Latin America and the Global Cold War, edited by Thomas C Field Jr, Stella Krepp and Vanni Pettinà, 2025, University of North Carolina Press
Latin America may be staring into a new imperialist abyss—but in doing so it may catch sight of flickers of a lost internationalist vocation.
As Donald Trump’s aggressive pledge to reenergise the Monroe Doctrine threatens to immerse the sub-continent in darkness, the old lexicon of solidarity offers new glimmers of hope.
The Bandung conference, Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), the Tricontinental in Havana, and ultimately “Third Worldism” are rising back up the scholarly agenda.
These ideas offer ways to explore—and challenge—the damaging neocolonial exceptionalism imposed upon Latin America by virtue of its position in the western hemisphere that has suppressed the continent’s instincts for solidarity.
One reason for this, as the editors of Latin America and the Global Cold War point out, has been that diplomatic historians persist in their preoccupation with the impacts of US foreign policy—something that continues right now, and hardly surprising given the region’s apparent powerlessness in the face of American hegemony.
Another reason, as Thomas Field, Stella Krepp and Vanni Pettinà add, citing the Uruguayan scholar Aldo Marchesi, may be that exceptionalism has prevailed because it has also been internalised by Latin American scholars themselves.
The editors write: “Latin American historians have shown a certain reluctance to abandon their nation-specific, domestic narratives regarding each country’s political, social, and economic evolution, a geographic exceptionalism evident even in decentred regional scholarship … these scholarly canons have fortified the historiographical barrier lying in the southern Atlantic, hobbling attempts to fully incorporate contemporary Latin America within a broader global framework.”
The result has been a form of “collective amnesia” among historians about once potent international interactions with other countries in the Global South and Latin America’s experience of varied iterations of internationalist ideologies and politics.
The editors cite the journal Tercer Mundo, whose initial publication in Argentina coincided with the rise and fall of Chile’s socialist government under Salvador Allende before it was forced into exile in Mexico in 1976, as an example of how this history has been sidelined.
At the same time, more recent Global South literature, they suggest, has adopted definitions of Third Worldism that subscribe to narrow Afro-Asian (Bandung) or Socialist bloc (NAM) biases, fuelling a “persistent ‘historiographical Monroe doctrine’, in which Latin America’s varied participation in the Third World movements has been largely neglected”.
The outcome has been an under-appreciation of an essentially tricontinental postwar struggle against imperialism—and Latin America’s critically important role within it.
Given how the original Cold War framework that propelled a convergence between countries in the region and anti-imperialist peers now seems to be assuming an eerily similar form under Trump 2.0, this observation represents a timely reminder of Latin America’s potential to frustrate Washington’s global designs.
Its countries were able to do so in the 1960s and 70s primarily in ideological concert with like-minded peers in the Global South that were similarly intent of leveraging Cold War rivalries in order to achieve political and economic benefits.
Applied to the contemporary era, such an approach today would imply, for example, that far from eschewing China’s growing presence in the region, Latin Americans should embrace and intensify their relationship with Beijing.
Take the case of Panama whose government, under extreme pressure, has recently capitulated to US demands to sever Chinese ties.
In early February US secretary of state Marco Rubio gave the country’s president José Raúl Mulino an ultimatum: reduce China’s presence in the Panama canal zone or face the consequences—a veiled threat to invade.
Washington has been pressuring Panama about China behind the scenes for years, but Trump 2.0 has switched US policy from passive threats to proactive lies, with the new US president claiming absurdly that Chinese soldiers “operate” the canal.
Of course, such US aggression defies international law and all the norms of diplomacy, but they are par for the course historically when it comes to its maximalist positions towards Central America.
In response, Panama’s government has pledged to end its participation in China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” global infrastructure plan and engineered a lawsuit to cancel a Hong Kong-based company’s concession to operate ports at each end of the canal.
While these actions can be interpreted as the cowardly capitulation of a vassal state, contemporary Panama undoubtedly has little room for manoeuvre. It is uniquely vulnerable to US pressure—its economy is dollarized and its business elite joined at the hip with the American market.
So in the face of apparently overwhelming US military and economic might, what choices does it have but to surrender up the only real symbol of its sovereignty (or, indeed, of its very existence as a nation state)?
In fact, as contributor Miriam Elizabeth Villanueva reminds us, the country does have options and needs only to look for them in its own history of struggle supported by international solidarity. How did this small, powerless country wrest control of the canal from the US empire in the first place?
Villanueva shows how the Panamanian state under General Omar Torrijos gained approval for the treaties that gave it control using a skilful combination of anti-imperialist and Third Worldist rhetoric.
This was, by any standards, one of the great triumphs achieved by any Latin American country against the hegemon and reflected in many ways the singular personality of Torrijos himself, one of the region’s most misunderstood leaders.
A military dictator with the common touch who remains revered to this day—described by Gabriel García Márquez as a “cross between a tiger and a mule”—Torrijos so intrigued the novelist Graham Greene that he wrote a book about him (Getting to Know the General).
Torrijos is important for having played an outsize role in regional affairs at the height of the Cold War and anti-imperialist liberation struggles—which explains why it is highly likely he was assassinated by the CIA in 1981 in a plane crash, an old trick from the US playbook.
Panama’s leader employed within and outside the country a broad and tireless political and cultural campaign challenging the neo-colonial status quo, seizing on Third Worldism to defend his country’s sovereignty and create unstoppable momentum in favour of change.
Third Worldism can be understood as a theory that saw liberation struggles in the Global South as the beginning of a revolution owing allegiance to neither the capitalist nor socialist world powers. Torrijos himself, for example, was wont to say: “Neither left nor right. ¡Panamá!”
Villanueva writes: “Torrijos and his negotiators seized on Third Worldism to defend Panama’s sovereignty before the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), the Organization of American States (OAS), and regional summits with Venezuela and Colombia.”
It was the mounting pressure on Washington from international bodies created by this strategy—and the juggernaut of solidarity generated in particular within Latin America itself—that set in motion the negotiations from 1975-77 about the canal’s future.
Hence, Panama past and present can provide examples both of the breathtaking ambition and reach of US imperialism, but also of the constraints that regional and international solidarity can impose upon it.
These themes are explored throughout Latin America and the Global Cold War, whose contributors examine the connections and interactions between the region and other countries known collectively as the “Third World”.
The approach taken to providing an overview of Latin American Third Worldism is divided conceptually between cases representative of Third World nationalism—by which nationalists (on both Left and Right) sought to harness the power of anti-imperialism—and Third World internationalism, which takes in themes from resistance and exceptionalism to solidarity.
This book is an excellent place to start if we are to understand how Latin America—currently, but only temporarily, stunned into silence by the audacity of Trump’s imperial ambitions—is likely to identify and employ US weaknesses as it fights back.
For example, despite apparent agreement between Rubio and Mulino on the steps Panama needs to take to placate Washington, Trump has been gripped by greed, defying his own secretary of state by churlishly demanding full US control of the canal itself in a move that would unilaterally scrap the international treaty between the countries.
The irony of such hubris is that while Panama has few options under its current conservative puppet regime, this could change—and other Latin American states will be watching.
The country’s neighbours will also understand that bending to Trump’s threats of tariffs or military intervention may well be pointless if these merely continue to be made once they have succumbed.
In short, not only will they be forced to start looking for counterweights both among the usual suspects—China, Russia and, possibly, Tehran—but they will also begin to burnish their internationalist credentials in the Global South. It is a lesson many of them have forgotten.
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Categories: Central America, Colombia, North America, Panama, South America, United States, Venezuela