No End in Sight: The Unwinding and Afterlife of the Cold War in Latin America

Nuevas y viejas formas de violencia en la era democrática 

Isabella Cosse 

En 1983, la transición democrática abrió una nueva era política en Argentina. Sin embargo, las décadas que siguieron estuvieron marcadas por nuevas formas de violencia estatal y social. ¿Cuáles fueron las expresionesconcretas de esas formas de violencia? ¿Qué fenómenos manifestaban? ¿Qué discusiones abrieron? 

Con la idea de que el caso argentino, por su intensidad extrema, permitiría componer un prisma analítico para comprender la articulación entre las viejas y nuevas formas de violencia en las décadas que siguieron a la restauración democrática, el artículo abordará una historización de tres movimientos o momentos, sostenida en bibliografía, fundamentalmente, y relevamiento de prensa. 

El primer momento está organizado en torno al copamiento del cuartel de La Tablada por parte del Movimiento Todos por la Patria (creado por viejos militantes del Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo nucleados en torno a la figura de Gorriarán Merlo) que fue rápidamente sojuzgado por las fuerzas represivas que fusilaron a guerrilleros rendidos y apremió y torturó a los detenidos antes de pasarlos a la justicia. El episodio, el “último acto de la guerrilla setentista” según Claudia Hilb que estuvo unido a la crisis económica e institucional que derrotó el proyecto progresista de acuerdo con Adair, resulta un punto de partida para comprender: a) la perdurabilidad del aparato de inteligencia, de la estructura represiva del terrorismo de Estado y la convivencia entre ésta y la justicia; b) una nueva configuración ideológica democrática y progresista sostenida en el rechazo a la violenciarevolucionaria para la resolución de las crisis políticas; c) el inicio de una nueva era en la que los saqueos, los piquetes, las tomas e incendios de gobernaciones expresaron la nueva expresión de la violencia social a raíz de la inequidad estructural de la democracia. 

El segundo momento está definido por el reconocimiento de las tramas mafiosas, su relación con las altas esferas de la política y la seguridad del Estado a raíz del caso del empresario Alberto Yabrán y el asesinato del reportero gráfico José Luis Cabezas en 1997. El episodio permitirá abordar: a) el lugar de la corrupción en las articulaciones del poder económico, político y la seguridad nacional; b) considerar las tensiones que articulabanesas relaciones y el nuevo papel que ocupó la lucha contra la corrupción en la nueva política norteamericana centrada en la lucha contra las prácticas corruptas; c) la discusión pública en torno a la emergencia de una violenciaparaestatal y sus conexiones con la seguridad del Estado que instaló una profunda y capilar represión institucional con el gatillo fácil. 

El tercer momento involucra el 2001 -quizás debería funcionar como epílogo- para abordar la crisis política e institucional que eclosionó con el fin de la paridad del dólar y el peso, junto a la amenaza del presidente De la Rúa de imponer el toque de queda. El episodio permitirá a) caracterizar las nuevas formas de violencia social que se habían configurado a raíz del relegamiento de los intereses y derechos de las clases trabajadoras en las pugnasredistributivas que articularon el poder político con las grandes corporaciones internacionales y la apertura de la economía; b) analizar la tensión / contradicción entre el ethos de la democracia política, los emergentes de la exclusión económica y las tramas clientelares; c) las expectativas depositadas en la quiebra institucional y la emergencia de nuevas formas de activismo social y político a la vez que la convicción compartida en solucionesdemocráticas e institucionales en el sostenimiento de la democracia y la emergencia de un nuevo progresismo -el kirchnerismo- con la promesa y la legitimidad dada por transformar las herencias del aparato represivodictatorial, la represión del movimiento social y crear una democracia social inclusiva.  

