Empire's Workshop Quotes

“All told, U.S. allies in Central America during Reagan's two terms killed over 300,000 people, tortured hundreds of thousands, and drove millions into exile.”
― Greg Grandin, Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism

“In December 1981, the American-trained Atlacatl Battalion began its systemic execution of over 750 civilians in the Salvadoran village of El Mozote, including hundreds of children under the age of 12. The soldiers were thorough and left only one survivor. At first they stabbed and decapitated their victims, but they turned to machine guns when the hacking grew too tiresome (a decade later, an exhumation team digging through the mass graves found hundreds of bullets with head stamps indicating that the ammunition was manufactured in Lake City, Missouri, for the U.S. government).”
― Greg Grandin, Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism

“Unlike European empires, ours was supposed to entail a concert of equal, sovereign democratic American republics, with shared interests and values, led but not dominated by the United States—a conception of empire that remains Washington’s guiding vision. The same direction of influence is evident in any number of examples. The United States’s engagement with the developing world after World War II, for instance, is often viewed as an extension of its postwar policies in Europe and Japan, yet that view has it exactly backwards. Washington’s first attempts, in fact, to restructure another country’s economy took place in the developing world—in Mexico in the years after the American Civil War and in Cuba following the Spanish-American War. “We should do for Europe on a large scale,” remarked the U.S. ambassador to England in 1914, “essentially what we did for Cuba on a small scale and thereby usher in a new era of human history.”
― Greg Grandin, Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism

“In Chile, everything from "kindergarten to cemeteries and community swimming pools were put out for bid." Between 1985 and 1992, over two thousand government industries were sold off throughout Latin America. Much of this property passed into the hands of either multinational corporations or Latin America's "superbillionaires," a new class that had taken advantage of the dismantling of the state to grow spectacularly rich.”
― Greg Grandin, Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism

“If Washington was unable to bring prosperity, stability, and meaningful democracy to Latin America, a region that falls squarely within its own sphere of influence and whose population shares many of its values, then what are the chances that it will do so for the world?”
― Greg Grandin, Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism

“From the mid-1970s, Christian organizations would begin to play a more prominent role in international politics, supporting causes associated with America’s resurgent nationalist right. Some worked with the American Security Council to oppose disarmament treaties and defend Ian Smith’s white government in Rhodesia.”
― Greg Grandin, Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism

“They pushed the evangelical movement not only to fight what would become known as the culture wars—the campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion, gay rights, and so forth—but to get more involved in foreign affairs as well.”
― Greg Grandin, Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism

“give today’s imperialism its moral force: punitive idealism, free-market absolutism, and right-wing Christian mobilization. The first justified a belligerent diplomacy not just for the sake of national security but to advance “freedom.” The second sanctified property rights and the unencumbered free market as the moral core of the freedom it was America’s duty to export. The third backed up these ideals with social power, as the Republican Party learned how to channel the passions of its evangelical base into the international arena.”
― Greg Grandin, Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism

“most discussions of George W. Bush’s foreign policy focus on the supposed innovation of a small group of neoconservative intellectuals in asserting the right to unilateral preemptive military action both to defend national security and to advance American ideals. But neither the neocons’ dire view of a crisis-ridden world that justifies the use of unilateral and brutal American military power nor their utopian vision of the same world made whole and happy by that power is new. Both have been fully in operation in Washington’s approach to Latin America for over a century. The history of the United States in Latin America is cluttered with “preemptive” interventions that even the most stalwart champions of U.S. hegemony have trouble defending.”
― Greg Grandin, Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism