Cold War History

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Which borders have not yet been crossed? A

supplement to Gilbert Joseph’s historiographical
balance of the Latin American Cold War

Marcelo Casals

To cite this article: Marcelo Casals (2020): Which borders have not yet been crossed? A
supplement to Gilbert Joseph’s historiographical balance of the Latin American Cold War, Cold War
History, DOI: 10.1080/14682745.2020.1762311

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14682745.2020.1762311

Published online: 18 May 2020.

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COLD WAR HISTORY
https://doi.org/10.1080/14682745.2020.1762311

Which borders have not yet been crossed? A supplement to

Gilbert Joseph’s historiographical balance of the Latin
American Cold War
Marcelo Casals
Centro de Estudios de Historia Política, Escuela de Gobierno, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Santiago, Chile

I’m writing in French, my native language, rather than in Latin, the language of my teachers,
because I hope for a better judgement of my opinions from those who use only their natural
reason in all its purity than I would get from those who only trust old books. As for those
who combine good sense with learning – the only judges I wish to have – I’m sure they won’t
be so partial to Latin as to refuse to listen to my arguments because I expound them in the
vernacular.

— René Descartes, Discourse on the Method

The US historian Gilbert Joseph is probably one of the most respected proponents of the
renewal of studies on the Cold War in Latin America. Around him, a growing group of
researchers has redefined the traditional understanding of this period, overcoming
a significant part of its limitations. Among other things, Joseph has drawn attention to
the need to consider local actors’ agency in the struggles, encounters and disagreements
that unfolded across the continent, thus moving away from mechanical views of Latin
America as one more of the ‘peripheries’ that formed part of the superpowers’ chess
board. Similarly, this current of scholarship has emphasised the circulation of ideas,
influences and resources across national borders, which, from this perspective, appear far
more permeable than they do when we take the nation-state as the international actor par
excellence. A significant part of this multidirectional flow of ideas and resources over-
lapped with the deployment, advances and setbacks of imperialist logics from the United
States towards Latin America, giving the Cold War in this part of the world its own
characteristics that cannot be reduced to geopolitical tensions between the two
superpowers.
In a recent article published in Cold War History, Gilbert Joseph carried out a detailed
historiographical account in which he analyses these and other fascinating advances in
this field, emphasising the increase in ‘border crossings’ between different approaches.1
In the text’s first section, Joseph reviews the advances of the past 20 years, characterised
by overcoming reductionist Cold War schemes and the ‘cross-fertilisation’ between

CONTACT Marcelo Casals marcelo.casals@uai.cl

1
Gilbert M. Joseph, “Border Crossings and the Remaking of Latin American Cold War Studies,” Cold War History
(published online 14 March 2019): 141–70. For a complete picture of the advances in the field of the Latin American Cold
War, this article should be read as a continuation of the one published 12 years earlier: Gilbert M. Joseph, “What We Now
Know and Should Know: Bringing Latin America More Meaningfully into Cold War Studies,” in In From the Cold: Latin
America’s New Encounter with the Cold War, ed. Daniela Spenser and Gilbert M. Joseph (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2007).
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 M. CASALS

scholars of international relations and specialists in Latin America. All this resulted in
a widespread change in the focus of studies on the Cold War in the region, now oriented
towards more nuanced, complex and shifting articulations of global encounters and local
political agency. Second, Joseph takes up the arguments from the compilation he edited
with Greg Grandin on the ‘long Cold War’. While the post Second World War period
represented a special moment of conflictive encounters and disagreements between Latin
America and the United States, the bases of violent local conflicts go back to at least the
beginning of the twentieth century.2 Finally, Joseph shows the recent advances that stem
from the combination of cultural history perspectives applied to research on the Cold
War, geared towards both studying the circulation and reception of artefacts and knowl-
edges and exploring the memories, subjectivities and experiences that shaped this
period’s hardest years. This broad field of intersection between cultural and political
history, expressed in numerous studies of science, counterculture, solidarity, consump-
tion and so on, seems to be the most fruitful of recent years.
At first glance, Joseph’s historiographical account is impressive. Hundreds of works
are put into perspective, through which we can identify general trends in the questions
and concerns of a growing body of research. However, after the first reading, the issue of
this same research’s institutional and cultural plots inevitably arises. A quick count of the
works cited reveals the problem clearly: of the 264 references, 242 (91.7%) are studies
published in English and only 22 (8.3%) are Spanish publications.3 There are no
references to works in Portuguese. In the rest of this short essay, I want to argue why
this is a problem and what we lose in our understanding of the Latin American Cold War
phenomenon by privileging a single language’s intellectual production at the expense of
others in this way. Through some examples focused on the historiography produced in
the Southern Cone, I want to show the cost of not engaging in meaningful intellectual
dialogue between English-speaking Latin Americanist scholars and those of us academics
who live in Latin America and think and write largely in Spanish and Portuguese. Despite
the extraordinary progress that Gilbert Joseph notes, apparently there are still borders
that have not yet been crossed and ‘border crossings’ that remain closed.
Considering works in the Latin American academy’s most commonly used languages
is not only justified as a question of justice. I am not advocating here for ‘linguistic
quotas’ of any kind, since what matters most to me is the intellectual contribution’s
quality and that is not determined by the language in which it is written. While I concede
that this point can be debated, what interests me here is showing that there is a solid base
of research done in Latin America that complements, complicates and sometimes blurs
the explicit and implicit consensus on which the historiographical advances on the Cold
War in the region that Joseph describes are predicated. The examples that I will use later
come from my limited research topics. By no means do I aspire to synthesise the general
Latin American production on the Cold War.
Latin American historiographical production has tended to compartmentalise its
objects of study on the national scale. Partly because of this academy’s history and its