Histories and Memories of Violence during Chile’s Transition from Dictatorship 

Tanya Harmer 

The campaign to end Chile’s dictatorship in the country’s 1988 plebiscite promised happiness and peace. Yet the opposition’s victory in the plebiscite, celebrated as a non-violent route to democracy, hid a more violent and contested Chilean transition at the end of the 1980s. The dictatorship’s repressive structures also continued into the 1990s, appropriated by Chile’s incoming democratic government to demobilise fragments of anti-dictatorial armed groups. Scores of detentions and extra-judicial state killings, the armed left’s assassination of a Senator, kidnappings and prison escapes followed. Returning exiles meanwhile experienced the personal rupture of encountering a world transformed by dictatorship and neoliberalism.  More recently, memories of violence in Chile’s transition from dictatorship in the late 1980s and 1990s have erupted into the public sphere in the media, street art, memorials and on television. Contributing to an environment of renewed polarization since social uprisings in 2019, the history of Chile’s transition has thus taken on new symbolism and significance. Focusing in on these renewed debates about the end of the dictatorship, this paper asks what we can learn from contemporary memories and histories of the transition to interrogate the end or persistence of the Cold War beyond 1990 and to the current day.  

Inhabiting War: Technologies of the Self and the Affective Economy in Counterinsurgent Violence

Ponciano Del Pino Huamán

This paper offers a phenomenological approach to war through the analysis of a war diary written by an officer of a Batallón Contrasubversivo in 1983, in the very heart of the war zone in Ayacucho, Peru. As an exceptional record, it offers an unprecedented look at the everyday life of conflict and the ways in which counterinsurgent warfare is configured. By addressing three analytical categories – technologies of the self, affective economy, and combat spirit— this personal account reveals the subjective process through which an individual comes to inhabit the place of the perpetrator within a system that prescribes his conduct, but never fully eliminates his agency. This intimate perspective on violence can also shed light on the repressive nature of the Peruvian state beyond the war itself. State violence reasserts itself in events such as the crackdown on the 2022 and 2023 protests, casting a shadow over the optimistic horizon of the transition and blurring the distinction between war and postwar period.

Disaggregating Coercion: The DFS, CISEN, and the Architecture of Deniability in Mexico 

Gladys McCormick 

This paper examines the transition from Mexico's Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS), the Cold War-era intelligence agency, to its successor, the Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional (CISEN), founded in 1989. CISEN was designed to break from the DFS model: a civilian agency with professional salaries, university-trained officers, modernized methods, and no drug-trafficking mandate. Yet its early history proved more complicated, marked by continued CIA collaboration and routine use for political espionage. The paper argues that CISEN's story is not simply one of professionalization, modernization, or the constraints civilian intelligence faces within a hybrid authoritarian regime. Rather, it reflects a broader reorganization of state violence after 1985—coercive power became disaggregated, redistributed across institutions, and deniable in new ways. The resulting system was not less violent, but more architecturally sophisticated in obscuring who wielded force and who authorized it. 

Territorios Ancestrales of Indigenous Blackness: Garifuna World-Making Politics on the Caribbean Isthmus 

Paul Joseph López Oro  

Garinagu, or as popularly known as, Garifuna, are a maroon African Indigenous people whose ethnogenesis in the late 15th century on the lesser Antillean island of St. Vincent are birth in the hybridity of their shipwrecked enslaved African and Carib Arawak Indigenous ancestors. They have lived in destierro (exile) on the Caribbean Coasts of Honduras, Belize, Guatemala, and Nicaragua since the late 18th century. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Garinagu, Creole, West Indians, and other Black Indigenous communities have survived, resisted, and contested in the face of mestizo nationalism, anti-Black racism, land dispossession, and archival erasure from national memory projects. In this paper, López Oro turns to the political genealogies of Garifuna land activism and Black Indigenous political organizations emerging in the mid-20th century as U.S. imperialism vis-a-vis the United Fruit Company of the Caribbean Coast of Honduras encroaches on Garifuna ancestral territories. Drawing on oral histories, testimonios, and ancestral memory of embodied archives, an uncharted terrain of knowledge-production is unearthed on how Garinagu political mobilizations world-make cimarronaje on the Caribbean isthmus.  

