Introduction^{Footnote 1}

Near the Honduran border, El Salvador’s Museo de la Revolucion sits atop a hill in the quiet, breath-takingly mountainous town of Perquin. Unsurprisingly, it hosts weaponry, hagiography, and cultural artifacts from the country’s 1980–1992 civil war. A display of international solidarity posters boasts ephemera from some prominent allies: Cuba, the Soviet Union, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and progressive American church groups. It also, perhaps more curiously, contains a tribute to leaders within the African National Congress and South West African Peoples’ Organization. San Salvador’s museum to slain Jesuit priests similarly houses robes, written liturgies, and other religious paraphernalia from central and southern Africa. That southern Africa has become integral to ways in which Salvadorans remember the attempted revolution that ended in a stalemate is as informative as it is surprising. After all, during the 1990s, when majority rule came to southern Africa as ceasefires and peace accords came to Central America, the world imagined the two spaces quite differently.

Within El Salvador, the ruling FMLN has remembered the revolution as continuous, Marxist, and global. Within southern Africa, as idealistic post-liberation politics have given way to difficult realities, the freedom struggle’s global dimensions seem less prominent in public discourse than do conversations centered on localized struggles. Thus, that these points of remembrance still converge perhaps speaks less to contemporary memorialization than to the unique circumstances of the 1970s and 1980s that drove these solidarities. They tell us not so much how movements consciously view themselves in the present, but how they framed themselves as allies transcending a common geopolitical structure, thus making the contemporary juxtaposition even starker. These South-South exchanges help challenge and reframe existing epistemologies concerning the Atlantic; they move us away from the essentialisms that have often framed “solidarity” to mean common cause within a necessary condition of Cold War decolonization.

While southern Africa’s National Liberation Movements – those internationally recognized as their people’s sole representatives and those that would eventually become state parties – directed comparatively small levels of financial and tactical resources to Central America, contact with the region proved important in shaping SWAPO’s and the ANC’s self-perception and actualization. It existed on the cusp of changing southern African dynamics and reflected a shift in non-aligned solidarities. These solidarities also failed to fit neatly into some of the discursive Atlantic’s main strands – namely, racial or ethnic commonalities, as well as those based upon a common experience with imperialism. This paper explores these trans-Atlantic connections and attempts to explain their significance to historiographies on both sides of the ocean, drawing upon research in southern African and American archives. It argues that the now-abandoned subaltern self-conception of southern African movements drew heavily off Central American connections and that this continues to permeate Central American views of revolution. Ultimately, it asks what these solidarities tell us about the historiographies of non-aligned alignments and Cold War trans-oceanic linkages, and fits them into discussions over the nature of the discursive Atlantic.

Historical Frames and Historiographies

Scholarship on the foreign policy of the ANC (African National Congress) and SWAPO (South West African People’s Organisation) includes expansive and ever-expanding studies on Cuba and the greater Caribbean, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. In exploring the relationship between a Pacific coast country with little ancestral connection to Africa – fewer enslaved Africans came to El Salvador than to other parts of the region – it urges scholars to view a Third World solidarity that did not necessarily follow racial or Cold War alliance lines and traces Central America’s increasingly prominent position within ANC and SWAPO rhetoric. Both movements represented big-tent iterations within their respective and diffuse freedom struggles, and shifting relations between Moscow and Washington, of course, also contributed to the degree that nonaligned solidarities came to supersede those of the big powers.

While Central America may not, in fact, have proven as central to the ANC’s and SWAPO’s international outreach as other parts of the Americas, investigating its position within the diplomatic imagination yields important insights into the sometimes fluid nature of South-South relationships during the Cold War. This story tells us a bit about how Third World movements, nations, and states harnessed rhetoric that helped best relate to allies with whom, on the surface, they may have shared few commonalities. It illuminates the potential that National Liberation Movements’ leaders from various societal segments saw for not just solidarity during freedom struggles, but for eventual state-to-state diplomacy between independent Third World nations. Indeed, ANC and SWAPO support for El Salvador in a sense came full-circle as it followed 1979 Nicaraguan Sandinista victory, which had provided such inspiration to African movements. Thus, what becomes evident is the degree to which the relationships existed within their own unique context which, yes, included the Cold War and imperialism, but on occasion elided them as well.

