An eye-opening examination of Latin America's role as proving ground for U.S. imperial strategies and tactics

In recent years, one book after another has sought to take the measure of the Bush administration's aggressive foreign policy. In their search for precedents, they invoke the Roman and British empires as well as postwar reconstructions of Germany and Japan. Yet they consistently ignore the one place where the United States had its most formative imperial experience: Latin America.

A brilliant excavation of a long-obscured history, Empire's Workshop is the first book to show how Latin America has functioned as a laboratory for American extraterritorial rule. Historian Greg Grandin follows the United States' imperial operations, from Thomas Jefferson's aspirations for an empire of liberty in Cuba and Spanish Florida, to Ronald Reagan's support for brutally oppressive but U.S.-friendly regimes in Central America. He traces the origins of Bush's policies to Latin America, where many of the administration's leading lights--John Negroponte, Elliott Abrams, Otto Reich--first embraced the deployment of military power to advance free-market economics and first enlisted the evangelical movement in support of their ventures.

With much of Latin America now in open rebellion against U.S. domination, Grandin concludes with a vital question: If Washington has failed to bring prosperity and democracy to Latin America--its own backyard workshop--what are the chances it will do so for the world?

Greg Grandin, a professor of Latin American history at New York University, is the author of two previous books, The Last Colonial Massacre and the award-winning The Blood of Guatemala. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, Grandin has served on the United Nations Truth Commission investigating the Guatemalan civil war and has contributed to Harper's, The Nation, and The New York Times. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. In recent years, one book after another has sought to take the measure of the Bush administration's aggressive foreign policy. In their search for precedents, they invoke the Roman and British empires as well as postwar reconstructions of Germany and Japan. Yet they consistently ignore the one place where the United States had its most formative imperial experience: Latin America.

An excavation of a long-obscured history, Empire's Workshop is the first book to show how Latin America has functioned as an indispensable laboratory for America's rise to world power. Historian Greg Grandin follows the United States's imperial operations, from Thomas Jefferson's aspirations for an empire of liberty that would govern Cuba and Spanish Florida to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy, which taught the U.S. how to use soft power more effectively and provided a blueprint for its postwar European and Asian empire by invitation. Empire's Workshop is also the first book 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 politics, forging today's ruling coalition of neoconservatives, Christian evangelicals, free marketeers, and nationalists. The road to war in Iraq, Grandin argues, 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. Today, much of Latin America is in open rebellion against American domination. Grandin concludes with a sobering analysis of these explosive tensions and poses a vital question: If Washington has been unable to bring prosperity, stability, and democracy to Latin America--its own backyard workshop--what are the chances it will do so for the world? The Americans who engineered countless military coups, death squads and massacres in Latin America never paid for their crimes--instead they got promoted and they're now running the 'War on Terror.' Grandin had always been a brilliant historian, now he uses those detective skills in a book that is absolutely crucial to understanding our present.--Naomi Klein, author of No Logo A provocative and lucid writer, Grandin examines how the United States has used Latin America as a proving ground for imperial war strategies employed later elsewhere, most recently in Iraq . . . An important book that deserves a wide audience.--Roger Atwood, The Washington Post Grandin convincingly argues that Latin America served as a crucible in which the ingredients of current U.S. foreign policy were first blended . . . With its vivid depiction of neocon militarists, religious evangelicals, and neoliberal economists coming together, Empire's Workshop offers a cogent analysis of how past interventions in Latin America provide the Bush administration with a troubling model for present policy.--Mark Engler, Mother Jones A] well-written history of American interventions in Latin America . . . and] another in the continuing series The American Empire Project, Empire's Workshop adds another strong perspective to the historical development of the American Empire.--Jim Miles, Palestine Chronicle This book] is a must read for anyone trying to understand the Bush Administration's increasing hostility toward Venezuela . . . It helps us understand the vast arsenal of tools that the U.S. government and transnational capital have at their disposal, but it also focuses our anger and the importance of popular resistance to Empire . . . It] is a good primer for our continuing education.--Chuck Kaufman, Nicaragua Monitor The Americans who engineered countless military coups, death squads and massacres in Latin America never paid for their crimes--instead they got promoted and they're now running the 'War on Terror.' Grandin had always been a brilliant historian, now he uses those detective skills in a book that is absolutely crucial to understanding our present.--Naomi Klein, author of No Logo

Greg Grandin knows the history of modern Guatemala better than anybody else in the world outside of that country--and therefore understands the nature of U.S. attitudes and action toward Latin America at their most disturbing. This grants him keen insight into the manic ferocity behind U.S. imperialism across the globe today, which he describes in fine, rich, vivid, bitter detail. Grandin also shrewdly observes that the outrages possible in little U.S. neo-colonies are not so easy to accomplish on a grand scale. His admirable book deserves many, many serious readers.--John Womack, Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics, Harvard University and author of Zapata If you want to know why the American intervention in Iraq has failed, look at the El Salvador of a quarter-century ago. Latin

