Russell Crandall, The Salvador Option: The United States in El Salvador, 1977–1992. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Maps, bibliography, index, 698 pp.; hardcover $99.99, paperback $39.99, ebook $32.
Dickie Davis, David Kilcullen, Greg Mills, and David Spencer, eds., A Great Perhaps? Colombia: Conflict and Convergence. London: Hurst, 2015. Acronyms, maps, figures, tables, notes, bibliography, index, 288 pp.; hardcover $34.93.
Lesley Gill, A Century of Violence in a Red City: Popular Struggle, Counterinsurgency, and Human Rights in Colombia. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Bibliography, index, 304 pp.; hardcover $99.95, paperback $25.95, ebook.
Ellen D. Tillman, Dollar Diplomacy by Force: Nation-Building and Resistance in the Dominican Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index, 288 pp.; paperback $29.95, ebook $19.99.
On September 8, 2010, in response to a question about her speech to the Council on Foreign Relations on U.S. security strategies toward Latin America, then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave the following response:
[T]hank you for asking about this hemisphere, because it is very much on our minds and we face an increasing threat from a well-organized network drug trafficking threat that is, in some cases, morphing into or making common cause with what we would consider an insurgency in Mexico and in Central America. (Clinton Reference Clinton2010)
One year later, Congressman Connie Mack (R-FL) introduced Bill H.R. 3401, titled the Enhanced Border Security Act, which explicitly called for applying “counterinsurgency tactics under a coordinated and targeted strategy to combat the terrorist insurgency in Mexico waged by transnational criminal organizations, and for other purposes” (Congressional Bills 2011). Such statements, which frame Latin America’s current security problems through the prism of (counter)insurgency, are accompanied by a renewed interest in “lessons learned” from previous counterinsurgency experience in the region, notably in El Salvador. In light of the Markus-Michael Müller is an assistant professor of Latin American Politics at the ZI Lateinamerika-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin. muellerm@zedat.fu-berlin.de setbacks of the military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, the “light footprint” U.S. counterinsurgency assistance for El Salvador has recently been rediscovered as “a model of counterinsurgency” (Metz Reference Metz2007, 10) in our post-9/11 world.
Latin American counterinsurgency “lessons,” however, are not just a thing of the past. More recently, Colombia has been identified as another counterinsurgency model from which other countries in the world can learn how to successfully defeat insurgencies. As one of the key architects behind the counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, now-retired General David Petraeus, and Michael O’Hanlon put it: “At a time of acute doubt over the future of the Middle East in particular, Colombia provides a model for hope as well as a reminder of what is required to make such progress possible” (O’Hanlon and Petraeus Reference O’Hanlon and David2013).
What the abovementioned statements indicate is that counterinsurgency, be it as an analytical lens, a historical model, or a contemporary military practice, is back in a world region that witnessed some of the most brutal counterinsurgency campaigns during the Cold War and that converted parts of Latin America into a “killing zone” (Rabe Reference Rabe2011). The books reviewed in this essay provide new insights into the causes and consequences, as well as the normative and practical dilemmas, of several key episodes of counterinsurgent warfare in Latin America from the end of the nineteenth century to the present.
A Transnational Laboratory
Ellen D. Tillman’s book Dollar Diplomacy by Force offers a fresh perspective on U.S. interventions in the Dominican Republic from the late nineteenth century until the end of the U.S. occupation in 1924. The book provides a powerful and convincing counterpoint to many other studies on the counterinsurgency-driven nationbuilding projects that stood at the center of this and many other U.S. interventions in Central America and the Caribbean during the so-called Banana Wars. It draws on archival evidence in the United States and the Dominican Republic and seeks to offer a “transnational synthesis” (5) of these documents.
In contrast to authors who portray these episodes of counterinsurgency-driven nation building as unidirectional, top-down U.S. efforts that imposed political order by violent means, Tillman paints a much more complex picture. In particular, Tillman makes several original arguments. First, she stresses the relational and mutually transformative character of the U.S. nation-building effort in the Dominican Republic. Far from just affecting Dominican society and institutions, U.S. interventions and the occupation of the country also (re)shaped and transformed the U.S. military institutions involved. Through the lived realities of intervention and occupation, “U.S. officers’ ideas of foreign occupation were reshaped, and enlisted men were exposed to drastically distinct ways of life and military service” (9), an experience that traveled with them once they left the Dominican Republic.
