América Latina e a Guerra Fria

Reviewed by: The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War Robert H. Holden The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War. By Greg Grandin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pp. xviii, 311. Illustrations. Appendix. Glossary. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $22.00 paper. The Guatemalan civil war that began in the early 1960s and ended with a peace treaty in 1996 became a one-sided affair. The armed forces and their paramilitary allies won, not just by killing guerrillas but almost anyone suspected of supporting them. Tens of thousands of civilians, including many Mayan Indians, were the victims of an unpardonable crime that is often classified as genocide. "This book," Grandin writes, "documents the nearly century-long intermittent mobilization leading up to the Panzós massacre [of some 35 Mayan demonstrators in 1978], focusing on the lives of a number of Q'eqchi' Mayans, mostly members of the Communist Party but not exclusively so" (pp. 3-4). In a fragmentary narrative that shifts back and forth from the late-nineteenth to the late-twentieth century, Grandin fastens on a few courageous individuals in the Alta Verapaz region who sought to challenge the worst effects of the coffee plantation system: the landlessness of the native inhabitants, the gradual erosion of their political autonomy and economic security, and the brutality with which the planters typically exploited their labor. Grandin artfully weaves these personal stories into the larger dramas of the country's growing dependence on coffee and banana production, and its experiences with dictatorship, democracy, military rule, land reform, communism, rural class conflict, insurgency and counterinsurgency. Compelling portraits of the interactions of political activists, plantation owners and the semi-proletarianized Indian labor force emerge from interviews and archival sources. Two arguments, one prominent and consistent, the other muted and confused, control the text. The first claims that Guatemalan violence from the 1950s to the 1990s was driven by a specifically Cold War redefinition of democracy. The United States and allies such as Guatemala's governments after 1954 undertook a "savage crusade" to convert democracy from what the Latin American left correctly understood it to be (economic equality, economic security and "social solidarity") into the [End Page 143] individualistic, free-market abomination known today as "neoliberalism." Since the Cold War was a terrorist crusade and the crusaders won, it follows that what passes for democracy today in Latin America is both a defeat for real democracy and an illegitimate "product of terror" (p. xv). Latin America is the Alta Verapaz. The second argument addresses the ever-delicate problem of violence and its undeniable prominence in the history of the Alta Verapaz. Grandin ridicules the "dubious armchair anthropology" (p. 101) that would identify a habitual and customary resort to violence as the typical way to resolve conflicts in Latin American politics generally or in Mayan culture. Yet Grandin himself repeatedly calls attention to just such patterns of violence in Guatemala, observing "a common pattern of community violence" (p. 114) in Indian towns and reporting that "Domestic and neighborly violence according to court records was a constituent element of daily life," so much so that planters themselves "systematically took advantage" (p. 149) of it to preserve their authority. Political violence drew on "ideological hardening and polarization" that led to "accelerating rhythms of frustration, fear, and extremism" (p. 173). He concludes his book about Guatemalan violence by rejecting as "myth" any interpretation of Latin American history that would spotlight violence, owing to "the danger of portraying Latin Americans as children of Cain" (p. 172). But to equate violence understood as a component of political culture with violence wrongly understood as a race marker is to confuse two different arguments. Racialist interpretations of history are rightly as discredited as the phlogiston theory of combustion. Both the exaggerated character of the first argument and the incoherence of the second stem from Grandin's failure to discipline his oft-expressed passion for socialism and his scorn for its enemies. Confronting the sins of the Left, Grandin exudes generosity and forgiveness: "The fact that the left, to use the term in the broadest sense possible, often repressed or silenced democratic ideals… does not make those beliefs and...

