The Third World in Latin America
ODD ARNE WESTAD
The Third World came to Latin America almost as an afterthought.1 In the early twentieth century, Latin Americans on the left and right were preoccupied with the continent’s own battles and with political and intellectual agendas that echoed those in Europe. Global anticolonial resistance and decolonization had only a very limited impact on the Latin American imagination. One reason, one suspects, was racial: concepts of “whiteness” and European heritage were supremely important to Latin American elites.2 The idea of linking the region’s development to liberation movements and to the newly independent states in Asia and Africa was far from what most Latin Americans had in mind for their countries’ futures.
There were of course exceptions.3 In the Caribbean, where real decolonization struggles were on the agenda, transcontinental anticolonial solidarity was already present since the late nineteenth century. Key anticolonial leaders such as Alexander Bustamante in Jamaica, T. U. B. Butler in Trinidad, Léon Damas in Guyana, and Aimé Césaire from Martinique built on these origins to create political and intellectual movements of great force. Seeing Caribbean anticolonialism as intimately connected with anti-imperial movements elsewhere, some activists—C. L. R. James and Frantz Fanon are, in different ways, great examples—went on to play major roles in the conceptualization of the Third World during the Bandung era.4
Early Communism in Latin America was another link with African and Asian anticolonialism.5 Latin American Communists travelled to the USSR or elsewhere in Europe and met people from the colonized world who had been drawn to Communism through its anti-imperialist proclamations. Some Communists from European colonies went to Latin America on behalf of the Comintern: the Indian M. N. Roy, for instance, was a cofounder of the Mexican Communist Party.6 All over Latin America, recent immigrants from the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia provided links to radical organizations in their countries of origin, and sometimes to their Communist parties.
The third set of early links between Latin America and wider anti-imperialism was the resistance against U.S. domination that developed from the mid-nineteenth century onward in some areas of the Western Hemisphere. Parts of the Caribbean—Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba—fall into this category, as do Central America and to some degree Mexico and Venezuela. But even in areas of Latin America that were affected by U.S. pressures only much later on, such as the countries of the Southern Cone, opposition to U.S. hegemony within the continent gave rise to a sense of Latin American solidarity beginning in the late nineteenth century.7 As Michel Gobat has shown, the very term “Latin America” came into use as a response to the occupation of Nicaragua by U.S. freebooters in the 1850s.8 The sense that all of independent “Latin” America had much in common in the present and not just in the past of course goes back to Bolívar and San Martín. But it was the sense of a threat from the North that reactivated solidarities among Latin Americans as duties that went beyond mere lip-service to the concept of state sovereignty.9
In spite of these exceptions, most of Latin America played a marginal role in the early twentieth-century struggles against imperial rule. This started to change after World War II, when U.S. power became more predominant throughout the continent and when economic interest began to link many Latin American countries to their newly independent African and Asian counterparts. In addition, the international reach of the Cuban Revolution focused the attention of both its supporters and its enemies on the newly independent countries outside of Latin America. In this sense, as the contributions to this volume show, the 1960s and 1970s were the high point of Latin America’s Third World imagination.
By the time World War II ended, U.S. power and influence had become paramount throughout Latin America. U.S. economic leverage was at a historic peak, pulling most Latin American economies toward the United States in ways that often skewed domestic development or outcompeted local producers (even while most consumers welcomed access to new U.S. products). The Cold War meant an intensification of U.S. security demands vis-à-vis Latin American states and created a political climate in which most U.S. policymakers equated nationalist radicalism with global Communism. Given the role that local Communist parties had played in Latin America, especially among intellectuals, it was not difficult to find “evidence” of Communist influence, such as motivated the U.S. interventions in Guatemala in 1954 and in the Dominican Republic in 1965.
Whereas the United States had an increasing interest in controlling and manipulating Latin American politics, Latin American governments had an interest in preserving as much of their independence and sovereignty as possible. Even right-wing dictatorships, which flourished on the continent as the Latin American ideological Cold War intensified, were wary of giving up too much autonomy to Washington, whether or not they benefited from U.S. support against domestic left-wing enemies. Throughout the twentieth century, therefore, Latin American governments tried to socialize the United States into a framework of cooperation and mutual aid, which would help elites stay in power while respecting their countries’ sovereignty. By the latter part of the century, with Latin America increasingly part of the global Cold War, states across the continent started looking for international allies in their attempts to temper U.S. power through what part I of this volume refers to as varying forms of Third World nationalism.
