Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States and the New Imperialism

Greg Grandin discusses his book Empire’s Workshop. Empire's Workshop is one of the first books to examine how a preemptive foreign policy in Latin America, which included sponsoring coups, death-squad states, and paramilitary insurgencies, has transformed America's domestic policies, forging today's ruling coalition of neoconservatives, Christian evangelicals, free marketers, and nationalists. The road to war in Iraq, Grandin provocatively argues, can be traced back to the 1970s and 1980s, when an increasingly internationalist New Right turned to Latin America to avenge Vietnam, and in so doing rehabilitated militarism as a legitimate instrument of state and made free-market capitalism the moral core of American purpose abroad.

"The Americans who engineered countless military coups, death squads and massacres in Latin America never paid for their crimes -- instead they got promoted and they're now running the 'War on Terror.' [This is a] book that is absolutely crucial to understanding our present."
-Naomi Klein, author of No Logo

"Illuminates our dark, confusing times. Read Empire's Workshop and the whole disastrous Bush adventure in Iraq suddenly appears as the logical continuation of a century of U.S. interventions in that sad laboratory called Latin America."
-Ariel Dorfman, author of Death and the Maiden

"A superb book that clarifies, like few others, the role of of Latin America in Washington´s grand design and the importance of the current uprising against the empire in Venezuela, Bolivia and beyond."
-John Pilger, author of The New Rulers of the World


Greg Grandin, a professor of Latin American history at New York University, is the author of two previous books. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, Grandin has served on the United Nations Truth Commission investigating the Guatemalan civil war and has contributed to Harper's, The Nation, and the New York Times. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.