A recent trend in recent histories of U.S.-Latin American affairs is to dig up in our hemisphere the roots of the global U.S. empire—the “empire’s workshop” approach.1 Fred Rosen attempts the same in this collection of essays.

After the introduction (discussed below), Alan Knight, one of the deans of Latin American history, provides a useful overview of U.S. hegemony (his term, p. 23) in Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries while offering a conceptual framework for understanding these activities. He analyzes the modalities, functions, mechanisms, and goals of U.S. activities. His most original contribution is to distinguish between, on one hand, the functions of “defense” against possible competitors in the Americas and on the other hand the more ambitious efforts of “engineering” occupied societies to permanently change their culture. Knight chooses to say little about resistance, a much less tilled research field than is U.S. empire.

Given the array of topics in this book, Rosen makes a valiant effort in the introduction to find common themes among the contributions. Among these is the question of “status” defined as “a militant assertion of humanity and citizenship by racially and ethnically excluded populations” (p. 6). The Zapatistas of Mexico and the Indians of Bolivia are good examples. Another theme is the amorphous transnational nature of domination expressed in Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s notion of “Empire”2, a disregard for political boundaries that Neil Harvey finds in resistance movements such as that of the Zapatistas, who have not pursued a traditional national strategy but one that looks for global allies in their struggle for local autonomy.

A third theme is the worsening of economic inequality caused by U.S. policies. On this theme Carlos Marichal provides the finest illustration. With broad brush strokes he paints a portrait of the influence of the U.S. government in negotiating bank loans for indebted Latin American governments (mostly Mexico and Argentina) from 1945 to 2005. Marichal contributes to the “workshop” thesis with a convincing study of how “the Latin America lending booms of the 1970s constituted a fundamental antecedent of modern financial globalization” (p. 96). He also makes the important point that loan agreements, so dispersed and complex, have been particularly difficult embodiments of “empire” against which to rally popular opposition. The only drawback of the chapter is one that occurs also in Daniel Cieza’s piece on Argentina: both make mention of Argentine President Néstor Kirchner’s successful hard-line refusal to pay back the foreign debt at the value demanded by international investors, but neither go into any details about what has been one of the only crowning glories of Latin American resistance to IMF-type financial imperialism. How was Kirchner able to do this? What arguments convinced the financiers to back down?

A fourth theme is the direction in which dissent flows—either “top-down” or “bottom-up.” In this instance Steve Ellner’s chapter on Venezuela is the most direct case. In that country both currents run strong but not always in the same direction, argues Ellner. President Hugo Chávez has riled up Venezuelans to focus their grievances on the United States through his political party and media and he has organized the rank and file to win elections effectively. But grassroots movements, though leftist, have often taken out part of their dissatisfaction on leading chavistas. He concludes that the still “experimental” state of Venezuelan politics makes it too early for verdicts on whether the bottom or the top is dominating or whether they have achieved a winning partnership (p. 222).

There are significant limitations to the book. First, readers looking for empirical research either on empire or dissent in Latin America will be disappointed. Most chapters review relatively well-known incidents in recent Latin American politics and are mostly informed by secondary literature. There is little new information and almost no quotations from those who resist U.S. power. And readers of this journal might be particularly saddened that history is not salient among the book’s methods.

In addition, the collection is rather mis-titled and more specifically mis-subtitled. To be sure, Rosen defines dissent straightforwardly, as “attempts by one or another of the ‘sister republics’ to pull away from U.S. dominance and […] widespread manifestations of popular discontent and unrest directed against U.S. power (p. 5). Yet the first two chapters after Knight’s overview, by Gregory Evans Dowd and John Richard Oldfield, have nothing to do with Latin America. Dowd’s is on British and U.S. relations with Indians and Oldfield’s is about British anti-slavery movements. They both do touch on “empire” and “dissent” and are the best researched contributions of the book (not to mention the only bona fide history chapters). But they concern Latin America only in the most oblique sense of suggesting struggles over status and the importance of transnational networks. The editor should have asked both authors to address more directly the implications of their findings for Latin Americanists. More important, the inclusion of these two stories of resistance before those from Latin America weakens Rosen’s argument that it was Latin America that was the workshop.

Finally, the book seems also mis-titled in overextending the concept of “Empire” to unfairly label the United States as the target of every movement of resistance in Latin America. The Zapatistas, for instance, are certainly opposed to U.S.-championed neoliberalism, but they are far more concerned with obtaining sovereignty from the Mexican government, a dispute with which the United States has nothing to do. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui more directly makes the argument that Indians oppose drug policies “pressed on Bolivia by the United States,” a reasonable statement (p. 144). But then she makes serious accusations without any evidence or footnotes: of “a persistent political infiltration of the Bush administration into the internal structures of the Bolivian state” and of “the long-term complicity of the U.S. government with the corporate interests of transnational companies such as those in the pharmaceutical industry, those of the military-industrial complex, and the Coca-Cola Company” (p. 147). Rivera makes an otherwise fascinating study of new Indian struggles to reconceptualize the consumption and production of coca, a struggle that is largely against the Bolivian government, with these broadsides again the United States. And the Jeffrey Rubin and Cieza chapters on Brazil and Argentina, respectively, are about social movements concerned mainly with domestic policies and only peripherally with “Empire,” much less the United States. There is simply too keen of an intent by the editor to have these multifaceted, complex movements—inspiring as they are—to fit a convenient anti-imperialist narrative.

All in all, the book has definite highlights but is among the least substantial and innovative publications on U.S.-Latin American affairs in Duke University Press’s American Encounters/Global Interactions series, which so far has produced remarkable standouts such as Close Encounters of Empire and In From the Cold.3

Notes:
1 Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop. Latin America, the United States and the Rise of the New Imperialism, New York 2006.
2 Michael Hart, Antonio Negri, Empire, New York 2000.
3 Gilbert Joseph, Catherine LeGrand, Ricardo Salvatore (eds.), Close Encounters of Empire. Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations, Durham, N.C. 1998; Gilbert Joseph, Daniela Spenser (eds.), In From the Cold.Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War, Durham, N.C., 2008.