LRB | Corey Robin : Dedicated to Democracy

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[London Review of B]

LRB | Vol. 26 No. 22 dated 18 November 2004 | Corey Robin

Dedicated to Democracy
Corey Robin

The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War by Greg Grandin
Chicago, 311 pp, £40.00

On 5 December 1982, Ronald Reagan met the Guatemalan president, Efraín
Ríos Montt, in Honduras. It was a useful meeting for Reagan. 'Well, I
learned a lot,' he told reporters on Air Force One. 'You'd be
surprised. They're all individual countries.' It was also a useful
meeting for Ríos Montt. Reagan declared him 'a man of great personal
integrity . . . totally dedicated to democracy', and claimed that the
Guatemalan strongman was getting 'a bum rap' from human rights
organisations for his military's campaign against leftist guerrillas.
The next day, one of Guatemala's elite platoons entered a jungle
village called Las Dos Erres and killed 162 of its inhabitants, 67 of
them children. Soldiers grabbed babies and toddlers by their legs,
swung them in the air, and smashed their heads against a wall. Older
children and adults were forced to kneel at the edge of a well, where
a single blow from a sledgehammer sent them plummeting below. The
platoon then raped a selection of women and girls it had saved for
last, pummelling their stomachs in order to force the pregnant among
them to miscarry. They tossed the women into the well and filled it
with dirt, burying an unlucky few alive. The only traces of the bodies
later visitors would find were blood on the walls and placentas and
umbilical cords on the ground.

Amid the hagiography surrounding Reagan's death in June, it was
probably too much to expect the media to mention his meeting with Ríos
Montt. After all, it wasn't Reykjavik. But Reykjavik's shadow - or
that cast by Reagan speaking in front of the Berlin Wall - does not
entirely explain the silence about this encounter between presidents.
While it's tempting to ascribe the omission to American amnesia, a
more likely cause is the deep misconception about the Cold War under
which most Americans labour. To the casual observer, the Cold War was
a struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, fought and
won through stylish jousting at Berlin, antiseptic arguments over
nuclear stockpiles, and the savvy brinkmanship of American leaders.
Latin America seldom figures in popular or even academic discussion of
the Cold War, and to the extent that it does, it is Cuba, Chile and
Nicaragua rather than Guatemala that earn most of the attention.

But, as Greg Grandin shows in The Last Colonial Massacre, Latin
America was as much a battleground of the Cold War as Europe, and
Guatemala was its front line. In 1954, the US fought its first major
contest against Communism in the Western hemisphere when it overthrew
Guatemala's democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, who had
worked closely with the country's small but influential Communist
Party. That coup sent a young Argentinian doctor fleeing to Mexico,
where he met Fidel Castro. Five years later, Che Guevara declared that
1954 had taught him the impossibility of peaceful, electoral reform
and promised his followers that 'Cuba will not be Guatemala.' In 1966,
Guatemala was again the pacesetter, this time pioneering the
'disappearances' that would come to define the dirty wars of
Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and Brazil. In a lightning strike,
US-trained security officials captured some thirty leftists, tortured
and executed them, and then dropped most of their corpses into the
Pacific. Explaining the operation in a classified memo, the CIA wrote:
'The execution of these persons will not be announced and the
Guatemalan government will deny that they were ever taken into
custody.' With the 1996 signing of a peace accord between the
Guatemalan military and leftist guerrillas, the Latin American Cold
War finally came to an end - in the same place it had begun - making
Guatemala's the longest and most lethal of the hemisphere's civil
wars. Some 200,000 men, women and children were dead, virtually all at
the hands of the military: more than were killed in Argentina,
Uruguay, Chile, Brazil, Nicaragua and El Salvador combined, and
roughly the same number as were killed in the Balkans. Because the
victims were primarily Mayan Indians, Guatemala today has the only
military in Latin America deemed by a UN-sponsored truth commission to
have committed acts of genocide.

The Last Colonial Massacre reminds us that when we talk about
America's victory in the Cold War, we are talking about countries like
Guatemala, where Communism was fought and defeated by means of the
mass slaughter of civilians. But Grandin is interested in more than
tallying body counts and itemising atrocities. The task he sets
himself is to locate this most global of contests in the smallest of
places, to find beneath the duelling composure of superpower rivalry a
bloody conflict over rights and inequality, to see behind a simple
morality tale of good triumphing over evil the more ambivalent
settlement that was - and is - the end of the Cold War. Mounting the
most powerful case to date against the know-nothing triumphalism of
Cold War historians and the smug complacency of the American media,
Grandin's book also performs a modest act of restorative justice: it
allows Guatemalans to tell their own stories in their own words. In a
series of remarkable biographies Grandin shows how men and women made
high politics and high politics made them, demonstrating that the Cold
War was waged not only in the airy game rooms of nuclear strategists
but 'in the closed quarters of family, sex and community'.

