Life history and cultures of militancy in Latin America’s Cold War

Abstract

Since the early 2000s, historians have transformed our understanding of the Cold War in Latin America. No longer do scholars describe Latin American events in this period as merely a reflection of the global conflict between two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. No longer do they relegate local actors to the historical margins. Rather, recent scholarship has described the power and, to a degree, the autonomy of domestic social and political dynamics in shaping the region’s Cold War conflicts. Those conflicts had their roots in layers of local history that interacted with the geopolitical struggle between the two superpowers, and which were, in various ways, influenced and radicalised – but never entirely controlled or subsumed – by Cold War ideologies and by the interference of, particularly, the hemispheric Northern colossus. It was a combination of superpower conflict and long-standing local tensions, and not merely the meddling of outside powers, that made Latin America into one of the Cold War’s ‘hot’ conflict zones, with hundreds of thousands of victims and enormous social and political costs in most countries of the region.1 This special issue of Radical Americas uses a biographical lens to probe the relationship between local dynamics and global ideological tensions in Latin America’s Cold War. Such a perspective has been suggested by recent approaches to biography in Latin America, which, according to the eminent practitioner Mary Kay Vaughan, have been ‘less interested in a person for his or her unique contribution