A Compact History of Latin America's Cold War

A Compact History of Latin America’s Cold War

A BOOK IN THE SERIES LATIN AMERICA IN TRANSLATION / EN TRADUCCIÓN / EM TRADUÇÃO

This book was sponsored by the Consortium in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University.

A Compact History of Latin America’s Cold War

Vanni Pettinà

TRANSLATED BY QUENTIN POPE

The University of North Carolina Press CHAPEL HILL

Translation of the books in the series Latin America in Translation / en Traducción / em Tradução, a collaboration between the Consortium in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University and the university presses of the University of North Carolina and Duke, is supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

© 2022 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Merope Basic by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Pettinà, Vanni, author. | Pope, Quentin, translator.

Title: A compact history of Latin America’s Cold War / Vanni Pettinà ; translated by Quentin Pope.

Other titles: Historia mínima de la Guerra Fría en América Latina. English | Latin America in translation/en traducción/em tradução.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press,

[2022]

| Series: Latin America in translation/en traducción/em tradução | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022016222 | ISBN 9781469669755 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469669762 (paperback ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469669779 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Cold War. | World politics—1955–1965. | Latin America—Politics and government—1948–1980. | Latin America—Economic conditions—1945–

Classification: LCC F1414.2 .P4813 2022 | DDC 980.03—dc23/eng/20220413

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022016222

Originally published as Historia mínima de la Guerra Fría en América Latina (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2018), copyright © 2018 El Colegio de México.

Beginnings and endings are the hardest of all.

Where to start? When to stop?

Our ten fingers have given

the decimal system a definiteness;

we can grasp ten and its multiples.

We hold time, decades, in our hands.

—JUAN VILLORO, Tiempo transcurrido

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations in the Text

Translator’s Note

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

Historiographical Approaches to Latin America’s Cold War

CHAPTER TWO

Latin America in the Early Cold War Period (1946–1954)

Political and Economic Tensions and Their Consequences

CHAPTER THREE

The Cuban Revolution

A Turning Point in Latin America’s Cold War

CHAPTER FOUR

The Decade of Terror

CHAPTER FIVE

The Central American Political and Military Conflict

Epilogue

Glossary of Terms

For Further Reading

Index

Acknowledgments

Many colleagues and friends have provided me valuable help with this book. Antonio Annino was primarily responsible for my ambitious attempt to provide a detailed explanation of Latin America’s Cold War history. Three of his observations on my initial draft prompted me to reshape key sections; I hope my analysis has been more insightful as a result. Without Antonio’s generous and astute comments, the book you are reading would have been markedly different. Similarly, I am in debt to José Antonio Sánchez Román, who read three different versions of the manuscript and never spared from offering constructive criticism and important suggestions at certain junctures to prevent the book from heading down blind alleys.

Working as a research professor at El Colegio de México has given me the enormous advantage of being able to open the door of my office at any time to have wide-ranging discussions on historical subjects with Soledad Loaeza and Carlos Marichal. Soledad has been a generous and attentive reader of this text, helping me to refine its conceptual framework and structure. Yet perhaps her greatest influence on my work derives from the stimulating intellectual exchanges we have had since my arrival at El Colegio de México. Carlos also gave freely of his time by commenting on the text in detail. I am obliged to him not only for his close reading of the manuscript but also for the long conversations we have shared over the years that have enhanced my understanding of Latin American history. Paolo Riguzzi has been another rigorous and critical reader of my work, helping me to fine-tune some of its key sections. Gerardo Sánchez Nateras was instrumental in giving the book its final form, thanks to his painstaking analysis, inspiring discussions, and thorough research into the history of political and military conflict in Central America. Erika Pani, Fernando Purcell, Eric Zolov, Sebastián Carassai, Julián Gómez Delgado, and David Jorge also went through the text, in full or in part, suggesting improvements. Gabriel Samacá furnished extremely interesting material on the history of Latin American guerrilla movements.

