Timeline of the Cold War in Latin America
How does this timeline help us critique textbooks?
This timeline demonstrates how these textbooks often fail to condemn the United States while it implicitly and explicitly dethroned and installed new political leaders. Events that had a direct impact on future United States ideology and policy, including events that dealt with Cuba as a constant communist threat and Nicaragua and the implications of United States officials that helped to fund the right Contras, are normally discussed in these textbooks. Events that illustrate the United States' overreach and intervention, even if mentioned, fail to describe the ramifications of United States involvement. For example, complicated Guatemalan and Chilean coups are explained in less than a paragraph and provide facts without any meaningful interpretation.
Events that could, for lack of a better phrase, be “left in Latin America,” such as the dethroning of Brazilian, Colombian, and Uruguayan left-leaning leaders, do not get mentioned. This paints a heroic and patriotic image of the United States that only stepped in to protect its freedoms and ideologies as opposed to painting a more nuanced understanding of the United States that prioritized its self-interests over all else. It argues very simply that communism was bad while capitalism was good without qualifying this claim.
While these events might have been discussed either briefly or substantively in the textbooks, they often do not mention the human rights violations and abuses that transpired due to both direct and indirect United States efforts. Countries such as Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Guatemala, among others, underwent long periods of dictatorial regimes and military juntas that punished anyone deemed to be a leftist subversive supporting ideas of communism. Oftentimes, this project's timeline entries provide much more detail about the short- and long-term effects of these events than the textbooks consider. These textbooks have the tendency to consider these events as static and in the past, when much memory work is still being pursued to reconnect living family members with those who perished or disappeared in Latin America during various dictatorial periods.
What are the stakes in presenting students with a partial timeline?
Without acknowledging the oftentimes direct role of the United States, students learning from these textbooks will not understand the negative implications that United States involvement can have in foreign regions, including Latin America. Providing a one-dimensional, objective, selective telling of these events without complicating the how and why of United States intervention presents a simplistic understanding that ignores the nuances of history. The silence perpetrated by the erasure of many United States-led or supported human rights violations and political instability only considers part of the United States ideology during this time, failing to incorporate the consequences of these actions.