Peru’s military government (1968 to 1980) is hard to categorize in Cold War terms. It was a dictatorship, yet not guilty of severe human rights violations.

Peruvian officers announced revolutionary intentions that were explicitly “not communist.” They were also “not capitalist.” Instead, the military showed a sincere desire to serve Peru’s poor majority. Their policy was driven by old fashioned nationalism:

• ambitious agrarian reform in a country with vast rural poverty
• nationalization of oil and other industries
• promotion of employee-owned companies
• indigenista themes, such as raising Quechua to the formal status of a co-national language with Spanish.

The revolutionary government of Cuba expressed strong support for the Peruvian regime. In the 1970s and 1980s, it too was —  in a sense — an anomaly. It remained authoritarian, and the army, long headed by Fidel Castro’s brother, Raul, constituted one of  the chief pillars of the regime. But the revolutionary state worked steadily to improve the lives of Cuba’s poor majority.

Mexico. on the other hand, totally disregarded the military trend. Marxism had influenced a generation of Mexican students, just as it had in other countries. But revolutionary socialism wasn’t new in Mexico, so its anticommunist reaction was less violent.

In the 1930s, Mexico had seen real land reform as well as the expropriation of major foreign owned industries. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) retained considerable revolutionary legitimacy and, through its massive patronage, kept a firm grip on industrial workers, the urban middle classes, and the rural population alike.

In the 1960s and 1970s, bolstered by an oil boom, the PRI could handle almost any challenge. Even so, the government did suffer one instance of panic. As Mexico was preparing to host the Olympic Games in 1968, protesting students in the Tlatelolco district of Mexico City were massacred.

The Tlatelolco event was unusual though. Mexican generals hadn’t been key political players for decades. The US government, too, had learned to live with a “revolutionary” Mexico. Dire warnings about “Red” Mexico were already a half century old.

By the mid-1970s, the revolutionary tide had turned in Latin America. Reactionary anticommunist dictatorships were in decline.

Bureaucratic authoritarian governments collapsed in the late 1970s and 1980s because of their own mistakes and excesses, especially problems with massive debt and hyperinflation.

In Argentina, the military government played on nationalism as it identified a new, external enemy: Great Britain. At first, the military garnered widespread public support for its 1982 war with Great Britain over the Falkland (Malvinas) Islands. But the poorly trained Argentine soldiers quickly surrendered. In 1983, Argentina held legitimate elections that ousted the armed forces.

Uruguay got a civilian president in 1984 as did Brazil in 1985. Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia had already returned to constitutional rule by that time. The last Cold War battles had been waged.

The Cold War ravaged countries not prone to insurgency or dictatorship. Chile is the best example of all because no other Latin American country could match Chile’s record of constitutional government. 

For years, Chile’s democracy had negotiated major ideological differences. The Chilean Communist Party was one of the oldest and strongest in the Western Hemisphere. It had participated in electoral coalitions with various other left-leaning parties since the 1930s. It was the kind of Communist Party that frustrated Che Guevara because it didn’t advocate armed revolution. 

In the Chilean presidential election of 1958, a socialist-communist coalition got almost 1/3 of the vote. Their candidate was Salvador Allende, a medical doctor and a Marxist. He was committed to Chilean constitutional traditions and didn’t advocate armed revolution. 

In 1964, Allende ran for president again and did even better than in 1958, despite the fact that his chief opponent was bankrolled by the CIA. Alarmed by Allende’s popularity, the US State Department made Chile a model of their Alliance for Progress aid program. Nevertheless, Allende won the 1970 presidential election. A coalition called Popular Unity was formed, dedicated to a constitutional Chilean “road to socialism.” Their goal was social transformation: nationalization of Chilean copper, coal, and steel, along with banks, and — of course — land reform. However, it soon became clear that they didn’t have the electoral strength to accomplish these goals. 

Allende had won the 3-way election with 36% of the vote. The two more conservative losers had garnered 63% of the vote between them. They were now more or less united in opposition to the Popular Unity government. Moreover, they found a powerful ally in the CIA which pumped money into the opposition. 

