The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War

Abstract

This ambitious book explores the ways U.S. cold-war policies helped frustrate the spread of democratic politics in Latin America, using Guatemala (especially the events leading to the 1978 Panzos massacre in northeastern Guatemala) as an example. It also concerns local politics and how peasants in the Polochic Valley embraced a form of democracy and resistance. The book succeeds in all aspects, but it is much more effective in the last discussion.Grandin makes several central arguments concerning the cold war and its impact. He persuasively attacks the suggestion—common in some of the literature on Latin America—that democracy was frustrated by the willingness of the Left to pursue armed resistance and that the defeat of leftist insurgency permitted the democratization of recent decades. In this argument, the threat of armed uprising compelled Latin American militaries to embrace the national security state. Grandin, instead, argues that “to the degree that Latin America today may be considered democratic, it was the left, including the Marxist left, that made it so” (p. xiv). Grandin also argues that Latin Amer-ican, or at least Guatemalan, peasants embraced democratic politics. Following on arguments made in his earlier book, The Blood of Guatemala (Duke Univ. Press, 2000), and also by Florencia Mallon among others, he suggests that Guatemalan peasants embraced aspects of nationalism and liberalism along with socialism, and they sought to implement their ideals in the local context. Finally, he argues that the current “democratic opening” in much of Latin America is limited and unsustainable precisely because it precludes a struggle for social justice along with democracy.The book also details the collapse of Guatemala into its particularly horrid nightmare of violence in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Grandin does a nice job of tying U.S. foreign policy to this virulent epidemic of violence. He argues that U.S. advisers, who succeeded too well in Guatemala, became belatedly alarmed at the level of violence they helped unleash. His account of how, by 1986, U.S. State Department accounts were “othering” Guatemalan society by talking about its innate propensity to violence (a violence the United States had helped foster) is particularly interesting. While Grandin expresses these arguments clearly and strongly, there is little here that would surprise scholars familiar with arguments about the cold war, contemporary politics in Latin America, and modern Guatemalan history.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 a number of key participants. Grandin focuses on the lives of local peasant organizers: José Angel Ico, Alfredo Cucul, Efraín Reyes Maaz, and most especially, Adelina Caal (Mamá Maquin). It is a testament to the power of Grandin’s writing that these lives seem to drive us, relentlessly but never inevitably, to the tragedy of the Panzos massacre that is the set piece of the book. Their political involvement spans the period from the early democratic opening of the 1920s to the end of the 1970s. By the 1950s, most of these actors were local organizers for, or involved in some other way with, Guatemala’s communist party, the PGT. Part of the strength of Grandin’s book lies in the way he illustrates how this involvement fulfilled their lives in a number of ways and (at least in some instances) both expressed and deepened their desire for a meaningful democracy. He also demonstrates how political expression was tied up in sexual politics, giving us glimpses of local attitudes toward homosexuality, polygamy, and women’s involvement in community organizing and radical politics. Most certainly, he skillfully explores the complex events and attitudes that led to their violent repression.Grandin’s argument requires him to focus on certain aspects of the Guatemalan experience, and this might prompt some quibbles about some of his assessments. There is a tendency to exaggerate the role of the PGT in the agrarian reform of the 1950s and to downplay internal opposition to that reform among members of the military and among certain sectors of the peasantry. The book focuses on the PGT, the last of Guatemala’s guerrilla organizations to embrace violence, which might lead some to question the relevance of the examples here for areas where guerrilla organizations had more shallow roots and were quicker to embrace violence. Still, these can only be minor quibbles about a book that does so much so superbly.