After decades of bloodshed and political terror, many lament the rise of the left in Latin America. Since the triumph of Castro, politicians and historians have accused the left there of rejecting democracy, embracing communist totalitarianism, and prompting both revolutionary violence and a right-wing backlash. Through unprecedented archival research and gripping personal testimonies, Greg Grandin powerfully challenges these views in this classic work. In doing so, he uncovers the hidden history of the Latin American Cold War: of hidebound reactionaries holding on to their power and privilege; of Mayan Marxists blending indigenous notions of justice with universal ideas of equality; and, of a United States supporting new styles of state terror throughout the region. With Guatemala as his case study, Grandin argues that the Latin American Cold War was a struggle not between political liberalism and Soviet communism but two visions of democracy - one vibrant and egalitarian, the other tepid and unequal - and that the conflict's main effect was to eliminate homegrown notions of social democracy. Updated with a new preface by the author and an interview with Naomi Klein, The Last Colonial Massacre is history of the highest order - a work that will dramatically recast our understanding of Latin American politics and the role of the United States in the Cold War and beyond.

Book Review: The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War, by GrandinGreg. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2004. $57.00;paper, $22.00. Pp. xi, 311. 60616-3793

Tracking the Cold War in Latin America William Michael Schmidli (bio) Hal Brands . Latin America's Cold War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. 385 pp. Figures, notes and index. $29.95. Stephen G. Rabe . The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. xxxvii + 247 pp. Chronology, notes, recommendations for further reading and research, and index. $19.95. In an influential 2003 survey of recent scholarship on U.S.-Latin American relations, Max Paul Friedman asserted that, after decades of intellectual jostling with advocates of the orthodox or nationalist position, revisionist scholars had come to dominate the field. "It is now unusual" Friedman wrote, "to come across a work of history that strongly argues the merit of U.S. policies in the region or claims these have been designed principally to protect and promote freedom and democracy."1 Yet if revisionist scholarship still revolved around the "tragic idiom" first articulated by William Appleman Williams, Friedman continued, the field was nonetheless in the midst of a dynamic evolution. Reflecting broader trends in U.S. foreign relations scholarship, studies of U.S.-Latin American relations increasingly incorporated multinational (and multilingual) research and revealed a willingness to consider non-U.S. perspectives and an emphasis on Latin American agency. As a result, "their findings question some conventional wisdom about U.S. power," Friedman concluded, "including elements of the revisionist synthesis that depicted the United States as a regional hegemon, a 'core' nation to the Latin American 'periphery,' or—to take any one of the familiar images—a puppetmaster pulling the strings of puppet leaders, a central planet orbited by satellites, or the manipulator of client states."2 Nine years later, Hal Brands' Latin America's Cold War reveals just how far scholarship on U.S.-Latin American relations has moved in the direction anticipated by Friedman. The breadth of Brands' research is impressive: forty archives in thirteen countries—including ten Latin American nations. The scope of Latin America's Cold War is equally ambitious: Brands describes his book as the first "multiarchival, international" history to assess the entire Cold War era in Latin America. Both "multinational and multilayered," Latin America's [End Page 332] Cold War "deals seriously with all sides of the diplomatic and transnational struggles that occurred during this period," Brands writes, and it weaves diverse perspectives "from the highest echelons of superpower diplomacy to the everyday negotiation of social and political relationships—into an understanding of how the global, the regional, and the local interacted in shaping Latin America's Cold War" (p. 2). As a result, Latin America's Cold War offers a sharp corrective to revisionist studies that situate the projection of U.S. political, economic, and military power into Latin America at the heart of the conflict. The U.S. effort to prevent communist inroads in the hemisphere, Brands contends, was just one facet in a "series of overlapping conflicts" that buffeted Latin America during the Cold War era, including longstanding social, political, and economic struggles and the ideological impact of decolonization and the emergence of the Third World (p. 7). Far from exerting unchallenged hemispheric hegemony, he continues, U.S. Cold War policymakers struggled to contain the initiatives of their Soviet and Cuban counterparts in Latin America in a competition for influence marked by "substantial symmetry" (p. 262). Moreover, even U.S. success in shaping Latin American allies was decidedly limited; not only were the region's "shrewder statesmen as likely to manipulate as to be manipulated by the United States," Brands writes, but U.S. Cold War initiatives had a limited impact on anticommunist Latin American policymakers and military leaders, who needed "no coaching on the dangers of internal violence and upheaval" (pp. 257, 81). With its emphasis on Latin American agency and sensitivity to the many players and layers that shaped the Cold War in Latin America, Brands' book stands as a model of international history. But does Latin America's Cold War go too far in decentering the role of the United States? In striving for balance, nuance, and complexity, does Brands assign too much agency to Latin America relative to the enormous power...

