13

The Cold War and Latin America

After the Cuban revolution, no other event positioned Latin America more in terms of the Cold War than the 1973 coup in Chile. By overthrowing their elected government in the name of anti-Communism, Chilean officers brought the global conflict home to an extent that few of their compatriots had thought possible. They also brought terror and the mass violation of human rights to a country that had known few such crimes in the twentieth century. Supporters of the elected government were detained in sports arenas and assembly halls before being sent off to prison camps without any legal process. Many were tortured. “The torture took place daily,” a female victim recounted. “We would be blindfolded, strapped to beds and then it would begin. There were electric shocks administered to all over our bodies, and then there would be a rape.”¹ Even after a century of peace, Chileans could commit terrible atrocities against each other in the name of ideology.

BY 1973 SOUTH AMERICA was no newcomer to the Cold War. Growing out of an already established US hegemony on the continent, its roots go back to the late nineteenth century, when the United States gradually replaced Britain as the key power in the region. But the origins of the Cold War in Latin America are not all about the effects of US supremacy. They are also about class and ethnic conflict inside Latin American republics and about the growth of nationalism, populism, and the Left. On the whole, perhaps, the roots of the Latin American Cold War fed on high levels of inequality and social oppression. The region’s greatest challenge has been to overcome extreme differences in levels of income and the political instability that such long-term inequities create.

What the Cold War added to this mix of dominance and resistance was the single-minded US preoccupation with Communism that became relentless from the late 1940s on. Successive US Administrations saw Latin American radicalism and Soviet-style Communism as natural allies of each other. This obsession became particularly important after the Cuban revolution, but it was visible well before then, for instance in the US intervention in Guatemala in 1954. It led the United States to ally itself with military regimes all over the continent. These regimes were the real tragedy of the Cold War in Latin America. They crippled the continent, even in those few cases when the time of their rule overlapped with economic advances. They disassociated their populations from participation in politics and from identifying with the state. They prevented the social progress that would have produced a more inclusive middle class. These regimes were not good for their countries nor for US relations with their countries. But the Cold War clouded the judgment of both Latin American elites and the US government, producing a symbiotic system of oppression that neither party benefitted from in the long run.

THE RISE OF US hegemony in Latin America was a much slower process than most people imagine. As late as 1939 the main European countries were more important than the United States for overall Latin American trade, even though US investment had increased strongly in the interwar period. In the early twentieth century, after the US invasion of Cuba in 1898, US influence spread gradually from the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America to the countries in South America. But it was World War II that signaled the big breakthrough for US supremacy throughout the Americas. By then, not only was the US economy predominant over that of all of its Latin American partners (the Argentinian GDP per capita, which had been two-thirds that of the United States in 1900, had been reduced to half by 1950), but the war again cut the continent off from its trade with Europe, and Washington attempted to solidify its political grip in order to keep any influence by the German-led Axis Powers out of the American republics. The fully developed US hegemony in the Americas therefore coincided in time with the Cold War as an international system, and should be understood in light of it.

The special fear of postwar US administrations was of Communism seducing Latin Americans away from US-inspired models of development. According to views widely held in the United States, Latinos, like children, had to be guided onto the right path in terms of politics and economics, and North Americans had to do the guiding. If the US sense of purpose failed, then the Soviets and their allies could do what the Germans and Japanese had attempted to do during World War II: tempt the easily excitable Latin American republics in directions that would be disastrous for US economic and strategic interest and for the Latinos themselves. Just like in Europe, the ease with which US images of Nazi subversion melted into equally frightening depictions of Communist subversion is striking in US policy-making as well as in public assumptions. By 1948, both the State Department and the CIA were on the lookout for Communist influence in Latin America, but could so far, as they truthfully reported to President Harry Truman, see few signs of it.

For US Cold War presidents, Latin America was in a special zone in which US power had to reign supreme to protect basic US security and US global aims. Much as Russians in the USSR thought of the Slavic part of eastern Europe as a sphere with which they had special relations for ethnic and cultural reasons, many US leaders envisaged special relations between their own country and the countries to its south, not because of culture, but because of politics. The Latin American states were republics, just like their bigger brother to the north, and had liberated themselves from the European powers and initially shown much promise. But all of the promise of republicanism in Latin America had, in Washington’s view, been squandered by the Latinos through their lethargy, caprice, and moral inadequacy. Good governance in Latin America needed a solid portion of US paternalism if it were not to be enticed away from its purpose.

But the US calling to guide Latin Americans toward their purpose was challenged by North American concepts of race and empire. From the nineteenth century on, white people in the United States had been wondering whether Latin Americans were capable of copying the US model of modernity. Could the “race” to which they belonged—a construct that Americans of north European origin placed far below themselves on the ethnic hierarchy—prevent Latin Americans from ever achieving order and prosperity, even if guided toward these standards? And furthermore: Was the US relationship with Latin America one in which normal boundaries for interstate behavior were valid? Could “republics” that in the US view had none of the founding virtues of good governance—personal autonomy, law, property rights—be regarded as equals of the American republic? Did the United States of America have natural borders, and—if so—where did these borders end? As late as 1864 US secretary of state William Seward had believed that “five years, ten years, twenty years hence, Mexico will be opening herself as cheerfully to American immigration as Montana and Idaho are now.”² In the twentieth century, even if Latin Americans hoped that the United States was gradually being socialized into behaving more like a normal state in international affairs, many North Americans still questioned the validity of their neighbors’ national aspirations.

