Reading Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism by Greg Grandin is, according to Hugo Chavez, the way to answer the question “What is happening today in Latin America?”
Grandin’s primary subject is the political coalition in the United States from the New Deal of FDR to the New Right of Regan and their relation to the foreign policy apparatus and political and economic unrest then occurring in Central America. Covering the transition from “soft power” of the Good Neighbor Policy to the overt support of anti-communist military rulers in Latin American Grandin holds that Central America in the 1980s became “…the crucible that brought together missionary Christianity, free-market capitalism, and American hard power (155).” Though his focus is on this particular period of history, the whole work itself is framed as a contribution to the claim that the strategy described by him to mobilize popular American sentiment in the support of war was employed in the build-up to the Iraq War via those participating in the Project for a New American Century.
The Protestant Ethic, Liberation Theology and Communism
At a time when global supply chains were fully recovered from the second world war, Latin America found itself in a precarious position and a battle of ideas began to take shape. A post-World War II reality gap between Latin American’s expectations and their current conditions of relative deprivation was a powerful driver for revolutionary subjectivity – especially in as land increasingly became consolidated amongst fewer hands.
Predominantly an exporter from the extractive industries and non-value-added primary goods, Latin America simply was not producing the kind of advanced engineering and technologically breakthroughs leading to large increases in productivity and quality that were occurring in the US, Europe and Japan.
In the manufacturing sectors – the growth of the number of tariffs, subsidies, capital controls, labor legislation and social welfare provisions to protect domestic workers from the pressures of foreign capital multiplied and created a downward spiral of state-control of the economy and inhibited competitiveness and innovation. While these protections ensured for a time a buffer from the economic effects of these outside market development, it was a drag on the capacity for domestic capitalists to adapt. Communists and Liberation Theologists rested their laurels on such programs, ironically enough, were seen as red flags by those within the IMF. State-owned industries were correctly identified as being oriented along political rather than economic lines, meaning massive duplications of effort and inefficiencies. Even Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrinedescribes these as, basically, massive public jobs programs that for the present helped with employment but in the long term inhibited GDP growth. One example of this effects of such behavior is found in contemporary Venezuela, who has seen the number of oil workers employed by PDVSA rise at the same time that it’s production has fallen.
This collectivist approach to politics by the Hard Left and the Catholic Left was viewed by those involved with determining what to invest in as bad business. Liberation Theologists who, as a class, were totally ignorant of principles of capital management or the rules and pressures of the international marketplace denounced the North as Evil and frequently allied themselves with Communists. Theologians connected with the American Enterprise Institute and the Insitute on Religion and Democracy elaborated a number of explanations as to how Latin America’s inheritance of cultural factors such as indigenous values and legal codes that originated from the Spanish Crown’s 17thcentury counterreformation made adoption to the new international dynamics a point of friction.
While Grandin’s subsequent quotation of a number of these commentators is clearly designed to make this Protestant line of thought to seem vile – having listened to numerous engineers and high-level business-people in Latin America, they all agree with such criticisms. Which brings me to a quick side note related to this point based on discussions that I’ve had since attending a Catholic University…
While many American free-market radicals frequently point to Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead as fundamental to the evolution of their thought, they ought to familiarize themselves with Christian depictions of free enterprise – such as Knut Hamsun’s The Growth of the Soil or Confucian depictions of free enterprise – such as Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth. According to numerous Catholic’s that I’ve spoken with in Medellin, people that are wealthy are further from God. While there are certainly instances where this seems to me to be the case – primitive accumulation of capital by dispossession or narco-trafficking being two such examples – such a generalized cultural taboo inhibits the cultural changes required to get out of the poverty mindset and take greater accountability for one’s economic situation.
Adversary Culture, Media Politics and Public Relations Strategy
In chapter four, titled Bringing it All Back Home, Grandin recounts the media strategy of the Regan administration to influence the domestic press to ensure positive coverage of the ongoing U.S. military actions in El Salvador and Nicaragua. With the memory of the domestic unrest that the Vietnam war had within American still fresh in the minds of many culture leaders, universities, churches, newspaper were at first adversarial to the notion of another “war against communism”.
Grandin describes this as a “psychological operation” which was being pushed on three fronts.
1) A centralized public-diplomacy that directly confronts the press through sophisticated techniques drawn from the intelligence community and the PR world
2) The loosening of restrictions regarding surveillance operations against political dissidents
3) The construction of a “countervailing grassroots support to counter what seemed a permanently entrenched anti-imperialist opposition, mobilizing militants and evangelicals on behalf of a hard-line foreign policy,”
While Grandin views this all as a maliciously designed means of duping the population, I think it’s more appropriate to view it as a creative solution to the problem of data governance and distribution in a society with numerous media and culture outlets.
