The Cold War Wasn’t So Cold
The Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union profoundly impacted Latin America. The Cold War’s impact on Latin nations is the case even though, outside of Cuba, the Soviet Union never posed a military threat to the United States in the Western Hemisphere. U.S. foreign policy attitudes toward its southern neighbors are characterized by historians as paternalistic at best and interventionist at worst in the centuries leading up to World War II. The early nineteenth-century Monroe Doctrine set a precedent for interventionist control in the name of protecting American economic and security interests.
Interventions were only temporarily paused by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy of nonintervention in the hemisphere that evolved from fostering economic cooperation to creating military dependency. Despite that interlude, the United States has intervened in Latin American affairs numerous times throughout its two-hundred years of existence for a combination of economic, ideological, and strategic reasons. American actions during the Cold War represent a continuation of the same nested into a fervent anti-Communist ideology that left many Latin American countries in ruins, some in a state of semipermanent civil war.
Even George Kennan, the architect of Soviet containment, argued that unfriendly regimes that were not centers of industrial and military capability posed little threat to the security of the United States. Regardless, National Security Council Memorandum 68 shifted perceptions of the threat to the international communist movement. The need to dominate the Western Hemisphere in the immediate aftermath of World War II was not a result of deteriorating Soviet-American relations but a natural evolution of the Monroe Doctrine, accentuated by Axis aggression during the war. Military officers and the secretaries of war and Navy departments argued for an extensive system of bases and a hefty increase in foreign military aid, sales, and training to ensure strategic hegemony.
There exist two traditional interpretations regarding the causation of U.S. involvement in Latin America — security and economics. These interpretations validate the Thucydidean paradigm of “fear, honor, and interest” precipitating war. The fear of Soviet influence, preserving American honor by not capitulating or allowing nascent hostile regimes in its backyard, and its economic interests in maintaining “free” and open markets for exploiting raw materials all contribute to the causation of American intervention in Latin America. As the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union expanded, it profoundly impacted internal Latin American politics. This attitude also reflects broader trends of intervention in the region to meet American hemispheric interests.
To some historians, the Cold War’s most crucial aspect was its effect on the Third World’s political and social development in a process strikingly like European colonialism. American interventionism is therefore rooted in an ideological pattern from its inception stressing liberty, the free market, anti-collectivism, and a fear of state power. According to Westad, reasons for intervention involve a combination of ideology, racial stereotyping, and geopolitical security concerns.
After World War II, an anti-communist agenda formed the core of American interventionist policies toward Latin America (and the entire Third World). In that regard, interventions were defensive and designed to prevent communist influence by remaking Latin American nations like the United States, which required changing their political conditions first and foremost.
American Cold War domination of Latin America is rooted in 19th and early 20th century trends of hemispheric hegemony entrenched through economic supremacy. American leaders felt it was their role to lead Latin America to democracy and capitalism while preventing foreign influences from gaining traction.
However, American ideology is rooted in free-market capitalism and opposed to a centralized, planned economy typical of communism. It is therefore difficult to rule out economics as a motivator. When United Fruit acted as a primary driver in precipitating the 1954 overthrow of the legitimate Jacobo Arbenz regime in Guatemala, economics, as much as ideology, drove policy — alongside strategic realpolitik factors like preventing the establishment of advance enemy bases in Central America.
The U.S. intervention in Guatemala was a lesson to others, noted guerrilla leader Che Guevara was present, and seeing the overthrow in real-time helped maximize anti-US attitudes in the region. Therefore, U.S. pressure and interventions helped push many Latin American governments and underground groups further left. Cuba also served as an example to the rest of the world.
The Cuban Revolution showed how revolutionaries could thwart the United States in the region. Castro also knew that cozying up to the Soviets helped provide security against a significant U.S. attack. Nevertheless, he wanted more involvement in the Soviet economic bloc. He saw Moscow as closed-fisted and not dedicated to their cause. The 1962 missile crisis convinced Castro that Cuba needed its own strategy — one that did not rely so heavily on the Soviet Union and included Cuban support for revolutionaries in the rest of Latin America and Africa.
To other scholars, the United States’s efforts to annex Central American economies into the U.S. sphere produced dependent and backward regimes, making revolutions against American influence in the region inevitable. Once U.S. policymakers understood this fact, the entire U.S. diplomacy towards Central America began to revolve around how to prevent those approaching revolutions regardless of the human and environmental costs.
