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CHAPTER 11
From Eastern Europe to Southeast Asia to sub-Saharan Africa, and throughout Latin America, the Cold War spread violence around the world in the 1960s and 1970s. In Latin America, the Cuban Revolution inspired a wave of left-wing guerrilla movements up and down the hemisphere, and elicited a vigorous – and ultimately more successful – counter-revolution from the region's conservatives and the United States, one that led most Latin Americans to fall under the rule of anti-communist dictatorships in this period.
The counter-revolutionary regimes differed significantly in their economic policies, ranging from the state-led development of Brazil's military dictatorship, to the free-market fundamentalism practiced in Chile. They also differed in the degree to which they functioned through the commanding personality of a single leader – like Chile's General Augusto Pinochet – or, more often, adhered to a new, de-personalized, collective model of "bureaucratic authoritarianism," in which faceless military juntas combined iron-fisted repression with technocratic administration. Mexico's ruling party, product of an earlier revolutionary era, evolved into a unique post-revolutionary counter-revolutionary entity, still formidably popular and by no means right-wing, but increasingly authoritarian.
What the counter-revolutionary regimes all shared was a sense of purpose: to save the nation from what they saw as the existential threat of Communism. This "National Security Doctrine," as it emerged in Guatemala and soon after Brazil and the Southern Cone, was used to justify all manner of violations of civil and human rights. In the name of anti-communism, Latin American militaries suspended democracy and conducted intimidation, surveillance, detention, and torture. Security forces and unofficial paramilitary "death squads" linked to them, were responsible for the death and disappearance of tens of thousands of Latin Americans suspected – with widely varying degrees of evidence or justification – of affiliation with or support for leftist guerrilla movements or Marxist parties, or even of simple dissent. In the background, providing development loans, military training and equipment, and ideological support, stood the United States, whose imperative to contain Communism largely overrode its concern for democracy and human rights among its allies.