Waging Ideological War: Anti-Communism and US Foreign Policy in Central America

Abstract

A haunting echo emerges from the solemn warnings today about the potential communist domination of Central America. For more than half a century US officials have harped on a similar theme and have followed it with intervention in the region. During much of this time journalists and scholars focused on the interventions, and treated the alleged threat of communism as little more than a pretext for US domination. The claims of protecting the hemisphere from a communist threat by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, when the US assisted in the overthrow of the Guatemalan government, have been similarly dismissed by most scholars as little more than a weak justification for other American purposes in Central America. Indeed, the anti-communist theme has been repeated so often to cover up the true intentions of the United States in Central America that many analysts have viewed it only as a pretext -and nothing more- for US intervention in the region.