Guerrilla History - Cold War Latin America w/ Alexander Aviña

Episode Date: March 26, 2021

In this episode of Guerrilla History, we bring on Rev Left Radio fan favorite Professor Alexander Aviña to talk about Latin America in the Cold War period.  While we in the global north tend to think of the Cold War period as being typified by tensions in Eastern Europe, Latin America was the playground for much of the US's conflicts of the era.   Alexander Aviña is historian at Arizona State University, and is author of the book Specters of Revolution:  Peasant Guerrilla in the Cold War Mexican Countryside (Oxford University Press, 2014, https://alexanderavina.com/specters-of-revolution/ ).  He has also had articles published in places like NACLA Report of the Americas and the Journal of Iberian and Latin America Research, and has made numerous interview appearances, including several episodes of Revolutionary Left Radio.  You can follow him on twitter @Alexander_Avina.   Guerrilla History is the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history, and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present.  If you have any questions or guest/topic suggestions, email them to us at [e-mail]. Your hosts are immunobiologist Henry Hakamaki, Professor Adnan Husain, historian and Director of the School of Religion at Queens University, and Revolutionary Left Radio's Breht O'Shea.   Follow us on social media!  Our podcast can be found on twitter @guerrilla_pod, and can be supported on patreon at https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory.  Your contributions will make the show possible to continue and succeed! To follow the hosts, Henry can be found on twitter @huck1995, and also has a patreon to help support himself through the pandemic where he breaks down science and public health research and news at https://www.patreon.com/huck1995.  Adnan can be followed on twitter @adnanahusain, and also runs The Majlis Podcast, which can be found at https://anchor.fm/the-majlis, and the Muslim Societies-Global Perspectives group at Queens University, https://www.facebook.com/MSGPQU/.   Breht is the host of Revolutionary Left Radio, which can be followed on twitter @RevLeftRadio and cohost of The Red Menace Podcast, which can be followed on twitter @Red_Menace_Pod.  Follow and support these shows on patreon, and find them at https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/.     Thanks to Ryan Hakamaki, who designed and created the podcast's artwork, and Kevin MacLeod, who creates royalty-free music.          

You remember Dinn-Vin-Bin-Bin-Boo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello, and welcome to guerrilla history. The podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history

and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm your host, Henry Huckamaki, joined by my co-hosts, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queens University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm great. Great to be with you, Henry. It's always nice to see you as well. And Brett O'Shea, host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast, Hello, Brett. How are you doing?

Hello, I'm doing great. Yeah, today we've got a great interview coming up with somebody who we're all quite familiar with at this point, but we'll be making his debut on guerrilla history, Professor Alexander Avina. Dr. Avina is a historian at Arizona State University and is the author of the book Spectres of Revolution, peasant guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican countryside from Oxford University Press in 2014. Our topic is going to be Latin America in the Cold War. And if that seems broad to you, listeners, it's because it is broad. We're going to be taking very much the same track with this episode as we did with our introduction to African resistance and revolutions episode,

where it's going to be a survey of the region as a whole and the time period as a whole so that we can use it as a reference point to getting into individual movements and individual resistance leaders, perhaps, in the future. So something that we can call back on to kind of give us a historical grounding. And that way we can really understand the context of these individual instances in a more regional context. So guys, what are you looking to get out of this conversation with Dr. Avina who, you know, Brett, you've had him on Revolutionary Left Radio several times. And listeners, if you haven't listened to those episodes before, go back. They're absolutely fantastic. I've had him as a guest on the David Feldman show, which I co-hosts a segment on several times as well. But Brett, why don't we start with you?

What are you looking forward to getting out of this conversation with Alex Avenia? Yeah, I mean, first and foremost, you know, Alex is just a wonderful historian. He's affable. He's a fountain of wisdom that he can just pull from his own mind at any time. You can ask him any question, and he can speak eloquently and at length on that subject. And so just to have somebody of that caliber on our show or Rev. Left or David Feldman's show, anything else like that is always an honor and a pleasure. So I'm excited to share Alex with the guerrilla history audience. But then the other thing is I really like what we're doing, which is taking this international approach, which everybody, you know, if you're a listener, you know that we take that approach.

We are internationalists. But then doing these broad surveys, almost, you know, continent based, sometimes, you know, time history based. like this epoch of history or like, you know, today we're talking about the Cold War and then, you know, do a Passover. And that gives everybody a good foundation to root themselves in for further deep dives. And, you know, Alex couldn't be better at that because his knowledge is so multifaceted. He can talk just as eloquently about Chile as he can about Cuba as he can about, I mean, I had him want to talk about the Haitian Revolution. And so I'm excited to do that and I'm excited to lay these groundworks for further investigations down the line.

I think it's a really great way to explore history just generally. Adnan, what do you have to look forward to in this episode? Well, I am not so familiar with Latin American history. And so I'm looking forward to learning a lot and getting a bit of a primer and an overview. I have little specific slivers of knowledge on certain topics that I was very interested in at different periods, but to think about the shape of the continent as a whole during this period of the Cold War and see whether there are patterns to this history, shared experiences, before we examine in future episodes the specifics of individual movements and individual countries

or different leaders and movements, I think, is really very useful. So I'm looking forward to see whether there are some continuities with a longer period of the colonial era into the post-colonial and then the post-World War II era in terms of Latin American history. What are the kind of great big themes and tensions that define social and political struggle and conflict on the continent? And then, you know, to be able to reflect broadly on the Cold War to think about whether, you know, the post-Cold War changed much. What did it change in terms of the U.S. role and relationship to the region? So I'm very interested in some of these broad questions because I have just a passing novices understanding of this rich history of an entire continent. so I'm looking forward to learning a lot more.

And one thing I want to say is that I think that, well, again, we're taking an overly broad look at history here. I mean, you're never going to be able to really pick out nuance looking at such a broad topic. What we're really trying to do is set up these really granular looks at individual histories in the future here. But one thing I want to point out is that Latin America and the Cold War was really an active, active region in terms of both, domestic politics in Latin America, as well as U.S. interference in Latin America. Now, a lot of the people that listen to our show, whether they came to the show because they just naturally found us or they came over from Rev. Left, they'll already know a bit of the

history of Latin American intervention by the U.S. during the Cold War. But I think that this region really is kind of underthought of by the broad populace as a whole during this time period. When people harken back to the Cold War, they tend to think of Eastern Europe, the Berlin Wall, you know, these kind of eastern block type areas. Very few people, when they hear Cold War, the first thing that jumps to their mind is Latin America. But really, there was just as much going on in Latin America, if not more so than there was kind of on that eastern front. So I think that this will be a very interesting episode to try to draw out from Alex. The the fact that this was such an active region, both domestically as well as in terms of what

was going on external pressure, particularly from the U.S., and it's like I said, it's something that we don't really cover very well in textbooks or history programs in the U.S. This is really an undercover topic. Anybody want to add anything to that? Yeah, yeah, I'll start. I just, you know, just sort of bouncing off that idea, patterns emerge as we do these histories. One of the patterns is, of course, the brutality and insistence and relentlessness of U.S. imperialism and the sort of European arrogance that makes colonialist countries feel like they own the world. But another huge pattern that arises is the importance of colonialism broadly, whether that's settler colonialism or, you know, just regular colonialism, neo-colonialism, imperialism.

You know, sometimes on the left, we can very get bogged down and important, but, you know, sometimes reductive conversations about class. Phenon famously said, as he was doing his wretched of the earth, in the colonial situation, the Marxist analysis needs to be stretched a bit. And time and time again, we see the imprint of colonialism all over the world. And that is part and parcel with indigenous resistance,

which is the other side, the other side of that dialectical coin of the colonial repression. And so once again in Latin America, I don't even know what we're all going to get to, in this conversation, but I know one thing is going to be gotten to, and that is the legacy of colonialism, white supremacy, and the inevitable indigenous resistance to that stuff. And so, you know, I really think that understanding colonialism, theorizing colonialism, and aiming toward decolonialism as part and parcel with any socialist or communist or left-wing progressive movement is is a bedrock

of what we stand for. And any leftist who does not take that question seriously and does not investigate and analyze that aspect of things will have a very lopsided analysis at best. So once again, history is showing us this is an important element to understand and to analyze and to fight against. And I think that's going to be shown here as it's shown in every episode we do. Yeah. And speaking of patterns, if I may jump in, we said that, this is a very active region during the Cold War. I have a list of U.S. interventions in the region from the Latin American historian John Cotsworth, who was at University of Chicago, then Harvard, and then was the provost at Columbia. And this really is something that he is well vetted in.

He has a list of U.S. interventions. And I'm just going to read through the list very quickly of the ones that took place during the Cold War. And you'll see how many there are. And a lot of these, they really did have the same sorts of patterns. But there was direct interventions in the Dominican Republic twice during the Cold War, Granada, Guatemala, Haiti right at the tail end of the Cold War, Nicaragua, Panama, and there was indirect intervention. So those are ones where the U.S. was basically assisting local actors as the front line of that intervention within the country

rather than sending in the CIA or the Marines or something like that as being the front line. But there was indirect interventions in Bolivia twice during the Cold War, Brazil, Chile, twice during the Cold War, Dominican Republic, El Salvador three times during the Cold War, Guatemala three times, Guyana, Honduras, Nicaragua, again, and Panama twice. I mean, the list is unbelievably long in

How many countries did we just list there that the U.S. was involved in? And like you said, Brett, there's patterns involved, both in terms of patterns of why the intervention took place as well as how the intervention took place. And this really kind of broad look at history might help us draw out these commonalities as we go into the future conversations. Adnan? Well, that list is quite impressive and disturbing. I think what's interesting, though, is that, of course, the U.S. has such a long history of intervention even before the Cold War.

