One of the leading historians of the Americas of our age, professor Greg Grandin is one of those rare scholars who has managed to attract the attention of academic and broad public audiences with his prolific writings and clear political commitments. The Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History at Yale University, Grandin is the author of numerous books, including the 2019 Pulitzer Prize–winning The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. In this interview we discuss his most recent publication, America, América: A New History of the New World, an ambitious, compelling, and provocative look at how five centuries of myriad engagements made both Latin America and the United States.

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Alexander Aviña (AA): Why did you become a historian of Latin America?

 

Greg Grandin (GG): I’m the first person in my family—though there wasn’t much of a family to speak of—to go to college; and I went late, about eight or nine years after high school. After high school I mostly worked in restaurant kitchens, bartending, and other odd jobs. For a few months, I worked as an exterminator during my William Burroughs phase. I wound up going to Brooklyn College mostly as a way to avoid going into the IBEW Local 3’s apprentice program, the electricians’ union. The father of a friend got me in; it was, um, let’s say competitive, and it helped to be connected. And it was too good a paying job to simply turn down.

At the time, I was dating someone who was attending Brooklyn College, and one day, meeting her on campus, I filled out a form and was soon accepted. As simple as that. Those were different days. In any case, I had the excuse I needed to avoid taking a real job: I’d go to college.

I did read a lot, but I wasn’t particularly political. But growing up in New York in the 1970s was itself a political act. At Brooklyn College, I fell in with a group of older students and professors, mostly in history and political science, who were debating questions about the Soviet Union and whether Gorbachev was going to save socialism. We started a Marxist reading group and used that old red-jacketed Robert C. Tucker collection, The Marx-Engels Reader. Wish I could find my copy, I’d like to see what I underlined.

Anyway, at the same time these scholars, most of them social historians focusing on various regions—among them Renate Bridenthal, Hobie Spalding, Bonnie Anderson, Teo Ruiz—were wrestling with the cultural turn. And so I was simultaneously introduced to Marxism and to poststructural challenges to Marxism, which, looking back, led not to an either-or impasse but rather an instinctual synthesis, at least when it came to my thinking about historical change. I took a few classes in Russian language and Soviet history, but soon Gorbachev would be deposed, rendering the question of redeemability of the Soviet Union moot. Freed from having to learn Russian dative and genitive cases, I turned to Latin America.

Around this time—the late 1980s—I had become involved in anti-interventionist politics in Central America, working with CISPES and paying attention to Iran-Contra. I realized that not much social history was being written on Central America—of the kind we were reading on Europe—with the exception of Jeff Gould’s To Lead as Equals. That was a motivating book for me, an example of how to apply Gramscian political-culture history to a peripheral region—the cotton and sugar lands of rural Chinandega, Nicaragua—to explain in a nonreductive way the breakdown of authoritarian liberalism and the rise of revolutionary Sandinista nationalism. The application to Yale’s graduate history program asked you to write on a book and I chose Jeff’s.

Following Jeff, I had planned to work on Nicaragua. But I graduated from Brooklyn mid–academic year, and I spent the spring semester before going to Yale in Guatemala. I first flew into Cancún, with a free Airhitch ticket. From there, I took a bus into Guatemala. This must have been late 1992. On paper, Guatemala appears indistinguishable from Chiapas—all part of the extended Mayan highlands—but crossing the border into Huehuetenango was one of those life-changing moments. I can’t put it into words, but the air was different, the light.

I’d spend the next two decades working on Guatemala, writing a dissertation and two books and serving on the Guatemalan truth commission. Both of those books—The Blood of Guatemala, from my diss, and The Last Colonial Massacre—were archive- and oral history–based social histories set in the context of Guatemala’s national history. But both also cast an eye toward a wider hemispheric history. Empire’s Workshop took Iran-Contra less as a crime than a first-time get-together for the neocons, economic libertarians, and Christian nationalists who would go on to take over the Republican Party.

