My project examines how Cold War struggles in Latin America prompted human scientists to reinterpret the reality of political violence on Indigenous peoples. During the first half of the twentieth century, experts working in the tradition of “salvage anthropology” approached Indigenous communities as peoples destined to disappear through evolutionary struggle or acculturation to Western norms. Salvage anthropologists often treated violence as a natural and or inevitable product of “contact” between “civilized” and “primitive” societies — a process in which Indigenous people were theorized as inferior groups who would fade away. Yet during the 1960s and 1970s, as many Latin American nations fell under the grip of extractivist military dictatorships, a new generation of experts challenged this naturalistic conception of violence and adopted frameworks that confronted the ideological and economic underpinnings of Western civilization and the dangers of aggressive modernization.