Seeing and unseeing landscapes: Geographic knowledges, cartographic technologies, and the early Cold War in Latin America

In 2003, historian Diego Armus reflected on the coalescing subfield of the history of medicine in Latin America. His edited collection Disease in the History of Modern Latin America: From Malaria to AIDS demonstrated that medicine was a fruitful analytical lens for exploring broad historical phenomena in the region. A new volume, Peripheral Nerve: Health and Medicine in Cold War Latin America, edited by Anne-Emanuelle Birn and Raúl Necochea López, illustrates how much the subfield has developed over the last two decades—and how much necessary research remains to be done.In exploring the Cold War through Latin American medicine, Peripheral Nerve pokes holes in two influential narratives that have guided scholars' understandings of the Cold War. The first replicates a bipolar framework and centers action in the Western and Eastern blocs; the second maintains that the United States exercised an all-encompassing hegemony over Latin America, pulling the puppet strings throughout the region to secure its interests. Peripheral Nerve proves how these two assumptions have papered over a more complex reality.The title of the book cleverly speaks to its arguments. “Peripheral” references Immanuel Wallerstein's designation of Latin America as a periphery to the cores of the global economy. “Nerve” speaks to the “impudence or even daring” of the region's actors (p. 19). However, the combined term “peripheral nerve” has a physiological meaning: those nerves that connect the brain and the body, which “often cause the most insistent shock (pain) that makes the body take note” (p. 19). Birn and Necochea López contend that seemingly marginal Latin Americans instead shaped the trajectory of medicine in the global Cold War.Rather than that influence being unidirectional or even bidirectional, Latin Americans occupied a “complex positionality,” one in which there were “multidirectional, tangled connections among all the players” (pp. 3, 22). While Latin Americans did have to contend with constraints imposed by the United States, they did so in multifaceted ways, accepting, rejecting, or reshaping these constraints to serve their own interests. In addition, Latin Americans sought medical connections with a variety of other players in the Cold War, whether in the Soviet Union, the Eastern bloc, or the global South.The editors' historicization of the Cold War emphasizes how complex the era was. The chapters are broken into three chronological sections, allowing readers to trace change and continuity over time. For example, Gabriela Soto Laveaga's chapter on “wonder drugs” in Mexico illustrates that the opening salvo of the Cold War proved unique. In the 1940s and 1950s, one Mexican company maintained a virtual monopoly over steroid production. This power put US pharmaceutical companies at a disadvantage and allowed Mexicans to establish pharmaceutical and political connections with the Soviet Union. However, Mexicans' agency proved tenuous. As the Cold War heated up, US pharmaceutical companies purchased control over Mexico's steroid hormone industry, claiming that such a move was critical for ensuring national security.Other chapters emphasize continuity. For example, Jennifer Lynn Lambe posits that leading Cuban psychiatrists in the 1960s attempted to extirpate Freudian influences and make hegemonic the Pavlovian model (the basis of Soviet psychiatry). Despite their efforts, Freudian traces remained among “an unorthodox mélange” of psychiatric practices in Cuba (p. 159). This landscape bears remarkable similarities to Argentine psychiatrists later in the Cold War. Marco Ramos explores this group of medical practitioners who criticized psychiatric schools in both the United States and the Soviet Union for their inherent imperialism. Instead, these Argentine psychiatrists sought to develop diverse alternatives: from anti-imperial models that could apply throughout the global South to models that were fundamentally local, drawing on national popular practices. Lambe and Ramos thus demonstrate that Latin American psychiatrists did not adhere to a binary East-West divide or a solely North-South orientation; instead, they practiced what Lambe terms a “theoretical eclecticism” (p. 160).The authors within Peripheral Nerve present a dazzling array of medical connections that Latin Americans forged in the Cold War. The editors, however, note that the volume is limited (e.g., its lack of attention to subaltern actors) and detail a set of research questions that still need to be answered. Their compelling agenda centers on more fully understanding medical connections, within and beyond the region.Another fruitful avenue that may exist in the future is more explicitly comparative scholarship. In the foreword, Gilbert Joseph notes that there was a particular Latin American Cold War. Peripheral Nerve contends that there was also a distinctive Latin American Cold War medicine, with long-term legacies, such as Latin America's contemporary leadership in South-South health cooperation. Birn notes that histories of science in the Cold War have remained focused on the two superpowers and “their major allies” (p. 7). One hopes that as the history of medicine in Africa and Asia during the Cold War more fully develops, Latin Americanists researching transnational medical connections will employ a comparative lens toward other parts of the global South. While a difficult task, this will more firmly define what makes Latin American Cold War medicine unique as well as historicizing the causes and identifying the consequences of those characteristics. Peripheral Nerve has proven that such efforts will engage a multidisciplinary audience of readers.