Theorizing Asia:An Introduction Alex Taek-Gwang Lee (bio) In The Age of Extremes, Eric Hobsbawm suggested the term "short twentieth century" to consider the extreme experiences of the century. The period refers to seventy-eight years between 1914 to 1991, beginning with the First World War and ending with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The fall of the German, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian empires during the First World War paved the way for the Second. When the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in 1941, it appeared that the war had come to an end, with the Allies' "justice league" destroying the Fascist alliance. Contrary to common belief, Hobsbawm emphasized that "the Second World War had barely ended when humanity plunged into what can reasonably be regarded as a Third World War" (1994, 226). After the fall of the Japanese Empire, the United States' most pressing mission in Asia was to build an anti-communist defense line rather than decolonize the countries. In Japan, the US enjoyed establishing "a completely unilateral occupation that excluded the USSR and any other co-belligerent" (227). While Europe settled into postwar conditions, the war did not end in Asia. Ironically, the end of World War II meant the beginning of civil wars in the area. As Hobsbawm pointed out, Asia was "the zone in which the two superpowers continued, throughout the Cold War, to compete for support and influence, and hence the major zone of friction between them, and indeed the one where armed conflict was most likely, and actually broke out" (227). This geopolitical confrontation resulted in widespread violence in the region. For Asians, the end of World War II did not signal the end of the conflict but rather the beginning of a new one. It all started with the people's yearning for nation-building following Japan's defeat in World War II. For example, the Korean people wanted to build a nation-state at the time, but the situation forced them to separate into two regimes—North and South Korea. The US policy to "roll back" communism introduced the cruel division of people, divided into the inclusive group and the exclusive group by the rule of anti-communism. This violent operation rolled out in many places in the Global South. The United States' overseas policy did not aim to build a democratic regime in the areas but prioritized [End Page 1] more efficient governance to manage the anti-communist defense line. Accordingly, it helped local power elites build despotic authority. What must be stressed here is that the revival of despotism in Asia revealed the realpolitik of the anti-communist strategy, which betrayed its political cause of anti-fascism and went against people's desire for liberation. This trickery always lurks in the shadow of so-called freedom propaganda. The right of independence was not equal and was a concept used to divide people into those included in and those excluded from the nation. During the Cold War, the US supported military despotism with the pretext of protecting the "Free World" against communism in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In those areas, the Cold War had a profound impact on postcolonial nation-building. Almost all Southern Cone countries were dominated by military autocracies from the 1950s through the 1970s, an experience that continues to affect political and economic regimes to this day. The paradox is that, despite the dictatorships' breaches of human rights, the United States defended its assistance. This coalition between the US and those authoritarian regimes was called the "Condor Operation" and was seen to repress people's demand for democracy. These dictatorships caused traumatic experiences in Latin America, and those countries in the region share the crippled history of the republic. In this sense, the postwar authoritarianism in Asia is the regional occasion of the state violence and the structural consequences of the United States' geopolitical plan. Asia's experiences are not an erasable memory buried in the abyss of the past; they returns again and again to the surface of cultural consciousness. Rather than disappear, trauma constructs its origins with the eternal return of the moment. The experience is not bearable...

