A review of AMERICA, AMÉRICA: A New History of the New World, by Greg Grandin
By John Perry
“An American team will win the next soccer World Cup,” a Nicaraguan boy once told me. It took me a second to realize he meant Brazil or Argentina, not the United States. Greg Grandin’s new book shows that “America” (or, in Spanish, América) was the name used for the whole hemisphere by the late 17th century. In the 18th, the great liberator Simón Bolívar set out his vision of “our America”: a New World free of colonies, made up of distinct republics living in mutual respect. He even cautiously welcomed the newly declared Monroe Doctrine as a rejection of European imperialism. Bolívar died without realizing his dream of a Pan-American international order but, Grandin argues, his ideals would be revived and eventually be enormously influential.
Yet the visionary Bolívar was under no illusion that an expanding United States would behave respectfully towards its neighbors. By 1825, politicians in Washington began to insist that their countrymen were the only “Americans,” claiming hemispheric superiority. The tussle over words was symptomatic of a widening rift. From Mexico southwards, many of those who had liberated their republics from Spanish rule were idealists who (at least, in theory) recognized the universal rights of all their peoples. But the prosperity of a growing United Sates depended on “stolen Indian land and slave labor” and, within two decades, the stealing of half of Mexico to form the state of Texas.
Worse was to follow. In 1855, the adventurer William Walker did “Texas all over again.” His mercenaries invaded Nicaragua and, recognized by Washington, installed him as president. Chilian radical Francisco Bilbao summarized the fears this raised in Spanish America: “Walker is the invasion. Walker is the Conquest. Walker is the United States.” A Costa Rican newspaper said he threatened the whole of “Latin America” (the first known use of the term).
By the end of the 19th century, the United States had intervened militarily in Honduras, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Colombia as well as Mexico and Nicaragua. Washington began to use “human rights” to spin its foreign-policy objectives when it suited US interests, as it did when Spain harshly repressed those fighting for the independence of its last remaining colony, Cuba. Spain lost, but instead of gaining full independence Cuba became a de facto US colony and Cubans’ human rights barely improved.
Greg Grandin in 2020. (The Laura Flanders Show / Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY 3.0)
Grandin argues that Pan-American humanist internationalism was first kindled in response to the horrors of the Spanish conquest (“the greatest mortality event in history”). The Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas and other scathing critics of Spain’s atrocities in the 16th century established the principles of a common humanity that would be developed further by Bolívar and his successors. The “Bolivarian dream” might have been taken to global level after the First World War with the establishment of the League of Nations, of which many Latin American countries were founding members. But lacking US support and dominated by the old imperial powers of Britain and France, it quickly failed.
Idealism receded in the inter-war period when Latin America became the focus of the US’s nascent military-industrial complex. Huge arms imports fed massacres of rebellious workers, brutal suppressions of dissidents and the pointless and chaotic Chaco war which cost 150,000 lives in the 1930s (when Bolivia and Paraguay fought over what turned out to be a non-existent oil field). US marines again pillaged Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
Eventually, however, Pan-American idealism resurfaced in the US in the form of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “good neighbor” policy which – had it been sincerely implemented – would have eschewed intervention and conquest. FDR even added that the constitutional arrangements in Latin American republics were not something that warranted US interference. The New York Times felt able to announce, in 1934, that the era of imperialism “nears its end.”
However, Grandin is rather too effusive in his praise for a policy that, to a large extent, was a rebranding. He doesn’t mention that 1934 was also the year in which the guerrilla leader Augusto César Sandino was assassinated in Nicaragua after ending its 20-year-long occupation by US Marines. The Washington-backed Somoza dictatorship would last until 1979. FDR is alleged to have excused his role in this, remarking that “Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”
Nine years later, Pan-Americanism provided the basis for FDR’s model of a post-war world order based on cooperation and social justice. According to diplomat Sumner Welles, it would be “the cornerstone in the world structure of the future.” Latin Americans would go on to write the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At this moment, Grandin argues, Washington had the luxury of “an entire resource-rich hemisphere” eager to work with it to create a new world order.
