Latin American History

Climate change is producing profound changes globally. This environmental history analysis offers a much needed but barely examined ground‐level study of human impacts and responses to climate change over time. It analyzes how people around Peru's Cordillera Blanca mountain range grappled with climate‐induced glacial lake outburst floods and glacier avalanches, which killed approximately 25,000 people since 1941. As survivors grieved, they formed community organizations and demanded state programs to drain dangerous glacial lakes. Yet they rejected hazard zoning in their communities. Peruvian engineers working with miniscule budgets invented innovative strategies to drain dozens of unstable lakes that continue forming in the twenty first century. But hazard mitigation, disaster responses, and climate change adaptation were never just about engineering the Andes to protect vulnerable populations. Local urban and rural populations, engineers, hydroelectric developers, irrigators, tourists, and policymakers all perceived and responded to glacier retreat differently, based on their own view of an ideal Andean world. Disaster prevention projects involved debates about economic development, state authority, race relations, class divisions, cultural values, the evolution of science and technology studies, and shifting views of nature. Over time, the influx of new groups helped transform glaciated mountains into commodities to consume. Locals lost power in the process and today comprise just one among many stakeholders—and perhaps the least powerful. Climate change transformed a region, triggering catastrophes while simultaneously jumpstarting political and economic modernization processes. This book's historical perspective illuminates these trends that would be overlooked in any scientific projections about future climate scenarios.

Franklin Roosevelt's good neighbour policy, coming in the wake of decades of U.S. intervention in Central America, and following a lengthy U.S. military occupation of Nicaragua, marked a significant shift in U.S. policy towards Latin America. Its basic tenets were non-intervention and non-interference. The period was exceptionally significant for Nicaragua, as it witnessed the creation and consolidation of the Somoza government — one of Latin America's most enduring authoritarian regimes, which endured from 1936 to the Sandinista revolution in 1979. Addressing the political, diplomatic, military, commercial, financial, and intelligence components of U.S. policy, this book analyses the background to the U.S. military withdrawal from Nicaragua in the early 1930s. It assesses the motivations for Washington's policy of disengagement from international affairs, and the creation of the Nicaraguan National Guard, as well as debating U.S. accountability for what the Guard became under Somoza. The book challenges the conventional theory that Somoza's regime was a creature of Washington. It was U.S. non-intervention, not interference, the book argues, that enhanced the prospects of tyranny.