Greg Grandin, History, New York University. He is the author of The Blood of Guatemala (Duke, 2000), which won the Latin American Studies Association's Bryce Wood Book Award for best book on Latin America; The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago, 2004); and Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (Metropolitan, 2006). He has served on the United Nations Truth Commission for Guatemala, and has published in the Hispanic American Historical Review, the AHR, Harper's, The Nation, the Boston Review, and the New York Times. He has most recently been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies, Ryskamp Fellowship Program.

“Remembering Latin American’s Other ‘Transition to Democracy’”

Abstract

One of the main challenges confronting scholars of Latin America is not how to account for its historical weak democratic traditions - as the research agenda of much of the social-science literature on the 'transition to democracy' of the 1980s and 1990s suggested -- but rather how to explain the lasting strength and depth of the region's democratic movements, the stubborn endurance of religious and secular beliefs in human dignity and the possibility of redemption that has outlasted sustained violent and politicalassaults. From the terrors of the Cold War, Latin America has been the site of, in the 1990s, the emergence of a diverse array of 'new social movements' -- which transformed the region into the vanguard of the global social justice movement -- and, more recently, the return of the developmentalist state -- offering one of the few bright spots on an otherwise bleak global landscape scarred by wars, extremism, and fundamentalism of all strips. This paper will consider the current revitalization of Latin American democracy, through the prism of an earlier, often overlooked 'transition to democracy' that took place in the 1940s.