Abstract

The history of the Cold War in Latin America is waiting to be written. Recent scholarship has led to new conceptualizations of it and generational distance has allowed for more measured analysis. Yet what the Cold War meant in a Latin American context or to Latin Americans is still relatively unclear. Scholarship is largely fragmented between different countries and time periods. There is little agreement about when the Cold War in the region began and ended, whether it was imposed or imported and precisely how it evolved over time. Some argue that the very concept of the Cold War is irrelevant in a Latin American context. ¹ Others contend that the region’s Cold War set something of a precedent for what happened elsewhere. ² In short, we still have a lot to learn.