AHA Session 166
Conference on Latin American History 37
Conference on Latin American History 37
Saturday, January 9, 2027: 8:30 AM-10:00 AM
Napoleon Ballroom C1 (Sheraton New Orleans, 3rd Floor)
Chair:
Alison J. Bruey, University of North Florida
Papers:
Comment:
Alison J. Bruey, University of North Florida
Session Abstract
The popular image of German connections with Latin America’s Southern Cone has long been dominated by the escape of some of the Holocaust’s major masterminds to Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and other countries in the region to avoid prosecution for their crimes. Recent scholarly approaches emphasize polycentrism, mobility, hybridity, transnational advocacy, and tolerance but also settler colonialism and forms of intolerance similar to that practiced by other European colonial powers, as alternative frameworks to examining relations between the German-speaking regions and Latin America’s Southern Cone in the twentieth century. With the historiographies of Latin America and Germany being rewritten under the influence of the global turn, it is a propitious time for a panel bringing three scholars working at the forefront of this intellectual project. H. Glenn Penny’s paper will discuss the role of German migrants in modernizing the Chilean Andes through settlement, scientific exploration, and economic exploitation as a touristic site, but also environmental preservation. William Gray will explore the German environmentalist movement’s successful campaign to pressure conservative leaders such as Helmut Kohl to institutionalize environmental protections in German-Brazilian relations, a win that underscored the unequal power relation between the countries. Felix A. Jiménez Botta analyses how West Germany’s political and economic elites worked to influence Argentina’s democratization after 1983, seeing it as a crucial test case for democracy in the region. But they also did so with an eye to ensuring that democratization did not become excessive, for instance, by damaging West Germany’s extensive economic interests in the country. The panel is well suited for the AHA, which hosts the Conference on Latin America and the Central European History Society, allowing for exchanges between scholars that might not otherwise meet.
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