So with the Monroe Doctrine, that really it was a laboratory for U.S. empire, before the U.S. becomes a global hegemon and engaged in neocolonialism and imperialism over the course of the Cold War with major interventions, either through CIA-sponsored coups or action. military conflicts like in Vietnam, it was busy crafting these policies of smaller scale interventions closer to home in the Caribbean, in Latin America, ever since the Spanish-American war and beyond. So it will be really interesting to see the continuities, what's sort of the same in terms of the pattern of U.S. involvement, and what changes or develops that's unique to the Cold War situation and whether in fact the fact that the United States had a rival global power or block that it was competing with changed or altered its policies and whether there were opportunities for people struggle, freedom, and so on as a result of World War II

and the Cold War environment. So I'm very keen on finding out more also about, I would say, you know, the Bolivarian revolutions, which is something that would also be a great topic to look at, were Republican revolutions. We think of them as democratic revolutions, but like the United States Revolution in 1776, the American Revolution, it was a settler colonial republic that was founded. And there might be interesting things to notice about the way in which a conservative land-owning and church elite preserves itself in Republican form and that it takes a long time for what we might think of as real full democracy to actually express itself. And of course, there were many huge setbacks with dictatorships and the like during this entire period.

but, you know, going from this settler republic that's established when you first have the independence of these countries, this doesn't necessarily mean that all those ideals of Republican ideals actually leads even to what we would think of as political democracy. So that's another theme that I think will be interesting to see. How does that shape Latin American politics, particularly during the Cold War, when the United States was promoting itself globally as a, you know, democratic champion, right? You know, we know, of course, that how baseless in many ways this claim was, but it would be interesting to see how that plays out in the history of the continent and globally. Yeah, and I'll say my final word, and then I'll give you each the opportunity for your last word

before we bring in Alex and do our interview with him. But it's always interesting to try to think of why things happen. And I'm still on, you know, my mind is stuck on these U.S. interventions because they really were so horrific and caused so much suffering in the region. And the question of why always jumps to my mind. And really, there's three ways that you could look at it. And two of them make very little sense. So it really leaves one option in my mind.

The first option is. is security, right? That's what the U.S. always preaches when we go in and do these foreign interventions, whether it's in Latin America or elsewhere, the Middle East particularly. It's always security that's being preached. But have we ever faced a security threat from Latin America? Not since the Spanish-American war, I'd posit. I mean, the closest that perhaps we've come was the Cuban missile crisis, but even then, there's internal documents that show that they didn't care about the missiles being in Cuba. They knew that the risk from the missiles in Cuba, I actually have a quote somewhere around me, but maybe we'll do that when we do an episode on

the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Cuban Revolution or something along those lines. But there's internal documents that showed that they were not worried about the missiles in Cuba, internally the government. So that's the closest that they would have had to some sort of security concern within Latin America in the last 120 years. The second option is economic issues. So, of course, we know that some of these interventions did have economic reasons behind them, at least nominatively. For example, Guatemala, 1954, when the Arbenz government started to nationalize some

unused lands of the United Fruit Company, while those unused lands by the United Fruit Company might not, you know, have a big impact on the United States economy as a whole, but it does set a precedent for nationalizing lands that are held by either the U.S. government or U.S. corporations. But the point that I'm making here is that the economic interests are very, very small, even here, certainly not to any sort of extent that it would be worth doing an intervention for. I mean, when was the last time that we had a Latin American intervention that we did where there was a net gain economically from that intervention, at least not much?

So that leaves the third option, which is politics and projection of power. So the U.S., I think, goes in and does all of these interventions to project its power elsewhere in the world is a signal of how strong they are. And this show of political might really has shaped U.S. foreign policy for the last 100 years or so, certainly in the last 60, 70 years

ever since World War II. But, you know, it's just interesting to think about the reason why some things happen. And I think that I'm going to try to get to that point with Alex when he comes on for the interview and see what his thoughts on this are. So, Adnan, what are your final thoughts before we wrap up this introduction? Well, just that I'm eager to have this conversation with Alex,

and I think we've raised a lot of key issues. So hopefully our listeners will learn a lot, and even if you're familiar with Latin American history to some extent, having a synthetic overview, should hopefully be very valuable in allowing us to pursue some other particular themes. and so I'm looking forward to this conversation. Yeah, I mean, as from my final thoughts, it's basically echoing all the sentiments. Henry, you made a really great point.

And I think when it comes to using the language of security threat, it's just the selling of it to the general population here at home. They have to have to have some sort of way to pitch to others while they're making these interventions, while they're putting tax dollars towards slaughtering children in this country or that country. And time and time again, whether it's Vietnam, whether it's Iraq, whether it's Latin America, it's always under the pretense of national security. And when you have a population that is generally ignorant about the rest of the world and pumped up on nationalism, that whole

pitch becomes much, much easier to sell. And it never runs out of juice. And so the U.S. will use it as long as the majority of Americans will fall for it. And I think that's going to become increasingly clear as we go throughout this episode. And that's why we have to educate people about history. So that's the purpose of this podcast is to disabuse people. of the impressions that allow them to be manipulated and exploited politically in just that fashion. Exactly right. Couldn't agree more with both of you. So listeners, that's your call to send this episode around to friends and comrades to help

educate them on this topic, whether or not they're on the left. I think that this conversation will be very beneficial for most people who don't really have a good idea of what was going on in the region at the time. But in any case, now that we've had our thoughts out on what we'd like to get out of the conversation. Let's bring in Professor Avina and we'll be right back listeners with the conversation that we're that we're going to have with him. Welcome back to Gorilla History. We're now joined by our guest, Professor Alexander Avina, historian at Arizona State University and author of Spectres of Revolution. Hello, Alex. How are you

doing today. Hey, Henry, I'm doing well. Thank you. Thank you for having me on. Oh, it's a pleasure. You know that in our past conversations, you and I have always had a very fun back and forth, and it's really a pleasure to bring you on to guerrilla history to bring you on with the other guys as well, and I'm sure that this is going to be a very fun conversation. So we're going to be talking about Latin America and the Cold War, but I think that it's probably a good idea to kind of lay out the historical background of Latin America before the Cold War, as we were mentioning just before we hit record, the structures that were in place didn't come out of nowhere as we went into the Cold War. It's not like these countries went from one distinct form to a completely

other distinct form when the Cold War started, and that was what led to this kind of foreign policy, the American foreign policy in Latin America that we had seen. So what was the historical context of Latin America leading up into the Cold War, and then was there any sort of changes as we got into the Cold War? Yeah, so let me think about how to approach this gigantic question. So, you know, when we get independence in Latin America from, in Spanish America, I'll start there, you know, in the 1820s, there was a, there was a saying that emerged from those independence movement in which some people are said that, you know, we have, quote, But it's the same horse, but with a different writer.

And what the saying refers to is that many of the Spanish colonial structures, economic, social, particularly social structures, remain largely the same. The only different was who was riding the horse. It wasn't the Spanish crowd anymore. But it was their brethren, crioyos, settlers, who had been born in the Americas, who simply took power and wielded political social and economic power in Latin America in the post-independence era. Now, there's a couple of exceptions, but Haiti is obviously an exception where there wasn't just a transfer of power from one white elite to another. And the question of race, obviously, is really different in Latin America and then it differs regionally. And we can talk about that. And then there was a, in Mexico, in 1810, there was an effort to launch a social revolution and independence movement that ultimately was defeated, partially defeated.

It gets a little bit of complicated. But with that, with those exceptions, you know, by and large, independent. simply resulted in political independence for many of the, at least in Spanish-American countries, but the people who remained in power look a lot like the people who had been in power before. And what this region looks like as a whole, by and large, it's an agricultural, almost feudalistic region, right? You have a landed, a small, tiny white landed elite at the top, and you have masses of dark-skinned Latin America. at the bottom, most of which throughout the 19th century will be engaged in agriculture endeavors.

There's, depending on country, their indigenous communities managed to hold on to their lands that had been guaranteed to them essentially by the Spanish crown. Up until the late 19th century, when we get what some historians referred to as a second conquest of Latin America, when you have the introduction of laissez-faire capitalism throughout the region, we have wholesale privatization of indigenous communal peasant lands. lands, and you have really the emergence of Great Britain and British capital as the predominant economic power in the region and the United States that's slowly catching up. Again, this varies by region, right?

The Caribbean is radically different with the legacies of African slavery, right? But by and large, the social structures remain the same in terms of a tiny white elite descended from an earlier imperial power or more recent European arrivals by the late 19th, early 20th century. And then you have other countries like coastal Mexico, both on the Caribbean coast and on the Pacific coast, you have the legacies of African slavery as well, and in Peru and in Argentina and other places. But what Latin America looks like by the early 20th century is a region that, again,

is primarily agricultural. Some of the biggest countries are starting to engage. in industrialization that's being, you know, spurred by foreign capital, and the introduction of foreign capital into the region tends to produce these export-oriented economies in Latin America where they provide cheap labor and natural resources, and they also provide open markets for expensive manufactured goods coming from the global north. But these industrial sectors are limited to some of the bigger countries in Latin America, like Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, But by and large, the region is still agricultural.

And you have an alliance generally of militaries, Catholic Church hierarchy, and these landed elites who are wielding power in different countries, right? But by and large, that's what the social structure looks like. High levels of social economic inequality, not a lot of political enfranchisement across the region. particularly throughout the 19th century. It'll start to change a little bit throughout the 20th century. And again, that's actually what spurs

a lot of the, some of the Cold War dynamics we'll be talking about, expanding the political power of the masses. And it's interesting also to think about how much of what we'll talk about in the Cold War era, some of these reforms that Latin American reformers will try to implement

in their countries are a direct response to these almost feudalistic legacies from different colonial powers. So a lot of the reforms that will be demonized in U.S. media, for instance, or by U.S. political leaders, as communistic, as Bolshevik, as whatever,

actually are capitalistic reforms meant to break these long-lasting feudalistic structures that existed in the region and were actually solidified throughout the 19th century. So that's like a really broad, and it starts to change, right? we get to, at the same time that British capital dominates much of the region, particularly South America throughout the 19th century, you have the simultaneous gradual rise of the United

States as a competitive imperial power. You know, some of you may know, they already, by the late 19th century, the U.S. has taken half of Mexico land as part of the Mexican-American War. There's estimates that between 1860s, say the 1898 Spanish-American War, U.S. gunboats enter Latin American ports in coercive ways, like thousands of times, like two to three thousand times. So, and then we get to the Spanish-American War where the U.S. expands extracontinentally and starts to acquire its own colonies in Asia and the Caribbean. All this forms part of the background to, and helps sets the terrain for what historians

of Latin America now refer to a long cold war, a history that doesn't just begin in 1947, but actually stretches back to the early 20th century. And they really focus on a huge, one, the constant intervention of the U.S. military, particularly with the U.S. Marines in the first 30 years of the 20th century, right? Something like 34 to 40 direct military interventions in Latin America, that'll play a huge role in how the Cold War unfolds in the latter half of the 20th century. But the other two big events that I want to signal as part of this long Cold War that stretches to the early 20th century.

