The historiography on Uruguay during the Cold War has identified the period 1959–62 as a key juncture in the process of political polarisation that culminated in the fall of democracy in 1973. Based on the analysis of press articles and other documentary sources, I describe the role played by the main fraction of the Partido Colorado (Red Party) led by Luis Batlle Berres in promoting polarisation of the Uruguayan political system in those years. My findings contradict the conventional depiction of Batlle Berres as a moderate who tried to prevent the polarisation provoked by other agents.

This article explores Mexico’s overlooked importance in the Central American armed conflict, the limits of its influence, and its connection to the late Cold War. Mexico’s policy toward Central America attempted to prevent an American and Cuban military intervention in the area and avoid a Cold War confrontation along its southern border. Mexico attempted to build detente in the region and prevent a global escalation of tension between the great powers. Meanwhile, it sought to propose a “third way” for the revolutionary actors shaped after Mexico’s political system and history. Studying Mexico’s efforts to create detente-like arrangements can shed light on the efforts of peripheral actors and their projects to influence the international system despite the actions of hegemonic powers.

This article examines the conditions that led the Argentine armed group Montoneros to establish a nursery in Cuba, in 1979, to care for the children of exiled members who had decided to return to the country to fight against a dictatorial regime characterised by the crime of enforced disappearance and supported by continental and global alliances. The analysis focuses on the dilemmas children posed for militants and the organisation and how those concerns were in part addressed by setting up a facility to care for the children. The article then considers how that childcare effort by the Montoneros connected with Cuba's internationalist and refugee policies and with continental struggles, as well as looking at how the children involved experienced it. This reconstruction offers a new approach to thinking about political conflicts in the heated Cold War scenario in Latin America, through the lens of children's history and by exploring how love and politics are intertwined.

The Ford Foundation's involvement with the social sciences in Brazil coincided with the early years of the military regime that ruled the country between 1964 and 1985. The paper studies how changed political circumstances in the United States and abroad induced the Foundation to gradually abandon the technocratic approach that had governed its overseas programme since the 1950s, thus introducing a critical shift in its policies toward the developing world. A grant proposal to the University of Brasília, which had been subject to repeated military interventions since 1964, highlighted the ethical dilemmas raised by the goal of fostering policy-relevant research in an authoritarian political context. Relying on a pragmatic decision-making framework that converted ethical and ideological considerations into cost–benefit exercises, the Foundation finally moved away from the maxims of modernisation theory to embrace new strategic priorities like human rights, democracy and intellectual pluralism.

This article examines the transnational activism of the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (Revolutionary Student Directorate, DRE), a group of exiled Cuban anti-Castro students. In the wake of the Bay of Pigs invasion, with CIA funding, the DRE attempted to challenge student support for the Cuban Revolution in Latin America and elsewhere in the global South. This article uses the DRE's trajectory to rethink the 1960s as a period of anti-communist, as well as leftist, youth ascendancy. It challenges the idea that Cuba garnered universal youth support, stressing instead that the Cuban Revolution helped turn student politics into a key battleground of the Cold War.

This article takes existing histories of Chilean transnational anti-communist activity in the 1970s beyond Operation Condor (the Latin American military states’ covert transnational anti-communist intelligence and operations system) by asking how the Pinochet dictatorship responded to two key changes in the international system towards the end of that decade: the Carter presidency and introduction of the human rights policy, and the shift of the epicentre of the Cold War in Latin America to Central America. It shows how both Salvadoreans and Chileans understood the Pinochet dictatorship as a distinct model of anti-communist governance, applicable far beyond Chile's own borders. This study of Chilean foreign policy in El Salvador contributes to new histories of the Latin American Extreme Right and to new understandings of the inter-American system and the international history of the conflicts in Central America in the late 1970s and the 1980s.

