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    The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War, Updated Edition
    The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War, Updated Edition
    The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War, Updated Edition
    Ebook326 pages8 hours

    The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War, Updated Edition

    By Greg Grandin and Naomi Klein

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    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.

    “This work admirably explains the process in which hopes of democracy were brutally repressed in Guatemala and its people experienced a civil war lasting for half a century.”—International History Review

     

    “A richly detailed, humane, and passionately subversive portrait of inspiring reformers tragically redefined by the Cold War as enemies of the state.”—Journal of American History

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateJun 24, 2011
    ISBN9780226306896
    The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War, Updated Edition
    Author

    Greg Grandin

    Greg Grandin is the author of The End of the Myth, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and Fordlandia, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His widely acclaimed books also include The Last Colonial Massacre, Kissinger's Shadow, and The Empire of Necessity, which won the Bancroft and Beveridge awards in American history. He is Peter V. and C. Van Woodward Professor of History at Yale University.

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    • 4/5
      The right-wing repression that occurred in 1980s Guatemala was exceptionally bloody. In less than five years 130,000 were killed by the army's "scorched earth" campaign. Millions were forced from their homes. These numbers far outweigh the more famous rightist repression in countries such as Chile or Argentina. Indeed, according to Greg Grandin, "the Guatemalan civil war in all its cruelty could understandably be considered history in extremis—singular in its viciousness and devastation" (4).Grandin's argument that Guatemala's experience gives us a window into the larger Latin American history is interesting. In many ways, the events of the Guatemalan civil war provide a model that would later be followed by other Latin American countries. Its 1944-1954 democratic opening under Juan Jose Arevalo and Jacobo Arbenz was on of the most prolonged experiment in economic reform and democratic socialism. The coup that brought an end to this period of openness in 1954 was the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) first intervention in Latin America. Guatemala also has the dubious distinction of being the first Latin American nation in which the United States introduced, assisted, and perfected counter-insurgency techniques. The strategy of political disappearances was also introduced in Guatemala. Because of these distinctions, Grandin proposes to use Guatemala as a template to explain Cold War history in Latin America in The Last Colonial Massacre. Specifically, Grandin attempts to accomplish the retelling of this history through a recounting of the lives of individuals who led the leftist struggle in Guatemala. Much of Grandin's work seems to be, in many ways, an eulogy and obituary for the old left; much of the book recounts the struggle for land and social reform by the Guatemalan Communist Party, efforts that helped create a sense of community among leftist peasants. It also helped create a hope for a liberal state that would destroy the evils of peonage and repression. This world, sympathetically described by Grandin, would later be destroyed in the bloody repression of the 1980s. The hope for a liberal state has mutated from one that advocated solidarity and promised welfare into one that promotes a very hollow version of democracy. Ironically, though, right-wing repression could defeat the socialist threat only by implementing some of its demands. The dictatorial state did end the feudal power of the large landowners—"in this sense, government repression was both a backlash against the ongoing legacy of the Revolution and the revolution's perverse realization" (131). So, "many of the reforms the left long struggled for were achieved not through victory but through defeat" (132). Grandin succeeds in telling the story of Guatemala through the horrors of Cold War repression. His research is superbly grounded in a wide variety of archival, primary and secondary sources. While the organization of the book does follow some sort of logic, the focusing of each chapter around one core figure does provide both coherence as well as some redundancies as the same theme may be addressed more than once throughout the book. Because the book is not organized thematically or chronologically, at times it is difficult to understand whom the author is referring to or how a particular passage relates to the bigger picture. One gets the sense that Grandin is very sympathetic to the figures of the Guatemalan old left; the work is imbued with a sense of nostalgia for what was and what could have been. Grandin fits his work perfectly within the historical context, fitting the experiences of Guatemala from the 1950s to the 1980s within the context of both a wider Latin American history as well as within the context of the greater Cold War. While some may quibble with his expressed ability to relate Cold War Latin American history within the confines of the Guatemalan story, he succeeds to a greater extent than he fails.

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