One is the Mexican Revolution of 1910, which really shook the region. It was a seismic event for the region in advancing not just the possibility of the power of a peasant revolution, but also the way that the Mexican Revolution gets resolved with the 1917 constitution, it provided a very vibrant example of economic nationalism for other Latin American countries to follow. So that's one. And then a couple years later, a man who was actually in post-revolutionary in Mexico hanging out with anarcho-sindicalist oil workers, Augusto Cessar Sandino, this Nicaraguan, he gets these ideas from the Mexican Revolution. He's hanging out with these radical oil workers. He will go back to his native Nicaragua, and he in the late 1920s will lead this liberation

effort to try to free Nicaragua from the occupation of the U.S. Marines. And Sandino's movement is like a second seismic event in Latin America and that it shows the power of political nationalism. So you have the economic nationalism represented by the 1910 Mexican Revolution, and then you have the political nationalism represented by Sandino's, quote unquote, crazy little army as a Chilean journalist and writer referred to it as. And also, I mean, they'd be partly because they also forced the U.S. Marines to leave by the early 1930s. So those two events were really important for the region. That, in addition to the Great Depression, to a lot of Latin America's economies, particularly the bigger economies, adopting an import substitution model, right? They really tried to protect domestic manufacturing and industrialization by keeping foreign competitors out. These economic models really were looking toward the Mexican Revolution in 1910 and the Sunanese, early, the first Nandino movement, as examples to follow.

That's a tremendous survey of that earlier. history late 19th and early 20th century is so helpful one thing that you said that I was interested to ask you a little bit more about is in thinking about it as a long cold war you know who are the players in the earlier period we know of course we think of the cold war as the united states and its allies NATO against soviet union warsaw pact but you were talking a little bit about how British capital was so important in the 19th century. Are you suggesting that there's a lot of competition in the early part of the 20th century, late 19th, early 20th century between U.S. political and military and economic influence in the region and the British? How does that

transition work? In addition to all those small wars, I remember an awful book by Max Boot early in the 2000s that was about America's small wars, right? He actually detailed a lot of these small interventions that you were, I think, referring to. But I'm just kind of interested in the interaction. Why call it the Long Cold War? And what kind of interaction is there between British Capitol and U.S. political and military influence in the region before you get to the U.S. dominance? That's a great question, Adeline. It's also you're you're like begging me to go and talk shit about Max Boot, but I'm going to control myself and like not go in that route. But yeah, so no, I think before World War I, there is in,

you know, as it is in the rest of the global South, there is a, there is imperial competition, right? The rise of the U.S. as a, as a global empire is not a predetermined thing. And there is, really before World War I, there is competition, whether it's in Africa and Asia and in Latin America, between German capital, Great Britain, the United States. And it's really World War I and the consequences of it that allows the U.S. to kind of emerge, particularly in Latin America, as the primary political and economic power from the outside, right? And they're very effective at creating linkages between themselves and local allies on the ground. And it's just something that a thing that I'll keep talking about, right, that when we talk about U.S. Empire and Latin America during the long Cold War, there's a lot of unintended consequences. is there's a lot of failed U.S. efforts to get people to do what they want them to do.

And so there's a lot of local agency on the ground. And beyond that, none of the U.S. imperial projects would have succeeded had they not been able to cultivate local elite allies on the ground. So World War I knocks out to a certain extent the power of a British, German capital, for instance, in the region. But it allows the U.S. to kind of emerge as the predominant force in Latin America. And that's when you have, I mean, it even starts before that. It starts really with the Spanish-American War and with Teddy Roosevelt talking about, you know, giving his Monroe Doctrine 2.0 and with the Roosevelt corollary, which essentially makes the U.S., an international police force beginning in Latin America.

But it's really World War I that allows the U.S. to assume a predominant role in the region, and it's able to cultivate strong relationships with local, political, and economic elites on the ground. And we see this particularly in the Caribbean basin in Central America with its ability to continuously intervene in the region. Yeah, the Marines might be invited or uninvited, but they're there because local allies want them to be there. And once they get there, they become enmeshed in longstanding domestic conflicts between different political parties and class struggle. And that complicates the issue even more. Even as the U.S. does it start to emerge as the predominant power in the region. But before that, there is serious competition.

There's a great book by a wonderful historian of Mexico, Friedrich Katz, called The Secret War in Mexico. And it's a history of the Mexican Revolution, but from the outside in. And he really shows how you have all these different countries from Europe, and including even Japan, how they were participating and involving themselves in the Mexican Revolution, trying to buy for political and economic power within this revolutionary process. And it's interesting to see within that book, by the end, you start to see, okay, it's the U.S. becoming the dominant power in Mexico, whereas the longstanding dictator that had ruled Mexico the previous three decades, you had really done a good job of balancing off U.S. capital with British capital and then even inviting the Germans and the Japanese in as a way to kind of offset what he knew was predominant U.S. power. This guy, Porfirio, yes, is credited with a famous quote in Mexican history where he said, poor Mexico so far from God so close to the United States. So his way to mitigate that was to bring in British capital.

But really, World War I had a big impact in removing a lot of the outside competitors for the United States, which then really becomes solidified in the 1930s with the Great Depression and Franklin D. Roosevelt's much celebrated, somewhat misunderstood good neighbor policy where he comes back and he said, look, the U.S. is done with gunboat diplomacy. We're done invading your countries. we are done using hard power in the region we're still going to use soft power we're still going to mess around

with these smaller Caribbean and Central American nations but we're finally going to be a good neighbor and that that also marks a really important moment a Mexican revolution and the Mexicans in the late 1910s early 20s they become kind of like what Cuba will become during the Cold War during the more formal Cold War like the Mexicans

are the first Bolsheviks in Latin America and because of the Mexican Revolution because of their call for economic nationalism because of their certain precepts enshrined in their constitution, like grain reform and the nationalization of subsoil minerals, for instance. That makes the Mexican revolutionaries the first, let's say the first Cubans in the eyes of American diplomats and policymakers. So throughout the 1920s, if you look at the historical records, like the U.S. is preoccupied with, quote-unquote, the Mexican Bolsheviks,

especially by the late 1920s. There's a lot of conflict between the president of Mexico, Kayas, and U.S. policymakers, particularly because Caius is also supporting the Sandino movement in some of these Central American revolutionary movements in Central America. And the one last thing I'll mention about the long Cold War is that, again, it's to understand what happens after 1947, we have to think about what the social structures in the region look like. And again, by and large, it's this alliance of militaries, Catholic church hierarchies, and landed elites that will wield power before the cold.

And in many ways, they will fuel the worst parts of the Cold War in Latin America after. They're the ones trying to hold on to political, social, and economic power. They're not, and they don't wait until 1947 to do so. They've been doing this throughout the 20th century. And the one really infamous, horrible event that demonstrates this is what happens in Salvador in 1932, which is generally referred to the Matanza, the massacre, where you have stolen elections. The Salvadoran Communist Party tries to do a peasant uprising, and the military response by massacring anywhere from 15 to 30,000 people,

most of them overwhelmingly indigenous. Indigenity, if you're displaying any sort of cultural marker of indigenity, that marks you for death, right, or for execution. So they really do a lot. It becomes a genocidal campaign to a certain extent in that indigenous identity gets conflated with communism, right? So you have the specter of communist Indians, therefore they need to be targeted for extermination.

That's something, that kind of dynamic will also be at play. in Central America during the Cold War. But this event happens in 1932, and the memories of it will continue long into the 1970s and 80s, and that's part of what historians refer to as a long Cold War. Great. I'm going to make a little bit of a statement with a kind of a broad question,

and I know Brett is going to have a much more incisive follow-up to mine, so I'll make my statement, and then Brett, you feel free to just jump in whenever. I was going through some of the works of the Latin American historian John Cotsworth. And I found some interesting section, so I'm going to try to transition us into the Cold War. So if we take this broader look of history, this is from his, I guess you could call it essay called liberalism and big sticks. He writes, between 1898 and 1994, the U.S. government managed to secure the overthrow of 41 governments among our sister republics in Latin America, an average of one successful intervention every 28 months for an entire century.

Direct intervention involving the use of U.S. military forces, intelligence agents, or local citizens employed by U.S. government agencies occurred in 17 of the 41 cases. In another 24 cases, the U.S. government intervention was indirect. That is to say, that local actors with U.S. support were the main actors within those conflicts. But if we look more specifically at the Cold War, this is from his piece, the Cold War in Central America, 1975 to 1991 in the Kansas. Cambridge history of the Cold War, he writes. Between the onset of the global Cold War in 1948 and its conclusion in 1990, the U.S. government secured the overthrow of at least 24 governments in Latin America, four by direct use of U.S. military forces, three by means of CIA managed revolts or assassination, and 17 by encouraging local military and political forces to

intervene without direct U.S. participation, usually through military coup d'etat. So we see that during the Cold War, there was really a ramp up in the amount of U.S. interventions, either direct or indirect, in Latin America. And when you go through the literature of what the U.S. was saying in regards to these interventions, the overriding theme was always security, whether it was before the Cold War or during the Cold War, security was always preached. But there really was never any sort of security issue in any of these conflicts. So I guess my kind of broad question, and Brett, feel free to follow up, is they're using security as kind of a smoke screen to hide what their real ambitions were.

And of course, we all have our suspicions of what their real ambitions were. But as a historian of Latin American history, why has there been so many interventions in Latin America? and why did they really ramp up during the Cold War? That's a great question. I'm glad you cited Coastworth. He's one of the giants, at least, especially in my field of Mexican history. Okay, so the way, I mean, I wish I had like a pithy answer to your question.

