Catholics, Evangelicals, and US Policy in Central America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Cangemi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Central America ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Ronald Reagan ◽  
The United States ◽  
Peace Processes ◽  
Evangelical Protestants ◽  
Jerry Falwell ◽  
The Cold War

During the Cold War’s earliest years, right-wing governments and oligarchic elites in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua fostered closer relationships with the Catholic Church. Dictatorial leaders like Guatemala’s Carlos Castillo Armas and dynastic regimes like Nicaragua’s Somoza family regarded the Church as an ally against supposed Marxist influence in the region. Those ties began to fray in the late 1960s, as the Second Vatican Council’s foundational reforms moved Catholicism farther to the political and social left around the globe. This shift was especially prominent in Central America, where Catholics like El Salvador’s Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero and Guatemala’s Father Stanley Rother were among Central America’s most visible critics and reformers as political violence increased across the region during the 1970s. Relatedly, evangelical Protestants, particularly Pentecostal groups based in the United States, flooded Central America throughout that decade. Their staunch anticommunism and established ties to influential policymakers and political lobbyists in the United States, among other factors, gave evangelical Protestants greater influence in US-Central American relations. Their influence was strongest during the early 1980s, when José Efraín Ríos Montt, an ordained Pentecostal minister with Eureka, California’s Verbo Ministries, seized Guatemala’s presidency via a coup in March 1982. Notable US evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson praised Ríos Montt’s regime for its rabid anticommunist ideology, while President Ronald Reagan claimed that the dictator had received a “bum rap” in the global press. Concurrently, some US evangelical missioners and pastors also foregrounded the Sandinista government’s anti-Protestant activities as additional justification for US support for Nicaragua’s Contra forces. Religious actors were also instrumental to Central America’s peace processes after the Cold War, as Catholic and Protestant leaders alike worked closely with regional governments and the United States to end decades of political violence and enact meaningful socioeconomic reforms for the region’s citizens.

16. US foreign policy in Latin America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Dunkerley
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Central America ◽  
The United States ◽  
Us Foreign Policy ◽  
Monroe Doctrine ◽  
European Expansion ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Impact

This chapter examines US foreign policy in Latin America and the historical evolution of US relations with the region. It first considers the Monroe Doctrine and manifest destiny, which sought to contain European expansion and to justify that of the United States under an ethos of hemispherism, before discussing the projection of US power beyond its frontiers in the early twentieth century. It then explores the United States’ adoption of a less unilateral approach during the depression of the 1930s and an aggressively ideological approach in the wake of the Cuban Revolution. It also analyzes US policy towards the left in Central America, where armed conflict prevailed in the 1980s, and in South America, where the Washington Consensus brought an end to the anti-European aspects of the Monroe Doctrine by promoting globalization. Finally, it looks at the impact of the Cold War on US policy towards Latin America.

Helmut Schmidt, Euromissiles, and the Peace Movement

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 148-171
Author(s):  
Noel D. Cary
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Ronald Reagan ◽  
The United States ◽  
Peace Movement ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Mikhail Gorbachev ◽  
Nuclear Missiles ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Vladimir Putin

On February 1, 2019, President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from a landmark Cold War treaty: the agreement between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev to ban intermediate-range nuclear missiles from Europe. One day after Trump's announcement, Vladimir Putin announced that Russia would also withdraw from the treaty. Allegations of Russian violations in recent years have thus led to actions that threaten to return Europe to some of the most frightening days of the Cold War.

scholarly journals The Oppressed, the Suspect, and the Citizen: Subjectivity in Competing Accounts of Political Violence

2001 ◽  
Vol 26 (01) ◽  
pp. 63-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Bibler Coutin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Central America ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Group Membership ◽  
The United States ◽  
Liberal Theory ◽  
Legal Action ◽  
Asylum Law ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Individual

By juxtaposing religious, legal, and victims'accounts of political violence, this essay identifies and critiques assumptions about agency, the individual, and the state that derive from liberal theory and that underlie U.S. asylum law. In the United States, asylum is available to aliens whose gooernments fail to protect them from persecution on the basis of their race, religion, political opinion, nationality, or social group membership. Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigrants have challenged this definition of persecution with their two-decade-long struggle for asylum in the United States. During the 1980s, U.S. religious advocates and solidarity workers took legal action on behalf of what they characterized as victims of oppression in Central America. The asylum claims narrated by the beneficiaries of these legal efforts suggest that repessiwe pactices rendered entire populations politically suspect. To prevail in immigration court, however, victims had to prove that they were individually targeted because of being somehow “different” from the population at large. In other words, to obtain asylum, persecution victims had to explain how and why their actions had placed them at risk, even though persecution obscured the reasons that particular individuals were targeted and thus rendered all politically suspect.

Operation Pedro Pan: The Migration of Unaccompanied Cuban Children to the United States, 1960–1962

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anita Casavantes Bradford
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
The United States ◽  
Federally Funded ◽  
Difficult Decision ◽  
History Of ◽  
Children’S Homes ◽  
Pedro Pan ◽  
The Cold War

Between the autumn of 1960 and October of 1962, the parents of more than fourteen thousand Cuban children made the difficult decision to send their children alone to the United States, where a young Irish immigrant priest, Father Bryan O. Walsh, arranged for them to be cared for by U.S. foster homes and in Catholic children’s homes and orphanages. The Cuban children’s exodus would later become known as Operation Pedro Pan; the federally funded and Catholic Church–administered program that was established to care for these children would be called the Cuban Children’s Program. Their interconnected trajectories are central to the history of post-revolutionary Cuba and of the Miami Cuban exile community, and shed important light on U.S.-Cuba and U.S.-Latin America relations during the height of the Cold War.

