Introduction to The Cold War and Latin American Studies
Those of us whose academic careers evolved during the Cold War have intensely experienced pressures on our approaches to teaching and research. Some of us in North American universities were affected by anticommunist hysteria, required to sign loyalty oaths and face surveillance by the FBI and the CIA. Our work on Latin America sometimes involved protests of U.S. policy and direct or covert intervention into the affairs of countries in the hemisphere. The predominant role of the United States in Latin America dates to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 and the nineteenth-century acquisition of territory through wars with Mexico and Spain. Academic interest in Latin America during the early twentieth century was largely shaped by diplomatic history and U.S. expansionism and imperialism. The end of World War II and the onset of the Cold War in 1945 saw the beginnings of Latin American studies as an interdisciplinary field.
The outreach of the United States into Latin America in the early years of the Cold War initially aimed at containing communist influence through support of conservative authoritarian rule and later emerging social democratic regimes during the 1950s. The Cuban Revolution in 1959 and the rise of revolutionary movements throughout Latin America led to U.S. counterrevolutionary strategies and eventually to intervention, covert (as in Guatemala, Brazil, Cuba, Chile) and overt (the Dominican Republic). Authoritarianism throughout the region brought repression, censorship, and imprisonment or expulsion of many intellectuals, who sought exile abroad and carried with them cultural and political influences that accompanied the establishment of centers of Latin American studies.
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