But let me start that. What are the consistent things that I see about U.S. intervention in Latin America from the late 19th century to today is that there's always been, an idea from U.S. policymakers and political elites, that the region is simply incapable of self-governance. And there's all sorts of racial, and there's all sorts of racialized explanations for it. So, like, sometimes these explanations are very direct. Like during the Cold War, you find, you look at some of these declassified documents, and there's things about Latin hot bloodedness and the Latin fiery character, you know,

prevents these people from having stable governance, right? You see that to today, but the language is much more coded. You take it back to Teddy Roosevelt of the early 20th century. The language is more, you know, these people cannot, they're not civilized. Therefore, they're not, they don't know how to live any civilized fashion. Therefore, it's our rule to go, it's our role to go in there and make sure that we help them along in achieving a certain level of civilization. So I think fundamentally, like historically in U.S. Latin American relations, from the U.S. side,

there's a, from the elite side, there's a common sensical notion that these people, for racial reasons, for cultural reasons, they are simply incapable of self-governance. And we have to step in and kind of teach them, you know, or force them to live in a certain way. The second way to approach this question is to think about what kind of how U.S. Empire has moved and grown since the Spanish-American War, right? Or even since the late 19th century after the Civil War. And what you see is an expand, it's a westward expansion into the Pacific and to Asian markets, right? And if you see, like, the establishment of a U.S. Navy, of a strong U.S. Navy in the late 19th century and all these little polling stations throughout the Caribbean that guard the interests of the Caribbean, you have the creation of the Panama Canal, and then you have this movement west to the Pacific Ocean and to Asian markets, particularly Chinese markets, then part of this is about economic security or the ability of American capital to seek security and make a lot of profit in markets, not just in Latin

American, the Caribbean, but also in Asia. And it's interesting, you look at maps of that expansion, and it's really interesting. You can kind of track it, right? You can try, okay, in the 1860, the U.S. did this. They opened up Korea in 1860. Commodore Perry opened up Japan, opened up, right? They're forcing these different Asian markets to open. And then you see how, where they're putting their naval stations or colony stations.

There's a reason why they want Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, right? If you look at the map, it like guards the entrance to the Caribbean. It essentially guards the entrance to the Panama Canal. which was a U.S. possession to the late 1970s, right, until they could have a caretaker government that they know is not going to mess with it, like what happened to the Suez Canal in the 1950s. So a lot of this is the security part is the economic aspect of it and the ability of American capital to expand and to make profits, right? So there's this really in next, there's a very intimate link between U.S. political power and U.S. economic power.

And for me, it really manifests itself in how it's expanded, acted as an empire in Latin America all the way back to at least the Spanish-American War. The Cold War just adds this extra layer of discourse that doesn't really fundamentally change what's going on, right? That the Cold War and the Soviet Union give the United States an excuse to talk about what they want to do in Latin America through the language of security or national security. But it's not about national security. It's about the United States being able to exercise a certain level and a certain form of control throughout the region, right? I mean, and it's really one of the first times, if not the first time in the history of the U.S., that it's actually managed to make good on the promises of the Monroe Doctrine back from 1823, right? And they use it, right? to use it. If you look at, you know, if you look at the debates that happened in the U.N.

between the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the Guatemala fiasco and intervention in the early 1950s, the U.S. policymakers are very clearly using them on road doctrine to tell the Soviets to stay out of our hemisphere. And the Soviet ambassador is like, we're not even there. What are you talking about? Like, we're not, you know. So this language of national security becomes another decision for this long-standing idea and belief in U.S. circles that the region, for a variety of reasons, is incapable of governing itself, and it needs the influence, the imperial influence of the United States to help him do so. Yeah, that's all incredibly fascinating. One thing I want to touch on is how most Americans specifically are taught about World War II, and it's usually

thought of as a largely European, you know, Western Front, Eastern Front, sort of thing in continents like South Africa, or I'm sorry, South America, Africa itself can sort of get left out of the conversation sometimes. So I'm wondering what the fallout of World War II was in Latin America broadly and sort of transitioning into the Cold War proper. Like for example, you know, Nazis immigrating to Argentina, for example. Can you talk about how the Latin America overall was impacted by World War II and sort of where it was as we transitioned out of World War and toward the Cold War proper? Yeah, Brad, that's a great question.

It allows me to introduce the other, I guess, innovation to the study of the Cold War Latin America. So the first one I mentioned was kind of stretching the temporal boundaries of it back to like the late 19, early 20th century to talk about this long Cold War. The second innovation, I think, is really was pushed forward by this historian, and we've talked about it, Greg Grandin, in which he talks about how World War II in Latin America really contributed to what he refers to as a democratic springtime in the region. So, you know, before 1944, I think there was every country but four in the region

was under some sort of dictatorial rule or authoritarian governance. After 1944, only four dictatorships were left in the region. So something happened during World War II in Latin America, and broadly what you had was this democratic springtime in which broad political alliances that included urban middle classes, liberal parties, socialist parties, worker parties, came together, and they really tried to create social democracy in Latin America. And the interesting thing is it's not just limited to one country. You see the spreading throughout the region.

Some countries are a little bit more complicated. Like Mexico is really complicated because they already had that revolution. But anyway, it went a certain direction. But by and large, you look at what's going on in the region between 1944 and 1947, and you see similar types of policies and political. coalitions that are being implemented. So expanding the vote, expanding who can vote, who has political power to the peasantry, to the people in the countryside, which most of the people in the region in the 40s are

still living in the countryside, depending on countries, but by and large, that's the same dynamic. But also socializing democracy, pushing forth some of these ideas that have been contained in the Mexican Revolution, that democracy is not just about the right to vote, the right to form political parties, but also you've won. certain social and economic rights, the right to housing, to land, to health care, to, to labor rights, to the right to form labor unions so you can collectively bargain for better working conditions, better pay, et cetera.

This, this democratic springtime, it happens really quickly, and it dies just as quickly. So like by 1947 is the beginning of the reaction to it. So that alliance that I mentioned earlier, the land that elites, the Catholic Church hierarchy, and these militaries, the way that they react to this Democratic springtime that spreads throughout the region is to enact a counter-revolution. And 1947 is a really important year, right, for a variety of reasons. But one, it's really the year that gets marked as the beginning of the traditional Cold War. It's the year that the National Security Council gets formed in the U.S. It's the year that the CIA gets founded. but that year really marks the beginning of a broader continental counter-revolution

against that earlier Democratic springtime that really what they were just trying to do is to create a social democracy throughout the region. In many ways, they were trying to do what FDR had done with the New Deal. The FDR and his New Deal actually was really popular in Latin America, and it did a lot to erase the earlier bad of memories of the bad American of the early 20th century. There's a famous anecdote of Fidel Castro as a little kid,

writing a letter to FDR, you know, congratulating him on the New Deal and asking him to send him a $10 bill. So there's this moment in Latin America where the American ideals enshrine in a document like the Declaration of Independence, which could be read as a radical document and was so by a variety of global software evolutionary leaders, including Ho Chi Men, matched up with the New Deal. And it was inspirational. But that effort to create a social democracy to break away from feudalistic, structures and to move into something that was modern, but as defined as modern by Latin Americans themselves, was brutally, started to be brutally rolled back in 1947. One of the last countries to hold out was Guatemala, right?

And Guatemala holds out until 1954. They have a 10-year-long revolution that they refer to as the October revolution, which essentially is an attempt to create the social democracy, and it gets thrown out, It gets overthrown in 1954 with the CIA's first operation, clandestine operation in Latin America. But by 1947, you see anti-communist purges throughout the region. Anti-communists who are in labor unions from Mexico to Chile are attacked. They're kicked out of unions. You have the re-emergence of military dictatorships and authoritarian governance throughout the region.

And this really culminates with Guatemala and the overthrow of Hakoborans at 1954, which is now seen as really the first shot of the Cold War in Latin America. It's not Cuba, it's not the Bay of Pigs, but it stretches back to the early 50s. And the overthrow of Arbans represents the defeat of this largely peaceful Latin American effort to create social democracy in their own home countries. That's fascinating. I really love that connection to that Fidel story about admiring FDR's transatl. formation of U.S. economy. That's brilliant. It does remind me, I think there was an essay by

Fanon who mentioned in one of his essays in El Mujahid, I think, so not collected in Wretched of the Earth or black-skinned, white masks, mentions about how revolutionary the experience of World War II was and how you could not put the genie back in the bottle, the anti-fascism, the fact that all of these capitalist governments themselves had to shift towards social democracy in response. So it's a very interesting question about why the counter-revolution was so quick and so effective. You know, both in the United States, you might say, kind of clamping down on the New Deal and Truman making a turn very much towards the conservative establishment and so on. But in the region, how did it proceed so quickly in undermining all of

these popular revolutionary kinds of movements that seem to have emerged as a result of these enormous transformations of World War II? That's a great question. Yeah, I mean, I think World War II is, I love that phenomenon. We can even talk about the impact of World War II on, really it's the beginning of the modern civil rights movement in the U.S. as well, right? With someone like Mediger Edwards, right, a generation of veterans who then went home and really fought for the civil rights movement in a variety of different ways. That's a, that's a difficult question to answer. I think it's difficult because each country has its own different political dynamic.

But what, by and large, what happens is they know that local elites who are leading the counter-revolution, know that they have the support of the United States. So you have local dynamics, local political and economic conflicts. And some of these local elites feel like because of the beginning of the Cold War, because of the Truman Doctrine, because of the National Security Act, because of the creation of the Soviet Union, the imagination of the Soviet Union as an empire built for global domination, right? If you read Kennan's famous Long Telegram. And then the subsequent Truman Doctrine of, we're going to contain Soviet expansion. I think some of these local elites felt like they had license to do what they wanted to do

because they were losing political clout. They were losing economic clout, right? And the thing is, I mean, this is like a, I think, characteristic of oligarchic elites anywhere, I think. Right. Like the irony here is that some of these reforms are capitalist reforms. They're meant to increase productivity, especially like a grain reform. Right. So in Guatemala, that's one of the big things that the historians send to focus on, right?

Hako Baran vans passes a grain reform. but it's a very timid capitalistic form of a grain reform that is meant to break up feudalistic estates give the land to small farmers who will then be more productive, right? It was in a grain reform program very similar to what MacArthur implemented in Japan after World War II. The World Bank and the IMF liked Hakobo Arbenz's aggrane reform program because it would unleash capitalist productivity. These elites didn't use their land for economic productivity per se.

They used it for prestige, right? They use it for social status. And so in a certain way, this could have been effective for that. It would have been more beneficial for them, like materially. But they pushed back quite brutally, right? And I think one of the reasons is that they met anti-communism becomes a wedge that they're able to drive between, as a wedge in some of these political coalitions. So liberal, more liberal reformist parties are forced to choose, right?