Recognizing the myriad limits of journalistic investigation, the government became proactive in responding to and anticipating the claims of political activists connected to informational networks such as CISPES – whose narratives and political activities sought to degrade and otherwise demoralize the population such that they would actively oppose military conflict. Though the FBI wasn’t never able to prove a direct agency relationship between the organization and El Salvador or of any monetary aid – it’s clear that this sort of activity was a reaction to such intelligence operations rather than an effort at misinforming the public.
The Return of Latin America’s Left and Closing Thoughts
Towards the end of Empire’s Workshop Grandin briefly takes as his subject the Global Justice Movement and their claim that since the Capitalist Revolutionaries failed to bring Peace or Prosperity through their exchange of wealth and management that this means that they have no right to continue to try to influence or direct them anymore. Given the numerous breaches of contracts and agreements that were precursors to such loans and assistance programs – in the opening chapter of the book Grandin describes Brazilian farmers not following the directives given by their American management team, thus leading to the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars – such claims are often connected to half told tales.
Indeed, Andres Oppenheimer sees the narratives typical of the New Latin American Left as part of the reason that Latin America has not been able to grow at the same rate as other developing countries. Rather than focusing on the domestic economy’s connection to capital flows, politicians seek take on the economic agency of those that they represent and – in a way – manage them. The problem with this, as it evident is that generations of wealth accumulated within a family unit can be undone in a few years – or indeed a few days – by a dissolute or corrupt member and new competitors can quickly emerge and take over the market of a leader that has stopped trying to maximize added value and innovation.
Empire’s Workshop is part of a series of published by Metropolitan Books called The American Empire Project, which features other authors praised by Hugo Chavez such as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. While the only other book that I’ve read in the series is Hegemony or Survival, if they are like at all akin to these two then thematically they have a number of the same problems in how they present their historical accounts.
- Omission or minimalization of endogenous factors informing the conflicts under discussion.
When providing an overview of USAID and DEA policy in Bolivia in the late 1990s, for instance, – as if those populations didn’t actually want assistance in the prevention of their government from becoming a state dominated by the narcotics production and trafficking sector.
Another iteration of this is removing agency from those currently engaged in illegal behavior on prior events only tangentially related. Using an example outside of Grandin’s work – to show this theme – is the placing of full or partial blame for the rise of MS-13 at the feet of the United States government. The United States government does not condone or assist with their drug-trafficking, kidnapping, extortion or any other of these illegal activities.
Absolute cynicism on the part of the author towards foreign actors.
A typical trope of the counter- and alter- globalization movement that I’ve noticed is to frame all efforts at economic development as secret debt traps – a charge that has been recently leveled against China and those countries accepting aid it’s aid. A similar trend is evident in Grandin’s writings – all intentions on the part of foreigners involved in economic development – be it those in the IMF-technicians or U.S. diplomats – are depicted as malign and deceptive. Non-liberation theology priests are all propagandists, economic advisors are vultures setting up traps, government assistance to fight narco-trafficking is just a pretext for neo-colonial domination. Thus, though Grandin presents a number of related facts that do fit together, because of his ideological bent he presents a Manichean world. This probably why Hugo Chavez loved the book.
- Avoidance of or selective analysis of international law and legal cases.
The international and domestic legal order by which nations operate provides a set of guidelines that form the framework within which allows for internal and international cooperation and development to occur.
All history writing will have elements of subjectivity within it based upon the author’s choices of evidence and mobilization of it – but even though I’m not a subject area specialist I’ve read enough of Latin American political science to know a warped narrative when I see one.
For example, whereas Grandin points to the FBI’s loosening of regulations on surveillance of domestic actors as evidence of the United States being an Evil Empire, he doesn’t at all engage with the fact that spy and espionage networks are real.
This is not to say that there is no cause for reflection on what occurred in the past, just that any sort of commentary should include the full legal context.
- Authorial pretense of having all available data
While FOIA requests, reviews of the Congressional records and interviews with known participants certainly create a simulacrum of reality – there is always a gap.
Two major reasons for this are that the U.S. military has a commitment to protecting individuals, ongoing operations, tradecraft and national security.
Another is that those which identify with the FMLN, Bolivarian, Guevarist, Marxist, etc. movements are committed militants who abide by their own version of military doctrine – which includes deceiving those that aren’t on the inside.
I say this not to make the argument that authentic history can only be written and read by those that are a member of such organizations – but to highlight the need for unreliability to be a component of authorship. Sandinistas, for example, claimed that their activities were completely of their own, however later revelations showed they were assisted by the Cubans – who have their own geopolitical goals.