England couldn’t find—once you do away with papal dispensation—a legal foundation for war, conquest, and enslavement. And so the English conclude, maybe it is better we don’t say anything.

AA: So let’s turn to America, América: A New History of the New World. How do you place this new massive history within your previous works?

 

GG: Since The Last Colonial Massacre, many of my books have followed a thread, trying to explain a tension between Latin America and the United States. Specifically, I’ve been looking to explain the intellectual, economic, and political sources of Latin America’s social-rights tradition, as well as how that tradition has endured, despite tremendous repression.

To do that, one has to bring in the United States, and its fetishistic adherence to an almost crystalline conception of ‘individual rights’ (as an ideal at least, even if other forms of collective or corporate, including patriarchal, power continue to hold sway). This opens the door to the question of American exceptionalism, a term that has been defined in many different ways but for me—in books like Empire’s Workshop, The End of the Myth, and now, America, América—it is most usefully thought about through this polarity, of a social-rights tradition in Latin America and an individual-rights tradition in the United States. You need others to be considered unique.

Latin America has generally remained committed to sovereignty and social democracy—not every government and not every citizen, but enough that the region still operates broadly within a recognizable radical Enlightenment left tradition, while still being flexible to incorporate new rights, new demands, into its agenda. If US “individualism” has been a constant object of historical study, Latin American “sociality” less so. Three other books—The Empire of Necessity, Fordlandia, and Kissinger’s Shadow—each consider how their protagonists—Herman Melville, Henry Ford, and Henry Kissinger—embodied the existential crises of their moment: chattel slavery in the case of Melville, industrial capitalism for Ford, and the US’s catastrophic war in Southeast Asia for Kissinger.

America, América then really is a summa of different things that I’ve been thinking about over the years.

 

AA: Yes, and that gets to the book’s ambitious argument: that this is not just a complete new history of the Western Hemisphere from the conquest to the present, but it’s a history of the creation of the modern world.

It’s interesting for me to read this thinking about Latin America as a vibrant, active place, past and present; where new intellectual formations, ideas, and traditions are being developed that then go out into the world and play a really important role. Especially since, within the US at least, generally we learn about Latin America in a distinctly different way: a place where things are constantly happening to it from beyond; the region is constantly being acted upon. And, consequently, not a lot of regional, original contributions are produced.

So, this is a good point for us to talk about your main argument. You can take as long as you want to trace how Latin America has contributed to the making of the modern world.

 

GG: So the book begins with the Spanish Conquest, really with the arrival of Bartolomé de Las Casas in Hispaniola, and the beginning of a reformation within the Catholic Church, a reaction to the brutality of the conquest, an awareness of the density of the New World’s population, and a questioning of Spain’s right to enslave, to rule, to take.

Take Las Casas’s dissent. What right, he asked, does Spain have to rule over people, who clearly have reason, have a conception of property and possess property, who organize themselves in political communities? And he’s forcing these questions nearly a century before the first British ships even reach Jamestown.

Needless to say, the reality of the conquest was unimaginable cruelty and suffering, and murder on a mass scale. But the crisis provoked within the Church was consequential. Because of its presumption of universalism—because it claimed to be the mediator between the mundane and the divine, between humans and God—the Catholic Church had to rhetorically defend itself as a magisterium of mercy, charity, and love. Its priests were shepherds tending to sheep.

Most royal officials kept filing reports saying the sheep were doing fine. But Las Casas and others like him kept posting anguished letters to Spain reporting that the sheep were being slaughtered at an incalculable rate.

Las Casas was just one of a cohort of moral revolutionaries—some on the front line of Spanish dispossession in the Americas, others, such as Francisco de Vitoria, in seminar rooms in Spain—that began to lay out the terms of political and legal modernism, related to equality, rights, and sovereignty.

