The Last Colonial Massacre (Grandin)

 "Empire rather than fortifying democracy, weakened it to the fragile degree that democracy and human rights exist today in Latin America, they have been achieved not through the mercy of the US empire but through resistance to that empire." ( Grandin, http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/305724in.html)

Greg Grandin's book, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (2004), focuses on 20th century Guatemala. The book examines the history of Maya political activism, specifically the Guatemalan Communist Party and variations of it between the 1920s and 70s. His methods are ethnographic in nature -- interviews/life stories.  Post 1954 -- the removal of the Arbenz -- the support for his research and corroboration of the interviews has been criticized as "tougher to swallow" (Woodward, dissentmagazine.org). Grandin's argument is a challenge to imperialism ultimately citing US's support of repressive governments in Latin America, specifically Guatemala here (see When Mountains Tremble and my notes from that on this blog). Woodward, fellow at the Center for Humanistic Enquiry at Emory University,  challenges Grandin's assertions about  the US as an enemy of regional democracy citing a few instances of US's efforts to advance civil rights in Puerto Rico, take down leaders like Diaz, Heurta and Somoza and then challenging Grandin on asserting Latin American liberals who also abandoned democratization in Latin America asking " Who were these 'liberals'?"

The overthrow of Arbenz convinced many Latin American reformers,
democrats, and nationalists that the United States was less a model to be
emulated than a danger to be feared. Che Guevara, for example, was in
Guatemala working as a doctor and witnessed firsthand the effects of US
intervention. He fled to Mexico, where he would meet Fidel Castro and go
on to lead the Cuban Revolution. He taunted the United States repeatedly
in his speeches by saying that ‘Cuba will not be Guatemala.’ [2]

Woodward states that Che Guevara was not a reformer, democrat or nationalist and "would have reacted with particular scorn to the suggestion that he ever was a 'democrat'" (92). However, of interest to Grandin, according to Woodward, is suggesting that the armed guerrillas of 1960s were an extension of the socialist, nationalist and communist parties of working-class and even peasants "driven by the frustration of efforts to consolidate post-World War II social democracies" (Grandin 3).  This is an argument that Woodward suggests conflates Guatemala with Latin America citing 1) a Cuban-backed insurgency aimed not at a US installed dictatorship but an elected reformist government; 2) Venezuela's President Betancourt exiled by a miltary coup later returned to power in an election in 1959 who later turned over power democratically in 1964 (Woodward 93).Woodwards is not alone in this criticism as Murray also sees Grandin as offering Guatemala as a "microcosm" of Latin American history.



In addition to challenging Grandin's assertion about the old left and new left, Woodward argues that Grandin is critical of human agency and a dependency on capitalism, it seems rather than a social movement or unity:

Violence had the effect of dissolving the affiliation between individual activists and their wider social network…. Repression severed alliances between reforming elites and popular classes, disaggregated powerful collective movements into individual survival strategies, extracted leaders from their communities, and redefined the relationship between human beings and society. … The key to counterinsurgent triumph lay in the creation of a new way of thinking. Terror trained citizens to turn their political passions inward, to receive sustenance from their families, to focus on personal pursuits, and
to draw strength from faiths less concerned with history and politics. Such conversions were the routine manifestations of the larger reinterpretation of democracy…: the idea, widely held in different forms at the end of World War II, that freedom and equality are mutually fulfilling has been replaced by a more vigilant definition, one that stresses personal liberties and free markets and sees any attempt to achieve social equity as leading to at best declining productivity and at worst political turmoil. (Grandin 196-97)

Ultimately, Woodward concludes that Granding "refuses to consider the broader context in which the apparent exhaustion of alternatives occurred, specifically the degree to which the horrors (at worst) and inefficiency (at best) of 'real existing socialism' served to discredit any socialist project. How else to explain the seeming absence of an alternative to neoliberal capitalism in societies the world over that never experieced the kind of state terror describe in The Last Colonial Massacre?" (94).  What's more is that because the participants in Grandin's study talk about leaving political activism for Christianity, Grandin suggests that hope and activism for social justice has been abandoned, but Woodward offers that the next generation may take up that movement. History is never ending; the stories are just now being told and so those who hear those stories are bearing witness, are listeners, are companions to the survivors and their efforts who are now "living through" a history that was not available to them because of silence (see posts on this blog about Felman and Laub's Testimony for a discussion/notes).

