Customer Reviews

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

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This book is much more than a history of the US in Latin America. It's an explanation of the importance of Ronald Reagan's Central American policy in the formation of the conservative movement and how that policy led to war in Iraq. All of the stuff that we are reading about today - abuses of power such as the NSA wiretapping controversy, the surveillance of antiwar protesters, the way the Bushies have used public relations companies and so-called "grassroots" conservative groups like the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the justification of torture in the name of supporting freedom, the lying and misinformation - have their beginnings in Reagan's Central American policy. The stuff in chapter four on how Otto Reich and the rest of the neocons learned out to manipulate the press is fascinating and scary. And Grandin's discussion of how the Christian evangelicals joined forces with the neocons to fight liberation theology is the best discussion I've so far read on the origins of Bush's foreign policy. It's much more interesting than Kevin Phillip's book on the theocons or any of the multiple books on the neocons. This is the smartest historical examination of neoconservative foreign policy adventurism that I have read.

Greg Grandin's Empire's Workshop is a work of enormous synthetic breadth. While it is a commonplace for commentators to point out that many of the policy analysts and foreign policy specialists that staffed the Reagan administration have also staffed the George W. Bush administration, in my reading Grandin's work is the first to chart the philosophical, policy and propagandistic correlations between them.

Grandin demonstrates that many of the techniques employed by the Bush administration to garner and sustain support for its wars and to employ effective disinformation were forged and refined in the laboratory (or "workshop" as Grandin puts it) of Central America during the Reagan years. Particularly novel is Grandin's analysis of how both Reagan and Bush curried the active support of the USA religious right in pursuit of its foreign and military policy aims. In the end, the reader realizes that the Reagan years became a template for the Bush years.

The book is brilliant. I found it difficult to put it down.

I saw Grandin discuss this book at an event last month in Cambridge, where he appeared with Noam Chomsky. The place was packed, and both Grandin and Chomsky gave great presentations. Grandin's was one of the best summaries of the origins of the modern conservative movement I have ever heard, so I bought the book. It is an amazing analysis, very counter-intuitive. Grandin's book stresses the importance of foreign policy in the rise of the New Right, in particularly the importance of the US's long history in Latin America. I've read a lot of interesting speculation about neoconservatives and the Christian New Right, but this book traces their alliance back to Ronald Reagan's Central American policy. Actually, the connections between Bush's foreign policy, which has gotten us into the mess the US is in in Iraq, and Reagan's support of the Contras in Nicaragua and the death squads in El Salvador is kind of terrifying. Since so many of the bushies first got started in Iran-Contra, I have to wonder why nobody has connected the dots before this book. At the presentation in Boston, Grandin pointed out that Chomsky's book on Central America, Turning the Tide, came out 21 years ago. I just read that book a few years ago myself, and Empire's Workshop is a worthy follow-up.

The second reviewer above misses the point of this book, which is to show the historical relationships between the players in current United States Foreign Policy (e.g., Cheney, Rumsfeld, Negroponte) and the players of the mid-'80s in the Reagan Foreign Policy. Moreover, his number one point, that no one in "Latin America" killed 3500 Americans (presumably a reference to the attacks of 9/11), sort of misses the obvious fact that no one in Iraq did either. I think the fact that so many players in Reagan's Iran-Contra clandestine foreign policy have surfaced once again in the current Middle East policy cries out for a book like this. Buy it and learn more.

This is truly an excellent book that in a clear way illustrates American involvement in South and Central America.The book begins by telling the story about how Kennedy set out to reshape the Americas into a place where true revolutionary ideals could grow spread by free men and women. He started something called the "Alliance for progress" which contained the nucleus of this idea. The problem was that he armed exactly those people who where completley opposed to these revolutionary ideas. thus began an era of counterrevolution, that gave birth to the death squads and coups in Brazil, Uruguay, Chile and Argentina. When Richard Nixon arrived in Venezuela in 1958 his limousine was attacked by an angry mob. The next day they cleared the streets with tear gas so he could leave safely. This set the tone for American and Latin American relation in the coming years. Allendes election in Chile terrified Nixon because Allende wasnt trying to create another Cuba with Soviet style repression of civil liberties. He wanted a socialist state that would be a symbol of real reform, and this was truly frightening to Washington. Therefore Nixon with the help of the strong arm of the CIA ordered Allendes downfall.