The CIA was determined that Allende be overthrown by a coup, and the US State Department used all its leverage to cut off international credit to Allende’s government. Popular Unity imposed price freezes and wage increases to raise living standards of the Chilean poor, but inflation soared into the triple digits. Prosperous and moderately prosperous Chileans fought Popular Unity’s initiatives. Meanwhile, the government retained the strong backing of urban workers, many of whom thought Popular Unity was moving too slowly. 

Workers moved directly to take over factories that the government had been slow to nationalize. But Allende insisted on working within constitutional restraints. His expropriation of the copper industry had been widely popular, and in the 1971 midterm elections, Popular Unity garnered more votes than ever. 

In September 1973, Chilean army tanks rolled into the streets. Allende refused safe passage out of the country, went to his office, and died under attack by his own armed forces. 

The Chilean coup turned out to be the bloodiest coup in the history of Latin America. Thousands of supporters of Popular Unity were herded into the Santiago soccer stadium. As in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, many of these were subject to torture and murder. Bodies were transported to mass graves. 

The military government closed the legislature and governed by decree for 17 years. Except for the Carter administration, it had the firm support of the US State Department. (You may recall that Carter emphasized human rights as a criterion of US policy.) Juntas all over Latin America were relieved when Ronald Reagan, a confirmed Cold Warrior, took office in 1980. 

The Chilean dictatorship was basically a bureaucratic-authoritarian regime, except that the leader of the 1973 coup, General Augusto Pinochet, had a leading role unparalleled in Brazil or Argentina. Chile had become the epitome of the Latin American trend toward military dictatorship.

Want More? Click Here to Access a Free Multimedia Timeline of Cold War Chile

Compared with Argentina, Uruguay had been remarkably calm since World War II.

Between 1951 and 1966, Uruguayans implemented an executive committee instead of a one-man presidency.

Despite economic problems, Uruguayan standards of living remained the envy of the hemisphere. Then a group called the Tupamaros tried to foment revolution, just as Che attempted to do in Bolivia.

Formed in 1964, the Tupamaro urban guerilla movement, was directly inspired by the example of the Cuban Revolution.

The Tupamaros recognized the absence of revolutionary conditions in Uruguay. They carried out daring, brilliantly planned operations designed to impress public opinion.

In 1967, the Uruguayan president declared martial law to fight the Tupamaros. The military began a gradual takeover which was completed in 1973. The Tupamaros were quickly cornered once torture penetrated their cover.

Bureaucratic Authoritarianism  descended on this once privileged society.

By the end of the 1970s, Uruguay had more political prisoners, relative to its size, than any other country in the world.

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Brazilian military leaders fought alongside American forces in World War II, enjoying warm ties with the United States. So when the US responded with alarm to the Cuban Revolution, the Brazilian military saw danger everywhere. In a very real sense, they went on “red alert.”

The military was especially distressed by their government’s civilian leadership and a confrontational political climate soon developed.

In 1964, with the knowledge and collaboration of American officials, and with US naval support standing by offshore, Brazilian generals seized control of the country.

The military ruled Brazil undemocratically for the next twenty years.

Brazil had no tradition of military rule, so military leaders carefully maintained the outward appearance of constitutional government. If laws got in their way, they decreed a change in the laws. For example, dissolving congress was an unconstitutional act, so before they took action, the generals decreed amendments that let them dissolve the legislative body legally.

Still, the Brazilian military wasn’t a unified organization. Moderate constitutionalists were in control of Brazil’s government from 1964 to 1967. More dictatorial hardliners took over in 1968, dominating the government until 1974. Then the regime relaxed somewhat.

Along with the group of generals who took their cues from the US, there were right wing nationalists who wanted to make Brazil into a world power. This group was afraid of losing the vast territory that made up the Amazon River basin, so they paid special attention to road building and development projects in the surrounding region.