"America's post-9/11 policy of idealistic military adventurism has a long history, argues this incisive study. NYU historian Grandin (The Blood of Guatemala) sketches the vexed course of U.S. relations with Latin America, but focuses on the Reagan administration's involvement in Central America during the 1980s, when it backed the Salvadoran government in a brutal civil war against left-wing insurgents and the Nicaraguan Contras against the Sandinista regime. Then as now, Grandin contends, Washington justified a militarist stance by citing a threat to America (Communists advancing on the Rio Grande) and championing democracy and human rights. America did not send troops but did sponsor native death squads in El Salvador, and the author notes recent press reports that the U.S. military is sponsoring similar death squads in Iraq. Grandin's conception of American imperialism — covering everything from outright invasion to corporate investment and Fed interest-rate hikes — is too broad, and he overstates the importance of Central America in the making of the American New Right. But this timely book offers an analysis of the ideological foundations of today's foreign policy consensus and a cautionary tale about its dark legacy." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Open any book on Latin America these days, and you're likely to see a complaint about how little attention is paid to Latin America. 'Empire's Workshop' is no exception — the region 'elicits little curiosity from its neighbor to the north,' writes Greg Grandin — and by the time you finish the book, it's hard not to conclude that Latin America would be better off if even less attention were paid.... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) This book's vision of Washington's relationship with Latin America is one of such relentless abuse, such bloodsucking exploitation, that it's a wonder the region's voters haven't elected more anti-yanqui leaders.

A provocative and lucid writer, Grandin examines how the United States has used Latin America as a proving ground for imperial war strategies employed later elsewhere, most recently in Iraq. Some rhetorical excesses aside, it's an important book that deserves a wide audience.

Grandin, a historian at New York University, argues that the alliance of neoconservatives, Christian evangelicals and military hawks that championed the invasion of Iraq first took shape in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan's anticommunist crusades in Central America. Conservatives saw an opportunity to reassert U.S. moral authority, fundamentalist Christians wanted to defeat atheistic communism, and everybody wanted to expunge the stain of Vietnam. Central America was the crucible in which these forces came together, Grandin argues. And they stayed together through the Bill Clinton years, joined by a smug conviction that Americans were put on this Earth to bring free markets and elections to everyone else.

The civil wars that ravaged Central America in the 1980s may look now like the Cold War's furious endgame, but they were viewed at the time as deadly serious challenges to U.S. power. Central America was 'the most important place in the world for the United States,' a region 'colossally important ... (to) vital national interests,' said Reagan's U.N. ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick. Grandin believes the Reagan administration made such a big deal of Central America not because the stakes were so great but because they were so small: While Reagan's team accommodated and negotiated with the Soviet Union and its proxies elsewhere, it could afford to impose its will on this string of struggling little countries in the confidence that here, at least, it would prevail. Central America was vitally important, but only to the revival of the United States' sense of its own power and righteousness.

Central Americans paid a price for all this attention. Guatemalans and Salvadorans endured death squads that were outgrowths of elite security units created with U.S. aid in the 1960s, while Nicaragua was bled white by a fratricidal war between an army of U.S.-financed revanchists known as the contras and the leftist Sandinistas, who had taken power by overthrowing a homicidal dictator. Grandin draws an ironic parallel between the contras and the neo-Baathist 'dead enders' fighting in Iraq. With little chance of taking power by force, they both fight on to 'wear down a fledgling regime through unpredictable acts of persistent terror.'

Grandin sees Central America replayed everywhere in Iraq: the bypassing of congressional oversight, the contemptuous disregard for international law and the attempts at nation-building, which, in Central America's case, mostly omitted U.S. troops but did include billions of dollars in aid designed to promote elections, woo the poor away from guerrillas, and get the military to leash its death squads. Even some of the faces are the same: John Negroponte, Elliott Abrams, John Bolton. Presumably they would welcome the comparison. Far from the pathology Grandin depicts, many conservatives see Reagan's policy in Central America as a gleaming success, leading as it did to a collection of democratic, right-leaning governments.

Grandin overreaches when he takes his argument beyond the U.S. political realm and applies it to Latin America itself. His whole vision of Latin America, in fact, is of a place where very little happens without being willed by the United States. He thinks Latin American social democrats embraced free markets not because they grew disillusioned with state-driven economics, like liberals everywhere, but because they had been jailed and tortured into submission by U.S.-backed regimes.

For a historian, Grandin can be curiously ahistorical. America has given military aid to a lot of countries, but nowhere did it curdle into death squads as badly as in Guatemala and El Salvador. Surely some aspects of their own histories — class and racial antagonisms, caudillo-based power structures, lack of independent judiciaries — were responsible for that, but Grandin concedes nothing. He sees death squads as an entirely U.S. creation, and he offers lusty descriptions of their slaughters and torture techniques to raise the emotional temperature and make you feel even worse about it. Americans share the blame for the 'wretchedness that engulfs Latin America,' as Grandin puts it. But by attributing every ill to Washington, Grandin sounds a bit — dare I say it? — imperialist." Reviewed by Roger Atwood, author of "Stealing History" and a visiting researcher at Georgetown University's Center for Latin American Studies, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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An eye-opening examination of Latin America's role as proving ground for U.S. imperial strategies and tactics