Peripheral Nerve: Health and Medicine in Cold War Latin America

After decades of bloodshed and political terror, many lament the rise of the left in Latin America. Since the triumph of Castro, politicians and historians have accused the left there of rejecting democracy, embracing communist totalitarianism, and prompting both revolutionary violence and a right-wing backlash. Through unprecedented archival research and gripping personal testimonies, Greg Grandin powerfully challenges these views in this classic work. In doing so, he uncovers the hidden history of the Latin American Cold War: of hidebound reactionaries holding on to their power and privilege; of Mayan Marxists blending indigenous notions of justice with universal ideas of equality; and, of a United States supporting new styles of state terror throughout the region. With Guatemala as his case study, Grandin argues that the Latin American Cold War was a struggle not between political liberalism and Soviet communism but two visions of democracy - one vibrant and egalitarian, the other tepid and unequal - and that the conflict's main effect was to eliminate homegrown notions of social democracy. Updated with a new preface by the author and an interview with Naomi Klein, "The Last Colonial Massacre" is history of the highest order - a work that will dramatically recast our understanding of Latin American politics and the role of the United States in the Cold War and beyond.

Latin America and the Global Cold War

Peripheral Nerve: Health and Medicine in Cold War Latin America

Latin American Studies and the Cold War

Reviewed by: The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War Scott Pollard Franco, Jean . 2002. The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. $52.00 hc. $22.95 sc. 352 pp. In The Sociology of Music, Theodore Adorno paints a dour picture of advanced capitalism's deleterious effect on music (e.g., the imposition of a culture industry which subverted creative genius and privileged repetition and replication), yet he consistently demonstrates a faith in the avant-garde to escape the ravages of capitalism and arrogate a space for creativity and exploration. In The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War, Jean Franco writes a similar kind of cultural history for Latin America since the Cold War. The book is framed by a pessimistic evaluation of the lose-lose [End Page 196] effects of the Cold War for Latin America, yet throughout the book Franco consistently turns to exemplary cultural figures, texts, art, and film to demonstrate how a creative work or an aesthetic practice was able to escape the pitched ideological battles of the Cold War, find its own voice, and preserve a Latin American particularity in the face of homogenizing global forces. Admitting, at best grudgingly, some sense of hope in the face of an otherwise grim analysis of Latin American society since the 1950s, Franco finds continued evidence of an "exuberant creativity" in Latin America that can liberate itself from imposed ideological boundaries, adapt and master foreign imports to its own ends, and successfully assert its inexorable difference in a globalized economy. In the initial chapters, Franco lays out how binary Cold War ideologies invaded Latin America to its detriment. Seen as a prize by the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Latin America became a battleground in the struggle of the two superpowers, and it lost: economically, culturally, and as a continent of autonomous nations. In Franco's judgment, neither of these imported political economies adapted to the particularities of the cultures, peoples, nations, and social milieus of the continent, and the poor fit resulted in inevitable and multifarious failures. Communism has not defeated poverty in Latin America nor met the needs of its marginalized communities. The Zapatista Revolution imagines Mexico as a multicultural society, but how can such a fight for freedom and autonomy be won when the revolution has been marketed as entertainment? The United States' ideological intervention was grounded in the duality of universalism (i.e., the preeminence of European culture) and the Soviet threat to that preeminence. Through the propaganda films of the Office of Inter-American Affairs, Disney, print media (Encounters, Cuadernos, Mundo Nuevo), and the recruitment and use of conservative Latin American intellectuals (e.g., Emir Rodriguez Monegal, Octavio Paz, Salvador de Madariaga), the United States pursued an ideological campaign in Latin America that used universalism as code for an attack on Latin American particularity, which was inevitably linked with Soviet ideals (e.g., class struggle). Correlatively, Franco looks at the failures and mismatches of Marxism in Latin America, focusing on the disjunction between austere Marxist political practice and the "exuberance and excess of the aesthetic" (3). She uses the Mexican writers José Revueltas and Elena Poniatowska to exemplify literature's critique of the failures of Marxism in Latin America, and then she turns to the Chilean Pablo Neruda to explore how poetry and Marxist practice could co-exist. Franco makes clear her own political preference here: The sins of the application of Marxism in Latin America can be corrected, while there is no corrective for United States imperialism. [End Page 197] In the following chapters, Franco plots a causal arc from the failed socioeconomic policies of the Cold War in Latin America to the resultant dictatorships and military interventions to contemporary neo-liberalism. At each stage of that arc, she investigates the consequent implosions for Latin American culture, delineating the internalized products of these changes (e.g., dictatorship, torture, death) and then against their backdrop analyzing the function of literature and art as revelatory if ephemerally liberating counter-narratives. Although Franco takes on conventional themes...

