Title: Marxism: Latin America | Encyclopedia.com
Headings: Marxism: Latin America
Marxism: Latin America
Marxism: Latin America
Antecedents and Origins
1929 – 1959: International Crises and the Search for Common Ground
Foquismo
The 1970s and After: New Heterodoxies
bibliography

Content: The resulting repression drove many of these parties into semiclandestine status; an attempted insurrection in El Salvador ended in catastrophe, with more than ten thousand killed. In 1935 the rise of fascism prompted the Comintern to call for a "popular front" of proletarian parties and the antifascist bourgeoisie. During World War II, Latin American communist parties also abandoned their earlier anti-imperialism in favor of a broad international alliance against fascism. They also built alliances with right-wing groups and local dictators such as Batista in Cuba and Somoza in Nicaragua. In Chile, the Popular Front of communist, socialist, and radical parties won the presidency in 1938 and pursued a program of moderate reform. In many other countries, however, communist parties lost ground to populist regimes or other left opposition movements. The wholesale repression of communist parties — and the aggressive intervention of the United States — encouraged Latin American communists to continue alliances with liberal and democratic parties in the postwar years. Marxist intellectuals embraced Latin American liberals' age-old enthusiasm for national "development," combining sophisticated critiques of global political economy with vague tropes of modernity. Latin American poverty, they held, stemmed from its economic dependency on the United States, whereby Latin American economies exchanged raw materials for manufactured goods at disadvantageous terms.