Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence During Latin America’s Long Cold War

2013; Duke University Press; Volume: 93; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-1903084

1527-1900

Michel Gobat,

Politics and Society in Latin America

The political violence that haunts much of modern Latin America has long preoccupied scholars of the region. Yet few works provide a perspective as wide-ranging as A Century of Revolution. This important collection — with its careful attention to causes, processes, and outcomes — goes a long way toward debunking the widespread view that political violence is “natural” to Latin America. It also shows just how restrained revolutionary violence has often been in face of pervasive counterrevolutionary terror.In his extensive introduction, Greg Grandin forcefully argues that political violence should be taken as a category of historical analysis. He criticizes historians of Latin America for having ceded to other disciplines “the task of assessing and defining the larger historical meaning of twentieth-century Latin American political violence” (p. 11). As overstated as this claim may be, Grandin is right to call for more historical analysis of Latin American political violence. Drawing heavily on Arno Mayer’s study of violence in the French and Russian revolutions, Grandin proposes that historians view political violence as a contingent historical process; pay closer attention to the interplay between revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence as well as between domestic and international forces; and consider Latin America’s revolutionary twentieth century as a distinct historical period (“revolutionary” is defined quite broadly here and includes populist regimes).Ten deeply researched case studies reinforce but also expand on Grandin’s framework. Friedrich Katz examines why Mexico’s revolutionary reforms of the 1930s did not engender the mass terror marking similar changes elsewhere in the world. Katz masterfully contrasts Mexico with the Soviet Union to highlight the differing roles played by international powers, counterrevolutionary forces, and revolutionary leaders. Yet his analysis also stresses distinct traditions of state repression, levels of state power, and memories of earlier revolutionary violence. Memory and the “spectacle” of revolution ary violence stand at the center of Jocelyn Olcott’s study of a 1930 demonstration in Matamoros, Mexico, that cost the lives of 20 communists. Olcott uses an understudied issue — revolutionary state violence against radical revolutionaries — to show how competing representations of political violence can shape intra-revolutionary struggles for power and legitimacy. Jeffrey Gould’s essay stands out for illuminating how passion and memory shaped revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence in El Salvador’s insurrection of 1932 and Nicaragua’s Sandinista Revolution. The juxtaposition of the two events also allows Gould to highlight the political costs of the revolutionaries’ own symbolic violence. Moving to Chile’s southern frontier, Thomas Klubock’s essay details how the 1934 rural uprising in Ránquil was structurally rooted in the violent colonization process of the late nineteenth century. His contribution neatly reveals that antipeasant/counterrevolutionary violence can, at times, reflect weak elite authority in a quasi-stateless countryside.The next six case studies cover the Cold War era. Michelle Chase examines the 1959 trials and executions carried out by Cuba’s revolutionary regime against Batista officials accused of human rights violations. Focusing on the debate over legitimate/illegitimate violence, Chase convincingly argues that the executions reflected not “some ahistorical Marxist propensity toward violence” but the regime’s success in restraining revolutionary violence from below. Lillian Guerra in turn explores how the Cuban counterrevolution shaped the repression of the revolutionary state. That this repression took a less overtly violent and more disciplinary form is evident in her analysis of the regime’s use of “weapons of intimidation” against distinct sectors of Cuban society. Peter Winn’s comprehensive study of the origins of Chile’s 1973 coup and its violent aftermath reveals the very different role that ideology can play in shaping revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence. Like Gould, Winn underscores the high political cost that the Left can incur for its own symbolic violence. Carlota McAllister challenges recent accounts of the Guatemalan civil war by showing how Mayans were willing participants in the guerrilla struggle of the 1970s and ’80s — not its hapless victims. Her ethnographic work reveals that although ladino racism and state repression pushed poor Mayans to take up arms, revolutionary ideals and a sense of historical necessity were just as important. Rather than emphasizing ideology, Gerardo Rénique stresses structural factors in his essay on Peru’s civil war of 1980 – 92. He thus focuses less on the war itself than on its historical roots, especially the 1960s changes affecting rural society, the Left, and the military. This emphasis on structure also marks Forrest Hylton’s study of why a Colombian city (Medellín) that had been largely untouched by La Violencia of the 1940s – 50s became, in the 1980s, a center of narco-paramilitary violence. He suggests that Medellín’s brazen narco-paramilitary violence stemmed mainly from the efforts of narco-entrepreneurs to create a “parastate.” For Hylton, this violent process “epitomizes the refeudalization of power” (p. 357). To quote Charles Tilly, we might also see it as “state making as organized crime.”The book closes with four conceptual essays. Corey Robin provides a sweeping reflection on US support for counterrevolutions, while Neil Larsen stresses the histori cal contingency of Latin American political violence and its structural roots in capitalist modernization. Gilbert Joseph similarly links Latin America’s political violence with modernity and blasts revisionist efforts to render revolutionary violence as senseless. Above all, he argues that the region’s Cold War began with the Mexican Revolution, due to its profound effects on US-Latin American relations. Arno Mayer, in an interview with Grandin, reiterates the benefits of a comparative approach that not only stresses historical contingency but situates political violence in its social, economic, and cultural contexts.Overall, this stimulating volume sheds important light on the history of twentieth-century Latin America. It presents innovative ways of studying political violence, thanks especially to its careful attention to dialectical relationships such as revolutionary/counterrevolutionary violence, local/international forces, and agency/structure (though there is little discussion of the interplay between everyday forms of violence and political violence). A Century of Revolution powerfully shows why Latin American historians of all eras should consider political violence a key category of historical analysis.