This article examines the interventions of different official and non-official actors of Mexican origin in the Costa Rican civil war in 1948. The article demonstrates that during the early Cold War years, Mexico’s international relations with Central America were conducted by multiple actors, part of different transnational networks, in part due to the ruptures surrounding the pacts of what was known as the Mexican revolutionary family. This article reconstructs the different historical trajectories, interests, agendas, and actions of these actors, shedding light on a topic often neglected by Mexican foreign policy historiography. Taking up recent debates over Mexico’s stance during the Latin American Cold War, this article contributes to filling the gap in the early Cold War Mexican foreign policy towards the region, stressing nuances over the existence of a non-intervention, homogeneous foreign policy that prioritized the relationship with the United States.

In January 1958 the Council of Ministers of the Romanian People's Republic launched a worldwide effort to showcase Romania's progress in health care. The decision reflected the Communist regime's medical Cold War diplomacy and was also a result of growing interest in what outside Eastern Europe was called “socialized medicine,” that is, a state-funded and organized health care system with equal and universal access for all citizens. Among the governments that wished to learn from Romania's experience were those of Bolivia and Argentina. Their representatives were invited to Bucharest for official visits or specialization courses. In the case of Argentina, the collaboration also stemmed from interwar encounters at international medical congresses between physicians of the two countries.This example of early exchanges between Romania and Latin American countries signals a broader research field that has recently emerged in Cold War studies: the multiple geographies of medical exchanges, mobilities, and conceptualizations in the 1945–1989 period. The volume edited by Anne-Emanuelle Birn and Raúl Necochea López is an essential addition to the growing literature about the relationship between health care, the bipolarity of the Cold War, and decolonization. Along with other pioneering studies, such as those by Marcos Cueto (Cold War, Deadly Fevers: Malaria Eradication in Mexico, 2007), Young-Sun Hong (Cold War Germany, the Third World, and the Global Humanitarian Regime, 2015), and Dora Vargha (Polio across the Iron Curtain: Hungary's Cold War with an Epidemic, 2018), the collection explores the fascinating terrain determined by the relationship between Cold War politics and rhetoric, on one hand, and notions of health, disease, and welfare, on the other.Peripheral Nerve brings two new dimensions to this scholarship. First, it offers a comprehensive panorama of Latin American cases of local, regional, and transregional alignments engineered by medical experts. It goes beyond the usual focus on U.S. interventions in and hegemony over this part of the world. The contributors convincingly emphasize the agency of Latin American actors, their ability to engage with multiple partners, and their savviness in taking advantage of the ideological competition between the two camps of the Cold War.Second, Peripheral Nerve brings a new chronological perspective for discussing health care entanglements, circulations, and partisanships: ideas, choices, and affinities during the Cold War were rooted in the interwar period. They are linked to the institutional and intellectual history of medical reforms in Latin America before 1945, to international experiences such as cooperation within the League of Nations Health Organization, or to the fascination with the Soviet Union's radical experiment in state-managed health care. Moreover, many of the contributors provide suggestive connections between pre-1989 policies and phenomena that unfolded after the end of the Cold War.The overarching theme of Peripheral Nerve is that of local agency and, consequently, of revising the history of the Cold War from its margins. Such an approach brings Latin America back into the global history of the period, a task flagged by other recent publications as well. For instance, in the introduction to the impressive volume Latin America and the Global Cold War, Thomas Field Jr., Stella Krepp, and Vanni Pettinà affirm that they compiled the book to revive “the history of what were once powerful interactions between Latin America and the rest of the Global South” (p. 2).Peripheral Nerve opens with a foreword by Gilbert Joseph, who places the volume in the general trend of “remaking . . . Latin American Cold War history” (p. ix). Three sections follow, each with its own distinct vantage point. The first deals with the interplay between leftwing internationalism and U.S. pressure on Latin America during the early Cold War. Katherine Bliss examines the biography of Lini de Vries, a former U.S. antifascist volunteer in the Spanish Civil War who sought to elude the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation by going into exile to Mexico in the 1940s. The Mexican government welcomed her contribution to rural health care reform, despite encountering criticism from U.S. officials. Nicole Pacino shows how the shrill anti-Communism of the 1950s in Washington led to the politicization of the Rockefeller Foundation's grants to medical schools in Bolivia, a departure from the institution's more ecumenical approach before 1945. Gabriel Soto Laveaga offers a fascinating study of how U.S. pharmaceutical companies skillfully employed Cold War rhetoric to control international prices and exert pressure on the Mexican government to open up its steroid hormone industry. If in the early 1950s a Mexico City company, Syntex Laboratories, controlled much of the world's steroid trade, by the end of the decade U.S. investors had purchased Syntex and relocated its headquarters to Palo Alto, significantly diminishing Mexico's domestic pharmaceutical capacities. In these three cases one can observe the degrees to which Latin American governments were able to maneuver in the increasingly troubled waters of U.S.