The book opens with an epigraph from Sartre: 'A victory described in
detail is indistinguishable from a defeat.' The victory Grandin refers
to here is singular and by now virtually complete: that of the United
States over Communism. But the defeats he describes are various, their
consequences still unfolding. First is the defeat of the Latin
American left, whose aspirations ranged from the familiar (armed
seizure of state power) to the surprising (the creation of
capitalism). Next is the defeat of a continental social democracy
which would allow citizens to exercise a greater share of power - and
to receive a greater share of its benefits - than historically had
been their due. Finally, and most important, is the defeat of that
still elusive dream of men and women freeing themselves, thanks to
their own reason and willed effort, from the bonds of tradition and
oppression. This had been the dream of the transatlantic
Enlightenment, and throughout the Cold War American leaders argued on
its behalf (or some version of it) in the struggle against Communism.
But in Latin America, Grandin shows, it was the left who took up the
Enlightenment's banner, leaving the United States and its allies
carrying the black bag of the counter-Enlightenment. More than
foisting on the United States the unwanted burden of liberal
hypocrisy, the Cold War inspired it to embrace some of the most
reactionary ideals and revanchist characters of the 20th century.

According to Grandin, the Latin American left brought liberalism and
progress to a land awash in feudalism. Well into the 20th century, he
shows, Guatemala's coffee planters presided over a regime of forced
labour that was every bit as medieval as tsarist Russia. Using
vagrancy laws and the lure of easy credit, the planters amassed vast
estates and a workforce of peasants who essentially belonged to them.
Reading like an excerpt from Gogol's Dead Souls, one advertisement
from 1922 announced the sale of '5000 acres and many mozos colonos who
will travel to work on other plantations'. (Mozos colonos were
indebted labourers.) While unionised workers elsewhere were itemising
what their employers could and could not ask of them, Guatemala's
peasants were forced to provide a variety of compulsory services,
including sex. Two planters in the Alta Verapaz region, cousins from
Boston, used their Indian cooks and corn grinders to sire more than a
dozen children. 'They fucked anything that moved,' a neighbouring
planter observed. Though plantations were mini-states - with private
jails, stockades and whipping posts - planters also depended on the
army, judges, mayors and local constables to force workers to submit
to their will. Public officials routinely rounded up independent or
runaway peasants, shipping them off to plantations or forcing them to
build roads. One mayor had local vagrants paint his house. As much as
anything Grandin cites, it is this view of political power as a form
of private property which confirms his observation that by 1944 'only
five Latin America countries - Mexico, Uruguay, Chile, Costa Rica and
Colombia - could nominally call themselves democracies.'

And then, within two years, it all changed. By 1946, only five
countries - Paraguay, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and the
Dominican Republic - could not be called democracies. Turning the
anti-Fascist rhetoric of the Second World War against the hemisphere's
old regimes, leftists overthrew dictators, legalised political
parties, built unions and extended the franchise. Galvanised by the
New Deal and the Popular Front, reformers declared, in the words of
the Guatemalan president Juan José Arévalo, that 'we are socialists
because we live in the 20th century.' The entire continent was fired
by a combination of Karl Marx, the Declaration of Independence and
Walt Whitman, but Guatemala burned the brightest. There, a
decades-long struggle to break the back of the coffee aristocracy
culminated in the 1950 election of Arbenz, who with the help of a
small circle of Communist advisers instituted the Agrarian Reform of
1952. This redistributed a million and half acres to a hundred
thousand families, and also gave peasants a significant share of
political power. Local land reform committees, made up primarily of
peasant representatives, bypassed the planter-dominated municipal
government and provided peasants and their unions with a platform from
which to make and win their claims for equity.

Arguably the most audacious experiment in direct democracy the
continent had ever seen, the Agrarian Reform entailed a central irony,
critical to Grandin's argument about the Latin American left. The
legislation's authors - most of them Communists - were not building
socialism: they were creating capitalism. Scrupulous about property
rights and the rule of law - peasants had to back their claims with
extensive documentation; only unused land was expropriated; planters
were guaranteed multiple rights of appeal, all the way to the
president - the Agrarian Reform imposed a regime of separated powers
that was almost as cumbersome as James Madison's Constitution.
(According to one of the bill's Communist authors, 'it was a bourgeois
law.' When grassroots activists complained about the slowness of
reform, Arbenz responded: 'I don't care! You have to do things
right!') As Grandin points out, the Agrarian Reform turned landless
peasants into property owners, giving them the bargaining power to
demand higher wages from their employers - in the hope that they would
become 'consumers of national manufactures', while 'planters,
historically addicted to cheap, often free labour and land', would be
forced to 'invest in new technologies' and thereby 'make a profit'.

