The Cold War was an intensely spatial and geographic project. The Cold War redefined spatial scales of the globe, regions, continents, and the city in terms that emphasised national security and defined shifting frontiers beyond the nation-state as strategic threats. In Latin America, the spatial reimagination of the hemisphere played out differently across the

Region as diverse actors imagined and reimagined the spatial scales and places of Cold War counterinsurgency, intervention, and development. Across the global south, geographic knowledge, including knowledge of resources and minerals, has been an essential intellectual tool of international war and colonial conquest since the sixteen century. Still, we know little about how Cold War geographic knowledges made possible counter-insurgency state violence, U.S. military intervention, and large-scale economic development projects, and the worlds these cartographies erased. Authors in this panel present cutting-edge research on Cold War maps and cartographic technologies including radar-navigation, remote sensing, aerial photography to begin to unpack the construction of Latin American regions, across different spatial scales, and the uses to which these knowledges were deployed. Adrián Lerner explores the construction of a transnational region - “Cold War Amazonia” - through a series of scientific, cartographic, and policy-oriented knowledges that reveals the profound human and environmental impacts of these knowledges. Sebastián Diaz Angel examines a specific cartographic and under-studied cartographic technology, radar technology, by the Brazilian military in mapping the Amazon Basin, and the profound political and environmental conflicts in produced. Frederico Freitas examines U.S specialists’ use of aerial photography to define a new location for the Brazilian capital. Julie Gibbings examines the role of CIA strategic Area Atlases in the construction of a Central American and Caribbean region as spaces of U.S. imperial intervention after the 1954 coup in Guatemala. Together, these papers highlight the construction of a new spatial scales and new regions in ways that redefined national security, development, and the U.S. sphere of influence. This panel engages with these questions as part of a three-session workshop on Science, Technology, and Medicine in Latin America’s Cold War.