AS IF IN conscious response to US belittlement, the political agendas in Latin America have since the nineteenth century been dominated by nationalism. Similar to most other places, Latin American nationalisms have been intimately connected to the emergence of mass politics and have been manipulated by elites in order to strengthen their hold on power. The common themes of all of the different nationalisms south of the Rio Grande have been resistance to foreign pressure, especially that of the United States, and a belief in the national authority of military power. Especially in Spanish-speaking America, there has also been a strong sense of cultural unity, a pan–Latin Americanism of great force, though colored by the specific national agendas and the geographical location of its activists. In the first half of the twentieth century, Latin American nationalisms became increasingly populist, often with very separate Right and Left components, as happened in Europe roughly at the same time. Just as US economic influence increased sharply, some of the internal political conflicts in Latin American countries were coming to a head.

If one believes that a substantial part of the Cold War in Latin America was domestic and ideological, then the 1920s and ’30s were certainly the first Cold War era.³ As workers organized and landless peasants protested against privilege and oppression, the Russian Revolution set an example for some. By 1929 small Communist parties had emerged in fifteen countries in the region. In some cases, such as in Brazil, Chile, Mexico, or Guatemala, they had an influence far greater than their numbers.⁴

Brazil became a focal point for class warfare in South America. There the young officers who took control of the main city São Paulo in 1924 were supported by Communist intellectuals. After being driven out of the city, the revolutionaries set out on a long march through the country, eventually ending up in Bolivia in 1927. Luís Carlos Prestes, who led the troops, later became the head of the Brazilian Communist Party and a central figure of the Comintern. But even where they gained some local support, the adherents of international Communism and the fronts they attempted to establish were usually no match for their political competitors, who often suppressed them cruelly. The main leaders of the new popular politics in Latin America emerging out of this period were not Communists but radical populists, who were as much inspired by the European radical Right as by the European Left. Vargas in Brazil, Perón in Argentina, Cárdenas in Mexico may, at times, have collaborated with Communists and other parts of the Left, but their aim was to strengthen the state and their own personal power.

But while Latin American populism increased in strength, so did US economic power in the region. During the 1920s and ’30s—often seen as an isolationist era in US foreign affairs—American economic involvement in the southern republics increased steeply, much helped by new trade through the Panama Canal, which had opened in 1914. American investment increased, too, more than to any other part of the world. So did political ties, and not all of them were to the liking of the new Latin American radical nationalists. In countries as far away as Chile the North Americans tried to use their economic clout to fix prices on raw materials or intervene in elections. In Central America and the Caribbean the United States intervened militarily no fewer than thirteen times in the first three decades of the century. Under political pressure at home, at the Pan-American Conference in Havana in 1928 Mexico, Argentina, and other Latin American countries protested US interventionism. Before the conference, the Argentinian newspaper La Prensa wrote that US “imperialism has thrown down its mask and free people will reject it.… Orders by one government are [now] presented as valid for all.” The United States was attempting to be the “global dispenser of justice” and the “supreme master through economic control… humiliating sovereignty with an arrogance unworthy of great nations.”⁵

After 1933, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration attempted to reduce anger in the southern republics by its “good neighbor policy.” In terms of relations with Latin American states quite a lot was achieved. Sensing that they had a more cooperative, or at least a more gracious, Administration in place in the White House, southern republics were more likely to go along with the isolation of enemy states in World War II. Nine Latin American states declared war on Japan and Germany right after the attack on Pearl Harbor. By the time the war ended eleven other states had joined the United States, though Argentina joined only in March 1945 and Chile the following month, after the fighting in Europe had ended.

The main US security preoccupation during the war was with Mexico. With a two-thousand-mile-long border with the United States, a large immigrant population, and with a history of opposing US foreign policy in the region, Mexico stood out as a country from where enemy agents could operate. Mexico had declared war on the Axis Powers in May 1942, but the US government remained suspicious of its southern neighbor’s political orientation. And if Mexico seemed suspicious, then Argentina seemed positively alarming: having at first refused to join the Allies, Argentina was embargoed and Washington broke off diplomatic relations in 1944. The political instability in Buenos Aires also alarmed the Americans, especially after Juan Perón became vice president as the war was coming to an end. Colonel Perón represented the exact US image of a Latin American rabble-rouser. He had been involved in several military coups, was building organizations with a personal loyalty to him, and had been known to praise European Fascism and Nazism. When Perón was elected Argentinian president in 1946, he allowed escapees from Nazi Europe into Argentina, leading to another diplomatic crisis with Washington.