-Soviet competition.The second section of the volume deals with the circulation of ideas and experts within the ideological camps of the Cold War. Each contribution underlines levels of ideological adaptation and transfer in various Latin American countries. Raúl Necochea López analyses how fertility surveys in Puerto Rico were the basis for U.S. advocacy of family planning policies throughout Latin America. He insists that this process antagonized Puerto Rican nationalists who used the Cold War to consolidate their position on the island. Gilberto Hochman and Carlos Herinque Paiva present the intellectual and ideological itinerary of parasitologist Samuel Pessoa. They link his fascination with Communist states’ health care systems (from the Soviet Union or China) and his membership in the Brazilian Communist Party to his interwar advocacy for medical, social, and economic reforms in the Brazilian countryside. The chapter provides glimpses into the multifaceted Latin American engagements with “socialized medicine.” From 1956 to 1961, Brazilian President Juscelino Kubitschek emphasized state centralization and planning of programs for the control and eradication of rural endemic diseases (p. 151). Jennifer Lambe examines the evolution of psychiatry in Cuba from the perspective of debates pitting Sigmund Freud against Nikolai Pavlov as central paradigms of the profession. She stresses the prerevolutionary roots of these discussions. She insists on the eclecticism, particularly in the 1960s, of Cuban responses to official attempts to emulate the Soviet focus on the Pavlovian tradition. She also shows how the two Soviet psychiatrists sent to Havana to advise on the revolutionary reform of the discipline had to acknowledge the diversity of local approaches (pp. 172–173).The third section is centered on the multidirectionality of Latin American medical experiences throughout the Cold War. Jadwiga Mooney focuses on two biographies—those of Salvador Allende and Benjamin Viel—when recounting Chilean attempts to create a national health service. For both men, Mooney emphasizes the pre-1945 origins of their reformist projects as well as the role of other health care models, such as the British or the Soviet, in shaping their visions of the Chilean medical system. Marco Ramos's chapter explores Argentinian psychoanalysts’ syncretic interactions and cross-fertilizations with Soviet, Western, and Third Worldist approaches in the field. These exchanges pushed some professionals to call in the 1970s for the “nationalization” of psychiatry so that it would better reflect Argentine realities. Ramos shows the shifting meaning of anti-imperialism and its embeddedness in the local context. This sometimes caused “failed encounters” (desencuentros) between strands of anticolonial medicine (p. 212). Cheasty Anderson contributes a study of Cuban medical teams’ activity in Nicaragua during the Sandinista regime. The Cuban government sought to insulate its medical workers from Nicaraguan society, beyond their medical provision tasks. Nicaraguan officials likewise safeguarded their policymaking autonomy. Anderson offers an engrossing analysis of daily contacts between Cuban personnel and the Nicaraguan population, but she does not fully explore the potential hierarchies of this interaction, particularly the Cuban superiority complex that sometimes appears between the lines of her interviewees’ accounts. Anderson could have also pursued a comparison between Cuban activities and East German doctors’ experience at the Carlos Marx hospital, created and operated by the German Democratic Republic in the 1980s. Iris Borowy has written a captivating account of this medical institution in the journal História, ciências, saúde—Manguinhos (2017). Peripheral Nerve would have benefited from a more comparative exploration connecting Latin American experiences with other instances of medical entanglement and circulation in different regions during the Cold War.Peripheral Nerve ends with a conclusion by the two editors that discusses the new vistas for research on health, medicine, and the Cold War in Latin America. The linchpin for the issues they raise is the central role played by international institutions (e.g., the World Health Organization or United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund) in global health care dynamics. These bodies offered world forums for various governments and their experts to pursue their interests, engage in dialogue, and imagine their positions in international political and medical hierarchies. Birn and López also explore the continuities across the 1989 threshold, underlining that the end of the Cold War did not bring “a wholesale rebooting of health philosophies and proposals in Latin America, instead hosting a mingling of the old and the new” (p. 272). They connect medical solidarities across the region during the post-2000 Pink Tide of elected left-leaning governments with programs first established during the Cold War. For instance, they show how the 2005 PAHO Declaration of Montevideo revived the primary health care principles of the Alma-Ata Declaration (1978), and they point out that the Cuban-Venezuelan Misión Barrio Adentro (Inside the Neighborhood) was an offspring of Havana's pre-1989 medical diplomacy. In this last case, they should have stressed the blatant manipulation of the program by Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro to ensure his and his party's reelection, as detailed for instance in extensive reporting by Nicholas Casey in The New York Times in March 2019.The volume edited by Birn and López is a trailblazing contribution to the global history of medicine during the Cold War. It presents geographies and expertise that recapture the complex connections pursued from Latin America, which equally echoed and defied ideological divides during the second half of the 20th century. Such versatile reading of international health care politics is highly topical for the present: the COVID pandemic has reopened debates about medical diplomacy, competition among health care models, and vaccine nationalism.

