Anticommunism, the Extreme Right, and the Politics of Enmity in Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico, 1946-197

This dissertation examines Latin American Cold War anticommunism as political imaginary rooted in the region's political idioms and history, particularly in the legacies, postwar transformations, and social resonance of right wing nationalisms, and their elective affinities with authoritarian forms of state-making. Based on the analysis of state security archives, newspapers, pamphlets and other propaganda materials from Argentina, Colombia, Mexico and the United States, the dissertation shows how both national and transnational arenas anticommunists constructed, debated, and disseminated their idea of "the enemy," often posing violence as a legitimate instrument for the "defense of society" through repression from above and from below. My central argument is that the intersections between the local and global meanings of anticommunism enabled it to cut across social, ideological and national borders, gaining support among a wide range of social groups, prompting forms of national and transnational mobilization, and the implementation of legal/extra-legal institutional responses to the "communist threat." In contrast to narratives that portray the U.S. as the sole architect and instigator of the region's anticommunist crusades, this analysis accounts for moments of coercion, collaboration, negotiation and tension between these Latin American anticommunists and domestic and foreign state actors, thus providing a nuanced interpretation about the efficacy and traction of the anti-communist imaginary and on the differentiated impacts of U.S. intervention in the region.;The three cases shed light on convergent themes and transnational ideological linkages, while noting the importance of local differentiation. Part I tackles the intellectual and political history of the construction of dissidence as banditry, criminality and communist insurgency in Colombia, tracing the uses of anticommunism as a frame to interpret the causes and possible solutions to endemic violence, and how these assessments shaped Colombia's early process of counterinsurgent state-building, from 1948 to 1966. Part II deals with the history of Catholic-nationalist and neo-fascist movements in Argentina between 1946 and 1970, showing how the Argentine nacionalista constellation attempted to navigate the Peronist/anti-Peronist divide, exert influence on state affairs, and shape public perceptions about the country's recurrent crises, while cultivating links with anticommunist fellow travelers abroad. Part III develops an analysis of anti-communism in Mexico in the period between 1946 and 1972, examining the grassroots and popular dimensions of Cold War anticommunism and how they reflected the historical tensions, negotiations, and forms of collaboration between the right wing Catholic dissidents and the postrevolutionary PRI regime. Despite their relatively limited national influence and their ambiguous stance vis-a-vis "official" anti-communism, these largely understudied groups were crucial actors of the Cold War in Mexico and beyond, as they built and capitalized on important domestic and external alliances (particularly with the Argentine Right), and inserted themselves in global initiatives such as the World Anti-Communist League, a hub of transnational activism for the Global Right. This dissertation thus makes a contribution to the historiography of right wing movements in Latin America and to a historical understanding of political violence in the region by tackling these actors' forms and strategies of mobilization in response to what they understood as the local, national, and global challenges of the Cold War.