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

This book is both a marvelous work of history and an illustration of how excellent scholarship is diminished by unconstrained bias.

The book at its best is a meticulous reconstruction of Guatemala’s experience of decades of political violence, disproportionately caused by state terror. Greg Grandin weaves personal stories at the local level with large-scale national and international processes and events to demonstrate the horror of zealous anti-Communist policies that led to mass killings, displacements, and vast destruction and also the subtleties of Old Left and specifically Communist party actions in Guatemala from approximately 1950 to the mid-1980s. He draws on many archives in Guatemala, both local and national, as well as photocopies of declassified U.S. government documents stored at the non-governmental National Security Archive. In addition, he draws insightfully and with sensitivity from many oral histories, both with elderly participants and with their descendants.

The book provides a splendid history showing why the Communist party (Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo, PGT) mattered in Guatemala. Grandin argues that the PGT “sought to advance national capitalism through the extension of democracy in the countryside” (p. 54). More importantly and persuasively, Grandin repeatedly shows how the PGT made a difference in the lives of individuals. He writes that “the Communist Party helped [individual name] emerge from an exploitative, deeply deadening system, to develop a sharpened sense of himself as a critical being, able to observe, act in, and change the world” (pp. 108–109). In Guatemala’s indigenous heartland, Marxism interacted with the beliefs of local communities to deepen the PGT’s grassroots support through “the party’s ongoing promotion of an ethical society centered in the just distribution and use of land” (p. 123).

Grandin demonstrates that the PGT’s national leaders, with few exceptions, eschewed political violence and sought to restrain extremist armed struggle on the left. The PGT incorporated Guatemalans across ethnic lines, even though the party focused its appeal on social justice and land rather than on the articulation of ethnic grievances as such. By the 1960s the PGT had also developed a strong platform on the role of women in society, helping to change discourse even if party members’ own behavior did not quite live up to the program. In general, Grandin argues that the PGT nurtured and fostered the foundations for a modern, democratic Guatemala.

Grandin also demonstrates in detail the violent horror that the state, the army, and death squads inflicted on the population, especially on rural indigenous peoples, in the name of anti-Communism. Yet he also calls attention to a historical irony. The intensity of the army’s repression in 1981–1983 was associated with an effort to build social support, and the domestic war also bankrupted many planters. The army sought political order through an eventual return to constitutional democracy and implemented a substantial land reform. In that way, “many of the reforms the left long struggled for were achieved not through victory but by defeat” (p. 132). Merchants, planters, and labor contractors no longer dominated Mayan communities as they once had.

The book is marred, however, by Grandin’s insistence on a thesis that he does not demonstrate: “Cold War terror—either executed, patronized, or excused by the United States—fortified illiberal forces, militarized societies, and broke the link between freedom and equality” (p. xiv). The introduction, a large segment of the conclusion, and passages throughout the book reiterate these themes, and they constitute Grandin’s dominant explanatory framework for the whole of Latin America. Yet his archival and interview research pertains only to Guatemala.

Even with regard to Guatemala, the United States played a “star” role only twice: during the overthrow of the constitutional president Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 and during the counterinsurgency training in the mid-1960s. The United States was clearly counterrevolutionary in 1954, but the terror began in Guatemala a decade later. For the 1960s, Grandin mentions only in passing attempts by U.S...