Latin America and the Global Cold War

This paper examines the history and historiography of the global Cold War from the perspective of Latin America. It focuses on the ‘stacked’ global, regional, and local conflicts that comprised the Cold War in Latin America, paying particular attention to connections between the region and North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. While US-Soviet rivalry gave the global conflict its organizing logic, the Cold War in Latin America overlayed and added new meaning to long-running struggles over inequality, labour, and modernization that erupted into cycles of revolution and counter-revolution. As this paper traces, these eruptions did not remain confined to the region but rather echoed globally. Beginning with the origins of Latin America’s Cold War in global perspective, the paper moves through global networks forged through struggles against US hegemony; over culture, morality and religion; between duelling Latin American socialist and anti-communist internationalisms; and against state terror by the transnational human rights movement of the 1970s and 1980s.  

The paper thereby goes beyond bipolar conceptions of the Cold War, outlining how centring a region often on the peripheries of Cold War historiography can open new understandings of the conflict. It asks questions such as: what was the Cold War and how might we write its global history? To what extent did regional and local struggles affect the global conflict and vice versa? How do Cold War archives, especially those related to state terror, shape the histories we write? In sum, while this paper focuses on Latin America in global perspective, it also offers the opportunity to consider global history as a multi-scalar mode of analysis and the political and social lives of archives.