During the Cold War, Havana symbolised the struggle for national liberation in Latin America. Yet in few other places on the island of Cuba did the Revolution's visions of development materialise as they did in the southern city of Cienfuegos. This article examines why two half-finished nuclear reactors and a decaying ‘nuclear city’ still remain in Cienfuegos. Through a comprehensive spatial and infrastructural transformation of Cuba, the revolutionary government sought to remedy the evils of dependency and unequal exchange. Cienfuegos, and its shifting place in the Cold War political economy, demonstrates how a radical critique of urbanisation merged with the spatiality of centralised energy infrastructure in the pursuit of ultimately-failed nuclear modernity. The history of Cienfuegos draws the academic gaze away from Latin America's major cities to broaden the ‘geographies of theory’ in urban, energy and Latin American studies.

This article draws on an international assemblage of sources to recover the history of the involvement of the Organization of American States (OAS) and the United Nations (UN) in the Cuban missile crisis. It argues that, through the mechanisms of the OAS and the UN, Latin American citizens and officials helped shape the peaceful outcome of the crisis. This article challenges dismissive portrayals of both Latin American countries and multilateral organisations and, in so doing, joins the growing literature on how supposedly weak Latin American countries have used international organisations to influence world affairs.

In the 1950s, the Sociedad de Escritores de Chile experienced bitter disputes caused by the efforts of the Chilean Committee for Cultural Freedom, the local branch of a major institution in the US cultural Cold War, to gain control of the association. These disputes reveal the role played by the cultural Cold War in the breakdown of older political and intellectual alliances in Chile. They also highlight the transnational networks that connected Chilean writers during the Cold War, and the complex articulation of local and international contexts and agendas that influenced Chilean cultural and political groups.

Drawing on minutes, publications, diplomatic documents and the written press, I explore the transnational networks of the Chilean right wing within Latin America in the 1950s, especially around the four Congresses against Soviet Intervention in Latin America held in Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Lima and Antigua between 1954 and 1958. I argue that the Chilean right wing's participation in those networks alongside other Latin American like-minded actors was based on both its long local experience in fighting communism and its attachment to Cold War anti-communism. In these transnational spaces, some Chilean right-wingers gained recognition and prestige, as was the case with the conservative leader Sergio Fernández Larraín, largely thanks to his systematic denunciation of supposed Soviet penetration in the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR), then the ruling party in Bolivia.

This article presents an entangled history of Argentina and Egypt in the years surrounding the 1952 Egyptian Revolution. It combines diplomatic, migration and anti-imperial activism histories to delineate the intellectual and institutional links between these nations from the late 1940s to the 1950s – from the rise of Peronism through to Nasser's management of the Suez Canal crisis of 1956. Diverse Argentine social and political sectors saw parallels between the anti-imperial struggles in the Arab world and in Latin America. Though with differing and sometimes competing agendas, these groups learned and deployed the language of non-alignment and South–South solidarity in the escalating Cold War.

This article analyses the administrative structure and development of Chile's indigenous policies under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–90), taking as its focus a pilot project for indigenous Mapuche integration known as Plan Perquenco. Officials formulated Plan Perquenco in accordance with the Chilean state's new administrative structure known as regionalisation. I focus on the unintended consequences of regionalisation that permitted the Mapuche youth group, Los Guitarreros Caminantes, to work through Plan Perquenco's music programmes to challenge the cultural politics of and justification for the pilot project.

This article chronicles the fifteen-month border conflict between the military regimes of Brazil and Paraguay that occurred between March of 1965 and June of 1966 – a stand-off that paved the way for the Itaipu project that would become the largest dam in the world. In the context of the 1960s Cold War, both governments saw a large-scale dam on the Paraná River as a means to catalyse industrialisation and strengthen the political legitimacy of their respective authoritarian regimes. Yet the border crisis was not a stand-off between equal powers. Brazil was the much stronger force, and, with the backing of the United States, the Brazilian dictatorship brought Paraguay firmly under its sphere of influence while also marginalising neighbouring Argentina. The border question at Guaíra served as a springboard for Brazil's rising power, and subsequently transformed the geopolitical landscape of the Southern Cone.