Later when Reagan came to power he saw his purpose to reinstate a sense of national purpose and this he did by restoring military power. Almost all of Latin America was ruled at the time by pro american dictators, but something was starting to brew in Central America. The hardest hit countries where El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala. US allies killed approximatley 300,ooo people during Reagans two terms. Hundreds of thousands where tortured. Jean Kirkpatrick advised the Reagan administration to undo the human rights programs that Carter had initiated and spoke instead of the true nature of politics that was based on "competition for power", and that "brute force" was often better than "human reason". This rationalized such things as the dictatorships death squads-because "salvadors political culture respected a sovreign who was willing to wield violence". America now painted itself as the vanguard against the evill empire of the Soviet Union and this was used as an excuse to legitemize the brutal opposition to third world nationalism. In countries like El salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua, the United States did not make the same mistake as they did in Vietnam. Instead they "outsourced" their army and by supporting local bad boys let death squads do their dirty work. The idea of "going primitive" was implemented in these conflicts, where the most brutal crimes against human rights imaginable where committed.To tell you the truth I skimmed past most of the descriptions of the violence due to the intense brutality that was described.

Already in the 1960s Kennedy had installed such anti-communist paramilitary groups in El Salvador called ANSESAL and ORDEN. These groups where to work preemptively to stop any communist threats in the area. These groups where such a large part of the political oppression that eventually the people rose up,and this gave the Reagan administration the motivation they needed to "go primitive". One US expert said that "the horrible lesson of El Salvador is that terrorism works". Several torturers defected from the notorious Battalion 316 and testified in American courts of how they where trained by American specialists. They where taught to employ psychological torture instead of physical torture. This is what we are seeing today in Abu Graihb. Ofcourse if this didnt work then the good old hands on methods where used. Finally at the end of the cold war in 1991 the FMLN rebels where not defeated and saw to it that the United States helped to implement the changes that they had long been fighting for. If El Salvador was bad then Guatemala was worse. Here there was a literal genocide that moved into its most brutal faze when Ronald Reagan became president. The military turned the Guatemalan highlands into a "slaughterhouse" committing as many as 600 massacres there between 1981 and 1983. Most of the victims being Indian men, women and children, all the while Reagan pushed military aid to the area.

Reagan was also handson in rearming Somozas National guard and with the help of the CIA turning that ruthless group of marauding thugs into the "freedom fighters" better known as the Contras. After the US government froze the funding for the Contras Reagans accomplice Oliver North was sent to negotiate arms deals with Iran, securing large sums of money for the Contras. Large amounts of evidence say that he also negotiated delas with drug cartels to have access to their planes bringing weapons to the contras while giving them easier access to US markets for their drugs. The Contras where infamous for their "murders, mutilations, tortures and rapes" and at the end of the war an apporximate 30,000 civilians hand been killed, most at the hands of the Contras. They destroyed schools, health clinics, and power stations to show the Nicaraguan civilians that the Sandinistas werent capable of bringing stability to the region. There also followed an intense degredation of the Sandinistas in US media. The sandinistas where linked to such things as "terrorism, nuclear submarines, religious and ethnic persecution, totaliarianism, Castro, East germany Bulgarians, Libya, Iran, and even the Bader meinhoff gang".

The American christian right opposed itself to "peace christianity"(the same thing as liberation theology)-this christianity opposed Reagans policies in Central America. Liberation theology said that democracy and capitalism were antithetical values. This liberation teology also threatend the new right because they opposed the rights claim that capitalism was linked to human freedom. The christian right therefore now claimed that corporate capitalism mirrors "god's presence on earth". They fought latin american liberation theology with an american "theology of the corporation". They called liberation theology the "theology of mass murder" and claimed it to be "the single most critical problem that christianity has faced in its 2000 year history". The evangelical christian right argued that in a universe of free will where the good are rewarded and the bad are punished, then the USA is a shining example of gods blessing. The misfortune of the third world was "gods curse". The christian right proclaimed Robert DÁubuisson, the despicable murderer of the El Salvadorian archbishop Oscar Romero, as hero and freedom fighter.

This is infact the story of how American corporate elites helped to bring down reformist presidents in places like Chile, Brazil, and Guatemala. Dictatorships where therefore needed for these countries to understand the values of individualism, consumerism and passive rather than participatory democracy. Grandin writes that "Chile had fulfilled the new rights agenda of defining democracy in terms of economic freedom and restoring the power of the executive branch." In 1973 the US experienced a deep economic recession therefore third world nationalism was seen as a great obstacle to economic recovery. This led to Latin Americas "second conquest". First the Spanish and the Portugese took all the gold. Then during the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth the second faze came- which "entailed the initial phase of US corporate expansion, as firms like United Fruit Company, Standard Oil, and Phelps Dodge turned on the region as a source of raw materials and agricultural products, coming to control most of the continents railroads, electric companies,ports, mines and oil fields." The third conquest began in the 1980s "Railroads, postal service, roads, factories, telephone services, schools, hospitals, prisons, garbage collection services,water, broadcast frequencies, pension systems, electric, television,and telephone companies were sold off-often not to the highest but to the best connected bidder." Much of this property landed with multinational corporations or with latin American "superbillionaires- this was a new class that had taken advantage of the dismantling of the state.

