Over the last two decades, scholars have embraced transnational methodologies to rethink the histories of Latin America. If historians and social scientists alike used to see the nation-state as the primary framework of historical analysis, transnationality has become a central framework of understanding to bring Latin America back into histories of the world and to insert histories of the world into histories of Latin America. In an effort to reconsider the historical origins of social change away from Europe and the United States, we have an increasingly expansive scholarship dedicated to rediscovering a “Latin American agency” and its role in shaping worldwide processes and ideas—from liberalism to modernity, from development to revolution, from neoliberalism to counter-revolution, from enlightenment to democracy, from religion to secularization, from science to environmental policies. The books featured in this review are part of this critical historiographical shift.Footnote ¹ Taken together, they offer an opportunity to interrogate the contested histories of democracy in Latin America—its political rationalities, meanings, ideas, projects, practices, and institutions—from the colonial period to the present. In what follows, I propose that in our current present we must approach democracy not as foregone conclusion, as scholars often do, but rather as a historical question. I proceed in three specific ways. First, I briefly contextualize the production of these books. Then I present their overall narratives while asking specific questions about their main arguments. Then, as a conclusion, I bring some of these questions together to suggest a brief historiographical consideration to rethink the pasts of democracy in a transnational context.

The study of democracies has historically been associated with the experiences of Europe and the United States, from where democracy has long been understood as originating and then spreading to the rest of the globe. Indeed, democracy is frequently depicted as a selfless gift from “the West” to the rest of the world, an irresistible present that must be gracefully embraced. This depiction has routinely perpetuated a teleological narrative of an exclusively Western and universal democracy against which other regions are often found wanting. The universalization of these particular experiences has perpetuated the notion that divergent historical realities, in whatever form or content, can only be understood as deviations from or derivatives of the experiences of Europe and the United States.

These entrenched assumptions about democracy are still very much with us. Indeed, Europe and the United States, as it were, keep fighting hard for the original ownership of the histories of democracy. The best and most recent example of this tendency is Santiago Muñoz Machado’s De la Democracia en Hispanoamérica. In nearly 1000 pages, the Spanish jurist seeks to prove the lack of liberal democracy in Spanish America. Muñoz Machado argues that, in stark contrast to the United States and Europe, where democracy has fully materialized since the late eighteenth century, in Spanish America liberal democracy, “the fairest form of human government,” has been at best an “ephemeral” historical experience and at worst has never existed at all.Footnote ² Imagining a Latin American present he categorizes as the turn to neoconstitucionalismo, the enemy of liberal democracy, he attempts to offer the historical reasons as to why, after two centuries, democracy has failed to adapt itself to “the unique characteristics of the subcontinent.”Footnote ³ If it is argued that “the principles of liberal democracy do not work in those countries, it is worth examining what has happened,” Muñoz Machado maintains.Footnote ⁴ Not only does this examination lack a careful inclusion of recent literature on the contested definitions of liberalism throughout Spanish America, but it also offers racialized explanations of what Machado Muñoz perceives as the region’s ontological absence. The relationship between liberal democracy and Spanish America appear as a foundational oxymoron because, the author insists, different leaders in the region did not adapt—or properly provincialize—the principles of liberal democracy to the peculiarities of their republics. Rather, they accepted them in a raw form as they were produced in their “original” North Atlantic settings. Europe, United States, and Spanish America were fundamentally different, a reality these leaders did not seem to comprehend, and this meant that democracy, as a model of government, was never capable of emerging.