Continuities of exclusion: LGBTQ+ and HIV/AIDS activism between Cold War and post-dictatorship politics in Chile, 1984-2001 

Claudio Javier Barrientos 

In contrast to Brazil and Argentina, most scholarship on Chilean LGBTQ+ movements locates their emergence in the post-dictatorship period: from 1991 onward, activists organized, occupied public space, and pressed the new democratic government for a legislative rights agenda. These studies framed the LGBTQ+ movements as new social movements, disconnected from the political logics of the Cold War. This paper challenges that periodization. Tracing LGBTQ+ activism from the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s through the first decade of the democratic transition, I argue that these movements, and the politics they enacted, constituted a continuation of the dictatorship's and the Cold War's politics of segregation, exclusion, and gendered political violence into the democratic period. LGBTQ+ and HIV/AIDS activists queered Chilean politics not only through resistance to abandonment and isolation by the military government and the Left amid HIV/AIDS stigma, but also by resignifying their demands for free, universal treatment and linking them to the human rights movement's forms of struggle and political repertoires. Drawing on written archives and oral history interviews, this paper repositions Chilean LGBTQ+ organizing within, rather than apart from, the broader political history of the Cold War and its aftermath.  

A Kiss From the Street: Prostitution and Media in Newly Democratic Brazil

Meg Weeks 

This paper chronicles the creation of the prostitute-run newspaper Beijo da rua in 1988 by activist Gabriela Leite and her colleagues from the Rede Brasileira de Prostitutas, founded the previous year to organize sex workers across Brazil as a political and cultural community. I situate the periodical within the context of an effervescent civil society and expanded political field in the last phase of Brazilian re-democratization after more than twenty years of military rule. In doing so, I examine the newspaper as a tool for codifying the historical memory of the prostitutes’ social movement, as well as a means of articulating an alternative vision of sex, sex work, and sex workers, one that differed markedly from depictions of prostitutes in the traditional media and literature. Beyond serving its own community, the newspaper aimed to disseminate news and historical essays to shape public opinion on a topic long considered taboo and controversial against a backdrop of great political and social change on Brazil’s national stage. In particular, I will analyze columns written by Leite herself, probing how her iconoclastic, irreverent, and eclectic political sensibilities set the tone for broader mobilizations of sex workers in Brazil.  

From Military Forces to Market Forces: Telecommunications Policy and Maya Radio Rights in Guatemala, 1995-2008 

Polly Lauer 

Guatemalan telecommunications regulation represents a turbulent zone of contestation between Indigenous Peoples and the state. In Guatemala, where nearly half the population identifies as Maya, only ten out of 400+ legal radio stations operate in Maya languages. Most Maya broadcasters transmit programming to marginalized audiences from under the radar, risking police retribution. The Guatemalan state’s control of radio frequencies exposes the air as yet another site of dispossession for Indigenous Peoples and reveals how the enforcement of telecommunications policy upholds Cold War patterns of anti-Indigenous violence.  

When Guatemala’s 36-year armed conflict formally concluded with peace accords in 1996, the Maya—who survived state-waged genocide during the war—secured dramatic gains in recognition of Native-language media rights. However, that success became moot when Guatemala’s Congress reformed telecommunications policy that same year. The new law created a radio spectrum property regime that allocated all non-governmental frequencies through auctions, without community media exceptions. Neoliberal economists argued the law replaced military corruption with market efficiency. As monopolists bought frequencies for astronomical prices, most Native broadcasters found their cultural media rights held no significance in this new political economy. When Maya broadcasters attempted to broadcast without authorization, the law permitted devastating raids, arrests, and fines and incentivized legally-operating Maya broadcasters to report on unauthorized peers. These aggressive police interventions eerily mirrored military tactics during the armed conflict. The inequalities of Guatemala’s telecommunications system upend radio’s democratic promise as an otherwise low-cost, wide-reach medium and reflect the shortcomings of cultural rights protections for Indigenous Peoples.  