Second, the book points to the inherently transnational dimension of the occupation and the resulting U.S.-Dominican relations. The latter, Tillman argues, were essentially shaped by “U.S. imperial concerns and global economic competition during World War I” (3). Third, Tillman highlights the crucial role of local actors and agency in shaping, negotiating, and resisting the occupation, in particular inner-Dominican class divides, as well as center-periphery relations. In a telling passage, Tillman writes:
The country’s top elite families had traditionally controlled politics and the military, and Dominicans of other social classes negotiated empowerment through the establishment of patron-client relationships. In the intermediate years of the occupation, local negotiations with occupation forces opened to the gente de segunda the choice of allying either with the elite families, who widely opposed the occupation, or with the foreign power. The establishment of regionally different commands made such alliances possible. One could work with a local marine commander and constabulary force, especially if that commander focused on regional needs, and still proclaim against the general occupation. Such alliances were rare, but became more common as the occupation became more entrenched. (106)
Fourth, and closely related, the book points to the essentially hybrid outcomes of the occupation that ultimately produced a “system incorporating many elements from both societies” (203). A final point Tillman makes is that the occupation and its coercion-backed nation-building effort cannot be presented as a coherent, straightforward U.S. project. Instead, Tillman describes them as an “experiment,” executed by the U.S. Navy, that “became a laboratory for colonial experiments by the U.S. Navy and was instrumental in defining early ‘dollar diplomacy’” (2).
Tillman develops these arguments throughout the seven chronologically ordered chapters, which follow the growing intensification of U.S. involvement in the country. Chapter 1 portrays U.S.-Dominican relations through the lens of the reciprocal impact of Dominican center-periphery dynamics. Here, she points out how regionalism “clashed” with the interests of U.S. investors aiming at the modernization of the U.S.-dominated sugar industry, a process that escalated after the assassination of Dominican national caudillo Ulises Heureux in 1899. This event “opened the door to increased U.S. intervention at exactly the moment when U.S. expansion and discourse about annexationism in the Caribbean increased” (27).
Chapter 2 follows the gradual intensification of U.S. involvement in the Dominican Republic from the creation of a U.S.-controlled customs receivership in 1905 to the growing, highly regionalized civil strife that followed the assassination of another national caudillo, Ramón Cáceres, in 1911, a date after which growing U.S. involvement continuously reproduced internal conflicts and caudillismo. Chapter 3 assesses the turn from U.S. “involvement to invasion” (53), which largely resulted from growing resistance toward U.S. interventions; this escalated hostilities that ultimately led to the U.S. occupation in 1916.
Chapter 4 turns to one of the institutional pillars of the counterinsurgent-driven nation-building project of the occupation: the U.S.-trained constabulary force, the Guardia Nacional Dominicana. Chapters 5 and 6 analyze local and more transnational aspects of resistance against and negotiation with the occupation forces, first and foremost the constabulary. Chapter 7 closes the book by highlighting how the ultimately negotiated experiment in counterinsurgent nation building ended in a compromise that undermined most of the initial goals of U.S. military planners and politicians: “In the end, as an attempt to control and reform political culture through military force, the U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic was a clear failure, leaving the country with a more powerful centralized military and surveillance system that long precluded democratic development” (204).
Tillman’s book is analytically enriching, and most of her key arguments are well sustained by the empirical evidence provided. One point that could have been teased out in more detail is how, exactly, transnational relations, such as global economic competition or the travels of U.S. military personnel from other parts of the U.S. empire, well documented in the book, shaped U.S. interventions and the occupation. Another aspect that, largely due to the book’s time frame, is not as well developed as it could have been is to what extent the Dominican Republic’s “colonial laboratory” shaped other U.S. interventions in Latin America and how the Dominican experience (re)shaped U.S. military interventions in the long run. Tillman offers no definite statements on these topics, but by pointing to these factors, her book opens up an important avenue for future research on U.S. military interventions in Latin America.
