Latin America's Cold War: An international history from Guevara to Reagan

This dissertation is an interpretive history of the Cold War in Latin America. It covers the period from the end of World War II to the close of the Central American civil wars in the late 1980s and early 1990s, focusing most intently on the three decades following the Cuban revolution in 1959. Using a wide variety of new and old sources---archival and translated documents from more than a dozen countries in the Americas and Europe, published contemporary records, and the mass of scholarly literature on this era---it seeks to reconstruct the history of Latin America's Cold War in a way that is both multinational and multilayered. Multinational in that it deals seriously with all sides of the diplomatic and transnational struggles that occurred during this period; multilayered in that it integrates the perspectives of actors in several diverse realms---from the highest echelons of U.S. and Soviet diplomacy to the everyday negotiation of social and political relationships in Latin American countries---into an understanding of the essential dynamics of Latin America's Cold War. It argues that Latin America's Cold War was not a single conflict but rather represented a collection of overlapping local, regional, and global conflicts, and contends that the intensity that often characterized social, political, and diplomatic disputes during this period was a product of that complexity. It also challenges prevailing interpretations of the Cold War in Latin America, arguing that commentators on both the Left and the Right have oversimplified the central themes of the era.