The Panzós massacre was similar to earlier forms of official reaction to Mayan protests, stretching back to Spanish colonialism. The already cramped space for political negotiation became even more restricted. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is looking to understand the effects of Latin America and the Cold war. YouTube. Guatemala, the unfortunate locus of a thirty-years long civil war characterized by the slaughter of entire villages, including the machine-gunning of peasants gathered to petition the government and the pioneering use of untraceable death squads for the extrajudicial murder of political activists was a theater of the Cold War in which Communism was defeated by the genocidal massacre of unarmed civilians. This site uses cookies. See all details for The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War, Updated... © 1996-2020, Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Guatemala, the unfortunate locus of a thirty-years long civil war characterized by the slaughter of entire villages, including the machine-gunning of peasants gathered to petition the government and the pioneering use of untraceable death squads for the extrajudicial murder of political activists was a theater of t. The Cold War wasn't fought only between the United States and the Soviet Union; Latin America was a battleground from the 1950s to the 1980s and not only in Chile, Cuba and Nicaragua. State-directed terror redefined the relationship of the self to society, training citizens to turn their political passions inward, to receive sustenance from their families, to focus on personal pursuits, and to draw strength from religions that were not concerned with history or politics. To make the point as crudely as possible, the conception of democracy now being prescribed as the most effective weapon in the war on terrorism is itself largely, in Latin America at least, a product of terror. It is about the hopes and defeats of the twentieth-century left. xii The Last Colonial Massacre. The main effect of United States intervention in Latin America, Grandin shows, was not the containment of Communism but the elimination of home-grown concepts of social democracy. ras. United States: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Top subscription boxes – right to your door. We use cookies and similar tools to enhance your shopping experience, to provide our services, understand how customers use our services so we can make improvements, and display ads. © 1996-2020, Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Please try your request again later. i wanted to love this more -- the intro and conclusion were amazing, but the history was a bit hard to follow if you weren't already an expert on guatemala in the 20th century. There are 0 reviews and 0 ratings from United Kingdom. We’d love your help. The overthrow of Arbenz was an important milestone in this transformation. Before this book I had no idea there was a cold war in Latin America. Cloth $57.00, paper $22.00 After viewing product detail pages, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. The cynical rhetoric employed in Guatemala and elsewhere was identical to Moscow's in its own sphere, and makes this book a revealing comparison to Constantine Pleshakov's "There is no Freedom Without Bread" (reviewed elsewhere. The first major criticism I have with this book is the title. Something went wrong. The Last Colonial Massacre cha The Last Colonial Massacre challenges these views. That aside, his interest in Guatemala as a representation of the damage Cold War ideology did to the ideals of democracy was interesting. Dr. Grandin is both knowledgeable and concise. But after World War II those opposed to a more equitable distribution of political and economic power had more access to US military aid and beefed up their ability to repress domestic dissent. A worthy read, but with an eye to the author's bias. Are we headed back to those dark days? I admire the well written work finding more a out this dark history of Guatemala and the war.