Dr. Greg Grandin (NYU) delivered the department’s Annual History Lecture last night (March 22nd). A leading scholar of Modern Latin American history, Dr. Grandin has written widely on U.S. foreign policy, Cold War politics, human rights, and truth commissions. His acclaimed book Fordlandia (2009), about Henry Ford’s quixotic visions of progress in the Amazon jungle, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.
Dr. Grandin’s talk, “The Empire and the Elephant: Reading U.S.-Latin American Relations in the Age of Wikileaks” offered an audience of students, faculty, and community members a crash course in the workings of U.S. power in the region since the end of World War II.
While noting that the thousands of Wikileaks documents pertaining to Latin America did not contain any sensational ‘smoking guns’, Grandin argued that when read carefully, they do reveal important shifts in power dynamics in the Western hemisphere. In particular, they show a loosening of U.S. power in South America, where Brazil has risen as a regional counterweight. They also illustrate a retrenchment of U.S. power in the northern half of the region, from Colombia through Mexico. Privately, U.S. diplomats even acknowledge that U.S. anti-narcotic and anti-terrorist policies are fueling the extreme violence that grips these countries — especially Mexico. In the talk and the discussion afterwards, Dr. Grandin also reflected on some of the lessons that the Latin American experience offers us as we try to understand current U.S. actions in the Middle East and North Africa.
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