THE UNITED STATES'S SUPPORT OF STATE TERROR IN CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICA

Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War, updated edition,with a new Preface by Greg Grandin and an interview with Naomi Klein (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2004, 2011) ( From "Preface to the Updated Edition: A New Enlightenment": "What explains Latin America's seemingly inescapable reversion to violence? How to account for the weakness of its democratic culture? For over a half century, attempts to answer these questions have defined much of the writing produced in the United States on Latin America, as social scientists and intellectual historians have created an entire scholarly subfield dedicated to gently guiding--or, if gradualism failed, abruptly inducing through 'shock therapy'--the region's post-Cold War 'transition to democracy.' But these questions are exactly backward. The real challenge is not to answer why Latin American democracy is so fragile but to explain its inextinguishable strength." Id. at xi. From "Preface to the First Edition": "In Latin America, in country after country, the mass peasant and working-class movements that gained ground in the middle of the twentieth century were absolutely indispensable to the advancement of democracy. To the degree that Latin America today may be considered democratic, it was the left, including the Marxist left, that made it so. Empire, rather than fortifying democracy, weakened it. Launched first by domestic elites in the years after World War II and then quickly by the United States, the savage crusade, justified under the guise of the Cold War, against Latin American democratic movements had devastating human and political costs. In some countries, such as Uruguay, Brazil, and Chile, national security states carried out a focused, surgically precise repression. Other states, such as Argentina, El Salvador, and Guatemala, let loose a more scattershot horror. In all cases, terror had the effect of, first, radicalizing society to produce febrile political polarization and, second, destroying the more capacious, social understandings of democracy that prevailed in the years around World War II. One important consequence of the terror was the severance of the link between individual dignity and social solidarity, a combination that . . . was the wellspring of the old left's strength. During the transition to constitutional rule that occurred throughout Central and South America following the Cold War, democracy came to be defined strictly in the astringent terms of personal freedom rather than social security. This redefinition served as the qualification for the free market ideologies and policies that now reign throughout the continent and indeed most of the world. In other words, to make the point as crudely as possible, the conception of democracy now being prescribed as the most effective weapon in the war on terrorism is itself largely, at least in Latin America, a product of terror." Id. at xxii-xxiii. From the bookcover: "After decades of bloodshed and political terror, many lament the rise of the left in Latin America. Politicians and historians have long accused the left there of rejecting democracy, embracing totalitarianism, and prompting both revolutionary violence and a right-wing backlash. Through unprecedented archival researcch and grippiing personal testimonies, Greg Grandin mounts a powerful challenge to thise views in this classic work. In do so, he uncovers the hidden hiistory of the latin American Cld War: of hid-bound reactionaries hiolding on to their power and privilege; of Mayan Marxists blending indigenous notions of justice with universal id3as of equality; and of a United States supporting new stuyles of state terror throughout the region.").