The Last Colonial Massacre

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The Last Colonial Massacre

Author : Greg Grandin
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226306909
Total Pages : 346 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (263 download)

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Book Synopsis The Last Colonial Massacre by : Greg Grandin

Download or read book The Last Colonial Massacre written by Greg Grandin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-07-30 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After decades of bloodshed and political terror, many lament the rise of the left in Latin America. Since the triumph of Castro, politicians and historians have accused the left there of rejecting democracy, embracing communist totalitarianism, and prompting both revolutionary violence and a right-wing backlash. Through unprecedented archival research and gripping personal testimonies, Greg Grandin powerfully challenges these views in this classic work. In doing so, he uncovers the 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 region. With Guatemala as his case study, Grandin 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 that the conflict’s main effect was to eliminate homegrown notions of social democracy. Updated with a new preface by the author and an interview with Naomi Klein, The Last Colonial Massacre is history of the highest order—a work that will dramatically recast our understanding of Latin American politics and the role of the United States in the Cold War and beyond. “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 “A richly detailed, humane, and passionately subversive portrait of inspiring reformers tragically redefined by the Cold War as enemies of the state.”—Journal of American History

Latin America’s Cold War

Author : Hal Brands
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674055284
Total Pages : 408 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis Latin America’s Cold War by : Hal Brands

Download or read book Latin America’s Cold War written by Hal Brands and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-05 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For Latin America, the Cold War was anything but cold. Nor was it the so-called “long peace” afforded the world’s superpowers by their nuclear standoff. In this book, the first to take an international perspective on the postwar decades in the region, Hal Brands sets out to explain what exactly happened in Latin America during the Cold War, and why it was so traumatic. Tracing the tumultuous course of regional affairs from the late 1940s through the early 1990s, Latin America’s Cold War delves into the myriad crises and turning points of the period—the Cuban revolution and its aftermath; the recurring cycles of insurgency and counter-insurgency; the emergence of currents like the National Security Doctrine, liberation theology, and dependency theory; the rise and demise of a hemispheric diplomatic challenge to U.S. hegemony in the 1970s; the conflagration that engulfed Central America from the Nicaraguan revolution onward; and the democratic and economic reforms of the 1980s. Most important, the book chronicles these events in a way that is both multinational and multilayered, weaving the experiences of a diverse cast of characters into an understanding of how global, regional, and local influences interacted to shape Cold War crises in Latin America. Ultimately, Brands exposes Latin America’s Cold War as not a single conflict, but rather a series of overlapping political, social, geostrategic, and ideological struggles whose repercussions can be felt to this day.

Empire's Workshop

Author : Greg Grandin
Publisher : Metropolitan Books
ISBN 13 : 1429959150
Total Pages : 318 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (299 download)

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Book Synopsis Empire's Workshop by : Greg Grandin

Download or read book Empire's Workshop written by Greg Grandin and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2006-05-02 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An eye-opening examination of Latin America's role as proving ground for U.S. imperial strategies and tactics In recent years, one book after another has sought to take the measure of the Bush administration's aggressive foreign policy. In their search for precedents, they invoke the Roman and British empires as well as postwar reconstructions of Germany and Japan. Yet they consistently ignore the one place where the United States had its most formative imperial experience: Latin America. A brilliant excavation of a long-obscured history, Empire's Workshop is the first book to show how Latin America has functioned as a laboratory for American extraterritorial rule. Historian Greg Grandin follows the United States' imperial operations, from Thomas Jefferson's aspirations for an "empire of liberty" in Cuba and Spanish Florida, to Ronald Reagan's support for brutally oppressive but U.S.-friendly regimes in Central America. He traces the origins of Bush's policies to Latin America, where many of the administration's leading lights—John Negroponte, Elliott Abrams, Otto Reich—first embraced the deployment of military power to advance free-market economics and first enlisted the evangelical movement in support of their ventures. With much of Latin America now in open rebellion against U.S. domination, Grandin concludes with a vital question: If Washington has failed to bring prosperity and democracy to Latin America—its own backyard "workshop"—what are the chances it will do so for the world?