Coming out of the nineteenth century, state leaders and diplomats from all over Latin America attempted to bind the United States to frameworks of multilateralism and international organizations.10 Much of this work dealt with international law and commercial treaties, in which Latin American diplomats, for reasons having to do with their countries’ geographical proximity to the rising United States, became experts in the early twentieth century. These discussions continued at the League of Nations, where Latin American countries held significant numerical weight in a world still ruled by empires.11 But the Union of American Republics (commonly known as the Pan-American Union, first organized in 1890), also played a significant role, both in developing Latin American cooperation and in regulating relations between the United States and the region. Some of these early twentieth-century interactions and mechanisms underpinned not only Latin American but also U.S. approaches to later changes in the wider world, such as the creation of the United Nations and its role in the processes of decolonization.12
The post–World War II transformation of the Pan-American Union into the Organization of American States (OAS) also helped to set a framework for Latin America’s approach to multilateralism. The U.S. intention behind this transformation was primarily anti-Communism. At the founding conference in Bogota, U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall stressed the need to discuss “foreign-inspired subversive activities directed against institutions and peace and security of American Republics.”13 Latin American leaders readily agreed, though some of them may have had a different view from the secretary of state as to what such activities may have consisted of. Throughout the Cold War, the United States often saw the OAS primarily in terms of its global contest with the Soviet Union. But in part as a result of U.S. anti-Communism, Latin American leaders were also able to continue their attempts to bind the United States into a larger regional framework.
The Cuban Revolution changed both the U.S. approach to Latin America and the Latin American approach to the United States and the world. For the Latin American Right, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were manifestations of a Communist threat inside their own region. The revolutionaries’ appeals to Latin American solidarity and their alliance with the Soviets shook traditional elites who had long been combating the Left in their own countries, but had had less patience with U.S. claims of Soviet subversion (except when it suited their need for U.S. political and military support). The revolution in Cuba and the internationalist policies of the leaders in Havana made the Latin American and U.S. Right more united in their anti-Communism than they had ever been before.14
At the same time, Cuba’s involvement with emerging Third World regimes in postcolonial states and its support for African liberation groups created a new playing field for Latin American interaction with the rest of the globe. In spite of its increasingly tight connections with the Soviet Union, Castro’s Cuba became a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) at its first meeting in Belgrade in 1961. Through the NAM, Cuba was able to interact closely with a number of new states and assert its vanguard role for social and political change in all of Latin America. The Cuban Communists claimed to speak for the downtrodden and poor across the continent, and they portrayed leaders elsewhere as stooges of the United States. The fact that the Cubans followed up their stated support for anticolonial liberation with concrete action, sending supplies and soldiers to fight with liberation movements, massively increased Cuba’s prestige in Africa and Asia.
Having discovered the Third World through Cuba, others in Latin America proceeded to involve themselves with the growing cooperation that took place among countries in what we now often call the Global South. As shown in this volume, concepts of Third Worldism took hold among Latin American students, intellectuals, and even nationalist elites during the 1960s and 1970s. Some on the Left began to see Latin America’s dependence on the United States in similar terms to Africa and Asia’s dependence on the former colonial metropoles. Just as in Europe and North America, the discovery of the Third World fed into a set of new left-wing movements, often critical of the established Communist and Socialist parties, and occasionally dedicated to a guerrilla struggle for which they found inspiration in Cuba, Algeria, Vietnam, and southern Africa.
As this volume also shows, it was not only the New Left that was inspired by Third World motives. Brazil under Juscelino Kubitschek, Peru under Fernando Belaúnde, Mexico under Luis Echeverría, and Chile under Salvador Allende began to formulate policies with regard to their countries’ raw materials that were similar to those of the radical states in Africa and Asia. Under pressure from declining terms of trade in the early 1970s, even some Latin American military dictatorships—foremost among them Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil—began to think in similar terms as well. Concepts developed by the Left, such as “dependency,” “import substitution,” and “central planning,” won adherents even among some supporters of right-wing regimes. For conservative nationalists, adopting a state-centric economic model made sense in a setting where they wanted to assert their freedom of action from what they saw as undue pressures from the United States and a global economy that served its interests.15
This broadening of the Third World concept inevitably led to strange bedfellows in international affairs. In terms of international economic policies, many raw material producers united from 1964 in the UN-based Group of 77. Just as often, consultations among Latin American and other postcolonial regimes took place within the Non-Aligned Movement. By the time of its 1973 Algiers conference, Chile, Cuba, Peru, and Jamaica had joined the movement, with Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Uruguay, and Venezuela attending as observers. Moreover, by the end of the decade, Argentina, Bolivia, Grenada, Guyana, Nicaragua, Panama, Suriname, and Trinidad had officially signed up, while Colombia, Costa Rica, and El Salvador joined the growing list of Latin American observers. At the end of the Cold War a substantial number of Latin American states, of many political shades and colors, had signed up to a movement that, twenty five years earlier, had seemed the preserve of radicals only.