They don't want to be tagged as communists, so they'll start to break away from some of these broads. coalitions. Even within certain social classes that led the effort to socially democratized Latin America, there's cleavages. So within the middle classes, urban middle classes, they're forced to choose and take sides. And there's already like a strong anti-communism that exists within some of these, within some of these segments of the urban middle classes, right? So the Cold War really plays on that. And really, as any sort of social conflict, right, these efforts to socially democratized Latin America led to polarization and conflict. And some of these folks that were part of this effort were not willing to engage in this type of conflict and polarization. So I think

what the counter-revolution managed to do is they were overwhelmingly violent. They were unafraid to use violence. And they faced an enemy that became divided and were able to be divided quite easily within this broader rubric of the Cold War and anti-communism. And then they also, these local leagues knew that they had a willing partner and supporter in the form of the United States, particularly throughout the 1950s. I think that leads well into what I wanted to ask. And this is one of the main questions I had even going into this conversation. You know, I think a lot of people understand, yes, this was a tumultuous time. You know, yes, we had counter-revolution. Yes, there's CIA messing around in Latin American countries all over the continent. But sometimes it can

get too abstract and so one thing i always like to do is focus on the human cost of this you know u.s imperialism as well as the counter revolution at home and just trying to drive home that this cashes out and bloodshed on the level of individual human beings and families and communities being utterly destroyed and it's a hard conversation to have because it is so tragic in so many ways but i was hoping that you could talk a little bit about some specific atrocities during this entire sort of post-World War II Cold War period in Latin America to really drive home that that human cost of this sort of imperialism and this sort of counter-revolution. Yeah, that's a great point.

No, yeah, it's, I, in my classes on the Cold War and Latin America, I go in, when we get to the 80s, I go into great detail with some of the more famous, infamous massacres that happened in Central America, like El Mosote or the Dos Arras massacre that happened in Guatemala as a way to do exactly what you just mentioned, Brett, to get beyond the abstract and to really reveal the human suffering. And I go into great detail and I've had students cry, right? Because the story of Emosote is awful, right? Like, it has stories of babies being grabbed by their feet by these military soldiers and then having their heads smashed against rocks or being thrown up in the air and being impaled by bayonets, right? Like horrific,

horrific stories of violence. I mean, the Cold War in Latin America, there's hundreds of thousands of people who were killed, hundreds of thousands of people who were tortured, and millions who never forgot the traumas of this period. And, you know, depending on countries, the Cold War really hasn't ended. We can think about how the Cold War in certain ways

continues to manifest itself in Central America in a place at Colombia, another place, that had hundreds of thousands of dead in the late 40s and early 50s. But let me think about, let me talk about what happens in Guatemala after 1954 in the overthrow of our bends, because that kind of sets the stage for what's going to happen later. And what happens once, so this Operation P.V. success, the CIA organizes a clandestine operation to overthrow our bends.

It was more than anything, a cycola, a sciop, right? Like, it was meant to separate the Guatemalan military from Hakul Wurvans, who had been a colonel in the Guatemalan military. So it was an operation meant to induce fear in the Guatemala military that the U.S. was going to militarily intervene if they didn't act and remove Arbenz because they were unhappy with agrarian reform because they were unhappy that our vans had communists in his cabinet. But they also did things like, you know, fly over Guatemala City in planes and drop leaflets, right? So it was – and to scare the Guatemalan population. So our bends gets overthrown and what happens in the aftermath is that thousands of communists are people who are identified as communists based on lists created by the CIA are rounded up in prison and many of them are executed. So the and then communism, the identity, the political identity of a communist becomes then tagged to a variety of different occupations and identities as well. So if you're a student, a university student in Central America, in Guatemala, and this is going to go throughout the spend of the Cold War, you could be considered a communist just by the virtue of the fact that you were a university student.

If you're a labor leader, obviously, you're going to be done. Like, they're going to take you out, right? So the CIA operating in the background, trying to push things indirectly, cheaply, like, one of the things that the Operation P.B. Success guys would say is that, like, we managed to overthrow government, and it wasn't that expensive. and we didn't have to actually use that many resources. We can do this again. And they tried it again, and they got their asses kicked in Cuba with the Bay of Pigs invasion. But the fact that they're preparing lists of people

that they deem to be communist and therefore marked for extermination and handing it over to the Guatemalan military that takes over, that's going to be something that characterizes the type of violence that we see in Latin America throughout the rest of the Cold War. And, you know, you look at it. some of the declassified documents of what the CIA was doing, even before the overthrow of our bends,

they put together this manual of assassination. They're trying to teach people how to assassinate political figures. And it's really like this one document that I use in my classes, right? It's really interesting because you get a little bit of insight into how the CIA views the world. And it's, it prefaces its methods of assassination with the statement that says, assassination is not for the morally squeamish. So those who have some sort of morals should not engage in assassination, right? So it's like, they know what they're doing. They know that what they're doing is awful, right? But what justifies it, right? What justifies this level of violence? Well, the Soviet Union is bent on expansion. We cannot allow any sort of reformist

movement in Latin America to take hold because any form of reformist movement during the Cold War period that is not directed by the U.S. is going to be tagged as communist and therefore it's going to be tagged for subversion and overthrow and violent counter-revolution. So the thing with Guatemala, though, is that this counter-revolution against the efforts of socially democratized the region produces a radicalization throughout the region, right? And the famous example here is Che Guevara, who was actually in Guatemala during the overthrow of our bends. He barely manages to escape with his life, gets into the Argentine embassy, makes his way to Mexico, and who does he meet Mexico in 195, 1926? well, the Castro brothers who had just been exiled there by the dictator for Hensio Batista. And, you know, one of the ways that Che and Fidel would mock the United States after the Bay of Pigs is by saying,

we are not Guatemala, we're going to defend ourselves. I mean, that's directly connected to Chez experiencing Guatemala in the violence that he witnessed in 1954. Like, it really convinced him that peaceful reformist efforts in Latin America would not succeed because of the United States. Therefore, revolution was the only way forward. And that radicalization would manifest itself in the Cuban Revolution in 1956 and then throughout the 60s and 70s throughout the region, right, through a variety of different rural and urban guerrilla movements. And as a counter-revolutionary response to that, you add the emergence of some of the most bloodthirsty, violent military dictatorships that we've seen in the history of Latin America. Their response, again, supported by the U.S., many times trained by the U.S. at the school, the Americas, and it used to be in the Panama, Connecticut. out zone, teaching them the arts of torture, what physical, psychological, teaching them the

arts of counterinsurgency, you know, these military dictatorships that slowly start to take power again in the 60s and 70s in Central America and South America will use horrific methods of violence to tap down and to suburb and to exterminate revolutionary and reformist movements. And, you know, I can leave, we can talk about Central America in a bit just because in the 70s and 80s because they're like so much to cover there. But the Central America is really, Central America in the 70s and 80s and then Argentina in the late 70s, early 80s become really

Latin Americans killing fields during the Cold War. This brief, this military dictatorship in Argentina that takes power in 1976 until 83, they disappear something like 30,000 people, right? And their method of disappearing people was to place them on airplanes and to fly over

the South Atlantic Ocean to just dump them into the ocean. Some of these people had kids. Some of these people actually, some of these women who were disappearing in this way delivered children while in captivity. And something between 500 to 1,000 of these kids were then adopted by the military people who were responsible for the disappearance of their parents. It's like sick. And this is something also that happens on a lesser scale in Central America. And it's even, I mean, there's even cases that's happening in Mexico. And again, Mexico is like a super complicated case. But some of these types of violence do occur there as well.

Something else that I want to mention because obviously the U.S. plays a predominant role in the Cold War in Latin America. But another really interesting thing that historians are starting to uncover is the influence of other outside powers and kind of shaping the type of violence that we see in the region.

And it seems pretty clear now that the militaries in South America, particularly Argentina and Brazil, were really influenced by the French. And there's really the type of counter insurgency that the Argentine militaries and the Brazilian militaries will use in the 60s and 70s, a lot of that is battled on like what the French were doing in Algiers. And in many case, in the battle of Algiers, but Algeria more broadly, and in many cases you have the same

military officers, French military officers who had been in Algeria, and we used to be referred to as Indo-China, then going to South America and training the Brazilian and the Argentine and the Chilean militaries. So France actually has a huge role in in training militaries in South America in how to deal with, quote, unquote, subversion and what type of violence to use. And then the Brazilians will become really good at learning this. They have their own military dictatorship that takes over in 64.

They'll be in power until 85. And then they'll start to export this stuff to other Latin American militaries, right? So if we want to talk about Chile in 73, the Brazilian military was actually very instrumental, more so probably than the U.S., in helping the Chileans overthrow, Pinocet, overthrowing in Chile.

in the 1970s. So France plays a really important role. There's also the role that Israeli military trainers and military technology will play in Central America in the 70s and 80s. When nobody wanted to, even the U.S. was a shame to support some of these bloodthirsty military dictators of Central America, they could always count

on Israeli military trainers and weapon merchants to go into the region and provide some of these essential services of counterinsurgency and suppression. And the final thing I'll mention about this, again, to kind of expand this to a more global perspective is that we now have work coming out, particularly by a great historian at Harvard, Kirsten Well, that shows how impactful the Spanish Civil War was in Latin America. And that's really interesting, right? So in Chile, for instance, during the Allende administration, a lot of the violent Chilean right, viewed Allende and his

reformist programs and his revolution, socialism via peaceful means through the lens of the Spanish Civil War, right? And unapologetic Franco supporters throughout the region were really influenced by how Franco dealt with the Spanish Republicans in Latin America, and that really fed in with their right-wing revanchism and their violence as well. So again, just to bring in multiple strands into how the counter-revolutionaries in Latin America were influenced and shaped, right? It wasn't just the U.S. They had multiple sources that inspire their counter-revolution. And in many cases, case you had these fanatics, you know, imagining that they could recreate some sort of Francoist-type society in their particular Latin American country.

Alex, that is absolutely fascinating to draw some of those global interconnections and strands of a kind of revanchist international, as it were, that is working usually with statist power, obviously. That's the really gruesome and difficult part of this, is because they have access to, you know, military force and these training and techniques. But one question I had, or observation I wanted to make about this, what you've been mentioning, are the colonial attitudes that you first were talking about, about the inability to self-govern. These are things that are very similar that we see in the same era, of course,

in other parts of the world, the mandate system that's imposed after World War I in the Middle East, despite attempts at democratic reform and constitutional governance, as we talked about in an episode this month with Elizabeth Thompson about how the West stole democracy from the Arabs, to this other affiliations globally between settler colonial regimes, whether it's Israel or France and Algeria. And I'm wondering if, you know, part of the reason why is because that elite that you're talking, about Catholic elite, the big planters, the white settlers, is that they still act and think like a settler colonial elite that looks at its indigenous and its former enslaved populations

as unworthy of rule and treating them like colonial subjects. Yeah. No, I think that's fundamentally, that's what it comes down to. These are rabidly anti-democratic a settler elites, right? And that hasn't changed, right? I think one of the things that we need to disabuse ourselves of is it's like what Walter Benjamin mean, we're constantly railed on, right? Like, history is not moving in a progressive way forward, things are getting better. These elites haven't changed that much in their attitudes. They are profoundly anti-democratic. They do have a settler mentality depending on the region in Latin America or globally. I mean, they haven't really let go of that, right? I think that's one of the things that really stress,

That's a great question. And I hadn't thought about it that way, but you're exactly right. I mean, there's, Quinn Slobodian has this great book on, on this generation of economists that went on to form what we now refer to as like neoliberalism, right? So like von Mises and, and Bonhe. And he does like a deep dive intellectual history into what, like, what influenced them. And again, it's very anti-democratic.

