This panel highlights some of the exciting new research that is currently being done on the local, transnational, and international history of the Cold War in Central America. Moving beyond the traditional focus on United States’ political and military interventions in the region, the four speakers in this panel bring into focus new battlegrounds and actors in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. The battle for Central America’s future, this panel shows, was fought out in a range of often-overlooked spaces, such as refugee camps, Western European halls of power, revolutionary health centers, and Guatemala’s National Geography Institute. With significant consequences for Central Americans’ everyday lives, it shaped debates and practices surrounding knowledge, diplomacy, expertise, healthcare, and humanitarianism. In tracing these histories, the panel provides historians with new insights into how we can study the Global Cold War and twentieth-century Latin American History.

Focusing on the 1980s, Fionntán O’Hara demonstrates why and how Central American refugee camps and refugees were utilized by insurgents groups. Refugees served important propaganda purposes, O’Hara shows, but they were also important actors in their own right, responding to pressures and demands from revolutionaries in a variety of ways. Drawing on archival research and oral history interviews, O’Hara shows that the refugee camps were an important site in Central America’s Cold War.

Julie Gibbings analyzes the impact of the Cold War on Central America by focusing the history of geographic expertise in Guatemala. Tracing the life stories of Guatemalan geographers, Gibbings analyzes how geographic knowledges were produced in a context of civil war, international pressure, and military state surveillance. By doing so, her paper also highlights the complex interplay between the local, the national, and global in Guatemala’s Cold War.

Zooming in on health discourses and practices among the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador, Heather Vrana shows how disability and the body became battlegrounds in the Cold War. Through guerrilla medicine, she shows, the FMLN put its revolutionary ideals into practice and mobilized new recruits. By focusing on the role of the body, Vrana’s paper provides a new way of understanding the dynamics of the Cold War in Central America.

Finallly, Eline van Ommen looks at the relationship between the end of the Cold War and the Nicaraguan Revolution. Through the prism of Western Europe’s relations with the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN), she argues that the decline of superpower tensions limited the impact of Nicaragua’s revolutionary diplomacy. In doing so, she shows how Central America’s Cold War struggles were shaped by actors beyond the Americas, making the region a crucial player in the Global ideological struggle between socialism and capitalism.