The Brazilian military also pushed heavy industrialization, focusing on the manufacture of durable consumer goods. Additional resources were channeled into mining, transportation, steel production, and oil refining.

By the early 1970s, the economy was growing explosively. The government bragged of a Brazilian economic “miracle.” In actuality, the military government had purposely created conditions in which new industries would thrive at the expense of Brazil’s impoverished majority. The military was able to hold down wages, suppress strikes, and even “disappear” anyone who complained.

Most ordinary Brazilian citizens didn’t benefit from the “miracle.” Heavy industry used only a small portion of Brazil’s pool of unskilled labor, and production was aimed at a middle-class market. Military policies put more money and credit in the hands of those who were “better off” and likely to buy cars, electronics, and domestic appliances. In fact, the bulk of Brazil’s income gains went to the richest tenth of Brazilian society.

After constructing some of the world’s largest — and most environmentally destructive hydroelectric dams — along with highways, bridges, and airports, the economic bubble burst. The miracle was over. And Brazil was impacted in a big way!

Oil prices had been rising steeply since the early 1970s and Brazil imported a lot of oil. The military had borrowed billions of petrodollars to sustain its developmental drive. They had also borrowed petrodollars to import the petroleum they needed. When international interest rates rose dramatically in the late 1970s, Brazil’s foreign debt mushroomed. By the early 1980s, the country had the world’s largest foreign debt.

Beginning in 1978, worker strikes in Sao Paulo, Brazil’s industrial heart, broadcast the revival of popular opposition to the military’s regressive social policies. The military had used economic growth to justify its continued authoritarian rule. Now, in the early 1980s, with an economic meltdown and increasing opposition, the military was finally ready to bow out.

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In the 1960s, the US initiated a new aid policy for Latin America in response to the Cuban Revolution. The plan was called the Alliance for Progress and was announced by President Kennedy in 1961.

Based on the Marshall Plan, the Alliance was designed to reduce revolutionary pressures by stimulating economic development and political reform. But the Alliance for Progress never really got off the ground.

By the 1970s, most Latin American generals thought that socialist revolution was imminent. They could see signs all around them. Spray painted revolutionary slogans seemed to cover every wall. Marxism was becoming the predominant political philosophy among Latin American artists, social scientists, and nationalist intellectuals, and it pervaded the cultural scene.

The 1960s New Cinema of Brazil gained critical acclaim, producing films designed “to make people aware of their own misery.”

Cuba’s film industry became one of the best, and most influential, in Latin America. One of the most famous Cuban movies was titled Memories of Underdevelopment or Memorias del Subdesarrollo. Released in 1968, the film was elected the 144th best movie of all time in 2012. It tells the story of Sergio, a wealthy bourgeois aspiring writer, who decides to stay in Cuba even though his wife and friends flee to Miami. Sergio looks back over the changes in Cuba, from the Cuban Revolution to the missile crisis, the effect of living in an underdeveloped country, and his relations with his girlfriends Elena and Hanna. Memories of Underdevelopment highlights feelings of alienation during a tumultuous period of social change.

Latin American novels were becoming famous throughout the world, and prestigious authors were speaking for revolutions. Columbia’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for example, traveled often to Cuba and was a good friend of Fidel Castro.

The Garcia Marquez novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967),one of the best known Latin American novels of the 20th century, ends with a massacre, as government machine guns fire into crowds of workers on strike against a US banana company, (Garcia Marquez used literary license, however. The real event took place in 1928 near the author’s home.)

Authors such as Mexico’s Carlos Fuentes and Peru’s Maria Vargas Llosa also admired revolutionary Cuba.

Marxist thought was most prevalent in public universities. But even the Catholic Church developed a wing in sympathy with the revolutionaries.

Many in the Latin American military believed that it was their responsibility to put an end to the revolutionary “red tide.“ Secret kidnapping, torture, and murder in the name of counterinsurgency became widespread. Anyone suspected of sympathizing with guerillas was targeted: student protestors, labor leaders, peasant organizers.

