Crucible of Global Pacification

Over the last two centuries, the United States became entangled with Latin America in ways that turned the region into a crucible of global pacification, where a repertoire of counterrevolutionary warfare was co-invented, contested, and remade. In response to Latin America’s consistent insurgent challenges to the interests of both local elites and Washington, pacification emerged as the United States’ key instrument for keeping its hemispheric household in order. Crucible of Global Pacification tracks these efforts to put down rebellions in Latin America and the ways they became central to the construction of U.S. counterinsurgency thinking. From the United States’ first intervention in Latin America in the nineteenth century to our post-9/11 present, Markus-Michael Müller shows how each generation of Washington’s pacification campaigns built on the last, accumulating a body of counterrevolutionary knowledge and methods the United States still relies on. Latin America was not a passive backyard of U.S. power but the crucible where a defining instrument of U.S. global power was forged.