US policy toward Argentina under Perón set a pattern for its policies toward Latin American countries during the Cold War. As the US focus on subversion in the southern republics changed from Fascists to Communists in the late 1940s, much of the approach stayed the same. Latin Americans could not be trusted to come up with political preferences of their own, even through elections. Domestic and foreign subversives were waiting in the wings to take over the political stage, using radical populists as the warm-up act. The United States therefore had to be on its guard against any change that would allow Communists to get closer to power in any American republic. As the architect of the US containment policy, George F. Kennan, observed in 1950: “implicit in these communist activities is the possible wrecking of… the relationships… basic to Latin America’s part in our global policies.… The danger lies less in the [Communist] conquest of mass support than in the clever infiltration of key positions, governmental and otherwise, from which to sabotage relations between these countries and the United States.”⁶

The first test of the attention the United States paid to Latin America in a Cold War context came in Guatemala in 1954, when the Eisenhower Administration intervened against an elected radical reformist regime that had the support of the miniscule Guatemalan Communist Party. Led by Jacobo Árbenz, an officer from a wealthy family, the elected government attempted to introduce much needed social and land reform in what was probably the most unequal country in all of Latin America. In Guatemala 2.5 percent of the population owned more than 70 percent of the arable land, and the majority of the population was landless peasants. Since the late nineteenth century US companies, including the powerful United Fruit Company, had grown rich from production in Guatemala because of its good conditions for tropical fruit and its low wages. In 1952 President Árbenz expropriated uncultivated land—including some that belonged to US companies—against compensation that the owners found to be far too low. The Guatemalan government divided the expropriated land among one hundred thousand landless peasant families. Washington protested, but to no avail.

It was not the complaints of United Fruit executives, or the stories their PR department planted in North American newspapers, however, that made the US government decide to intervene. It was the fear of Communism. “In Guatemala,” President Eisenhower told a Congressional delegation, “the Reds are in control and they are trying to spread their influence to San Salvador as a first step of the breaking out… to other South American countries.”⁷ By spring 1954 Eisenhower had given the green light to prepare the overthrow of Árbenz, and the CIA put together an operation that also involved military opponents of the Guatemalan president and parts of the civilian opposition. The United States organized the training of rebel troops, set up a propaganda radio station, and—after the Guatemalan government tried to boost its military capacity through buying arms from Czechoslovakia, a member of the Soviet bloc—declared a blockade against the country.

In June 1954 US-trained rebel troops crossed into Guatemala, with lists of Left-wingers marked for “elimination” by the CIA. US-piloted fighter planes strafed the capital. After a few weeks of fighting Árbenz resigned, mainly because he thought that was the only way to stave off a full-scale US invasion. He was replaced with a succession of military juntas that had the blessing of the United States. The military revoked most of Árbenz’s social reforms. From the 1960s to the 1990s Guatemala’s inequities set off civil wars that devastated the country. The US-led overthrow of President Árbenz had created conflicts that neither the United States nor the Guatemalan Right could control. From his exile in Cuba, the former president concluded that it was US anti-Communism that had set off the intervention, not the need to protect American investments. “They would have overthrown us even if we had grown no bananas,” Árbenz’s close friend José Manuel Fortuny is quoted as saying.⁸

There is little doubt that Árbenz was right about what set off the US intervention. Secretary of State Dulles celebrated his overthrow as “the biggest success in the last five years against Communism.”⁹ But US diplomacy paid a significant price for its belligerence toward Guatemala. Even after the Czechoslovak weapons imports became known, Washington had a tough time getting even its allies in line. Uruguayan foreign minister Justino Jiménez de Aréchaga lauded “the intangible greatness of the principle of nonintervention” and chided those who indulged in “hysterical fear” or “use the phrase ‘cold war’ too generously.”¹⁰ Árbenz’s foreign minister Guillermo Toriello “said many things some of the rest of us would like to say if we dared,” one Latin American diplomat told the New York Times.¹¹ Even Winston Churchill’s British government objected: “The Americans are making extraordinarily heavy weather over all this and acting in a manner which is likely to alienate world sympathy.”¹² President Eisenhower, exasperated, told his staff that they were “being too damned nice to the British” and ordered the State Department to “show the British that they have no right to stick their nose into matters which concern this hemisphere entirely.… Let’s give them a lesson.”¹³

The Soviet Union had no role in the events in Guatemala; the distance was too great and its Communists regarded as too weak for Moscow to take much notice. It was the US intervention that set off a degree of Soviet interest. But even after Guatemala the general feeling in Moscow was that there was little that could be done to help Latin American revolutionaries, except through some increased support for the local Communist parties. Outside Europe, the Soviet focus was on Asia, where—following in the footsteps of the Chinese revolution—some of the great events of the future were expected to take place. Within this larger picture, Latin American Communists were left to fend for themselves. They helped organize, and sometimes had a significant impact within, the labor movements in their countries. But nowhere did they come close to holding political power or directing the general course of events.

The consolidation of the Cuban revolution changed all of that. By 1959 there was in Latin America a radical revolutionary government that operated in conjunction with local Communists. And even if the Cuban Communist Party as such had played a very limited role in the civil war—and was soon overshadowed by Fidel Castro’s own revolutionary organization, with which it was to merge in 1961—Communists played a key role in the new regime from the beginning. The Soviets became Cuba’s closest ally, in spite of policy differences that waxed and waned throughout the 1960s. Supported by most leading Latin American Communists, Moscow wanted a gradualist approach to revolution in other countries in the region and was skeptical of the insurrectionist guerrilla approach that the Cubans stood for. There was also the sense among South American radicals that Cuba was peripheral both geographically and historically to the main developments on the continent—it is quite clear that many Left-wingers in Argentina, Chile, or Brazil, at least to begin with, looked down their noses at the new leaders in Havana. But these conflicts and doubts were of minor importance compared to the big story: for the first time Latin America had seen a successful socialist revolution, which—with the active help of the Soviet Union—was able to defend itself against US attacks.

