Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States and the Rise of the New Imperialism

By Greg Grandin

New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006

Reviewed by Jeremy Kuzmarov

Z Magazine Online October 2006 Volume 19 Number 10 Book Review

With the U.S. occupation grinding into a quagmire in 2004, Vice President Richard Cheney called for the "Salvador option" in a nationally televised debate, implying a reliance on local paramilitary forces to impose order. Sadly, as Greg Grandin reminds in his provocative new book Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States and the Rise of the New Imperialism, historical amnesia prevented most Americans from understanding the horrific precedent to which Cheney was referring.

Under the guise of democracy promotion, human rights, and "rooting out guerilla subversion," the United States during the 1980s gave crucial financial and military support to political reactionaries and death squad operatives in El Salvador who slaughtered upwards of 80,000 people, including over 900 civilians by the elite U.S. trained Atlcatl battalion in the village of El Mozote. This was in a war fought against predominantly progressive forces backed by the Catholic Church, who sought a modicum of equality and justice in a nation long dominated by an exploitative ruling oligarchy.

Grandin's main argument is that U.S. foreign policy in Latin America during the course of the last half century has set an ominous precedent for Cheney & Co.'s current imperial escapades in the Middle-East. If empire has been an unmitigated disaster for the peoples of Latin America, who have suffered grave injustices at the hands of the Yankee giant looming over them, how can one reasonably expect a better outcome in a region already rife with anti-U.S. sentiment, religious fundamentalism, and a long history of grievances against the West? This is an important question to ask--one which should have been addressed by the ream of imperial apologists and pro-war pundits dominating the media and intellectual landscape.

The author of two excellent previous books on Guatemalan history, Grandin begins his story with a brief discussion of the centrality of Latin America to the rise of American global power at the turn of the 20th century, which was guided largely by a missionary impulse and the demand for economic markets. With direct military occupation breeding indigenous resistance, the U.S. shifted under Franklin Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy to informal colonization. Though marred by contradictions and support for corrupt dictatorships like that of Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Grandin provides a favorable evaluation of this transformation, which allowed for a more cooperative framework of bilateral relations that he hopes could be reestablished in the future.

Regrettably, in Grandin's view, FDR's successors reincorporated a unilateral and bullying approach to foreign policy. Beholden to business interests and a rigid Cold War framework, the Eisenhower administration supported a series of brutal tyrants and fomented a violent coup against the democratically elected Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954, ushering in over four decades of civil strife and reactionary right wing rule. Panic stricken over the triumph of the Cuban revolution and failed Bay of Pigs reinvasion, the Kennedy administration followed suit by undermining even moderately reformist governments, like that of Joao Goulart in Brazil, and stepped up American military training and counter-insurgency programs under the banner of the Alliance for Progress. These programs, as Grandin notes, came to embody the strategic grip yielded by the United States in Latin America and helped usher in an era of violent counter-revolution and state terrorism that was the trademark of the late 20th century.

Apart from the 1973 Chilean coup, the worst violence occurred during the 1980s where the case of El Salvador was no anomaly. In his evocative chapter "Going Primitive: The Violence of the New Imperialism," Grandin contrasts the moralistic rhetoric of Reagan ideologues, many of whom now hold key positions in the Bush II administration, and the cruel realities of U.S.-supported repression and terror, such as in Guatemala, whose CIA trained forces razed over 400 villages and massacred 100,000 civilians, mostly poor Mayan Indians.

Besides destroying regional infrastructure and leaving a legacy of trauma and loss, Grandin argues that the violence of the 1980s had the eventual effect of empowering the dominant ruling class of most Latin American countries, decimating progressive organizations, and allowing Washington to pursue its neo-liberal agenda of free-trade and corporate-led globalization. The result, he argues in a successful rebuttal to New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, and celebrants of the so-called Washington Consensus, has been catastrophic. Only tiny sectors of the elite have benefitted at the expense of the vast majority, which continues to abound in economic poverty and misery. Grandin's book is of great value in its comparative approach to understanding the international costs and consequence of the U.S. empire. As the continent where the U.S. has exerted the most direct influence, the Latin American case is instructive. Given its appalling record there, which Grandin reveals in illuminating detail, the prospects for an American dominated future indeed appear bleak--unless the government is compelled to pursue a change of course through popular mobilization and pressure. Jeremy Kuzmarov is an assistant professor of history at Bucknell University.