By offering a detailed account of the histories of Spanish America since the turn of the eighteenth century, Muñoz Machado provides multiple historical reasons for this foundational impossibility. Unlike in the United States, he contends, political chaos was common in Spanish America. The variety of independence movements condemned societies to political intrigues and social rivalries. The Napoleonic invasions did not help either, but the profound misunderstanding of the constitutional legacy represented by the Cortes of Cádiz became a major obstacle. As a result, Spanish America became a region in which the state was absent, notions of political sovereignty were foreign, the population was not united, visions of citizenship were extraneous, the nation as a polity was fractured, and national territorial borders lacked clarity. Thus, as Spanish American nations tried to become independent, they descended into civil wars, autocratic caudillismo, and dictatorship. No democracy, no state, no people. The region emptied itself of what Muñoz Machado imagines is a proper nineteenth century reality associated with a “Hyper real” United States in which national unity, social harmony, and political stability presumably took hold as the mandatory features of liberal democracy.

Muñoz Machado resuscitates modernization theories of the 1960s and, in particular, the concept of the “colonial legacy” that for so long presented Spanish America as the paradigm of anti-democracy. Leaders lacked preparation given that this colonial legacy prevented them to live, experience, or recognize democracy, even when they saw it, since they had only known monarchy as a form of government. But as important, Muñoz Machado contends, colonial legacies created a more potent obstacle: the region’s intrinsic racial heterogeneity and social differences. The Spanish colonial rule had not “fully unified [uniformar plenamente]”Footnote ⁵ society; instead, it produced an “ethnic mixture” which precluded the unification of nations as polities. Indigenous communities could be considered neither citizens of the republic nor members of a national territory because they were condemned to follow their own particular—and still colonial—rules. “Undomesticated” indigenous groups, castas, and enslaved peoples continued to live on the margins of society, which made it difficult to create the necessary unity for a proper nation. Muñoz Machado ignores recent literature that demonstrates how subaltern groups, rather than merely rejecting liberalism, fought hard for the content and form of national belonging as well as for democracy.Footnote ⁶

But here I would argue the question is not just historiographical. Muñoz Machado sees indigenous and enslaved peoples as part of a racial heterogeneity that prevented a white-creole elite from forming a unified nation, either because that “heterogenous population” did not want to participate or were foreign to democracy with European origins. He resorts to racialized arguments to explain the histories of democracy. He sees inclusion in the nation in the same way that many “founding fathers” of the nineteenth century did: as a process through which the perceived “racially heterogenous population” needed to detach themselves from their identities to finally become proper modern citizens, members of a national territory, and representatives of a liberal democracy.Footnote ⁷ Explicitly or implicitly, Muñoz Machado contrasts such heterogeneity as an obstacle with, again, a hyper real Europe and United States, places where a presumably “homogenous population” materialized soon after the independence. In other words, racial homogeneity—an imagined whiteness, really—became the condition for a shared vision of national harmony and a proper democracy. In Spanish America elites could not “hispanize” indigenous groups, and although slavery was abolished by the middle of the nineteenth in most of the region, racial heterogeneity persisted to the point that liberal democracy remained a theoretical impossibility and unreachable practice.

During the twentieth century, Spanish American problems intensified as the region developed a profound anti-imperialism, entrenched forms of populism, and an obsession with revolution. By the turn of the twentieth century, the author tells us, the writings of José Martí and José Enrique Rodó (specifically, their critique of the United States as imperial force) produced a culture with its own unique ideology that again precluded liberal democracy. But Muñoz Machado is generous enough in his analysis, or so he claims, to inform the reader that, although the century was mostly about wars and dictatorships, there was an ephemeral moment of liberal democracy in the first half of the century when leaders tried to implement a “sketch” of a welfare state. The second half of the twentieth century, however, witnessed an “expansion of communism,” particularly after the 1959 Cuban Revolution. U.S interventions and dictatorial rule, along with failed developmental programs, gave way to neoliberal rule, which, after the 1980s, sought to promote a market-driven economy. By the 1990s, democracy, either as an idea or as a practice, proved yet again to be a chimera because it had continuously been intertwined with patronage-based practices. As a result, caudillos manipulated electoral politics and exercised corruption to renew a new version of populism, a political manifestation of, again, a thick genealogy of caudillista tendencies in the region. The result was a “delegative democracy” through which, according to Muñoz Machado, an election of charismatic leaders—baptized as a patria-caudillos—combined nationalism with populism and, in so doing, undermined liberal democracy. Inspired by pensamiento latinaomericanista and indigenismo, these patria-caudillos have recently demonized neoliberal democracy as a predatory and aggressive ideology that only serves capitalism in its pursuit of financial gain and the destruction of peoples.Footnote ⁸

