Imagine a couple of bros recording a video podcast in which they get together to swap compliments while casually chatting about vaporizing due process. This is roughly what it felt like to tune in to President Donald Trump’s joint press conference with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in the Oval Office in April. First came the mutual praise. “I want to just say hello to the people of El Salvador and say they have one hell of a president,” Trump started. Bukele expressed delight at meeting “the leader of the free world.” Later in the conversation, Trump told Bukele, “You sort of look like a teenager,” playfully slapping his arm.
想象一下，几个兄弟录制了一个视频播客，他们聚在一起交换称赞，同时随便聊天聊天适当程序。这是四月份与唐纳德·特朗普总统在椭圆形办公室与萨尔瓦多总统纳伊布·布克利（Nayib Bukele）共同新闻发布会的感觉。首先是相互称赞。特朗普开始说：“我只想向萨尔瓦多人民打招呼，说他们有一个总统的地狱。”布克利对“自由世界的领袖”会面表示高兴。在谈话的晚些时候，特朗普告诉布克勒：“你看起来像个少年，”调皮地拍了拍他的手臂。
The pair then turned their attention to the extrajudicial transfer of dozens of Venezuelan migrants held in the United States to the notorious Salvadoran mega-prison known as CECOT (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo), as well as the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who had been mistakenly deported to El Salvador by U.S. authorities. Asked by a reporter if he would facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return, as mandated by the U.S. Supreme Court, Bukele asked coyly, “How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?” Trump bobbed his head approvingly. (Abrego Garcia was ultimately returned to the U.S. earlier this month.)
两人随后将注意力转移到了在美国的数十名委内瑞拉移民的法外转移到臭名昭著的萨尔瓦多人大型监狱，被称为Cecot（Centro de Concinamiento del thortorismo），以及基尔马尔·阿布雷戈·加西亚（Kilmar Abrego Garcia），玛丽·阿布雷戈·加西亚（Kilmar Abrego Garcia），玛丽·阿布雷戈·加西亚（Kilmar Abrego Garcia），玛丽·玛丽兰（Maryland）被误认为是萨尔瓦多（U.记者问他是否会促进阿布雷戈·加西亚（Abrego Garcia）的返回，按照美国最高法院的要求，布克勒问coyly：“我该如何将恐怖分子走私到美国？”特朗普认真地摇了摇头。（Abrego Garcia最终于本月初返回美国。）
This confab was the latest brutish two-step in a decades-long political dance between the U.S. and El Salvador. In the 1980s, the U.S. gave billions of dollars to murderous right-wing factions during the Central American nation’s civil war, fueling the conflict and destabilizing the country. In the ’90s, the Clinton administration began deporting Salvadoran immigrants convicted of crimes in the U.S. back to their homeland, a move that helped propel the rise of powerful gangs in a country that was institutionally weak after years of war. Rising gang violence then led thousands of ordinary Salvadorans to flee to the United States. The chaos laid the groundwork for the rise of Bukele, a man who once described himself as “the world’s coolest dictator.” And now the U.S. is paying the country to house Venezuelan migrants, including many whose greatest crime seems to have been seeking asylum here.
这是美国与萨尔瓦多之间长达数十年的政治舞蹈中最新的残酷两步。在1980年代，美国在中美洲内战期间向谋杀的右翼派系捐赠了数十亿美元，从而助长了冲突并破坏了该国的稳定。在90年代，克林顿政府开始驱逐萨尔瓦多移民在美国犯罪的罪名成立，回到了自己的家园，这一举动有助于推动一个在战争后在制度上薄弱的国家中强大的帮派的崛起。随后，崛起的帮派暴力导致成千上万的普通萨尔瓦多人逃往美国。混乱为伯克利的崛起奠定了基础，他曾经自称是“世界上最酷的独裁者”。现在，美国正在向该国支付委内瑞拉移民，其中包括许多最大罪行似乎一直在这里寻求庇护的移民。
This feels like more of the same, but with an awful new twist. American intervention in Latin America has often been premised on the condescending notion that the U.S. is a forbearing parent, the stable democracy tasked with maintaining order in its hemisphere. But now that our country has deployed the military against its own citizens in Los Angeles, taken a Constitution-shredding approach to deportation, and defied court orders, it might be Latin America’s turn to offer guidance. Latin American nations, for all their political convulsions and repressive periods, have a rich history of social movements grounded in collective ideals. As some historians talk about Trump as a strongman in the Latin American mold, perhaps the region has something to teach us about democracy.