As I have discussed elsewhere, this turn towards economic demands and subsequent political broadening signaled the death of the Third World as a political project.16 Once South American military dictators (or, for that matter, Saudi princes) could be seen as partners in promoting economic development in the Global South, radical redistributive politics went out the window. What remained more or less uninterrupted were links—not least of a personal kind—that assisted in furthering global capitalist markets as the Cold War came to a close. To point out one dramatic example, the Angolan government, headed by the Movimento Popular de Liberação de Angola (People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola) and coming out of a movement for which so many revolutionary Cubans (and Angolans themselves) fought and died, is today firmly tied to global energy producers and Western oil companies.17
Despite its deep historical origins, Latin America’s Third World phase was an enchantment that did not last long. Nonetheless, it stimulated forms of thinking about potential overseas associations that are still with us today. As Latin American economies further internationalize, links with Asia, the Middle East, and Africa will become increasingly important. The image of the heroic guerrilla has long been replaced by the dream of lucrative contracts, but the future needs of the continent require a gaze beyond the Americas and toward the same global horizons that people saw a generation or so ago.
I am grateful to Thomas Field, Vanni Pettinà, Vanessa Freije, and Tanya Harmer for comments on a draft version.
1. For a discussion, see Jason C. Parker, “ ‘An Assembly of Peoples in Struggle’: How the Cold War Made Latin America Part of the ‘Third World,” in Internationalism, Imperialism and the Formation of the Contemporary World: The Pasts of the Present, ed. Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 307–26.
2. See Alan McPherson, “Anti-Imperialist Racial Solidarity before the Cold War: Success and Failure,” in this volume, or, for a more extensive discussion, Edward Eric Telles, Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, Race, and Color in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
3. In terms of postcolonial theory, see Mabel Moraña, Enrique D. Dussel, and Carlos A. Jáuregui, eds., Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
4. James and Fanon of course also provide links to earlier Caribbean anti-imperialists, such as Marcus Garvey and Hubert Harrison. Another key figure is George Padmore. See Leslie James, George Padmore and Decolonization from Below (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
5. For overviews of Comintern policies, see Jürgen Mothes, Lateinamerika und der “Generalstab der Weltrevolution”: Zur Lateinamerika-Politik der Komintern (Berlin: Karl Dietz, 2010); Leonardo Guedes Henn, A Internacional Comunista e a revolução na América Latina: Estratégias e táticas para as colônias e semicolônias (1919–1943) (Sao Paulo: Blucher Acadêmico, 2010).
6. The Comintern’s organizational lumping of Latin America together with colonial areas of the ‘East’ prior to 1928 may also have played a role. (I am grateful to Tanya Harmer for this observation).
7. For an overview, see Tanya Harmer and Alberto Martín Alvarez, “Introduction: Writing the History of Revolutionary Transnationalism and Militant Networks in the Americas,” Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y El Caribe 28, no. 2 (2017): http://
8. Michel Gobat, “The Invention of Latin America: A Transnational History of Anti-Imperialism, Democracy, and Race,” American Historical Review 118, no. 5 (1 December 2013): 1345–75, https://
9. See Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), esp. 11–50, and, from a different perspective, Max Paul Friedman and Tom Long, “Soft Balancing in the Americas: Latin American Opposition to U.S. Intervention, 1898–1936,” International Security 40, no. 1 (2015): 120–56.
10. See Greg Grandin, “The Liberal Traditions in the Americas: Rights, Sovereignty, and the Origins of Liberal Multilateralism,” American Historical Review 117, no. 1 (February 2012): 68–91.
11. A good introduction is Alan McPherson and Yannick Wehrli, eds., Beyond Geopolitics: New Histories of Latin America at the League of Nations (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2015).
12. See, from different perspectives, Benjamin A. Coates, Legalist Empire: International Law and American Foreign Relations in the Early Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), esp. 107–35, and Arnulf Becker Lorca, “International Law in Latin America or Latin American International Law? Rise, Fall, and Retrieval of a Tradition of Legal Thinking and Political Imagination,” Harvard International Law Journal 47, no. 1 (2006): 283–305. See also Arnulf Becker Lorca, Mestizo International Law: A Global Intellectual History 1842–1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014; Juan Pablo Scarfi, The Hidden History of International Law in the Americas: Empire and Legal Networks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); and Juan Pablo Scarfi, “La emergencia de un imaginario latinoamericanista y antiestadounidense del orden hemisférico,” Revista Complutense de Historia de América 39, no. 1 (2013): 81–104.
13. The Secretary of State to the Acting Secretary of State, 30 March 1948, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, vol. 9, The Western Hemisphere, 24 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1972), https://
14. See Aldo Marchesi, Latin America’s Radical Left: Rebellion and Cold War in the Global 1960s. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) and Aldo Marchesi, “Escribiendo la Guerra Fría Latinoamericana: Entre el Sur ‘local’ y el Norte ‘global,’ ” Estudos Históricos (Rio de Janeiro) 30, no. 60 (2017): 187–202.
15. Some of the perceived Left-Right division with regard to import substitution in the Global South is of course a red herring, since it assumes that new countries are following another strategy than what the Global North had already done. See Ha-Joon Chang, Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective (London: Anthem, 2002).
16. See Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
17. Such political metamorphoses are of course not unknown in Latin America either. Think, for instance, of the former Nicaraguan revolutionary Daniel Ortega’s 2000s mutation into a market-oriented Catholic nationalist.