Muñoz Machado ignores recent literature on the histories of neoliberalism and the crucial responses, appropriations or critiques that emerged from below and from the middle to that neoliberal rule. Equally significant, the author purposefully disavows the possibility that the “pink tide” was part of larger social and political struggles over the meanings and practices of democracy. Instead, Muñoz-Machado “evaluates” these experiences as the historical product of an “extreme weakness” in Spanish America when it comes to democracy—a weakness that, he argues, borderlines on a phobia.Footnote ⁹ In no uncertain terms, Muñoz Machado concludes: “[the extreme weakness of democracy in Spanish America] is not up for debate: it is a sufficiently verified fact.”Footnote ¹⁰ Quite a “democratic” conclusion coming from an author who has written a massive book that intends to prove that debate is a central value of liberal democracies.

But at least three related questions arise. Does liberal democracy become an impossibility in the region because the ideal was in contradiction with the realities of Spanish America and/or because liberal democracy’s supposed incongruities and dissonances proved fatal in practice, even while embraced in theory? The author suggests a combination of both situations has made liberal democracy a chimera because certain colonial conditions—cultural, historical, and, presumably, racial—have terminally condemned Spanish America to experience a lack of democracy. But, in this context, what does it even mean to experience a lack of democracy? Furthermore, in this framework of understanding, does Spanish America need to produce a democracy a la Spanish America—that is, one that is fundamentally distinct and ontologically unique in comparison to other parts of the world? Or does the region just need to embrace democracy as it has been experimented by the “exemplary…the most tenacious, culturally and politically superior… nations” of the world?Footnote ¹¹ Although one might dismiss these questions as merely rhetorical, they indicate how the histories of democracies are often enclosed through a differentially and hierarchically territorialized manner according to “region” (even if the studies are framed in a transnational context) with societies deemed “properly democratic” (universal, global, orderly, exportable, and legitimately violent) and societies understood as “less democratic” or “not democratic” (locally experienced, improper, exclusionary and violent). The former often appears as the unique but universal model through which all other cases must be historically understood.

Recent studies have indeed criticized the hierarchical normativity attached to this framework and have sought to interrupt these narratives by examining the vanguard role Latin America has played in the democratization of the world. As part of such an effort, Greg Grandin’s America, América offers a powerful counter-narrative to Muñoz Machado’s analysis.Footnote ¹² Although both authors share an interest in similar topics, historical actors, and some of the chronological scope, they arrive at drastically different conclusions. For Muñoz Machado Spanish America is the epitome of democracy as an impossibility, while the United States and Europe are the superior examples of democracy. For Grandin América, or Latin America, is historically the panacea—the past, the present, and the future—of an unquestionable democracy for the world; by contrast, the United States is the uncertain force for democratization. By mobilizing romance as a plot, Grandin argues Latin America cannot be considered merely a passive recipient of democratic ideals that emanated from elsewhere. Latin America, rather, has provided the United States what other empires lack: “its own magpie, an irrepressible critic.”Footnote ¹³ By proposing an immanent critique as a methodological approach, Grandin argues that the history of English-speaking North America, in singular, cannot be told without the history of Spanish-and-Portuguese speaking America, also in singular, since that approach allows us to see how this entangled history shaped the form that a liberal international order would take—an order that many believe is currently in crisis across the world.

