Review

Reviewed Work(s): Latin America's Cold War by Hal Brands

Review by: THOMAS O'BRIEN
Source: Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 43, No. 3 (August 2011), pp. 609-611
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23031096
Accessed: 28-06-2017 01:07 UTC

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 Book Reviews 6 09

examples come quickly to mind. First, publishers that still copy-edit manuscripts (and
there are those who do what has been referred to as 'light-touch' copy-editing) carry
out grammatical and stylistic reviews, not an evaluation of historical content or
consistency. Second, a historical copy-editor would have to ask for clarification
regarding the relationship between the community and collective public labels used
interchangeably throughout the introduction and chapters, and their relationship to
the imagined community interpretation. Moreover, a historical copy-editor, I imagine,
would question the contradictory use of the term 'postrevolutionary' to describe the
revolutionary programmes during the 1920s and 1950s that were carried out by
revolutionary government officials attempting to achieve revolutionary goals. Third, in
the past, endnotes were perhaps justified by costs of production, but contemporary
technology requires no special arrangements for page production, so there is no
justification for notes that are inaccessible to the serious reader. The editors and
authors include significant commentary in informational notes that must be sought
out at the end of each chapter. Publishers should change to footnotes immediately.
These comments notwithstanding, this is an outstanding addition to Mexican
historiography.

University of Arizona WILLIAM H. BEEZLEY

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 43 (1011). doi:io.ioi7/Soo2.zzi6Xi 1000666

Hal Brands, Latin America's Cold War (Cambridge, MA

University Press, 2010), pp. 385, $29.95; 22.95, hb.

Hal Brand's study of the Cold War in Latin America disting

new works on the subject both in its breadth and in some of t
Brand examines events throughout Latin America over the c
decades while drawing on archival sources from 13 different
external actors frequently had far less influence than they ar
that domestic actors and conditions as well as nation-spec
decisive in determining the course of the region's develop
Furthermore, he argues that the Cold War never constitute
rather a conglomerate of conflicts that were the product of
forces. Although he adheres to the scholarly convention of
playing itself out between the 1960s and 1980s, he also o
suggest that the Cold War as traditionally understood effec
the beginning of the 1970s. That final point can be inferred e
Brand engages with some of the events that are usually con
core of Latin America's Cold War.
The author does an impressive job of recounting the e
and fear triggered in the region by the Cuban Revolutio
United States, the Soviet Union and the Castro government i
Brand concludes that neither the Cubans nor their Sov
effective in promoting leftist militancy or guerrilla insurge
same token, Washington's Alliance for Progress, which li
social and economic reforms, had few positive effects. D
civilian politicians like Romulo Bettencourt of Venezuel
officers of Brazil, ultimately had far more say in the outco
marked this iconic era of the Cold War. But Brand's most i

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61 o Book Reviews

this period concerns the demise of significant armed insurgencies by the end of the
1960s.
In characterising the decade that followed the insurgent years, Brand argues that
during the 1970s the conflicts that dominated the region's politics and external
relations were clearly focused on North-South as opposed to East-West issues. With
the immediate threat from armed militants fading, the attention of Latin American
politicians turned to more traditional concerns, especially anti-Americanism and anti
imperialism, with a particular focus on Latin America's role in third world struggles to
achieve more equitable economic relations with the industrial powers. Buoyed by
rising commodity prices, Latin American politicians took a more strident nationalist
posture and even expropriated important US holdings in oil and copper. Given the
North-South orientation of Latin America's political dialogue and the fact that the
Soviet Union was clearly ratcheting down its commitment to leftist causes in the
region (most notably its tepid support for the Allende government), Brand's analysis
raises serious doubts about characterising the entire period from the 1960s through the
1980s as the Cold War, a term which clearly suggests a period in which the Soviet
Union and the United States were engaged in a global struggle for power. While that
conflict was certainly continuing in places like Angola and Vietnam, it seems that
Latin America was no longer a major theatre for this East-West drama. It could be
argued, however, that the 1980s represented a resurgence in that superpower conflict
in the western hemisphere.
In his chapters on the 1980s, the author not surprisingly focuses on Central
America and on Washington's efforts to subdue the revolutionary forces that toppled
America's ally in Nicaragua and threatened to do the same in El Salvador and
Guatemala. Especially in Nicaragua, the Cold War seemed to have resumed as the
Soviet Union and Cuba offered tangible aid to the Sandinistas while President Ronald
Reagan envisioned US involvement as a way to roll back the Brezhnev doctrine and
erase the timidity that he believed had characterised US foreign policy since the end of
the Vietnam War. To be sure, the Cold War was alive and well in Latin America
during the Reagan years - but while other Latin American nations were concerned
with events in Central America, especially the resurgence of US interventionism, the
direct impact of this mini-Cold War was hardly pervasive in a region where most large
nations were transitioning back to democracy and grappling with a debt crisis that
threatened to plunge their economies into depression. As much as events in Central
America may have contained echoes of the Cold War in the 1960s, they were even
more reminiscent of US policy in the circum-Caribbean in the early twentieth
century, when the US used its military and economic might to assert its domination of
the region and exclude any other major power. This study suggests the need for a
serious rethink of the wisdom of labelling more than three decades of Latin American
history as a Cold War era.
With all its strengths, the book does suffer from several shortcomings. There is
an over-reliance on ideologies to explain events; for example, the 1970s are cast in
terms of a struggle between Marxism, dependency theory and national security
dogmas, but while ideologies help give form to political mobilisations, they do not
explain the material conditions that give rise to the dreams and aspirations that
underlie those movements. And in explaining the violence that marked much of
this era, Brands seems to employ a much-used and quite flawed argument that the
armed elements of the Left brought on violent repression by the military. That
interpretation ignores the fact that the military's principal targets were not armed

