| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War. By Greg Grandin. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. xviii, 311 pp. Cloth, $57.00, ISBN 0-226-30571-6. Paper, $22.00, ISBN 0-226-30572-4.)
The names of José Angel Icó, Alfredo Cucul, and Mamá Maquin do not readily come to mind when one imagines the Cold War in Latin America. The Last Colonial Massacre places these indigenous Guatemalans on the front lines of a very real and violent local articulation of what too many have seen as an abstract or cold duel pitting global ideologies against each other. Its author, Greg Grandin, boldly and compellingly reinterprets the Cold War as "the politicization and internationalization of everyday life and familiar encounters" (p. 17).	1
Guatemala's Cold War highlighted how forays into social solidarity exposed the contradictions of the liberal state. To be sure, conflicts over land had always existed. But mid- century modernization ideology, and especially the immediate post–World War II discrediting of dictators, encouraged peasant and working-class activists to seek justice and security through an open state modeled somewhat after U.S. democracy. In Guatemala, the decade following 1944 brought to power elected reformers Juan José Arévalo and Jacobo Arbenz, and Q'eqchi'-Mayans took a risk by siding with these governments against local planters. The gamble did not pay off. After the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) led a counterrevolution in 1954, a military-planter-Washington alliance reversed all reforms, and the Guatemalan state went on to massacre over two hundred thousand people in the next forty years.	. . .

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