这感觉更像是一样，但是有一个糟糕的新转折。美国对拉丁美洲的干预通常以屈尊的观念为前提，即美国是顽强的父母，这是稳定的民主制度，其任务是维持其半球的秩序。但是，既然我们的国家已经针对洛杉矶的公民部署了军队，采取了宪法修正的驱逐方式，并违反了法院的命令，可能轮到拉丁美洲提供指导。拉丁美洲国家尽管其所有政治抽搐和压制性时期，都拥有基于集体理想的社会运动的丰富历史。当一些历史学家谈论特朗普是拉丁美洲模式中的一个强人时，也许该地区有一些教会我们有关民主的知识。
Trump’s regime makes the arrival of the historian Greg Grandin’s ambitious new book, America, América: A New History of the New World, incredibly timely. His previous, Pulitzer-winning book, The End of the Myth, incisively explained how U.S. expansionism gave way to the border-wall isolationism of the Trump era. In America, América, he expands the frame. Over 768 pages, Grandin gives us the sweep of history: the bloodshed of colonization, the movements for independence, manifest destiny in the U.S. and caudillo rule in Latin America, a pair of world wars, the Cold War, and the growing polarization of the 21st century.
特朗普的政权使历史学家格雷格·格兰丁（Greg Grandin）雄心勃勃的新书《美国，阿米里卡（América）：新世界的新历史》（América）的到来，令人难以置信。他以前的，普利策奖的书《神话的终结》敏锐地解释了美国的扩张主义如何让位于特朗普时代的边界墙隔离主义。在美国，América，他扩大了框架。超过768页，格兰丁（Grandin）为我们提供了历史的扫描：殖民化的流血，独立运动，在美国和拉丁美洲的库迪洛统治，一对世界大战，冷战，冷战以及21世纪的两极分化。
Read: El Salvador’s exceptional prison state
阅读：萨尔瓦多的杰出监狱状态
The author is not the first scholar to tackle the history of America—as in the American continent, not just the United States (which keeps trying to hoard the name for itself). The British historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s 2003 book The Americas: A Hemispheric History covered the shifting fortunes of the continent’s Anglo and Latin American nations over five centuries. But that work was more limited in scope, and in the two decades since it was published, a new generation of caudillos has arisen, including Bukele, Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, Argentina’s Javier Milei, and Trump.
作者不是第一个应对美国历史的学者 - 在美国大陆，而不仅仅是美国（这一直试图为自己ho养这个名字）。英国历史学家费利佩·费尔南德斯·阿姆斯托（FelipeFernández-Armesto）2003年的《美洲：半球历史》涵盖了五个世纪以来非洲大陆盎格鲁和拉丁美洲国家的转移命运。但是，这项工作的范围更具限制，并且在出版以来的二十年中，新一代的库迪洛斯（Caudillos）出现了，包括布克勒，委内瑞拉的尼古拉斯·马杜罗，阿根廷的哈维尔·米利和特朗普。
America, América brings us to the present. It also offers a fresh look at the past, primarily focusing on the British and Spanish empires and providing a deep analysis of the ideas upon which both were built and governed (for better and worse). Grandin considers, for example, how both empires contended—or didn’t—with the ethics of conquest. And he goes deep on the ways that the Monroe Doctrine shaped U.S.–Latin America relations over two centuries. When President James Monroe declared in 1823 that the Western Hemisphere was off-limits to future European colonial projects, his proclamation was received as a statement of solidarity by newly independent Latin American nations. But it quickly became “a self-issued warrant for the U.S. to intervene against its southern neighbors,” Grandin writes. Within two years, the U.S. was actively undermining Mexican President Guadalupe Victoria; military incursions in Mexico, Haiti, Cuba, and Puerto Rico followed. By the middle of the 20th century, Cold War paranoias about left-wing movements, spurred by the revolution in Cuba, led to, in Grandin’s estimation, 16 U.S.-aided regime changes from 1961 to 1969—including one in El Salvador, which put that country on the slippery slope to civil war.
