Latin American Communisms

The opening of the Comintern archives after the collapse of the Soviet Union triggered an avalanche of new studies on the twentieth-century left, and we are still reaping the benefits of those investigations. The historian Patricio Herrera González contributes to the research that access to new sources has made possible in his edited volume on communism in Latin America. This book presents papers delivered at a conference in Santiago de Chile in August 2015. Herrera is at the Universidad de Valparaíso, and as a result the essays have a strong orientation toward Chile. Some readers may see this seemingly narrow focus as unfortunate. Herrera, however, more than compensates for the book’s geographic limitations by including essays that draw on a remarkably broad array of themes. Beyond a more “traditional” emphasis on party politics and labor movements, contributors also address cultural and transnational influences on the Latin American left during the first half of the twentieth century. The result is an impressive volume that significantly advances our interpretations of the roles that communists played in Latin America from the 1917 Bolshevik revolution through the onset of the Cold War.

Almost all of the contributors to this volume are from Latin America (and many of them from Herrera’s home institution), and this may be the first time that many readers of Latin American Perspectives encounter their work. The exceptions to this pattern are well-known academics with whom most readers will be familiar, and rather than a distraction their inclusion adds special value to this work. This is particularly true for Barry Carr’s historiographic introduction to the collection. As a master of the history of the Latin American left, Carr ably situates the collected essays within broader theoretical and conceptual trends. He begins his essay with an insistence on using the plural “communisms” and “marxisms” when discussing patterns on the left, and this is a theme that many of the subsequent essays pick up. Carr and the other contributors do not hide from fractionalization but embrace internal divisions as part of the rich and diverse histories of the left. Highlighting rather than hiding a multiplicity of voices is in large part what makes this volume so rich and valuable.

Carr complains that too often studies of Latin American communisms are defined by the period during which the Comintern functioned (1919–1943), and often this time frame is truncated even more to the institution’s early years. With the release of new documents with the opening of the Comintern archives this tendency has been reinforced, particularly since the archives contain relatively little documentation on the last four years of the organization’s formal functioning. Carr rightly notes that the history of Latin American communisms did not end in 1943, and many of the essays in this volume attempt to address that issue by continuing their discussion into the 1950s.

The 16 essays in this book are divided into four sections with four contributions in each section. The first section examines the arrival of communism in Latin America after the Bolshevik revolution, with two chapters on Chile and one each on Colombia and Uruguay. In this final essay, Gerardo Leibner faults the Uruguayan party for its Eurocentrism and ideological dependence on the Soviet Union. He is critical of the party for following the accommodationist line of the secretary general of the Communist Party of the United States of America, Earl Browder, during World War II. With the Soviet Union fighting for its very survival, loyal pro-Soviet parties allied with the United States government in a common fight against the Nazi threat. In this context, communists criticized strikes as hindering the war effort. In Uruguay this position led to an unfortunate decision in 1943 to support the breaking of a strike at a government-owned meat packing plant. Communist leaders denounced the strikers as being pro-Nazi for disrupting the flow of vital war materiél to the British. A result was the division of the labor movement and the communists’ gaining a reputation as strikebreakers.

The second section of the book turns to cultural issues and includes essays on José Carlos Mariátegui, Jorge Amado, and Pablo Neruda. Patricio Gutiérrez Donoso situates Mariátegui’s ideology in the context of debates within the Comintern over the establishment of alliances with a democratic and nationalist bourgeoisie. Gutiérrez argues that disputes between the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA) and the Comintern limited Mariátegui’s influence in Chile. Sebastián Rivera Mir contributes a fascinating examination of communist publishing houses in Latin America and the problems they faced in the distribution of literature. How material arrived from Europe and was translated into Spanish and Portuguese is worthy of more study for the light it would shed on transnational connections and alliances.

