World War I in Latin America

Abstract

The First World War was a global event that intensively involved Latin America. From the beginning, Latin Americans sensed that this war had worldwide scope. For many observers, the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 represented a profound turning point in the unfolding of history. Because of the breakdown of the European civilizational and development model, and in the unreserved belief in human progress in the years from 1914 to 1918, a world where Latin America had occupied a fixed position was effectively gone. Many contemporary witnesses agreed that an era had ended in the days of August 1914, and a new, still uncertain age had begun. The war stimulated the massive utilization of new forms of media like photography and cinema. Press photography proved to be an important instrument of propaganda, which contributed to the worldwide circulation of war pictures that seemed to depict objective reality. The understanding of reality expanded, for what was real no longer simply pertained to one’s own life, but also to events mediated through imagery. It was precisely in places like Latin America, where there was a geographical separation from the front lines that people experienced the war, both privately and publicly, through media-produced images. What is more, the World War I took place there especially as a propaganda war, which also caused a largely unprecedented form of radical hatemongering among rivals to spread in the subcontinent. Consequently, the traditional bias toward European models proved to be obsolete and the future had to be conceived anew. Due to this attitude, the call for a reorientation of identities on a national and regional level, which had already gained momentum before the war, became even louder. Scholarship on Latin American history has for decades largely ignored the First World War as a major event in which the continent played a part. This was mainly due to historiography’s focus on the nation and as well as initially on military and diplomatic, and later social and economic, topics. Only recently, with the rise of the new cultural history and global history, have the tides started to turn. Several important studies have now been published.