In many ways, this framework presents a natural culmination of several decades of such studies. It moves us toward the direction for which Paul Gilroy argued, contesting essentialisms about race and ethnicity or politics and power within the Atlantic world. It undermines white supremacy by rejecting a structure where connections centered wholly upon either race or imperial power. Yet, it also asks that we re-think much of the last two decades’ scholarship – or at least add to it. Refuting Gilroy, late twentieth century scholars often problematized binaries while still operating within them. As Frederick Cooper and others argue in the iconic Confronting Historical Paradigms, the study of Africa and Latin America yields constant contrast and enhances our ability to understand paradigmatic shifts – both writ large and within individual movements.^{Footnote 2} Cooper and colleagues focus their study on labor systems and their role in crafting a Global South. In constructing these boundaries of Africa-America interaction, they largely focused on areas where similar racial demographics and legal conceptions of race led historical actors to craft comparative social, then political, narratives. This is most evident, of course, in the work of George Frederickson, John Cell, and fellow transnationalist titans. Scholars such as Keisha Blaine, Adam Ewing, Minkah Makalani, and Robert Vinson have embraced Gilroy’s call to harness the Atlantic as a model of black discursive empowerment. Their studies accurately portray the spaces that so many pan-Africanist movements created and operated within, where race served as a foundational tie; yet the cooperation between southern African and Central American guerilla groups extended far beyond – and sometimes excluded completely – racial or ethnic commonalities.^{Footnote 3}

As the literature moves forward, these solidarity frames should widen. Christopher Lee and others have more recently pointed out that much of the literature focusing on South-South cooperation during the era of decolonization discusses Afro-Asian solidarity leading up to and emanating from the Bandung Conference.^{Footnote 4} The conference sought to create an alternative diplomatic space for countries seeking decolonization and non-alignment, but its actors’ rhetoric existed explicitly within a Cold War framework. Jawaharlal Nehru, for instance, seized upon this throughout much of his speech, discussing the potential for world nuclear annihilation that the standoff could bring. Yet, he also sought to operate outside of this framework, intoning that “If I join any of these big groups I lose my identity…. That is the position. It is not an academic position; it is not a position of discussing ideologies; nor is it a position of discussing past history. It is looking at the world as it is today.”^{Footnote 5} Thus, while the Cold War may have overhung these interactions, Nehru grappled explicitly with the reality that binary hegemonies governing global politics must be contested, even as they were acknowledged.

In large part, the subsequent solidarities resulted from similar historical timelines in Africa and Asia; Latin America had, for the most part, undergone independence struggles during the nineteenth century, though continued neocolonial meddling undermined this. Its concerns, and therefore place within the larger Global South, may have made it a bit of an outlier in the larger Third World. Additionally, Latin America represented a liminal region; where some scholars have argued that Bandung and its aftermaths based much solidarity upon racial heritage, the region stood out as being viewed (at least by many people of African or Asian descent) as white and primarily (at least by many pale Americans and Europeans) as non-white. Much of the region, then, related to the rest of the world from an intermediate perspective between former colonial powers and nation-states emerging from colonialism. And in the absence of Bandung and other meetings centered around “great men,” connections between Latin America and decolonizing territories took on a different timbre.^{Footnote 6} Within the framework of throwing off European rule, many Global South leaders viewed the region as holding a long-standing political independence.