In their ascent to empire, the English paid attention to Spanish debates. They are paying attention to Vitoria’s questioning of the right of conquest, to Las Casas insisting on the humanity of Native Americans, to other argued for the outlawing of slavery and wars of aggression. In fact, right around the time of Jamestown in the early 1600s, would-be English colonists come together to discuss whether they should issue some kind of declaration or proclamation, to justify what they hope to accomplish in the New World. Their discussion repeatedly returns to Spanish arguments, and how, for over 50 years, Spanish jurists had been trying to find a justification for dominion and possession, but couldn’t. They couldn’t find—once you do away with papal dispensation—a legal foundation for war, conquest, and enslavement. And so the English conclude, maybe it is better we don’t say anything.

This is one of the book’s through lines. Spain, on the one hand, presided over an empire in which Native Americans, and then Africans, were the main thing: obviously essential for the extraction of wealth from the colonies but also for the foundation of Catholic morality, a source of unending debate over the nature of humanity and equality. Then, on the other hand, there’s fledgling England, which evaded and denied. Its settlers took the fact that an epidemic wiped out most of the Indigenous population of coastal New England prior to the arrival of the Mayflower as the cornerstone of their property rights regime—empty land was theirs for the taking—and as proof of God’s grace. Without downplaying the importance of Native Americans in the early slave trade, or in the later fur economy, Native Americans, except to a few English moralists, remained shadow dancers, flickering around the fringes of the Puritan imagination, used as plot devices to keep the story of the pilgrims’ progress moving forward.

Not so for Hispaniola’s Dominicans, and then later for the University of Salamanca’s theorists. They were central to the great debates over the justness of dominion and posses­sion, conquest and enslavement.

 

AA: You show how Spanish American independence had individuals and movements talking about the abolition of slavery. This reminded me of the point made by other historians like Gerald Horne: that for enslaved Africans and Native Americans, 1776 was a counterrevolution, a catastrophic event that unleashed horrific, genocidal processes. The fact that the US comes into being as an independent nation is catastrophic for the peoples who are written into the Declaration of Independence as constituting a problem: Black slaves as inciters of “domestic insurrections” and Native Americans with their so-called “savage” ways of fighting, “an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.”

 

GG: Yes, to jump ahead to the hemisphere’s anticolonial wars for independence, the North American revolution took place on a continent its leaders imagined to be empty, or empty enough. Of course it wasn’t: Spain, France, and Great Britain still had a presence. Mexico would soon break free of Spain, and the continent was the homeland of Native American sovereignties. But the United States was a lone republic (they ignored Haiti), and Benjamin Franklin negotiating in Paris with London, France, and Madrid the terms of its independence put forward an expansive theory of sovereignty. Franklin made it clear that nothing would contain the United States in its drive west. When a Spanish envoy at the talks asked John Jay by “what right” the new United States presumed to take “territories which manifestly belong to free and independent Nations of Indians,” Jay responded by pointing out that “his Catholic Majesty had had no doubts of his right to the Sovereignty” of the New World when he claimed it for Spain.

Jay here was effectively citing the most robust version of the doctrine of conquest, put forward by the most brutal defenders of the Spanish Empire, as the foundation of the US’s claim to continental sovereignty. In the years to come, the US Supreme Court repeatedly affirmed the doctrine of conquest, and law professors taught it as valid law well into the early 20th century.

Two generations later, Spanish America broke from Spain. Three things that are notable about Spanish American independence, in contrast to the founding of United States. First, independence brought into existence an already socialized community of nations, a league of nations, or a united nations if you will: seven republics plus Brazil’s independent monarchy which had to learn to live with each other. They couldn’t armor their sovereignty, as the US did, with a revival of the doctrine of conquest. The result would have been endless war. What would have stopped Argentina from rolling over the Andes and taking Chile to get to the Pacific, the way the US took northern Mexico?

Rather, they explicitly rejected the doctrine of conquest and began to work out a new, more modern conception of international law, one that stressed cooperation and shared interest rather than presumed competition as the foundation of international relations. No doubt there were conflicts, and, as the century progressed, brutal wars. But ideally, Spanish Americans consciously began to advance what they believed to be a reformation of the international order, one that rejected both the doctrine of conquest and realpolitik balance of power.