Although Latin America now has democracies with the exception of Cuba many of its countries are devestated economically. Countries like Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador all suffer from incredible poverty In Latin America 165 millionpeople live on less than 2 dollars a day. 60 people are murdered in Guatemala city each week. For many people the only alternative is to try to make it into America through Mexico to find work. This is becoming increasingly difficult due to the tough border patrols. All this has resulted in a new movement in Latin America, which could be called the anti-globalization movement. More and more left politicians are being elected and are protesting against free-market orthodoxy. This to me is a hopefull sign. And even though the Us keep projecting their imperial ambitions in Iraq I think its clear that if they couldnt do it in their own backyard they wont be able to do it in the middle east either. All in all I think that this was a great book and I can reccomend it to anyone that wants to learn more about US foreign policy and how it has effected the third world.

Grandin does an excellent job of shedding light on U.S. policy today by examining our actions and interventions historically in our own hemisphere. He makes a connection that most do not bother to see, and in doing so, reveals how America has been two-faced in expressing values that it then does not bother to live by itself.

I've understood for some time that there is a connection between US foreign policy history, corporate globalization, militarism, and current events around the world -- and that US rhetoric says one thing, while US policy often does the opposite. This is the first book I've read that presents the timeline and the players of our involvement in Latin America so completely and so accessibly. I'm not a history buff, or a political scientist, or an academic - just someone who believes that it's important to understand our history so that I can better understand the present and be an informed participant in our democracy. I'm following the events in Iraq and elsewhere with a greater understanding of the US's true objectives and methods.

As an avid reader on American imperialist interventionism, I thought I was pretty aware of the course of events leading up to our current status as contemporary conquistadors. Greg Grandin masterfully engages the subject, deepening the understanding of ANYONE. On book tour in Boston, Noam Chomsky accompanied Grandin and often bowed out during Q&A, acknowledging him as "a better person to ask". Now that's a serious testimony...

This is a great book that details America's foreign policy with Latin America during between roughly 1950 to present. With a good deal of time being spent in the 1980s and 1990s. The book specifically addresses the support of Latin American rebels that launched and led coups of political leaders in their respective countries. A lot of time is given to the post-Vietnam economic/war engine that America was attempting to create in the wake of the Vietnam disaster. Hearing stories about how our country and leaders were constantly overthrowing leaders, putting new ones in power, only to overthrow them shortly thereafter . . . is quite disturbing. The book is a part of The American Empire Project, which seems extremely interesting. My only complaint about the book would be the sheer amount of details and timelines that get thrown about. While this definitely shows good research . . . at times it left you confused as to what was being discussed as the author jumped from the 50's to the 70's to the 90's and then back to the 70's. It wasn't written with a linear timeline. But rather a philosophy timeline. Which I found confusing at times. But I definitely recommend the book if you are at least somewhat curious about what Cheney, Rumsfield, and Reagan's pals were up to in Latin America. And even how that policy is being reflected in the Middle East today.

This book describes what the author regards as the roots of the Republican imperialist ideology that came to the forefront after 9/11. Those roots were nurtured by the American campaign of aggression and state terror in Central America in the 1980's. The author makes use of scholarly secondary sources and primary sources, including congressional reports. Dr. Grandin finds many similarities between American involvement in Central America in the 80's and the US war on Iraq this decade.

Grandin points out that with the Kennedy administration's commencement of the so-called Alliance for Progress, the US concentrated on training the internal security forces of Latin American countries. In 1962, Grandin notes, US General William Yarborough privately advised the Colombian military to, in Yarborough's words, form irregular units to "execute paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents." I think Grandin should have explained here that "known communist proponents" encompassed not simply Communist Party members and sympathizers but peasants expressing grievances against landowners, union leaders, journalists or anybody else who spoke for an amelioration of the extreme mal-distribution of political and economic power in Latin America. In countries like Guatemala, the death squads that Yarborough referred to began attempting to kidnap, torture, and "disappear" any political activist to the right of Barry Goldwater. Death squads organized by military units trained and equipped by the US were behind the "mysterious" killings of political activists in Guatemala in the late 1960's, according to US embassy cables quoted by Grandin.