“To Get Rid of Every Glimpse of a Hamlet,”: Conflicts over Modernization in Urban Amazonia since 1980 

Adrián Lerner  

The Amazon Rainforest experienced the Latin American Cold War’s state-led drive for modernization with unusual ferocity. Comprising a large percentage of the territories of Brazil and Peru, in regions often considered severely underdeveloped, Amazonia was the focus of ambitious developmental drives characterized by authoritarianism and violence. Top-down approaches to regional development resulted from entrenched social and political relations, and therefore they both preceded and outlasted the Cold War. But they were also additive, so that the transformations wrought upon the Cold War decades generated scenarios that exacerbated the potential for repressive politics and violent conflict. Accelerated urbanization was one of the key transformations of Amazonia in the second half of the twentieth century. Urban politics in the exploding popular neighborhoods of the largest metropoles of the Amazon, Manaus (Brazil) and Iquitos (Peru), reveal that the forms of sociopolitical conflict that became prevalent since the 1980s were the result of long-term trajectories, including those that shaped ethnic, regional, and class cleavages, but also of the specific processes unleashed in these realms by the policies of the Cold War era. 

Clientelism of the 21st Century? Venezuela’s Polarized Path to Neocolony 

Alejandro Velasco 

In 2005, having bested enemies foreign and domestic to consolidate power in Venezuela, a triumphant Hugo Chavez appeared before the World Social Forum to call for the emergence of “Socialism of the 21st century” as a new political horizon for the region, and the world.  In the ensuing years Chavez remade the political movement that had brought him to office from a Bolivarian Revolution to a putatively socialist one, lifting millions out of poverty, leading a continental leftward turn, and presiding over the seeming end of US power in the region. Twenty years later, the US has seized Chavez’s successor following an unprecedented military raid, taken control over Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, and placed Chavez’s erstwhile successors under strict tutelage, reinventing the meaning of US empire while also confirming the dramatic collapse of any promise of a just and democratic future that chavismo once held. This essay recasts the spectacular failure of chavismo in Venezuela as the product of something beyond the triad of ideology, populism, or oil dependency commonly deployed to explain what went wrong. Instead, it considers the lasting, and unanticipated, effects of Venezuela’s experiments with neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s in remaking the state and laying the groundwork for both the apogee and the agony of chavismo, as well as the attendant waning and reassertion of US power in Latin America. In particular, it traces how frenzied experiments in technocratic decentralization not only accentuated but over time ossified deep polarization of politics and society that came to define the very meaning of the state - and of Venezuelans’ relationship to it - under Chavez, in the process reconfiguring patterns of clientelism at home and abroad that over time helped turn Venezuela into a US neocolony. 

No Transition for Chilean Children? Children’s Rights as a Bellwether for Democratization in Chile after 1990

Marian E. Schlotterbeck 

Within months of taking office in a newly democratic Chile, President Patricio Alywin ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and signed it into Chilean law in August 1990 in a ceremony surrounded by underprivileged children. On the surface, the ratification of the CRC signaled a clean break between a dictatorship that violated human rights and a democratic civilian government that championed them. Despite the rhetorical embrace of children as rights bearing subjects, the tenuous implementation of the CRC reveals a more complicated story of how Cold War continuities constrained reforming neoliberalism. 

This paper examines child-centered NGOs advocacy for CRC ratification, their direct participation alongside government ministries in drafting Chile’s first National Plan for Childhood (1990-1992) and their dissenting report on the Chilean state’s compliance with the CRC (1993). This was not a period in which NGOs and children’s rights-advocates were sidelined, but rather when they had a seat at the table to shape and, eventually critique, the new government’s policies.   

