South-to-South by the North: the CINVA-Ram machine journey along the Equator and the Cold War

In 1951, within the technical cooperation programme of the Organization of American States (OAS), the Centro Interamericano de Vivienda y Planeamiento (CINVA) was established in Bogotá. Its mission was to train architects from all over Latin America to deal with the housing shortage problem. The whole story of the CINVA deserves great attention, as little has been published in comparison to the wide scope and impact of its agency. During CINVA’s three-decade-long existence, among its many theoretical and technical outputs, one had enjoyed a certain success: the CINVA-RAM machine. Invented by Chilean engineer Raúl Ramírez in 1956, it consisted in a simple pressing machine to produce compressed earth blocks. In the following years, the machine was not only widely used in rural Colombia, most of Latin America and the USA, but also exported to Africa and Asia. It was used in Ghana and Cameroon; it was requested by Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew; it was adopted by the Vietnamese Army in the framework of the Civic Action plan supported by the United States Operation Mission. At first, this journey through three continents along the equator may appear as a successful case of South-to-South cooperation. In fact, all this was possible because the CINVA-RAM machine was patented and distributed by the International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC), the Rockefeller Foundation’s (RF) financial branch for developing countries. Unpublished documents from archives in Colombia and the USA and publications of the time allow to outline this story, remarkable in showing the global outreach of the intertwined action of international (OAS) and private (RF) institutions linked to the US Government across the global South in the years of the Cold War, when actions aimed at tackling poverty and the housing problems were oftentimes complementary to the armed containment of the Communist threat.