Latin America

"He was indeed. Hal finished his dissertation only last year, and yet the book that has come out of it is the most comprehensive overview of US-Latin American relations from the 1960s to the 1980s that anyone anywhere has yet produced. It’s amazing to have a recent PhD write a book of which professors in mid-career and beyond would have been proud. Sometimes your own graduate students can zoom way ahead of you. Most important are the sources Hal has used. Most books on US-Latin American relations have been written chiefly from US sources, or, if they have used Latin American sources, it’s often been the archives of only one country. Hal worked in the archives of ten Latin American countries, as well as those of the United States, Canada, Germany, and, through published or online collections, those of the Soviet Union. So we get a truly international view of the Cold War; one written, for the first time, as much from the perspective of the Latin Americans as from that of the United States. It is too early to say because the book has just come out. My guess is that it will be controversial for a couple of reasons. First, because previous histories of the Cold War in this region have been based so heavily on US sources, they’ve tended to exaggerate, and to be extremely critical of, the role the US has played in that part of the world. Most of the bad things that happened there, they insist – the authoritarian regimes, the civil wars, the human rights abuses – happened because Washington caused them to happen. Hal acknowledges that there’s plenty of evidence for this. But he also points out that to blame everything on the US is to deny ‘agency’ to the Latin Americans, a strange conclusion for histories that purport to be sensitive to their views. The US from time to time acted repressively in Latin America, but it did not invent repression there – it has a very long history. Nor was the concept of a Cold War anti-communist crusade, or the violence often associated with it, something always imposed from Washington. It had Latin American roots as well. So Hal Brands has given us a much more balanced treatment of US-Latin American relations than we’ve had up to this point. Of course it will be controversial. But it will also, I think, be definitive."