The most significant weakness of the Marxist Left in early Cold War Mexico was that it subordinated itself to post-revolutionary nationalism. Both the Mexican Communist Party and followers of Vicente Lombardo Toledano supported the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI), avoiding significant criticism before late 1947. Some dissident currents of Marxism did exist, but they were sparsely followed. Mexico provides an extreme case of Left subordination to popular-nationalist ideology, yet is indicative of trends visible elsewhere, e.g. among Marxist groups in post-war Cuba and the United States. Rather than promoting notions of communist political practice, the Mexican Marxist Left consistently advocated the elimination of class conflict and support for the ‘national bourgeoisie’. The Marxist Left held the Mexican government to different standards from those to which they held the governments of other countries. A near-consensus on the Mexican Left equated patriotism with progressive politics. The argument is illustrated with an important case study: the 1947 Marxist Round Table.

The Cuban Revolution of 1959 ushered in many radical changes, both socio-economic and political. Yet the macropolitical upheaval of the period also manifested in concrete ways in the lives of ordinary Cubans. The sudden scarcity of everyday medications, closely linked to diplomatic tensions with the United States, was one such outcome. This article traces the transnational battles provoked by the sudden disappearance of US prescription drugs from Cuban shelves. It seeks to understand pharmaceutical shortages not only as a political side effect but also as a social reality, which provided a venue for the articulation of new forms of sociability and body politics.

This article unveils the continuous and productive relationship that developed between Chile and the IMF during Salvador Allende's presidency (1970–73). This counter-intuitive relationship was made possible by the systematic depoliticisation and technocratisation of the ties between them. By downplaying ideological discrepancies and keeping a high degree of autonomy, the IMF and Chilean technocrats blurred rigid Cold War divides and circumvented the US-imposed embargo against Allende's regime. The examination of this relationship sheds new light on Allende's positioning in the international arena and provides a unique prism to reconsider dichotomist perceptions of the Cold War in Latin America.

This article examines transnational connections among anti-communist women in Brazil, Chile and the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s. It explores the political beliefs and networks upon which these women drew and built in order to promote their role in the overthrow of João Goulart and Salvador Allende and to encourage other women across the Americas to join them in the fight against communism. This paper shows that these women reversed the flow of ideas, served as models for each other and for anti-communist women, and built gendered transnational networks of female anti-communist activists.

This article analyses the bilateral economic negotiations between Washington and Havana during the era of the Cuban PRCA (Auténtico) governments led by Ramón Grau San Martín and Carlos Prío Socarrás (1944–52). This work shows that, initially, the PRCA governments took advantage of the economic bargaining capacity that Cuba had developed with Washington during the Good Neighbor era, but after 1947 this declined as the Truman administration's Cold War foreign policy agenda assigned only a marginal position to Latin America and Cuba. Havana's inability to obtain further economic support from the United States had a powerful destabilising effect, complicating Cuba's economic governance and delegitimising the PRCA politically. The study of this episode enhances our comprehension of a period largely overlooked by the historiography on Cuba and our understanding of the demise of the Auténtico project, the last attempt to transform Cuba's social structures in a progressive and democratic manner.

In 1976, the US Congress halted arms sales to Chile. This paper examines the congressional debate over arms sales to Chile and the political and military consequences of the action. Recent scholarship has largely overlooked the embargo and its implications for regional security dynamics in South America. Initially US sanctions increased Chile's diplomatic isolation and military vulnerability, which made regional conflict more likely. However, Chile's ability to surmount the effects of the embargo eventually increased Augusto Pinochet's independence vis-à-vis Washington. When the Reagan administration began pushing for a transition to democracy, it lacked two key instruments for influencing a military government: weapons sales and security assistance.