Ernesto "Che" Guevara's message to the Havana meeting of the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (OSPAAAL)also known as the Tricontinental Conferencewas the clearest elucidation of his Tricontinental vision of revolutionary warfare. The speech lauded the Vietnamese people for their courageous struggle against US imperialism and called for the creation of many other Vietnams. Guevara's conviction that the international proletariat shared a common enemy led him to promote a strategy for guerrilla warfare on the continents of what is now widely referred to as the "Global South." Though the nomenclature took a while to catch up, this shift in the conceptual construct of the developing countries, from the "Third World" to the "Global South" tracked an evolving understanding of the ways in which the world was divided. Guevara, among others (Figure 10.1), came to believe that the most salient divisions were not between the capitalist and communist blocs, but between the Global Norththe industrialized economic powers, including the Soviet Union and other highly developed economies of the Eastern blocand the Global South. The latter term was understood as including not only the peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin Americain other 1 Che Guevara, Message to the Tricontinental (Havana: Executive Secretariat of the
The 1982 Falklands/Malvinas conflict pitted two of the most foundational principles of postwar international relations—anti-colonialism and self-determination—against each other, creating dilemmas for the great powers and smaller states alike in determining where to place their loyalties. The British consistently upheld the self-determination of the islanders, while portraying the war as a struggle between the forces of democracy and those of dictatorship. Though the United States strove for the appearance of neutrality, support for the United Kingdom resulted in the effective abandonment of the anti-colonialism of the Monroe Doctrine. The Soviet Union viewed the war as an anachronistic return to open imperialist aggression, and backed the fiercely anti-communist military junta in Argentina, even as it waged what was viewed as a “third world war” against the transnational forces of Marxism-Leninism. Meanwhile, the countries of the Western Hemisphere polarised into Latin American demands for decolonisation and the devotion of the Anglophone Caribbean to the principle of self-determination. This division was reflected in the debates and resolutions of the Organization of American States, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the United Nations.
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