Shattered Hope

Author : Piero Gleijeses
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400843499
Total Pages : 458 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (8 download)

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Book Synopsis Shattered Hope by : Piero Gleijeses

Download or read book Shattered Hope written by Piero Gleijeses and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most thorough account yet available of a revolution that saw the first true agrarian reform in Central America, this book is also a penetrating analysis of the tragic destruction of that revolution. In no other Central American country was U.S. intervention so decisive and so ruinous, charges Piero Gleijeses. Yet he shows that the intervention can be blamed on no single "convenient villain." "Extensively researched and written with conviction and passion, this study analyzes the history and downfall of what seems in retrospect to have been Guatemala's best government, the short-lived regime of Jacobo Arbenz, overthrown in 1954, by a CIA-orchestrated coup."--Foreign Affairs "Piero Gleijeses offers a historical road map that may serve as a guide for future generations. . . . [Readers] will come away with an understanding of the foundation of a great historical tragedy."--Saul Landau, The Progressive "[Gleijeses's] academic rigor does not prevent him from creating an accessible, lucid, almost journalistic account of an episode whose tragic consequences still reverberate."--Paul Kantz, Commonweal

Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War

Author : Tanya Harmer
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 9780807869246
Total Pages : 400 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (692 download)

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Book Synopsis Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War by : Tanya Harmer

Download or read book Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War written by Tanya Harmer and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2011-10-10 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fidel Castro described Salvador Allende's democratic election as president of Chile in 1970 as the most important revolutionary triumph in Latin America after the Cuban revolution. Yet celebrations were short lived. In Washington, the Nixon administration vowed to destroy Allende's left-wing government while Chilean opposition forces mobilized against him. The result was a battle for Chile that ended in 1973 with a right-wing military coup and a brutal dictatorship lasting nearly twenty years. Tanya Harmer argues that this battle was part of a dynamic inter-American Cold War struggle to determine Latin America's future, shaped more by the contest between Cuba, Chile, the United States, and Brazil than by a conflict between Moscow and Washington. Drawing on firsthand interviews and recently declassified documents from archives in North America, Europe, and South America--including Chile's Foreign Ministry Archive--Harmer provides the most comprehensive account to date of Cuban involvement in Latin America in the early 1970s, Chilean foreign relations during Allende's presidency, Brazil's support for counterrevolution in the Southern Cone, and the Nixon administration's Latin American policies. The Cold War in the Americas, Harmer reveals, is best understood as a multidimensional struggle, involving peoples and ideas from across the hemisphere.

A Century of Revolution

Author : Gilbert M. Joseph
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822392852
Total Pages : 456 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (223 download)

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Book Synopsis A Century of Revolution by : Gilbert M. Joseph

Download or read book A Century of Revolution written by Gilbert M. Joseph and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-21 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Latin America experienced an epochal cycle of revolutionary upheavals and insurgencies during the twentieth century, from the Mexican Revolution of 1910 through the mobilizations and terror in Central America, the Southern Cone, and the Andes during the 1970s and 1980s. In his introduction to A Century of Revolution, Greg Grandin argues that the dynamics of political violence and terror in Latin America are so recognizable in their enforcement of domination, their generation and maintenance of social exclusion, and their propulsion of historical change, that historians have tended to take them for granted, leaving unexamined important questions regarding their form and meaning. The essays in this groundbreaking collection take up these questions, providing a sociologically and historically nuanced view of the ideological hardening and accelerated polarization that marked Latin America’s twentieth century. Attentive to the interplay among overlapping local, regional, national, and international fields of power, the contributors focus on the dialectical relations between revolutionary and counterrevolutionary processes and their unfolding in the context of U.S. hemispheric and global hegemony. Through their fine-grained analyses of events in Chile, Colombia, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Peru, they suggest a framework for interpreting the experiential nature of political violence while also analyzing its historical causes and consequences. In so doing, they set a new agenda for the study of revolutionary change and political violence in twentieth-century Latin America. Contributors Michelle Chase Jeffrey L. Gould Greg Grandin Lillian Guerra Forrest Hylton Gilbert M. Joseph Friedrich Katz Thomas Miller Klubock Neil Larsen Arno J. Mayer Carlota McAllister Jocelyn Olcott Gerardo Rénique Corey Robin Peter Winn

