Latin America

In 1945, most of Latin America had been independent for over a century. These were not new nations fumbling toward sovereignty. Mexico had its revolution in 1910. Brazil declared its republic in 1889. Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru: all had been governing themselves since the 1820s.

And yet, for millions of Latin Americans, political independence had never delivered on its promise. The old colonial hierarchies survived under new names. Land remained concentrated in the hands of a few families. Indigenous and Afro-descended populations were shut out of political life. Literacy rates were low. Infrastructure was built to export raw materials, not to connect communities. The architecture of extraction outlived the empire that built it.

The Cold War would make everything worse. Latin America became a stage on which Washington and Moscow projected their anxieties, armed their proxies, and treated the lives of ordinary people as acceptable collateral. But to frame the story as one of superpower manipulation alone is to erase the agency, the courage, the political imagination, and the failures of Latin Americans themselves. This is their history. The outside powers were a factor. They were not the whole story.