The product is an ambitious book of almost 800 pages, which recounts the ideological, ethical, and intellectual disputes over of what it has meant to live in democracies in a transnational context: the role of Christianity in defining humanity during colonial rule, notions of freedom, the task of international law, visions of national sovereignty, definitions of property, claims to equality, and the images of “America.” Grandin focuses mostly, if not entirely, on statesmen, lawyers, intellectuals, leaders, and military men across the Americas to offer a sweeping historical analysis from the colonial period to the present.

Such analysis begins with the Spanish conquest and its successive colonial rule. Although he describes the brutality and the unprecedented mortality that colonialism brought to the Americas, Grandin is also interested in demonstrating how, given this degree of violence, the Catholic Church was forced to come to terms with its claims to universal humanity starting in the sixteenth century. Most representatives of Spanish power justified colonial rule by arguing native peoples could not be considered human at all and, as such, deserved the violence of “civilization.” But Grandin contends there was a critical current of dissent within the Catholic Church, which questioned how particular European notions of humanity actually were. The Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas becomes the hero of Grandin’s story. His ideas are categorized as the original inspiration for the future of social humanism in the Americas and his dissertations the inventiveness for the materialization of political sovereignty in a transnational context. Grandin concludes: “…it was Las Casas, and only Las Casas, who hitched the Catholic Church prophetic communitarian tradition that promised deliverance to political action. And such action: he witnessed, he wrote, he preached, he lobbied, he theorized, he consoled, he condemned, and he conspired. Las Casas stood against the unfathomable brutalities of the Spanish Conquest of the New World, advancing a moralism that, no matter how much he appealed to the laws of medieval Catholicism, pointed toward a modern ethics of equality. In this he was a kind of Adam.”Footnote ¹⁴ And Las Casas was because, as attested in the Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, he questioned all forms of violence the Spanish practiced and declared “todo lineaje de los hombres es uno,” which Grandin translates as “[a]ll humanity is one.”Footnote ¹⁵ In so doing, Las Casas assigned—or appointed—free will and the ability to reason to indigenous groups. After giving up his encomiendas and the ownership of slaves, he rejected slavery as an institution and questioned violent forms of labor exploitation. Drawing on Mexican poet Octavio Paz, Grandin tells us this royal Catholicism, predicated on a shared lineage of humanity, “organized itself not by suppressing but administrating difference, by placing Indians, the people colonists came close to exterminating, at the center of things, theologically, economically, legally, and bureaucratically.”Footnote ¹⁶

In stark contrast, English settlers predicated their colonial domination on philosophical theories of justified dispossession. They selectively read Las Casas to emphasize the violence that the Spanish exercised, but the English ignored the moral reckoning that the Dominican priest posed when they tried to carry out similar practices in Ireland. And as they landed in the Americas, English settler-colonists found empty or abandoned lands which motivated a notion of “emptiness” that, in contrast to the administration of population proposed by the Spanish, sought to legitimize the right to conquer, to possess, and to occupy. John Locke, the English philosopher, proposed this position precisely because the task was to connect labor and land, it was natural to possess land and put it to work. Such theorization also called for perpetual expansion, competition, accumulation, and above all, an obsession with individual private property. Unlike the oneness of humanity advocated by Las Casas, the product of an existential reckoning with the violence of colonial rule, the English remained “untroubled” by their colonial endeavors and, instead, embraced the idea of “intractable racial divisions” in which humanity had distinctive origins and came about from different species.Footnote ¹⁷