Revolution in the Countryside

Author : Jim Handy
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 0807861898
Total Pages : 285 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis Revolution in the Countryside by : Jim Handy

Download or read book Revolution in the Countryside written by Jim Handy and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2000-11-09 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although most discussions of the Guatemalan "revolution" of 1944-54 focus on international and national politics, Revolution in the Countryside presents a more complex and integrated picture of this decade. Jim Handy examines the rural poor, both Maya and Ladino, as key players who had a decisive impact on the nature of change in Guatemala. He looks at the ways in which ethnic and class relations affected government policy and identifies the conflict generated in the countryside by new economic and social policies. Handy provides the most detailed discussion yet of the Guatemalan agrarian reform, and he shows how peasant organizations extended its impact by using it to lay claim to land, despite attempts by agrarian officials and the president to apply the law strictly. By focusing on changes in rural communities, and by detailing the coercive measures used to reverse the "revolution in the countryside" following the overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, Handy provides a framework for interpreting more recent events in Guatemala, especially the continuing struggle for land and democracy.

The Empire of Necessity

Author : Greg Grandin
Publisher : Metropolitan Books
ISBN 13 : 1429943173
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (299 download)

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Book Synopsis The Empire of Necessity by : Greg Grandin

Download or read book The Empire of Necessity written by Greg Grandin and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed author of Fordlandia, the story of a remarkable slave rebellion that illuminates America's struggle with slavery and freedom during the Age of Revolution and beyond One morning in 1805, off a remote island in the South Pacific, Captain Amasa Delano, a New England seal hunter, climbed aboard a distressed Spanish ship carrying scores of West Africans he thought were slaves. They weren't. Having earlier seized control of the vessel and slaughtered most of the crew, they were staging an elaborate ruse, acting as if they were humble servants. When Delano, an idealistic, anti-slavery republican, finally realized the deception, he responded with explosive violence. Drawing on research on four continents, The Empire of Necessity explores the multiple forces that culminated in this extraordinary event—an event that already inspired Herman Melville's masterpiece Benito Cereno. Now historian Greg Grandin, with the gripping storytelling that was praised in Fordlandia, uses the dramatic happenings of that day to map a new transnational history of slavery in the Americas, capturing the clash of peoples, economies, and faiths that was the New World in the early 1800s.

Original Death

Author : Eliot Pattison
Publisher : Catapult
ISBN 13 : 1619023237
Total Pages : 363 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (19 download)

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Book Synopsis Original Death by : Eliot Pattison

Download or read book Original Death written by Eliot Pattison and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Edgar–winner Pattison combines action, period details, and a whodunit with ease in his impressive third mystery set in Colonial America.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) Despite the raging war between French and British, Scottish exile Duncan McCallum has begun to settle into a new life on the fringes of colonial America, traveling the woodlands with his companion Conawago, even joining the old Indian on his quest to find the last surviving members of his tribe. But the joy they feel on reaching the little settlement of Christian Indians is shattered when they find its residents ritually murdered. As terrible as the deaths may be, Conawago perceives something even darker and more alarming: he is convinced they are a sign of a terrible crisis in the spirit world which he must resolve. Trying to make sense of the murders, Duncan is accused by the British army of the crime. Escaping prison to follow the trail of evidence, he finds himself hounded by vengeful soldiers and stalked by Scottish rebels who are mysteriously trying to manipulate the war to their advantage. As he pieces together the puzzle of violence and deception he gradually realizes that it may not only be the lives of Duncan and his friends that hang in the balance, but the very survival of the native tribes. When he finally discovers the terrible truth, Duncan is forced to make a fateful choice between his beloved Highland clans and the woodland natives who have embraced and protected him.