ABSTRACTThis essay reviews the burgeoning literature on Latin America’s distinctive variant of the Cold War since about 2000. First, it examines a watershed of recent collaborations between Latin American area specialists and foreign relations scholars, which has dramatically transformed Latin American Cold War Studies. Then, it focuses on two of the more fertile veins in that scholarship: first, the notion that the region’s Cold War should be placed in a broader historical context, which scholars are increasingly referring to as Latin America’s “long Cold War,” and second, the long Cold War’s multivalent cultural dimension. If study of the Latin American Cold War has become something of a growth industry in the last 15 years, its leading edge may well be efforts to tease out the complex, power-laden cultural processes, relationships, exchanges, and institutional forms that antedated and shaped Latin America’s Cold War proper (c. 1947 to the early 1990s), and had consequences beyond the conflict’s denouement.

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-7976.2016v23n36p352The Latin American Cold War theatre was distinct from the global struggle between American capitalism and Soviet communism. The Soviet Union had very little infuence on the region prior to Fidel Castro’s 1960 declaration of Marxism-Leninism. Despite this, a plethora of social struggles spanning virtually every Latin American republic have been broadly grouped together – defned by this Latin American ‘Cold War’. This paper seeks to determine the origins of this paradoxical defnition. It will argue that the convenient alignment of national and international crises was utilized by US Secretary of State George C Marshall in April 1948. The establishment of the Organization of American States sought to realize the political alignment of the hemisphere against ‘Communism’, both Soviet and internal. This confounded many Latin American leaders as communism, while evident, did not pose any legitimate threat to their nations or the region. Hence, Marshall’s sale of an anti-communist declaration, which would decrease the sovereignty of individual states, was made quite diffcult during initial negotiations. Conveniently, On April 9 Colombia was brought to the brink of Civil War following the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. The US State Department knew that the ensuing Colombian Bogotazo was not related to the global Cold War. They had intelligence on the populist liberal Gaitán and the violent response to his assassination. Nevertheless, the opportunity to internationalize the crisis was seized by Marshall. In doing so, the Latin American Cold War emerged with devastating national and regional consequences.