 Robin, in his review,  begins with an account of Ronald Reagan's meeting with Guatemala's president Efrain Rios Montt in Honduras on December 5, 1982 after which Reagan declared Rios Montt to be "dedicated to democracy," a meeting which was followed, the next day, by a massacre of 162 Las Dos Erres villagers by  a Guatemalan platoon (see below for two accounts of this recently published). Robin brings this up to point out Americans' misconceptions about the Cold War -- that it was a US/Soviet struggle, about nuclear weapons, and situated in the memory of Berlin wall's fall. As far as Latin America, he argues, Cuba, Chile, and Nicaragua might be associated with the Cold War in the eyes of Americans, but Guatemala is certainly outside that scope. In fact, as Grandin shows, Guatemala  in the 1954 was where 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" (Robin).  This "cold war" continued in 1966 when in Guatemala the "disappearances" from US-trained officials "captured some thirty leftist, tortured and executed them, and then dropped their corpses into the Pacific," disappearances common in Argentina, Uraguay, Chile, and Brazil. By 1996, a peace accord between the leftest guerrillas and the Guatemalan military ended the Latin American Cold War -- most of the 200, 000 dead were Mayas deeming the the "civil war" acts genocide. Robin's contribution here is to articulate that America's victory in the Cold War includes Guatemala where Communism was defeated by mass slaughter of civilians.  Therefore, Grandin's book is  a "modest act of restorative justice: it allows Guatemalans to tell their own stories in their own words."

While the US did defeat Communism, it defeated much more, according to Grandin. The democracy which would allow citizens to share power and to free themselves from oppression were also defeated, the dream of Englightenment. Grandin argues that the US offered a counter-Enlightenment by supporting military power and oppressing access to individual liberties. What Grandin suggests is that the Latin America left brought feudualism (through capitalism?)  with Guatemala's coffee planters enforcing forced labor, vagrancy laws and credit -- essentially owning the peasants. Robin writes that "it is a view of political power as a form of private property which confirms [Grandin's] observattion that by 1944 'only five Latin American countries -- Mexico, Uraguay, Chile, Costa Rica and Columbia -- could nominally call themselves democracies.'" In the 1950 election of Arbenz with the help of the Agrarian Reform of 1952, this land was redistributed  to families bypassing the planter-dominated municipal government. What Grandin offers here is an irony: the socialism was really capitalism: "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 manufacturers,' while 'planters, historically addicted to cheap, often free labor and land,' would be forced to 'invest in new technologies' and thereby 'make a profit'." So what Grandin is showing is how the leftist ideologies "awakened peasants to their own power, giving them extensive opportunities to speak for themselves and to act on their own behalf."

However, the 1954 coup to oust Arbenz began ten years of US support of a anti-communist, democratic left movement in Guatemala prompting the organization of armed guerrillas in rural areas of the country. The response was a Guatemalan army modernized, trained and equipped by the US that by 1981 it conducted "the first colour-coded genocide in history" and "an internationalization of Guatemala's traditional struggles over land and labor" (Robin):

‘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.’ (Grandin)

Such drastic measures are the basis of Grandin's argument that America, the ideology of an America that it is a country of liberty, of equality, of social justice, was lost in the Cold War. Robin writes, " 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...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."

I think that what will be most useful for my argument about what stories can do for history, or more importantly what a novel can do, is how a novel can capture the resilience of a people. The novel can capture the "complex architecture manifestations of that oppression"(DeStigter email). As we see in Grandin's book, "Repression severed alliances between reforming elites and popular classes, disaggregated powerful collective movements into individual survival strategies, extracted leaders from their communities, and redefined the relationship between human beings and society" (Grandin 196). However, individuals, especially activists, while extracted did not remain isolated. Out of such manifestations grew a new way of thinking that resisted oppression. The state sanctioned terror in Guatemala actually ignited a consciousness.The politics of the plantation economy created forced migration and even the formation of new communities -- for a people firmly rooted in tradition and defined by their land, this altered the way individuals related to each other and to the state. The institutions of parties, unions, and legislation  and ideas like Marxism provided the people a means to resist  -- again, a people historically situated in subjugation.  While Grandin weaves research and testimony into an account of Latin America in the Cold War, we do not hear but a few excerpts from his interviews with activists, and we do not get a sense of the landscape save names of towns and regions.  Gradin argues that Guatemala advanced democracy not through autonomy or isolated freedom but rather a "collective action laid bare the social foundations of self" (181). This, I think, is what is worth knowing and teaching in our schools. This notion of democracy is worth contemplating, and so how can we make this story accessible to adolescents.  How can we make this known? A novel. But how would an artist show or make known this resiliance?


"What Happened at Los Dos Erres," This American Life
"Finding Oscar: Massacre, Memory, and Justice in Guatemala," ProPublic.org