I also appreciate the contribution of the anonymous readers whose comments enabled me to improve the manuscript’s structure and to refine its various sections. I am particularly grateful to Ana González Masegosa for her invaluable linguistic advice on the original Spanish-language edition of this book. Finally, I would like to thank my PhD students—Claudia Piña, Gerardo Sánchez Nateras, Ilbel Ramírez Gómez, and Martín Humberto González Romero—who have provided a constant stimulus for me to improve my work as both a professor and a researcher. I wrote this book with the intention of providing a useful analytical guide to help graduate students and others understand the reality of their fields of study.

I dedicate this book to the three An(n)as in my life. To Anna, my mother, for always standing by me for as long as her life allowed; to Ana, my partner, because simply nothing that I do in this life would be possible without her; and to Arianna, our daughter, with the hope that the world described by her father in this book will be forever consigned to history.

Abbreviations in the Text

Translator’s Note

In the main body of the text I have generally retained the official Spanish or Portuguese names of political parties, government entities, organizations, and movements, using their abbreviations on subsequent mentions. Apart from the list of abbreviations appearing earlier, at the end of the book readers can also consult a short glossary of terms specifically relevant to Latin America during the Cold War period.

A Compact History of Latin America’s Cold War

Introduction

Some high-profile figures of the British Empire once possessed an uncanny ability to coin words and phrases to mark the start and end of complex historical periods. One August afternoon in 1914, the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, while gazing out his window in London as dusk began to fall, pithily remarked on the catastrophe about to overwhelm Europe in the years ahead: The lights are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime. A little over three decades later, in March 1946, another illustrious British citizen, Winston Churchill, expressed the beginning of a new and dramatic era: From Stettin, in the Baltic, to Trieste, in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. With these words, Churchill described the process that between 1946 and 1947, with the world still crippled by the brutal violence unleashed by the Second World War, led to a new global conflict, referred to by another Briton, George Orwell, as the Cold War.

The initial protagonists in the confrontation that shook the world were the United States and the Soviet Union, the two former allies that had emerged victorious from World War II. At the start of their global struggle for geopolitical control, as they competed to impose their respective interpretations of modernity, Washington and Moscow mainly clashed in Eurasia. From the mid-1950s onward, in the aftermath of the political and economic decolonization process, the conflict also engulfed Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. The U.S.-USSR conflict affected a vast array of peoples and nations from around the world for decades, changing the course of their political, economic, and cultural development in what Odd Arne Westad has defined as the global Cold War.

The most shocking images broadcast around the world during the long decades of confrontations between Moscow and Washington mostly came from the conflicts that the Cold War unleashed or exacerbated in the so-called Third World. The Vietnam War; Patrice Lumumba’s assassination; Congo’s civil war; the coups d’état in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile; the Suez crisis; the Arab-Israeli conflict; the entry of Castro’s bearded revolutionaries into Havana; the outbreak of guerrilla warfare across Latin America; and the enforced disappearances at the hands of South America’s sinister dictatorships were just some of the events and processes linked to the clash between the Soviet Union and the United States.

This book seeks to offer an analysis of the Cold War in one of the many theaters of conflict in the Third World—the Latin American subcontinent. As in other parts of the Third World, in Latin America the conflict between the two superpowers overlapped with complex processes of social, economic, and political change. This convergence set the stage for more than four decades of major political and economic instability, domestic polarization, and dramatic violence.

In these pages I describe these processes and the Cold War’s various impacts on Latin America from 1947 until the end of the 1980s. In providing this overview, the main difficulty lay in working out how to approach Latin America as a single space and not exclusively at the scale of the nation-state. Analyzing a territory that comprises a total of almost nine million square miles and twenty nations and has significant ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and political differences clearly represents a serious challenge. Therefore, readers will not find a detailed history of every Latin American country over the years in question. Instead, this book offers an outline of the general processes, problems, and inflection points that signal regional trends, helping us consider Latin America’s history as a whole during the years of confrontation between Washington and Moscow. This work will hopefully provide a marker for future studies into how individual countries’ realities connected to, or differed from, the broader regional dynamics discussed here.