But independence becomes, perhaps, deceptive, as it ushered in the era of Banana Republics and other neo-colonial structures that dramatically impacted agency within the region. US interventionism increased from its already-high baseline in the wake of the 1959 Cuban Revolution and subsequent fears of communist takeover in neighboring states. Perhaps, then, southern Africa and Central America reflect a rejection of North-South or East-West binaries, rather than a continuation of them. Lee’s work calls for both an incorporation of Latin American relationships into studies on Afro-Asian solidarities and a rethinking of patterns of interaction.^{Footnote 7} Given different decolonization timelines, then, these interactions may both reflect and refract a larger pattern of globalization.

Piero Gleijeses has expanded this avenue of study, elucidating the connections between Cuba and Africa and reflecting, at least partially, a sphere-of-influence, if not quite colonial, desire on the part of the former.^{Footnote 8} His works reflect what Partha Chatterjee, dialoging with Benedict Anderson, has viewed as a temporal shift from the 1960s and 1970s, when violence still seemed a feature of decolonization, as it had been in colonialism, to the later 1970s and beyond, when ethnic, religious, or political divisions between competing groups of Africans, Asians, or Latin Americans served in common Western discourse as “the reason why people in the Third World killed each other.”^{Footnote 9} As this became evident, solidarity work in the late 1970s and 1980s largely shifted away from currencies of race alone, as activists explored intertwined identities such as those forged by decolonizing countries within the Third World, and Cold War tensions between Moscow and Washington receded in rhetorical importance, though not always in fact, to much of the globe. Additionally, southern Africa – and Namibia in particular – relied upon internationalist solidarities for struggle legitimization and material support, but found itself competing for attention with Central American conflicts, Euromissiles,^{Footnote 10} and other objects of United States interest within that same geopolitically dichotomous context.^{Footnote 11}

Recent scholarship has yielded some insights that might help to frame an Africa-Latin America paradigm. While Gleijeses and others have long discussed the centrality of armed struggle to southern Africa’s emergence from minority rule, Roger Southall explains this as the central feature in the region’s parties.^{Footnote 12} “International solidarity,” he explains, “was to prove crucial to all anti-colonial struggles but reached its apogee in the support given to the liberation struggles in southern Africa.”^{Footnote 13} This support extended largely to southern Africa, but also emanated from, providing justification and nation-building capacity for the official liberation movements, as Christine Hatzky deftly reminds us.^{Footnote 14} Yet, the literature on southern Africa as recipient remains wider than that of purveyor. While Central America may not have undergone explicitly anti-colonial struggles during the 1980s, its receipt of support from fellow Soviet-bloc or non-aligned countries in the fight against largely US-backed rightist movements, did mimic many of these patterns.

Hauke Dorsch describes this two-way social interaction in “Black or Red Atlantic” – to whose title this article alludes – investigating the agency of Mozambican students shuttling back and forth between home, East Germany, and Cuba.^{Footnote 15} Significantly, Dorsch adds to our understanding of Gilroy’s foundational Black Atlantic, portraying the ocean as a causeway for Africans and Latin Americans of similar ideologies.^{Footnote 16} The agency that Dorsch’s sometimes apolitical, migratory characters exercise is not always ideological, but often pragmatic. In this scene, movement itself represents resistance, whether or not actors view it as such. Such transnational characters create a new space that defies and redefines the ability to act against or within colonial structures.

Thus, while southern African support for El Salvador’s leftist guerilla leaders may have been framed as largely ideological, it also represented the (perhaps limited) possible; it signaled an “African authenticity” based not upon shared blood, or even always shared ideology, but upon shared agency on the part of the Davids upon the Goliaths. Namibian and South African liberation movements related to Salvadoran or other Central American ones not because of common African ancestry, but because of opportunities the latter provided the former to serve as donor or visionary, rather than recipient of material and ideological aid. Thus, the imaginative connections allowed for hopeful future-state diplomacy. Within these connections, visions of freedom were, at least on a theoretical level, realized.