Through an examination of the broader co-optation of children’s rights discursively into neoliberal governance, this paper foregrounds how the economic policies and state institutions that emerged in crucible of Cold War military dictatorships continue to have repercussions today. The failure to curtail the market-incentives within child protection and to provide effective state oversight to the private, for-profit decentralized network of service providers facilitated abuse and neglect. In this gap, lives were lost. In 2025, President Gabriel Boric created the Comisión Verdad y Niñez en Chile to investigate violations human rights of the children and adolescents in state-subsidized care between 1979-2024. Their work faces strong head winds in the current political climate.  

Nicaragua: The Looming Debate over the Revolution’s Legacy 

Mateo Jarquín 

Daniel Ortega’s political career has paralleled the unwinding and afterlife of Latin America's Cold War like none other. By the time the Berlin Wall fell, he had already governed Nicaragua for ten years, first as Junta Coordinator (1979-84) and then President (1985-90) during the Sandinista Revolution. Close to twenty years have now passed since he returned to power in 2007, proclaiming a Government of National Unity and Reconciliation.  

This essay explores the relationship between these two political projects. Specifically, it maps the debate over whether Nicaragua’s current regime should be understood as a legacy of the 20th century’s last major left-wing revolution. The debate is sometimes explicit, as in Ortega’s speeches drawing a straight line to the Revolution. More often, it reveals itself implicitly. 

In tracing narratives of continuity, rupture, fulfillment, and betrayal, this essay pays special attention to who is participating in the debate, where it unfolds, what is at stake, and how divergent readings of the past shape the country’s political landscape today. Balancing changes and continuities in Nicaragua since 1979, it proposes a historical synthesis raising wider questions about neoliberalism, democracy, and state formation in Latin America – and about what the Cold War’s end meant, or did not mean, for the region.  

Building a ‘Cattle Paradise’: Debt, Cattle, and Counterinsurgency in Colombia, 1970–1990 

Mariana Díaz Chalela 

While the 1980s was a time of sovereign debt crises and austerity across Latin America, there were other ways in which debt was reshaping Latin American landscapes. In Colombia, the 1970s and 80s saw an explosion of loans for cattle production. As part of an effort to build a “Cattle Paradise,” large landowners, international development institutions, and business interests from across the region and the United States reshaped local land tenure and rural credit markets. 

At the center of this transformation stood the Caja Agraria, Colombia's agricultural development bank and, for decades, one of the central institutions of the Colombian state. By the 1980s, as the Cold War entered its final stretch, the Caja Agraria became the epicenter of subsidized cattle loan programs. This paper explores the entanglement of international development financing and foreign debt with local agricultural credit regimes. It argues that the turn towards subsidized cattle loans not only altered the course of state institutions like the Caja Agraria but also profoundly reshaped land politics, peasant mobilization, and the Colombian armed conflict. 

Decriminalizing Uncovered Cheques: Economic Citizenship, Financialization, and Property Rights in 1980s Mexico

Louise E. Walker

This paper presents a history of financialization and economic citizenship through analysis of uncovered cheques. It shows how economic and political elites created, in the 1930s, a modern financial institution that depended on latent coercion, because from 1932-1984 uncovered cheques were considered fraud. People who wrote uncovered cheques faced serious consequences, from significant fines to jail time. This changed in 1984 when uncovered cheques were decriminalised as part of a major reform to the penal code. This paper analyses the decriminalisation, as an entry into debates about the role of the state in economic development. Decriminalisation came during the lost decade, when many middle-class citizens and bank account holders had lived through years of economic instability and crisis. At the time, financial modernisation was no longer just a tool for consumption: finance itself was becoming the goal in the context of economic transformation. The paper argues that the historical arc of uncovered cheques encapsulated the shifting role of coercion in the economy: by the dawn of neoliberalism in the 1980s, financialization had taken root, and bankers no longer needed the state to punish citizens who misused financial products.

