Grassroots Movements and Witnesses for Peace: Challenging U.S. Policies in Latin America in the Post‐Cold War Era

Abstract

This article examines the U.S.‐Latin American peace movement from the end of the Cold War until the present, and attempts to explain the regeneration of an earlier movement which had peaked in the decade of the 1980s. Most scholars believed that the Central American peace movement ended by the early 1990s, but Virginia Williams argues that new phenomena revived the existing peace organizations of the 1980s and gave life to new ones. This article focuses on a few specific peace organizations—Witness for Peace, School of the Americas Watch, and the Committe for the Rescue and Defense of Vieques, but seeks to explain the larger movement for peace and justice in the Americas.