Second, and related to what I just referenced, Spanish American independence leaders understood their freedom movement as an atonement for the conquest. Really, can you think of any other nationalist movement whose leaders admitted their foundational moment was a crime and their forerunners were vile criminals? Bolivar said that that Conquest was “impure,” shrouded in the “black mantle of crime.” “We are the descendants, he said, of those “hunting tigers that came to America and raped their victims before they sacrificed them.”

US leaders, for their part, saw no problem with English settlement. Woodrow Wilson later said that the American Revolution wasn’t really a revolution at all but a “methodization” of English notions of rights and freedoms. In any case, men like Hamilton, Jefferson, and Adams didn’t believe they had anything to apologize for. Bolívar and others in his revolutionary cohort in contrast thought independence required not just a political break, but an intellectual and moral rupture. This required, at the very least, a clear-eyed recognition of history, an ethical confrontation with the colony’s horrors and brutalities and hypocrisies. Many of the region’s constitutions and independence declarations openly condemned the conquest, in terms drawn straight from Las Casas. Where enslavers said Native Americans were less than human, and thus could be subjugated, Las Casas, and, later, independence leaders said it were the conquistadors who were subhuman, that by breaking free of all social and moral restraints they turned themselves into wild animals, coming across the Atlantic like “rabid wolves” and jackals to ravage the Native Americans. In contrast, Las Casas said it was the Native Americans who were more fully human. He cited Cicero, insisting that their humanity was not based on their individuality, in the modern sense, but rather because they were gente, individuals who came together to live socially: “Gentes para vivir socialmente,” Las Casas wrote.

This idea—that human individuality could only exist in society—made its way into independence-era constitutions, which, I think, is one of the sources of the region’s social-rights commitment. Social reality and power placed limits on what “atonement” meant in practice. But this antagonistic relationship between the Conquest and Independence gave Spanish Americans a more honest historical consciousness than that available to their English-speaking neighbors in the north. Bolívar was acutely aware that they were founding new republics on conquered land, on Indigenous land. Likewise, though abolition took place at different times—some places immediately, other places gradually—emancipation from all forms of bondage was understood to be fundamental to republican independence, part of not just separating from Spain but also the legacy of the Conquest. That separation would prove harder than many of the independence leaders had hoped.

Third, Spanish America broke free from one empire, only to have to confront a new one, the United States, whose leaders were now citing the Spanish Conquest as precedent for their claims to sovereignty. As the US flew across the continent like a whirligig—taking Indigenous land, Texas, Mexico, and so on—Spanish Americans had on hand an already elaborated critique of empire, forged against Spain. It didn’t take much to apply to the United States.

America, América details the painstaking efforts by which Spanish American and Portuguese American jurists worked to try to contain the United States, to try to convince Washington to reject the doctrine of conquest and the right of intervention. They eventually, by 1933, succeeded, creating the possibility of what came to be called the liberal international order.

AA: In Empire’s Workshop, you described the first four decades of the 20th century as how Latin America saved the US from itself. But this book is an even more direct, deeper, intellectual and legal explanation of how that actually happened. Here, you are really clear about how essentially Latin American revolutionary movements and antifascism enabled the creation of something that we now know as the New Deal.

So what are the Latin American roots of a US President like FDR? How does the New Deal, as an antifascist program, have its roots in Latin America in the early 20th century, in revolutionary movements like the 1910 Mexican Revolution or César Augusto Sandino’s movement in Nicaragua in the late ’20s and early ’30s?

 

GG: Yes. There is a lot there, and I don’t want to drag readers too far into the weeds, but the book does spend some time on the history of Wilsonism, filtered through his Latin American policy, as a precursor to FDR.

 

AA: That was surprising: Wilson and his idealism being a fan of the Mexican Revolution.