The Concept of Urban Poverty in Uruguayan Political Debate (1950–2010): From Criticism of the Welfare State to a New Form of Social Governance

Aldo Marchesi 

This article aims to trace the specific meanings of the concept of poverty in the discussion of social policies from the 1960s through the first left-wing government of the 21st century. The paper will examine the various intellectual and political approaches through which poverty came to be central as a driving force for social policies. Initially, it was the sectors of the New Left—intellectual, political, and social—that, in the 1960s, presented the rise in poverty as evidence that the modernization-driven optimism surrounding social reforms had reached its limit and proposed social revolution as a way out. By the 1980s, the debate on poverty had shifted. Now it was the technical experts, encouraged by ECLAC’s new methodologies, who warned that economic growth had created situations of poverty that needed to be addressed in a targeted manner. The measurement methodology was modeled after the Mollie Orshansky income line used in anti-poverty programs during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. In the Southern Cone, these approaches moved away from structural and political perspectives and emphasized a technical perspective focused on individual capabilities. Starting in the 1980s, studies on these issues expanded and formed the basis for the targeted policies of the new democratic governments. Data collection processes continued to increase, and after the last economic crisis (2002–2004), the new center-left government developed a transfer program based on an algorithm—supported by the World Bank—that determined who had access to the program.  

These transformations surrounding the concept of poverty and the debates about its reduction were accompanied by the concept’s gradual rise to centrality in political discourse, through which the basic notions (social rights, concepts of need, ideas of social justice) of what constituted a welfare state and who the beneficiaries of such policies were were gradually transformed. While a universalist program was promoted in the 1940s and 1950s—characterized by the development of public services and regulation, and focused on supporting the working class— beginning in the 1980s, social issues began to be considered solely in terms of poverty, with a focus on the targeted transfer of resources and marked by a process of increasing commodification of the public services created in the middle of the last century. 

The Politics and Perils of Decentralization in Guatemala

J. T. Way

Based on a case in which a Guatemalan and his family members won asylum in the U.S., this paper explicates the dangers faced by grassroots political actors. The asylee’s legal team successfully argued that he has a political identity related to his participation in the National Strike of 2023, which erupted when powerful elites nearly overturned the results of the election that brought President Bernardo Arévalo to power. In reaction to the lawfare against Arévalo, the 48 Cantones de Totonicapán—a powerful contingent in the nation’s greater Mayan Movement—spearheaded pro-democracy protests and roadblocks that paralyzed the nation and its economy in October 2023. To block the highways, the strike’s leaders called on COCODES, community development councils integral to municipal governance since decentralization laws passed in the early 2000s. In that capacity, an impecunious artisan and volunteer politician from a tiny hamlet ended up in the crosshairs of an allegedly corrupt Attorney General and justice system, of local politicians and plantation-owners, and quite possibly, of powerful narcotrafficking cartels. Arguing that well-intentioned, neoliberal decentralization measures have contributed to lawlessness and corruption, the paper charts the political and economic evolution that has put scores of activists and ordinary people in lethal peril.

The Lost Decade as “Eco-Social Tragedy:” The Rise of Sustainable Development in Latin America at the Cold War's End 

Rebecca Herman

In the 1980s, the international community became increasingly preoccupied with environmental degradation, and the promise of “sustainable development” came into vogue as a way to reconcile the seemingly contradictorypriorities of economic growth and environmental protection. This paper will argue that in Latin America, for a brief period of time at the end of the Cold War, “sustainable development” seemed to offer a new language to reframe long-standing critiques of global capitalism, US imperialism, and right-wing authoritarianism. It reconstructs an initiative led by the Argentine Fundación Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (FARN) to articulate a “Latin American” position on sustainable development ahead of the 1992 Earth Summit. To this end, FARN convened a series of meetings between activists and experts dedicated urban and rural development, women’s rights, indigenous rights, consumers’ rights, human rights, and conservation, which culminated in the production of the “Declaration of the Andes.” Far from a narrow treatise on exclusively environmental matters, the document framed the Lost Decade in Latin America as an “eco-social tragedy” and advanced visions for how the state, civil society, and the international community might forge a more just path forward.  