2
Greg Grandin and Gilbert M. Joseph, eds., A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during
Latin America’s Long Cold War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
3
Moreover, of these 22 works, only one is analysed in somewhat greater detail: the volume edited by Benedetta
Calandra and Marina Franco, La guerra fría cultural en América Latina: desafíos y límites para una nueva mirada de las
relaciones interamericanas (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 2012).
 COLD WAR HISTORY 3

role in building the respective national States, and in part because of the enormous
difference in resources compared to the First World, this tendency has not been funda-
mentally altered.4 However, this trend has not made recent historiographical production
immune to the ‘transnational turn’ that the study of the Cold War has experienced.
Despite not abandoning the nation as a framework for analysis, today there is a much
fuller awareness of the connected nature of many of these phenomena. An example of
this is the research on Latin American political actors on both the Left and the Right.
Thanks to researchers like Horacio Tarcus and Adriana Petra for the Argentine case;
Gerardo Leibner for Uruguay; and Sergio Grez, Jaime Massardo, Olga Ulianova, and
Alfredo Riquelme in the Chilean context, we have a more complete idea of the process of
circulation, reception, and adaptation of socialist and communist ideas since the mid-
nineteenth century and for much of the twentieth century.5 Because of these and other
contributions, the field of studies on communism and socialism is robust. Through this
research, it is possible to see in detail how revolutionary political actors were formed at
the intersection between the reception of global dynamics and their adaptation to local
political struggles, oftentimes marked by different types of confrontation with the state
apparatus.
Something similar can be said about the field of studies on the Latin American Right.
While this is not in an area that enjoys as much popularity as studies of the Left, it has
developed significantly as result of collective works that address different countries,
allowing for highly useful comparative and connected analysis.6 There, too, it is possible
to identify the different articulations between global ideologies and local conflicts that
shaped the activities of said actors. The study of anticommunism as a phenomenon in its
own right has helped to explore these connections. Rodrigo Patto Sá Motta, for example,
wrote a now classic study of anticommunism in Brazil that accounts for the circulation of
ideas and images from global revolutionary referents and their use in specific local
conflicts, including the Right’s political and social mobilisation, which paved the way
for the 1964 coup d’état.7
Studies of the Left and Right, attending to both their national activities and transna-
tional connections, allow us to observe a phenomenon that the English-language histor-
iography on the Cold War in Latin America tends to miss: the multiplicity of references,
encounters and conflicts of Latin American political actors with peers in other parts of
the world. That blind spot can largely be attributed to what one could call a hegemonic