 

GG: Yes, Pan-Americanism was indispensable to what historians identify as Wilson’s “idealist” vision of internationalism. Wilson came into office confronted with the immediate challenge of the Mexican Revolution, which led him to question many of his beliefs. And he also came into office already convinced that New World relations might serve as a model for how to organize the world. His first cabinet meetings were dedicated to Latin America, not to any one country but on the need to address past US aggressions honestly, and even to acknowledge the role of US capital in destabilizing the region’s governments.

There are many intellectual models for a world organization, and Great Britain was involved. But Wilson often cited Pan-Americanism and the Monroe Doctrine as what he wanted to accomplish at war’s end. That Doctrine today is known as a blunt instrument the US uses to assume mandatory power in its sphere of influence: Latin America. But when it was first enunciated in 1823, Spanish Americans thought they heard echoes of their own anticolonialism: Europe keep out, no part of the Americas is open to recolonization. It was this more idealist vision of Monroe that Wilson said he wanted to bring to the world.

But as Wilson faced strong pushback at home by nationalists, and abroad by reactionaries and colonialists, he turned about-face and began to push for the more heavy-handed version of Monroe to be inserted into the League’s Covenant. The US Senate still voted against joining the League, but Japan, Great Britain, and Germany began citing the Monroe Doctrine for their own imperialist ambitions.

 

AA: As you discuss in the book, they want their own Monroe Doctrine, for Asia and West Asia.

 

GG: Yes, Japan cited a Monroe Doctrine for China, and London for Africa. And of course Carl Schmitt very much appreciated the legal reasoning, grounded in territorial power rather than abstract ideals, behind the Monroe Doctrine, or at least one version of the Monroe Doctrine.

Still, despite Wilson’s fumbles—including first supporting and then opposing Mexican revolutionaries—his holding up Pan-Americanism as a model for world organization set the stage for Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.

FDR took office in 1933, in the depths of the Great Depression and an even greater political recession, an enormous contraction of US power. The crisis was global, and FDR and many of his advisers knew he had to act globally. But his options were limited, with fascism on the march in Europe and Japanese militarism in Asia. After two failed international conferences in Europe, he sent his Secretary of State Cordell Hull to Montevideo, Uruguay, to attend the seventh Pan-American Conference.

Hull plays an important part in the book, not just for his policies but because his life serves as a bridge. He was born in the late 1800s in the Cumberland Mountains, to a large clan. His father fought for the South in the Civil War. For his part, Hull went to a mountain law school and considered himself a Jacksonian—but not the embittered, resentful slaver Jacksonians that looked out distrustfully at the world, afraid that that world was going to force them to give up their slaves. He was a reforming, good-government Jacksonian, and after a curious tour of duty in Cuba in 1898, Hull made his way up the Democratic Party. He helped Wilson write his income tax law.

FDR sent him to Montevideo with instructions not to give in to any of Latin America’s substantive demands: don’t deny the right of conquest; don’t give up the right of intervention; and don’t recognize national sovereignty as absolute. But Hull did all those things, and he was hailed in the press—in Latin America and at home as an “unconquering hero.” He defied the White House for a number of reasons: he had as an adviser Ernest Gruening, a fierce anti-imperialist and editor of The Nation who gave him background on Latin America. As a free trader, Hull instinctively saw noninterventionism as a political analogue to economic laissez-faire. FDR knew a good thing when he saw it and empowered Hull to sign reciprocal trade treaties to lower tariffs.

This had several salutary effects. Economically, the consolidation of a corporate block of capital-intensive, high-tech industries that supported Roosevelt provided he opened markets abroad helped save the New Deal. Hull was their favorite, and he won back a number of business elites that had supported FDR in ’32 but had since abandoned him. Politically, it created an era of good feeling throughout the hemisphere. The 1930s were politically effervescent in Latin America, with vibrant ideologies across the spectrum. The region could have—as many of FDR’s foreign policy advisers feared—turned right, falling into the kind of civil war that was then gripping Spain. Latin America had many of the same sociological variables that did Spain: a powerful, praetorian Catholic landed class, threatened by militant peasants and modernizing economic nationalists. Many saw the Mexican Revolution through the prism of Spain, and if all Latin America turned Falangist, the US would be isolated.