The Cuban revolution inspired radicals elsewhere, but not all of them were in Communist parties. In Venezuela, where free elections in 1959 had brought to power a reformist coalition headed by President Rómulo Betancourt, it was the youth wing of the president’s own party that broke away and formed the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR). Accusing Betancourt of compromising with the United States, the military, and the Right, the young Marxist-Leninists in MIR—with Cuban support—launched an armed uprising against him. The Communist Party joined the revolt, but it was soon defeated by the Venezuelan military. The two parties turned to urban terrorism and guerrilla fighting in the countryside. Among their tactics were robbing banks, killing policemen, burning down government buildings, and kidnapping wealthy businessmen. Although both parties had some popular support at the outset, their tactics lost them the political game. Trade unions and peasant organizations campaigned for harsher measures against the rebels. Ninety-two percent of the voting population cast their ballots in the 1963 elections, which the insurrectionists tried to disrupt. By 1967 the extreme Left in Venezuela had been defeated and the insurrectionism often associated with the Cuban experience seemed a lost cause among most Latin Americans.

US worries about Cuba being replicated elsewhere knew no bounds, however. The Kennedy Administration was obsessed with the thought of Communist encroachment to its south. But it was also much more aware than its predecessors had been that it was poverty and social injustice that created the conditions under which radical political movements could operate successfully. In April 1961, just weeks before his Bay of Pigs attack on Cuba, the young US president launched what he called an Alliance for Progress between his country and Latin America. A ten-point program centering on development and economic assistance, while also promising to defend any country whose “independence is endangered,” Kennedy’s plan aimed to eradicate poverty in Latin America within ten years.

If we are successful, if our effort is bold enough and determined enough, then the close of this decade will mark the beginning of a new era in the American experience. The living standards of every American family will be on the rise, basic education will be available to all, hunger will be a forgotten experience, the need for massive outside help will have passed, most nations will have entered a period of self-sustaining growth, and, although there will be still much to do, every American Republic will be the master of its own revolution and its own hope and progress.¹⁴

In spite of the president’s lofty rhetoric, the aims of the Alliance for Progress were far too extensive to be realistic. Local elites feared what Kennedy’s “revolution” would do to their own privileges. Radicals on the Left and the Right saw the Alliance as US imperialism by other means. The hierarchies of the Catholic church worried about moral decline and religious deviation in the wake of US Peace Corps volunteers and other North American experts. And the methods and technologies the United States sought to introduce were often unsuited for Latin American purposes. But in spite of all of this, some Alliance programs did have an impact, not least because they helped convince the emerging Latin American middle class that Cold War–inspired US policies could be to their advantage. The best of such programs—in education, health, transport, and housing—also showed a more open, less exclusive United States that was willing to work with its Latin American partners for mutual benefit.

The positive aspects of the Alliance for Progress were, however, entirely overshadowed by US willingness to support antidemocratic military regimes throughout the region. From the very beginning, military aid to resist Communism was an integral part of the Alliance plan. Under JFK’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, the counterinsurgency aspect of the Alliance often came to dominate the civilian programs. Influenced by the widening war in Vietnam, LBJ was preoccupied with avoiding any Communist advances in Latin America on his watch. The president recognized the desperate social situation that drove young South Americans toward rebellion. But if the choice was between another “Castro revolution” and a right-wing dictator, then the United States should be with the latter any day, LBJ believed.

If any country in South America seemed prone to upheavals for purely social reasons it was Brazil. The country’s inequality was the second-highest in the world, narrowly behind Sierra Leone.¹⁵ A small white minority had income levels well beyond those in Europe or North America. Meanwhile the vast majority—white and black—lived in abject poverty, whether as landless laborers in the countryside or in the rapidly growing urban slums, the favelas of São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro. After years of dictatorship and military-influenced rule, Brazil began to experiment with democracy in the 1950s. The president elected in 1956, Juscelino Kubitschek, started a number of state-led development projects, which led to strong economic growth but also to sharp rises in inflation. Kubitschek and his successor did little, however, to attack the social inequality that seemed to be at the root of so many of Brazil’s problems. The Kennedy Administration, at the start of the Alliance for Progress, often commented on the need for social reform in Brazil.

