Empire's Workshop

Citation

Grandin, Greg. Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism. Macmillan, 2006. Google Books Link

Notes and Excerpts

Page	Quote	Notes
102	”El Salvador became Washington’s most ambitious nation-building project since South Vietnam”
122	Citation: Alfonso Chardy, “NSC Supervised Office to Influence Opinion”, Miami Herald, July 19, 1987
125	”using polling data to identify Sandinista ‘negatives’ and Contra ‘positives’ and to compile ‘key words, phrases, or images’ that could turn Americans against the Nicaraguan government.”
131	”By flooding the media with questionable facts and allegations, the Office_of_Public_Diplomacy forced Reagan’s opponents to dissipate their energies disproving allegations rather than making their own positive case for nonintervention”
155	“‘Killing for the joy of it is wrong’, a Paralife minister from the United States comforted his flock of Salvadoran soldiers, but ‘killing because it was necessary to fight against an anti-Christ system, communism, was not only right but a duty of every Christian.‘“
180	”A week after Reagan’s 1980 victory, he [David Rockefeller] toured Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay to reassure the generals that, unlike Carter, the new president ‘will deal with the world as it is’ and not as it should be, promising them that the United States would soon restore full diplomatic and military relations with them no matter what their record on human rights.”
194	Paul Wolfowitz: “American forces under President Clinton’s command have been bombing Iraq with some regularity for months now’, he wrote approvingly, ‘without a whimper of opposition in the Congress and barely a mention in the press.‘“
219	”the Pentagon in the early 1990s again advised the Colombian armed forces to create a ‘more efficient and effective’ intelligence network by keeping their operations ‘covert’ and ‘compartmentalized’ and by not putting orders ‘in writing’.” Citation to: Frank Smyth, “US Arms for Terrorists?”, The Nation, 13 June 2005
229	Rendon: “We were doing 195 newspapers and 43 countries in 14 or 15 languages. […] I can tell you what’s on the evening news tonight in a country before it happens”

Zotero Metadata

Abstract

An eye-opening examination of Latin America’s role as proving ground for U.S. imperial strategies and tacticsIn recent years, one book after another has sought to take the measure of the Bush administration’s aggressive foreign policy. In their search for precedents, they invoke the Roman and British empires as well as postwar reconstructions of Germany and Japan. Yet they consistently ignore the one place where the United States had its most formative imperial experience: Latin America. A brilliant excavation of a long-obscured history, Empire’s Workshop is the first book to show how Latin America has functioned as a laboratory for American extraterritorial rule. Historian Greg Grandin follows the United States’ imperial operations, from Thomas Jefferson’s aspirations for an “empire of liberty” in Cuba and Spanish Florida, to Ronald Reagan’s support for brutally oppressive but U.S.-friendly regimes in Central America. He traces the origins of Bush’s policies to Latin America, where many of the administration’s leading lights—John Negroponte, Elliott Abrams, Otto Reich—first embraced the deployment of military power to advance free-market economics and first enlisted the evangelical movement in support of their ventures.With much of Latin America now in open rebellion against U.S. domination, Grandin concludes with a vital question: If Washington has failed to bring prosperity and democracy to Latin America—its own backyard “workshop”—what are the chances it will do so for the world?

Metadata

FirstAuthor:: Grandin, Greg
Title:: Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism ShortTitle:: Empire’s Workshop Year:: 2006
Citekey:: grandin_empires_2006
itemType:: book
Publisher:: Macmillan
ISBN:: 978-0-8050-7738-4