The second challenge was to tell the story of this period in a way that might allow an autonomous understanding of Latin America’s politics, society, and economies during the Cold War years. Countering the traditionally dominant U.S. perspective in the historiography of this period, this book seeks to reveal the standpoint of Latin American countries in their struggle to adapt to the dynamics triggered by the bipolar conflict. We must not underestimate the decisive impact of U.S. hegemony over the subcontinent, nor deny how strongly Washington’s interventions influenced how the Cold War played out in the region. But given this context, this study focuses on the dilemmas posed for the countries in the region by the ideological and geopolitical confrontation between the two superpowers, and on Latin American actors’ various responses to a situation that gradually worsened after 1946–47.

The third challenge of this work was to provide a non-episodic history of the period. We traditionally associate the Cold War in Latin America with images of its bloodiest episodes, such as coups d’état, disembarking marines, and revolutionary uprisings. In contrast, here we seek to help readers understand not only the region’s crises but also its broader evolution during the era in question.

The book is divided into five chapters to unravel the complex historical legacy of the Cold War in the region. The first chapter offers a historiographical and conceptual analysis of the Cold War in Latin America, analyzing the wider historiographical context that saw the emergence of the first attempts to understand the history of Latin America during the Cold War and the evolution of the numerous studies of this subject. This chapter also suggests ideas for a conceptual definition of the Cold War in Latin America, along with a tentative chronology. The lack of general histories of the region focusing on the years of the bipolar conflict requires us, in this chapter, to lay the interpretive foundations of the period and of its processes. As a result, rather than summarizing existing literature on the topic, this book assembles a number of tools to help conceptualize and analyze Latin America’s specific situation within the context of the Cold War. This is essential in our attempt to break away from an episodic account of these decades and to offer instead a structural analysis of the period and the issues at stake.

In the second chapter, the book analyzes how the initial years of the Cold War interfered with Latin American’s political and economic evolution, in particular how those years destabilized the region’s economic and political-democratic governance and how the countries adapted in many ways. We see how the Cold War, from its onset, appeared homogeneous in terms of its dynamics across the subcontinent, but that these same dynamics produced contrasting effects in different Latin American countries when combined with their local realities. As explained in this chapter, this disparity was mainly due to the contrasts in how the region’s nations adapted to the new political, ideological, and economic challenges posed by the bipolar conflict at both international and subregional levels in Latin America.

The third chapter examines how the tensions that built up during the first decade of the Cold War led to the Cuban Revolution and it also analyzes the consequences of this movement’s triumph for other countries across the region. From this perspective, the text explores the formation of various guerrilla groups inspired by the Cuban Revolution and supported materially by Havana, analyzing their impact on Latin American societies. This chapter also analyzes how—from a nonrevolutionary perspective—some countries in Latin America reacted to the issues raised by the experiment in Cuba. Finally, it looks at the way the Cuban Revolution forced the United States to revise its strategy toward the region, leading to the Alliance for Progress.

The book’s fourth and fifth chapters explore the interconnections between the bipolar conflict and the political violence that ravaged South and Central America during the 1970s and 1980s. These chapters seek to explain how the Cold War spawned the bloody dictatorships that took power in South America and its impact on the armed political conflicts in Central America; they also describe the violent events in the region and, based on an analysis of the connection between local processes and international dynamics created by the bipolar conflict, suggest some ways of understanding the violence that marked this period.

In conclusion, this book hopes to contribute an overview that is both comprehensive and original in its interpretive analysis. It aims to provide a primary means of studying this period and a critical basis for further studies on the Cold War era, its processes, and its problems.

