"Grandin's more distinctive contribution lies in documenting Latin America's role as a staging ground for the rise of militaristic idealists within the Republican Party."
"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."
The ideology behind current US Middle Eastern policy was shaped close to home.
Empire's Workshop: Latin America and the Roots of U.S. Imperialism. By Greg Grandin. Henry Holt: Metropolitan Books, May 2006, 320 pp., $25,00
In October 2004, during his debate with John Edwards, Vice President Dick Cheney made a comparison that seemed surreal even by the standards of the present administration. He was looking for an example of past U.S. intervention that could be cited as a model for "democracy building" in Iraq and Afghanistan. Where did he turn? El Salvador.
In the Vice President's soliloquy, the bad old days of "dirty war" in the 1980s in Central America--the death squads and "Made in U.S.A." weapons, the raped nuns and Jesuit professors murdered on campus--were recast as a noble crusade. "A guerilla insurgency" fell, Cheney said, "terrorists" were defeated, and El Salvador today is "a lot better" because the U.S. stepped in. Of course, a few facts went unmentioned: That a U.N.-sponsored truth commission held the U.S.-backed regime responsible for massive atrocities; that the civil war stretched on for over a decade after American arms and advisors arrived; and that half of the country lives in poverty today.
Cheney's warped use of Latin American history is not an isolated case. The region appears to hold a special place in the conservative imagination. In recent years, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol has cited Central America as "an amazing success story" for the U.S. The National Review has depicted Reagan-era policy in Central America as "a spectacularly successful fight to introduce and sustain Western political norms in the region." And personalities from the dirty wars--John Negroponte, Elliott Abrams, Otto Reich, John Poindexter--have reappeared to take posts in the Bush administration, rejoining the effort to spread "freedom" throughout the globe.
In Empire's Workshop: Latin America and the Roots of U.S. Imperialism, Greg Grandin, professor of Latin American History at New York University, raises such examples as signs that the ideology behind current U.S. intervention the Middle East was actually shaped much closer to home. "In their search for historical precedents for our current imperial moment," he writes, "intellectuals invoke postwar reconstructions of Germany and Japan, ancient Rome, and nineteenth-century Britain but consistently ignore the one place the United States has projected its influence for more than two centuries."
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