The Cold War: A World History

Hal Brands’s goal in reconstructing the history of Latin America’s Cold War seeks to deal with the subject through a multinational and multilayered approach. By this the author means integrating perspectives from diverse realms and views, from the highest echelons of superpower diplomacy down to the everyday negotiation of social and political relationships, in order to understand how global, regional, and local influences interacted in shaping Latin America’s Cold War. This has been the call of recent research and writing from a variety of scholars of Latin America’s Cold War. On the surface Brands seems to be sensitive to new approaches, debates, and sources, but in fact he delivers a conventional diplomatic history, albeit enriched by his foray into numerous Latin American and US archives. By not delving into the everyday forms of the Cold War conundrum, the book limits our understanding of the human, the ethical, and the complex interaction of the internal and the external roots and consequences of the long and bloody Cold War in Latin America, which much of the recent Cold War history has tried to recover.True, the history of the Cold War cannot be reduced to the duel between the political and ideological right and left, but neither can it be depicted as a result of the convergence of post – Second World War sociological and political conflicts embedded in historically given economic, political, and cultural structures. According to Brands, Latin America’s history after the Second World War is the result of extremism fostering extremism, intervention inducing intervention, and one layer of instability exacerbating another as if they were all equal, as if there were not disparities and abuse of power. Critical history is not about apportioning blame, but neither is it bereft of ethical values. The author’s view is that to think in terms of moral implications leads scholars to blindness; instead, Brands advocates a detached narrative and analysis.Brands’s point of departure is the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and not the paradigmatic overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz’s democratic government of Guatemala in 1954, in which, he points out, the United States did not play a central role. The rejection of the centrality of the United States in the unfolding and trajectory of the Cold War in Latin America runs throughout the book, flying in the face of mountains of studies that have documented the contrary. We are told time and time again that the point is not to assign the United States “the primary responsibility for the course of events in Latin America during the 1960s” (p. 61). While it is true that the United States did not manufacture all of the Latin American dictators, by doing business with them and by using trade, labor, technology, culture, and even philanthropy as props to its relations with them as the stronger partner and the provider of military know-how and hardware, the US government tended to coerce much of Latin America to its Cold War designs.At critical junctures, the book reiterates the argument that US intervention and counterinsurgency were not decisive in defeating the radical left but that the left and the guerrillas defeated themselves. This point requires qualification. Indeed, the foco theory proved to be the wrong tactic to retrieve the population from the shackles of poverty and domination, and made the revolutionaries an easy prey for counterinsurgency forces, but this worked largely the other way round: state repression and counterinsurgency forces weakened the left, compelled it to make blunders and be cornered, as in the Guatemala of the 1980s. Even conceding that the revolutionary left’s erroneous steps reduced its efficacy, drawing moral equivalency between state terror and revolutionary insurgency is a travesty.As other reviewers of Brands’s book have noted, the author’s insistence on parallel responses to Latin America’s unrest by Moscow, Havana, and Washington leads to treating the three players as if they were of equal strength and engagement. True, “Moscow, Havana, and Washington looked to gain influence in Latin America by remaking the region in their own images” (p. 38), but their intentions, instruments of power, and not least the strength of their allies certainly differed. To treat them as equals distorts the complex picture.Even though Brands did not intend it that way, his Latin America’s Cold War can be read as an eloquent exemplification of what Greg Grandin describes in Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (2006) as the denial of any wrongdoing on the part of the United States.

