Israel in Latin America

Over the past year and a half, we have become acutely aware that Israel exports its military knowledge, technology, and weapons around the world, from police departments in the United States to Narendra Modi’s India. Gaza and the West Bank have rightfully been described as imperial laboratories for military technologies and forms of control. However, the historical context that enabled Israel’s position of global dominance and colonial influence has received less public attention. Grounding the urgency of the genocide in historical context strengthens the movement — exposing entrenched systems, recurring patterns, and weak points.

During the Cold War, the United States waged a relentless campaign against democratically elected, left-leaning governments across Latin America. In 1954, a U.S.-backed coup aligned with local interests to overthrow the democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz and suppress left and indigenous movements across the continent. Ten years later, in Brazil, U.S. ambassador and former Harvard professor Lincoln Gordon requested U.S. assistance for coup plotters only four days before they overthrew the democratically elected President João Goulart.

Gordon justified his push for intervention by arguing that President Goulart was plotting a dictatorial seizure of power with help from the Brazilian Communist Party. He urged the U.S. to support the coup plotters to prevent Brazil from becoming “the China of the 1960s,” invoking memories of the 1949 Chinese Revolution and the myth that the United States had “lost” China to communist ideology. This fantasy, rooted in imperial delusions, haunted Democratic Party loyalists like Gordon and fueled their willingness to trample democracy abroad to preserve U.S. dominance. Following the coup in Brazil, military elites installed a dictatorship that lasted 21 years.

Less than two months after the coup, however, Israeli officials were already making moves to build relations with the new military government. The Israeli ambassador to Brazil sent a rather optimistic report back home, foreseeing Brazil’s departure from the non-aligned movement and toward a closer relation with the United States — an advantage which Israel hoped to exploit. Only a few months later, Israel signed a nuclear cooperation agreement with the Brazilian junta, an alliance that lasted for a little over a decade.

While Israeli cooperation with Brazil started to die down by the late 1970s — driven by Brazil’s economic interest in cheaper Arab oil and a desire to improve diplomatic relations — Israel only increased its presence and cooperation elsewhere in Latin America. Israel armed the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza up until his ousting by the Sandinista Revolution in July of 1979. After Somoza’s fall, Israel trained and supplied weapons to the Contras — a U.S.-backed brutal counter-revolutionary militia attacking Nicaragua from Honduras and Costa Rica — until the peace agreements of 1990. In one telling episode, Israel captured weapons from the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) during its 1982 land invasion of Lebanon and handed them over to the CIA, who then funneled them to the Contras, thereby turning tools of Palestinian resistance into instruments of anti-revolutionary violence.

With U.S. support, Israel also provided assistance to right-wing governments in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. It shared counterinsurgency training and knowledge that spurred the Guatemalan genocide, killing over 160,000 Maya peoples. In a chilling 1989 interview with PBS’s Frontline, an Israeli shooting instructor bragged about training every single police officer in Guatemala, describing himself and his services as the gift that opened doors in the government. That same instructor would later face serious accusations from the Colombian government for training cartel-affiliated militias. This case received renewed attention in October 2023 when Colombian president Gustavo Petro condemned Israeli operatives like lieutenant colonel Yair Klein, responsible in part for decades of paramilitary violence, and senior Mossad operative Rafi Eitan, who orchestrated the slaughter of a liberatory leftist political party in the 1980s. Petro declared that these men would have no place in Colombia’s story of peace, stating boldly, “One day, the army and government of Israel will ask us for forgiveness for what their men did on our land, unleashing genocide.”

The stories of Brazil, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Colombia are just the tip of the iceberg of Israel’s export of repression during the Cold War. These cases paint a better understanding of how a small settler-colonial state came to dominate the global market of “defense” training — a euphemism for counterinsurgency and military technologies designed to crush liberation movements and inflict violence upon Indigenous people. Latin America formed only a single part of Israel’s global defense entanglements, which included cooperation with Mobutu Sese Seko’s brutal regime in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore. To truly understand Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, we must understand that our struggles are connected.