Over the last decade, studies of the Cold War have mushroomed globally. Unfortunately, work on Latin America has not been well represented in either theoretical or empirical discussions of the broader conflict. With some notable exceptions, studies have proceeded in rather conventional channels, focusing on U.S. policy objectives and high-profile leaders (Fidel Castro) and events (the Cuban Missile Crisis) and drawing largely on U.S. government sources. Moreover, only rarely have U.S. foreign relations scholars engaged productively with Latin American historians who analyze how the international conflict transformed the region’s political, social, and cultural life. Representing a collaboration among eleven North American, Latin American, and European historians, anthropologists, and political scientists, this volume attempts to facilitate such a cross-fertilization. In the process, In From the Cold shifts the focus of attention away from the bipolar conflict, the preoccupation of much of the so-called new Cold War history, in order to showcase research, discussion, and an array of new archival and oral sources centering on the grassroots, where conflicts actually brewed. The collection’s contributors examine international and everyday contests over political power and cultural representation, focusing on communities and groups above and underground, on state houses and diplomatic board rooms manned by Latin American and international governing elites, on the relations among states regionally, and, less frequently, on the dynamics between the two great superpowers themselves. In addition to charting new directions for research on the Latin American Cold War, In From the Cold seeks to contribute more generally to an understanding of the conflict in the global south. Contributors . Ariel C. Armony, Steven J. Bachelor, Thomas S. Blanton, Seth Fein, Piero Gleijeses, Gilbert M. Joseph, Victoria Langland, Carlota McAllister, Stephen Pitti, Daniela Spenser, Eric Zolov

After decades of bloodshed and political terror, many lament the rise of the left in Latin America. Since the triumph of Castro, politicians and historians have accused the left there of rejecting democracy, embracing communist totalitarianism, and prompting both revolutionary violence and a right-wing backlash. Through unprecedented archival research and gripping personal testimonies, Greg Grandin powerfully challenges these views in this classic work. In doing so, he uncovers the hidden history of the Latin American Cold War: of hidebound reactionaries holding on to their power and privilege; of Mayan Marxists blending indigenous notions of justice with universal ideas of equality; and, of a United States supporting new styles of state terror throughout the region. With Guatemala as his case study, Grandin argues that the Latin American Cold War was a struggle not between political liberalism and Soviet communism but two visions of democracy - one vibrant and egalitarian, the other tepid and unequal - and that the conflict's main effect was to eliminate homegrown notions of social democracy. Updated with a new preface by the author and an interview with Naomi Klein, The Last Colonial Massacre is history of the highest order - a work that will dramatically recast our understanding of Latin American politics and the role of the United States in the Cold War and beyond.

Precarious Paths to Freedom: The United States, Venezuela, and the Latin American Cold War (2016)

Precarious paths to freedom : the United States, the Caribbean Basin, & the new politics of the Latin American Cold War, 1958-1968

Research on Marxism as a religious movement has primarily focused on its theological implications. Building on this work, this article instead examines the practical aspects of revolutionary Marxism as a religious experience during the Latin American Cold War, and compares it to two other non-Christian religious traditions, Judaism and Umbanda. Drawing on secret police records, memoirs and oral history interviews, this article explores the influence of Judaism, Marxism and Umbanda on the anti-dictatorship activism of Alfredo Syrkis. Through an analysis of Syrkis’s life history, it assesses his conversion from liberal anticommunism to revolutionary Marxism, his participation in Marxist proselytising as a high school activist and his political activity in the clandestine Marxist organisation Revolutionary Popular Vanguard (VPR), highlighting group dynamics that were comparable to millenarian movements. It also considers the importance of other religious traditions in Syrkis’s life, including Judaism, the religion of his parents that equipped him with valuable social ties, and Umbanda, a syncretic Afro-Brazilian religion that Syrkis turned to during times of extreme anxiety in the armed struggle. This article argues that the religious traditions of Judaism, revolutionary Marxism and Umbanda influenced Syrkis’s political activism in both complementary and competing ways. While none of these traditions were able to command Syrkis’s undivided loyalty, collectively they informed the terms of his engagement with and disengagement from the Brazilian armed struggle against military rule. By analysing Syrkis’s life history through the lens of religion, this article broadens the study of cultures of militancy during Latin America’s Cold War.

After decades of bloodshed and political terror, many lament the rise of the left in Latin America. Since the triumph of Castro, politicians and historians have accused the left there of rejecting democracy, embracing communist totalitarianism, and prompting both revolutionary violence and a right-wing backlash. Through unprecedented archival research and gripping personal testimonies, Greg Grandin powerfully challenges these views in this classic work. In doing so, he uncovers the hidden history of the Latin American Cold War: of hidebound reactionaries holding on to their power and privilege; of Mayan Marxists blending indigenous notions of justice with universal ideas of equality; and, of a United States supporting new styles of state terror throughout the region. With Guatemala as his case study, Grandin argues that the Latin American Cold War was a struggle not between political liberalism and Soviet communism but two visions of democracy - one vibrant and egalitarian, the other tepid and unequal - and that the conflict's main effect was to eliminate homegrown notions of social democracy. Updated with a new preface by the author and an interview with Naomi Klein, "The Last Colonial Massacre" is history of the highest order - a work that will dramatically recast our understanding of Latin American politics and the role of the United States in the Cold War and beyond.

