Allen Wells provides a meticulously researched and necessary intervention into twentieth-century Latin American history. It examines the long struggle against authoritarianism through major international watersheds and from the perspective of the region’s moderates. Focusing on these voices rather than emphasizing more extreme ones on both ends of the political spectrum allows Allen Wells to effectively complicate narratives that present the political right and left as monoliths and view all interactions through a strictly binary Cold War lens (2–3). Wells joins revisionist efforts of the last 20 years to rethink Latin America’s Cold War and international diplomacy, which has challenged Eurocentric periodizations of the conflict, examined how popular mobilizations made use of Cold War rhetoric in pursuit of their own localized struggles, and studied how the Cold War shaped identities and cultural expressions.
Part One focuses on the pre-World War II era, tracing how Latin Americans coupled the fight against authoritarian rule with a strident critique of US intervention in its various forms. Through well-known characters such as Rómulo Betancourt and Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre alongside lesser-known actors such as Honduran bookseller and writer Froylán Turcios, Wells adeptly traces transnational efforts to collectively advocate non-intervention and internationalization of imperial spaces such as the Panama Canal. Latin Americans effectively pressured a shift to the so-called Good Neighbor Policy of the United States in the 1930s, which Wells argues was less of a pivotal shift in US foreign policy and more a begrudging response to decades of Latin American diplomacy and activism.
Despite reformers’ modest successes through the 1930s, in Part Two, Wells also demonstrates the vulnerability of democracy throughout the region. Reformers were not only up against Washington but also regional strongmen such as Rafael Trujillo and his organization, La Internacional de la Espada. The analysis of what Wells refers to as “border wars,” or conflicts between alliances such as the Caribbean Legion, a pro-democracy alliance, and La Internacional, is a key contribution of this volume, as it draws attention to how assassinations, press campaigns, and political maneuvering between Latin American countries greatly contributed to reformers’ efficacy in pursuing democratic rule. In questioning why democracy proved so tenuous during Latin America’s Cold War, Wells points to the perceived communist threat. However, instead of positioning containment efforts as the cause of democracy’s weakening prior to the 1960s, Wells argues that it simply provided a new language with which to frame the longstanding struggle against authoritarianism and relatedly, the debate about intervention. However, Wells also admits that events transpiring in Europe and then the Cuban Revolution significantly shaped the way that both US and Latin American actors viewed their societies, thus suggesting a shift greater than the recycling of diplomatic scripts. As the United States continued investing in the region’s militaries and in 1954 launched its program for police modernization (309), and as Trujillo-led La Internacional continued its assassinations, diplomatic pressure, and media campaigns against reform-oriented governments, the region’s militaries increasingly gained a “monopoly of power” (520). This created a significant barrier for democracy’s survival. These institutions were firmly entrenched by the 1960s, according to Wells, and in the aftermath of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and Castro’s embrace of the Soviet Union, they unsurprisingly became the bedrock of counterinsurgency campaigns throughout the region that continued to undermine democracy.
Though the book’s length will likely prevent its widespread adoption in undergraduate classrooms, scholars of Latin American history should incorporate the many lessons and examples from this book in their courses and their research to emphasize inter-American connectedness and the transnationality and deep influence of various Latin American actors. It is a generative book, as it makes an important argument while also raising additional questions and avenues for future research into Latin American diplomatic relations and political activism, promising to continue to reshape the historiography of Latin America’s Cold War.
