Book Reviews

as always, uncertain (p. 195). I quote these chapter closings not only to highlight the
somewhat formulaic quality of Samuels depiction of the six eras but also to suggest a
deeper point that accords with his view. The American Dream is a genuinely protean
image, although it is also foundational to American culture and self-presentationor
perhaps it is foundational because it is so protean. The Dream can mean strenuous
self-improvement plans, such as Benjamin Franklins chart; or winning the lottery; or
turning on, tuning in, and dropping outit is whatever an American wants it to be.
Yet the American Dream is recognizably distinct from the national self-image
of other countries. When I first started to write about the ideology of the American
Dream several decades ago, I worried that there was no there there, but a seminar
full of European visitors to the United States assured me and the other dubious U.S.
citizens that they saw it clearly and that there was no identical French dream or
Nigerian dream or Chinese dream (though Xi Jinping is now trying to promote
one). Samuel is also right that the American Dream is both a reason for celebration
and ever-renewed hope and a reason for despair and blame, again in a complicated
emotional and political tangle that defies clear causal or linear analysis.
Samuels tactic of paraphrasing and quoting many journalists, novelists, screen-
writers, authors of op-ed articles, and political elites may be as good a method as any for
capturing the gestalt of the American dream. Perhaps the Dream really does not change
in its essence but only in its form, over decades and centuries. Perhaps it is always on
the verge of ushering in a new era or turning a new corner. This book does not offer
a great deal to the analytic social scientist or the theoretically sophisticated scholar
of cultural studies. But it does offer arresting vignettes and comments, along with an
invitation to ponder whether there really is an American consensus and whether there
really is something profoundly ahistorical about U.S. history.

Marcia Esparza, Henry R. Huttenbach, and Daniel Feierstein, eds., State Violence and
Genocide in Latin America: The Cold War Years. New York: Routledge, 2010. 272 pp.
$150.00.

Reviewed by Christopher Darnton, Catholic University of America

This volumes primary objective is to demonstrate that the systematic killing of civilians
by right-wing governments in Latin America during the Cold War qualifies as genocide,
opposing the common argument (based on the definition in the 1948 Genocide Con-
vention) that political groups, unlike ethnic or national ones, are excluded from such
consideration. The contributors largely succeed at making this case. The book provides
parallel illustrations from four countries in the later stages of the Cold War (Guatemala
and Colombia in the 1980s, Argentina and Chile in the 1970s), althoughas the au-
thors recognizethese violent episodes have been frequently studied under alternative
frameworks such as state terrorism rather than genocide. Taken together, the chapters

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powerfully depict a prolonged regional pattern of wide-scale human rights abuses by

