Waiting for Marcel Orphüls: The Literature of Authoritarian Rule and Resistance in Latin America

In 2010, at the XXIX Latin American Studies Association Congress in Toronto, the historian Steve Stern called 1970s stated-sponsored terror in Argentina a “dirty war.” An audience member self-identified as an “Argentine”, speaking for “Argentines” scolded him. “Dirty war”, he told Stern, was a term invented by the Argentine dictatorship, and as such, should never be used. Stern, perhaps the most authoritative analyst of Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, apologized, conceding implicitly that policing ..

Cold War Argentina

For the period 1945-90, longstanding academic and popular narratives of Argentina have set the Cold War on the margins of important historical developments with only a few exceptions. The project that I am currently engaged in reassesses those narratives in two stages. First, it breaks down traditionally organized historical chronologies in Argentina to suggest poorly understood but crucial continuities across the decades. Second, and building on that historiographical shift, it proposes several avenues toward a new understanding of the centrality of the global Cold War to Argentine history

Soft balancing in the Americas : Latin American opposition to U.S. intervention, 1898–1936

In the aftermath of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, scholars of international relations debated how to best characterize the rising tide of global opposition. The concept of “soft balancing” emerged as an influential, though contested, explanation of a new phenomenon in a unipolar world: states seeking to constrain the ability of the United States to deploy military force by using multinational organizations, international law, and coalition building. Soft balancing can also be observed in regional unipolar systems. Multinational archival research reveals how Argentina, Mexico, and other Latin American countries responded to expanding U.S. power and military assertiveness in the early twentieth century through coordinated diplomatic maneuvering that provides a strong example of soft balancing. Examination of this earlier case makes an empirical contribution to the emerging soft-balancing literature and suggests that soft balancing need not lead to hard balancing or open conflict