America, América
A Bold New History Highlights Latin America’s Humanist Ideals
A new book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Greg Grandin offers a fresh account of the region as an incubator of internationalism and commitment to the common good.
“Grandin allows that the conquistadors were responsible for enormous bloodshed. But he goes on to say that it is precisely because of the vicious havoc they wreaked that they elicited outrage and dissent. He offers a rich, moving portrait of Father Bartolomé de Las Casas, a 16th-century Dominican priest who started out as a supporter and beneficiary of the Spanish crown’s imperial ambitions before becoming one of its most scathing critics. Las Casas’ conversion moment took place when he accompanied an expedition to pacify Cuba. He saw his fellow Spaniards disemboweling women and children. He would later remember “the land, covered in bodies.”
Las Casas wrote as a witness to atrocity: “so many massacres, so many burnings, so many bereavements and, finally, such an ocean of evil.” The Spanish empire had its prominent apologists, like Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who deemed Indigenous people deserving of subjugation. But Grandin says that we don’t pay nearly enough attention to “moral revolutionaries,” like Las Casas, who acknowledged that “Native Americans were humans, all humans were equal and no one was born a ‘natural slave.’”
Even as scholars in other parts of the world were elaborating a “new humanism,” Grandin says, Las Casas went one step further by hitching it to “the Catholic Church’s prophetic, communitarian tradition.” The resulting philosophy balanced individual rights with “the needs of the common good” — something Latin Americans have repeatedly tried to remind their northern neighbors of, even when the United States did not necessarily want to listen.
The rest of “America, América” follows this theme through the ensuing centuries, amid revolutions, civil wars and struggles for independence. Grandin explains how the Spanish Americans were so eager to give “Saxon” Americans the benefit of the doubt that they initially read the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 as confirmation of a collective struggle against European imperialism. But the United States would go on to cite the doctrine as “a self-issued warrant to intervene against its southern neighbors,” from the annexation of Texas through the end of the Cold War. “All told,” Grandin writes, “Washington had a hand in 16 regime changes between 1961 and 1969.”
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