La Guerra Fria en América Latina by Vanni Pettinà (review)

The many contributions of the recent studies on the experiences of the Cold War in Latin America notwithstanding, no good synthetic, introductory reflection was available, at least not until last year, when the series Historia Mínima, published by Colegio de Mexico, commissioned Vanni Pettinà to competently fill this gap.

To be sure, prominent scholars working on what is coming to be known as New Cold War History, such as Odd Westad and Carole Fink, have provided new frames of analysis that moved us beyond the limits of the realm of US-Soviet rivalry. It is equally clear that the analyses of innovative authors such as Stephen Rabe, Greg Grandin, Gilbert Joseph, and Hal Brands, among others, have all in their own ways enriched our understanding of the specificities of events taking place in the Latin American context. All in all, though, Pettinà's original frame of analysis on the basis of Latin America's own idiosyncratic line of developments, which at times worked more as counterpoints to global events than their pure local manifestations, provides us with a uniquely valuable, critical overview of Latin America's Cold War.

The Cold War was clearly an all-impacting historical dynamic that helped reshape all regions of the world in the second half of the twentieth century. Yet it was the case that, despite the growing limitation imposed by the ever more intolerant behavior of the US government in the hemisphere, Latin American experiences did not always simply mirror broader international trends. This was clearest from the second half of the 1960s into the 1980s, when, despite the fact that the global Cold War was significantly defined by the experiences of the détente, Latin American societies experienced unparalleled levels of domestic violence. This situation derived mostly from the fact that traditional oligarchic groups, closely aligned with better-equipped national armed forces, managed to articulate their own interests along the lines of US regional Cold War policies, many times by overplaying the internal communist threats in order to strengthen their trustworthy ally credentials vis-à-vis regional hegemonic positions.

In addition to an initial valuable historiographical section that critically examines the limitations even of the most recent scholarship on the field, Pettinà's work offers four substantive sections covering the main phases of the Cold War experiences in Latin America. Beyond this chronological organization though, in detailing each decade of the Cold War, from the mid-1950s to the 80s, La Guerra Fria en América Latina provides a well-grounded narrative interweaving global and local developments along an insightful analytical frame that highlights the unique character of the Cold War in Latin America.

In effect, the book convincingly advances the notion that any good analysis of the Cold War in Latin America should acknowledge the fact that the global bifurcation of the world along conflicting ideologies and economic projects was paralleled in Latin America by an internal rivalry the author calls an internal fracture. For its part, this regional trend of growing domestic bifurcations revealed the reasserted mobilization of conservative groups who shrewdly utilized the new global oppositional frames of the period to revert the more inclusive socio-economic and political policies put in motion by the reformist political coalitions coming to power in most countries in the throes of the global economic depression on the 1930s.

In tandem with global Cold War dynamics manifested regionally with local overtones (which in many ways made Latin America's Cold War more vivid than in other parts of the world), historically fractured Latin American societies thus experienced the 1960s, 70s, and, in some places even the 80s, along deeper socio-economic and political cleavages still marring the region to this day. Some of the important economic transformations of the period (such as the industrial consolidation of countries like Brazil) were indeed reached by means of undemocratic political processes and the deepening of wealth disparities attuned to the hawkish Cold War policies of the US...