The Cold War, National Security, and the Military State in South America (1959-1980)

Abstract

The main aim of this paper is to understand the concept and experience of the cold war in South America in the 1960s and 1970s -in the Southern Cone the so-called National Security regimes were effectively developed- and, at the same time, to understand the way in which those regimes created a military State. Archives and oral sources have been researched in different places -Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Israel- for several years with different purposes, all of them linked to the study of the military phenomenon and, after the analysis, it is concluded that, in the total war against communism, the authority of the military state originally founded to protect civil society from authoritarianism, became despotic and tyrannical.