美国，América将我们带到了现在。它还提供了过去的崭新审视，主要关注英国和西班牙帝国，并对建立和管理的思想进行了深入的分析（因为更好，更糟）。例如，格兰丁（Grandin）认为，两个帝国都在征服伦理学的伦理方面是如何争辩的。他深入了解梦露学说在两个世纪以来塑造了美国 - 拉廷美国关系的方式。当总统詹姆斯·梦露（James Monroe）在1823年宣布西半球是未来欧洲殖民项目的禁区时，新独立的拉丁美洲国家被视为团结的声明。格兰丁写道，这很快成为“美国对南方邻国进行干预的自我发行的逮捕令”。在两年之内，美国积极破坏墨西哥总统瓜达卢佩·维多利亚。随后在墨西哥，海地，古巴和波多黎各的军事入侵。到20世纪中叶，在古巴革命的刺激的左翼运动中，冷战的偏执狂导致格兰丁的估计，从1961年到1969年，美国辅助政权的16个变化，包括在萨尔瓦多（El Salvador），这使那个国家的那个国家都在湿滑的斜坡上。
This is a big and unwieldy book—and it could have made for arid reading. But Grandin has a knack for enlivening theory with anecdotes that are both enlightening and appalling. A section detailing the independence movement in Venezuela, for instance, features a novelistic tangent about a royalist caudillo named José Tomás Boves, who attempted to beat the reformers back: He gathered an army to seize the capital of the newly independent nation, brutalizing anyone who stood in his path. In Cumaná, he held Caracas’s republican orchestra captive and ordered the musicians to play waltzes as his soldiers danced with the town’s widows. “Blood from the day’s killing still moist on their boots turned the dance floor red,” writes Grandin. “As the orchestra played, Boves took one musician out at a time to be executed.”
这是一本笨拙而笨拙的书，它本可以为干旱的阅读而制作。但是格兰丁（Grandin）具有使理论充满轶事的诀窍，这些轶事既启发又令人震惊。例如，一个详细介绍委内瑞拉独立运动的部分是关于一个名叫何塞·托马斯·鲍夫斯（JosétomásBoves）的保皇党库迪洛（Caudillo）的新颖性切线，后者试图击败改革者：他聚集了一支军队来夺取新独立国家的首都，使任何站在他的道路上的人都遭受了责任。在库曼纳（Cumaná），他占领了加拉加斯的共和党乐团俘虏，并命令音乐家在士兵与该镇的寡妇跳舞时扮演沃尔兹斯（Waltzes）。格兰丁写道：“当天的杀人案中的鲜血仍然在靴子上湿润，使舞池变成红色。”“随着乐团演奏，Boves一次将一名音乐家带出了执行。”
Although such gory tales push the story along, what makes América, America instructive is Grandin’s focus on the way that Latin American thinkers have advocated for important social rights from the very foundation of their republics. For starters, many early independence movements in Latin America were linked to the abolition of slavery—most notably in Haiti. The South American liberation leader Simón Bolívar emancipated the slave laborers who worked on his family’s estate—unlike George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Moreover, the constitutions of many Spanish-speaking republics went beyond enshrining individual rights, also offering protection to el bien común de la Sociedad (“the common good of society”). Mexico’s constitution was the first in the world to guarantee birthright citizenship. Venezuela’s first constitution included nine instances of the word social and 15 of the word society, Grandin writes: “Neither word appears in the United States Constitution.” Venezuela’s remarkable document declared, “Because governments are constituted for the common good and happiness of men, society must provide aid to the destitute and unfortunate, and education to all citizens.”