When João Goulart became president in 1961, the Kennedys got more than they had bargained for. From the beginning of his presidency, President Goulart tried to get to grips with Brazil’s social problems by mobilizing worker’s organizations and supporting new and militant peasant groups that had grown up in rural areas during Brazil’s brief democratic era. His aim was to counterbalance the many conservative forces in Brazilian politics, including some within his own party. He also wanted more political power for himself—Goulart was an impatient man, who had much to be impatient about. In foreign policy the Brazilian president wanted more independence from the United States, but was wary of both Cuba and the Soviet Union. Goulart was from a very wealthy landowning family in the south; he wanted reform but not revolution, and he kept the Communist Party under strict political control. His program, however—which included land reform and nationalization of utility companies—met increasing resistance from the Right. In a massive anti-Goulart demonstration in March 1964, organized by members of the Catholic clergy, a proclamation was read out: “This nation which God gave us… faces extreme danger.… Men of limitless ambition… have infiltrated our nation… with servants of totalitarianism, foreign to us and all consuming.… Mother of God preserve us from the fate and suffering of the martyred women of Cuba, Poland, Hungary and other enslaved Nations!”¹⁶

The Johnson Administration encouraged and supported a military coup against Goulart that month, as demonstrations and counterdemonstrations came to a head in cities all over Brazil. “I think we ought to take every step that we can, be prepared to do everything that we need to do” in order to support the coup-makers, President Johnson ordered. “We just can’t take this one.”¹⁷ The fearmongering against Goulart that the United States had supported for several months helped ensure the rapid success of the coup. The downturn in the economy over the last eighteen months of his presidency also helped the military leaders depose him. The military dictatorship that inaugurated itself in 1964 was to last for twenty years, in which Brazil’s most basic problems were shunted aside and the internal Cold War was stepped up.

If the United States played a central role in keeping the Brazilian dictatorship in power, it had an even more important position in Bolivia. One of the poorest countries in Latin America, Bolivia was ruled by General René Barrientos, who first came to power in a coup in 1964 and was elected president two years later. Barrientos was the Americans’ kind of general, a young, energetic modernizer with real support in the population, who wanted to stress technology and land reform in an attempt to remake his country. US advisers flocked to Bolivia. But politically the Bolivian president kept his own counsel. Barrientos was a populist who presented himself as a staunch Christian while fathering dozens of children in extramarital relationships; a Quechua-speaking friend of the Indians who massacred peasants and miners when they objected to his rule; and a US-trained air force pilot and modernizer who easily engaged in anti-US rhetoric when politically expedient. By 1967 he was at the peak of his power—flying around the country in a helicopter he piloted himself, handing out footballs and radios, and shaking people’s hands.

This was the political situation in Bolivia when the Cubans decided to make the country a test case for their doctrine of insurgency. The operation was spearheaded by Che Guevara, who had become increasingly restless in Cuba. Che thought of himself as an international revolutionary, linked both to pan–Latin Americanism and Communist internationalism. By 1966 Che and Cuban intelligence had begun to prepare support for an armed rebellion in Bolivia. Che rather abruptly—and against the advice of the Bolivian Communist Party—decided to lead the insurgency himself. He was smuggled into the Bolivian countryside in October 1966. From there a number of agents had been preparing the situation for months. Che’s guerrillas scored some early victories against Bolivian military regulars and the insurgency gained the support of some militant miners, thanks to the Bolivian Communist Party’s decision to throw its weight behind the Cuban operation. But otherwise everything went wrong for the guerrillas from the very beginning. Soon they were isolated in a couple of rural areas, not able to recruit from among Bolivian peasants, and cut off from contact with Havana.

For Barrientos the contest with the Cubans was a campaign he relished. Believing that he personified the Bolivian “revolution,” as he called his program, he was doing battle against foreigners and invaders. He also liked the fact that as long as the Communist insurgency was under way, he had extra claims on US military and economic support. “The Fatherland is in danger,” Barrientos proclaimed. “A vast Communist conspiracy, planned and funded by international extremism has exploited the good faith of some sectors of labor in trying to pit the people against the armed forces.”¹⁸In October 1967—starving and almost out of ammunition—Che Guevara was captured by Barrientos’s special forces and summarily executed. He told his interrogators, who included agents of the CIA, that his defeat was due to “the effective organization of Barrientos’s political party… who took charge of warning the army about our movements.”¹⁹ Che Guevara lived on as a revolutionary icon, though his political defeat in Bolivia was another massive setback for those who believed in vanguard insurgencies as the path to Latin American socialist revolutions. It was also a signal that populist nationalism was a real match for Communism all over the continent. René Barrientos did not live long to savor his victory, though. His helicopter crashed in the mountains of central Bolivia in 1969, killing all onboard.

Che Guevara’s death symbolized the final collapse of the foco approach to revolution—the belief that a small group of armed revolutionaries by themselves could provide a focus, foco, for discontent and lead an insurrection. But people drew different lessons from that collapse. In Chile, for instance, Socialists and Communists stressed that only a peaceful road to a socialist society would be possible. The United States government believed that Che’s defeat meant that its policy of arming and supporting strong local leaders was working. It was nationalist anti-Communists who would defeat the Left, not US interventions. This conclusion fitted an intervention-weary Vietnam War generation of US leaders well. It also went with what some Americans thought were the general lessons of the mid-1960s, from Ghana to Indonesia, where local armies had overthrown their Leftist governments with US encouragement but little direct US support. Meanwhile, a successful direct US intervention in the small Dominican Republic in 1965 had been justified by anti-Communist rhetoric, but could as well be seen as one in a series of such invasions in the Caribbean going back to well before the Cold War. It was not an operation that could be replicated on the South American mainland, Washington believed.