Rethinking the Cuban 1990s 

Michelle Chase 

The 1990s are often perceived as a period of devastation in Cuba, both materially and ideologically. There is some truth to this depiction. The mass euphoria that greeted communism’s defeat across Eastern Europe in 1989 seemed to indicate the bankruptcy of Marxist rule and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 ravaged the Cuban economy. Yet the first half of the 1990s was also a politically effervescent, if highly conflictive, time in Cuba, when many new grassroots organizations questioned what post-Soviet revolutionary politics should look like. Some of these groups were overtly critical of authorities while others wanted to engage with the government and prompt internal reform. 

This presentation will attempt a preliminary overview of these developments by analyzing the grassroots groups that emerged in this period, including the feminist group Magín; leftist collectives including Criterio Alternativo and Paideai; human rights groups including Comité Cubano Pro-Derechos Humanos; and the Christian Democratic group Movimiento Cristiano de Liberación. These groups help us recover the diverse expressions of post-Soviet revolutionary politics that emerged in the aftermath of the Cold War, before the Cuban state clamped down more firmly on autonomous political organizing in the mid-1990s. 

Cradle to Grave? Latin America in the Making and Unmaking of Neoliberalism 

Christy Thornton 

Latin America held a crucial place in the history of neoliberalism. While the economic theories and intellectual paradigms underpinning neoliberal ascendancy might have been first developed in seminar rooms in Chicago or Vienna, they found early and ardent adherents in places like Argentina, Guatemala, and Peru beginning already in the 1940s. By the 1970s, neoliberal policy experiments were being pioneered in countries like Chile and Argentina, and with the advent of the debt crisis and attendant structural adjustment programs in the 1980s, neoliberal reforms were heralded as a “consensus” throughout the region. But the neoliberal hegemony that marked the post-Cold War region was short lived; already in the 1990s social movements from Mexico to Venezuela to Bolivia were challenging the supposed consensus—and, indeed, making “neoliberalism” a household word for a burgeoning global justice movement across the world. As scholars and activists today struggle to understand whether we are in a new “post-neoliberal” world order, this paper looks to the era of the Washington Consensus not to examine the building of a stable hegemonic world order, but to emphasize the history of fracture and struggle that marked neoliberalism from its earliest days. 

Perpetually Foreign, Hauntingly Familiar: The Past, Present, and Future of Chinese Presence in Latin America 

Monica DeHart 

The current "rivalry between great powers" discourse conjures a world in which China-US competition has redefined the global landscape, creating a new cold war standoff. In this framing, China’s relationship to Latin America is portrayed as new and dangerous, encroaching in the US’s sphere of influence and threatening US interests. What is at stake in understanding contemporary global relations, especially as they play out in Latin America, in terms of a new cold war? This paper interrogates that framing in relation to the long-standing, constitutive role that China and Chineseness have played in Latin American development. It asks not just what is new or exceptional about Chinese presence in the region, but how the cold war rhetoric obscures its many continuities with earlier forms of Western intervention and transpacific encounters. In doing so, the paper highlights both the ongoing legacy of US imperialism and the deeply embedded presence of Chinese workers, finance, infrastructure, commerce, and culture in the region. Rather than consolidating mutually-exclusive hemispheric or Global South solidarities, ethnographic evidence shows instead how the afterlives of the long Latin American Cold War—US belligerence, anti-Chinese racism, and material inequality—continue to shape the present new world order and Latin America’s place within it. 

