Guerrilla Medicine and Disability in Cold War Central America, 1954-1996

Disability was a battleground in Central America’s Cold War, which began with the U.S.-backed overthrow of Guatemala’s democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz in 1954. For four decades, Guatemalans (1960-1996), Nicaraguans (1978-1990), and Salvadorans (1979-1992) fought for hearts and minds. But more than Cold War metaphors, these were vital organs whose debility before mortars, torture, and ideologies prompted a medical Cold War. How does a focus on disability change our understanding of Latin America’s Cold War? Guerrilla Medicine and Disability in Cold War Central America answers this question with the region’s first disability history.

Disability was both a historical experience of citizens' bodies and a lens through which perpetrators of violence viewed their targets. Following U.S. historian Douglas Baynton, I understand disability as a marker of hierarchical relations that is best examined through the social conditions that concentrate stigmatized attributes in particular populations. The social conditions that created disability in Central America included poverty, exploitative labor practices, infrastructural scarcity, and anti-Indigenous and anti-Black medical discourses and practices. War not only exacerbated these social conditions, but also created new disabilities.

Medical care is a crucial part of war. Guerrilla medicine required expertise in amputation, antisepsis, sexually transmitted infections, and diarrhea, but also emergency transportation and communication technologies. This expertise was dispensed from a network of hospitals, mobile clinics, and small first aid kits carried in medics’ backpacks. Counterrevolutionary forces targeted these critical resources on multiple fronts, from air strikes to U.S. Senate hearings. Militaries in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador also promoted their own nutrition, infrastructure, and vaccination programs to undermine the appeal of guerrilla medicine. Health was a military objective and disability was at its core.

Guerrilla Medicine is filled with combatants, medics, social workers, diplomats, nurses, internationalists, politicians, and torturers who all understood that the body was worth fighting for. It uncovers contradictions in projects of technocratic modernism, revolutionary uplift, and democratic restoration. It amplifies disabled people’s responses to these projects. It challenges how we calculate the costs of war and peace.