Greg Grandin, a specialist in Latin America and a professor at New York University, traces the origins of the war in Iraq to the Central American conflicts of the 1980s. Grandin, the author of Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of New Imperialism, calls the wars in Guatemala and El Salvador a “dress rehearsal” for Iraq.
Offering his insight on these Reagan-era battles, Grandin will take part in the Action Speaks! discussion series at AS220 (115 Empire Street, Providence), on Tuesday, October 11 from 5:30 to 7 pm. The annual series, which probes “underappreciated days that changed America,” is examining “the complex interplay of optimism, denial, and foreboding that characterize contemporary life.”
The October 11 discussion will focus on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy in Latin America. Joining Grandin will be Ricardo Hausmann, director of the Center for International Development at Harvard University; and Charlotte Dennett and Gerard Colby, co-authors of Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon. (The Phoenix is a cosponsor of Action Speaks!)
Grandin corresponded with the Phoenix via an e-mail interview.
How and why did you become interested in relations between the us and Latin America?
I was in college — Brooklyn College — in the late 1980s, and Ronald Reagan’s Central American wars were raging. The US was supporting a death-squad regime in El Salvador, a genocidal evangelical government in Guatemala, and murderous anti-communist mercenaries in Nicaragua. All in all, over 300,000 people were killed, an equal number tortured, and more than a million were driven into exile as a direct result of US policy. My interest in the region, and in the US’s relation to it, was sparked by a desire to learn the deeper history of what could account for this carnage.
Is the US losing its status a super power? Is this evident in the shifting relationships between the us and Latin American countries?
US power in the world has long been based on claiming Latin America as its own. During the Cold War, it would have been unthinkable for Latin American nations to oppose the major tenets of US foreign policy. Today, in contrast, most countries, even close allies like Chile and Brazil, have shown remarkable independence. They have refused to be conscripted in the war on terror, opposing the invasion of Iraq and efforts to subordinate their militaries to US command.
How are worldwide foreign relations changing?
The kind of independence Latin America is today exhibiting is occurring elsewhere as well. It is one of the factors why the US needs to rely on bullying and military force to get its way.
What is the message of your book, Empire’s Workshop?
In recent months, a number of books have been published that have sought to take the measure of the Bush administration’s aggressive, militarist post-9/11 foreign policy, but they all miss the one place where these groups first came together. Reagan’s Central American wars of the 1980s — which included the patronage of the Contras in Nicaragua, but [also] of vicious counter-insurgent campaigns in El Salvador and Guatemala — can best be understood as a dress rehearsal for what is going on now in the Middle East.
Empire’s Workshop, therefore, is one of the first books to examine how a preemptive foreign policy in Latin America, which included sponsoring coups, death-squad states, and paramilitary insurgencies, has transformed America’s domestic policies, forging today’s ruling coalition of neoconservatives, Christian evangelicals, free marketers, and nationalists.
The road to war in Iraq can be traced back to the 1970s and 1980s, when an increasingly internationalist New Right turned to Latin America to avenge Vietnam, and in so doing rehabilitated militarism as a legitimate instrument of state and made free-market capitalism the moral core of American purpose abroad.