These global comparisons tend to read as a foundational binary through which Spanish colonial rule is explained away as the product of violence but with presumably inclusionary visions of humanity, whereas English colonization is understood as violent and with exclusionary notions of humanity. One wonders, however, if what was at stake was precisely the contested disputes over the methods of colonization. But colonization, nevertheless. If Las Casas as a subject of colonial rule—his ideas about morality, his claims to the oneness of humanity, his dissent regarding the Catholic Church’s role—happened during a pivotal moment of discussion over the legitimacy of colonial rule, why do we think he is not doing exactly this: to make a claim, as fiercely critical as it might have been, to exercise a proper form of colonial rule? Did Las Casas imagine life beyond colonialism or was this a call for making colonial rule more “inclusive” and more “humane”? What was the vision of humanity-as-one he proposed?Footnote ¹⁸ In my reading, what Las Casas was after was precisely an effort to materialize the form and content of subjugation, exploitation, and devastation of the ways of life and cultural worlds in the Americas. He envisioned the Christianization of the souls, bodies, and minds, to make a case in which “all humans” could be free and rational enough to know who the rulers and ruled—conquerors and conquered, slavers and enslaved peoples, exploiters and exploited—were so that colonization would not need as much “physical” violence but rather could be predicated on a harmonized (that is to say, profoundly hierarchical) diversity of exploitable racialized human subjects. A claim to a “better”—more “humane”—form of colonization.

Then came the Age of Revolutions. The processes of independence, Grandin argues, continued the differentiation of Latin America from the United States. By the 1800s, the Spanish empire in the Americas had yielded to a republican experiment that was more inclusive, more activist and, one might infer, more democratic in theory if not in practice. In Spanish America that effort sought to advance a vision based on emancipation in order to expand inclusionary notions of citizenship and national belonging. In contrast, Anglo America perpetuated the exclusion of indigenous groups and enslaved peoples from the national polity while claiming possessions of empty and unworked lands. And although both Americas tried to learn from each other and fought over the proper name for America/América, the U.S and its imperial endeavors soon severed such communication since the Colossus of the North dedicated itself to exercise the right to conquer by any means necessary. In this context, América fought for sovereignty, territorial unity, independence, and arbitration. Here, like Muñoz Machado, Grandin does not discuss the expansive literature on how a multiplicity of subaltern groups—enslaved peoples, free Black people, rural peasants, and indigenous groups, among others—mobilized ideas of liberty, democracy and universalism inspired by a notion of popular liberalism that sought to redefine the meanings of citizenship, the notions of social rights, and the content of national belonging.Footnote ¹⁹ In this context, at least three questions emerge. Are the main protagonists of the story Grandin offers—statesmen, “founding fathers,” intellectuals—responding to social pressure from subaltern groups and their visions of popular liberalism rather than pursuing a political project they themselves produced on their own? If we contextualize this popular liberalism against—or along—these Latin American representatives, can we actually argue that, as Grandin does, in Latin America, unlike in the United States, dispossession, exploitation, and disappearance were not integral to a hegemonic vision of liberalism? How do we account for the apparent contradiction between such class struggles domestically for the right to rule in liberal polities and the struggles against an empire?

As many historians have maintained, the Mexican Revolution of 1910 was indeed the product of this popular liberalism, and it materialized a vision of social democracy. The Mexican Constitution of 1917 promised the expansion of labor rights, questioned the notion of private property as a condition of national belonging and, instead, tied it to a larger social good. A revolutionary state also limited the role of foreign capital in the country and declared oil resources part of the nation. These critical visions of democracy, Grandin shows, proved foundational for the international liberal order in general and the creation of specific transnational institutions, such as the League of Nations and, later, the United Nations. “Latin Americans” mobilized a regional identity against the right to conquest, advocated for anti-interventionist policies, and promoted an anti-imperialist politics. In hemispheric forums and international conferences, Latin American diplomats also worked hard to convince their peers from the North that an equality of nations was indeed possible through inter-American cooperation, multilateral dialogue, shared consensus, and mutual fraternity. The most important moment in this history was the Good Neighbor Era of the 1930s and 1940s. During this period, Grandin argues, U.S-Latin American relations achieved mutual understanding and admiration. Both the U.S. and Latin America embraced a definition of democracy predicated on social and economic rights. But it was Latin America, once again, that taught the U.S to embrace this more robust idea of democracy and, along the way, it educated the empire how to fight against fascism. Indeed, Latin America became the template—and the hope—for democracy at the core of an internationalist world defined by a commitment to both international law and national sovereignty.

