The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War [Paperback]

Greg Grandin (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0226305724 | ISBN-13: 978-0226305721 | Publication Date: September 15, 2004 | Edition: 1

After decades of bloody revolutions and political terror, many scholars and politicians lament the rise and brief influence of the left in Latin America; since the triumph of Castro they have accused the left there of rejecting democracy, embracing Communist totalitarianism, and prompting both revolutionary violence and a right-wing backlash. The Last Colonial Massacre challenges these views.

Using Guatemala as a case study, Greg Grandin argues that the Cold War in Latin America was a struggle not between American liberalism and Soviet Communism but between two visions of democracy. The main effect of United States intervention in Latin America, Grandin shows, was not the containment of Communism but the elimination of home-grown concepts of social democracy.

Through unprecedented archival research and gripping personal testimonies, Grandin uncovers the hidden history of the Latin American Cold War: of hidebound reactionaries intent on holding on to their own power and privilege; of Mayan Marxists, blending indigenous notions of justice with universal ideas of freedom and equality; and of a United States supporting new styles of state terror throughout the continent. Drawing from declassified U.S. documents, Grandin exposes Washington's involvement in the 1966 secret execution of more than thirty Guatemalan leftists, which, he argues, prefigured the later wave of disappearances in Chile and Argentina.

Impassioned but judicious, The Last Colonial Massacre is history of the highest order--a work that will dramatically recast our understanding of Latin American politics and the triumphal role of the United States in the Cold War and beyond.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"[This book] covers an important history. It also provides an important position on that history, addressing several different audiences and providing new information to each in riveting prose. It combines many specialists'' knowledge about how the Cold War played out in different parts of Latin America with new and previously unknown material about how Cold War tactics unfolded in Guatemala."—American Historical Review

(Carol A. Smith American Historical Review )

"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

(Joseph Smith International History Review )

"A richly detailed, humane, and passionately s (Alan McPherson Journal of American History )

"This book is a searing indictment of U.S. imperialism in Latin America. Grandin makes abundantly clear that the U.S. government did not support democracy in Latin America; on the contrary, it thwarted it every step of the way. . . . [The] book contributes to our understanding of who the victims were, why they fought, and why they were tragically killed."—Science and Society

(Margaret Power Science & Society )

“Mounting the most powerful case to date against the know-nothing triumphalism of Cold War historians and the smug complacency of the American media, Grandin’s book also performs a modest act of restorative justice: it allows Guatemalans to tell their own stories in their own words.  In a series of remarkable biographies Grandin shows how men and women made high politics and high politics made them, demonstrating that the Cold War was waged not only in the airy game rooms of nuclear strategists but ‘in the closed quarters of family, sex, and community.’”—Corey Robin, London Review of Books

(Corey Robin London Review of Books )

"What is new and pathbreaking is the way Grandin links local history and local lives to this struggle for democracy and to the violence that confronted that dream. Through careful archival work in national and local collections and, most especially, oral testimony from a diverse range of local participants, Grandin gives us a social history of the Polochic Valley told most effectively through the lives of the key participants."

(Jim Handy Hispanic American Historical Review ) --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From the Inside Flap

Latin America today is seen by many as the crown jewel of the U.S. effort to spread freedom throughout the world. During the Cold War, the argument goes, the United States defeated Latin American communism, paving the way for the region's embrace of capitalist democracy and making Latin America the model to be emulated around the globe. The Last Colonial Massacre mounts a powerful challenge to this view.

Through unprecedented archival research and gripping personal testimonies, Greg Grandin uncovers a 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 continent. Drawing from declassified U.S. documents, Grandin exposes Washington's involvement in the 1966 secret execution of over thirty Guatemalan leftists, prefiguring later disappearances in Chile and Argentina.

With Guatemala as his case study, Grandin also 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 ultimately the conflict's main effect was to eliminate home-grown notions of social democracy. Grandin provocatively concludes that the definition of democracy now being extolled as the best weapon in the war against terror is itself a product of terror.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press; 1 edition (September 15, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226305724
• ISBN-13: 978-0226305721
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #818,883 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #100 in Books > History > Americas > Central America > Guatemala

More About the Author

Greg Grandin is the author of Fordlandia, Empire's Workshop, The Last Colonial Massacre, and the award-winning The Blood of Guatemala. A professor of history of Latin American history at New York University and a Guggenheim fellow, Grandin has served on the United Nations Truth Commission investigating the Guatemalan Civil War and has written for the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New Statesman, and The New York Times.

Grandin received his BA from Brooklyn College, CUNY, in 1992 and his PhD from Yale in 1999. His many books and articles explore the connection between the diverse manifestations of everyday life and large-scale societal transformations that took place in Central and South America related to agricultural commodity production and state formation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Grandin has published extensively on issues of revolution, popular memory, U.S.-Latin American relations, photography, genocide, truth commissions, human rights, disease, and the tensions that exist between legal and historical inquiries into political violence. In 1997 and 1998 Grandin worked with the Guatemalan Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico--the UN-administered truth commission set up to investigate political violence committed during Guatemala's thirty-six-year civil war.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Invaluable view from Mayan perspective, April 11, 2005

By 

MKS (California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Paperback)

Many books discuss the violence and political turmoil in Guatemala. What Grandin has done is add a wonderfully distinctive and long-overdue Mayan voice to a terrible history.

