Heather Vrana

Guerrilla Medicine and Disability in Cold War Central America reexamines the Cold War by centering disability in the civil wars of Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. To date, these conflicts have been understood mainly in terms of social class, foreign intervention, and death tolls. But disability was a critical outcome of the region’s civil wars and a major motive for combatants to take up arms. This project focuses on the lived experiences of disabled Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Nicaraguans before, during, and after the wars to understand the social conditions that created and defined particular attributes as impairments, to borrow from Julie Minich. In Central America, these social conditions included poverty, exploitation, and anti-Indigenous and anti-Black scientific discourses and practices. To counter these conditions, leftist militants formed specialized health systems around preventive and curative medicine, inclusion, and rehabilitation, often led by disabled comrades alongside community health practitioners and internationalists. These complex systems offered a proving ground for revolutionary ideals. As the three civil wars came to divergent conclusions, disabled combatants and civilians confronted distinct post-war conditions. Would disabled Central Americans form alliances with former enemies, participate within the state, work with NGOs, or take up the language of human rights? What can these choices tell us about the changing experiences and understandings of disability in the region? Using an archive of medic field journals, guerrilla film and radio broadcasts, government reports, case notes, public health publications, interviews, and ephemera, Guerrilla Medicine and Disability expands our understanding of disability as a cause of war, challenges the measures of loss that dominate truth and reconciliation scholarship, demonstrates how all sides of the global conflagration wielded health practices and discourses to achieve their geopolitical objectives, and shows how guerrilla medicine approached disability through interdependence and solidarity and challenged the biopolitics of human rights.