Even two decades after a shift to emphasising the implications of the Cold War beyond the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact, historical accounts often foreground the actions of the superpowers in the wider world. Latin America, with a partial exception of post-revolutionary Cuba, mostly appeared as a battleground, in which primary attention was accorded to actors, interventions and proposals from the United States.
However, the historiography has sharply shifted. Today, Latin Americans are central actors, and a new generation of multi-archival work continues ‘retiring the puppets’, in the words of Max Paul Friedman, by delving into the Cold War's meaning for specific countries and conjunctures. In A Compact History of Latin America's Cold War, Vanni Pettinà draws on this now-extensive literature – largely in history, but also in politics and international relations – to offer a convincing synthetic account of Latin America's Cold War. Pettinà shows how the global bipolar conflict affected Latin America, and how diverse Latin American actors responded to the period's constraints and opportunities at home and across the region. In doing so, he follows the path developed by Odd Arne Westad's The Global Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
First published in Spanish by El Colegio de México, the new edition is a clear and very readable translation by Quentin Pope. The book's first chapter addresses historical debates, notably the growing consideration of Latin American sources and actors as an antidote to the long-dominant focus on the United States. Pettinà adopts the view that the Cold War affected Latin America almost immediately after the Second World War, countering periodisations that start at the Cuban Revolution and more expansive arguments that the Cold War's struggles over modernity can be located much earlier.
In the following three chapters, the book illustrates that the global Cold War's impact was great indeed, although far more nuanced than the frequent focus on US interventions versus Soviet- and Cuban-backed revolution suggests. The ‘early’ Cold War, covered in Chapter 2, reduced space for democracy and developmentalism in the immediate post-war years, including through frequent proscription of domestic communist parties. The early trend reached a tragic apogee with the US-backed intervention in Guatemala, driven by ‘issues related to bipolar conflict’ (p. 54). Even at this peak of US power, however, looking at the northern power does not provide all the answers. Pettinà follows recent scholarship on Central American and Caribbean actors’ pushback against Guatemala's reformist project.
The book examines the Cuban Revolution in Chapter 3, stressing the revolutionary government's successful installation and the reverberations across the region. Cuba's effects were both direct, through military and economic aid, and indirect, through its revolutionary model and autonomy from the United States. Most consequentially may have been the blowback against Cuba's example, however. As Pettinà emphasises, this reaction was not limited to the United States or a small slice of Latin American elites. The Revolution ‘sowed anxiety and hostility across wide sectors of societies that feared the radical message being spread by the bearded revolutionaries’ (p. 75). When conservative elites and militaries increased repression in the mid-1960s, they did so in social contexts of considerable acquiescence if not support.
This suggests an important implication of Pettinà's focus on Latin American agency – at times offered as a welcome antithesis to US imperialism, unilateralism and interventionism. And it can be that. But grappling with the complexities of Latin American agency during the Cold War also means recognising that many Latin American actors – and not just jackbooted despots like Chile's Pinochet, Argentina's Videla and Guatemala's Ríos Montt – were not puppets but perpetrators in their own right.
Such complexities come into focus in the fourth and fifth chapters of the book. Local factors interacted with US pressures and the global system in pernicious ways. Violence reached new heights despite US–Soviet détente. US anti-communism ‘prepared the ground’ for such bloodshed, but ‘repression germinated within Latin American societies in relative independence of US pressures’ (p. 92). The rise and fall of Chile's left-wing President Salvador Allende garner particular attention; building on recent scholarship, Pettinà highlights the opposing influences of Brazil and Cuba, in addition to subterfuge of the United States. Hardening authoritarianism and systematic anti-communist repression during the 1970s, particularly in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay, often converged with US preferences (and enjoyed some material support), but also developed with great autonomy. Alongside the Southern Cone's authoritarian constellation, Pettinà rightly includes Mexico, where the single-party state deployed violence against guerrillas, campesinos and the Indigenous while selectively supporting reformist causes abroad. Unlike the South Americans, Mexican rulers largely kept the killing out of the headlines.
The book's multinational viewpoint turns the brutal Central American conflicts of the late 1970s and 1980s into complex international contests. The Sandinistas successfully internationalised the Nicaraguan struggle while isolating the nepotistic Somoza government. In El Salvador and Guatemala, conservative elites and their military allies repressed those who demanded change, provoking the emergence or expansion of self-defence groups and guerrillas. State-backed violence reached genocidal levels. South American militaries, especially Argentina's, saw isthmian turmoil as an opportunity to expand political and ideological influence. The non-interventionism of President Jimmy Carter – criticised for leaving a ‘political void’ – and the bellicose unilateralism of President Ronald Reagan are more than a backdrop, but nor are they the only story.
The book presents a valuable introduction for a broader readership and a resource for scholars looking for a summary of new research from across the region. The book would be an effective text for advanced undergraduates or graduate students. Here, however, there is one proviso: the book lacks standard parenthetical or numerical references of the sort one generally wants students to employ in their own work. This is partially offset by frequent reference to specific scholars in the text and bibliographic summaries for each chapter, but nevertheless makes it more difficult to track the sources of specific claims.
As a synthetic account of a complex region in a tumultuous period, the book has many virtues: a broad scope, admirable balance and effective integration of historical scholarship on – and published in – many countries of Latin America. When the Soviet Union disappeared, taking the bipolar battle along with it, it removed one layer without resolving old conflicts (p. 163), sometimes exposing the weaknesses of political projects on the left and right. Pettinà's book draws on a growing historiographical consensus to offer a readable synthesis of how the Cold War mattered deeply in Latin America through the overlap with deeply rooted social conflicts and inter-American asymmetries.
