THE COLD WAR, LATIN AMERICA, AND "HEMISPHERIC DEFENSE"
Officially started in 1947 with the Truman doctrine theorizing the "containment" policy, the Cold War had important consequences in Latin America, considered by the United States to be a full part of the Western Bloc, called the "free world." As such, the U.S. considered it a priority to rid it of any influences from the communist Eastern Bloc.
In Latin America, the U.S. defense treaty called the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance of 1947, or the "hemispheric defense" treaty, was the formalization of the Act of Chapultepec, adopted at the Inter-American Conference on the Problems of War and Peace in 1945 in Mexico City. During the war, Washington had been able to secure Allied support from all individual governments except Uruguay, which remained neutral. With the exceptions of Trinidad and Tobago (1967), Belize (1981), and the Bahamas (1982), no countries that became independent after 1947 have joined the treaty. In April 1948, the Organization of American States was established. Member states pledged to fight communism on the American continent. Twenty-one American countries signed the Charter of the Organization of American States on April 30, 1948.
The next year, the Organization of American States was created in April 1948 during the Ninth International Conference of American States held in Bogotá. Member states pledged to fight communism in the Americas. Twenty-one American countries signed the Charter of the Organization of American States on April 30, 1948.
Operation PBSUCCESS, which overthrew the democratically-elected President of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in 1954, was to be one of the first in a long series of US interventions in Latin America during the Cold War. It immediately followed the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran (1953).
U.S. RESPONSE TO THE CUBAN REVOLUTION
The Cuban Revolution (1953–59) was an armed revolt conducted by Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement and its allies against the U.S.-backed authoritarian government of Cuban President Fulgencio Batista. The revolution began in July 1953, and continued sporadically until the rebels finally ousted Batista on January 1, 1959, replacing his government with a revolutionary socialist state. The 26th of July Movement later reformed along communist lines, becoming the Communist Party in October 1965.
The Cuban Revolution had powerful domestic and international repercussions. In particular, it reshaped Cuba's relationship with the United States. It was one of the first defeats of the US foreign policy in Latin America. In 1961, Cuba became a member of the newly created Non-Aligned Movement, which succeeded the 1955 Bandung Conference. After the implementation of several economic reforms, including complete nationalizations, by Cuba's government, US trade restrictions on Cuba increased. The U.S. halted Cuban sugar imports, on which Cuba's economy depended the most, and refused to supply its former trading partner with much needed oil, creating a devastating effect on the island's economy. In March 1960, tensions increased when the freighter La Coubre exploded in Havana harbor, killing over 75 people. Fidel Castro blamed the United States and compared the incident to the 1898 sinking of the USS Maine (ACR-16), which had precipitated the Spanish–American War, though admitting he could provide no evidence for his accusation. That same month, President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized the CIA to organize, train, and equip Cuban refugees as a guerrilla force to overthrow Castro, which would lead to the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.
Each time the Cuban government nationalized US properties, the American government took countermeasures, resulting in the prohibition of all exports to Cuba. Consequently, Cuba began to consolidate trade relations with the Soviet Union, leading the U.S. to break off all remaining official diplomatic relations. The U.S. began the formulation of new plans aimed at destabilizing the Cuban government, collectively known as "The Cuban Project." This was to be a coordinated program of political, psychological, and military sabotage, involving intelligence operations as well as assassination attempts on key political leaders.
Relations between the U.S. and Cuba culminated in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. This crisis showed that neither superpower was ready to use nuclear weapons for fear of the other's retaliation, and led to the first efforts at nuclear disarmament and improving relations. Beside this aggressive policy towards Cuba, President Kennedy tried to implement the 1961 Alliance for Progress, an economic aid program.
1960s
In Venezuela president Rómulo Betancourt faced determined opposition from extremists and rebellious army units, yet he continued to push for economic and educational reform. A fraction split from the government partyAD and formed the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR). When leftists were involved in unsuccessful revolts at navy bases in 1962, Betancourt suspended civil liberties. After numerous attacks, he finally arrested the MIR and Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) members of Congress. In the same time, the U.S. suspended economic and/or broke off diplomatic relations with several dictatorships between 1961 and JFK's assassination in 1963, including Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Peru. But these suspensions were imposed only temporarily, for periods of only three weeks to six months. However, the US finally decided it best to train Latin American militaries in counter-insurgency tactics at the School of the Americas. In effect, the Alliance for Progress included U.S. programs of military and police assistance to counter Communism, including Plan LASO in Colombia.
By 1964, under President Johnson, the program to discriminate against dictatorial regimes ceased. In March 1964, the U.S. approved a military coup in Brazil, overthrowing left-wing president João Goulart. The next year, the U.S. dispatched troops to the Dominican Republic to stop a possible left-wing takeover under Operation Power Pack. Through the Office of Public Safety, the U.S. assisted Latin American security forces, training them and sending them equipment.