Given the critical work Grandin has offered in previous scholarship, I must admit I was often puzzled by his determination to monumentalize Latin America—or Latin Americans—as the center of gravity for democratic rule. What purpose does this serve? Who is the audience for such monumentalizing? Does it make any difference at all that most of the Latin Americans who sit at the core of these stories of democracy are men and are discussing—and devising—a global system of rule in forums and conferences that functioned as homosocial universes? Why do we have to equate specific social actors—diplomats, economists, politicians, and foreign experts—with Latin America as a whole in a transnational field? How did they achieve a classed or gendered status to claim the right to represent Latin America? What was the Latin America that they imagined as the democratic model for the world? At the very moment that discourses about mestizaje were becoming the official discourse in many of the “social democracies” of Latin America, did such discourse shape a racialized notion of Latin America as the laboratory of democracy?

What is clear is that the Cold War brought an end to the internationalist experiment of the first half of the twentieth century. As Grandin has argued elsewhere, Latin America became part of an international civil war over different visions of democracy. The U.S further established multiple “contra-insurgent” measures and developmental policies to prevent what was perceived as the expansion of “communism.” A dialectical struggle between revolution and counterrevolution ensued. The former, originating mostly in Latin America, is historicized as vibrant, egalitarian, collective, and participatory. The latter, emanating from the United States, is characterized as illiberal, individualistic, anti-democratic, anti-enlightenment, tepid, violent, and dictatorial, asphyxiating the social and political rights gained in previous years.

Joining other scholars, it is this binary that Allen Wells seeks to question in his book about Latin America’s transnational crusade again dictatorship from the 1920s through the 1970s. He argues that the notion of the “Cold War”—a Manichean battle between Left and Right, or between communism and capitalism—gets teleologically imposed onto previous historical experiences in which the Global South, and particularly Latin America, is often narrated as “either a witting or an unwitting proxy.”Footnote ²⁰ Even recent literature, Wells contends, remains wedded to that binary, which has been translated into a monopoly of topics: “state terror, guerrilla insurgencies, dirty wars, mass graves and the plight of desaparecidos.”Footnote ²¹ In a meticulously researched 700-plus page tome, Wells instead reclaims the role of a diversity of political “moderates” from the region, who opted for reform instead of revolution. In so doing, Wells contends that the Cold War “came late” to Latin America since, until the materialization of the Cuban Revolution, the main struggle was not between capitalism and communism but rather between democracy and dictatorship. Drawing support from professionals, teachers, students, small business owners, rank-and-file trade unionists, and peasants, this transnational crusade against authoritarianism was a political, ideological, cultural, and social movement, and it reshaped the form that democracy as reform would take in the region, particularly in the Caribbean Basin.

Latin America’s Democratic Crusade is divided into two main parts. Part one, “Mobilizing against Dictatorship,’’ focuses on the emergence and consolidation of university reform movements that, since the 1920s, sought to depose autocrats from power. By focusing on Rómulo Betancourt, Gustavo Machado, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, and Froylán Turcios, Wells skillfully describes the transnational connections that this movement created as it defended non-interventionism, promoted anti-imperialist projects, and delegitimized political personalism in a context in which the United States was expanding its own violent presence in the Caribbean. Partially motivated by the Mexican Revolution, these experiences proved pivotal for the later expansion of the movement against dictatorship. Wells also invites the reader to see how Latin Americans effectively, if frustratingly, lobbied for a shift toward the Good Neighbor Policy of the of the 1930s—a policy which Wells sees as a partial, rather than fundamental, shift in U.S. foreign policy since it was mainly a reluctant response to the political work of diplomacy and activism. The U.S. government was always vigilant of what was proposed in the struggles between democracy and dictatorship, as the empire supported causes that fit with its own economic agenda.