Small groups on the radical Left drew different lessons from Guevara’s defeat. They formed new clandestine organizations that aimed at destroying the existing order through armed combat, but now often in the cities, not in the countryside. In Guevara’s homeland Argentina a number of youth movements challenged the government and some of them began using urban guerrilla methods. They came from a wide array of ideological backgrounds. Some were Trotskyist or Marxist-Leninist. Others were inspired by nationalism or by radical Catholicism. The largest movement, the Montoneros, were Peronists whose leaders had often emerged from the nationalist Right, but who by the late 1960s had begun taking up Left-wing revolutionary phrases in the quest for the return of their hero from his exile in Spain. Their leader, Mario Firmenich, liked the slogan La patria socialista, sin Yanquis ni Marxistas (A socialist nation without Yankees or Marxists).²⁰ Between them, these groups and the military’s increasingly violent repression subjected Argentina to a time of terror.

At first the Montoneros gained some public support for their spectacular kidnapping and execution of Argentina’s former military dictator Pedro Aramburu in 1970. He was widely hated as the man who had overthrown Perón in 1955. But as the urban guerrillas began a series of murders, kidnappings, bomb attacks, and bank robberies, their support evaporated. Still, they were able to recruit enough supporters to carry out a steady stream of terror, close to one attack per day in the early 1970s.²¹ Nobody was safe. The Leftist guerrillas assassinated military officers, industrialists, trade unionists, priests, and foreign diplomats, almost seven hundred in total between 1969 and 1975. The terror did not abate after Perón did return as president in 1973. By 1975 Argentina seemed ungovernable, as did neighboring Uruguay, where the Tupamaros guerrilla group carried out similar attacks.

The first part of the Cold War conflict in Latin America was to come to a head, though, in Chile, on the other side of the Andes mountains. The country had a strong working class, parts of which had been organized in trade unions since the early interwar years. The political parties of the Left, Socialists and Communists, also commanded a substantial following. In the 1964 elections the candidate of their coalition, Salvador Allende, pulled more than 38 percent of the vote. He lost against the candidate of the Christian Democrats, Eduardo Frei, whose campaign was heavily backed by the CIA. But while the Johnson Administration was very afraid of the consequences if the Left won the election, the Christian Democrat Frei was no automatic supporter of American interests. As president he began many important domestic reforms that Allende could build on when he—in a sharply contested election—won the presidency in 1970, in spite of the CIA’s attempts to stop him.

The new government was an alliance of Socialists and Communists dedicated to overcoming capitalism in Chile. While drawing inspiration from the Russian revolution, it intended to carry out a peaceful transition to a socialist state, through “the principle of legality, the development of institutions, political freedom, the prevention of violence, and the socialization of the means of production,” as Allende noted in his first presidential address to Congress.²² But Chile was a very conservative society, in which the old bourgeoisie and the new middle class had no intention of allowing a transition to socialism, peaceful or not. The reforms of Allende’s government were met with growing protest, with the Chilean people split down the middle. Working-class and peasants’ organizations supported Allende policies of nationalization and land reform, but all political groups outside the Left, including the Christian Democrats, opposed them. The government, the opposition claimed, “has sought to conquer absolute power with the obvious purpose of subjecting all citizens to the strictest political and economic control by the state and, in this manner, fulfilling the goal of establishing a totalitarian system.”²³

In Washington Allende’s victory in the 1970 elections set off near panic. President Nixon thought Chile would develop into a second Cuba, with enormous consequences for Latin America and for the Cold War in the rest of the world. Détente with Moscow did not diminish this perspective. On the contrary, both Nixon and Kissinger believed that if Allende was able to succeed in Chile, then the Soviets would be less likely to cooperate with the United States elsewhere. With Allende’s victory in a democratic election, the Soviets had a “Red sandwich” between Havana and Santiago, which could engulf all of Latin America, Nixon asserted later. Kissinger was, if anything, even more alarmist. The manner in which Allende had won his mandate made him even more dangerous than Castro, the US national security adviser claimed. Chile presented an “insidious” model that other Communists on the continent—or for that matter in western Europe—could follow later, Kissinger said.²⁴

By 1973 it was clear that Chile’s future would be decided by whether its armed forces would remain loyal to the constitution. The Chilean Right and the United States pushed for a military coup. Washington had set off considerable amounts of money through the CIA to create the conditions for a military takeover and had been doing its best to sabotage the Chilean economy, to “make the economy scream,” as Nixon put it to CIA director Richard Helms.²⁵ Both the Soviets and the Cubans were dubious of the Allende government’s chances of survival, and the Cubans advised it to arm the population against the threat of a coup. On its side, Brazil—the most powerful Right-wing military regime in South America—was supplying intelligence to a small group of dissident officers in Santiago, who were beginning to plan the removal of Allende by force. The CIA knew that coup-plotting was going on, but did not directly participate in it. The Agency only learned the date of the planned takeover a day before the plotters struck.

