Editors' Introduction

This special section focuses on genocide and related mass violence in Latin America. Clearly there is a long history of genocide of indigenous peoples, from the arrival of Columbus and other conquerors to the present day. Perpetrated first by European colonial powers, particularly Spain and Portugal, genocidal activities continued in postcolonial settler states following the revolutions of the nineteenth century. Government shifted from Europe to local Euro-American, as well as in some cases indigenous, elites, who shared economic and thus political power with imperialist international actors—including, in many cases, the United States and some of its large corporations. Human-rights abuses continued. In the second half of the twentieth century, the Cold War-era National Security Doctrine, as well as state-specific tensions and agendas, played out in various Latin American contexts in a new round of repression, genocide, and other forms of mass violence. The Guatemalan Genocide of the 1980s and systematic killings and general military repression under dictatorships in Chile and Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s are perhaps the best-known cases, but others abound.

The goal of this special section is to add to the growing literature on genocide and mass violence in Latin America through scholars working within Latin American societies. The pages that follow contain what the editors believe is a substantive step toward a new understanding of the dynamics of genocide and related mass violence in Latin America, past and present, as well as analyses of the responses from within those societies to their history and the social and institutional forces toward mass violence. This contribution is especially timely, with world attention focused recently on Spain's attempt to try Augusto Pinochet and current trials of alleged perpetrators of mass violence in Argentina. Crucial to efforts at transforming Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, and other affected states and societies is a clear and honest engagement with the human-rights abuses in both the recent and the distant past—an engagement that includes discussions of the complex issues of historical memory: ideas about the ways the past can or should be represented; views on the use of different concepts such as "genocide," "crimes against humanity," "civil war," and "mass violence," and the consequences for historical memory of using this or that term in a given context; and more. We hope that the articles in this special section will contribute to this process.

No study of genocide in the western hemisphere should begin anywhere but with the attempted annihilation of indigenous peoples that forms the basis of Euro-American states and societies and has been an ongoing project of small and large, weak and powerful settler states from Canada to Argentina. "Discussing Indigenous Genocide in Argentina: Past, Present, and Consequences of Argentinean State Policies toward Native Peoples" by Walter Delrio, Diana Lenton, Marcelo Musante, Mariano Nagy, Alexis Papazian, and Pilar Pérez, presents research findings on the genocide of indigenous peoples of Argentina that has been largely edited out of the Argentine national narrative in a manner similar to that of other American settler states. The historical details in this article alone make it an important contribution to the literature, but the authors' analysis of how these historical details have been excluded from public understanding of Argentine history and identity represent a tremendous addition. An important accomplishment of the authors is to highlight the role of denial of the Argentine state as the agent of destruction of indigenous peoples in the past as a way of rationalizing the choice not to direct state resources and commitment to help stabilize and reconstitute indigenous groups in the face of debilitating poverty and marginalization in the present. Based on an ignoring of Argentine agency in the past, the contemporary situation is misrepresented as an unfortunate but unavoidable natural progression, rather than as a social problem that can be addressed through public policy and for which the Argentine state and society have ethical and legal responsibility.

To support this rethinking of the destruction of indigenous peoples, Delrio et al. make a compelling case for seeing it as genocidal. Of special...