That of course didn’t happen, largely because of a cohort of progressive New Dealers who tilted the playing field in Latin America to the left, in all its many varieties. I go into the details in the book, regarding the importance of Mexico and Brazil.

But an aspiring social-democratic Latin America did indeed save FDR, providing the US an important strategic but also ideological rear guard in the coming fight against fascism. At home in the US, the White House borrowed the term Good Neighbor for FDR’s 1936 reelection get-out-the-vote campaign. In response to the Saxon-supremacism that was on the rise, especially in organizations like the rightwing Liberty Leagues, the New Deal began organizing “Good Neighbor” leagues and clubs that put forth a more tolerant “Americanism,” and became Roosevelt’s primary “get-out-the-vote” organization, organizing African Americans in the North and South, Catholics and Jews in the cities, Native Americans and Latinos in the southwest. The acceptance of pluralism within the hemisphere was equal to the acceptance of pluralism within the nation. “Your Americanism and mine,” as FDR put it. Hundreds of Good Neighbor Clubs were organized around the country, turning the humanist worldview represented by the phrase “good neighbor” into votes.

Over 27 million citizens voted for FDR in November 1936, pushing back a fascist upsurge on an unlikely platform of nonintervention, labor rights, social security, free trade, and good-neighbor humanism. And an equally unlikely coalition of foreign-market-oriented corporations and a growing coalition of urban white workers, farmers, poor Southerners, European immigrants, Catholics, Jews, and African Americans.

And the first thing he did after such a landslide was sail to Rio and then Buenos Aires, where he began to organize the hemisphere for the coming war, making it clear that the war wouldn’t be just to fight against illiberalism, but for socialized democracy.

 

AA Was FDR’s vote tally the largest?

 

GG: It was the largest: no human being had ever won that many votes in an election in history. And he won it on a campaign basically organized around the Good Neighbor Policy’s vision of socialized, tolerant democracy.

 

AA: Roosevelt’s support of economic nationalism—and the nationalization of industry and land—was a surprise for me.

 

GG: Yes, it was ad hoc, and inconsistent, and by no means supported by the conservative wing of the New Deal, including Hull but also Southerners like William Clayton, a cotton magnate from Mississippi, the Texan Jesse Jones, and the South Carolinian Jimmy Byrnes. Henry Wallace, FDR’s vice president during his third term who was very involved in Latin America, called these men the “Texans,” by which he meant the “slavers.”

For a good while, from 1933 to 1943 I’d say, the social-democratic wing of the New Deal was in charge of Latin American policy, a group that included Rex Tugwell, Sumner Welles, Josephus Daniels (FDR’s ambassador to Mexico), and others. Wallace was the most outspoken, and most beloved in Latin America. He toured the region in 1943 and many of the Latin Americans he met, from presidents to union leaders to peasants, assumed he would be the Democratic nominee in 1944, not thinking that FDR would stand for a fourth term. They addressed Wallace as “Mr. President.” Wallace, who in Chile called Communist Party–organized miners the frontline forces of democracy, believed he saw the future, a new world, in Latin America. “We are writing the post war as we are going along,” he liked to say, and he kept making powerful statements that warned of fascism not in Germany but in the United States, waiting for the war to end to put its program in place. FDR advised him to tone his remarks down, but Wallace continued to insist that fascism would not be defeated on the battlefield but in the workplace, by raising the wages of the world’s workers.

I suggest that it was the success of Wallace’s tour that galvanized opposition against him and got him kicked off the 1944 ticket, replaced by Harry Truman. Some of the earliest red-baiting in the “Second Red Scare” was directed at those in the foreign policy service, or scholars who worked on Latin America, a campaign that started pretty much as soon as Soviet troops began to turn the tide in eastern Europe against the Wehrmacht. Anticommunists pretty much saw all of Latin America, and anyone associated with it, as a front organization.

