LRB | Vol. 26 No. 22 dated 18 November 2004 | Corey Robin Dedicated to Democracy Corey Robin
The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War by Greg Grandin Chicago, 311 pp, �40.00
On 5 December 1982, Ronald Reagan met the Guatemalan president, Efra�n R�os Montt, in Honduras. It was a useful meeting for Reagan. 'Well, I learned a lot,' he told reporters on Air Force One. 'You'd be surprised. They're all individual countries.' It was also a useful meeting for R�os Montt. Reagan declared him 'a man of great personal integrity . . . totally dedicated to democracy', and claimed that the Guatemalan strongman was getting 'a bum rap' from human rights organisations for his military's campaign against leftist guerrillas. The next day, one of Guatemala's elite platoons entered a jungle village called Las Dos Erres and killed 162 of its inhabitants, 67 of them children. Soldiers grabbed babies and toddlers by their legs, swung them in the air, and smashed their heads against a wall. Older children and adults were forced to kneel at the edge of a well, where a single blow from a sledgehammer sent them plummeting below. The platoon then raped a selection of women and girls it had saved for last, pummelling their stomachs in order to force the pregnant among them to miscarry. They tossed the women into the well and filled it with dirt, burying an unlucky few alive. The only traces of the bodies later visitors would find were blood on the walls and placentas and umbilical cords on the ground.
Amid the hagiography surrounding Reagan's death in June, it was probably too much to expect the media to mention his meeting with R�os Montt. After all, it wasn't Reykjavik. But Reykjavik's shadow - or that cast by Reagan speaking in front of the Berlin Wall - does not entirely explain the silence about this encounter between presidents. While it's tempting to ascribe the omission to American amnesia, a more likely cause is the deep misconception about the Cold War under which most Americans labour. To the casual observer, the Cold War was a struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, fought and won through stylish jousting at Berlin, antiseptic arguments over nuclear stockpiles, and the savvy brinkmanship of American leaders. Latin America seldom figures in popular or even academic discussion of the Cold War, and to the extent that it does, it is Cuba, Chile and Nicaragua rather than Guatemala that earn most of the attention.
But, as Greg Grandin shows in The Last Colonial Massacre, Latin America was as much a battleground of the Cold War as Europe, and Guatemala was its front line. In 1954, the US fought its first major contest against Communism in the Western hemisphere when it overthrew Guatemala's democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, who had worked closely with the country's small but influential Communist Party. That coup sent a young Argentinian doctor fleeing to Mexico, where he met Fidel Castro. Five years later, Che Guevara declared that 1954 had taught him the impossibility of peaceful, electoral reform and promised his followers that 'Cuba will not be Guatemala.' In 1966, Guatemala was again the pacesetter, this time pioneering the 'disappearances' that would come to define the dirty wars of Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and Brazil. In a lightning strike, US-trained security officials captured some thirty leftists, tortured and executed them, and then dropped most of their corpses into the Pacific. Explaining the operation in a classified memo, the CIA wrote: 'The execution of these persons will not be announced and the Guatemalan government will deny that they were ever taken into custody.' With the 1996 signing of a peace accord between the Guatemalan military and leftist guerrillas, the Latin American Cold War finally came to an end - in the same place it had begun - making Guatemala's the longest and most lethal of the hemisphere's civil wars. Some 200,000 men, women and children were dead, virtually all at the hands of the military: more than were killed in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Brazil, Nicaragua and El Salvador combined, and roughly the same number as were killed in the Balkans. Because the victims were primarily Mayan Indians, Guatemala today has the only military in Latin America deemed by a UN-sponsored truth commission to have committed acts of genocide.
The Last Colonial Massacre reminds us that when we talk about America's victory in the Cold War, we are talking about countries like Guatemala, where Communism was fought and defeated by means of the mass slaughter of civilians. But Grandin is interested in more than tallying body counts and itemising atrocities. The task he sets himself is to locate this most global of contests in the smallest of places, to find beneath the duelling composure of superpower rivalry a bloody conflict over rights and inequality, to see behind a simple morality tale of good triumphing over evil the more ambivalent settlement that was - and is - the end of the Cold War. 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'.
The book opens with an epigraph from Sartre: 'A victory described in detail is indistinguishable from a defeat.' The victory Grandin refers to here is singular and by now virtually complete: that of the United States over Communism. But the defeats he describes are various, their consequences still unfolding. First is the defeat of the Latin American left, whose aspirations ranged from the familiar (armed seizure of state power) to the surprising (the creation of capitalism). Next is the defeat of a continental social democracy which would allow citizens to exercise a greater share of power - and to receive a greater share of its benefits - than historically had been their due. Finally, and most important, is the defeat of that still elusive dream of men and women freeing themselves, thanks to their own reason and willed effort, from the bonds of tradition and oppression. This had been the dream of the transatlantic Enlightenment, and throughout the Cold War American leaders argued on its behalf (or some version of it) in the struggle against Communism. But in Latin America, Grandin shows, it was the left who took up the Enlightenment's banner, leaving the United States and its allies carrying the black bag of the counter-Enlightenment. More than foisting on the United States the unwanted burden of liberal hypocrisy, the Cold War inspired it to embrace some of the most reactionary ideals and revanchist characters of the 20th century.
According to Grandin, the Latin American left brought liberalism and progress to a land awash in feudalism [ie., colonial capitalism]. Well into the 20th century, he shows, Guatemala's coffee planters presided over a regime of forced labour that was every bit as medieval as tsarist Russia. Using vagrancy laws and the lure of easy credit, the planters amassed vast estates and a workforce of peasants who essentially belonged to them. Reading like an excerpt from Gogol's Dead Souls, one advertisement from 1922 announced the sale of '5000 acres and many mozos colonos who will travel to work on other plantations'. (Mozos colonos were indebted labourers.) While unionised workers elsewhere were itemising what their employers could and could not ask of them, Guatemala's peasants were forced to provide a variety of compulsory services, including sex. Two planters in the Alta Verapaz region, cousins from Boston, used their Indian cooks and corn grinders to sire more than a dozen children. 'They fucked anything that moved,' a neighbouring planter observed. Though plantations were mini-states - with private jails, stockades and whipping posts - planters also depended on the army, judges, mayors and local constables to force workers to submit to their will. Public officials routinely rounded up independent or runaway peasants, shipping them off to plantations or forcing them to build roads. One mayor had local vagrants paint his house. As much as anything Grandin cites, it is this view of political power as a form of private property which confirms his observation that by 1944 'only five Latin America countries - Mexico, Uruguay, Chile, Costa Rica and Colombia - could nominally call themselves democracies.'
full: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n22/robi02_.html
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