Latin America’s Cold War

Abstract

Hal Brands’s goal in reconstructing the history of Latin America’s Cold War seeks to deal with the subject through a multinational and multilayered approach. By this the author means integrating perspectives from diverse realms and views, from the highest echelons of superpower diplomacy down to the everyday negotiation of social and political relationships, in order to understand how global, regional, and local influences interacted in shaping Latin America’s Cold War. This has been the call of recent research and writing from a variety of scholars of Latin America’s Cold War. On the surface Brands seems to be sensitive to new approaches, debates, and sources, but in fact he delivers a conventional diplomatic history, albeit enriched by his foray into numerous Latin American and US archives. By not delving into the everyday forms of the Cold War conundrum, the book limits our understanding of the human, the ethical, and the complex interaction of the internal and the external roots and consequences of the long and bloody Cold War in Latin America, which much of the recent Cold War history has tried to recover.True, the history of the Cold War cannot be reduced to the duel between the political and ideological right and left, but neither can it be depicted as a result of the convergence of post – Second World War sociological and political conflicts embedded in historically given economic, political, and cultural structures. According to Brands, Latin America’s history after the Second World War is the result of extremism fostering extremism, intervention inducing intervention, and one layer of instability exacerbating another as if they were all equal, as if there were not disparities and abuse of power. Critical history is not about apportioning blame, but neither is it bereft of ethical values. The author’s view is that to think in terms of moral implications leads scholars to blindness; instead, Brands advocates a detached narrative and analysis.Brands’s point of departure is the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and not the paradigmatic overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz’s democratic government of Guatemala in 1954, in which, he points out, the United States did not play a central role. The rejection of the centrality of the United States in the unfolding and trajectory of the Cold War in Latin America runs throughout the book, flying in the face of mountains of studies that have documented the contrary. We are told time and time again that the point is not to assign the United States “the primary responsibility for the course of events in Latin America during the 1960s” (p. 61). While it is true that the United States did not manufacture all of the Latin American dictators, by doing business with them and by using trade, labor, technology, culture, and even philanthropy as props to its relations with them as the stronger partner and the provider of military know-how and hardware, the US government tended to coerce much of Latin America to its Cold War designs.At critical junctures, the book reiterates the argument that US intervention and counterinsurgency were not decisive in defeating the radical left but that the left and the guerrillas defeated themselves. This point requires qualification. Indeed, the foco theory proved to be the wrong tactic to retrieve the population from the shackles of poverty and domination, and made the revolutionaries an easy prey for counterinsurgency forces, but this worked largely the other way round: state repression and counterinsurgency forces weakened the left, compelled it to make blunders and be cornered, as in the Guatemala of the 1980s. Even conceding that the revolutionary left’s erroneous steps reduced its efficacy, drawing moral equivalency between state terror and revolutionary insurgency is a travesty.As other reviewers of Brands’s book have noted, the author’s insistence on parallel responses to Latin America’s unrest by Moscow, Havana, and Washington leads to treating the three players as if they were of equal strength and engagement. True, “Moscow, Havana, and Washington looked to gain influence in Latin America by remaking the region in their own images” (p. 38), but their intentions, instruments of power, and not least the strength of their allies certainly differed. To treat them as equals distorts the complex picture.Even though Brands did not intend it that way, his Latin America’s Cold War can be read as an eloquent exemplification of what Greg Grandin describes in Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (2006) as the denial of any wrongdoing on the part of the United States.