AA: Describing the Cold War in Latin America in the book, you draw on two anecdotes. When FDR visited Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires in 1936, local residents threw rose petals in front of him with much celebration and fanfare. But two decades later, when Vice President Richard Nixon traveled to Latin America in the late 1950s, he received a different sort of reception—especially in Venezuela. By the time he gets to Caracas, protesters attack his motorcade, nearly flipping his spit-soaked limousine. President Eisenhower almost sends in the Marines.

That’s just a space of what, 22 years, between FDR’s reception in the region and the reception that Nixon got?

 

GG: Yes, ’36 to ’58.

 

AA: Yes, so the big question then here, and you talk about it a lot toward the end of the book: What changes? What happens to Latin America during the Cold War? What happens to that promise that the Good Neighbor Policy embodied—which inspired people from Ho Chi Minh to a young Fidel Castro, who is writing letters to FDR—that protesters try to attack Richard Nixon by the late ’50s? What changes?

 

GG: I tell the story of Cold War polarization through Colombia and mostly through the April 9, 1948, execution of liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. They killing took place in Bogotá, just as the city was hosting a Pan-American Conference with the objective of creating the Organization of American States.

Everybody is there: Fidel Castro, as a student activist, is there; Gabriel García Márquez, at the time a law student and budding journalist, is there; US Secretary of State George Marshall is there; Nicaragua’s Somoza family is there, as is Tomás Borge, another new-generation activist who would go on to found the Sandinistas and overthrow the Somoza regime. Along with a host of new diplomatic “attachés,” that is, agents for the just-created Central Intelligence Agency, which was taking over vigilance of Latin America from Hoover’s FBI. Also present was a young Colombian, Camilo Torres, who would go on to become a radical sociologist and Dominican priest, an early liberation theologian (although that term, Liberation Theology, would not yet be in wide circulation when Torres was killed in combat in 1966).

There were many tumultuous things going on in the world at this moment: China, Czechoslovakia, Greece, northern Iran, elections in Italy and France, the Indian Partition, The French and Dutch were fighting to keep Indochina and Indonesia. And in Palestine, on the same day Gaitán was killed, the escalation of the Nakba, with Zionist paramilitaries murdering hundreds of Palestinian villagers, including women and children, in Deir Yassin, not far from Jerusalem.

But Latin America had emerged from World War II relatively stable, transitioning, it seemed at the time, to a peaceful continent of social-democratic nations. Remember, many Latin American reformers and nationalists saw the war not just as a fight against fascism, but as a fight for an expanded, socialized notion of citizenship. For social democracy. As the new democratic president of Guatemala, Juan José Arévalo, put it in 1944: “We are socialists because we live in the twentieth century.” Socialism was indistinguishable from antifascist modernity, for Arévalo and many like him.

Latin Americans expected a Marshall Plan: an infusion of public capital to jump-start value-added industries that could pay better wages to citizens. Henry Wallace himself had committed the US to such a program. For years during WWII, both would-be industrialists and workers endured hardship, as the region oriented its whole economy to feed the war machine. Drawing on the work of a new generation of heterodox economists (many of whom were in Bogotá for Gaitán’s killing), they wanted to escape from depending on the export of raw materials.

So by the time delegates began gathering in Bogotá in late March 1948, Latin America was peaceful but expectant. The leaders had that had led the region through the war were still largely committed to following Washington’s lead, but a younger generation—activists like Castro, and others—had already grown critical of what they correctly identified as a shift in Washington’s policies, away from fighting fascism toward fighting not just Soviet communism but socialism more broadly. I won’t go into the details here, because they are baroque. But Gaitán was wildly popular, embodying postwar hopes.

