History of Political Murder in Latin America: Killing the Messengers of Change by W. John Green (review)

Which murders are political? W. John Green’s answer begins in the subtitle. He is concerned with Latin American elites (on the right) who have employed murder as a systematic weapon against agents of political change on the left or center-left. In this, there is a strong link between hegemony and murder, wherein the state has frequently functioned as a terror regime, sponsoring the killing of opponents. This is the analytical backdrop to an interesting overview of Latin American history during the past 70 years in which Green ties together disparate national and regional problems. The approach works, to an extent. For those with little knowledge of Latin America, the book will be a helpful introduction, complete with a country-by-country appendix of horrors. At the same time, Green covers well-worn ground. There is not much new here for those familiar with Cold War-era, US-sponsored dictatorships in the hemisphere.

The book contains errors, puzzling generalizations, and unsubstantiated tropes about Latin America. “Almost all Latin American states” used political murder, “not just military dictatorships but also democracies” (4). Should a “democratic” state that employs political murder not raise red flags about its democratic credentials? “Latin American elites,” Green writes, “believe in the power of bodies, literally” (109); here, power refers to spiritual energy. This is not only an odd mystification of the body, but the rhetoric underlines an opportunity lost. There is no theorizing the body here, despite rich related literatures.

Nor is there much on the links between culture and politics in reference to killing. Green notes as well that, “with breathtaking blindness to irony,” the Argentine military named its political project after the 1976 coup d’état “El Proceso,” in a manner that “overlapped with” Franz Kafka’s Der Process (The Trial, or in Spanish, El Proceso). “True to Kafka’s work, already much beloved by Latin American intellectuals,” Green goes on, “the military intended to purge Argentine society of what they considered to be pernicious subversive influences that threatened ‘Western Christian Civilization’” (214).

Readers may wonder what just happened. Was the Argentine military inspired by Kafka, or did it take a leaf out of his work? In fact, there is no link at all. Green does not quite say there is, despite dwelling on it for a hundred words. In this and other cases, there is a grim, ambiguous romanticizing of dictatorships’ state terror that leads to incomplete and inaccurate analysis.

The problem here is less in the sum of these incomplete or inaccurate parts, than in what the author’s analysis sets aside. Although he constructs a broad cross-regional construct that characterizes murderous elites in established categories across time and across national boundaries, Green sees little political nuance or complexity in authoritarian regimes; he does not examine how they functioned, or why they conducted mass murder.

This is not to suggest that the book exaggerates the atrocities addressed. However, Green misses the significance of killings perpetrated by the revolutionary left (of prominent labor leaders in late 1960s and early 1970s Argentina, for example), focusing instead on explaining the horrific state terror of the right. More important, he neglects the intersections of dictatorship and democracy in Latin America. Where Green touches on links between dictatorship and democracy, it is to highlight the persistence of dictatorial practice under democracy. But he does not probe the long-term continuities by which dictatorship and so-called democracy have often fueled the long-term denial of rights and the perpetration of violence toward working people across the region.

Throughout the Cold War, Latin Americans from El Salvador to Chile understood that authoritarian regimes that lasted often represented ugly but clear continuities from the so-called democratic governments that preceded them. Political murder has to be understood in the larger context of death in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and the working-class...