There exists an American tendency to see foreign interference as a primary driver of Central American politics. U.S. policy toward Central America began in earnest in the late 19th century. It was marked by repeated use of gunboats and marines to safeguard U.S. firms capitalistic interests in the region. The doggedness of U.S. support for the region’s oligarchs had by then produced a system so corrupt that when President Kennedy launched the Alliance for Progress, it just made the rich richer and the poor poorer. LaFeber does not credit any administration with justifiable policies, including Jimmy Carter’s, since LaFeber sees him as only using his famous human rights concerns selectively to buttress traditional American interests.
Latin American politics quickly became ideological, as dictators and caudillos chose anti-communism to be accepted by a Washington now more concerned with containing communism than promoting democracy. Modernization efforts such as the Alliance for Progress replaced democracy. However, the practice of Washington’s Latin American policies was remarkably consistent with that of the previous policies and attitudes — diplomatic and economic pressure (carrot and stick), covert action, and direct military intervention.
The Cold War was an obsession for Washington that left Latin America with few choices in responding: First, fomenting a socialist revolution that would need Soviet support was hostage to great power politics. A second option lay in seeking American support by joining the anti-communist cause. A third option included attempting to find economic independence in joining the non-aligned movement — a decision Smith says would still draw Washington’s wrath.
Gilbert Joseph and Greg Grandin present a case for the Cold War to extend back to the 1910 Mexican revolution. Grandin argues that the cold war was never a fight among proxies of post-World War II superpowers throughout Latin America, but rather an attempt by the United States to contain insurgencies that challenged a system predicated on dependent economies. This trend began well before World War II. Regarding the post-Second World War superpower competition known as the Cold War, Greg Grandin argues that the Cold War expanded terror and accelerated a state’s capacity to repress. This expansion occurred because American leaders abandoned multilateralism to embrace cooperation with nefarious actors in the name of containment against Communist influence in the region.
Before World War II, and especially during the twentieth century, European powers had some influence over the region, but the United States displaced Europe as the primary provider of security aid and training. Political repression was then made possible “by the provision, coordination, and enthusiasm provided by the U.S.”
The first half of the twentieth century was therefore a training ground in which the United States learned to project influence and power to ensure stability throughout the region. By later sponsoring coups, destabilization, counterrevolution, and then invasion, the United States engendered an increasingly transnational response for resistance. Intervention in the region was a “powerfully radicalizing catalyst.” U.S. Containment policy was thus dominant in shaping each nation’s revolutionary history. Though they see that the preponderance of U.S. influence ensured crises did not spin over into external wars and thus forced Latin American nations to turn inward.
In Latin America’s Cold War, Hal Brands characterizes the Cold War in Latin America as part of a broader Third World trend of decolonization and resulting discord. For Brands, polarization and bloodshed come from under a cloud of broader American competition with the Soviet Union. He argues that superpower rivalry, foreign intervention, and Inter-American diplomatic strife dominated Latin America’s external relations. Ideological polarization — rapid swings between dictatorship and democracy and internal violence featured within domestic politics. Cold War tensions only peaked during the Cuban Revolution, which he cites as a catalyst that exacerbated anti-Americanism throughout the region.
Insurgencies based on the Cuban example rise in the 1960s thanks to a partnership between Havana, Moscow, and various guerrilla groups. Meanwhile, Washington unveiled a vast economic program — the Alliance for Progress — while deploying counterinsurgency, covert action, and sometimes direct military action.
Hal Brands describes Latin America’s Cold War as not a single conflict but rather several convergent conflicts in the region’s internal and external affairs. He sees four primary factors that drove the Cold War: 1) The continuing struggle over political and social arrangements in the region. 2) Tensions between U.S. power and Latin American imperialism. 3) Decolonization and the rise of the Third World. And 4) Superpower competition to influence the Global South profoundly affected the internal politics of developing countries. Each of these coalesced to create the unique violent situations that existed throughout the region.
Brands likewise views the Cuban Revolution as the catalyst that inspired a left-to-right escalating feedback loop: the Cuban Revolution inspired other insurgencies, leading to counterinsurgencies, which again led to resurgent leftist movements, and ultimately this led to brutal military crackdowns followed by what he terms incompetent leftist governments. These governments then begat more military coups in a vicious cycle of the pendulum. Therefore, American and Soviet interests combined with the Latin American political pendulum’s violent swings to create a bloodbath that was solved seemingly because the various parties were exhausted, at least in the Soviet example.
