Environment under the gun: literature and environmentalism in Cold War Central America

This dissertation explores how Central American poets reinterpret both the political, historical, and cultural value of landscapes that were devastated by new political, economic, and international military governmental policy that coincided with the Cold War. By examining environmentally engaged literature produced between the 1950s and 1990s in Central America, I elucidate how ecological paradigms shifted in the face of North American military, economic, and environmental intervention. The cases of the CIA-led Guatemalan coup in 1954, the Sandinista victory in Nicaragua in 1979, and the Mayan genocide of the 1980s constitute rallying points around which Central American authors renegotiate how humans interact with the environment. Their literary output encapsulates the varied historical and environmental results of anthropogenesis in both Western and indigenous cultures. Authors restructure the political ecology of their respective countries and the fundamental place of humans in nature. Their works reflect changes in environmental history, anti-capitalism, ecotourism, genocide, and indigeneity outside of traditional binary definitions of the Cold War that showcase the inherent contradictions in the capitalist promise of modernization and human prosperity. The tangible consequences of the Cold War manifested through Civil Wars and intense environmental degradation, especially throughout the 1970s and 1980s, led writers to challenge the traditional, Western relationship between humans and nonhumans. I examine Central American poets who witnessed the ecological repercussions of the Cold War inscribe into their how nonhumans suffered and questioned how nonhumans responded to their polluted and destroyed environments. Several Nicaraguan writers who published texts close to the Sandinista revolution recognized the potential for nonhumans to collaborate in human politics and imbued them with agency. Indigenous publications from the 1990s exemplify a reflective and meta-poetic transition away from Cold War ideologies. These works contribute to global discussions surrounding land proprietorship and nonhuman subjectivity by challenging traditional Cold War understanding of nature. Their work represents how a variety of Mayan ontologies understand the implications of genocide and ecocide that resulted from the Cold War beyond the global division between East and West. I conclude that one of the tenets of Cold War ideology that necessarily leads to environmental degradation is the North American discourse of security, which transformed Cold War anxieties into the War on Drugs and furthered economic practices that jeopardize ecological welfare in Latin America.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference