The United States has a long and bloody history of invasion, occupation, extraction, and exploitation in Latin America. But the history of US empire isn’t just the history of violent conquest — it’s also the history of those who fought against it.
Steven Striffler’s Solidarity: Latin America and the US Left in the Era of Human Rights surveys the history of the US Left’s engagement with Latin America. Striffler argues that “progressive forays into internationalism provide particularly revealing points of entry for understanding the US left as a whole.” The contemporary diagnosis is grim.
His sweeping research reveals an uneven history of domestic opposition to US imperialism. Tensions between notions of US empire as a fundamentally benevolent force whose excesses must be contained, or as an agent of capitalism “that delivers extreme levels of inequality and violence to the hemisphere,” have shaped US-Latin American solidarity for centuries.
Conceptions of solidarity evolved together with those of empire. In the hands of revolutionaries like Che Guevara, Striffler writes, solidarity “was rooted less in a common experience or economic position than in a series of other concerns and goals that ultimately reflected how actors see the world and envision the future.” But these other, shared aspirations of seizing state power, redistributing wealth, and restructuring production were largely overcome by the neoliberal counterrevolution.
Though it spans more than two centuries, the book’s thrust is a critique of activism in the neoliberal age, from the fragmented countercultures of the 1990s to professional human rights advocacy organizations, and a call to return to an internationalist Left politics that takes state power seriously.
Strifler writes in a context of “the ongoing decline of the left,” one in which “international allies have tended to engage in … defensive struggles to help Latin Americans ‘negotiate the best possible terms of their defeat.’” Happily, circumstances have shifted. The Latin American Left rose to power across the continent in the form of progressive elected governments — now the target of a vicious counter-offensive — and in the United States, the heart of imperial power, a new generation is forging a militant left politics the likes of which have not been seen in decades.
In a moment of right-wing reaction in the South and budding Left renaissance in the North, Striffler’s lessons from movements past are perhaps more urgent than he imagined at the time he wrote Solidarity.