While Dorsch expands upon Armitage’s concept of a Red Atlantic based upon the connections of centuries of seafaring laborers,^{Footnote 17} he also struggles with this concept as one wholly connotative of shared ideologies among Communist bloc sympathizers, rather than among non-aligned actors. “Pragmatic Atlantic” does not pack quite the level of panache. Yet, as Klein and Mackenthun remind us, that Atlantic became a logical meeting place more often than a line of division. The ocean’s connective power, they argue, was “not merely psychological or metaphorical, as its frequent use as a literary motif might suggest – but material and very real.”^{Footnote 18} Indeed, liberation movements transmitted supplies, people, and ideas across the vast space many times over.

OPSAAAL (Organizacion de Solidaridad con los Pueblos de Asia, Africa, y America Latino)

Both the ANC and SWAPO, of course, largely justified their opposition to domestic racist structures through internationalism, culminating with official UN recognition of representative status for both. This undergirded the liberation movements’ abilities to garner international support in the face of domestic repression. Bandung, formal Launchpad of the Non-Aligned Movement and a Worldwide Anti-Apartheid Movement centered around Nehru’s emphasis on decolonization and non-aligned solidarities, ensured that efforts to combat minority rule in southern Africa became a non-aligned cause as often as a Moscow- or Washington-backed one. Following Bandung, Afro-Asian nations held 1957 and 1960 solidarity conferences; at the 1963 iteration, delegates met in Moshi, Tanzania – then site of nascent independence and soon thereafter of Julius Nyerere’s Ujaama and ANC exile offices. For the first time, as Manual Barcia documents, “Latin American delegates were first invited to participate as observers. Not surprisingly, one of the main resolutions of the Conference was that of expanding solidarity to Latin America and its struggle against US imperialism.”^{Footnote 19} Between the 1963 meeting, when Afro-Asian nations seemed to view Latin America as undergoing re-colonization in the form of neo-imperial US hegemony and 1967, when liberation movement leaders formed the Organizacion de Solidaridad con los Pueblos de Asia, Africa, y America Latino (OPSAAAL), this perception shifted dramatically. The American blockade against Cuba and continued American interventionism that escalated local conflicts into Cold War battles catapulted Latin America, in the minds of many delegates, from an independent region to one undergoing increased colonial repression; organizations such as the Black Panther Party, representing internally colonized peoples, also sent observers. One solidarity paper reported growing Afro-Latin work in 1968, writing that “[t]he people of the world will continuously advance their revolutionary cause for liquidating all the monsters.”^{Footnote 20} These monsters included not just the capitalism of Western powers, but also the state-party Communism of Eastern ones.

Within this context, some scholars point out that the ANC in particular remained a liminal figure. Though the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) is often conflated with Afro-Asian solidarity, the two often differed. At Khartoum, for instance, delegates focused primarily on non-governmental organizations and not National Liberation Movements, which they viewed as often communist-leaning; National Liberation Movements, for their part, grew increasingly dissatisfied with the strategic use of “world public opinion” by the mid-1960s, thus desiring more concrete solidarities.^{Footnote 21} Additionally, the Afro-Asian solidarity movement to which the ANC belonged often competed with the NAM, within which it did not officially belong. The latter favored already-formed states over emerging ones.^{Footnote 22} As Afro-Asian supporters debated whether Soviet “anti-imperialism” actually reflected “anti-colonialism,” given the country’s Euro-style international policies, nations such as Cuba that sought to join solidarity efforts despite previous Soviet interactions often found resistance. In Havana in 1968, the ANC served as one of the country’s main supporters.^{Footnote 23} This served as culmination of a long process whereby the ANC and comparable parties had adopted socialist teachings and goals while struggling with, and ultimately rejecting much of, the way these teachings manifested within Soviet politics.