El Salvador Revisited
Russell Crandall’s Salvador Option assesses the recent rediscovery of El Salvador as “one of the most dramatic successes of Cold War–era U.S. counterinsurgency and nation-building” (3) and a potential model for contemporary counterinsurgency. During the 1980s, a few dozen U.S. counterinsurgency advisers, so the story goes, achieved the professionalization of the Salvadoran military, helped to reduce human rights abuses, and managed to defeat the insurgent forces of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) on the battlefield, forcing them into negotiations with the government to find a political solution for the conflict. This military effort was accompanied by pressure from Washington on the Salvadoran government to implement economic and political reforms, including free elections, thereby ultimately “legitimizing the local client government through economic reforms and democracy” (3).
In this book, Crandall, who has published several other books on U.S. military interventions in the region and U.S. counterinsurgency more broadly, draws on “tens of thousands of pages of declassified CIA, State Department, and White House documents and a sizable number of Salvadoran sources” (12). These documents, many of which were not available to an earlier generation of scholars writing on El Salvador’s internal conflict, allow Crandall to paint a more complex, ambivalent, and ambiguous picture of the U.S. counterinsurgency-by-proxy campaign than most other contributors to the “emotionally charged and polarizing” (498) debate on the causes and consequences of U.S. involvement in the country.
The book, in many ways, can be called revisionist. Crandall wants to offer “a thorough and fair-minded evaluation based on available evidence” (7) and seeks to overcome the dichotomizing debates on the U.S.-supported counterinsurgency effort. One of the book’s main arguments is that far from a coherent, thought-through strategy, the “Salvador Option” was implemented “in a largely ad hoc fashion in country without strategic guidance from Washington” (7). From this it follows that many of the related outcomes cannot be solely attributed to Washington’s geopolitical interests and projected interventionary violence. Instead, according to Crandall, “all of the relevant actors—both Salvadoran and foreign, individual and collective—have a reasonable sense of agency and were thus capable of committing both good and bad” (12). Emphasizing the agency of local and external actors echoes arguments made by other revisionist scholars on U.S. interventions in Cold War Latin America, such as Hal Brands (2010). And like Brands, Crandall, by reiterating a similar argument already made in his earlier book, Gunboat Democracy (2006), tends to emphasize the more positive long-term outcomes of the U.S. counterinsurgency effort in the country.
For example, contrary to what we might otherwise assume, the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) covert operations did in fact attempt to bolster centrist Salvadoran forces at the expense of what at the time could be considered the country’s death squad or oligarchic right. Parts of the U.S. foreign policy even repeatedly resorted to “undemocratic” means to save Salvadoran democracy. (10)
Another key argument Crandall puts forward in the book’s nearly seven hundred pages is that there was much more continuity between the Carter and Reagan administrations’ approach to El Salvador than is usually assumed, and that “whatever hardline alternatives were considered at the White House, the U.S. diplomatic bureaucracy [during the Reagan administration] continued to operate in the Carter-designed engagement strategy despite the white-hot rhetoric coming from Haig and others” (219). In pointing to role and agency of the U.S. foreign policy bureaucracy, including those “imperial diplomats” (8) stationed in El Salvador, the book provides rare insights into the bureaucratic workings of Cold War counterinsurgency, as well as the related contingencies, intrabureaucratic conflicts, and strategies that substantially shaped the dynamics of the “Salvador Option.”
The book’s 49 chapters are divided into 5 parts, which follow the chronology of events. After a contextualization of the Salvadoran conflict by placing the country in the region’s Cold War context, part 2 assesses the Carter administration’s growing engagement in the conflict. Parts 3 and 4 assess the dynamics of continuity and change in U.S. involvement in El Salvador during the Reagan and Bush administrations. The final part briefly discusses the situation in postwar El Salvador and offers a concise conclusion, in which Crandall highlights that “the Salvador Option’s hidden angle” lies in “opaque ‘pro-democracy’ schemes”: “That is, there does not appear to be, say, a secret set of U.S. policies to intentionally create or back death squads despite Washington’s public rhetoric to the contrary” (497).
