Latin America — The United States' Cold War Backyard

The Monroe Doctrine (1823) established the principle that the Western Hemisphere was an American sphere of influence and that European powers should stay out. By the Cold War, this doctrine had expanded into something considerably more aggressive: not just keeping out external powers, but actively shaping which kinds of governments Latin American countries were permitted to have.

The history of US intervention in Latin America predates the Cold War — the United States had intervened militarily in Mexico, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba multiple times before 1945. What the Cold War added was an ideological framework that converted any government with leftist economic policies into a potential Soviet proxy, regardless of actual Soviet involvement or interest.

Guatemala in 1954 is the clearest early example of the logic. Jacobo Árbenz, Guatemala's democratically elected president, pursued land reform that expropriated unused land from large landowners — including the United Fruit Company, a US-based corporation with significant influence in Washington. The Eisenhower administration, partly acting on United Fruit's lobbying and partly genuinely concerned about communist influence in Central America, authorized the CIA to organize a military coup. Operation PBSUCCESS replaced Árbenz with a military government that reversed the land reform and initiated decades of authoritarian rule. Guatemala's civil war eventually killed around 200,000 people, predominantly indigenous Maya civilians.

The pattern repeated with variations across the hemisphere. The Bay of Pigs invasion (Cuba, 1961), the military coup against Salvador Allende in Chile (1973, backed by the CIA and Henry Kissinger), support for the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua and the Contras after the Sandinista revolution, training of military death squads at the US Army's School of the Americas in Panama — the consistent thread was that left-leaning governments and movements, whatever their actual relationship to Moscow, were treated as existential threats to be removed rather than political movements to be negotiated with.

The Cuban case is distinctive because it actually did produce a Soviet-aligned government, and because the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the Cold War's nuclear dimension closest to Latin America. Fidel Castro's revolution succeeded in 1959 partly because Batista's US-backed dictatorship had become embarrassingly corrupt and brutally repressive even by Cold War client-state standards. The subsequent failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the disastrous result for the CIA, pushed Cuba further into Soviet alignment than might otherwise have occurred.

By the 1980s, Central America — El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua — was a major theater of Cold War proxy conflict. The Reagan administration spent billions supporting anti-communist governments and movements. The Iran-Contra affair revealed that the administration was secretly selling weapons to Iran and channeling the proceeds to Nicaraguan Contras in violation of a Congressional ban — a scandal that illustrated how far the proxy war logic had distorted even US domestic governance.

The legacy is visible in Latin American politics today: deep institutional distrust of US intentions, political cultures shaped by decades of authoritarian rule and political violence, and the specific ways in which Cold War interference disrupted the development of functional democratic institutions in multiple countries.

Latin America — The United States' Cold War Backyard

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