Virginia Textbooks and the Cold War in Latin America Main Menu Virginia History Textbooks and the Cold War in Latin America home-page; basic description Textbook Introduction Heat Map This is how frequently each country is mentioned in text in these different textbooks Visualizations of Textbook Titles This is where my super pretty interconnected web will come into play. Primary Sources Here is where my bibliography will be with a bunch of different archives/primary sources Secondary Sources Additional Resources About the Author

Timeline of the Cold War in Latin America

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Another representative way to demonstrate the incomplete and partial narrative posited by these middle and high school textbooks involves considering a timeline of events that transpired during the Cold War in Latin America. This tool provides an abridged version of major events in this era that the United States involved itself in, whether that be through financial, political, and social resources or direct military aid and bodies to uproot left-leaning and potentially communist leaders with right-wing, totalitarian-leaning political officials. This timeline offers a consolidated presentation of events, as a more extensive list remains the goal of a future iteration of this project when there is more time for research and resources.
 




This timeline demonstrates how these textbooks often fail to explicitly condemn the United States when their efforts 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 implication of United States officials that helped to fund the right Contras, are normally discussed in these textbooks. However, 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 discussed in instructing students about how the Cold War extended far past the United States and the Soviet Union. 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, these timeline entries provide much more detail about the short- and long-term effects of these events than the textbook considers. 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.

Without acknowledging the oftentimes direct and enforced 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 falls short in teaching a more nuanced account of the past. 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.
 

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  1. Virginia History Textbooks and the Cold War in Latin America Tyler Goldberger