The Allende government was overthrown in a military coup on 11 September 1973 (a reason why the significance of 9/11 in Latin America and the United States differs). The main reason why the plotters succeeded was that they had won the support of General Augusto Pinochet, who had just been appointed Allende’s commander in chief of the army. Pinochet betrayed his president with ease as soon as he became convinced that the coup stood a chance of succeeding. The general was convinced that Chile faced an existential battle against foreign Communists and internal subversives and made certain that maximum force was used against the government. President Allende killed himself when soldiers stormed the presidential palace. In Washington, the Nixon Administration drew a sigh of relief, and offered to assist the new regime.

Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile lasted seventeen years. In a country with a broad democratic tradition, its longevity and its brutality was a shock to most people, including some of those who had supported the coup. More than three thousand people were killed without any semblance of law or process. More than forty thousand were arrested, most in the three months following the coup, and many of them were tortured by the military.²⁶ “They stuck us in a room and forced us to remain standing, with our hands on our necks and without talking,” one prisoner recounts. “Anyone who moved or talked was thrown on the floor and beaten with rifle butts and kicked.… [Among the prisoners] was a professor of literature at the University of Chile. There was also a Catholic priest, and another, a man named Juan, well known in the workers’ districts of Valparaiso, who later died during a torture session.… There were unbelievable howls of pain, and they never stopped, day or night.”²⁷

By the late 1970s much of Latin America was ruled by military dictators. In Uruguay the military had also taken over in 1973. In Argentina they overthrew Juan Perón’s widow, Isabel, in 1976, and established a military dictatorship under the drab but murderous general Jorge Videla. In all, fifteen out of twenty-one major states in Latin America were led by military dictators by the end of the decade. Most of them used their power to attack the Left. In Argentina almost ten thousand people were murdered by the junta in their “dirty war” between 1976 and 1983. The vast majority of them had nothing to do with the guerrillas who had terrorized the country; most were labor organizers, journalists, student leaders, or human rights activists. The same pattern was repeated by military dictators from Uruguay to Guatemala. Their violence was much more deadly than that of the Left-wing groups who had challenged the existing order. And it could be carried out because the military dictators knew that the United States would not break its ties with them in spite of their human rights abuses. Even a group of people as seriously lacking in talent as the Argentinian junta knew how to frame their terror in Cold War terms. General Orlando Agosti, who commanded the Argentinian air force, believed that he and his fellow officers had won a war “within the national territory but the aggressor is only a tentacle of a monster whose head and whose body are beyond the reach of our swords.… The armed combat is finished but the global confrontation continues.”²⁸

Brazil’s military dictatorship, dating from 1964, followed a different trajectory. Its terror against the Left was widespread at first, with hundreds murdered and thousands imprisoned and sometimes tortured. Small Leftist groups responded by terror attacks, including the kidnapping of US, European, and Japanese diplomats. But during the early 1970s, with the war on the Left already won and détente reigning internationally, the Brazilian government began a more independent foreign policy and a more state-centered plan for economic development. Led by João Reis Velloso, the minister of planning, the country implemented import-substitution and national-development plans. Brazil was by far the biggest country in Latin America. The Brazilian generals were nationalists who wanted to strengthen the state and improve the country’s international position. They were inspired by other Third World governments, of very different ideological persuasions, who saw state-planning, national control of resources, and a more fair economic world order as central to their countries’ progress. To the great irritation of the United States, Brazil not only supported Third World demands at the UN, but under President Ernesto Geisel—a conservative anti-Communist of Prussian origin—it recognized the Marxist government in Angola, which the United States was trying to overthrow. Brazil wanted to be seen as a world power, even outside the Portuguese-speaking world. The United States responded by not renewing its military cooperation agreement with the country in 1977.

Outside of Cuba, the Soviet Union was more of an active bystander than a main participant in the Cold War in Latin America. It subvented the Communist parties and their fronts and alliances (including Allende’s Unidad Popular in Chile) with money and with advice (sometimes welcome, sometimes not). It kept agents of the KGB and the GRU in the field in even the smallest of Latin American countries. Their task was more to report to Moscow than to influence local events, however. “The main thing,” KGB chairman Iurii Andropov advised his Latin American operatives, “is to keep our finger on the pulse of events, and obtain multi-faceted and objective information about the situation there, and about the correlation of forces.”²⁹ The Soviets were ready to attempt to steer the course of events and to grab opportunities whenever they arose. But in reality distance, priorities, and the relative balance of power made Moscow a restricted influence in Latin America during the Cold War.

But if the Soviet Union played a limited role in Latin America, so, in a different sense, did the United States. North American power was of course far superior to that of the Soviets, and in the Caribbean and Central America US military intervention was always a possibility. Elsewhere on the continent US economic influence was central, and Washington repeatedly attempted to use the extending or withholding of credit, investment, or trade as a political tool. It also on occasion tried to manipulate the prices of raw materials on which Latin American economies depended to gain political advantage. It trained Latin American officers and supplied their armies with weapons. The CIA bribed politicians and officials and spent money to subvent the political campaigns of US favorites. But none of this enabled the United States to set the agenda in any major Latin American country on its own. Latin American nationalism—including that of the Right—precluded such a total predominance. Unlike the Soviet presence in Eastern Europe—with which it is often compared—the United States did not have subservient ideological allies in power in Latin America. A Betancourt, a Barrientos, or even otherwise despicable creatures such as a Videla or a Pinochet, were not straw men for the United States. They were nationalist Latin Americans, who opposed the Left for reasons that were altogether their own.

