Latin American History: Colonial Era to the Cold War

A comprehensive vocabulary study set covering key figures, concepts, revolutions, and geopolitical developments in Latin American history from the colonial era through the Cold War.

Mexica (Aztecs)

An Indigenous people who established a powerful empire in central Mexico with their capital at Tenochtitlan, which fell to Spanish forces led by Hernán Cortés in 1521.

Francisco Pizarro

A Spanish conquistador who led the conquest of the Inca Empire during the 1530s, captured Cuzco, and founded Lima in 1535.

Encomienda

A Spanish colonial arrangement granting colonists the right to collect tribute and demand labor from designated Indigenous communities, theoretically justified by obligations to protect them and promote Christianity.

Bartolomé de las Casas

A sixteenth-century Spanish Dominican friar who criticized the abuse, violence, and enslavement of Indigenous people by Spanish colonists in the Americas.

Slavery in Latin America

A system of forced labor supporting colonial economies such as sugar plantations and mining, which shaped racial hierarchies and remained legal until 1886 in Cuba and 1888 in Brazil.

Age of Revolutions

A period of political upheaval that included the American Revolution (1776), French Revolution (1789), Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), and Spanish American wars of independence (approximately 1810–1825).

Haitian Revolution (1791–1804)

A revolutionary struggle in the French colony of Saint-Domingue where enslaved and free people of African descent defeated slavery and colonial rule, culminating in independence on January 1, 1804.

Simón Bolívar (1783–1830)

A leader in Spanish American independence who liberated territories that became Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Bolivia, delivered the Angostura Address of 1819, and organized the Congress of Panama.

Monroe Doctrine (1823)

A US foreign-policy declaration warning European powers against establishing new colonies or expanding intervention in the Western Hemisphere, later used to justify US regional hegemony.

Gradual abolition

The process of dismantling slavery in stages rather than immediately freeing every enslaved person, often implemented via Free Womb Laws and age-based emancipation.

Free Womb Laws

Legislation declaring that children born to enslaved mothers after a specified date would be legally free, while frequently requiring them to remain in the service of enslavers until adulthood.

José Martí (1853–1895)

A Cuban writer, intellectual, and independence leader who organized the movement for Cuban independence from Spain and authored the essay 'Our America.'

Mestizaje

Racial and cultural mixture among Indigenous, European, and African populations, which also developed into a nation-building ideology promoting a unified mixed identity.

Racial harmony

The claim that a society has overcome racial conflict or is racially inclusive, which elites often used to obscure continuing disparities in wealth, education, land ownership, and political power.

Mexican Revolution (1910–1920)

A major conflict against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz driven by demands for agrarian reform and political inclusion, which led to the Constitution of 1917.

Emiliano Zapata (1879–1919)

A Mexican revolutionary leader who fought for agrarian reform and communal land restoration, issuing the Plan de Ayala (1911) after breaking with Francisco I. Madero.

Good Neighbor Policy

A 1930s US foreign policy associated with President Franklin D. Roosevelt emphasizing cooperation, trade, and non-intervention in Latin America over armed intervention.

Marshall Plan

A 1948 US economic aid program to rebuild Western Europe after World War II, which caused regional frustration when Latin American nations were denied comparable development support.

El Bogotazo (1948)

A wave of riots and political violence in Bogotá, Colombia, triggered by the April 9, 1948 assassination of popular Liberal politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán during the Ninth International Conference of American States.

Prebisch–Singer thesis

An economic theory arguing that the prices of primary commodities exported by less-industrialized countries decline over the long term relative to the prices of manufactured goods imported from industrialized countries.

Dependency theory

A theory arguing that the global economy is structured through unequal relationships where the industrialized core extracts resources and labor from the less-industrialized periphery.

Long Cold War

Gilbert M. Joseph's concept framing Latin America's twentieth-century conflicts over land, labor, and power as beginning with the 1910 Mexican Revolution rather than solely the postwar US–Soviet rivalry.

Jacobo Árbenz (1913–1971)

Guatemala's democratically elected president from 1951 to 1954 whose agrarian reforms challenged the United Fruit Company and led to his overthrow in a CIA-backed covert operation.

Fidel Castro (1926–2016)

The principal leader of the Cuban Revolution and head of state for decades after 1959 who established a socialist government aligned with the Soviet Union.

Cuban Revolution (1953–1959)

A revolutionary movement that overthrew Fulgencio Batista's government in 1959, evolving into a socialist revolution that expanded public healthcare and education while restricting political opposition.

Bay of Pigs Invasion (1961)

A failed military invasion of Cuba in April 1961 carried out by US-trained Cuban exiles with US support in an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro's government.

Cuban Missile Crisis (1962)

A 13-day confrontation in October 1962 between the US and the Soviet Union over Soviet nuclear missiles stationed in Cuba that brought the superpowers to the verge of nuclear war.

Salvador Allende (1908–1973)

Chile's democratically elected socialist president from 1970 until his death during the military coup led by Augusto Pinochet on September 11, 1973.

Chicago Boys

Chilean economists trained at the University of Chicago who implemented neoclassical free-market policies, including privatization and deregulation, under Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship.

Augusto Pinochet (1915–2006)

The Chilean general who seized power in the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende and ruled as dictator until 1990, using state terror and forced disappearances while reshaping the economy.

Dirty War (Argentina, 1976–1983)

A campaign of state terrorism under Argentina's military dictatorship in which thousands of political dissidents were kidnapped, tortured, and forcibly disappeared.

Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo

An association of Argentine women who began demonstrating publicly in 1977 to demand information regarding their children forcibly disappeared by the military dictatorship.

Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo

An Argentine human rights group established to locate and restore the identities of grandchildren born to detained mothers and illegally taken during the Dirty War.