Fearing the loss of land and spread of communist ideas, powerful American businessmen convinced the US to work with opposition leaders in Guatemala to overthrow the socialist government.Top: the change in borders in eastern Europe following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Then in the 1950s Guatemalan leaders gave farm land back to a half a million poor people and allowed workers to organize for better wages (similar to land reform in China). In the 1940s, discontent led to election victories for socialists seeking more equitable distribution of resources. Local banana farmers were forced out of business. By the middle of the twentieth century, the American-based United Fruit Company became the largest single land-owner in the country. Two percent of people owned three quarters of the farm land. In Guatemala, indigenous Mayas were marginalized in favor of a minority of European descendants. Three centuries of Spanish colonial rule left Latin American communities divided along ethnic and economic lines. On to another continent (same Cold War, though). While this US strategy had short-term benefits of weakening the Soviet Union, it also helped bring to power Islamic fundamentalists who suppressed women's rights and ruled through threat of violence. This conflict lasted nearly a decade, bankrupting the USSR and contributing to its collapse in the early 1990s.
Fearing the spread of Soviet influence, the US funded Islamic jihadists, who viewed the Soviets as foreign invaders and infidels. But in the late 1970s, when a group of communist sympathizers tried and failed to unify Afghanistan with socialist ideas, the USSR invaded. Their extremely rough terrain and remote regions made it easy to resist foreign powers and do their own thing.
Peoples like the Pashtuns and Uzbeks preferred tribal or regional allegiances over a national identity. Though the British Empire gave up full control of Afghanistan in 1919, the arbitrary line they drew on that nation's southern border divided communities. And if you're thinking we forgot Central Asia, the Cold War was just as chilly there.
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