In Making Art Panamerican, Claire Fox explores the shifting institutional landscape behind mid-twentieth-century attempts to create a unified artistic tradition in the Americas. She inscribes these attempts within the longer history of Pan-Americanism— formulations centered on the perceived or desired unity of the culture and history of the hemisphere’s diverse nations—which spans the last two centuries. Fox’s four chapters combine a keen analysis of an impressive array of archival sources with a lucid interpretation of artworks. The thread that connects the chapters is the career as a cultural bureaucrat of the Cuban-born José Gómez-Sicre (1916–1991). Gómez-Sicre’s career began in the Visual Arts Section of the Pan American Union (PAU), an office founded in 1910 in Washington, DC, by a series of governments of the Americas and that became the Organization of American States in 1948. US–Latin American cultural relations, a priority for the US government during World War II, became a more ambiguously defined prerogative at this early Cold War moment. Socially committed artistic movements, some of which challenged US cultural dominance, also became increasingly visible throughout the Americas. “Gómez-Sicre’s trajectory from progressive social democrat and communist fellow traveler to cold war liberal,” a transformation that took place as he navigated this scenario, serves as a foil for Fox’s compelling analysis of “the generational impact of the cold war on Latin American intellectual and cultural sectors” (pp. 20–21).Among the many notable episodes that Fox examines is Gómez-Sicre’s participation in the triangulation of artists and institutions in Havana, New York City, and Mexico City that lay behind the completion in Havana of then-exiled David Alfaro Siqueiros’s mural Allegory of the Equality and Confraternity of the White and Black Races in Cuba (1943). Fox shows how this embattled commission underscored tensions between Gómez-Sicre’s simultaneous sympathy for socially committed art and his desire to sponsor art with such universal value that it could transcend national contexts and become part of a hemispheric canon. Similar tensions animated Gómez-Sicre’s Exposición Interamericana de Pintura Moderna, a survey of Latin American art organized in 1948 in Caracas to commemorate the inauguration of democratically elected Venezuelan president Rómulo Gallegos, and its successor exhibit, the traveling show 32 Artistas de las Américas (1949– 1950), which Fox describes as likely the “first traveling exhibition consisting primarily of Latin American art organized for Latin American viewing publics” (p. 117). Backed by corporate funding tied primarily to US interests and supported by local Latin American government agencies, these shows attempted to fuse the perceived universalizing ethos of modern art with a developmentalist praise of liberal democracy and modernization, a melding together of aesthetic and political agendas that defined much of Gómez-Sicre’s oeuvre.In chapter 3, Fox provides a remarkable analysis of the rise to international prominence of Mexican artist José Luis Cuevas, which was significantly aided by a show of his work organized by Gómez-Sicre at the PAU in 1954. The defining aspect of Cuevas’s rise was his critique of the official art of Mexico, chiefly mural painting, as exemplified in his 1956 manifesto “The Cactus Curtain.” Cuevas’s rise is well documented, yet Fox adds substantially to its study by examining his “fluency in the languages of cold war universalism at the PAU and the urban cosmopolitanism of his Mexican coterie” (p. 139). Similarly enlightening is Fox’s analysis in chapter 4 of HemisFair ’68, the Pan-Americanist-themed world’s fair celebrated in San Antonio, Texas, in 1968. Fox illuminates the extent to which this fair, focused heavily on celebrating US-Mexican cultural dialogue at this border location, was influenced not only by local and international racial and ideological divisions but also by officially endorsed formulations of mestizaje, or cultural mixing, emanating from Mexico.Making Art Panamerican is an accessible text, and it contributes substantially to at least three current trends in scholarship. It offers much to recent studies of the Latin American Cold War, which characterize the region not as a passive recipient of superpower interventions but as a complex terrain of conflicts with global repercussions. It also adds to studies of Pan-Americanism’s multilayered cultural impact, and it is arguably the most significant contribution to this field to date. Thirdly, it contributes to the expanding literature on the governmental and institutional patronage of twentieth-century art in Latin America. With impeccable archival zeal, Fox demonstrates that evolving notions of a hemispheric artistic tradition as formulated during the Cold War and the idea of Latin American art as we know it today are powerfully interconnected. As such, her book is necessary reading not only for those interested in twentieth-century politics and culture but also for anyone involved with the expanding terrain of teaching and research in the visual culture of the Americas.