Since the 1960s,  guerillas were often urban. They lived and worked in the big cities close to government and army headquarters where they could cause disruption. They also preyed on wealthy industrialists to finance their operations. Still, the urban guerillas were vulnerable, and they were forced to rely on secrecy for protection.

“This is war,” explained the generals.

Latin American security forces subjected prisoners to a variety of horrors. Many in Latin America believed that torture techniques were taught at the US School of the Americas (see our post on  Pope Francis and the Cold War in Latin America. ) The verdict may be out on this accusation, but many believe that ‘national security doctrine’ maintained a climate of emergency that was used to justify such action.

American policy called for democracy, but the US helped trigger dictatorship by encouraging the Latin American armed forces to take an increasingly active role in national life. As officers began promoting economic development and public health, a lot of them saw civilian politicians an unnecessary hindrance.

To “save democracy from the Marxists,” the generals engaged in a series of preemptive strikes. The governments of one Latin American country after another were taken over by juntas — executive committees composed of generals and admirals.

The juntas of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s tried to keep things under collective, institutional control. They wanted to avoid the emergence of  an unpredictable leader like Argentina’s Peron. 

The nonpersonal nature of the new military dictatorships led political scientists to speak of bureaucratic authoritarianism. By the mid 1970s, a plague of bureaucratic authoritarianism had swept through South America and constitutional civilian governments were few and far between.

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The early Cold War years in Argentina were dominated by the personalities of the wildly popular Juan Perón and his wife, the lovely and seductive Eva, known as Evita. The couple’s followers praised their efforts to eliminate poverty and dignify labor, while their detractors accused them of dictatorship.

Perón’s first term as president lasted from 1946-1952.  Eva died in 1952, but Perón was elected to a second term, serving from 1952 until 1955. He was ousted in ’55 when the Argentine armed forces set up their version of a bureaucratic authoritarian state. The military’s goals were:

• to eliminated any revolutionary threat
• to hold down wages
• to encourage foreign investment.

Official policy also included a commitment to anti-communist repression.

This was a challenge because Argentina’s revolutionaries were ardent proponents of their Perónist heritage and their deep socialist and anarchist roots. To counter these forces, the Argentine military turned to brutality. Killing began in the late 1960s and escalated throughout the 1970s.

A number of Marxist guerrilla movements — their members often young, middle-class, and university educated — opposed the Argentine military government.

The best known guerillas were the Montaneros. Many of them came from Perónist families and still considered themselves Perónists even though their particular ideology was more dramatically leftward leaning than that of Perón.

The military responded with deathsquads that claimed the lives — or disappeared — at least 9,000 people and, perhaps, as many as 30,000 people.

This anti-communist terror was officially called the Process of National Reorganization by the military junta that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. More commonly known as the Dirty War, it was a comprehensive campaign aimed at eliminating communists and others seen as “subversives.” According to Jon Lee Anderson, in a post on The New Yorker Blog

Many of the victims were held for months in official institutions, where they were repeatedly tortured before being killed, their bodies “disappeared.”

The dirty war continued even after the military finally permitted Perón to return to Argentina. He regained the presidency there in 1973 but died almost immediately. His second wife, Isabel, stepped in and became a political leader in her own right, but she was not  the leader that the Perónists craved. The movement spit apart and she was replaced by a new military president in 1976. Counterinsurgency operations moved into high gear and the military finally succeeded in eliminating their guerilla enemies. The generals proudly announced the triumph of  “Judeo-Christian civilization.” For a time, most Argentinians tried not to notice the dirty war.

In the late 1970s, however, mothers carrying photographs of their “disappeared” children began to protest in the Plaza de Mayo, the main square in downtown Buenos Aires. Gradually, the world recognized and honored the truth of their accusations. The military made a desperate attempt to change the subject and to reinforce Argentinean nationalism by identifying a new, external enemy, Great Britain.

In 1982, war erupted over the Falkland or Malvinas, Islands. The poorly trained Argentinean soldiers were quickly overwhelmed, though, and the military was disgraced. In 1983, Argentina held elections and the armed forces were defeated.