Beyond the Eagle's Shadow: New Histories of Latin America's Cold War

This volume makes a compelling case for centering circuits of experts and expertise in understanding Latin America's Cold War. Born out of a conference at Yale University in 2016, it follows the transnational trajectories of scientific, technological, and environmental experts during Latin America's “long Cold War,” shedding light on this crucial period beyond traditional Cold War narratives as well as contributing to histories of Latin American science, technology, and the environment.A lucid editors' introduction, an essay by Gilbert Joseph on the sea change in literature on Latin America's Cold War, and a conclusion by Eden Medina and Mark Carey on environment, technology, and science provide a comprehensive vision of the volume's stakes and contributions. The 11 historical chapters are organized into four, roughly chronological sections and cover diverse scientific and technological fields and projects, intersecting to varying degrees with histories of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and Puerto Rico from approximately the 1920s to the present.By tracing out the paths of experts in the production and circulation of expertise, these authors critique seemingly intransigent assumptions about the place of science, technology, and the environment in Latin America. While Latin American countries often have been seen as recipients of expertise from the United States and Western Europe, the authors of this volume challenge the directionality and place of expert circulation and knowledge production, as Thomas Rath does in his essay on the impact of Mexican responses to foot-and-mouth disease eradication programs on laboratory science and epizootic policies in Brazil, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Attentiveness to the local production of knowledge also reveals the place of Latin American experts in development projects like the Green Revolution, illustrated by Timothy Lorek's agronomists in Colombia's Cauca Valley. Scholars in this volume better locate this production in diverse inter-American exchanges, such as the “transnational contact zone” of the Inter-American Housing and Planning Center featured in Mark Healey's chapter (p. 200). Further demonstrating the multidirectional flows of Cold War expertise and expert politicking, Mary Roldán's chapter on education expertise illustrates the power of one expert's varied anticommunist discourse to marshal resources from across the hemisphere for his radiophonic schools.If the term Cold War suggests a bipolar world, this volume shows how experts, often because of their expertise, could forge unexpected connections across such geopolitical rigidity, as illustrated in Reinaldo Funes-Monzote and Steven Palmer's essay on the history of Cuban-Canadian cooperation on cattle breeding and in Andra Chastain's chapter on Chilean and French expertise in the construction of the Santiago metro and the role that it played in shaping political debates in Santiago and advancing French diplomatic aspirations. Opening up Cold War bipolarity also decouples scientific expertise from state dominance, seen in Emily Wakild's chapter on natural field scientists' resistance to developmentalism in the “middle landscapes” of the Peruvian Amazon and in Javiera Barandiarán's history of the privatization of Chilean environmental scientific expertise during the late twentieth century's neoliberal reforms (p. 262).Attentive to the porousness of the divide between cultural and political spheres and between scientific and technological ones, authors in this volume highlight entanglements of nonexpert culture and politics with scientific and technological projects, as demonstrated by Pedro Ignacio Alonso and Hugo Palmarola in their excavation of how the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's insignia design projected the scientific meaning of its satellite networks in Chile and by Fernando Purcell in his examination of the “concrete revolution” across South America and the necessity of crafting a popular imaginary for something as immaterial as electricity in order to support the construction of massive concrete hydroelectric dams (p. 222). Contributors also illustrate the political mutability of scientific knowledge and technological projects, made clear in Tore Olsson's unpacking of the Tennessee Valley Authority's power as an “idea” for both Left and Right in postrevolutionary Mexico (p. 75).Contributors to this volume do an excellent job of showing how a hemispheric program materialized out of transnational exchanges of expertise situated in local and national contexts; by doing so they advance scholarly agendas to construct a Latin American Cold War and to integrate histories of science, technology, and the environment. For this reviewer, the volume's successes gesture toward a need to reevaluate further how much the Cold War as a dominant historiographical concept explains and how much it obscures, particularly with regard to development as a response to structural phenomena and the continuities in transnational, inter-American scientific and technological networks from the nineteenth century onward. Ultimately, Latin Americanists working on different time periods will find this volume generative; scholars of science, technology, and the environment working on different geographical fields will recognize its contributions; and advanced undergraduates will find its essays stimulating.