While first- and second-wave historiographies have paid attention to the National Liberation Movements’ efforts to garner worldwide support as both tactically and materially important, Vladimir Shubin argues that this may be overplayed. Though rhetorical ties may have grown during the 1970s, he argues, these did not yield substantive connections. In fact, during that decade, Oliver Tambo lamented that ANC internationalism often seemed to be the work of “one man” – himself – and not part of a coordinated, large-scale effort.^{Footnote 24} Additionally, as Thomas notes, the 1970s diverted resources away from some of the National Liberation Movements recognized in the 1960s and operating underground, as “[i]n the wake of the Soweto uprising and the rise of the Black Consciousness Movement, the Non-Aligned Movement did not wish to choose the winners in the South African revolution if the recognized liberation movements were making little progress.”^{Footnote 25} Given the ever-changing dynamics of the diplomatic spaces it frequented, then, the ANC turned increasingly to National Liberation Movement-to-independent country diplomatic relations during the 1970s; these required less coordination and increased flexibility. In states such as El Salvador, where the Cold War loomed large but substantive engagement from the Non-Aligned Movement or other Third World powers lagged, the movement found a vacuum receptive to its influence. Liberation theologians labeled as Marxists represented an ideal space for acting as equal, and even leader, rather than subaltern. As this unfolded, rhetorical connections became increasingly important, paving the way for the intended and more substantive material ones.

Transnational Solidarities in the 1980s

Precise language from the 1960s, however, and particularly the word “liquidated/liquidado,” as the Afro-Asian Journalist wrote, carried through in SWAPO/ANC correspondence, as well as general OPSAAAL notes. Olaf Palme, for instance, used it shortly before his 1986 assassination, saying that “Apartheid cannot be reformed; it has to be liquidated.”^{Footnote 26} In 1985, OPSAAAL had used similar rhetoric to speak of US intervention in Central America, noting that:

In this vein, it seems clear that in the following decades, Namibian officials continued to view Afro-Latin solidarity as anti-imperialist, rather than fully aligned with either communist or anti-communist ideologies. In the wake of Cuba’s Angolan work, both SWAPO and the ANC sent cadres to Central America to train the region’s insurgent guerillas. A SWAPO memo that seems to originate the early 1980s argues that, “[t]rue to type, imperialism and its lackeys are trying to shift the world public opinion away from this crisis by using the progressive countries of the Third World and the National Liberation Movements, as scapegoats to be unjustly vilified as presumed enemies of so-called world peace and political stability.”^{Footnote 28} Though it seems unlikely that SWAPO conceptualized this indirect imperialism as outright colonialism, the rightist shift of Western governments during the Reagan and Thatcher administrations of the decade provided plenty of fodder for these comparisons. Additionally, the memo mentions Namibia as “for almost 15 years now the unique, special and direct responsibility of the United Nations. It is the only piece of earth which is under the direct sovereignty of the United Nations, with the UN Council for Namibia having been charged with the legal administering authority over the Territory until genuine, national independence is achieved.”^{Footnote 29} El Salvador, for instance, did not hold the same direct administration status, yet UN troop engagement and responsibilities within the country increased during the 1980s. As President Duarte’s rightist government increasingly clashed with leftist guerilla troops, UN presence in and jurisdiction over Morazan, San Salvador, and other parts of the country increased. This coincided with the failed Namibian peace talks, South African Defense Force Raid of Cassinga – Angola’s refugee settlement – and resurgence of South Africa’s populist internal resistance.

Additionally, 1980 – and the beginning of El Salvador’s largest conflict phase – seems to mark an ANC change point. In a 1980 address to Cuban workers, Tambo thanked socialist countries such as the Soviet Union and Cuba for their assistance in the South African freedom struggle, noting that its international dimensions had “gained momentum” as a result. This attribution positioned southern Africa as a solidarity recipient. When he named particular countries, however, he cited non-aligned nations such as Chile, El Salvador, Uruguay, and Argentina as “struggling to free their countries from fascist dictatorships. Puerto Rico’s struggle to free itself from United States colonial domination also has our full support.”^{Footnote 30} He continued to mention Palestine, East Timor, and Western Sahara as in need of solidarity. This turn from the ANC as desiring support to lending it coincides with a rise in global interest in the southern African struggle in the wake of late 1970s events such as the Soweto Massacre, Steve Biko’s murder, and ultimately stalled talks between South Africa, the United States, Cuba, and Angola in an attempt to bring about Namibian independence. It came, also, at a pivotal moment following Angola and Mozambique’s decolonization and in the midst of Zimbabwean Lancaster House talks, all of which contributed to a shift in ANC and SWAPO within the global diplomatic imaginary. Scholars have increasingly treated the late 1970s, following the birth of Black Consciousness, as a turning point for anti-apartheid and anti-colonialist movements. We can add to this list of changes the agency National Liberation Movements exercised through supporting what they seemed to view as movements less sophisticated than themselves.

