The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (review)

The Guatemalan civil war that began in the early 1960s and ended with a peace treaty in 1996 became a one-sided affair. The armed forces and their paramilitary allies won, not just by killing guerrillas but almost anyone suspected of supporting them. Tens of thousands of civilians, including many Mayan Indians, were the victims of an unpardonable crime that is often classified as genocide. "This book," Grandin writes, "documents the nearly century-long intermittent mobilization leading up to the Panzós massacre [of some 35 Mayan demonstrators in 1978], focusing on the lives of a number of Q'eqchi' Mayans, mostly members of the Communist Party but not exclusively so" (pp. 3-4).

In a fragmentary narrative that shifts back and forth from the late-nineteenth to the late-twentieth century, Grandin fastens on a few courageous individuals in the Alta Verapaz region who sought to challenge the worst effects of the coffee plantation system: the landlessness of the native inhabitants, the gradual erosion of their political autonomy and economic security, and the brutality with which the planters typically exploited their labor. Grandin artfully weaves these personal stories into the larger dramas of the country's growing dependence on coffee and banana production, and its experiences with dictatorship, democracy, military rule, land reform, communism, rural class conflict, insurgency and counterinsurgency. Compelling portraits of the interactions of political activists, plantation owners and the semi-proletarianized Indian labor force emerge from interviews and archival sources.

Two arguments, one prominent and consistent, the other muted and confused, control the text. The first claims that Guatemalan violence from the 1950s to the 1990s was driven by a specifically Cold War redefinition of democracy. The United States and allies such as Guatemala's governments after 1954 undertook a "savage crusade" to convert democracy from what the Latin American left correctly understood it to be (economic equality, economic security and "social solidarity") into the individualistic, free-market abomination known today as "neoliberalism." Since the Cold War was a terrorist crusade and the crusaders won, it follows that what passes for democracy today in Latin America is both a defeat for real democracy and an illegitimate "product of terror" (p. xv). Latin America is the Alta Verapaz.

The second argument addresses the ever-delicate problem of violence and its undeniable prominence in the history of the Alta Verapaz. Grandin ridicules the "dubious armchair anthropology" (p. 101) that would identify a habitual and customary resort to violence as the typical way to resolve conflicts in Latin American politics generally or in Mayan culture. Yet Grandin himself repeatedly calls attention to just such patterns of violence in Guatemala, observing "a common pattern of community violence" (p. 114) in Indian towns and reporting that "Domestic and neighborly violence according to court records was a constituent element of daily life," so much so that planters themselves "systematically took advantage" (p. 149) of it to preserve their authority. Political violence drew on "ideological hardening and polarization" that led to "accelerating rhythms of frustration, fear, and extremism" (p. 173). He concludes his book about Guatemalan violence by rejecting as "myth" any interpretation of Latin American history that would spotlight violence, owing to "the danger of portraying Latin Americans as children of Cain" (p. 172). But to equate violence understood as a component of political culture with violence wrongly understood as a race marker is to confuse two different arguments. Racialist interpretations of history are rightly as discredited as the phlogiston theory of combustion.

Both the exaggerated character of the first argument and the incoherence of the second stem from Grandin's failure to discipline his oft-expressed passion for socialism and his scorn for its enemies. Confronting the sins of the Left, Grandin exudes generosity and forgiveness: "The fact that the left, to use the term in the broadest sense possible, often repressed or silenced democratic ideals… does not make those beliefs and...