In many ways, the book can be considered the most comprehensive account of the Salvador Option, and Crandall manages to incorporate an impressive amount of data and sources into this study. The findings, particularly in light of the polarized debates on the topic, are controversial. Many insights, such as the agency of U.S. “imperial diplomats” and the intrabureaucratic struggles and compromises inside the U.S. foreign policy apparatus, are original and important, even for those scholars who will not agree with Crandall’s overall “prodemocracy” argument.
Colombian Lessons?
The last two books reviewed in this essay complement but also contradict each other and offer insights into the complex dynamics of counterinsurgency in Colombia. Lesley Gill’s Century of Violence in a Red City offers an in-depth account of the role counterinsurgent violence played in the (un)making of the urban working class in the Colombian city of Barrancabermeja, located in the Middle Magdalena Valley. Drawing on findings from in-depth empirical research in this oil town, Gill argues that in these processes, the Colombian state always “operated in overt and covert alliances with other powerful actors to promote particular projects of rule that sought to produce, normalize, and legitimate different forms of political and economic inequality” (7). This broader perspective on the (long-term) consequences of counterinsurgency allows her to demonstrate how counterinsurgent violence “becomes enmeshed within the interrelated processes of capital accumulation, state formation, and working-class disorganization and dispossession” (8).
The book’s chapters address different aspects of these developments. In chapter 1, Gill traces “Barranca’s birth as a foreign-dominated oil export enclave and the organization of a powerful working class that was not averse to rattling the chains of power” (29). In particular, the chapter illustrates how the Tropical Oil Company (TROCO), a Standard Oil subsidiary, with the active help of the Colombian state’s police and military powers, managed to establish a form of territorial control and power that enabled the company “to concentrate labor in ways that allowed it to take on statelike characteristics in a frontier region and regulate the lives of people in the emergent enclave” (34). However, the consolidation of TROCO’s power was accompanied by an equally powerful process of working-class formation. In turn, the latter produced a particularly militant (and masculine) working-class culture that allowed for the emergence of new forms of solidarity, born of the daily struggles “to improve working conditions and end the suffocating strictures on daily life imposed by the TROCO” (48).
The chapter follows the entangled dynamics of working-class resistance and repression throughout the first half of the twentieth century until the creation of a state-owned oil company, ECOPETROL, in 1948 and the nationalization of Barrancabermeja’s oil refinery in 1961 transformed these dynamics during the Cold War. Chapter 2 follows up on this by demonstrating how, due to the nationalization effort, the Colombian state and the National Front government (1958–74) then became the target of working-class militancy, which, in turn, was framed more and more through the prism of Cold War anticommunism: “As they pushed against the exclusionary practice of the National Front, the logic of anticommunism increasingly framed urban militancy within a deepening Cold War context, while growing militarization fueled repression and spurred the formation of guerrilla insurgencies that sought to overthrow the state” (65). These processes led to increasing U.S. engagement in the form of training, weapons, and financial support for the resulting counterinsurgency efforts of the Colombian state. This process “internationalized state-sponsored violence in the Middle Magdalena” (76).
Chapters 3 and 4 build on this account by assessing the impact the neoliberalization of the Colombian economy from the 1980s on had on the dialectics of resistance and counterinsurgent repression. The chapters highlight the role of paramilitary violence “as a consequence of working people’s opposition to free market policies, their demands for public services, and their insistence that the state attend to the needs of its citizens” (99).
Paramilitary violence against ever-expanding categories of people framed as the “subversive”or “insurgent other,” however, was not just a response to working-class protests against neoliberalism. According to Gill, it was also a means through which neoliberalism could unfold by dismantling and physically destroying institutions of working-class culture and the people supporting them—a fragmentation process that was further facilitated by growing resentment against insurgents, who increasingly tended to act like “arrogant delinquents who took advantage of people like themselves” (109).