Securing Central America Against Communism: The United States and the Modernization of Surveillance in the Cold War

1999 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert H. Holden
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Central America ◽  
Formation Process ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central American ◽  
Sponsored Programs ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War

The US.-sponsored programs of military and police collaboration with the Central American governments during the Cold War also contributed to the surveillance capacity of those states during the period when the Central American state formation process was being completed. Guatemala is used as a case study. Washington’s contribution was framed by the conventional discourse of “security against communism” but also by an underlying technocratic ethos in which “modernization” and “security” were higher priorities than democratization.

scholarly journals 21. Global environment

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robyn Eckersley
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Ronald Reagan ◽  
The United States ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Environmental Leadership ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Environmental Initiatives ◽  
International Environmental Problems ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter examines how US foreign policy on environmental issues has evolved over a period of nearly five decades, from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama. It first considers the United States’ environmental multilateralism as well as environmental initiatives under Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, and Donald Trump before discussing key trends and puzzles in US foreign environmental policy. It shows the United States as an environmental leader during the Cold War, but an environmental laggard in the post–Cold War period, with the Obama administration’s re-engagement in climate diplomacy as a significant exception. The chapter also explains how the larger trend of waning environmental leadership from the United States has occurred at the same time as international environmental problems, especially climate change, have increasingly moved from the periphery towards the centre of world politics.

Central America-US Relations

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evan D. McCormick
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Central America ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central American ◽  
Main Element ◽  
Democratic Capitalism ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Foreign Policies ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

Since gaining independence in 1823, the states comprising Central America have had a front seat to the rise of the United States as a global superpower. Indeed, more so than anywhere else, the United States has sought to use its power to shape Central America into a system that heeds US interests and abides by principles of liberal democratic capitalism. Relations have been characterized by US power wielded freely by officials and non-state actors alike to override the aspirations of Central American actors in favor of US political and economic objectives: from the days of US filibusterers invading Nicaragua in search of territory; to the occupations of the Dollar Diplomacy era, designed to maintain financial and economic stability; to the covert interventions of the Cold War era. For their part, the Central American states have, at various times, sought to challenge the brunt of US hegemony, most effectively when coordinating their foreign policies to balance against US power. These efforts—even when not rejected by the United States—have generally been short-lived, hampered by economic dependency and political rivalries. The result is a history of US-Central American relations that wavers between confrontation and cooperation, but is remarkable for the consistency of its main element: US dominance.

From Reagan to Bush: The Transition in US Policy Towards Central America

1990 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 595-621 ◽  
Author(s):  
William M. Leogrande
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Central America ◽  
East Coast ◽  
Ronald Reagan ◽  
The United States ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
George Bush ◽  
Policy Analysts

Many foreign policy analysts in the United States expected a shift in US policy towards Latin America when George Bush succeeded Ronald Reagan as president. Though Bush had been a loyal supporter of Reagan's policies throughout the preceding eight years, Bush nevertheless seemed more pragmatic than his mentor. Whereas Reagan was the leader of the Republican Party's right wing, Bush was a scion of the East Coast Republican establishment, stronghold of the party's moderate centre.

Outras Guerras Frias: os embates entre neoliberais e neoconservadores estadunidenses diante da Revolução Nicaraguense

Diálogos ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 44
Author(s):  
Roberto Moll Neto
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Central America ◽  
Reagan Administration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sandinista Revolution ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Nicaraguan Revolution

Em meio a Guerra Fria, a Revolução Sandinista abalou os interesses dos Estados Unidos na região da América Central e do Caribe. Durante o Governo Reagan, os Estados Unidos intensificaram as ações de intervenção na região a fim de derrubar o Governo Sandinista. Este artigo pretende demonstrar que, mesmo no campo ortodoxo da política estadunidense, o papel dos Estados Unidos em face da revolução na Nicarágua não estava pré definido exclusivamente em uma visão de mundo única e que, portanto, haviam propostas concorrentes, que, inclusive, compreendiam a realidade na região a partir de dinâmicas próprias, e não apenas em função da Guerra Fria. Abstract Other Cold Wars: the clashes between neoliberals and neoconservatives in the face of the Nicaraguan Revolution In the midst of the Cold War, the Sandinista Revolution shook US objectives in the Central America and Caribbean. During the Reagan Administration, the United States stepped up intervention in the region to overthrow the Sandinista Government. This paper intends to demonstrate that even in the orthodox field of American politics, the role of the United States in the face of the revolution in Nicaragua was not exclusively defined in a single perceptions and that therefore there were competing proposals that even understood the reality in the region from its own dynamics, and not only because of the Cold War. Resumen Otras guerras frías: los embates entre neoliberales y neoconservadores estadunidenses ante la Revolución Nicaragüense En medio de la Guerra Fría, la Revolución Sandinista sacudió los intereses de Estados Unidos en la región de América Central y del Caribe. Durante el Gobierno Reagan, Estados Unidos intensificó las acciones de intervención en la región a fin de derrocar al Gobierno Sandinista. Este artículo pretende demostrar que, incluso en el campo ortodoxo de la política estadounidense, el papel de los Estados Unidos frente a la revolución en Nicaragua no estaba pre definido exclusivamente en una visión de mundo única y que, por lo tanto, había propuestas concurrentes, que incluso comprendían la realidad en la región a partir de dinámicas propias, y no sólo en función de la Guerra Fría.

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