Robert H. Holden

Constructing the Limits of State Violence in Central America: Towards a New Research Agenda

This analysis of the historically high level of state-sponsored violence in Central America, typically explained in terms of ‘authoritarianism’ or ‘civil-military relations’, argues for according it a more independent research status. Three historic dimensions of state-sponsored violence – the mechanisms by which caudillo violence was displaced upward in the late 19th century, the level of subaltern collaboration with the agents of state violence as a function of clientelist politics, and the intrusion of US military power after 1940 – are proposed. The implications for the utility of political culture theory and for a reevaluation of the literature on civil-military relations are developed.

The Public University's Unbearable Defiance of Being

Modernity has imposed on many of us, and perhaps especially on academics, a habit of silence with regard to what John Rawls called deeply held ‘comprehensive’ moral beliefs. According to Rawls and his many disciples, the survival of liberalism depends upon the bracketing of comprehensive beliefs whenever we step into the public sphere. And in the field of higher education, that would have to include the classroom, the lab, the library carrel, the hotel conference suites where we confer and exchange ideas, as well as the vast academic publishing apparatus. I would like to call attention to the way that the supposed requirement of the Rawlsian silence is being challenged, not just by conservative critics but even by such a staunch defender of conventional liberalism as Jürgen Habermas. Second, if Habermas and the other critics are right, then a fortiori, the public university—perhaps the most representative and exemplary of all the institutions of civil society—ought to welcome the infusion of relevant but closely held beliefs, including religious ones, in carrying out its research and teaching responsibilities.

Borderlands and Public Violence in a Shadow Polity

Historians have long claimed Central America’s configuration as the Western Hemisphere’s land bridge between the oceans to be the most consequential feature of the region’s physical geography. The history of Central America’s exceptionally complex political geography, however, seems to have attracted much less interest. Among the most politically fragmented areas of the world for the past century and a half, Central America nevertheless can claim an even older and longer history of political unity, which in turn has never ceased to nourish a strong desire for reunification. Just how those legacies of initial unity, subsequent fragmentation, and the longing for reunification have shaped the state formation process in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua is a problem that still awaits its historian. This chapter approaches the problem by analyzing the borderland histories of the five countries, focusing on that of Costa Rica and Nicaragua during the Cold War both to explain and to weigh the results of a tradition of borderland-associated violence and intrigue.

Remembering a Massacre in El Salvador: The Insurrection of 1932, Roque Dalton, and the Politics of Historical Memory (review)

in his concluding chapter. He contends that Batopilas is, above all, an example of the larger late nineteenth-early twentieth century pattern of United States industrial capitalism coming to localities across the Caribbean Basin. In the more general sense it is. But probing more deeply, perhaps, one uncovers a dual structure within that general pattern. The well-established contrast of Robinson and Shepard reveals two stages of North American capitalism’s intrusion into Latin America: one, between 1850 and 1880, in which more individual, entrepreneurial capitalists introduced modernizing instruments and practices to extractive and infrastructure ventures, but compromised with, as much as changed the local societies they encountered; and a second, beginning in the 1880s, that brought the full weight of industrial, corporate capitalism to bear on those localities, radically altering them. It is the contrast of Henry Meiggs in Peru with the Cananea and Guggenheim Mining Companies in northern Mexico, the transportation ventures of Cornelius Vanderbilt with the United Fruit Company in Central America.

The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (review)

The Guatemalan civil war that began in the early 1960s and ended with a peace treaty in 1996 became a one-sided affair. The armed forces and their paramilitary allies won, not just by killing guerrillas but almost anyone suspected of supporting them. Tens of thousands of civilians, including many Mayan Indians, were the victims of an unpardonable crime that is often classified as genocide. “This book,” Grandin writes, “documents the nearly century-long intermittent mobilization leading up to the Panzós massacre [of some 35 Mayan demonstrators in 1978], focusing on the lives of a number of Q’eqchi’ Mayans, mostly members of the Communist Party but not exclusively so” (pp. 3-4).