Pope Francis’ role in the Dirty War — silence, complicity, or risk taking to support those in danger — has yet to be determined. But the discussion around the Cold War tragedy in Argentina reminds us all that human rights are not to be taken lightly. Trafficking in persons is a serious crime and a grave violation of human rights. Every year, thousands of men, women and children fall into the hands of traffickers, in their own countries and abroad. The “disappeared” are with us even now with United Nations stating that the number of victims (worldwide) at any given time tops 2.4.million.

According to the New York County District Attorney’s Office:

Victims of human trafficking are often in plain sight. They may be providing you services or interacting with the public in some way. If you believe that someone may be the victim of human trafficking it is important that you try to get help. If you believe the victim is in immediate danger please call 911.

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Today, March 14, 2013, the world is celebrating the election of  Latin America’s first pope, Pope Francis. But all is not rosy. Despite worldwide celebration, snide newspaper headlines are emerging. Here’s a sample. It popped up yesterday in The Guardian. In fact, almost as soon as Jorge Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires (Argentina), was elected, The Guardian blustered: Pope Francis: questions remain over his role during Argentina’s dictatorship.

The paper goes on to state that

the news of Latin America’s first pope was clouded by lingering concerns about the role of the church — and its new head — during Argentina’s brutal military dictatorship.

The Catholic church and Pope Francis have been accused of a complicit silence and worse during the “dirty war” of murders and abductions carried out by the junta that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983.

Today, the reputable New Yorker picked up the issue and is addressing it in its daily newsletter.

Well, you get the idea. If you insist, you can read the full Guardian article here and The New Yorker post here.

For quite some time, Cold War Studies has been planning a series on the Cold War in Latin America.  Today seems like a good time to start — even if it’s a bit earlier than planned. So I’ll give you a brief introduction below, and tomorrow I’ll move right into Argentina. Then we’ll backtrack for a more sequential overview of Latin America’s role in the half century superpower conflict. I hope you’ll join me for the complete series.

Introduction to the Cold War in Latin America

After the shock of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the Cold War came to Latin America in full force. The Cuban government tried to help Marxist revolutionaries in other countries of the region, but there wasn’t much that they could do. The Cubans had their hands full with their own domestic challenges.

Although Latin American Marxists believed that Russia was on their side, the USSR played only a minor role in Latin America’s revolutionary movements. Instead Nationalism formed the bedrock of Latin America’s revolutionary fervor.

America didn’t see things this way. Even though there were no Soviet proxy guerilla forces in Latin America, the US State Department saw Soviet involvement at every turn.

Nevertheless, the counter-revolutionary violence that spread across the region in the 1960s and 1970s was actually based on support of the weak and impoverished masses in their struggle against rich minorities in their own countries as well as US multinational corporations.

The upper class and most of the middle class in Latin America were anti-communist. So were many of the poor. These anti-communists branded Marxist ideas as foreign to Latin America, emphasizing that Marxism was an imported ideology supported by radical university students who didn’t speak for the masses.

America’s most important anti-communist allies were the armed forces of Latin America. The working alliance between the US and Latin American militaries dated from World War II, and  involved permanent, large scale US military aid for Latin American armies. It also included training at the US military’s School of the Americas. Here, the basic curriculum was summed up as counterinsurgency or “how to fight guerillas.”

The overall logic of the anti-communist alliance, sometimes called “national security doctrine,” was as follows:

• Latin American armed forces are key US allies in defense of the Free World, and counterinsurgency is their special role.
• The US military will handle any communist invaders from outside of the hemisphere.
• Latin American armies should defend against the internal enemies of freedom: revolutionary organizers in factories, poor neighborhoods, and universities.

Thus, the US alliance increased the power of Latin American armies within their own countries. Doctrine also offered a glorious mission — defending the “Free World” or even “Western Civilization. This mission won them rich and powerful friends as a fringe benefit. We’ll see how this played out in Argentina tomorrow.

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