Table 2

"Latin America in the global Cold War"

Since the 1990s, the historiography of the Cold War has witnessed a significant revival, encompassing methodological approaches, themes, and geographical areas of analysis, made possible by access to new documentary sources for historians. However, Latin America has often been overlooked by historians. Furthermore, when it comes to Latin America, the discussion often revolves around the period after 1959, following the Cuban revolution, a chronology that does not always correspond to the reality of the political and ideological developments that have shaped the region. Therefore, determining the actual experience of the Cold War in Latin American contexts remains challenging. Are the chronological milestones of the period the same in Latin America as in the rest of the world? How do Latin Americans perceive this conflict? More broadly, how does the history of Latin America transform our perspective on what the global Cold War was?

Moderation
Simon Fagour
Flores Giorgini

Discussion
Mario Del Pero [History Center of SciencesPo]

Speakers

Vanni Pettinà [Ca' Foscari University, Venice]
"Between shocks. Mexico, the 1970s crises and the path to the Third World"

On December 14th, 1974, Mexico finally achieved one of the main goals the country had pursued for more than two years of intense diplomatic endeavors. The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) approved Resolution 3281 (XXIX) by a vote of 115 to 6, with 10 abstentions, containing the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States. This Charter had been initially envisioned by Mexican President Luis Echeverría Álvarez in Santiago de Chile in April 1972, during UNCTADIII. The document proposed a new international legal framework aimed at rebalancing international economic dynamics in favor of developing nations. The charter represented the culmination of a strategy that, since 1971, increasingly focused on shifting the axis of Mexico’s foreign policy from its traditional emphasis on the relationship with the United States to a much stronger engagement with the emerging Third World. Indeed, with few exceptions, Mexico’s foreign policy had been largely aligned with that of the United States since the early 1940s. This paper will explore the factors that pushed Mexico to undertake such a radical change in its foreign policy. It will do so by analyzing the combination of internal and external shocks that struck the country in the early 1970s. Mexico’s engagement with the Third World was mainly an attempt to correct the international imbalances that, according to the country’s political elite, were strangling its development policies.

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Eline van Ommen [University of Leeds]
"Sandinista Revolutionary Diplomacy in the Global Cold War"

This paper focuses on the revolutionary diplomacy of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in Nicaragua. To build a successful revolution in Nicaragua, the FSLN's unique revolutionary diplomacy went far beyond elite politics, as they connected with thousands of musicians, politicians, teachers, activists, priests, feminists, and journalists. Many supporters of the FSLN flocked to the country to experience the revolution firsthand. Blending grassroots organizing and formal foreign policy, pragmatic guerrillas, creative diplomats, and ambitious activists from Europe and the Americas were able to create an international environment in which the Sandinista Revolution could survive despite the odds. The paper argues that the FSLN's diplomacy was remarkably effective, propelling Nicaragua into the global limelight and allowing the revolutionaries to successfully challenge the United States' role in Central America.

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Molly Geidel [University of Manchester]
"Documenting development in Latin America beyond the Cold War frame"

How useful is the Cold War as a framework for understanding the mid-to-late 20th century? Scholars in recent decades have questioned the utility of the Cold War frame, arguing that it misrepresents the lopsided nature of what is often depicted as a bipolar conflict, even as it obscures the struggles for local and national self-determination that preceded and persisted beyond the Cold War decades. In this presentation, I argue for development in Latin America as a durable world view that preceded and outlasted the Cold War. To understand the rise to dominance of development ideology, I examine the development film, a genre created in the 1940s that was at once art, propaganda, and science. The development film created indelible, believable images of underdevelopment and narratives of modernization, helping to reshape dominant global concepts of gender, race, social change, the economy, and the good life.

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Selective bibliographies

Molly Avery, “Connecting Central America to the Southern Cone: The Chilean and Argentine Response to the Nicaraguan Revolution of 1979,” The Americas   78:4 (2021): 553-79

Alexander Aviña, Specters of Revolution. Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside, Oxford University Press, 2014.

Jeffrey James Byrne, “Beyond Continents, Colours, and the Cold War: Yugoslavia, Algeria, and the Struggle for Non-Alignment”, The International History Review, Vol. 37, No. 5, (October 2015), Special Issue: Beyond and Between the Cold War Blocs, pp. 912-932

Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (Oxford University Press, 2001)

Escobar, Arturo. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Thomas C. Field Jr., Stella Krepp y Vanni Pettinà, Latin America and the Global Cold War, University of North Carolina Press, 2020

Grieveson, Lee. Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System . Oakland: University of California Press, 2017

Tanya Harmer, Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (UNC Press, 2011)

Mateo Jarquín, “Red Christmases: The Sandinistas, Indigenous Rebellion, and the Origins of the Nicaraguan Civil War, 1981-82,” Cold War History 18:1 (2018):  91-107.

David Johnson Lee, The Ends of Modernization: Nicaragua and the United States in the Cold War Era (Cornell University Press, 2021)

Ariel Rodriguez Kuri, Renato González Mello, “El Fracaso del Éxito”, in Velasquez García, Erik, Enrique Nalda, Pablo Escalante, Bernardo García Martínez, and Bernd Hausberger. Historia general de México ilustrada: volumen II, El Colegio de México, 2010.

George Lawson, Anatomies of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2019)

Offner, Amy. Sorting Out the Mixed Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019.

Carlos Rico, Hacia la globalización. México y el mundo. Historia de sus relaciones exteriores, Volume: 8, El Colegio de México, 2010

Claudia Rueda, Students of Revolution: Youth, Protest, and Coalition Building in   Somoza-Era Nicaragua (University of Texas Press, 2019)

Saldaña-Portillo, Maria. The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

Christy Thornton, Revolution in Development. Mexico and the Governance of the Global Economy, University of California Press, 2021

Robert Vitalis, “The Midnight Ride of Kwame Nkrumah and Other Fables of Bandung (Bandoong)”, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, IV (2013), 261-88

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