He describes the May 29, 1978 massacre of approximately 100 Q'eqchi' Indians in Panzos, Alta Verapaz. Grandin profiles a number of Q'eqchi' throughout his book culminating in Mama Maquin, the Q'eqchi' woman leader who was killed attempting to deliver a letter of protest to the local governmental authorities in Panzos.

Grandin lays the foundation for the 1978 massacre by going back to the critical events of the 1950s Arbenz adminstration. He describes how the Q'eqchi' were increasingly dispossessed of their land, going from 97 Q'eqchi' in 1888 owning fincas, or large plantations, to just 9 in 1930 and then dropping to none in 1949. (p. 26) After World War I, German immigrants to the Alta Verapaz acquired more and more land. Grandin notes: "Swastikas hung from municipal buildings and flew above German plantations." (pages 24-25.)

Perhaps the gem of Grandin's book is a quotation from a portion of Arbenz's sole campaign stop to the Alta Verapaz during the election of 1950. The speech was translated into Q'eqchi' word for word as it was given by Arbenz. Here is an excerpt:

"From the time when Alta Verapaz was populated by only the brave Q'eqchi' race until this moment...from the exploitation of the conquistadores' whip to the infamous exploitation of the plantation onwers...they have taken your property, your liberties, your rights...Alta Verapaz workers are the most exploited in all the country. The struggle of the reactionaries, of these 'friends of order' who scowl at us on the street, is to impose this regime on the whole republic. We, in contrast, want to destroy this system. It is not only agrarian reform that will resolve the problem. We need to treat Indians justly..with respect like human beings. We promise you better houses and a better salary. We promise you a little more justice." (p. 44.)

Arbenz won the election and instituted land reform that placed hundereds of thousands of acres of previously fallow land in the hands of Mayans. He was deposed in a CIA-sponsored coup in 1954. Grandin shows how that tragic loss of democracy led to the Panzos massacre in 1978, which set the fuse for the explosion of the long-simmering guerilla war and the genocidal military campaign in 1982 of President Rios Montt, who was praised at time by Ronald Reagan as getting a "bum rap" on human rights and being a man of "great integrity."

Grandin's book for the first time tells the story of the Q'eqchi' and their quest for justice. Kudos to him.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Valuable but Flawed, May 6, 2007

By 

Judith A. Northwood - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Paperback)

Although the book contains an abundance of information on an important topic within the broader scope of Cold War and Latin American history, the book's somewhat disjointed organization makes it more of a challenge to follow that it would otherwise need to be. I've rarely read a more informed discussion of the events in Guatemala, and Grandin presents difficult information with sensitivity and without a strident tone. He relates the complexities the Cold War caused for nations attempting to emerge from colonialism, a topic that needs more discussion.

However, my students found him miserably difficult to follow, primarily because he jumps around in time, backtracking and sidestepping in a manner that creates a sense of immersion, but not the clarity that the book could have had. The chain of events may not have been perfectly clear, but in a way it captures the essence of the compression of memory he describes. The events do gain a sense of jumbled timelessness that intensifies the numbing sense of horror the book conveys.

I benefited from some familiarity with Mayan culture and religion before reading the book, but for the average undergraduate, more explanation of Mayan beliefs and culture would have given more depth to Grandin's assertion that communism melded with aspects of their beliefs. He says it, and I can see it, but he does not demonstrate it.

For all that the book has flaws, it is still worth reading, but expect an impressionistic, flowing narrative that may be a challenge at times, since the reader needs to retain facts in mind to connect them later.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The iron curtain over the Americas, October 20, 2010

By 

R. L. Huff "An old reader" (Louisiana) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Paperback)

- originated in Washington, not Moscow, and was far more bloody and destructive than in eastern Europe. Grandin's tour de force of the cold war's hot-blooded reign in Latin America focuses on Guatemala, where it began with the emergence from dictatorship in the "democratic spring" of 1944, and ended with the US-backed return to business as usual in 1954. The cynical rhetoric employed in Guatemala and elsewhere was identical to Moscow's in its own sphere, and makes this book a revealing comparison to Constantine Pleshakov's "There is no Freedom Without Bread" (reviewed elsewhere.)

The essential origin of the modern cold war began, of course, in Russia in 1917, when the propetyless classes began entering the political sphere demanding forms of democracy relevant to themselves, going beyond the middle class interpretation of constitutional rights and civil society to give democracy a material basis. Ever since, confused liberal reformers have recoiled in horror and sided with counter-revolution, leaving Lenin or Castro to harvest the fruits of mass movements they refuse to touch or lead. In Latin America, this spectacle of "democrats" fearing democracy reaped the grisliest harvest in formal peacetime, and remains unknown to most North Americans for whom Solidarity and Lech Walesa are household names.

Grandin's style is anecdotal, as a previous reviewer states, and somewhat rambling; but he is assuming a familiarity with the subject that may be a stretch for the general reader precisely because Latin America in the cold war is terra incognito north of the Rio Grande. He is right to question the notion of "radicalism as the cause of radicalization," as American/conservative academics are prone to do to explain why this movement or how that leader "went Communist;" seeing Latin Americans as "children of Cain" out to kill for killing's sake. But while it's essential to focus on the context of the cold war as producing this carnage, it's also true that this period dovetails with a history of state and insurrectional violence in the region. Like eastern Europe, repression did not just descend from the sky after 1944, but rather world politics outside stimulated and exploited old desires for new deals and the traditional reaction to them by those holding the cards.

Of all the books on Guatemala and Latin America in this period, one of the better ones.