Precarious Paths to Freedom: The United States, Venezuela, and the Latin American Cold War ‐ by Miller, Aragorn Storm

Aragorn Storm Miller , Precarious Paths to Freedom: The United States, Venezuela, and the Latin American Cold War (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2016), pp. xxi + 278, $65.00, hb. - Volume 49 Issue 3

Tracking the Cold War in Latin America William Michael Schmidli (bio) Hal Brands . Latin America's Cold War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. 385 pp. Figures, notes and index. $29.95. Stephen G. Rabe . The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. xxxvii + 247 pp. Chronology, notes, recommendations for further reading and research, and index. $19.95. In an influential 2003 survey of recent scholarship on U.S.-Latin American relations, Max Paul Friedman asserted that, after decades of intellectual jostling with advocates of the orthodox or nationalist position, revisionist scholars had come to dominate the field. "It is now unusual" Friedman wrote, "to come across a work of history that strongly argues the merit of U.S. policies in the region or claims these have been designed principally to protect and promote freedom and democracy."1 Yet if revisionist scholarship still revolved around the "tragic idiom" first articulated by William Appleman Williams, Friedman continued, the field was nonetheless in the midst of a dynamic evolution. Reflecting broader trends in U.S. foreign relations scholarship, studies of U.S.-Latin American relations increasingly incorporated multinational (and multilingual) research and revealed a willingness to consider non-U.S. perspectives and an emphasis on Latin American agency. As a result, "their findings question some conventional wisdom about U.S. power," Friedman concluded, "including elements of the revisionist synthesis that depicted the United States as a regional hegemon, a 'core' nation to the Latin American 'periphery,' or—to take any one of the familiar images—a puppetmaster pulling the strings of puppet leaders, a central planet orbited by satellites, or the manipulator of client states."2 Nine years later, Hal Brands' Latin America's Cold War reveals just how far scholarship on U.S.-Latin American relations has moved in the direction anticipated by Friedman. The breadth of Brands' research is impressive: forty archives in thirteen countries—including ten Latin American nations. The scope of Latin America's Cold War is equally ambitious: Brands describes his book as the first "multiarchival, international" history to assess the entire Cold War era in Latin America. Both "multinational and multilayered," Latin America's [End Page 332] Cold War "deals seriously with all sides of the diplomatic and transnational struggles that occurred during this period," Brands writes, and it weaves diverse perspectives "from the highest echelons of superpower diplomacy to the everyday negotiation of social and political relationships—into an understanding of how the global, the regional, and the local interacted in shaping Latin America's Cold War" (p. 2). As a result, Latin America's Cold War offers a sharp corrective to revisionist studies that situate the projection of U.S. political, economic, and military power into Latin America at the heart of the conflict. The U.S. effort to prevent communist inroads in the hemisphere, Brands contends, was just one facet in a "series of overlapping conflicts" that buffeted Latin America during the Cold War era, including longstanding social, political, and economic struggles and the ideological impact of decolonization and the emergence of the Third World (p. 7). Far from exerting unchallenged hemispheric hegemony, he continues, U.S. Cold War policymakers struggled to contain the initiatives of their Soviet and Cuban counterparts in Latin America in a competition for influence marked by "substantial symmetry" (p. 262). Moreover, even U.S. success in shaping Latin American allies was decidedly limited; not only were the region's "shrewder statesmen as likely to manipulate as to be manipulated by the United States," Brands writes, but U.S. Cold War initiatives had a limited impact on anticommunist Latin American policymakers and military leaders, who needed "no coaching on the dangers of internal violence and upheaval" (pp. 257, 81). With its emphasis on Latin American agency and sensitivity to the many players and layers that shaped the Cold War in Latin America, Brands' book stands as a model of international history. But does Latin America's Cold War go too far in decentering the role of the United States? In striving for balance, nuance, and complexity, does Brands assign too much agency to Latin America relative to the enormous power...