US support for Central American death squads reached its apex in the 1980's under Ronald Reagan under cover of a crusade for anti-communism and democratic reform. Jimmy Carter had banned US aid to the Guatemalan military but, according to Grandin, aid actually continued to flow under Carter to the military through, among other sources, arms deals and training contracts agreed to before Carter's ban came into effect. The Reaganites eventually succeeded in completely eliminating restrictions on military aid to Guatemala. Between late 1981 and early 1983 the Guatemalan military roamed the countryside, raped, pillaged, burned villages and killed about 100,000 people. The Guatemalan dictator through most of this genocidal burst was General Efrain Rios Montt, a born again Protestant who had very friendly relations with Pat Robertson and other American evangelical Christian leaders. Reagan met with Rios Montt in late 1982 and declared that the general was totally committed to human rights and that criticisms of him were unfair. In December 1981, at least 750 men, women and children were stabbed and shot at the El Salvadoran village of El Mozote by the US trained Altacatl battalion. Raymond Bonner of the New York Times reported on the massacre and was subjected to a vilification campaign by the Reagan administration and right wing media outlets and, under such pressure, the Times reassigned him out of Latin America. Of course the mass graves at El Mozote were opened a decade later, an event which confirmed that the massacre had indeed happened. In Guatemala and El Salvador, the military and death squads conducted regular extrajudicial executions, tearing off people's arms and legs, mutilating genitalia, tearing off women's' breasts, etc. Roberto D'aubisson, the Salvadoran death squad leader who engineered the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980, received an award in 1984 from the organizations of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and other so-called pro-life groups. The eventual "pacification" of El Salvador was brought about, according to a RAND corporation report for the Pentagon in 1991 quoted by Grandin, not because of the bogus "reform" measures the Reagan administration supported for PR purposes but the murder of tens of thousands of people. The situation was hardly different in Nicaragua where the "freedom fighter" Contras behaved exactly like a death squad. Grandin notes how the creation of the Contras was formulated by an American lumber baron in Nicaragua and Jesse Helms's aid John Carbaugh in 1980. Carbaugh and the lumberman secured the services of military trainers from the neo-Nazi military dictatorship in Argentina which was at the tail end of its campaign of killing 30,000 of its citizens. The remnants of the Somoza National Guard were formed into the contras by the Argentines and the Americans took full control of the operation in 1982-83 after the military dictatorship collapsed. In Honduras, military units like the American trained Battalion 316 conducted torture and hundreds of murders and John Negroponte covered up their crimes while he was US ambassador to Honduras.

Support amongst the American public for Central American intervention was rather lukewarm. Grandin uses internal administration records and congressional reports to discuss the Reagan administration's illegal Office of Public Diplomacy.....Meanwhile the FBI conducted surveillance of members of CISPES and burglarized dozens of CISPES offices across the country.....

By the beginning of the 1990's the threat of social reform had abated to where the US could tolerate relatively free democratic elections (Grandin does not discuss the free election held in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas in 1984 or the elections held under conditions of death squad terror in El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980's). Nicaraguans voted out the Sandinistas in 1990 after the US threatened to continue funding the terrorist contras if they did not do so. After the 1980's, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala were nominally democratic. But since the 80's gang violence, extreme poverty, malnutrition, disease, corruption, etc. have greatly increased in those societies, as the US successfully imposed un-regulated free markets on them and they reeled from the effects of the US's death squad wars of the 80's.

Grandin discusses the model of un-regulated free market capitalism (neoliberalism) that the US Treasury and IMF have forced on Latin America (and the rest of the third world). Chile under Pinochet's dictatorship was the laboratory for this and is usually pointed to as a marvelous free market success story, though the facts are a bit different, as Grandin shows. As advised by Milton Friedman, Pinochet privatized state industries, slashed public spending, de-regulated capital movement and the banking industry, slashed taxes, eliminated tariffs, allowed 100 percent repatriation of profits for foreign corporations, etc. But in the early 80's, under the weight of reckless piling up of debt and speculation, the Chilean economy collapsed into a serious economic depression. Free Market ideologues turned their eyes away as their hero Pinochet was forced to nationalize most of Chile's banks and much of its private sector in order to prevent Chile from being totally destroyed. Since 1990, Chile has maintained a relatively low poverty level compared to the rest of Latin America, with tax increases on its wealthy to pay for social programs and strict regulation of capital flows in and out of the country. One might also add, though Grandin does not mention it, that Chile's leading export, copper, is dominated by a government run company. Grandin surveys some of the other disasters of unregulated free market capitalism. Argentina collapsed into near anarchy in 2001 after spending much of the 1990's touted as an "economic miracle." Free market reforms in Bolivia in the mid-80's ravaged Bolivia's domestic economy and drove many poor Bolivians into the coca growing business, making drug exports a leading pillar of Bolivia's economy and laundered drug money propping up its de-regulated banking system. Now this free market model has been imposed by the US on Iraq........