It would be short-lived. A brief social democratic interlude in Latin America after the Second World War, paralleling that in Europe, was eclipsed after the final Pan-American conference, held in Bogotá in 1948. Grandin highlights the murder of the Colombian progressive Jorge Eliécer Gaitán and the subsequent mayhem (the “Bogotazo”, witnessed by both Fidel Castro and Gabriel García Márquez) as instrumental, because it occurred while the conference was in progress. It enabled the US delegation to successfully push through anti-communist resolutions. The event also saw the creation of the Organization of American States (OAS), which was never a progressive body, and soon afterwards legitimized military coups in Venezuela and Peru.
Practically all of Latin America had, by 1950, reverted to dictatorships. Backed by the US military industrial complex, death squads and repression became commonplace. Covert action eclipsed even mildly progressive forces, epitomized by the CIA’s 1954 coup against the democratically elected Arbenz government in Guatemala. This began more than three decades of repression and revolt in Central America, in which 100,000s would die. Between 1961 and 1969, Washington engineered 16 Latin American regime-change operations.
Grandin underrates the Cuban revolution as a turning point, singling out liberation theology, economic theories of dependency and radical literary and artistic movements as the agents of a fresh wave of change during the 1970s that he calls a second Enlightenment. It is exemplified by Salvador Allende’s short-lived left-wing government in Chile and the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. Grandin captures the feeling that many of us had at that time, that political struggle and solidarity were key to an individual’s self-actualization, and this was nowhere more evident than in Latin America’s radical efforts to change its realidad social.
If Latin America could be inspiring, it could still also be horrifying. Pinochet’s Chile pioneered neoliberalism, laced with corruption, and exported it to Mexico, Argentina, and globally. Reagan’s response to the Sandinista revolution was to finance the Contra war and kill 30,000 Nicaraguans, in the process rejecting a ground-breaking judgment against the US by the International Court of Justice. George H. W. Bush’s 1989 invasion of Panama was another blatant violation of the supposed principle of non-intervention, his action blessed by the ever-compliant OAS.
As a North American himself, it is unsurprising that Grandin is in despair at the evolution of both domestic and foreign policy in the US. He notes that it has rendered nearly worthless the international law and institutions that Latin America helped create. He laments that US presidents pay little attention to wise advice from Latin American governments, which refuse to join their wars and argue for reconciliation in Ukraine, Palestine and Iran.
If he is more optimistic about Latin America, he acknowledges the danger of the rise of the right (Milei, Noboa, Bukele et al). Latin America “teeters between the dark and the light,” he says. Yet he believes the “indomitable spirit of Latin American humanism” will prevail. Writing in the New York Times, Jennifer Szalai accuses Grandin of engaging in “mythological thinking” and glossing over Latin America’s many defects. On this, as a resident of Latin America, I side with Grandin.
My criticism is a political one. Grandin notes that, by the end of the 19th century, the term “anti-imperialism” had entered the vocabulary of Latin American intellectuals, referring not only to Spain but to the imperial designs of the US. While anti-imperialism crops up throughout the book, he fails to acknowledge how fundamental it is. Take the example of Honduras – the country was Washington’s long-term lackey, it temporarily broke free only to be reined in by a coup in 2009 and the imposition of corrupt, neoliberal governments. Under Xiomara Castro in 2021 it broke free again, but she has to be continually on the watch for new interference by Washington.
US-inspired coups, covert action and more recently economic sanctions and “lawfare” have deposed or undermined progressive leaders across Latin America. Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua have had to curtail US intervention (masquerading as “democracy promotion”) to preserve peace and maintain their revolutionary progress. They deserve more respect for their achievements than Greg Grandin offers them.
Furthermore, a book which fully recognizes the struggle against a reborn Monroe Doctrine should have space between its covers for key figures such as Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Evo Morales in Bolivia and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. Above all, the omission of Hugo Chávez Frías, who led Venezuela’s new Bolivarian government for 14 years and inspired leftists across the hemisphere, is inexcusable. It was Chávez, speaking at the UN General Assembly after George W. Bush, who said that the podium “still smells of sulfur.” Simón Bolívar’s anti-imperialism – as well as his humanism – are alive and well in Latin America.
John Perry is a writer based in Masaya, Nicaragua, whose work has appeared in The Nation, The London Review of Books and many other publications.