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 Book Reviews 611

insurgents but elected governments and mobilised civilian populations. The military
toppled elected governments and replaced them with long-term, institutionalised
authoritarianism that empowered it to violently repress the civil societies it was
supposedly defending.

University of Houston THOMAS O'BRIEN

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 43 (zon). doi:io.ioi7/Soozzzi6Xi 1000678

Betsy Konefal, For Every Indio who Falls: A History of Maya Activism in
Guatemala, 1960-1990 (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press
2010), pp. x + 247, $28.95, pt>

Betsy Konefais history of Mayan activism in Guatemala from i960 to 1990 takes as
departure points the fact that scholars disagree about Mayan participation in t
country's civil war and that the development of Mayan indigenous activism during
war is poorly understood. Those who read Konefal's book in order to move beyo
such disagreements and gain a comprehensive understanding of the first decades o
Guatemalan Mayan activism will only be carried halfway towards putting thes
arguments to rest. Firstly this is because Konefal is rather vague about her ow
ambitions regarding the larger schemes of history; in a modest introductory chapt
she says her work aims to explore 'how (some) Mayas became, in varying degre
involved in political activism and opposition to a repressive state', and to trace 'ho
debates around issues of Maya identity and rights evolved ... and how resistance w
shaped and reshaped by revolutionary insurgency and genocidal counterinsurgency
(p. 4). Secondly, the book is analytically underdeveloped when it comes to placing t
background material into larger frames such as political strategies, structural chan
and even individual career paths.
The lack of a clearly defined author's voice and a set of theories concerning t
birth of modern indigenous or even nationalist movements in post-colonial societi
might be due to a programmatic respect for the fluidity of a social situation
historical moment. Large parts of the text indeed appear to be written in deference
the many strong and surely admirable people that participated in the events covered b
the book. Konefal herself notes that the book is 'heavily dependent on interview
(p. 4), that memories are imperfect and that fears of being outspoken remain palpab
but instead of compensating for this by way of, for instance, comparisons, larg
surveys or prolonged fieldwork, she is content to note that the many rich intervie
provide a nuanced and deep history.
So it is in the terrain of personal accounts that the book finds its stronge
justification. Having sat down to research the history of Mayan activism
Guatemala's National Library, Konefal finds a photograph of 22 young Mayan m
and women on the front page of the newspaper El Grafico for 30 July 1978. They wer
gathered to protest the staging of the festival of indigenous folklore that year, bu
around the selection of a reina indigena (indigenous pageant queen) and t
celebration of indigenous culture as defined by the country's Spanish-speaking elit
and military rulers. Two months earlier the army had fired on and killed dozens o
demonstrating Mayan agricultural workers in a massacre that was widely regarded
the starting point of the civil war of the early 1980s, but was viewed by the incipie
Mayan movement which the El Grafico picture might be said to represent not only
an act of social and political repression but of cultural and racial repression as well.

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