Counterrevolution Without Borders: Anticommunist Internationalism and Latin America's Cold War

Central America’s revolutionary upheavals of the 1980s became, in the context of the Cold War, a globally significant event for an entire generation. Yet during the conflicts themselves and in their immediate aftermath, scholars generally approached them in one of two ways: to craft studies of resistance and repression within individual Central American countries (Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador), or to write critiques of U.S. imperialism. It was not until the twenty-first century that historians began recovering the conflicts’ global dimensions, first by highlighting European, North American, and Latin American solidarity movements that supported Central American leftist guerrillas and, more recently, by examining the international diplomatic and military support networks that these movements leveraged.

While these newer histories have focused overwhelmingly on the global Left, Molly Avery gives the global Right its due. By exploring how conservative Chileans, Argentines, Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and Nicaraguans mobilized together to counter Central America’s left-wing revolutions, she has produced a fascinating shadow history of a crucial Cold War flashpoint. In doing so, she also offers new insights into the history of South American dictatorships. 

Dr Molly Avery is Lecturer in the History of the Americas at the University of Sheffield.