Setting of the Red Sun: The Last of the Cold War Battles

Setting of the Red Sun:

The Last of the Cold War Battles

                  After the success of the Cuban Revolution, Latin America officially became apart of the Cold War. Cuba’s success inspired other Marxist Revolutionaries, while it spelled doom for the ever-paranoid United States, interpreting any Marxist Revolutionary movement as a sort of Soviet Proxy force, despite the Soviet Union having little to no hand in the movements at all. Despite this, they banded together with the Latin American Special Forces and for the next two decades installed military dictatorships in order to combat the Marxist Guerrilla forces; they were dealt with through kidnapping, torture, and even flat out murder. Throughout the 1960s and 70s these “dirty wars” continued on, but by the mid-1970s, both the Revolutionary movements and the anticommunist dictatorships began to settled down as the twilight of the Cold War began.

                  Most of the revolutionary movements had been crushed by the authoritarian governments by the late 70s, that, along with the debt and hyperinflation created by such governments, led to their eventual downfall. In the 1980s, Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia had all returned to constitutional rule, it was only in Central America that Cold War Struggles continued. Costa Rica, for the most part, avoided the Cold War all together due to having very little indigenous people in their population, as well as having abolished their military in the 1940s. In Guatemala however, not only did the government carry on a dirty war against the guerrilla armies, but they tried to weaken them further by taking anyone who could possibly support them, mostly indigenous peasants, and placing them in what could only be described as concentration camps, where they were subjugated to horrible atrocities.

                  Then there was Nicaragua, who for nearly forty years was ruled by a single family, the Somozas. They were anticommunist allies with the U.S. and for a long time they were only resisted by the revolutionaries known as the Sandinistas, after anti-imperialist Augusto Cesar Sandino, whom the Somozas assassinated. However, when the dictator Anastasio Somoza assassinated a publisher for of a conservative opposition newspaper named Joaquin Chamorro, both the left and the right turned against them and the Somozas eventually had to flee. The U.S responded by sending in the Proxy Force known as the Contras, and their battle with the Sandinistas greatly weakened them and they eventually lost power when they lost the presidential election to Violeta Chamorro. El Salvador has a very similar story, the poor suffering under oligarchic rule and the anticommunist government thwarted any uprising. However, when the U.S. backed government began killing priests and nuns who spoke against them, some even from the U.S., massive public opposition to Latin American foreign policy began to show for the first time in the Cold War.

                  As the wars dragged on the revolutionaries found themselves in a stalemate with their countries respective governments, and with their morale wearing thin they just couldn’t beat them and surrendered in the 1990s. The Cold War was over, but the pain was still felt by many to this very day.  Recently however, Guatemalan activists received some justice as the former police chief responsible for the Spanish Embassy Massacre of 1980 was convicted and sentenced to 90 years in prison, which the activists regard as a great victory for human rights. (http://www.democracynow.org/2015/1/20/prosecuting_guatemalas_dirty_war_rigoberta_menchu)

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