ABSTRACT
The population of Latin America and the Caribbean reached 519 million people at the close of the twentieth century. Yet in twentieth-century world history Latin America was usually marginalised, perhaps because it did not in the first half of the century play a major role in the global conflicts of this century, which had their epicentres in Europe and Asia. Perspectives began to change only in the 1950s – not because of a belated recognition that millions of the world’s population deserved better, but because of the Cold War. Before then only Argentina’s flirtation with fascism had aroused wider interest. After the Second World War the spread of Marxism and the influence of the Soviet Union aroused Western concern, especially that of the US. Attention focused on Arbenz’s Guatemala, on Che Guevara’s efforts to spread communism from Cuba to the mainland, on Allende’s Chile, on the Sandanistas in Nicaragua and on the civil wars in El Salvador, Guatemala and Peru.