It's this idea of how human society should function because it can't function any other way. And for them, democracy and the ability of an everyday person to exercise some level of control over their everyday lives is the most fantastical idea. We cannot let the mobs have democracy. And that's simply, I think, in a simple way, that's what defines kind of the thinking and the actions of these Latin American elites during the Cold War, many of whom, if not most or all, are settlers, like descendants of settlers, right? And they haven't gotten rid of those colonial vestiges of that fundamentally conceptualize the masses in their countries as racially and culturally incapable of being, of being democratic.

Therefore, we have to treat them in an undemocratic way. The second, the final dictator of Nicaragua, Tachito Somosa, he has a famous quote from the late 60s where he's like, someone was asking, some American journalist was asking him, you know, why are literacy rates in your country of Nicaragua so low? And he's like, well, I don't want citizens. I want oxen. And that's like profound settler, imperial attitude, right? And I think that's one way to think about the revanchism that we see in Latin America

throughout the Cold War, the right-wing revanchism, that will then allow horrific levels, again, of colonial-type violences. I mean, what you see in Central America in the 70s and 80s, I mean, Guatemala experienced the indigenous peoples of Guatemala in from 1981 to 1983, 1983, experienced what the UN categorized in a truth commission, a truth report, a commission report as a genocidal campaign. You know, 150 to 200,000, Mayan indigenous peoples were killed by the Guatemalan military, precisely because they were indigenous and because that indigenity was marked as communist,

at subversive, as inferior, and as an obstacle to national progress. And that idea of indigenous peoples and peasant peoples and lower class peoples as being an impediment to national progress, that goes back to the mid to late 19th century in Latin America. And those attitudes within elites do not go away. The only thing, I think the more I teach and think about Latin American history, the more I'm convinced that the only thing that disrupts those type of attitudes, are these different revolutions that emerge in 20th century Latin America.

As imperfect as they are, as the issues that they had, the only thing that disrupts and puts a little bit of fear into these settler elites are revolutionary processes in which the workers, the peasants, the masses, women, people identified as not fulfilling some sort of like prototypical civic identity when they take a little bit of power, whether it's violent or not. I mean, that's the only, that's when you see momentary disruptions of these profoundly undemocratic ideals. So, Alex, I want to call back to something that you had mentioned earlier and kind of follow up with it. So you mentioned that a lot of these interventions take place perhaps because they're cheap to do.

And that harkens back to something in this same paper from Coatsworth, Coatesworth that I had mentioned earlier, liberalism and big sticks. He writes, I'll just pick a couple of sections out of here. Supply side logic, for example, would suggest that interventions will occur more often, where they do not cost much, either directly in terms of decision makers' time and resources or in terms of damage to significant interest, skipping forward a bit. The classic case of a cheap intervention was the invasion of Granada in 1983, skipping forward a little bit more. On the demand side, two factors seem to have been crucial in tipping decision makers towards global intervention, global strategy and domestic politics. The United States moved rapidly to project its power into regions of the Earth on the periphery of the communist states where it had never had a presence before to project power into the strategically important regions of the planet. The U.S. had to demonstrate that it possessed the capacity and will to intervene in Latin America

where no significant strategic or economic interests were threatened. This meant that the United States could not afford to tolerate governments that failed to conform to U.S. policy preferences, even when the consequences of their deviations affected no significant U.S. interests. Meanwhile, we have many historians, including people like Greg Grandin, talking about how the second side of the equation, using Latin America as basically a playground to signal abroad or to influence other areas of the world that maybe it would be more expensive to intervene in. And one of the examples that Greg Grandin uses is the overthrow of Allende, the coup against Ayende, as a way of preventing the communists from taking charge in Italy.

Because as Grandin points out, he says something along the lines of, well, the bigger threat than Ayende actually being in power is Ayende leaving power peacefully. Because if Iyende left power peacefully, it would signal to other places in the world that, hey, you have these kind of. lefty governments that are in place, and if they're able to take place within a democratic system where they get elected, they come in, they either lose an election or they run out of term limits and they go out, that's a very worrying precedent for people in Italy where the Communist Party was very strong at that period of time to say, hey, you know, we don't really necessarily have to worry about if the communists come in power that we're instantly going to have some undemocratic regime because that's inherent to communism.

there would already be a historical precedent in Chile that would say, hey, you know, the communists come in or the left-wing party comes in, and they're able to operate within the confines of a democratic system. So I was wondering if you had any sort of comment on that, you know, the genesis of this thinking being, hey, it's cheap to intervene in Latin America, but we can also use the projection of power in Latin America to influence our ambitions abroad.

maybe more expensive areas like Italy, for example. Yeah, no, those are great points. No, I by and large agree with that level of analysis, right? I think because it's so ingrained. I mean, I think John Kerry was one of the last political leaders. I remember saying something like this, but it's so ingrained in the U.S. elite imaginary that Latin America is the U.S.'s backyard.

And if you can't accomplish something in the U.S. backyard, then you really not fit to be a global superpower. power, hegemon, whatever other term you want to use to conceal the fact that the U.S. is an empire. Right. So, I mean, and that idea has been, it's been there for, I mean, since the Mexican-American war to a certain extent. But yeah, it becomes really apparent.

I mean, if you look at some of the declassified documents, especially Nixon, Nixon has some of the best in a kind of a sick way. But some of the best quotes about Latin America, right? Like, Nixon is so honest in these declassified documents. of how Latin America is, we can't trust them with democracy, therefore we need to like, you know, we just go with stability and we go with the, the undemocratic governments. That's the only, because in his work, to paraphrase one of his quotes is like, these guys have had their shot for 200-something years during independence and they blew it.

They can't do it. Now, obviously, like, Nixon is influenced by the fact that he almost got lynched in Venezuela in the late 50s when he went there on a good world tour and you can find videos of this on YouTube in terms of how he got attacked by the by the people of Venezuela as he tried to get to the airport um so on the one hand there's this record on the other hand there's also this idea that and again going back to kissinger nixon nixon also has another quote he's like no one gives a shit about latin america americans don't therefore we can project our power into latin america and we can show the rest of the world that uh how we exercise and demonstrate and and

project our power to latin america and that then allows us to do the same for the rest of the world. Because if we couldn't do it in Latin America, why would people trust us to do another part of the world? And Italy, with this specific case of Allende, Italy is on the minds of someone especially like Kissinger. Because for Kissinger, he has some other amazing quotes about how like world history runs through Berlin, not through Santiago. I can't remember what the specific quote is. But nonetheless, they still need Latin America as Grandin would talk about it, right? Like, it's still a workshop for U.S. Empire. And it's still the area where the U.S. has refined it's an imperial forms, configurations, and forms of projection. And then what happens

in Latin America will then expand globally. And I think it's pretty, I think the historical record really backs up that level of argument, particularly in his book Empire's Workshop, where he traces what the U.S. government does to these different Central American countries in the 80s. And it's the same monsters who then will go on and work with George W. Bush and launch the Iraq War. It's like literally the same people. It's the same, you know, the John Negroponte, who's the ambassador to Honduras in the early 1980s, who's helping run desquads, right? The Contras in Nicaragua will then be, you know, working at George W. Bush administration. You have the same military officials who were in the Salvadoran desquads or military battalions who committed some of the worst atrocities

in the history of Latin America, like at El Mosote. Well, then they'll be sent to Iraq and they'll be training, they'll be helping foment sectarianism and training Shia militias to fight against Sunni insurgents. Yeah, so it's Latin America historically then has served as this way for the U.S. Empire to demonstrate that it is an empire, that's an effective empire, therefore it is able to project this power beyond. Even if policymakers are like, we really don't care about Latin America, we care more about Italy and the Communists in the 1970s.

Well, that's, race is an interesting point. I'm thinking also of when the U.S. has failed in other regions, whether it had consequences in this hemisphere in Latin America. So I might ask if, you know, how was the Vietnam War consequential in Latin America? But I would note that the U.S. failed U.S. involvement in the Middle East, you know, in the 2000s, Iraq and Afghanistan being embroiled in

costly, difficult wars there that undermine U.S. prestige and power seem to have been coinciding with a real sort of socialist, red wave, left governments all across Latin America during that period. And so the interaction between those is interesting. So I'm wondering what you think about how Latin American history has developed in relationship, not only as U.S.'s projection of power by experimenting there, but also how maybe that workshop, you know, the workers could rise up in the workshop when the master was distracted elsewhere or embroiled in other things. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, no, I think, I think simply put, when the U.S. is, when the attention of the U.S. is elsewhere,

And that allows for a little bit of autonomy for Latin American countries. That's a good thing for Latin America. And it's no coincidence that you have the so-called pink tide in Latin America. You know, really begin, well, beginning 2000, let's say beginning in 2000 with Ugo Chavez's election in Minnesota in the late 90s. But really it's 2000 to about 2008, 910, right? Where the U.S. is preoccupied with Iraq, Latin America gets a little bit of wiggle room, right? A little bit of space for practicing autonomy, self-determination.

and national sovereignty, right? And a lot of these left-of-center leaders that take over the presidencies in these different Latin American nations, they're all veterans of the Cold War, right? They are all veterans of these really brutal, violent, political conflicts that characterize the regions, you know, in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

So you have someone like, I'm trying to think, so, like the Tavareskes and Jose Mujica in Uruguay, who had been Tupamaro guerrillas, which in their moment, the Tupamados were the most influential urban guerrilla movement in the world, too certain extent. They're the ones who become the most of prototype for urban guerrilla movements. Same with Lula and with Dilma Roussef herself, right, was a guerrilla fighter in Brazil, and she was actually tortured and imprisoned. Michelle Bachelet in Chile, right?