尽管这种血腥的故事推动了这个故事，但使América的原因是，美国的启发性是格兰丁对拉丁美洲思想家从共和国的基础上提倡重要社会权利的方式。首先，拉丁美洲的许多早期独立运动都与废除奴隶制有关，尤其是在海地。南美解放的领导人西蒙·玻利瓦尔（SimónBolívar）解放了从事家人庄园工作的奴隶劳动者，例如乔治·华盛顿（George Washington）和托马斯·杰斐逊（Thomas Jefferson）。此外，许多讲西班牙语共和国的宪法超越了个人权利，还为El BienComúnde la la Sociedad（“社会的共同利益”）提供保护。墨西哥的宪法是世界上第一个保证出生权公民身份的宪法。委内瑞拉的第一宪法包括社会一词的九个实例和社会一词，格兰丁写道：“美国宪法中都不出现任何一句话。”委内瑞拉的杰出文件宣布：“由于政府是为男人的共同利益和幸福而构成的，因此社会必须为所有公民提供援助，并为所有公民提供援助。”
Read: The revolutionary idea that remade the world
阅读：重塑世界的革命思想
Certainly, there was a gap between high-minded intentions and the actual application of the law. The abolition of slavery in Latin America didn’t immediately eliminate it in practice, and that first Venezuelan constitution was shortly replaced by another. But Latin America’s ideals of el bien común have nevertheless helped shape legal codes into the present—including international law. Many of the ideas put forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, emerged from Latin America, including the equal treatment of men and women, the right to marry across racial lines, the right to health care, and the right to leisure time.
当然，高尚的意图与法律的实际应用之间存在差距。在拉丁美洲的废除奴隶制并没有立即在实践中消除它，而第一委内瑞拉宪法很快就被另一个宪法所取代。但是，拉丁美洲的El BienComún理想尽管如此，包括国际法，还帮助将法律法规塑造成现在。1948年联合国通过的《普遍的人权宣言》中提出的许多思想来自拉丁美洲，包括对男人和女人的平等待遇，跨越种族的婚姻权，卫生保健权以及休闲时间的权利。
Grandin’s narrative upends the idea of Latin America as perpetual victim, instead chronicling a tradition of leaders who have consistently fought for the social good. One particularly illuminating chapter traces the way that liberation theology, Marxist economic theory, and Latin American literature came together in the 1960s to articulate “the intangible ways patriarchs, dictators, landlords, and foreign capital maintained their rule.” Grandin argues that this was “a period of such intense intellectual vitality, it should be considered equal to European Enlightenment.”
格兰丁（Grandin）的叙述颠覆了拉丁美洲作为永久受害者的想法，而是记录了一直为社会利益而战的领导人的传统。一个特别启发性的一章可以追溯到解放神学，马克思主义经济理论和拉丁美洲文学在1960年代融合在一起，以表达“族长，独裁者，房东和外国资本的无形方式维护了他们的统治”。格兰丁认为，这是“如此强烈的智力活力时期，应视为等于欧洲的启蒙。”
Particularly poignant in the context of El Salvador is the story of Father Ignacio Ellacuría, a prominent Jesuit clergyman in that country who was part of a wave of Latin American theologians interested in liberating their communities from economic and political peonage. One of Ellacuría’s central ideas was that the poor shouldn’t be expected to roll over and accept their condition. He wrote that he aimed “to bring the crucified down from their crosses.” These ideas, along with Ellacuría’s attempt to broker a peace treaty between leftist insurgents and the government, were not well received by the military. In 1989, amid the chaos of the civil war, Ellacuría was assassinated as he slept, along with five other Jesuit clergymen and their housekeeper and her daughter. The perpetrators: members of the infamous Atlácatl Battalion, which had been created under the direction of U.S. advisers. The murder of these priests did not stamp out their ideas. Today, the priests are on the road to canonization, and an associate of theirs, Cardinal Gregorio Rosa Chávez, is one of Bukele’s most outspoken critics.
