Conclusion

Summary

Surveillance, The Cold War, And Latin American Literature is a cultural and aesthetic analysis of the relationship between secret police agencies and the intellectuals and writers in Latin America during the Cold War. It examines the period from 1950 to 1989 from an interdisciplinary perspective, providing an original understanding of how the Cold War produced stories and created ‘truths’ at a national level through its mechanisms of surveillance and control and how that modus operandi transformed the broader society and its culture. It combines analysis of novels, short stories, and poems by Gabriel García Márquez, Pablo Neruda, José Revueltas, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, among others, with spy reports and declassified documents from Mexican, Guatemalan, Chilean, and Uruguayan police archives, as well as the CIA, FBI, and Stasi archives. Surveillance traces how the paradigmatic change that began in the Renaissance with Brunelleschi’s re-invention of perspective radically transformed the human locus of enunciation, allowing for the emergence of a new world vision. This consequence of modernity created a basis for paranoid societies like those that emerged during the Cold War in Latin America.