Project Pedro was a secretly funded program under the

United States Information Agency The United States Information Agency (USIA), which operated from 1953 to 1999, was a United States agency devoted to " public diplomacy". In 1999, prior to the reorganization of intelligence agencies by President George W. Bush, President Bil ...

during the 1950s to create

newsreels A newsreel is a form of short documentary film, containing news stories and items of topical interest, that was prevalent between the 1910s and the mid 1970s. Typically presented in a cinema, newsreels were a source of current affairs, inform ...

Mexico Mexico ( Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guate ...

.Fein, Seth. "New Empire into Old: Making Mexican Newsreels the Cold War Way." ''Diplomatic History'' 28 (2004): 703-748. The program was a clandestine

public relations Public relations (PR) is the practice of managing and disseminating information from an individual or an organization (such as a business, government agency, or a nonprofit organization) to the public in order to influence their perception. ...

campaign to spread

propaganda Propaganda is communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loa ...

portraying the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., federal district, five ma ...

positively and

Communism Communism (from Latin la, communis, lit=common, universal, label=none) is a far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society ...

negatively, in an effort to change the Mexican public's attitude toward Communism as part of the Cold War. Projects with similar objectives were carried out in other Latin American countries, such as Brazil, Chile, Bolivia and Ecuador. The project was publicly operated in part by a former film executive named Richard K. Tompkins who had produced

anti-communist Anti-communism is political and ideological opposition to communism. Organized anti-communism developed after the 1917 October Revolution in the Russian Empire, and it reached global dimensions during the Cold War, when the United States and th ...

animated cartoons and films in Mexico. Tompkins allowed the USIA to influence newsreel content while having no official trace to production. Since Mexican citizens owned the rest of the

production company A production company, production house, production studio, or a production team is a studio that creates works in the fields of performing arts, new media art, film, television, radio, comics, interactive arts, video games, websites, music, a ...

creating the newsreels, the USIA was not required to publicly disclose its involvement in the project. Project Pedro began production in February 1957 and by the end of that year, its newsreels were shown in several hundred

movie theaters A movie theater (American English), cinema (British English), or cinema hall (Indian English), also known as a movie house, picture house, the movies, the pictures, picture theater, the silver screen, the big screen, or simply theater is a ...

throughout Mexico. Several major

corporations A corporation is an organization—usually a group of people or a company—authorized by the state to act as a single entity (a legal entity recognized by private and public law "born out of statute"; a legal person in legal context) and ...

sponsored the project, including the manufacturers of

Corona Corona (from the Latin for 'crown') most commonly refers to: * Stellar corona, the outer atmosphere of the Sun or another star * Corona (beer), a Mexican beer * Corona, informal term for the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which causes the COVID-19 di ...

and

Coca-Cola Coca-Cola, or Coke, is a carbonated soft drink manufactured by the Coca-Cola Company. Originally marketed as a temperance drink and intended as a patent medicine, it was invented in the late 19th century by John Stith Pemberton in Atla ...

. Due to concerns about Project Pedro's high cost and efficacy, the USIA terminated funding for the program in September 1961.

References

*LaFeber, Walter. ''America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-2006.'' United States government propaganda organizations Cold War history of the United States {{US-stub