Guatemala's socialists did more than create democrats and capitalists.
They also made peasants into citizens. While liberals and
conservatives have long claimed that leftist ideologies reduced their
adherents to automatons, Grandin shows that leftist ideals and
movements awakened peasants to their own power, giving them extensive
opportunities to speak for themselves and to act on their own behalf.
Efraín Reyes Maaz, for example, was a Mayan peasant organiser, born in
the same year as the Bolshevik Revolution. 'If I hadn't studied Marx I
would be chicha ni limonada,' Reyes told Grandin. 'I'd be nothing. But
reading nourished me and here I am. I could die today and nobody could
take that from me.' Where other peasants seldom ventured beyond their
plantations, the Communist Party inspired Reyes to travel to Mexico
and Cuba, and he returned to Guatemala with the conviction that 'every
revolutionary carries around an entire world in his head.' The
Communist Party did not require Reyes to give up everything he knew;
it gave him ample freedom to synchronise the indigenous and the
European, making for a 'Mayan Marxism' that was every bit as supple as
the hybrid Marxism developed in Central Europe between the wars. When
anti-Communists put an end to this democratic awakening in 1954, it
was as much the peasant's newfound appetite for thinking and talking
as the planter's expropriated land that they were worried about. As
Guatemala's archbishop complained, the Arbencistas sent peasants
'gifted with facility with words' to the nation's capital, where they
were 'taught . . . to speak in public'.

Hoping to stifle this riot of thought and talk, Guatemala's Cold
Warriors fused a romantic aversion to the modern world with the most
up-to-date technologies of propaganda and violence (imported from the
United States), making their effort more akin to Fascism than to a
fight for liberal democracy. Here, Grandin again breaks new ground,
capturing the delicate amalgam of reason and reaction, elitism and
populism, that was the Latin American counter-revolution. Relying on
the power of the Catholic Church, the regime that replaced Arbenz had
prelates preach the gospel against Communism and socialism, and also
against democracy, liberalism and feminism. Reaching back to the
rhetoric of opposition to the French Revolution, the Church fathers
characterised the Cold War as a struggle between the City of God and
'the city of the devil incarnate' and complained that Arbenz, 'far
from uniting our people in their advance toward progress',
'disorganises them into opposing bands'. The Arbencistas, they
claimed, were 'professional corrupters of the feminine soul',
elevating women with 'gifts of proselytism or leadership' to 'high and
well-paid positions in official bureaucracy'. Because the Church
elders were sometimes too fastidious to whip up the masses, emigrés
from Republican Spain, who were partial to Franco and Mussolini,
frequently took their place, calling for a more ecstatic faith to
counter Communism's appeal: 'We do not want a cold Catholicism. We
want holiness, ardent, great and joyous holiness . . . intransigent
and fanatical.'

While the Cold Warriors' ideals looked backwards, their weapons -
furnished by the United States - looked forwards. (Indeed, one of the
Americans' chief justifications for their interventions during the
Cold War was that US involvement would contain not only Communism, but
also, in the words of the State Department, a right-wing
'counterinsurgency running wild'. Instead of a savage 'white terror',
US-trained security forces would work with the anti-Communist
'democratic left' - yesterday's third way - to fight a more
'rational', 'modern' and 'professional' Cold War.) During the 1954
coup, the CIA turned to Madison Avenue, pop sociologies and the
literature of mass psychology to create the illusion of large-scale
opposition to Arbenz. Radio shows spread rumours of an underground
resistance, inciting wobbly army officers to abandon their oath to the
democratically elected president. In subsequent decades, the CIA
outfitted Guatemala with a centralised domestic intelligence agency,
equipped with phones, radios, cameras, typewriters, carbon paper,
filing cabinets, surveillance equipment - and guns, ammunition and
explosives. The CIA also brought together the military and the police
in sleek urban command centres, where intelligence could be quickly
analysed, distributed, acted on and archived for later use. After
these efforts achieved their most spectacular results, with the 1966
disappearance of Guatemala's last generation of peaceful leftists,
guerrillas began seriously to organise armed opposition in rural
areas. In response, the regime threw into the countryside an army so
modernised - and well trained and equipped by the US - that by 1981 it
could conduct the first colour-coded genocide in history: 'Military
analysts marked communities and regions according to colours. White
spared those thought to have no rebel influence. Pink identified areas
in which the insurgents had limited presence; suspected guerrillas and
their supporters were to be killed but the communities left standing.
Red gave no quarter: all were to be executed and villages razed.'

