Unit 5: Twentieth-Century Revolutions

movements and outcomes were contradictory so it is difficult to speak of "Latin American Revolutions" in general (although that is what we must do in a survey class :) The principal revolutionary movements that we'll focus upon will be those of Guatemala, Cuba, and Chile. Other revolutionary movements also impacted Nicaragua and Colombia. Meanwhile, harsh military dictatorships took hold in Brazil and Argentina, and Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (or the PRI) also initiated heavy-handed repression of student activism and its own, secret "dirty war." Ernesto "Che" Guevara's presence in Guatemala during the 1954 CIA-sponsored coup against democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz radicalized his political views and shaped his future participation in Fidel and Raul Castro's July 26th Movement in Cuba. Within the context U.S. Cold War policies that demanded the containment of communism at all costs, U.S.-Latin American relations became increasingly strained. The successful Marxist Revolution in Cuba brought Soviet Missiles to within 90 miles of the U.S. coast in 1962. U.S. economic and political interests created an atmosphere in which brutal, non-communist dictatorships became preferable to democratically elected governments. The most salient example of this policy came in Chile where the democratic process brought Salvador Allende's Marxist party to power. The case of Chile straddles the topics we'll cover in this unit and the next one. For this unit, pay attention to the means by which Allende's government came to power in Chile, a nation with a long history of democratic stability. In Unit 7, we'll consider the reasons for which Allende's presidency was deemed unacceptable by U.S. foreign policy makers. Also, pay attention to the sections on U.S.-Latin American policy for context in which to better understand the rise of military dictatorships throughout the region.

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