Just a year before, OPSAAAL executives meeting in Costa Rica had called for an end to South African occupation of Namibia, framing the UN’s seeming inability to enforce Resolution 435 to “perspectives for peace and progress of humanity as well.”^{Footnote 31} That delegates chose Namibia, which had since the 1946 beginning of South Africa’s mandate, occupied a great deal of UN attention, as indicative of global trends also perhaps speaks to the centrality that SWAPO and ANC leadership came to see themselves occupying.

By the mid-1980s, National Liberation Movements had taken this solidarity extension much to heart. During this period, the religiously-oriented South African Outlook published a special edition, replete with cover story and several pieces of reporting, focused on El Salvador.^{Footnote 32} Placido Endermine’s “The Path to Calvary,” featured as the publication’s “Outlook of the Month,” drew economic connections between southern Africa and Latin America. In an impassioned writing on the life of recently assassinated Archbishop Oscar Romero, the author derived lessons for South African churches, intoning that “its (church’s) role is to keep alive the hope that the people have in their own historical march forward.”^{Footnote 33} He identified Romero as a shepherd, moving through the milieu of a world bifurcated into East and West, wealthy and impoverished. Thus, the liberation theologies that the US bloc had regarded as Marxist became portrayed throughout the pages as a unifying force absent of Cold War affiliations. Prominent pastor and theologian Allan Boesak again drew the global comparison in a published account of his Peasants Revolt commemorative speech. Citing prophetic traditions of the Old Testament, Boesak illustrated a contrast between the First and Third Worlds, calling the former “blind” to economic injustice. He said that:

American priest William C. Thiesenhusen assessed El Salvador’s land reform program, noting that the government initiative would likely fail. Thiesenhusen traced the importance of land ownership and reform in both Central America and southern Africa in the wake of the 1913 Natives Land Act, portraying this physical space as something that both transcended and was re-shaped by colonialism. Within such rhetoric, the ground itself became an indigenous force capable of defeating Western agents – at least on an individual level – while still being claimed on a collective level. Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, an article labeling Angola as the “El Salvador of Africa” cited the connections between right-wing American efforts, battles between East and West, and territorial sovereignty. The article suggests that, like Angola, El Salvador would become an iconic Cold War battleground, where geographically distant and ideologically disparate countries fought in a harsh and unforgiving physical landscape, with guerilla groups and standing armies jockeying for power of both the country and larger geopolitical spheres. Citing the Organization of African Unity’s (OAU) concerns over US incursion into El Salvador and, subsequently, Angola, the author fretted that American military incursions into Central America and the Caribbean served as prelude to more intense ones across Africa.^{Footnote 35} As Boesak indicated, El Salvador alone did not serve this role; southern African groups had also focused attention on Nicaragua and Guatemala during the preceding years. Supportive though this may sound, it also reinforces the degree to which perhaps even sympathetic Americans problematically viewed solidarities as reinforcing North-South dichotomies.