While chapter 4 focuses particularly on the role of political violence in conflicts around the local Coca Cola factory, chapter 3 pays special attention to the microlevel consequences of the takeover of Barrancabermeja by the paramilitary group Bloque Central Bolívar (BCB). It shows how paramilitary violence, by destroying working-class people, their institutions, and culture, became “the midwife of neoliberalism and fueled a new phase of territorial reconfiguration and capital accumulation” (102). Again, this process had an international dimension. It was embedded in the Clinton administration’s military aid package for Colombia, known as Plan Colombia, which “strengthened paramilitary power by channeling money and arms to its main ally, the Colombian security forces” (101).
Chapter 5 analyzes the consolidation of paramilitary power in the city between 2000 and 2006. Gill highlights how the BCB consolidated its power, leading to the emergence of an “armed authoritarian enclave.” This regime, in an effort to establish a degree of legitimacy, took over some functions usually associated with the state while deepening a particular form of “armed neoliberalism” that forced working-class people to devise new strategies for addressing their needs, often by entering “armed clientelistic relationships” (154).
In chapter 6, Gill offers a critical perspective on the emergence of human rights discourses in the local context, which, in her interpretation, reflect the narrowing of political options and discourses after years of counterinsurgent and paramilitary violence. Such violence had weakened traditional working-class institutions and other, more political ideas about rights. Chapter 7 then turns to the “aftermath of counterinsurgency” by demonstrating how the decades-long cycle of resistance and violent repression created a situation of “radical insecurity” in Barrancabermeja. That insecurity was political, social, and economic, and was “the outcome of the defeat of a decades-old, working-class political culture and the fragmentation of an infrastructure of grassroots solidarity that sustained an understanding of how to act on the world, a broad sense of political purpose, and the hope that animated resistance” (236).
The findings of Gill’s in-depth, microlevel analysis of the long-term consequences of what could be called the political economy side of counterinsurgency stand in contrast to, and in many ways challenge, some key arguments put forward in A Great Perhaps?, a co-edited volume by four security policy advisers and (ex-)practitioners. In their introduction, David Kilcullen, one of the world’s most influential contemporary counterinsurgency thinkers, and Greg Mills, head of the South Africa–based policy think tank The Brenthurst Foundation, offer an overview of “Colombia’s transition” from a state heading down the road of state failure and the battleground of “Latin America’s longest-running insurgency” toward “a shining success story” of counterinsurgency, security governance, and economic development (2). To this end, they provide an overview of the country’s political history and the dynamics of the Colombian insurgency (mostly by focusing on the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC).
The authors stress the importance of internal center-periphery dynamics, which limited the reach of the Colombian state, and the growing merging of the insurgency with criminality. In turn, the latter allowed insurgents to “use crime as an enabler for their pursuit of raw political power” (6). Additionally, the authors point to the crucial role of external support (Plan Colombia), as well as the “local ownership” of the counterinsurgency effort. This local impetus, particularly under the leadership of Presidents Álvaro Uribe (2002–10) and Juan Manuel Santos (since 2010), turned the tide by aggressively targeting the FARC, “protecting communities that had previously seen little or no state presence,” and addressing the needs of “marginalised communities that had been co-opted or intimidated by guerrillas” (10). The introduction ends with an effort to locate the Colombian case in counterinsurgency theory, and stresses the parallels between Colombia and African conflicts.
The remaining chapters address key aspects of “Colombia’s transformation.” The chapter by David Spencer offers a historical narrative “of the main events, from 1949 to the present, in Colombia’s long war against the FARC” (17). As in the introduction to the book, Spencer identifies the weakness of the Colombian state, the highly fragmented state presence, and “the culture of ‘the center’” as key factors that facilitated the long insurgency in the country. Spencer provides a detailed description of the different phases of the emergency, from the recruitment of militias by the Communist Party in the late 1940s to the most recent phase of the conflict. Regarding the latter, Spencer paints a rather gloomy picture by stating that the FARC’s growing involvement with drug trafficking transformed the involved FARC formations into “major coordinators of the interconnected networks across the Americas, used to facilitate the shipment and international distribution of illicit drugs” (41). In light of this development, Spencer is skeptical about whether the FARC’s willingness to sign a peace agreement will actually allow for the consolidation of a viable and sustainable peace process in the country (43).
