Resumen:
The studies on the American democracy promotion policy towards Francoist Spain have been many years relegated once taken for granted the propagandistic nature of the American public discourse. However, in order to assess what were Washington's real aims and determinants in its relations with Franco and his regime, in the first part of this article we briefly examine the changes operated in American geostrategic conceptions from the 30s onwards. In the second part, in what constitutes the core of this paper, a more detailed focus is put on the examination of the Spanish case from the documentation on Spain between the years 1945-1973 preserved in the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) at College Park, Md.