By the end of the decade, the liberal and predominantly white Black Sash adopted and promoted concerns similar to those that National Liberation Movements expressed. In “Lessons from Latin America,” David Fig wrote that the two regions shared several differences, yet also a large and striking number of similarities.^{Footnote 36} He concluded that Central America provided not only opportunity for African assistance, but also inspiration, noting that “[w]e should therefore be mindful of the Latin American experience, not only because of the excesses committed by the military regimes, but because despite the infliction of great suffering, these very excesses provoked a groundswell of opposition sufficient, in some cases, to bring an end to military rule.” Fig’s categorization of South Africa as a military regime alongside Duarte-era El Salvador and Allende-era Chile reflects sentiments during the late 1980s States of Emergency. These declarations from the State President allowed for increased policing and suspension of civil liberties, providing plenty of fodder for South Africans to compare the country to military regimes. The aforementioned evidence indicates that these connections were likely more rhetorical than material, but they remain striking.

Convergent Rhetoric

While many of El Salvador’s records remain sealed, a few pieces of material culture and public history exhibits do provide insight into religious Salvadoran views of southern Africa. The museum of the Centro de los Jesuites at the Universidad CentroAmericana in San Salvador, much like the museum in Perquin, houses artifacts from “the churches in Africa,” alongside an homage to Monsignor Muzibirwa, the Congolese bishop, “martyr and prophet” who died in the 1990s. Lutheran bishop Medardo Gomez, targeted for assassination on the night of the Jesuits’ killings noted that “[w]e looked often to the liberation theologies of the southern Africans.”^{Footnote 37} Liberation theology has become nearly synonymous in some ways with Central America, yet Gomez’s comment belies the degree to which the region’s prominent theologians viewed it as a transnational endeavor.

Despite this largely leftist tendency to look toward solidarity, some Salvadoran leaders viewed the civil war as existing – contrasting with the ANC and SWAPO’s internationalist stances – as a purely domestic issue. Movimiento Nacional Revolucioario (MNR) leader Guillermo Ungo told his cadre during peace negotiations that a national problem required national solutions, unhindered by global meddling.^{Footnote 38}

But as (particularly) the (guerilla movement) relationship between the two regions grew, like so many Cold War connections, against the backdrop of third parties. While Cuban intervention in Latin America had largely failed during the 1960s and early 1970s, it likely saw an indirect resurgence through possible government facilitation of South-South connections. In 1976, Havana hosted a conference on Pan-Africanism, capitalizing upon the disturbing images emanating from South Africa in the wake of the Soweto Massacre. These played out, amplified through Cuban news outlets, in real time as conference participants watched.

Perhaps drawing from southern African rhetoric, Fidel Castro told internationalist volunteers that:

The 1980s of course, became to Americans synonymous with culture wars and other battles over ideology that played out in both the country’s domestic and international policy. In 1984, Reagan noted on radio that “El Salvador has become the stage for a bold attempt by the Soviet Union, Cuba and Nicaragua to install communism by force throughout the hemisphere.” He asserted that the US would do anything necessary to protect against this perceived aggression.^{Footnote 40} In other foreign policy circles, rightist factions backed “constructive engagement” with South Africa’s apartheid regime and other anti-communist measures, while leftists agitated for less intervention in both southern Africa and Central America. By 1986, for instance, the American Committee on Africa boycotted a tour entitled “Soweto to San Salvador,” aiming to “demonstrate links between repression in Central America and Southern Africa and the ways US policy interacts with both.”^{Footnote 41} Throughout the year, the group continued to refer to Angola’s UNITA as “the South African sponsored ‘contras’ of Angola.”^{Footnote 42} It used the Sharpeville Massacre’s anniversary to renounce contra connections, arguing that Reagan policy opposing leftist groups in Central America originated in southern Africa.

Other western nations linked the conflicts as well. West Germans, for instance, often publicized and linked anticolonial struggles generally. Reinhart Kossler argues that Vietnam occupied much of activists’ time, along with “to some extent, Nicaragua. Southern Africa was unique because of the tenacity of apartheid and the long-term perspective this required of those who saw a need for solidarity action in fighting the racist regime.”^{Footnote 43} Despite these contrasts, Kossler also places Nicaragua and southern Africa alongside El Salvador and Guatemala as thorny issues that did not fit neatly into US or Soviet binaries. Indeed, they often seemed to elide even their own binaries.