Fordlandia

Author : Greg Grandin
Publisher : Metropolitan Books
ISBN 13 : 9781429938013
Total Pages : 432 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (38 download)

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Book Synopsis Fordlandia by : Greg Grandin

Download or read book Fordlandia written by Greg Grandin and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2010-04-27 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The stunning, never before told story of the quixotic attempt to recreate small-town America in the heart of the Amazon In 1927, Henry Ford, the richest man in the world, bought a tract of land twice the size of Delaware in the Brazilian Amazon. His intention was to grow rubber, but the project rapidly evolved into a more ambitious bid to export America itself, along with its golf courses, ice-cream shops, bandstands, indoor plumbing, and Model Ts rolling down broad streets. Fordlandia, as the settlement was called, quickly became the site of an epic clash. On one side was the car magnate, lean, austere, the man who reduced industrial production to its simplest motions; on the other, the Amazon, lush, extravagant, the most complex ecological system on the planet. Ford's early success in imposing time clocks and square dances on the jungle soon collapsed, as indigenous workers, rejecting his midwestern Puritanism, turned the place into a ribald tropical boomtown. Fordlandia's eventual demise as a rubber plantation foreshadowed the practices that today are laying waste to the rain forest. More than a parable of one man's arrogant attempt to force his will on the natural world, Fordlandia depicts a desperate quest to salvage the bygone America that the Ford factory system did much to dispatch. As Greg Grandin shows in this gripping and mordantly observed history, Ford's great delusion was not that the Amazon could be tamed but that the forces of capitalism, once released, might yet be contained. Fordlandia is a 2009 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.

Quiet Genocide

Author : Etelle Higonnet
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351495151
Total Pages : 226 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (514 download)

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Book Synopsis Quiet Genocide by : Etelle Higonnet

Download or read book Quiet Genocide written by Etelle Higonnet and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-08 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Quiet Genocide reviews the legal and historical case that genocide occurred in Guatemala in 1981-1983. It includes the full text of the genocide section of a United Nations sponsored Commission on Historical Clarification in Guatemala (CEH), brokered by the UN. In its final report, the CEH's rigorously reviewed abuses throughout the whole country. However, the memory of the Guatemalan dirty war, which predated the genocide and continued for over a decade of the heightened killing, has rapidly faded from international awareness. The book renders a historical picture of the 1948 Genocide Convention and its unique status in international law. It reminds readers of the difficulty of preventing and punishing genocide as illustrated by the ongoing tragedy of Darfur; anddiscusses the evolution of international and hybrid tribunals to prosecute genocide along with war crimes and crimes against humanity. Then, it sketches a brief history of Guatemala with a focus on genocide It explores how internal and global politics were an expression of structural violence, designed to ensure cheap, abundant, and quiescent Indian labor for coffee planters.a The volume provides the commission's general considerations, legal definitions, methodology, period of analysis, and victim groups, and finds that genocide had been perpetrated against five indigenous Guatemalan groups. By translating the genocide argument of the CEH into English and framing it in a lively, accessible way, this volume recovers the past, sets the record straight, and promotes accountability. This exploratory effort provides insight into the world of transitional justice and truth commissions, and valuable insights about how to engage with the question of genocide in the future. These findings shed light on a crucial and dark chapter of trans-American Cold War history, and will thus be of interest not only to scholars focused on Guatemala, but also on Central America and even more broadly, on the Cold War.

Democracy in Costa Rica

Author : Charles D. Ameringer
Publisher : New York, N.Y. : Praeger ; Stanford, Calif. : Hoover Institution Press
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 168 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Democracy in Costa Rica by : Charles D. Ameringer

Download or read book Democracy in Costa Rica written by Charles D. Ameringer and published by New York, N.Y. : Praeger ; Stanford, Calif. : Hoover Institution Press. This book was released on 1982 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

The Blood of Guatemala

Author : Greg Grandin
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822380331
Total Pages : 365 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (223 download)

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Book Synopsis The Blood of Guatemala by : Greg Grandin