The next chapter, by Dickie Davis and Anthony Arnott, explores “Colombian military adaptation through the lens of capability development” by “examining how the Colombian military identified the people, equipment, doctrine training and infrastructure vital for success” (45). They focus particularly on Colombia’s successful capture or killing of high-value FARC targets, which resulted from the combination of intelligence, air power, and the development of special operation capabilities. Regarding the special operations, the authors stress that the internationally recognized success and high quality of Colombia’s special forces might trigger a potential brain drain, as former Colombian special forces members “have been in extremely high demand as security contractors for private military companies supporting the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere since 2001” (60).
The chapter by David Kilcullen returns to the dynamics of insurgency and counterinsurgency. Like the other contributors to the volume, Kilcullen again emphasizes the country’s center-periphery dynamics as a key driver behind its insurgency problems, a situation he calls “territorial logic of stalemate.” This term designates a situation “that makes it virtually impossible for a rural guerrilla movement to overthrow the Colombian state, but also makes it almost equally difficult for governments to destroy guerrilla movements, as long as the guerrillas confine their operations to the country’s vast, remote and sparsely populated areas” (61).
The following chapter, by Greg Mills, focuses on Colombia’s economic recovery and argues that “security—and the resultant stability, predictability and business confidence—has been the door through which economic development in Colombia has followed” (89). David Spencer’s chapter takes a closer look at the development of FARC’s conceptual approach and strategy of “the combination of all forms of struggle” and concludes that because of this strategy,
there is evidence to suggest that normal democratic politics is not what FARC leaders have in mind. Rather, it appears more likely that they will form a political party and participate in elections, but that this will be backed up by massive, violent and semiviolent social protests, funded by drug trafficking or other forms of illegal activity, and protected by armed criminal bands (147).
Dickie Davis’s chapter puts the Colombian “home turf counterinsurgency” (149) in comparative perspective by highlighting commonalities and differences between the Colombian case and two more common cases of interventionary counterinsurgency: the Malayan Emergency (1948–60) and the recent war in Afghanistan. Kilcullen and Mills end the book with concluding thoughts that, once more, stress how much Colombia’s current social and economic challenges “have a resonance with many developing countries, particularly those in Africa” (179). And the most important lesson these countries can learn from Colombia is the crucial importance of leadership: “A good leader’s attention to detail in executing a vision and a plan enables such a cross-government approach, gets the best out of talented people, and allows difficult policy choices to be made” (190).
The book gives its readers an informative and very timely account of Colombia’s long episode of insurgent and counterinsurgent violence. Several of its key arguments, in particular the role of center-periphery relations, are important findings that allow for a deeper understanding of the Colombian conflict. Unfortunately, several chapters are rather poorly referenced, and the role of paramilitary violence and power identified by Gill remains a minor point when compared to the attention all the contributors pay to the insurgent forces, notably the FARC. This might be an understandable perspective for counterinsurgency practitioners and advisers. It is nonetheless problematic, as the lasting reconfigurations of political and territorial power achieved through paramilitary violence that Gill identifies are not taken into account when thinking about the Colombian “success story” and its exportability to other countries.
A Continuing Debate
The books discussed in this essay demonstrate that counterinsurgency is also back in Latin American scholarship. When the different cases analyzed in each of these studies are read together, they point toward several factors that earlier scholarship on counterinsurgency in the region did not fully take into account. In addition to internal center-periphery dynamics and the problem of fragmented state presence (Davis et al.; Gill, Tillman), the books highlight the agency of local actors and “imperial bureaucracies” in shaping the course of counterinsurgency (Crandall) and the mutually transformative power of counterinsurgent nation building (Tillman).
The books also demonstrate that the debate on the successes and failures of Latin American counterinsurgency experiences remains as unsettled as it has always been. While the books by Gill and Tillman point to the normative problems and practical failures that followed from counterinsurgency efforts, Crandall and Davis et al. highlight more positive outcomes. None of the books, in this regard, offers a definitive account of Latin American counterinsurgency. From a synthesizing reading, however, several new and interesting avenues for future research on this topic emerge that might help scholars better understand the complexities and challenges of counterinsurgent warfare in the region and beyond.