CHAPTER ONE

Historiographical Approaches to Latin America’s Cold War

The New Historiography on the Cold War and Latin America: A History Waiting to Be Written

Between the 1950s and the 1990s, three main historiographical approaches—orthodox, revisionist, and post-revisionist—offered different interpretations of the origins of the conflict that began in 1946 between the United States and the Soviet Union. In the aftermath of the Second World War, exponents of the orthodox perspective, such as Herbert Feis and, some years later, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., focused on identifying who started the Cold War. In attributing responsibility, these authors agreed that the conflict stemmed from Stalinist aggression in Eastern Europe, which forced Washington to take steps to check Moscow’s expansionism. During the 1960s and 1970s, revisionist scholars such as William Appleman Williams, and subsequently Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, Walter LaFeber, and Anders Stephanson, began countering the orthodox view, claiming that the Cold War resulted from aggressive U.S. neoimperial policies that alarmed Stalin and the Soviet Union. This argument gained adherents in the 1960s during protests against the escalating U.S. interventions in Vietnam and criticisms of the superpower’s foreign policy. More recently, between the 1970s and the 1990s, post-revisionists such as John Lewis Gaddis and Melvyn P. Leffler developed a more nuanced summary of the conflict by addressing the shifting strategies of both global powers in the aftermath of the Second World War, analyzing the role of different institutions in the United States, such as Congress and the executive branch, in triggering the bipolar conflict.

These approaches usually gave readers little room to reconstruct ideological and strategic perceptions, issues, and dilemmas that transcended the purely U.S. point of view. Despite their differences, these perspectives on Cold War history told the story of the conflict between the two superpowers essentially from the historical standpoint of the United States.

Only since the recent emergence of a new Cold War history have studies attempted to move beyond the reductionism of these three main interpretive approaches to the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. The use of the phrase new Cold War history is a provisional linguistic strategy to indicate a series of historiographical innovations that, from various perspectives, have sought to redress the reductionism of orthodox, revisionist, and post-revisionist authors. The defining feature of this recent research has been to decentralize Cold War studies, moving away from a purely U.S. historical perspective. The establishment of new archives outside the United States has undoubtedly been instrumental in consolidating these new historiographical interpretations. The most important initial steps in this new direction have been works reconstructing the Soviet perspective in counterpoint to that of the United States, based on previously unpublished primary sources from archives held in the former Soviet Union. Authors such as Vladislav Zubok, Constantine Pleshakov, and Andrea Graziosi struck a new seam of research, more recently explored by a younger generation of researchers such as Artemy Kalinovsky, Jeremy Friedman, and Alessandro Iandolo, among others. These authors have had an important impact on our understanding of the various political, economic, and social dynamics that characterized the Soviet Union’s political maneuvers in Europe and the Third World during the years of its conflict with Washington. In particular, Friedman—apart from exploring the Soviet perspective—reconstructed China’s role in the Third World, an issue overlooked by traditional Cold War historiography.

Equally important for the fresh historiographical approach to the period, with particular relevance for the evolution of Latin America’s Cold War studies, was the publication of Odd Arne Westad’s work at the turn of the twenty-first century. In his most important book, The Global Cold War, which discusses the impact caused by the global conflict between the two superpowers, Westad took a pioneering approach by focusing on the Third World as a way to develop a comprehensive understanding of the period and its problems. Instead of viewing peripheries as merely passive settings for the conflict between the two superpowers, the author considers their active role in the Cold War. Westad defines the Cold War as being a clash between two conflicting visions of modernity that used the Third World as an ideal theater to demonstrate their respective advantages. Furthermore, the Norwegian historian’s work shows how Third World elites tried to adapt or even capitalize on two sets of ideas that came bundled with vast amounts of material assistance, even though this also brought strong political interventions by Moscow and Washington in the internal affairs of the countries receiving support.

Since Westad, Cold War studies no longer tell the story of the clash between the West, namely the United States and Europe, and the Soviet Union. In other words, this new perspective has made the Third World an integral part of studies on the Cold War period.

Recent research inspired by Westad’s work shows how