Making Peace in Cold War Central America: Refugee Repatriation and International Collaboration, 1987-1992 

Eline van Ommen 

On 16 January 1992, after more than a decade of violence and foreign intervention and global move to neoliberalism, the Salvadoran War had officially come to an end. In the years leading up to January 1992, the international community had played a key role in brokering the peace agreement set within a context of neoliberal international trade and peace. Peace in El Salvador, however, was also a grassroots endeavour. In the 1980s and early 1990s, thousands of Central Americans worked towards peace, not just seeking to end to violence, but also struggling for human rights, reconciliation, justice, and democratic participation. To achieve these aims, Salvadorans collaborated with a range of international organisations and NGOs, who offered local peacemakers an international platform and, as such, a certain level of protection from Salvadoran state forces. This paper focuses on the refugee repatriation to understand how Salvadorans and a transnational network of supporters envisaged regional peace and challenged the neoliberalisation of peace and justice. 

Memorial, Catharsis, and Renewal: The Centro Fidel Castro and Revolutionary Identity 

Anthony Rossodivito 

Nearly seventy years after the guerrilla campaigns of the 1950s, and a decade after Fidel Castro's death, Havana’s Centro Fidel Castro Ruz offers a rare vantage point on how the Cuban state and its citizens are actively reworking Cold War memory for future generations.  

This paper considers the Centro as space of collective civic memory, that gives the dwindling Historic Generation of the revolution a platform to transmit their firsthand experiences to younger Cubans who know the Revolution only as inherited history. As an archive, it preserves both material culture and oral testimony, functioning as an active repository rather than a static shrine. Additionally, as a cathartic space, it invites visitors to engage with Fidel Castro's life and legacy in the wake of his passing.  

Situating the Centro within the broader historiography of commemorative practices in Cuba, Cold War memorialization, and the often-contested decisions regarding the constructions of commemorative spaces in Cuba, I consider how the Centro is meant to reinforce and revitalize a revolutionary identity and intended to sustain political unity amid continued U.S. hostility and growing intergenerational tension. In doing so, it reveals how Cold War identities are not simply preserved but actively remade. 

Documentary Art ~ Experimental Scholarship = No End In Sight To The Practice Of (Cold War) History (In The Americas) 

Seth Fein

This paper contemplates how Between Neighborhoods (2024) addresses –– empirically and conceptually –– this meeting's titular thematic. Empirically, it confronts the conference's call to "reassess the end of the Cold War from a Latin American perspective" by showing that there is no end in sight to where as well as when we map a Latin American perspective; for, as we stretch the Cold War's temporality, we need also stretch Latin America's geography to visualize what Between Neighborhoods documents and transhistoricizes: Latin America within the United States and immigration as an imperial legacy. Conceptually, by demonstrating art's analytic efficacy, Between Neighborhoods audiovisualizes no end in sight to the practice of (Cold War) history.  Editing associatively, combining juxtaposition and contemplation of multimedia documents (institutionally archived and personally filmed), the audiovisual essay self-reflexively works between temporalities. Finally, the presentation turns to Between Neighborhoods' unifying subject, the Unisphere, to analogize the split-screen work's own structure; like the sparklingly soaring armillary sphere it transhistoricizes, my artdoc nests in a less-conspicuous-but-supremely-stout base, its essential foundation, constructed from the research and scholarship that generated conceptually as well asempirically its experimental expression. The paper blueprints this architectural evolution across transnational, transhistorical, and audiovisual turns.  

From the Cold War to the FTAA: Cuba and the Struggle over Neoliberal Free Trade 

Felix Santiago-Martínez

The paper aims to explore Cuba’s role in understanding the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) negotiations during the 1990s and early 2000s, and how Cuba contributed to challenging the fragility of the post-Cold War order in the Western Hemisphere. Although excluded from the FTAA negotiations, Cuba asserted a fundamental role in the opposition to the U.S.-led hemispheric free trade negotiations. As the debate around the FTAA became fertile ground for challenging the unrivaled post-Cold War U.S. hegemony, its protagonists ended up repackaging some of the Cold War rhetoric, now in the form of a struggle between Latin American-led economic integration and a U.S. neoliberal agenda. The paper argues that we can indeed trace some continuities between the Cold War and post-Cold War periods.