Her father was an Air Force general who supported Allende, and because of that, he was tortured and they're dying from his wound. So in general, anytime the U.S. is preoccupied and losing, even better, somewhere else, that grants Latin America as a region a little bit of autonomy. The interesting thing there, though, is then you start to see what type of alliances the U.S. forges on the ground with allies in Latin America to kind of keep an eye on the region. And this is where a country like Colombia is so important, right? Like Colombia, as a client, almost like a client state of the U.S. That's been forged as a result of this drug war, right? That's another thing we could spend another hour talking about it.

The drug war is also part of this Latin American Cold War that takes place as another way of just projecting U.S. power into the region. You know, Colombia is left behind much of the region in Mexico to an extent as well. Much of the region in 2000s becomes part of this pink tide. this wave throughout the region, but the U.S. could still count on countries like Mexico and Colombia to kind of like keep an eye out on the region and at least advocate for U.S. interest in the region

as some of these political leadership fit. And, you know, you had right-wing governments in Mexico during the 2000s that initiated the latest disastrous drug war in Mexico that's killed hundreds of thousands of people, and you also have something similar in Colombia, beginning with Plan Colombia in the late 90s and 2000s where their president, Alvar Oribes, I mean, he's an arco president.

He was an archo president. He was a paracro, a paramilitary president. But it's interesting, again, these leaders that emerge are throwbacks, right? They're the people who survive the Cold War. They learn lessons from the Cold War. And that, combined with U.S. adventurism in the Middle East, gave them space to do so. With regards to Vietnam, Vietnam is really,

influential for leftist movements in Latin America. But yeah, it really, it was probably the weakest moment of U.S. Empire in Latin America, right? 1975, right? We learned through the church committee, that's where all the dirty, a lot of the dirty laundry the CIA was finally aired. And we learned up through the church committee, learned about all the assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, all the dirty counter-insurgency operation that the CIA was, had been waging against Cuba, right?

That's something else we haven't talked about as much. But Cuba, Revolutionary Cuba, in beginning as early as 1950, late 1959, was already suffering the ire of the U.S. government, right? And it would face U.S. state-sponsored terrorism throughout the 60s up until the 1970s with, like, direct military attack. So it's not just the Bay of Pigs, but like, you know, secret small groups of CIA operatives or assets, Cuban American exiles, who would go onto the island and do things like below shit. it up set fire to sugar king fuels um and it opened this momentary moment with the election of jimmy carter when he fought in the 70 late 70s when he said you know human rights will be the centerpiece of our relationship with the world and with latin america it's like it didn't you know it it wasn't it wasn't um and uh you know that's actually that was a failed opportunity

from the perspective of the u.s that was a failed opportunity um there could have been a momentous shift away from what the U.S., almost similar to what happened during FDR's administration. There could have been like another good neighbor policy. And even though there were some brave individual diplomats, U.S. diplomats on the ground that did good work, particularly in a place like Argentina, trying to save people. By and large, the human rights discourse that Jimmy Carter was implementing was really superficial at the same time that his advisors were helping to set up the, set up the Mujahideen and other certain places in the world.

But by and large, it's autonomy for Latin America is always good. So the people of Latin America can practice what they want to practice. And usually that only happens in the U.S. is preoccupied elsewhere. Yeah, Alex, it's always an honor and a pleasure to have you on. You covered so much history. And I think I speak for all of us when I say we're incredibly grateful to have you on and to learn from you. I guess a way to wrap this up is, you know, standing on the precipice of history as we are right now in 2021, looking at Brazil, looking at Bolivia, looking at Venezuela, how do the legacies of this period of time, you know,

the Cold War, and even in the extended sense, continue to live on in Latin America to this very day? Thank you, Brett. Thank you for your comments, man. It's always great to chat with you, and this has been great chatting with all of you. I think one of the ways we can think about the legacies to bring it a lot closer to home, and this is something you and I have talked about, Henry, with about how U.S. electoral politics are so shaped by the legacies of the Cold War and Latin America, particularly in a place like South Florida, right? So it's really interesting to me how like a place like South Florida like Miami has become this like the capital of right wing Latin American exiles living in the U.S. proper and then actually like affecting some pretty important political power

and influence in the United States. It's like talk about the empire coming home to Roos type of thing. Right. Like this is one direct way. And you look at. get the most important voting demographics in South Florida, and they're all linked to Cold War histories that we've talked about today. Another legacy is, there's been historians to make the argument that would really set the ground for the emergence of neoliberal capitalism in Latin America was the type of violence that we witnessed during the 1970s and 80s in Latin America, Right. So brutally disrupting and destroying communal links, identities throughout different countries in Latin America to then allow for the onset of something that we generally refer to as neoliberal capitalism, right? So that's an ongoing and ongoing legacy of it. Chile obviously gets pointed to as ground zero for this, right?

That you needed military terror and tanks to force the Chilean people, to coerce the Chilean people into accepting something now. that we're referred to as neoliberal capitalism, right? This economic and political project that always, that is based on the reconcentration of both wealth and political power and a tiny elite. So there's a link between the terror that we see in the Cold War and the ability of something called neoliberal capitalism to take root in the region. It differs by, it differs by country, obviously, right? Like not all countries needed a pinotche, right?

Even some countries like the brutal, the brutal. bloodthirsty military in Argentina, they tried to do something similar and they had to pull back, right, because it was so unpopular. And the Brazilian military also had to pull back to in terms of what Pinochet was doing. A lot of these Latin American countries had to go through a debt crisis in the 80s to allow for the final disarticulation of any last vestiges of that social democratic moment of the World War II era to allow for, you know, privatization of resources, deregulation of the economy and drastic cuts in social spending. So that's the onset of neoliberalism is a legacy of the Cold War.

And I think in certain countries in Latin America, their political identities and conflicts are still cast within Cold War terms. And Colombia is one that really comes to mind. I mean, the parameters of the political discourse and how political enemies see one another is still within this Cold War discourse of like, that, you know, you still hear the charge of Castroists being launched around by right-wing Colombian politicians against, like, mildly reformist, you know, centrist or left-of-centure Colombian rivals, politician rivals. So in some countries, and this is especially true in Central America, the parameters of political discourse and identities and conflicts are still, to a certain extent, being waged within Cold War parameters.

And in a place like Central America, right, like the refugee crisis that we see here that stretches back to 2014 with people from Honduras, Guatemala, Salvador, coming to the U.S. and the thousands, tens of thousands. You know, they're coming here because the United States government destroyed their fucking countries in the 1980s, right? Like, they supported death squad regimes in the 80s. They forced through neoliberal free trade agreements in the 90s. there's an ecological and environmental catastrophe in those countries. So the people are coming to these refugees are coming and trying to seek a better life in the very country that destroyed their own countries to begin. And to me, I think about the legacy of the Cold War in that regard,

like the refugees that we continue to see, right? There's people coming on the way right now. Now they've been kind of demonized as the caravans are coming. But what these people are escaping and the health holes that they're escaping are a consequence of what the U.S. government did to their countries in the 70s and 80s and then with free trade agreements in the 90s as part of this broader Cold War conflict. So, you know, the legacies continue in a really poignant, painful, and consequential way, not just for the people of Latin America, but in many ways, you know, Empire coming home to Roost,

type of thing for the United States as well. And just really quickly, Henry, before you finish it off, I just wanted to make this final connection to the rise of Donald Trump because the whole 2016 election into 2018 with the with the first you know caravan scare i mean trump really rose to power on this anti-immigration rhetoric um and it stems directly from that 2014 sort of tide which stems back to the cold war era so even here in the u.s you know the imperialism coming home to roost right in the form of fascism here at home we see that firsthand with a with a figure like like Donald trump here in the u.s so you know even americans are not spared from the backlash that eventually will come back in various multitudinous ways.

I just wanted to make that point. Yeah, I think you and I, Brett have talked about, I think we talked about it when we talked about Chile, maybe, or some other episode where thinking about some of the most prominent Trump supporters and the shirts that they wear, right, and the shirts that we saw a year or two years ago of these proud boys proudly proclaiming Pinochet as like a spiritual guide, right, in terms of, you know, we want to treat the commies here in the United States, how Pinochet treated them. in Chile, right, free helicopter rides. I mean, that's that type of revanchism and paramilitarism is here.

It's always been here, but it's interesting how it's interfaced with Latin American versions to create like an even worse monster. And, you know, what we saw with that capital riot, you saw some of these people like killing cops, right? On the one hand, they have Blue Lives Matter flags, with the other hand, they're beating up cops, like that dissonance. You know, one way to read that dissonance is to think about what the U.S. has done in Latin America and in other parts of the global south

and how those things have come back home. Amazing conversation. Thanks for joining us again, Professor Alexander Avina, who is a historian at Arizona State University and the author of Spectres of Revolution, peasant guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside, out from Oxford University Press. Hopefully you had fun here.

I know it's, I always enjoy getting to talk with you. Listeners, you definitely should check out Alex's work. Professor, how can the listeners find what you're working on and just keep up with you more generally? Well, thank you, Henry. Thank you, Henry. Thank you, Adnan, and Brett. This was a lot of fun, and I appreciate the chance to be on your podcast that I've become a regular listener to, so it's great.

I love what you guys are doing, beginning with Vijay Prashad's episode. You guys have been great. I have a website, Alexanderavina.com, But I'm mostly on, I guess, on Twitter, talking shit. I guess that's like my, when I can't take it anymore, I go on Twitter and just start, you know, doing what everyone else does. So, you know, being really counterproductive, I guess, with improving the civic life of these days. But I have a lot of fun on Twitter.

So my handle is Alexander underscore Amina. So I'm on there and my website, yeah. Yeah, and you've had several episodes on Rev Left Radio with Brett that listeners, I highly recommend listening to all of them. They're all excellent, and I've brought you on several times onto the David Feldman show for random conversations. And as long as you feel like coming back, I'm going to keep bringing you back onto that show. Great. Sounds good to me. So listeners, if you're ever looking for more content from Professor Avina, you can find him either via those episodes on Rev Left Radio or whenever I bring him on to the. David Feldman show, which is not too infrequently.

Adnan, you wanted to say something? Oh, I just wanted to say whenever you can't take it anymore, hopefully you can hop on to guerrilla history again. You're always welcome. It was a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much. Excellent. Thank you guys all.

This was fun. Thank you so much. Listeners will be right back with more guerrilla history. Thank you again, Professor. Thank you. So we're back on guerrilla history. We just finished our interview with Professor Alexander Avina. And boy, what a conversation it was.

