Book Review: ‘America, América,’ by Greg Grandin

Las Casas wrote as a witness to atrocity: “so many massacres, so many burnings, so many bereavements and, finally, such an ocean of evil.” The Spanish empire had its prominent apologists, like Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who deemed Indigenous people deserving of subjugation. But Grandin says that we don’t pay nearly enough attention to “moral revolutionaries,” like Las Casas, who acknowledged that “Native Americans were humans, all humans were equal and no one was born a ‘natural slave.’”

Even as scholars in other parts of the world were elaborating a “new humanism,” Grandin says, Las Casas went one step further by hitching it to “the Catholic Church’s prophetic, communitarian tradition.” The resulting philosophy balanced individual rights with “the needs of the common good” — something Latin Americans have repeatedly tried to remind their northern neighbors of, even when the United States did not necessarily want to listen.

The rest of “America, América” follows this theme through the ensuing centuries, amid revolutions, civil wars and struggles for independence. Grandin explains how the Spanish Americans were so eager to give “Saxon” Americans the benefit of the doubt that they initially read the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 as confirmation of a collective struggle against European imperialism. But the United States would go on to cite the doctrine as “a self-issued warrant to intervene against its southern neighbors,” from the annexation of Texas through the end of the Cold War. “All told,” Grandin writes, “Washington had a hand in 16 regime changes between 1961 and 1969.”

Grandin is such a terrific writer and perceptive historian that I was swept along by his enthralling narrative. Yet his insistence on the indomitable spirit of Latin American humanism is so broad that it sometimes verges on the sentimental. When Washington’s leaders wanted to assert “America for America,” Latin Americans responded with “America for humanity,” he writes. “Latin America,” he announces toward the end of the book, “remains among the most peaceful continents in the world, in terms of state-to-state relations.”

In terms of domestic politics, though, it’s been an altogether different story. Grandin knows this, however reluctant he is to allow it to complicate his inspiring thesis. He contends that responsibility for the continent’s travails lies elsewhere, rightfully recounting how the United States propped up right-wing dictators like Chile’s Augusto Pinochet. He also blames an unfair system of international trade, noting that the continent’s social democrats “believe that the key to solving their own considerable domestic problems lies in their ability to revamp the global order.”