In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War (review)

Latin America suffered a hideous fate during the Cold War. In the four decades that followed the overthrow of the popularly elected government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán (1950–54), over 200,000 Guatemalans perished. Most died at the hands of right-wing fanatics. Anti-Communist warriors also exacted a terrible toll in Central American countries like El Salvador. In the southern cone countries of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay, tens of thousands of citizens disappeared in the 1960s and 1970s. The ferocious Argentine military butchered perhaps 30,000 people during la guerra sucia. General Augusto Pinochet’s thugs tortured to death the father of Chilean President Michelle Bachelet (2006-) and abused her. Such horrors followed U.S. covert interventions in Latin America and were carried out by anti-Communist regimes that received stout support from U.S. presidential administrations.

The editors, Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniela Spenser, and their nine essayists agree that Latin America was a casualty of the Cold War. The Soviet-American confrontation helped impoverish the region, undermined popular democracy, and created the context for gross violations of human rights. As Joseph notes in his introduction, “Latin American states used a Cold War rationale, generated outside the region, to wage war against their citizens, to gain or perpetuate power, and to create or justify authoritarian military regimes” (p. 5). Joseph’s insight provides the rationale for this collection. The editors believe that the national and “grassroots” dimension of the Cold War in Latin America have too often been neglected, especially by historians of U.S. foreign relations.

This “new encounter with the Cold War” promises more than it delivers. Many of the essays had been previously published in Spenser’s edited volume, Espejos de la guerra fría (2004). To be sure, an English publication reaches a wider audience. But Piero Gleijeses analysis of Cuba’s decision to intervene in Africa is a summary of his brilliant book, Conflicting Missions (2002). Ariel C. Armony similarly rehashes his study of the Argentine military’s support and training of the anti-San-dinistas, the contras, that first appeared in his monograph, Argentina, the United States and the Anti-Communist Crusade in Latin America (1997). Seth Fein repeats the arguments that he has made in other journal articles on how the U.S. government used the culture industry—film and newsreels—to promote U.S. foreign policy. In her article on the Cuban Missile Crisis, Spenser introduces some new documents from East European archives. Spenser’s chapter, however competent, offers nothing that could not be found in the innumerable monographs on the crisis, such as “One Hell of a Gamble” (1997) by Alexsandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali.

Four of the 12 essays in the collection focus on Cold War Mexico. The editors believe that scholars have not underscored that the desire by Mexico’s governing elites for domestic order, stability, and market capitalism coincided with the international agenda of the United States. Eric Zolov demonstrates that the sacking of the U.S. cultural center in Morelia, Michoacán involved more than popular anger over the U.S. invasion of Playa Girón in April 1961. The uprising also reflected a yearning for a restoration of Mexico’s revolutionary promise under the leadership of Michoacán’s own President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-40). In his sophisticated article, “Chicano Cold Warriors,” Stephen Pitti shows that César Chávez and his United Farm Workers adopted, in their union organizing, the religious and nationalist themes that traditionally characterized ethnic Mexican rural militancy. As a way, however, of demonstrating their Americanism, Chávez and his followers adopted the fierce anti-communism of the U.S. trade union movement. Ironically, the major U.S. union, the AFL-CIO, collaborated in the 1960s with the CIA in undermining constitutional governments in Brazil and British Guiana.

Two essayists...