A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America's Long Cold War (review)

It has become commonplace when reviewing edited books to note that the quality of the chapters is uneven. Happily, I will not resort to saying this here, since all the chapters are excellent! This book reexamines twentieth-century Latin American history by focusing on key revolutionary and counterrevolutionary moments and movements across the region and the connections between them. The result is a stimulating discussion of the role that violence played in giving rise to revolutionary attempts to end injustice, how revolutionary movements conceptualized and employed violence to achieve their goals, and how counterrevolutionary forces ruthlessly unleashed violence to subdue and eliminate, literally and figuratively, revolutionaries and the possibility of revolutionary change.

The book had its beginning in a conference held at Yale University in 2003. It consists of an introductory chapter by Greg Grandin, ten empirically based chapters, two reflections, and a concluding essay by Gilbert Joseph. The final chapter is an interview Greg Grandin conducted with Arno Mayer, whose argument that violence is socially embedded and can only be understood when examined in the context of the historical struggles in which it occurs provides a framework for the book.

Grandin's opening chapter offers a rigorous critique of the literature on revolutions, counterrevolutions, and the use of violence. He points out that historians have not defined "the larger historical meaning of twentieth-century Latin American political violence" (p. 11). This book does precisely that and fills a critical gap that many may not have recognized. The ten chapters at the heart of the book are extremely rich in research and analysis. Many of the chapters offer new and stimulating interpretations of topics that are well known: the Popular Unity and Pinochet years in Chile; the revolutionary war and genocide in Guatemala; narcotraffickers, the left, and the state in Colombia; guerrilla warfare, the left, and the state in Peru; the 1934 uprising in Ránquil, Chile; the 1932 massacre in El Salvador; and the 1979 Sandinista victory in Nicaragua. Others present new case studies on issues that have been little examined: a comparison of the use of violence in the Russian and Mexican revolutions; how opposing forces in postrevolutionary Mexico framed an attack on a Communist Party rally to establish their political legitimacy; an exploration of how Cubans and anti-Castro forces, including the United States, understood and used the trials of counterrevolutionary forces following the Revolution; and the paradoxical strengths and weaknesses of Cuban political culture.

Although these chapters vary greatly in terms of time period, actors, and the means of struggle on which they focus, they share some key ideas. They vindicate the left and condemn the elite and/or the counterrevolutionary elements that opposed it. Whereas revolutionary forces worked to end injustice and establish or expand democracy, the right fought to maintain the former and curtail the latter. The elite employed violence to maintain the status quo and intensified its use when it felt threatened. Revolutionary forces, by and large, avoided violent measures except when other methods of seeking redress or of transforming the political reality were closed to them, as the chapters on El Salvador, Nicaragua, Mexico, and the trials in Cuba illustrate. And while the left's use of violence was restrained, even reluctant, the right did not hesitate to unleash vicious waves of terror against those it believed threatened its rule, as the chapters on Mexico, Peru, Chile, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Colombia so clearly demonstrate.

I remain unconvinced, however, of one of the book's arguments. The book locates the origin of the Cold War in Latin America in the early twentieth century, beginning with the Mexican revolution, without offering a clear explanation as to why. Certainly, this struggle unleashed many of the forces that would later come to define the Cold War, but, is that not true of most attempts to secure profound social changes, as the recent coup...