In The Killing Zone, Stephen Rabe argues that the United States waged Cold War in Latin America because communism threatened American national security. Rabe argues against the idea that the United States accomplished an unparalleled victory at the end of the Cold War. He is explicitly arguing that despite the collapse of the USSR presenting a triumphalist vision of the Cold War for Americans, Latin America suffered immensely during the Cold War at the hands of the United States. Dictatorship, authoritarianism, abuse of human rights, and state terrorism characterized Cold War Latin American life.
To Rabe, these terrible outcomes are primarily due to repeated U.S. interventions in Latin American nations’ internal affairs in the name of anti-communism, destabilizing constitutional governments, and aiding those who murdered and tortured. The Soviet Union was mostly absent in the region. Therefore according to Rabe, Washington politicians were chasing other more abstract versions of communism and not a global Moscow-led takeover. The United States, then, did not distinguish between Soviet communism and indigenous actors across Latin America. Furthermore, American politicians feared “losing” a Latin American country to Communism — American politicians could not appear soft on communism, especially in their backyard.
Thus, the Cold War in Latin America revolved around preventing international communism from gaining a foothold in the Western hemisphere. From the first intervention in Guatemala in 1954, Cold War policies toward the region reeked of paranoia. Jacobo Arbenz was a popularly elected president who tried leading all elements of Guatemalan society — not just the elites. As many scholars have noted, the U.S. overthrow of Arbenz was the “original sin” by the U.S. in Latin America — the act that begat decades of violence in Guatemala and the entire hemisphere.
Whereas President Roosevelt had worked hard to repair relations in the region, from 1954 on, the U.S. fomented regime change, counterrevolution, and instability in the name of preventing leftist ideology from spreading. This approach gradually morphed into an overt preference for military dictators in the region, particularly under Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. Therefore, the United States believed that sponsoring right-wing military dictatorships provided the best option for preventing communism in the Western Hemisphere.
Alan McPherson shows that resistance to occupation was the most critical factor in ending interventions because it reflected popular local grievances and spurred transnational networks of resistance that assisted the invaded. Regarding U.S. motivations, McPherson argues that stabilizing politics served as the most important one rather than ideological reasons. He lists strategic and economic reasoning as also valid. The Navy wanted to secure the Windward Passage and have advanced bases, while American corporations wanted to exploit raw materials, and the U.S. government extended loans through dollar diplomacy. The goal was to change the region’s political culture, transfer American values, and remake these countries in the United States’s image.
The historian Michael Grow focuses on the explicit decision-making process that led American leaders to intervene in Latin American affairs throughout the Cold War.
Grow finds that the key to explaining U.S. intervention in Latin America lies in three factors: 1) international credibility, 2) domestic politics, and 3) the invitations of neighboring states. By doing nothing, the U.S. would lose international standing and feared being a paper tiger or helpless giant unable to control its backyard. The second factor involves U.S. presidents using international intervention to advance their political standing as bold, assertive leaders who stood up to international bullies. No president wanted to be accused by partisans of “losing one on his watch.” The third factor involves political and private actors lobbying or requesting U.S. assistance. This can be summed up as imagery — projecting strength to foreign or domestic audiences.
Despite presidential attitudes, one cannot discount the national policy of containment and various efforts to achieve that end through soft (Alliance for Progress) and hard (Bay of Pigs) power. Securing the Windward Passage and the Panama Canal and keeping Soviet influence out of the region are real, salient factors. Economic factors become apparent when one understands United Fruit’s role in fomenting the 1954 Guatemalan coup and other U.S. businesses and Chilean millionaires requesting assistance in overthrowing Allende in Chile.
Whether for economic, ideological, and strategic reasons, the United States has consistently and forcefully intervened in Latin American affairs during the twentieth century. American actions in that region have had lasting consequences on Latin Americans’ political situations and overall livelihood to this day. Reports of vast caravans of migrants from Central America — whether blown out of proportion or not — are the direct result of American policy to the region since at least the 1954 overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz. As many of the authors listed argue, Latin American plight is ultimately the result of American paternalistic ideology toward their southern neighbors since Monroe’s words were first uttered.