The third section examines party structures, including an essay by Víctor Augusto Piemonte on intraparty conflicts in Argentina, with each faction appealing to Moscow for support, which led to a heightened dependency on Moscow. Joaquín Fernández Abara examines debates in Chile over how to approach Juan Perón’s government and whether it was fascist. Sergio Grez Toso studies the actions of the Chilean Communist Party in the 1931 election, an issue that he admits consists of an otherwise minor footnote in communist history. Nevertheless, he effectively explores the debates for their reflection of divisions toward united front strategies that emerged as an imposition of third period “class-against-class” policies.

The book’s fourth and final section turns explicitly to transnational issues. Juan Carlos Yáñez Andrade examines the presence of the Chilean Communist Party in the International Labor Organization archives to build an argument that the Chilean party was not a copy of the one in Moscow. Editor Herrera González’s own essay examines the conflicts that Vicente Lombardo Toledano created within the Mexican Communist Party. Some militants condemned the labor leader as reformist rather than communist even as he consolidated his role as an international labor leader.

Despite the length of this volume (almost 500 pages), it is unreasonable to expect it to be comprehensive. Even so, some of the absences are notable, and they underscore the importance of more work on the Latin American left. Carr highlights some of these gaps in his historiographic introduction, including the important role of anarchist movements. (Fortunately, Geoffroy de Laforcade and Kirwin R. Shaffer [2015] have significantly addressed this shortcoming with their excellent volume In Defiance of Boundaries: Anarchism in Latin American History.) Other shortcomings remain largely unaddressed, including important issues of race and gender. Without any attention to the roles of natives or Afro–Latin Americans, this collection tends to reinforce an image of the left as overwhelmingly male and of European descent.

An outlier and a valuable contribution to this volume and one that seeks to address this historiographic hole is Ana María Cofiño’s chapter on the “red communist women” in Guatemala. Cofiño’s expressed intent is to provide women activists with more visibility, and she admirably achieves this goal. Too often, histories of the left focus on male leadership, and Cofiño demonstrates the important presence of women throughout Guatemala’s history. This includes noted personages such as María Chinchilla, a young teacher whose death in a protest led to Jorge Ubico’s fall in 1944, and Jacobo Arbenz’s wife, María Vilanova, who influenced the president’s leftist ideology, but Cofiño also includes a discussion of less-well-known activists. This chapter is the only one in the book on Central America, and as such it also plays an important role in extending its geographic reach.

In his introduction, Carr calls for “bringing the United States back in” to a study of the Latin American left. Paradoxically, he notes that much of the coordination between Moscow and Latin American communists came through what José Martí famously characterized as the “belly of the beast.” Browder does score some token mentions in this book, but for all of its valuable examination of transnational actors, how this information flowed through New York City to South America is a history that still lacks a proper investigation.

Perhaps in response to Carr’s call to reincorporate the United States into a study of communisms in the Americas, the book closes with a contribution from one of the few non-Latin-American-based scholars. The Chileanist Jody Pavilack contributes a fascinating examination of Henry Wallace’s interactions with leftists in Latin America in the 1940s. In 1946, Chilean leftists helped elect Gabriel González Videla before the president turned rightward (which leads Carr to point to the need for more study of “creole anticommunism”). Pavilack contrasts González Videla’s actions with those of Wallace, who broke from the Harry S. Truman administration and campaigned for the presidency of the United States on a leftist platform. Later, however, Wallace reversed course and renounced his progressive positions as he moved rightward. Pavilack ably contrasts this move with that of the former Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas, who moved leftward after leaving office.

Herrera González is to be commended for assembling an impressive collection of essays that examines the diversity of experiences within Latin American communist movements. One hundred years after the Bolshevik revolution sent shock waves around the world, scholars are still debating its consequences for Latin America. This book excels at providing us with a deeper and better understanding of the interactions among militants, political parties, and intellectuals who operated in a transnational environment with an ever-present anticommunism. Drawing on new and multiple sources of documentation, the contributors to this volume provide new perspectives on historical processes in the formation of Latin American communisms. In the process, this book opens a path to new questions that will inform future research agendas.