Download or read book The Blood of Guatemala written by Greg Grandin and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2000-03-15 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the latter half of the twentieth century, the Guatemalan state slaughtered more than two hundred thousand of its citizens. In the wake of this violence, a vibrant pan-Mayan movement has emerged, one that is challenging Ladino (non-indigenous) notions of citizenship and national identity. In The Blood of Guatemala Greg Grandin locates the origins of this ethnic resurgence within the social processes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century state formation rather than in the ruins of the national project of recent decades. Focusing on Mayan elites in the community of Quetzaltenango, Grandin shows how their efforts to maintain authority over the indigenous population and secure political power in relation to non-Indians played a crucial role in the formation of the Guatemalan nation. To explore the close connection between nationalism, state power, ethnic identity, and political violence, Grandin draws on sources as diverse as photographs, public rituals, oral testimony, literature, and a collection of previously untapped documents written during the nineteenth century. He explains how the cultural anxiety brought about by Guatemala’s transition to coffee capitalism during this period led Mayan patriarchs to develop understandings of race and nation that were contrary to Ladino notions of assimilation and progress. This alternative national vision, however, could not take hold in a country plagued by class and ethnic divisions. In the years prior to the 1954 coup, class conflict became impossible to contain as the elites violently opposed land claims made by indigenous peasants. This “history of power” reconsiders the way scholars understand the history of Guatemala and will be relevant to those studying nation building and indigenous communities across Latin America.

Fear as a Way of Life

Author : Linda Green
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780231504287
Total Pages : 254 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (42 download)

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Book Synopsis Fear as a Way of Life by : Linda Green

Download or read book Fear as a Way of Life written by Linda Green and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1999-07-05 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the late 1970s and the mid-1980s, the people of Guatemala were subjected to a state-sponsored campaign of political violence and repression designed to not only defeat a left-wing, revolutionary insurgency but also destroy Mayan communities and culture. The Mayan Indians in the western highlands were labeled by the government as revolutionary sympathizers, and many Mayan women lost husbands, sons, and other family members who were brutally murdered or who simply "disappeared." Based on years of field research conducted in the rural highlands, Fear as a Way of Life traces the intricate links between the recent political violence and repression and the long-term systemic violence connected with class inequalities and gender and ethnic oppression––the violence of everyday life.

Who Is Rigoberta Menchu?

Author : Greg Grandin
Publisher : National Geographic Books
ISBN 13 : 1844674584
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (446 download)

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Book Synopsis Who Is Rigoberta Menchu? by : Greg Grandin

Download or read book Who Is Rigoberta Menchu? written by Greg Grandin and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2011-02-21 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1984, indigenous rights activist Rigoberta Menchú published a harrowing account of life under a military dictatorship in Guatemala. That autobiography—I, Rigoberta Menchú—transformed the study and understanding of modern Guatemalan history and brought its author international renown. She won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. At that point, she became the target of historians seeking to discredit her testimony and deny US complicity in the genocidal policies of the Guatemalan regime. Told here is the story of an unlettered woman who became the spokesperson for her people and clashed with the intellectual apologists of the world’s most powerful nation. What happened to her autobiography speaks volumes about power, perception and race on the world stage. This critical companion to Menchú’s work will disabuse many readers of the lies that have been told about this courageous individual.

The Killing Zone

Author : Stephen G. Rabe
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 9780190216252
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (162 download)

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Book Synopsis The Killing Zone by : Stephen G. Rabe

Download or read book The Killing Zone written by Stephen G. Rabe and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America, Second Edition, is a comprehensive yet concise analysis of U.S. policies in Latin America during the Cold War. Author Stephen G. Rabe, a leading authority in the field, argues that the sense of joy and accomplishment that accompanied the end of the Cold War, the liberation of Eastern Europe, and the collapse of the Soviet Union must be tempered by the realization that Latin Americans paid a ghastly price during the Cold War. Dictatorship, authoritarianism, the methodical abuse of human rights, and campaigns of state terrorism characterized life in Latin America between 1945 and 1989. Countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, and Guatemala endured appalling levels of political violence. The U.S. repeatedly intervened in the internal affairs of Latin American nations in the name of anticommunism, destabilizing constitutional governments and aiding and abetting those who murdered and tortured. Rabe supplements his strong, provocative historical narrative with stories about the fates of ordinary Latin Americans, an extensive chronology, a series of evocative photographs, and an annotated bibliography.

The Last Colonial Massacre

Author : Greg Grandin
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 9780226305714
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (57 download)

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Book Synopsis The Last Colonial Massacre by : Greg Grandin

Download or read book The Last Colonial Massacre written by Greg Grandin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2004-09-15 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.