4
Aldo Marchesi, “Escribiendo la Guerra Fría latinoamericana: entre el Sur ‘local’ y el Norte ‘global,’” Estudos Históricos
(Rio de Janeiro) 30:60 (April 2017): 187–202.
5
Horacio Tarcus, Marx en la Argentina: sus primeros lectores obreros, intelectuales y científicos (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI,
2013); Horacio Tarcus, La biblia del proletariado. Traductores y editores de El Capital (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2018); Adriana
Petra, Intelectuales y cultura comunista: itinerarios, problemas y debates en la Argentina de posguerra (Buenos Aires: Fondo
de Cultura Económica, 2017); Sergio Grez Toso, Historia del comunismo en Chile: la era de Recabarren, 1912–1924
(Santiago: LOM Ediciones, 2011); Gerardo Leibner, Camaradas y compañeros: una historia política y social de los comunistas
del Uruguay (Montevideo: Trilce, 2011); Jaime Massardo, La formación del imaginario político de Luis Emilio Recabarren:
contribución al estudio crítico de la cultura política de las clases subalternas de la sociedad chilena (Santiago: LOM Ediciones,
2008); Olga Ulianova and Alfredo Riquelme Segovia, eds., Chile en los archivos soviéticos 1922–1991, 3 v. (Santiago:
DIBAM – Centro de Investigaciones Diego Barros Arana, 2005, 2009, and 2017).
6
João Fábio Bertonha and Ernesto Lázaro Bohoslavsky, eds., Circule por la derecha: percepciones, redes y contactos
entre las derechas sudamericanas, 1917–1973 (Los Polvorines, Provincia de Buenos Aires: Ediciones UNGS, 2016); and
Ernesto Bohoslavsky, Rodrigo Patto Sá Motta, and Stéphane Boisard, eds., Pensar as direitas na América Latina (Sao Paulo:
Alameda Casa Editorial, 2019).
7
Rodrigo Patto Sá Motta, Em guarda contra o perigo vermelho: o anticomunismo no Brasil, 1917–1964 (São Paulo:
Editora Perspectiva: FAPESP, 2002).
4 M. CASALS

‘hemispheric narrative’. From that perspective, the Cold War in Latin America is
intimately and exclusively linked to US foreign policy. Even when Joseph and the
historiography he analyses recognise shifting levels of local agency and ‘contact zones’
in which these interactions are negotiated and resisted, a significant portion of the
interpretations of these phenomena focus on United States-Latin America polarity. Of
course, this is not a matter of ignoring the impact of the United States and the
identifications and rejections that it generated in different Latin American actors, but
rather of bringing nuance to the exclusivity of that central role. The issue is even more
visible when we study the moments in which the direction of transnational influences is
reversed, and Latin American experiences are the ones that shape processes elsewhere in
the world. Alessandro Santoni, for example, has shown the deep impact on Italy of the
Chilean revolutionary experience during the Popular Unity years (1970–73), while
Fernando Camacho has studied the effects of solidarity with Chile in Sweden.8 Part of
the impulse to demonstrate Cold War connections beyond the traditional North-South
and East-West coordinates has also been published in English, including Eugenia
Palieraki’s promising work on the political links between Chile and Algeria at the height
of Third Worldism.9 In other words, as studies of the Left and Right show, the constitu-
tion and development of Latin American political actors before and during the Cold War
cannot be reduced to their interactions with the United States, because their arc of
mutual references and identifications extends to a significant part of the West and
beyond.10
An important part of this literature is not explicitly framed by the ‘Cold War’ as such,
but rather is identified with notions closer to local political experiences. Such is the case
with the so-called ‘recent history’, which explores the 1970s and 1980s Southern Cone
authoritarian regimes.11 To be sure, this does not detract from this scholarship’s rele-
vance in conceptualising the Latin American Cold War, since it adds elements that
analytical frameworks focused on the United States obscure. All told, and despite the
national compartmentalisation of a good part of the Latin American historiography,
there have been high-quality efforts to build interpretative syntheses of the Cold War in
this part of the world, the contributions of which should form part of a more general
dialogue beyond linguistic barriers.
Probably, the best effort in this line of scholarship is Vanni Pettinà’s recently published
Historia mínima de la Guerra Fría en América Latina.12 There, the author explicitly
suggests the need to move away from an interpretative framework centred on the United
States’ foreign policy and towards understanding the Cold War as a process of intersec-
tion between what he calls ‘external rupture’ and ‘internal rupture’. The first refers to the
reordering of the international Inter-American system and Washington’s promotion of

8
Alessandro Santoni, El comunismo italiano y la vía chilena. Los orígenes de un mito político (Santiago: RIL editores,
2011); Fernando Camacho Padilla, Suecia por Chile: una historia visual del exilio y la solidaridad, 1970–1990 (Santiago: LOM
Ediciones, 2009).
9
Eugenia Palieraki, “Broadening the Field of Perception and Struggle: Chilean Political Exiles in Algeria and Third
World Cosmopolitanism,” African Identities 16, no. 2 (April 2018): 205–18.
10
That is precisely one of the main arguments of a book mentioned but not analysed by Joseph: Alfredo Riquelme
and Tanya Harmer, eds., Chile y la guerra fría global (Santiago: RIL Editores – Instituto de Historia, Pontificia Universidad
Católica de Chile, 2014).
11
On the need to link ‘recent history’ to studies of the Cold War in Latin America, see Marchesi, “Escribiendo la Guerra
Fría latinoamericana.”
12
Vanni Pettinà, Historia mínima de la Guerra Fría en América Latina (Ciudad de México: El Colegio de México, 2018).
 COLD WAR HISTORY 5

