Mateo Jarquín

Walk into any bookstore and you’ll see books and newspapers asking the same question: Is democracy in crisis? To explore this, Mateo Jarquín, a PhD candidate in history, turns to an oft-overlooked historical period: the revolutions that occurred in Latin America during the Cold War.

In virtually every country in the region, armed leftist groups, inspired by the Cuban Revolution, were attempting to take power from conservative dictatorships. All of these movements failed, except for one. “In my country, Nicaragua, the Sandinista National Liberation Front came to power in 1979 after overthrowing the US-backed Somoza dictatorship,” says Jarquín

The Nicaraguan Revolution had an oversized effect on the world: “Ronald Reagan called it a national security threat, while Noam Chomsky and college students were calling themselves Sandinistas,” says Jarquín. Because, in part, it elicited such passionate involvement from international actors, “the Sandinista revolution unleashed a series of conflicts in Central America that resulted in a devastating period of violence in the 1980s.”

Part of Jarquín’s work involves a reconsideration of the Cold War, which is often thought of as a non-violent, geopolitical conflict between the US and the Soviet Union. “I take a broader view, understanding it as an ideological struggle between capitalism and communism that took place primarily in the Third World,” he says. This struggle involved violence largely felt in the Global South, which accounted for 99 percent of war-induced casualties in the second half of the 20th century.

For Jarquín, this violence needs to be understood because it tells us so much about how democracy emerges. “By the end of the 1980s, both anti-communist and leftist governments realized that the carnage had to end,” he says. “As a result, they turned their countries into democracies,” Jarquín explains. But democracy didn’t spread because it was an ideal form of government; rather it emerged as compromise to defuse the ideological polarization that produced civil wars and invited intervention from foreign actors. “It was not designed to solve the other problems that we have in Latin America,” Jarquín explains. These problems—inequality, security, economic growth—create the kind of discontent that causes people to flirt with authoritarianism and wonder if democracy failed to live up to its promises.