Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Making of an Imperial Republic (Updated and Expanded Edition)

This is truly an excellent book that in a clear way illustrates American involvement in South and Central America.The book begins by telling the story about how Kennedy set out to reshape the Americas into a place where true revolutionary ideals could grow spread by free men and women. He started something called the "Alliance for progress" which contained the nucleus of this idea. The problem was that he armed exactly those people who where completley opposed to these revolutionary ideas. thus began an era of counterrevolution, that gave birth to the death squads and coups in Brazil, Uruguay, Chile and Argentina. When Richard Nixon arrived in Venezuela in 1958 his limousine was attacked by an angry mob. The next day they cleared the streets with tear gas so he could leave safely. This set the tone for American and Latin American relation in the coming years. Allendes election in Chile terrified Nixon because Allende wasnt trying to create another Cuba with Soviet style repression of civil liberties. He wanted a socialist state that would be a symbol of real reform, and this was truly frightening to Washington. Therefore Nixon with the help of the strong arm of the CIA ordered Allendes downfall. Later when Reagan came to power he saw his purpose to reinstate a sense of national purpose and this he did by restoring military power. Almost all of Latin America was ruled at the time by pro american dictators, but something was starting to brew in Central America. The hardest hit countries where El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala. US allies killed approximatley 300,ooo people during Reagans two terms. Hundreds of thousands where tortured. Jean Kirkpatrick advised the Reagan administration to undo the human rights programs that Carter had initiated and spoke instead of the true nature of politics that was based on "competition for power", and that "brute force" was often better than "human reason". This rationalized such things as the dictatorships death squads-because "salvadors political culture respected a sovreign who was willing to wield violence". America now painted itself as the vanguard against the evill empire of the Soviet Union and this was used as an excuse to legitemize the brutal opposition to third world nationalism. In countries like El salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua, the United States did not make the same mistake as they did in Vietnam. Instead they "outsourced" their army and by supporting local bad boys let death squads do their dirty work. The idea of "going primitive" was implemented in these conflicts, where the most brutal crimes against human rights imaginable where committed.To tell you the truth I skimmed past most of the descriptions of the violence due to the intense brutality that was described. Already in the 1960s Kennedy had installed such anti-communist paramilitary groups in El Salvador called ANSESAL and ORDEN. These groups where to work preemptively to stop any communist threats in the area. These groups whe

Greg Grandin's Empire's Workshop is a work of enormous synthetic breadth. While it is a commonplace for commentators to point out that many of the policy analysts and foreign policy specialists that staffed the Reagan administration have also staffed the George W. Bush administration, in my reading Grandin's work is the first to chart the philosophical, policy and propagandistic correlations between them. Grandin demonstrates that many of the techniques employed by the Bush administration to garner and sustain support for its wars and to employ effective disinformation were forged and refined in the laboratory (or "workshop" as Grandin puts it) of Central America during the Reagan years. Particularly novel is Grandin's analysis of how both Reagan and Bush curried the active support of the USA religious right in pursuit of its foreign and military policy aims. In the end, the reader realizes that the Reagan years became a template for the Bush years. The book is brilliant. I found it difficult to put it down.

I saw Grandin discuss this book at an event last month in Cambridge, where he appeared with Noam Chomsky. The place was packed, and both Grandin and Chomsky gave great presentations. Grandin's was one of the best summaries of the origins of the modern conservative movement I have ever heard, so I bought the book. It is an amazing analysis, very counter-intuitive. Grandin's book stresses the importance of foreign policy in the rise of the New Right, in particularly the importance of the US's long history in Latin America. I've read a lot of interesting speculation about neoconservatives and the Christian New Right, but this book traces their alliance back to Ronald Reagan's Central American policy. Actually, the connections between Bush's foreign policy, which has gotten us into the mess the US is in in Iraq, and Reagan's support of the Contras in Nicaragua and the death squads in El Salvador is kind of terrifying. Since so many of the bushies first got started in Iran-Contra, I have to wonder why nobody has connected the dots before this book. At the presentation in Boston, Grandin pointed out that Chomsky's book on Central America, Turning the Tide, came out 21 years ago. I just read that book a few years ago myself, and Empire's Workshop is a worthy follow-up.

This book is much more than a history of the US in Latin America. It's an explanation of the importance of Ronald Reagan's Central American policy in the formation of the conservative movement and how that policy led to war in Iraq. All of the stuff that we are reading about today - abuses of power such as the NSA wiretapping controversy, the surveillance of antiwar protesters, the way the Bushies have used public relations companies and so-called "grassroots" conservative groups like the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the justification of torture in the name of supporting freedom, the lying and misinformation - have their beginnings in Reagan's Central American policy. The stuff in chapter four on how Otto Reich and the rest of the neocons learned out to manipulate the press is fascinating and scary. And Grandin's discussion of how the Christian evangelicals joined forces with the neocons to fight liberation theology is the best discussion I've so far read on the origins of Bush's foreign policy. It's much more interesting than Kevin Phillip's book on the theocons or any of the multiple books on the neocons. This is the smartest historical examination of neoconservative foreign policy adventurism that I have read.