El Salvador and Ukraine

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Clarissa

February 26, 2015

I will be talking about the murdered nuns in El Salvador during my “Latin-American Conflicts” lecture today, just when the poor nuns are back in the news again for the first time in decades. Weird. I hope nobody asks me about Bill O’Reilly in class because I’m consciously as politically bland in the classroom as it is humanly possible*.

Where I’m not going to be bland is the talk about Ukraine that I will be giving to the university next Wednesday. People stop me on campus all the time to ask me about Ukraine (my very bright scarf in the colors of the Ukrainian flag might have something to do with it) but it’s hard to provide a short but meaningful response on the go. I have pretty much turned into the “Russia invaded Ukraine, pass the news along” person, and that’s getting old. At least, talking about Ukraine in public will make me feel better.

My colleague from Ukraine spoke about the war to the area’s retirees, and she says it was the best experience. The retirees remember the Cold War vividly and understand exactly what is going on. I will have a younger audience, and that is tougher.

Going back to El Salvador, in every class on Latin-American conflicts students ask, with a look of complete shock, “But why did the US support and finance this horrible regime?” And when I mention the Cold War in response, it doesn’t register a whole lot. I, on the other hand, am doing some real rethinking of history because of current events. The Cold War looked like a big joke from my side of the Iron Curtain because it was obvious that, after Stalin’s death, nobody was going to use nuclear weapons. But now I am understanding the terror of the crazy Russians that fed the Cold War from the West’s side and led to seemingly crazy things like financing nun-murdering regimes.

* Not worth the aggravation is why.

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8 responses to “El Salvador and Ukraine”

Shakti

February 26, 2015

Every U.S. war from the Korean War onward is either Cold War superpowers fighting wars through proxy in client states or the rebound fallout of such wars. I’m sure that’s conventional wisdom but I’ve never seen it stated as such in any news articles.

Of course the U.S. has considered Latin America to be its sphere of influence since the Monroe Doctrine(1823).

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1. Clarissa
  
  February 26, 2015
  
  I’m not a Latin Americanist, obviously, so for this course on Latin American conflicts that the students demanded I read a mountain of scholarship. And the Cold War was the only framework within which it was discussed. In the course I’m doing Argentina, Chile, Salvador, Guatemala, Panama, and Nicaragua.
  
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  1. Shakti
    
    February 26, 2015
    
    Of course they would. The Cold War was the pretext and the context and the Monroe Doctrine is deep in the past. However, if there had been no Cold War, the U.S. still would have intervened in the ways that it did. The Mexican American and the Spanish American Wars predate the Cold War. As it was, the US interpreted the Monroe Doctrine to mean that any friendly gesture toward the USSR, or any socialist measures taken by any Latin American government was a threat. These actions had very little, if anything to do with the USSR or the United States. The USSR, AFAIK, didn’t give “aid” to any South American/Latin American country except for Cuba.
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      February 26, 2015
      
      “The USSR, AFAIK, didn’t give “aid” to any South American/Latin American country except for Cuba.”
      
      It’s more complex than that. In El Salvador, for instance, FMLN was supported by the USSR proxy, Cuba, with weapons, military training, etc.
      
      History doesn’t accept “would haves”, of course, but I am convinced that the Junta in El Salvador, in Argentina, in Chile, etc. would have still happened even if the US never existed. This is such a long-standing tradition in Spanish-speaking countries on both sides of the continent. It dates back to the XIXth century when the concepts of guerrilla and pronunciamiento (military dictatorship) were invented. Every one of these phenomena was servicing the internal needs of these countries. But, of course, the reality of the Cold War made these conflicts worse and deeper.
      
      Franco, for instance, was obviously helped a lot by the US and was helped because of the Cold War. But at the same time, it is undeniable that he had won the Civil War and that he was massively supported within Spain.
      
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      1. Shakti
        
        February 26, 2015
        
        History doesn’t accept “would haves”, of course, but I am convinced that the Junta in El Salvador, in Argentina, in Chile, etc. would have still happened even if the US never existed. This is such a long-standing tradition in Spanish-speaking countries on both sides of the continent. It dates back to the XIXth century when the concepts of guerrilla and pronunciamiento (military dictatorship) were invented. Every one of these phenomena was servicing the internal needs of these countries. But, of course, the reality of the Cold War made these conflicts worse and deeper.
        It just always struck me as a series of reactions to being former Spanish colonies set up to be raw material and resource extraction depots. When they became independent, they couldn’t balance their economies to have a middle class of any significance. It was always a crust of oligarchs and a mass of peasants, and the oligarchs liked sitting in a plantation just fine, and the peasants wanted a socialist paradise yesterday, and neither group much cared for the industrial revolution. :p
        
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        Clarissa
        
        February 26, 2015
        
        “It just always struck me as a series of reactions to being former Spanish colonies set up to be raw material and resource extraction depots. When they became independent, they couldn’t balance their economies to have a middle class of any significance. It was always a crust of oligarchs and a mass of peasants, and the oligarchs liked sitting in a plantation just fine, and the peasants wanted a socialist paradise yesterday, and neither group much cared for the industrial revolution.”
        
        This is the perfect response to the homework assignment I gave in class today. 🙂 🙂
        
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  2. J. Otto Pohl
    
    February 26, 2015
    
    Governments in places like El Salvador, Guatemala, and Argentina justified their actions in reference to the Cold War. But, it is obvious that domestic factors, for instance labor unions in Argentina, were a far more important factor. The same is true for terror in Soviet allies like Afghanistan (the terror began before US funding of the Mujahadeen), Vietnam after unification, and Ethiopia.
    
    http://jpohl.blogspot.com/2013/11/proposal-for-book-on-comparative-state.html
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      February 26, 2015
      
      “Governments in places like El Salvador, Guatemala, and Argentina justified their actions in reference to the Cold War. But, it is obvious that domestic factors, for instance labor unions in Argentina, were a far more important factor. The same is true for terror in Soviet allies like Afghanistan (the terror began before US funding of the Mujahadeen), Vietnam after unification, and Ethiopia.”
      
      I agree completely. There were huge internal factors that created these realities. Which is why I detest the simplistic narrative of the US imposing these alien military dictatorships on the long-suffering people of Latin American countries.
      
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