The Methods That Proved Efficient in Nablus and Hebron Begin Speaking Spanish: Israel's Counterinsurgent Role in Cold War Latin America

As a number of Latin American governments turned to terror and even genocide by the 1970s and early 80s to quell popular protest movements, some relied extensively on Israeli military exports and knowledge. From airplanes and rifles to military advisers and napalm, private and state-linked Israeli arms dealers sold to some of the worst violators of human rights in Latin American history. Why? What explains the predominantly counterinsurgent role that Israel played during the late stages of Latin America’s Cold War?

In this paper, I explore how Israel locally developed and tested counterinsurgent military hardware and doctrines in the Palestinian Occupied Territories and exported them to different Latin American governments during the 1970s and 80s—especially in Central America. The violent imperatives of reproducing settler colonial occupation in Palestine became a comparative advantage in the global marketplace of arms and counterinsurgent know-how. While most of the historical literature focuses on the role played by the United States, France, (and certain Latin American countries like Argentina and Brazil) in helping suppress reformist and revolutionary movements in the Americas, I argue that Israel formed a crucial node in the global production, exchange, and circulation of counterinsurgency logics and technology—a node with long-lasting impact beyond the Cold War. After supplying death squad regimes in the 1970s and 80s, this arms industry helped create the conditions that have prompted tens of thousands of Central American refugees to flee their homes in the past fifteen years. They fled the consequences of what Guatemalan journalist Victor Perera termed “Uzi diplomacy,” only to encounter a militarized US-Mexico border surveilled by Israeli technology.