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Latin America's Democratic Crusade: The Transnational Struggle against Dictatorship, 1920s-1960s

Online ISBN:
9780300274653
Print ISBN:
9780300264401
Publisher:
Yale University Press
Book

Latin America's Democratic Crusade: The Transnational Struggle against Dictatorship, 1920s-1960s

Allen Wells
Allen Wells
Bowdoin College
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Published online:
18 January 2024
Published in print:
26 September 2023
Online ISBN:
9780300274653
Print ISBN:
9780300264401
Publisher:
Yale University Press

Abstract

Scholars persist in framing the Cold War as a battle between left and right, one in which the global South is cast as either witting or unwitting proxies of Washington and Moscow. What if the era is told from the perspective of the many who preferred reform instead of revolution? All too often, scholarship has neglected, dismissed, or caricatured moderate politicians. This book argues that until the Cuban Revolution, the struggle was not between capitalism and communism—that was Washington’s abiding preoccupation—but democracy and dictatorship. Beginning in the 1920s, the fight against authoritarianism was contested on multiple fronts—political, ideological, and cultural—taking on the dimensions of a political crusade. Convinced that despots represented an existential threat, reformers declared that no civilian government was safe until the cancer of dictatorship was excised entirely from the hemisphere. Dictators retaliated, often with deadly effect, exporting strategies that had been honed at home to guarantee their political survival. Grafted onto this war without borders was a belated Cold War, with all its political convulsions, the aftershocks of which are still felt today.

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