Faculty Fellows Lecture Series: Joaquín M. Chávez, History, “Avant-Garde Diplomacy and Cold War Politics in Latin America: The Joint French-Mexican Declaration on El Salvador”
October 12, 2023
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Location
Institute for the Humanities, 153 Behavioral Sciences Building
Address
1007 W. Harrison St., Chicago, IL 60607
Calendar
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This talk examines the historical significance of the Joint French-Mexican Declaration on El Salvador issued on August 28, 1981. As the civil war raged in El Salvador, Mexico and France produced an innovative diplomatic initiative that set the fundamental premises of the peace negotiation that ended the Salvadoran conflict in 1992. The Declaration recognized the FDR-FMLN, the insurgency at war with the ruling Christian Democrat-Military Junta, as “a representative political force willing to assume the obligations and exercise the rights derived from it” and called for a negotiated settlement to end El Salvador’s civil war. In doing so, Mexico and France disagreed with the basic premises of President Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy in El Salvador and prompted a hostile diplomatic response from several Latin American governments. The talk examines this crucial facet of the political and diplomatic history of El Salvador’s Civil War and its reverberations in history of Atlantic and Latin American diplomacy during the 1980s Cold War. It implicitly ponders the largely unanswered historical question of how the Cold War in Latin America ended and the multiple legacies of that global conflict in contemporary societies.
Joaquín M. Chávez is a historian of Latin America with a particular focus on the Cold War, intellectuals, Catholicism, and peace processes in Central America.
Date posted
Jul 5, 2023
Date updated
Sep 22, 2023