And we barely scratched the surface. But as we mentioned in the introduction, this really is a survey of Latin America in the Cold War, which didn't really allow us to get on to that granular level that I know I likely both of you and a lot of the listeners would have liked us to. but this really does open the door for us to go into individual movements or individual resistance to really dive in deep in the future, the same way that we did in our overview of Africa at an African resistance episode. So this really does open the door for a lot more exploration.

Now before I kick it over to you two to reflect on this conversation that we just had, I want to open with a quote from Perry Anderson that I think summarizes pretty well, a lot of what was said during the conversation. So this is in his book, American Foreign Policy and its thinkers, he says, the free world, sorry, there, if elections, there being the third world, if elections were not proof against attempts on private property, they were dispensable. The free world was compatible with dictatorship. The freedom that defined it was not the liberty of citizens, but of capital.

the one common denominator of its rich and poor, independent and colonial, temperate and tropical regions alike, what was incompatible with it was not absence of parliaments or rights of assembly, but abrogation of private ownership of the means of production. And I think that that sums up a lot of the issues that we had in Latin America vis-a-vis American intervention in Latin America, particularly during the Cold War. But there's so much going on here. And there's such a deep history. And as I said, we only scratched the surface. But I'm really looking forward to future conversations with Alex and with other Latin American historians to really dive in deep on these individual interventions, resistance movements, individuals even in Latin

America to get a more deep look at the history of the region as a whole by using that granular level of analysis. So Adnan and Brett, what did you think about the conversation that we had with Professor Alexander Avina Adnan? Well, I really enjoyed it, and I learned a lot. It's not an area that I've studied in great detail. So having this primer or overview, I think, was very useful for me and for listeners like me that aren't intimately acquainted with the history. But I think also it's not something that we should apologize for doing,

because I think when you take a broader look, you can notice different patterns and different issues emerging that maybe you wouldn't see when you go down into the specifics. You appreciate different things from different levels of analysis. So one thing that I really appreciated about this episode and our conversation with Alex Avina was about the global connections. So how you situate this region within. the global Cold War and broader patterns for U.S. involvement elsewhere compared to its effects and consequences in the region. Also, interconnections between different kinds of

colonialism from, you know, nation-state imperialism, like you would see from the British, you know, and the French in the Middle East, as we discussed with Elizabeth Thompson, compared with settler colonial projects and how they interact with one another and can be an international set of alliances and affiliations and approaches towards the people that borrow the same kind of right-wing, fascistic, undemocratic kind of attitude towards their own people that settler colonialism establishes at different historical eras around the world, that there's an intimate interconnection between those projects. And so I think that was, you know, very useful to have this overall framework, also to refer to

refer to when we do go into more specific context, different movements, and as you said, individual thinkers. But that is where I would like to see us go, because we did emphasize a lot the U.S. position as the Cold War, you know, hegemon in the region, conscious of its competitions with other you know, with the Soviet Union around the world and using that discourse to enforce its interests in Latin America. But what we, I hope to see and to learn much more about from him and other Latin American historians in future episodes, is more of the perspective from below of people engaged in these movements and their social experiences and social struggles.

We'll obviously always keep in mind that the broader framework that's often, And often suppressing these are the indigenous elites, the settler colonial elites, I should really, really say. But their connection and dependence upon the U.S. is always there in the background, and sometimes it comes to the fore. But I'd like to shift and appreciate the perspective of the people struggle from their own perspective. That'll be very fascinating as we go forward. Yeah. And for my part, the thing I wanted to pull out of this conversation, is how anti-communism is not only a legacy we still live with, but a pillar of fascism the world over. You know, Alex talked about how it's certain parts of counter-revolutions throughout Latin America.

It didn't really matter if you were technically a communist. It mattered that you were seen or could be put into that category given you're the subversive nature of your identity, you know, your position on the labor hierarchy, or even if you just wanted, regular liberal reforms that benefited regular people. All of it was called communist. Everyone is a communist unless they get with the plan of the elites and the reactionaries. And we still see that today. On the political right here in America, for example, you know, who are communist? Now, if you talk to one of these Trump supporters or, you know, these proud boys, could they give you a detailed analysis of Marxist understanding of capitalism or what socialism in common? No, everything that

they don't like is communism. They call Nancy Pelosi a communist. They call Chuck Schumer a communist. Obama was a communist. Biden and Harris are communists. And that is a sneak peek into the mind of a fascist. They're not at all concerned with these divisions that the left is hyper concerned with. You know, I'm an anarchist communist. I'm a Marxist-Leninist, et cetera. I'm not to say those distinctions are important, but our ultimate enemies, the people that would rather have us dead than have any shred of power, they don't make those distinctions. And I think that is something that is interesting and worth noting. For example, we're recording this about two weeks after the fascist riot on Capitol Hill. And one of the signs, the biggest signs, as they were flooding into the Capitol, was a sign that said

the real invisible enemy is communism. The reports and the interviews with people who either partook in the chaos or were just sympathetic to it, I was listening to like a New York Times podcast. where they're interviewing people who actually didn't even go to D.C., but we're just sympathetic with it, right? Try to get that perspective. And these are like, you know, 45-year-old women that are like, I just don't want communism to come to America. And, you know, if Biden gets in, he's going to bring the Chinese communist army over

and they're going to implement communism. So this hyper-fevered dream paranoia and this ambient anti-communism is a pillar of fascism. And I would say all of that to warn against a sort of ambient or needy, jerk anti-communism that even exist on the left as if you know there's there's elements of the left liberal left even the radical left who partake in this anti-communism and regardless of what your thoughts are on the historical manifestations of communist movements we should be very careful to see how that plays into broader fascist narratives that then get turned around and used against you

oh you're a liberal and you don't like communist and you want to make a big show of how you're anti-communist well the people that want to hurt the communist think you're one too And so, understanding the ideological role that anti-communism plays in the growth and maintenance of fascism, I think, is an incredibly important lesson. We can pull from this episode and many others. And then the last thing I would say is, you know, I touched a little bit on the human cost. And there could be an entire episode dedicated to the human suffering caused by this period of time and just this one part of the world. But there's been no justice since then, right? The people that were slaughtered in Guatemala, there is no systematic.

justice for them. You know, the people that were that were killed in, in different parts, you know, Chile or Columbia or El Salvador, Honduras, there's no justice for any of those people to this day. And that is, if nothing, a heartbreaking reality that we face and a motivation to keep the fight to liberate all people and keep in mind that the justice that we seek is not only future-oriented, but it has to look back into the past and take account for these past actions and these past structures that continue to haunt the president will continue to haunt the future unless they are systematically addressed and justice is on some level even though full justice is impossible on some level is advanced and that is the cause that I think

we are all fighting for and that most people listening to a show like guerrilla history should be fighting for yeah excellent I think that that's a great way to wrap up this episode I just want to point out that I did like you drawing out the fact that we still do have a red scale driving our internal politics even today, you know, that's something that a lot of Americans may think died out when McCarthyism died out, but no, the red scare is still well and truly alive even in the left. And I do like that you brought that up and tied that into American intervention in Latin America. In any case, thanks for joining me for this episode. Adnan and Brett, as always, I really do love doing these episodes with you.

and especially when we have a guest like Professor Avina who I think that I speak for all of us when I say we really do admire the work that he does and his eloquence and articulating really what was going on in Latin America in a specific time frame which is such a broad topic but he's able to kind of string all of these disparate points together into a cohesive narrative and really really impressive and I do love Professor Avina. But Adnan, how can our listeners find you in the work that you're doing outside of this show? Well, they can follow me on Twitter, Adnan A-Husain, all lowercase all together, 1-S-A-I-N. And, of course, I hope people will listen to my other podcast that I co-host, The M-J-L-L-I-S. And we have a new episode out this last month. we do one about every two weeks we have an episode. So follow the mud, you know, the Mudge list as well. Thanks so much.

Excellent. And Brett, how can our listeners find you in your work? You can go to Revolutionary LeftRadio.com. It has this show, Rev. Left and Red Menace, our Patreon's, Twitter accounts, etc. If you are interested in learning more about or just listening to more stuff from Alex, we have several episodes with him, I can't remember him probably all off top of my head, but Chile was one of them, the Mexican Revolution. We did an episode with Alex on, the Haitian Revolution, et cetera.

Definitely check that out. And then I'm sure Henry will also plug this, but I just want to reiterate the importance of supporting left-wing media like guerrilla history. You know, the far right, they have astro-turfed, millionaires and billionaires that fund their media corporations and even low-level podcasts and whatnot. The center has plenty of corporate and advertising funding. Advertisers aren't so keen to promote. and, you know, fund left-wing shows.

And so that means that uniquely on the far left, we are sort of tasked with funding our own stuff. And that means listeners who get a lot out of shows like this can support it and really makes that difference because we don't get the advertisers. We don't get the corporate revenue. We don't get any of that. It all has to be, by the nature of what we stand for, you know, listener-funded.

And so anybody that does support us or might think about supporting us in the future, we humbly, you know, appreciate that and would urge anybody with a few extra dollars, I know it's a very rough time economically for a lot of people. So no worries if you can, but if you can, it really does make a lot of difference. And if it's not this show, if it's not any of our shows, if it's some show, I think that is the ultimate point that I want to push. Like, you've got to support it from the ground up because that's the only way we're going

to have these media, these media structures at all. So that'd be my two cents on that. Yeah, it's an excellent point. and I agree entirely. Listeners for me, you can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995. I also have a Patreon where I break down science and public health, especially these days regarding COVID. You can find that at patreon.com forward slash Huck 1995.

As for this show, Guerrilla History, you can find us on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A- underscore pod. And as Brett said, we really do this show is really possible because of the contributions that you make. We have no other financial backing other than the backing given by our listeners. So if you've been listening to the show and enjoying it and do find yourself with a couple of extra dollars, you can help us make this show a sustainable show by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history.

Again, that's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And pledging as little as $1 a month to us, But we have bonus materials where we do readings or analysis of things. You get that at any contribution level. And we have bonus episodes that come out every month. We actually do two bonus episodes. We call them our intelligence briefings. One is available for early access on Patreon.

And the other one is a Patreon exclusive. And those are available to anyone who signs up at the $5 and above tier per month on our Patreon. So for as little as five extra dollars, you're getting quite a bit of bonus content. from this show and you're helping make this show sustainable. So on that note, thanks again, guys. We'll be back with another episode of guerrilla history very soon, solidarity listeners, and we hope to see you again. Thank you.