After his execution, “in the full light of day” as García Márquez put it in his memoir, Bogotá exploded. The city after a week looked, according to one of George Marshall’s aides, like London after the blitz. Gaitán’s assassin seemed to be delusional, but there’s strong evidence he was being run by the country’s fascist movement. In any case, the killing kicked off decades of rural violence, a peasant mobilization that Eric Hobsbawm described as second in intensity only to the Mexican Revolution in Latin America. His killing took place the day after Marshall himself told Latin Americans not to expect any kind of Marshall Plan: if Latin America wanted to industrialize, it would have to attract private capital—and that meant pacifying the restless union and peasant activists who were demanding a higher standard of life, a dynamic that led directly to the death squad terror states of the 1970s. Gaitán’s murder served the US well, since the subsequent rioting let delegates forget about their economic grievances and sign on to Washington’s Cold War security agenda.

I could go on, but you get the point: Gaitán’s murder is the climax of the book, a death foretold, an event so compressed with hope that its explosion sent historical shrapnel in all directions.

 

AA: But throughout the Cold War, Latin America continues to resist this new model forcefully imposed upon it. And not just through armed resistance and struggle. Radical figures and radical ideas like Colombian priest Camilo Torres and Liberation Theology, respectively, emerge.

 

GG: Gaitán’s killing serves as a nodal point, from which I trace out various histories, including new counterinsurgent techniques and George Kennan’s call for the US to wage a permanent global psychological warfare campaign, which he made shortly after the Bogotazo (as the city’s uprising following Gaitán’s death was called). In the other direction, I spin out from Bogotá 1948 to the rise of heterodox economics, or dependency theory, liberation theology, pedagogy, psychology, New Left sociology, and the radicalization of the arts, literature, and humanities, including history writing. I try to emphasize the integration of all this intellectual effervescence, especially the relationship of dependency theory and liberation theology. Most scholars silo these movements—the boom in Latin American literature, the radicalization of Catholicism, the rise of dissident social science, and so forth.

But America, América treats them of a piece, something of a “second Enlightenment.” Just as the first radical Enlightenment was forged against monarchical authoritarianism, the second was honed against capitalist dependency.

The irony is as Sidney Hook once put it: the Catholic Church can be thought of as the most totalitarian organization in history, and yet from its ranks emerged some of the world’s most critical, egalitarian thinkers, both in the 16th century and then again in the 20th. Among those Jesuits murdered by the US-created Atlacatl battalion in El Salvador in 1989 were a historian, sociologist, anthropologist, economist, and psychologist.

one can see an arc running from Spain’s conquest of the Americas to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

AA: You were finishing the book as Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza began in October 2023. Do you see any connections or echoes between what you write about in America, América and the Gaza genocide?

 

GG: Yes. We know that all periodizations are heuristic devices, relative to the argument one is making and the point one wants to get across. But one can see an arc running from Spain’s conquest of the Americas to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Moral revolutionaries such as Bartolomé de Las Casas, in reaction to the conquest, advanced a set of modernist principles related to human equality that, I’ve argued, eventually led to the end of the age of conquest and the establishment of the so-named liberal international order. One scholar has called this centuries-long process the “slow creation of humanity.”

Israel itself was a product of that international order, brought into being by the United States in 1949 with the nearly unanimous support of Latin America—the largest single regional caucus in the UN. A year earlier, Latin American diplomats—seeing what soon would be called the Holocaust through the prism of the Conquest—argued strongly for the UN to adopt a genocide convention, with Cuba, Panama, and Venezuela unsuccessfully pushing for a broader definition of the term, to include repression directed at political groups opposing their government. After the Six-Day War in 1967, the general assembly of the United Nations then became the primary venue in which nations expressed their criticism of Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank (today, with the exception of Panama, every Latin American country recognizes Palestine, along with most Caribbean countries). Israel in the meantime ignores UN criticism but invokes the UN Charter’s Article 51, which grants nations the right to self-defense, to justify its assault on Gazans. Latin American nations played a critical role in shaping Article 51, but you’ll have to read the book for the details.

Now though as we have entered the starving-children phase of the genocide, the long entanglement between the ‘rules-based order’ and Israel has become a death dance. One fears that humanity will never recover. 

Featured image: Greg Grandin © Richard Rowley.