an anti-communist ‘containment’ policy. The second represents the erosion of the

developmentalist and industrialist economic models in Latin America that were initially
constructed as a reaction to the 1929 global economic crisis and the subsequent strength-
ening of the conservative political sectors that sought to reduce the State’s regulatory
presence in the economy. Both ruptures occurred in the key years of 1946–48, decisively
shaping Latin American politics for the next 50 years. At the same time, the particular
forms of interaction between the two ruptures would have determined a periodisation of
this process that did not always align with the rhythms of the bipolar confrontation
between the two superpowers. Thus, for example, while Washington and Moscow
advanced in the 1970s ‘détente’, Latin America was experiencing an accelerated process
of radicalisation, polarisation, and authoritarian regression by virtue of local and regional
reactions to the Cuban Revolution.
Many of these aspects are not unfamiliar to the literature that already exists in English,
as Pettinà himself acknowledges. In the line of scholarship opened by Odd Arne Westad
and the recovery of the ‘Third World’ in ‘global Cold War’ studies, Tanya Harmer has
explored the ‘inter-American’ links and conflicts during the revolutionary experience of
the Popular Unity in Chile. In the same vein, Aldo Marchesi has investigated the
connections and circulation of ideas and resources among far-left groups in the
Southern Cone during the 1960s and 1970s, while Ernesto Semán has incorporated
Argentine populism into the study of transnational ideological linkages and disputes
during the first years of the Cold War in Latin America.13 To a greater or lesser degree,
these contributions have emphasised escaping US hegemony as the Latin American Cold
War’s ultimate explanatory factor.14 Systematically incorporating the voluminous
Spanish and Portuguese literature on populism, revolutionary movements and political
conflict, among other things, would help to reinforce the promising opportunities that
this and other research has opened up.
The examples discussed here are only a small and necessarily incomplete sample of
Latin American historiographical production. This scholarship not only offers ‘raw
material’ for more nuanced analytical frameworks, but also valuable historical interpre-
tations in their own right. The language in which these works are written, and the specific
conditions of their production, do not necessarily elevate them to a higher level of
knowledge. However, Latin American research on the Cold War does not deserve to be
ignored by the Anglophone centres of intellectual production. For a more complex
understanding of the Cold War in Latin America, it is necessary to integrate into the
discussion all those who can contribute new empirical and interpretative elements; on
this, many areas of research conducted in Latin America have a lot to say. Hence, frank
intellectual dialogue, beyond linguistic barriers and on an equal level, is crucial. Such
contact, of course, includes the possibility of criticism and disagreement, even of the

13
Tanya Harmer, Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War, The New Cold War History (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2011); Aldo Marchesi, Latin America’s Radical Left: Rebellion and Cold War in the Global 1960s
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Ernesto Semán, Ambassadors of the Working Class: Argentina’s International
Labour Activists and Cold War Democracy in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).
14
For more examples in this vein, see the special issue edited by Vanni Pettinà and José Antonio Sánchez Román,
particularly its introductory text: “Beyond US Hegemony: The Shaping of the Cold War in Latin America,” Culture & History
Digital Journal 4, no. 1 (June 2015): 1–4; on this topic, see also Tanya Harmer, “The Cold War in Latin America,” in The
Routledge Handbook of the Cold War, ed. Artemy M. Kalinovsky and Craig Daigle (London: New York: Routledge, 2014),
133–48.
6 M. CASALS

passionate variety, especially because the periods and phenomena under analysis are
often particularly sensitive for those of us who live in this part of the world. The cost of
turning away is too high. Reducing Latin American intellectual production to 8.3% of the
discussion about the Cold War – or imposing extra-intellectual limits on the area of
study, which amounts to the same thing – silences elements that are relevant for refining
the conceptual tools necessary for its study. We need, then, to exercise our ‘natural
reason’ and our ‘good sense’, as Descartes said, in order to overcome the structural
inequalities between the First World Latin Americanist academy and that of Latin
America. That way, we can meet on the plane of scientific and rational discussion in
both ‘Latin’ and ‘the vernacular’.

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Eugenia Palieraki, Alfredo Riquelme, Ernesto Bohoslavsky, and Rodrigo
Patto Sá Motta for their advice and suggestions.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Marcelo Casals holds a PhD in Latin American and Caribbean History from the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. He is Assistant Professor at the Centro de Estudios de Historia Política,
Escuela de Gobierno, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez (Chile). His most recent book, published in 2016,
is La creación de la amenaza roja. Del surgimiento del anticomunismo en Chile a la “campaña del
terror” de 1964.

ORCID
Marcelo Casals http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6746-4473