Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America

The fall of the Iron Curtain and the successful Chinese Communist Revolution placed a visceral fear of communist world dominance in the minds of US leaders. Over the ensuing decades of the Cold War, US foreign policy was dedicated to stopping any communist advances. This focus on anything resembling Marxism, socialism, or communism caused the US to look the other way when anticommunist governments became dictatorships and destroyed the freedoms of its citizens. The US's only concern was that these governments were anticommunist. As a result of the fear of communism spreading, the US intervened in areas that made things worse for a majority of people rather than better.

The process of anticommunist intervention began in 1948 with the creation of the Organization of American States (OAS). Member states pledged to combat communism in the Americas. A few years later, US intervention aided the overthrow of the constitutionally elected president, Jacobo Árbenz. Árbenz had earned the ire of leaders within the US government who had ties to United Fruit because Árbenz expropriated large amounts of land held by United Fruit and United Fruit protested vociferously. These protestations led to President Eisenhower supporting Guatemalan rebel forces operating in Honduras to overthrow the Árbenz government. The justification for this action was that Árbenz was a communist. Árbenz, however, had no communist leanings. He was dedicated to democracy and economic reform. This economic reform involved restructuring Guatemala’s agricultural sector. To give more opportunities to poor Guatemalans to improve their lives, he needed land controlled by United Fruit. United Fruit did not want to lose those lands and wanted more monetary compensation from the Guatemalan government than the government was willing to pay. After Árbenz was ousted, the land reform ended, and the military dictatorship of Carlos Castillo Armas began. Guatemala may have been the first, but it was far from the last Latin American nation that succumbed to US intervention that inaugurated the beginnings of a tyrannical dictatorship, all in the name of defeating communism.

The so-called Red Scare was not restricted to foreign nations. Its genesis could be traced back to the first red scare during the early decades of the 20th century but especially to the second wave of fear led by Senator Joseph McCarthy. The subsequent witch hunt of communists in the United States became known as McCarthyism. Though nowhere near as destructive and violent as the death squads in Latin American nations, plenty of US citizens suffered from being blacklisted and arrested for supposed ties or sympathies to communism. The internal purge of McCarthyism was simply exported around the globe and Latin America was no exception.

Nations like Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil illustrate the absolute worst examples of military dictatorships in Latin America during the Cold War. These nations represent the worst, but every nation in Latin America experienced some form of violence and turmoil because of Cold War policies and politics. All except Costa Rica.

Costa Rica experienced a short civil war (44 days) in 1948, which was caused by political strife between the Calderón regime and its opponents. The 1948 election was a fiasco with all sides declaring fraud. Costa Rica had a strong communist party at this time called The People’s Vanguard Party. The result of the election was an uprising led by José Figueres and the National Liberation Army. The war progressed quickly with neither side gaining an upper hand until the US intervened. The Costa Rican communist party had sided with Calderón. The result was a victory for the rebels. Figueres became president. The Civil War cost the lives of approximately 2,000 and was the bloodiest event in Costa Rica in the 20th century. By way of comparison, an estimated 15,000-30,000 people were victims of military dictatorships in Argentina alone.

What is interesting about the Costa Rican Civil War in the context of the Cold War and anticommunist dictatorships in Latin America is that in Costa Rica the communist party sided with the former dictator, causing the US to side with the rebels. The US simply backed which side the communists were on. Furthermore, following the civil war, Costa Rica disbanded its military; thus, unlike other nations, Costa Rica didn’t possess a military that could overthrow the democratically elected government.

Mexico, too, offers an interesting contrast to other Latin American nations and their dealings with the US and the Cold War. One would think that with Mexico sharing a border with the US, and thus, the closest Latin American nation to it, the US would constantly and overtly interfere with Mexican politics. However, as history shows, the US interfered with Mexico far less than many other nations with which the US had previously shown lesser interest (Chile, for example). An important difference in Mexico was the stability of the dictatorial-like leadership of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI (Spanish: Partido Revolucionario Institucional). The PRI had led Mexican politics and the government since the 1930s. The PRI’s ideology varied at times depending on the president and circumstances, and for decades the PRI had been using fraud and repression to maintain power. Even though the PRI could sway socialist at times (especially in the 1940s), it was usually pro-capitalist, and any communist fears, as Chasteen points out in the book, had been well-weathered by US leaders. This, more than any other aspect of Mexican-American relations during the Cold War era contributed to a lack of US involvement. The US was simply used to dealing with Mexico, and thus any communist sentiments rising in the nation were met with less fear in the US than when they appeared elsewhere in Latin America.

The Columbian Civil War was like many other civil wars in Latin American history that pitted conservatives against liberals. The liberals lost the war, and the conservatives controlled the country for decades. The destabilization brought about in the 1970s by economic woes and the rise of powerful drug cartels provided impetus for Marxist revolutionaries still smoldering over the earlier defeat. The guerillas struggled to fund their war, however, and resorted to kidnapping and ransom tactics borrowed from the cartels. However, the guerillas often kidnapped cartel members, which only increased the violence in the country. The government fought the guerillas and the cartels. The cartels fought the government and the guerillas, and the guerillas fought the government and the cartels. It was a violent triangle. The US sent massive amounts of aid to Columbia, mostly in an effort to destroy the cartels but also to defeat Marxist guerilla groups. However, some have criticized the Columbian government for using most of the money to fight the guerillas, which it sees as its primary enemy, instead of the drug cartels, which the US views as the greatest problem. Furthermore, the Columbian military has been accused numerous times of human rights violations, which would make the country ineligible for much of hundreds of millions in aid it receives. The situation in Columbia continues to the present day, though a peace deal was signed in 2016 between the Columbian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC), the far-left guerilla group.