Journal of Latin American Studies

This virtual special issue highlights some of the exciting directions that scholarship on the Cold War in Latin America has taken over the last decade. The field has flourished since Gilbert Joseph and Daniela Spenser’s call back in 2008 to bring the region ‘in from the Cold’ and pay attention to Latin Americans’ experiences of the conflict.¹ By the Latin American Studies Association’s 50th  anniversary meeting in New York, over 100 papers directly and explicitly engaged with ‘the Cold War’ in their titles or abstracts.²

  As a flagship journal for Latin American Studies, JLAS has also reflected this new interest in Latin America’s Cold War. Over 30 articles published since 2008 have provided new insights into the way that the conflict affected – and was shaped by – Latin Americans’ international, transnational and global interactions as well as their³ domestic politics.⁴ From research on the intersection of religion and Cold War ideologies⁵ to cultural manifestations of the Cold War,⁶ the journal’s articles have moved our understanding of the conflict well beyond simplistic ideas of a distant bipolar superpower battle over the region. When it comes to the United States Cold War interventions in Latin America, for example, recent articles published in JLAS have shed new light on the varied dimensions, limitations and effects of US power.⁷ Economic relations between Latin American countries and the United States, and their consequences for local politics and society, have received nuanced attention.⁸ In the past decade, JLAS has also published significant interventions on the pervasive legacies of the Cold War and transitional processes that followed conflict in the region and continue to shape contemporary politics and society.⁹ If Latin Americanists once had good reason to be suspicious of “the Cold War” as a frame of reference, seeing it as a lens that relegated complex developments within the region to outside powers, short-term timeframes and simplistic binaries, this is no longer the case. Unsurprisingly, given its focus, JLAS has showcased some of the best new scholarship on the Cold War that emphasizes the importance of regional expertise in navigating the contours of the conflict’s relevance and significance for Latin America....

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