governments that generally enjoyed some degree of U.S. support against perceived
domestic enemies, generally on the political left. The volume is usefully structured to
address in separate sections not only the underpinnings but also the mechanisms
and aftermath of violence (pp. vvi). The emphasis on mechanisms is particularly
important because so much existing work already focuses on either causes or memories
of political violence. Future research should be encouraged to trace the diffusion of
specific practices such as torture, rendition, and disappearance across countries and
organizations to highlight the foreign influences on Latin American violence. Valuable
models might include Darius Rejalis Torture and Democracy; Joao Resende-Santoss
Neorealism, States, and the Modern Mass Army; and Brian Lovemans For La Patria.
A second goal of the book is to demonstrate U.S. complicity and culpability in
these atrocities. Here the volume is weaker, though provocative. U.S. foreign policy
frequently seems reduced to a monolithic, nefarious promotion of National Security
Doctrines, yet the critiques presented in different chapters (as well as in the introduc-
tion) appear at odds. Was U.S. Cold War strategy in Latin America primarily realist
(pp. 152, 162, 169), anti-Communist (pp. 3, 5, 44, 111, 190), imperial or colonial (pp.
5, 9, 13, 236), or capitalist (pp. 9, 124, 133)? Did it vary over U.S. administrations and
across Latin American countries and governments, or not? To what extent was the Cold
War an ideological framework that drove new forms of intervention and violenceor
a rhetorical cloak for preexisting (and already violent) systems of national inequality
and regional hegemony? In what contexts did U.S. objectives influence, rather than
simply coincide with, those of Latin American security policymakers? Luis Ronigers
observations in the first chapter that the United States at least sometimes supported
democratic and reformist governments in Latin America during the first half of the
Cold War (pp. 2627), that opinions about violence may have varied within the U.S.
government, that Latin American military leaders had their own independent beliefs
(p. 31), and that subsequent U.S. support for repression alongside stated commitments
to democracy is more accurately understood as contradiction rather than deceit
(p. 38) are notable exceptions from the volumes overall tone. As other contributors
recognize, more work is needed (pp. 76, 236).
Similar tensions affect the volumes treatment of the domestic objectives of geno-
cide. The atrocities profiled in the book occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, so it is not
clear how these abuses fit into the politics and violence of the earlier Cold War, raising
questions about whether escalation came from ideological changes or other condi-
tions. Marcia Esparza argues in the introduction that genocide sought to eradicate el
pueblothat is, the popular sectors of society (particularly workers, peasants, and the
urban poor)in order to protect an unequal distribution of material resources and
forestall policy demands such as wage increases and land reform (pp. 3, 68). This fits
with the idea that repression preceded the Cold War and was readily transferred to
counternarcotics and counterterrorism frameworks after the Cold Wars end (pp. 125,
155). However, class-based analysis does not square well with much of the evidence
of subsequent chapters. Guatemala may have contributed the majority of the regions

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state-led killings, and the ethnic dimension of repression in Guatemala is undeniable

(pp. 82, 87, 95, 210). Assassinations of former presidents (in Bolivia and probably
Brazil), prominent politicians (Colombia), and former diplomats and military officers
(Chile), as well as students and intellectuals (region-wide), suggest that the violence
cannot be reduced to a war on the poor (pp. 108, 113, 143, 152). Also, the language of
fear, pathology, holy war, and military culture suggests that ideas rather than material
factors were hugely influential (pp. 4748, 83, 109, 184, 197).
Primary sources are vital for analyzing the beliefs of victims (to establish a common
identity targeted for annihilation, part of the profile for genocide) and perpetrators (to
reveal motivation) and for tracing the role of foreign actors. Moreover, political vio-
lence research often makes major contributions by revealing new data, documents, or
testimony. The chapters in this volume rely predominantly on secondary sources, news-
paper accounts, and published collections such as governmental truth commissions
and non-governmental organizations reports on national atrocities. Interviews are few
and usually anonymous; declassified U.S. documents appear in some chapters, but
most are already published (e.g., in the Foreign Relations of the United States series
or on the website of the National Security Archive) or are cited vaguely in terms of
location or origin. Some of the most intriguing Latin American documentary and
oral sources are also cited opaquely (e.g., a 1982 Guatemalan military plan, in notes
77 and 80 on p. 101, and Guatemalan survivor interviews, on pp. 8891, though
note 60 points to the authors masters thesis) or not at all (Chilean trial transcripts,
quoted directly on pp. 197, 200, 202, but with no notes). Two chapters previously
appeared in the Journal of Genocide Studies, and arguments in other chapters are more
systematically presented in monographs by their authors (e.g., J. Patrice McSherry
and Jennifer Harbury). This does not invalidate the authors claims but suggests that
the volumes contribution and persuasiveness are more conceptual and synthetic than
empirical.

Miriam Dobson, Khrushchevs Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime and the Fate of
Reform after Stalin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. viii + 264 pp. $24.95
paper.

Reviewed by E. A. Rees, University of Birmingham

At the time of Iosif Stalins death in March 1953, approximately 2.5 million people
were incarcerated in Soviet Gulag camps and colonies administered by the Ministry of
Internal Affairs (MVD), another 2.7 million were in special settlements, and roughly
150,000 were in regular prison. Out of a total population of 188 million in 1953, some
5.4 million, or 2.8 percent of the population, were under some form of confinement.
(The proportion for the adult male population under confinement was significantly
higher.) Some 22 percent of those in detention were held for counterrevolutionary

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