在萨尔瓦多（El Salvador）的背景下，特别凄美的是伊格纳西奥·埃拉西亚（IgnacioEllacuría）神父，他是那个国家著名的耶稣会神职人员，他是有兴趣将社区从经济和政治欺骗中解放出来的拉丁美洲神学家的一部分。埃拉克里亚（Ellacuría）的核心思想之一是，不应该期望穷人劳累并接受他们的状况。他写道，他的目的是“将十字架从十字架上降下来。”这些想法以及埃拉库拉（Ellacuría）试图在左派叛乱分子和政府之间进行和平条约的企图，并没有得到军方的好评。1989年，在内战的混乱中，埃拉克里亚（Ellacuría）在睡觉时被暗杀，还有另外五名耶稣会神职人员及其管家和她的女儿。肇事者：臭名昭著的阿特拉卡特营的成员，是在美国顾问的指导下创建的。这些牧师的谋杀并没有消除他们的想法。如今，牧师正在通往义务的道路上，他们的同事是枢机主教GregorioRosaChávez，是Bukele最直言不讳的评论家之一。
As Grandin notes in his final chapter, the world is now experiencing the rise of a new generation of autocrats—among them Bukele, whom he criticizes for using CECOT as a site of a “Dantesque display of fascist dehumanization.” But in Latin America’s socially minded ideals, the author finds a way forward. “Latin Americans know that the way to beat fascism now is the same as it was back then,” he writes, comparing our era to the rise of autocracy in the 1930s, “by welding liberalism to a forceful agenda of social rights, by promising to better the material conditions of people’s lives.” To take one example, the electoral rise of the socialist Salvador Allende in Chile didn’t come about because the masses were being mindlessly seduced by leftist doctrine; it was a result of the tangible (and very reasonable) reforms that Allende delivered: literacy programs, an expanded education system, increased pensions for widows, free lunches for schoolchildren, and workplace-safety regulations.
正如格兰丁（Grandin）在他的最后一章中指出的那样，世界现在正在经历新一代的独裁者的兴起 - 他们在布克利（Bukele）中，他批评他们将Cecot用作“法西斯式非人性化的丹特斯式展示”的地点。但是在拉丁美洲的社会志趣相投的理想中，作者找到了前进的道路。他写道：“拉丁美洲人知道，现在击败法西斯主义的方式与当时的方式相同。”他将我们的时代与1930年代的专制崛起进行了比较，“通过将自由主义焊接到社会权利的有力议程中，通过承诺改善人们生活的物质条件，以实现社会权利的有力议程。”举一个例子，智利的社会主义萨尔瓦多·阿伦德的选举崛起并没有出现，因为左派教义无意识地吸引了群众。这是Allende提供的切实（且非常合理的）改革的结果：扫盲计划，扩大的教育系统，增加寡妇的养老金，为学童提供免费午餐以及工作场所安全法规。
How might these ideas of el bien commún inform American social movements today? For now, Grandin has no more answers than anyone else. America, América focuses more on big-picture ideology than on the nitty-gritty mechanics of resistance. Unexamined, for example, are the ways in which the Catholic Church in Chile built institutions to resist the depredations of the military regime in the 1970s and ’80s, helping set the stage for the liberalization that followed. There is a lot of material left to explore when it comes to overcoming the latest setbacks in the American continents’ slow progress toward freedom. Perhaps it would be a fitting topic for Grandin’s next book.
这些埃尔·比恩·库恩（El BienCommún）的思想如何告知今天美国的社会运动？就目前而言，格兰丁的答案比其他任何人都没有。美国，阿米里卡（América）更多地关注大型意识形态，而不是抵抗的善良机制。例如，未经审查的是智利天主教会在1970年代和80年代建立了抵制军事政权驱逐的机构的方式，这为随后的自由化奠定了基础。在克服美国大陆对自由进展缓慢的最新挫折方面，还有很多材料要探索。对于格兰丁的下一本书来说，这也许是一个合适的话题。
