Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America

Abstract

With Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America, Tanya Harmer delivers a brilliant book that offers new and needed perspectives on the apex of the Latin American Cold War. This thorough biography of a prominent activist and key link within the multilayered regional Left expands far beyond the life of an individual and explores various Cold War patterns and dynamics. Owing to an extraordinary array of previously unconsulted primary sources, this book is a masterful example of how, by exploring one person's life and surroundings, researchers can scrutinize broader phenomena—in this case, “a particular revolutionary moment in Latin America's Cold War” (p. 16).A major asset of the book is Harmer's methodical examination of how the Eduardo Frei administration (1964–70) influenced the Chilean Left. There is a regrettable trend in Cold War historiography to disregard Chile's Christian Democratic experience, which fostered a “climate of reform and voluntarism” that had a strong impact on a younger generation of revolutionaries (p. 88). Frei's reformist agenda, which included rapprochement with the socialist sphere, helped set the scene for new patterns of mobilization and activated mounting hopes that forged a dynamic of radicalization by expectation. This concatenation had a lot to do with the rise and fate of Salvador Allende's socialist project. Thus while the Popular Unity period has received the bulk of academic attention, Harmer convincingly invites us to further delve into the years preceding it, in order to reveal those hard-to-grasp mechanisms that led to the growth of revolutionary awareness.A second major strength of this book is its incorporation of a gender approach across the entire volume. This approach demonstrates how decisive gendered political divisions were in determining (and stymieing) women's aspirations and political possibilities. The book probes episodes in both Chile and Cuba in which Beatriz Allende's ambitions were repeatedly hampered by well-entrenched, masculinist revolutionary imagery. This is aptly presented as evidence of how Latin American women were constrained in the political sphere.But despite these nearly insurmountable constraints, Allende played a pivotal role as key mediator among multiple revolutionary groups, often with clashing proclivities. She was able to navigate across several factions and managed—sometimes successfully—to build ties within the complex Latin American Left: among Cuban and Chilean officials under Salvador Allende, radical and moderate Chilean leftists, and local and exiled revolutionaries in Chile and Cuba. Far from simply an idiosyncrasy, Beatriz Allende's astounding ability to assume “different roles and personalities depending on the situation” contributed to shaping the hemispheric Left's progression (p. 104). By highlighting Allende's position as a bridge between factions—with constant and revealing illustrations of this peppered throughout the book—Harmer underscores the role of Cold War intermediaries and, by doing so, exposes why a transnational outlook is fundamental to a fuller picture of the Latin American Cold War.However, even though Harmer has long been a key proponent of the concept of the “global Cold War”—coined by her doctoral dissertation director, Odd Arne Westad—this book lacks a wider discussion of the appropriateness of a transnational history approach to Allende's biography. The book is punctuated with personal episodes of Allende's multifaceted and tormented life that exerted an impact on her political posture. While the book evinces both inner and transnational dynamics, it does not provide a broader debate on the main factors that ultimately played the greatest role in defining Allende's trajectory and, by extension, the nature of Latin America's Cold War. Can personal stories sometimes outshine global trends? Are people's political mobilization and choices molded by personal experiences? Or should we rather focus on the grand ideological narratives and developments? Harmer presumably has a clear answer to these queries, but a more straightforward discussion of this in the book would have been desirable in clarifying her intellectual approach.While the book certainly delivers an eloquently multidimensional view of the Left, the Right is barely considered for its ideological ramifications in the global Cold War. Undoubtedly Allende and her political entourage “faced terrible odds” in confronting “powerful, foreign-backed opponents” (p. 265). But beyond its repressive apparatus and sinister alliance with the United States, the Latin American Right, as Vanni Pettinà has pointed out, also had a political project, one that garnered significant support from the economic elite as well as large portions of the regional middle class. Harmer is well aware of this, but her depiction of the Right without its ideological distinctiveness (which ultimately motivated violence) is one slight flaw in an otherwise formidable and indispensable book for both contemporary Latin Americanist and Cold War experts.