América Latina e a Guerra Fria

In the last decades, there has been considerable growth in the number of studies using the Cold War conceptual framework to explain contemporary historical phenomena in Latin America. Building on seminal works such as Espejos de la Guerra Fría (Spenser, 2004), In From the Cold (Joseph; Spenser, 2008), The Last Colonial Massacre (Grandin, 2004), and Guatemala y la Guerra Fría en América Latina (Ferreira, 2010), the study of Latin America’s Cold War has undergone a profound transformation, moving beyond traditional narratives of superpower proxy conflicts to reveal a far more complex historical landscape (Harmer, 2014; Marchesi, 2017; Pettinà, 2018). Despite the fact that most of the historiography on the subject has been written by non-Latin American scholars, research and centers in Latin America have gained increasing prominence. There is also a growing movement to value Latin American research traditions that predate the current historiographical wave. These earlier traditions often did not employ the “Cold War” category; instead, other ways of conceptualizing the period emerged, such as “historia reciente” or “historia del tiempo presente” studies, especially in the Southern Cone countries. The recent La Guerra Fría Latinoamericana y sus historiografías (Pettinà, 2023a) serves as a crucial milestone in reasserting the pivotal role of Latin American academia within the field.