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Reviewed by:
  • State Violence and Genocide in Latin America: The Cold War Years ed. by Marcia Esparza, Henry R. Huttenbach, and Daniel Feierstein
  • Christopher Darnton
Marcia Esparza, Henry R. Huttenbach, and Daniel Feierstein, eds., State Violence and Genocide in Latin America: The Cold War Years. New York: Routledge, 2010. 272 pp. $150.00.

This volume’s primary objective is to demonstrate that the systematic killing of civilians by right-wing governments in Latin America during the Cold War qualifies as genocide, opposing the common argument (based on the definition in the 1948 Genocide Convention) that political groups, unlike ethnic or national ones, are excluded from such consideration. The contributors largely succeed at making this case. The book provides parallel illustrations from four countries in the later stages of the Cold War (Guatemala and Colombia in the 1980s, Argentina and Chile in the 1970s), although—as the authors recognize—these violent episodes have been frequently studied under alternative frameworks such as state terrorism rather than genocide. Taken together, the chapters [End Page 199] powerfully depict a prolonged regional pattern of wide-scale human rights abuses by governments that generally enjoyed some degree of U.S. support against perceived domestic enemies, generally on the political left. The volume is usefully structured to address in separate sections not only the “underpinnings” but also the “mechanisms” and “aftermath” of violence (pp. v–vi). The emphasis on mechanisms is particularly important because so much existing work already focuses on either causes or memories of political violence. Future research should be encouraged to trace the diffusion of specific practices such as torture, rendition, and disappearance across countries and organizations to highlight the foreign influences on Latin American violence. Valuable models might include Darius Rejali’s Torture and Democracy; João Resende-Santos’s Neorealism, States, and the Modern Mass Army; and Brian Loveman’s For La Patria.

A second goal of the book is to demonstrate U.S. complicity and culpability in these atrocities. Here the volume is weaker, though provocative. U.S. foreign policy frequently seems reduced to a monolithic, nefarious promotion of National Security Doctrines, yet the critiques presented in different chapters (as well as in the introduction) appear at odds. Was U.S. Cold War strategy in Latin America primarily realist (pp. 152, 162, 169), anti-Communist (pp. 3, 5, 44, 111, 190), imperial or colonial (pp. 5, 9, 13, 236), or capitalist (pp. 9, 124, 133)? Did it vary over U.S. administrations and across Latin American countries and governments, or not? To what extent was the Cold War an ideological framework that drove new forms of intervention and violence—or a rhetorical cloak for preexisting (and already violent) systems of national inequality and regional hegemony? In what contexts did U.S. objectives influence, rather than simply coincide with, those of Latin American security policymakers? Luis Roniger’s observations in the first chapter that the United States at least sometimes supported democratic and reformist governments in Latin America during the first half of the Cold War (pp. 26–27), that opinions about violence may have varied within the U.S. government, that Latin American military leaders had their own independent beliefs (p. 31), and that subsequent U.S. support for repression alongside stated commitments to democracy is more accurately understood as “contradiction” rather than “deceit” (p. 38) are notable exceptions from the volume’s overall tone. As other contributors recognize, more work is needed (pp. 76, 236).

Similar tensions affect the volume’s treatment of the domestic objectives of genocide. The atrocities profiled in the book occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, so it is not clear how these abuses fit into the politics and violence of the earlier Cold War, raising questions about whether escalation came from ideological changes or other conditions. Marcia Esparza argues in the introduction that genocide sought to eradicate el pueblo—that is, the popular sectors of society (particularly workers, peasants, and the urban poor)—in order to protect an unequal distribution of material resources and forestall policy demands such as wage increases and land reform (pp. 3, 6–8). This fits with the idea that repression preceded the Cold War...

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