Three weeks ago, I participated in a fantastic symposium organized by Mila Burns and Jonathan Brown as part of the triennial Congreso Internacional de Americanistas held this year in Salamanca, Spain. The symposium explored the influence of Latin Americans on the Cold War, an important intervention in a field that has more often approached the relationship from the opposite direction. At one point in the discussion, Alan McPherson gave concise expression to something that many were feeling. The more closely you look at the Cold War in Latin America, he observed, the less of the Cold War you see.1 I’ve long been inclined to agree. After all, to riff on McPherson’s comment, the big questions that marked the politics of the region from World War II through the 1980s were not primarily “Cold War” questions. Is the U.S. an imperialist power? How should resources be distributed? Whose interests should be advanced by the state, and how should violence be deployed in their service? The answers to these questions were surely colored by the struggle for supremacy between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. as it unfolded, but in most cases, they were not determined by it.
The ensuing conversation got me thinking about the very meaning of the term “cold war,” in light of a fascinating 1960 document I saw at Rio de Janeiro’s Escola Superior de Guerra (ESG, or Superior War College) last July. Founded in 1949 and modeled explicitly on the U.S. National War College, the ESG functioned as a military-civilian think tank and was responsible, more than any other institution, for developing the Brazilian instantiation of the “national security doctrine” that would give shape to the country’s 1964-1985 dictatorship and in turn influence parallel regimes in Bolivia, Uruguay, Chile, and elsewhere.
Cruder analyses paint the ESG as something of a U.S. satellite campus, a locus for the transmission of a doctrine devised up north. But this isn’t at all what I saw while working in its library last year. While U.S. influence was evident in many of the ESG lectures, conferences, and curricula I consulted — particularly those from the school’s intelligence course — on the whole, ESG students and officials showed far greater interest in French conceptions of counterrevolutionary war, and they borrowed eagerly from the British and the Portuguese as well. Operating within a continental system unambiguously dominated by the United States, in the 1950s and 1960s, esguianos (as those connected to the center were called) wove these diverse stems into a unique basket of strategies and tactics, in turn giving form to a security state distinct from any that had come before. (For the best treatment in English of the ESG, see Benjamin Cowen’s excellent 2016 book, Securing Sex.)
The 1960 document I had in mind offers unusually direct insight into what “cold war” meant at the ESG. It is a report of a symposium on the topic of revolutionary war, one of a series of annual events at which the students of the school’s various courses discussed major topics. Each symposium culminated in a written exercise. At the 1960 event, the students of the Curso de Estado-Maior Conjunto (Joint General Staff Course) were divided into four teams of approximately ten members each and asked to “characterize (communist) revolutionary war in relation to so-called cold war, psychological war, and insurrectional or subversive war.”
In the more than 60 pages that they submitted in response, the four teams agreed that Brazil, like other non-communist countries, was engaged in a “political, economic and pyscho-social” cold war waged by international communism. The groups did not define this uncapitalized cold war in terms of the confrontation between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. The former country, in fact, went unmentioned in the essays, though the latter was referenced frequently. Instead, as Team A explained, cold war was the “orienting idea” of global communism and the instrument through which it sought to achieve “its unlimited political objectives.” Team B, the only one to specify any sources for its definition of the concept, cited British Air Marshall Robert Saundby and French Colonel Jean Némo in support of a similar characterization.
While cold war was both broad and ongoing, all four teams focused the bulk of their attention on one of its “facets” in particular. As the very framing of the exercise suggests, this facet was revolutionary war. Several of the groups cited French officers Gabriel Bonnet and Jacques Hogard to characterize revolutionary war as the principal instrument, in the context of cold war, by which the Bolshevik revolution sought to conquer the world. Its agents, the students claimed, would deploy the tactics of psychological warfare to both weaken and win the sympathy of the population, with the ultimate the aim of launching “insurrectional or subversive war” at specific places and times. Numerous ESG documents explored this two-phase sequence in far greater detail, identifying five discrete sub-stages of revolutionary war and proposing strategies and tactics appropriate to each. (The most compelling research on this subject has been done by Brazilian historian João Roberto Martins Filho.)
In sum, though these students of the Joint General Staff Course saw revolutionary war as a facet of cold war, they gave much greater weight to the former and defined both in ways that owed vastly more to France and (to a lesser degree) Britain than to the U.S. This tendency held across most of the school’s doctrinal documents — though not, I should stress, those connected to the ESG’s intelligence course, where U.S. influence was stronger.
I make this observation not because I read in the words of these esguianos anything incompatible with the hemispheric role that the U.S. military sought for Brazil. Yet it is nonetheless significant that in their essays, all four teams cast Brazil not as a subsidiary participant in a standoff between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, but as a country on the front lines of a global war. In 1960, this conflict may still have been limited to psychological warfare, but “insurrectional or subversive war” represented an ongoing and imminent risk. Open — if typically small-scale — combat would indeed arrive in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a reaction to the military’s own “Revolution of 1964.” And when it did, it should hardly be surprising that a dictatorship born of the ESG would respond most immediately in the terms not of cold but of counterrevolutionary war.