JUNTAS
Following the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the US waged a war against what it called "Communist subversives," leading to support of coups against democratically elected presidents such as the backing of the Chilean right wing, which would culminate with Augusto Pinochet's 1973 Chilean coup against democratically-elected Salvador Allende. By 1976, all of South America was covered by similar military dictatorships, called juntas. In Paraguay, Alfredo Stroessner had been in power since 1954; in Brazil, left-wing President João Goulart was overthrown by a military coup in 1964 with the assistance of the US in what was known as Operation Brother Sam; in Bolivia, General Hugo Banzer overthrew leftist General Juan José Torres in 1971; in Uruguay, considered the "Switzerland" of South America, Juan María Bordaberry seized power in the 1973 coup. In Peru, leftist General Velasco Alvarado in power since 1968, planned to use the recently empowered Peruvian military to overwhelm Chilean armed forces in a planned invasion of Pinochetist Chile. A "Dirty War" was waged all over the subcontinent, culminating with Operation Condor, an agreement between security services of the Southern Cone and other South American countries to repress and assassinate political opponents. The armed forces also took power in Argentina in 1976, and then supported the 1980 "Cocaine Coup" of Luis García Meza Tejada in Bolivia, before training the "Contras" in Nicaragua, where the Sandinista National Liberation Front, headed by Daniel Ortega, had taken power in 1979, as well as militaries in Guatemala and in El Salvador. In the frame of Operation Charly, supported by the US, the Argentine military exported state terror tactics to Central America, where the "dirty war" was waged until well into the 1990s, making hundreds of thousands "disappeared."
With the election of President Jimmy Carter in 1977, the US moderated for a short time its support to authoritarian regimes in Latin America. It was during that year that the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, an agency of the OAS, was created.
THE POST-WW2 MIDDLE EAST
The British, the French, and the Soviets departed from many parts of the Middle East during and after World War II. Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the Middle East states on the Arabian Peninsula generally remained unaffected by World War II. However, after the war, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, Israel and Cyprus had independence restored or became independent.
The struggle between the Arabs and the Jews in Palestine culminated in the 1947 United Nations plan to partition Palestine. This plan attempted to create an Arab state and a Jewish state in the narrow space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. While the Jewish leaders accepted it, the Arab leaders rejected this plan. On May 14, 1948, when the British Mandate expired, the Zionist leadership declared the State of Israel. In the 1948 Arab–Israeli War which immediately followed, the armies of Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia intervened and were defeated by Israel. About 800,000 Palestinians fled from areas annexed by Israel and became refugees in neighboring countries. Approximately two-thirds of 758,000–866,000 of the Jews expelled or who fled from Arab lands after 1948 were absorbed and naturalized by the State of Israel.
THE MIDDLE EAST IN THE 1960s AND 1970s
The departure of the European powers from direct control of the region, the establishment of Israel, and the increasing importance of the oil industry, marked the creation of the modern Middle East. These developments led to a growing presence of the United States in Middle East affairs. The U.S. was the ultimate guarantor of the stability of the region, and from the 1950s, the dominant force in the oil industry. When radical revolutions brought radical anti-Western regimes to power in Egypt in 1954, in Syria in 1963, in Iraq in 1968, and in Libya in 1969, the Soviet Union allied itself with Arab rulers such as Nasser of Egypt and Hussein of Iraq. These regimes gained popular support through their promises to destroy the state of Israel, defeat the U.S. and other "western imperialists," and to bring prosperity to the Arab masses. When the Six-Day War of 1967 between Israel and its neighbors ended in a decisive loss for the Muslim side, many in the Islamic world saw this as the failure of Arab socialism.
In response to this challenge to its interests in the region, the U.S. felt obliged to defend its remaining allies, the conservative monarchies of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iran, and the Persian Gulf emirates. Iran in particular became a key U.S. ally, until a revolution led by the Shi'a clergy overthrew the monarchy in 1979 and established a theocratic regime that was even more anti-western than the secular regimes in Iraq or Syria. This forced the U.S. into a close alliance with Saudi Arabia.
In the mid-to-late 1960s, the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party led by Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar took power in both Iraq and Syria. Iraq was first ruled by Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, but was succeeded by Saddam Hussein in 1979, and Syria was ruled first by a Military Committee led by Salah Jadid, and later Hafez al-Assad until 2000, when he was succeeded by his son, Bashar al-Assad.
In 1979, Egypt under Nasser's successor, Anwar Sadat, concluded a peace treaty with Israel, ending the prospects of a united Arab military front. From the 1970s the Palestinians, led by Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, resorted to a prolonged campaign against Israel and against American, Jewish and western targets generally, as a means of weakening Israeli resolve and undermining western support for Israel. The Palestinians were supported in this, to varying degrees, by the regimes in Syria, Libya, Iran and Iraq. The high point of this campaign came in the 1975 United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 condemning Zionism as a form of racism and the reception given to Arafat by the United Nations General Assembly. Resolution 3379 was revoked in 1991 by the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 4686.
Due to many of the frantic events of the late 1970s in the Middle East it culminated in the Iran–Iraq War between neighboring Iran and Iraq. Iraq invaded Iranian Khuzestan in 1980 at the behest of the latter's chaotic state of country due to the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The war eventually turned into a stalemate with hundreds of thousands of dead on both sides.
Begin, Carter, and Sadat at Camp David (1978), photo by Bill Fitz-Patrick.
The Camp David Accords were signed by Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin on September 17, 1978.The two framework agreements were signed at the White House, and were witnessed by United States President Jimmy Carter. The second of these frameworks led directly to the 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty. Due to the agreement, Sadat and Begin received the shared 1978 Nobel Peace Prize. The first framework, which dealt with the Palestinian territories, was written without participation of the Palestinians and was condemned by the United Nations.