economic systems