Referring to a 1978 military massacre of Indians in Panzós, a river
town in the Polochic Valley, the title of Grandin's book brilliantly
evokes this mixture of modern and anti-modern elements. On 29 May that
year, roughly five hundred Mayan peasants assembled in the town centre
to ask the mayor to hear their complaints against local planters,
which were to be presented by a union delegation from the capital.
Firing on the protesters, a military detachment killed somewhere
between 34 and a hundred men, women and children. At first glance, the
massacre seems like nothing so much as a repetition of Guatemala's
colonial past: humble Indian petitioners ask public officials to
intercede on their behalf against local rulers; government forces in
league with the planters respond with violence; Indians wind up
floating down the river or go home. On closer inspection, the massacre
bears all the marks of the 20th century. The Indians were led by
leftist activists - one of them an indigenous woman - trained by
clandestine Communist organisers. They worked with unions, based in
the capital, reflecting the left's attempt to nationalise local
grievances. For their part, the soldiers firing on the peasants were
more than a local constabulary defending the interests of the
planters. They were a contingent of Guatemala's newly trained army,
spoke fluent anti-Communism, and wielded Israeli-made Galil assault
rifles, suggesting not just the nationalisation but the
internationalisation of Guatemala's traditional struggles over land
and labour.

Though the Cold War in Latin America began as a tense negotiation
between American rationalism and Latin revanchism, Grandin suggests
that it ended with the US careening towards the latter. In a rerun of
the fabled journey into the heart of darkness, US officials returned
from their travels south echoing the darkest voices of the
counter-Enlightenment. One embassy officer wrote to his superiors back
home: 'After all hasn't man been a savage from the beginning of time
so let us not be too queasy about terror. I have literally heard these
arguments from our people.' A CIA staffer urged his colleagues to
abandon all attempts at mass persuasion in Guatemala and instead
direct their efforts at the 'heart, the stomach and the liver (fear)'.
Seeking to destabilise Allende's Chile, another CIA man proclaimed:
'We cannot endeavour to ignite the world if Chile itself is a placid
lake. The fuel for the fire must come from within Chile. Therefore,
the station should employ every stratagem, every ploy, however
bizarre, to create this internal resistance.' As Grandin writes, 'Will
to set the world ablaze . . . faith in the night-side of the soul,
contempt for democratic temperance and parliamentary procedure: these
qualities are usually attributed to opponents of liberal civility,
tolerance and pluralism - not their defenders.' With this plangent
remark, Grandin concludes his remarkable tale, suggesting that the
greatest defeat of the Cold War could be said to be that of America
itself.

But there may have been one more defeat, which Grandin's book suggests
not by explicit argument but by the force of its analysis. For all its
violence and misery, the Cold War had the virtue of imposing on
Western intellectuals, Communist and anti-Communist alike, the duty of
historical intelligence. Marxism attracted its share of morally blind
and politically repellent followers, but its varied currents carried
scholars and writers - in happy or unhappy conveyance - to an
unparalleled appreciation of the effects of time and place. Whether it
was Lukács discerning the failed revolutions of 1848 in the stilted
realism and archaic dialogue of Flaubert's Salammbô or Louis Hartz
attributing American liberalism to the absence of feudalism in the
United States or George Steiner hearing the 'hoofbeats' of Napoleon's
armies in Hegel's Phenomenology ('the master statement of the new
density of being'), Marxism pressed intellectuals of varying stripes
to think about history's wayward intrusions. Even W.W. Rostow - the
most anti-Communist of anti-Communism's 'action intellectuals', to
borrow a phrase from Arno Mayer - was forced by the challenge of
Marxism to offer an economic and political programme that tallied,
however minimally, the persistent effects of colonialism throughout
the postcolonial world.

But the collapse of Communism and disappearance of Marxism have eased
the burdens of intelligence. With the market - and now religion -
displacing social democracy as the language of public life, writers
are no longer compelled by the requirements of the historical
imagination. Facing a new enemy, which does not make the same demands
that Communism once did, today's intellectuals wave away all talk of
'root causes': history, it seems, will no longer be summoned to the
bar of political analysis - or not for the time being. Mimicking the
theological language of their antagonists, contemporary writers prefer
catchwords such as 'evil' and 'Islamo-fascism' to the vocabulary of
secular criticism. Their language may be a response to 9/11, but it is
a product of the end of the Cold War. When Marxism was banished from
the political scene in 1989, it left behind no successor language -
save religion itself - to grapple with the twinned fortunes of the
individual and the collective, the personal and the political, the
present and the past. That Grandin has managed to salvage some portion
of that historical vision from the dustbin of history suggests not
only his resourcefulness, but also the timeliness of this most
untimely of meditations.

Corey Robin teaches at Brooklyn College, City University of New York.
He is the author of Fear: The History of a Political Idea.

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20 November 2004



--
Paul A. Bove
Professor of English
University of Pittsburgh
Editor, boundary 2