Mexico, with its long border with the United States, is perhaps the best case in point. Ruled since 1929 by the PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, post–World War II Mexico was a jumble of capitalism and corporatism, centered on political compromises between the Right and the Left within the ruling party. But at the same time, Mexican elites became increasingly concerned with the threat of a challenge by the Left outside of the political system. In spite of its corruption and authoritarianism, the PRI took pride in having created a strong state, substantial economic progress, and defenses against US political and financial pressure. Its failure to create more social equality or more inclusive politics were its Achilles heel. When movements of students and workers began protesting in the late 1960s, the regime reacted with repression of dissent. The army was used against protesters, killing hundreds. In one of the main housing projects in Mexico City, Tlatelolco, scores were shot in a massacre on 2 October 1968. President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz’s press secretary claimed that the “disturbances” were caused by “international Communist agitators… under the influence of foreign interests that the whole world should know.”³⁰ With US assistance, the PRI organized anti-Communist militias, who acted against “Cuban infiltration” of Mexico. At one demonstration in 1968, they chanted “we want one, two, three dead Che’s! Long live Christ the King! Long live Díaz Ordaz!”³¹

THE COLD WAR in Latin America was internal more than external. It centered on increasingly violent conflicts between the Right and the Left, parts of which became ever-more politically extreme. But Right and Left are complicated categories in Latin America. Within the Left were vicious provocateurs of the Montoneros kind and principled reformists such as Salvador Allende. The split between these two directions became increasingly deep in the latter stages of the Cold War. But the Right was deeply split as well. Some fought simply to keep their massive share of money and resources. Others were deeply ideologically committed to concepts of religion and nation. And some—especially in the small middle class in the Southern Cone—saw the United States as a direct inspiration in terms of politics and the organization of society.

As in so much else, the 1970s became a watershed for these political tendencies in Latin America. The advent of the military dictatorships did not mean “national unity,” as they often proclaimed, but further fragmentation. Within the Left, there was an increasing split between those who believed in the democratic road and those who swore by revolutionary violence. Sometimes these differences were dictated by different histories or national backgrounds: it was a lot easier to believe in a peaceful return to democracy, say, in Uruguay, with its generations of parliamentary rule, than in Nicaragua, in spite of the ugliness of Montevideo’s military rulers.

But often the splits on the Left were a matter of politics or ideology; those inspired by Cuba or by Che Guevara, or by liberation struggles in Africa or Asia, frequently opted for armed resistance. Those who organized in trade unions or within the church and those who belonged to the old Communist parties mostly preferred peaceful activities. Mario Firmenich, who had graduated top of his class at university in Buenos Aires, admired Che Guevara (and Juan Perón), and became the leader of the Montoneros guerrilla group. Luiz da Silva, known as Lula, who had no education, became head of the Steelworkers’ Union in the Brazilian auto-manufacturing town of São Bernardo do Campo, and admired Gandhi and Dom Helder Camara, the radical archbishop of Recife. Lula became the first Left-wing president of Brazil. Firmenich became an economics lecturer in Spain.³²

But if the Left was split, so was the Right. The brutal military dictatorships that dominated Latin America in the 1970s had little in common politically, except their disgust at the Left and general references to “order” and “Christian civilization.” While all of them carried out bloody repressions, they had few ideas about how to actually govern their countries—some even sought advice from intellectuals who shared much of the general thinking that had inspired the Left. So it was, for instance, that the Brazilian military dictatorship came to emphasize centralized economic planning and a somewhat Thirdworldist foreign policy in the mid-1970s.

Chile under Pinochet took a very different direction. In a leap of faith it linked its economic future to radical Right-wing US economists that even many Americans regarded as extreme. Its policies led to the impoverishment of much of the working class and helped the regime defeat labor organizations. But at a time when much of the world slowly began to move in the same neoliberal direction, the experiments carried out by the “Chicago-boys” in Chile put the country’s economy in an advantageous position. To the regime’s surprise, however, the new middle class it helped create turned against it politically almost from the beginning. By the mid-1980s it was not just the working class and the Left that detested Pinochet; it was also many of those who had exploited the privatization of the Chilean economy, who now regarded the dictator and his violent methods as primitive embarrassments to their country.

The United States contributed significantly to the instability, uncertainty, and violence that characterized Latin America during the era of military dictatorships. It did so because of Cold War priorities. Washington saw the defeat of the Latin American Left as a defeat for Moscow, and it was willing to support the military dictatorships that achieved this victory in spite of the violence with which their campaigns were carried out. It was also willing to ignore its own immediate economic interest in the process; the Brazilian junta developed state-owned industries, practiced import-substitution, and manipulated its currency to gain advantage against the US dollar. All of it was accepted by Washington as long as the Brazilian military was regarded as a bulwark against Communist influence in Brazil. As so often in the Cold War, the logic of the conflict defeated both self-interest and common human decency.