Part two of the book, “Democratic Effervescence and Authoritarian Retrenchment,” focuses on the period running from the 1940s through the 1970s. It underscores the transnational struggles between the powerful Internacional de la espada (the International of the Sword), which was constituted by mostly military forces, and the Caribbean Legion, a pro-democracy international alliance composed of exiles, reformists, and progressives. Both political projects, it must be emphasized, emanated from the historical experiences of Latin America and had connections with Europe and the United States as they promoted their own definitions of democracy. The decades-long fight to overthrow Rafael Trujillo’s regime became the primary example of these struggles over the meanings and practices of democracy. The International of the Sword practiced diplomacy, targeted reformers who questioned its dictatorial practices, created media campaigns to legitimize its efforts, and executed political assassinations across nations. Wells offers a detailed account of the brutality of the Trujillo regime as it tried to silence its critics. Such efforts became the predecessors of the later Operation Condor in the 1970s. But Wells also offers a detailed account of pro-democracy efforts to legitimize democratic rule by reformers, many of whom lived in forced exile and were constantly on the move. The task was as clear as it was difficult. Convinced that tyrants were in fact an existential threat to the emergence of democracy in the region, these reformers erected cosmopolitan alliances to promote the view that a proper civil government was not possible until despots were excluded from politics. The exiles best-laid tactics often got lost in the daily heated discussions of regional politics. But even if that was the case, the emergence of these two distinct political projects demonstrates the transnational struggles over how to overcome dictatorial rule, the conditions necessary for democratic rule, and the great lengths that tyrants went—and the multiple violent forms of retaliation they practiced—to remain in power.

A democratic wave emerged across Latin America in the years after World War II, and civilian rule tended to consolidate around reformist efforts in different countries. Yet, despite such possibilities, military power remained intrusive in politics and state rule. What’s more, reformers became aware that democracy, defined as a representative government, could prove elusive. By the end of the 1940s, authoritarianism was yet again on the rise, and as the Cold War came into view, the efforts against dictatorial rule were soon seen as a manifestation of the expansion of communism, which thus offered further legitimacy to authoritarian leaders and projects. For elites and their allies in Washington, reformists, argues Wells, were too radical. For those revolutionaries who now claimed, “Cuba will not another Guatemala”, as Che Guevara famously said, these reformists were too close to the ideology of anti-communism. Like many other scholars, Wells demonstrates that, with some exceptions, the U.S. had little, if any, hesitation in supporting dictators who could provide political stability and social harmony and thus create the conditions necessary to prevent alleged communist influence in the region. But he also shows how the Alliance for Progress, the most important developmental program of the 1960s, was at least a partial response to the struggles for democracy by these reformers. By the end of the 1960s, democratic reformist governments were, with few exceptions, once again excluded as revolution vs. counter-revolution became the way to imagine the future of the region. Democracy yet again proved tenuous, if not impossible.

Although Wells questions the Cold War binary that is imposed upon much historical analysis, I wonder if he is not creating one of his own. As expansive, compelling, and detailed as his narrative is, there is a tendency to pose a unified struggle between a homogenous crusade for democracy as reform and a uniform political project for dictatorial rule as anti-democratic. Wells tells us the crusade for democracy drew multi-class support, enjoyed sustained political success among different groups, and resonated deeply with many Latin Americans. One could offer a similar description for the consolidation of dictatorial rule as anti-democracy. What were the social foundations of this project for authoritarian rule?Footnote ²² Indeed, did such social support, beyond military leadership, play a role in undermining the crusade for democracy promoted by reformists? In my reading, it is not entirely clear how the crusade for democracy obtained a broad base of support. Did the leaders of the crusade and their followers envision the same vision of democracy as reform? The task here is not at all to ease the atrocities committed by transnational projects, such La internacional de la espada, but to come to terms with an equally difficult question: what are the democratic elements—understood here as the support and legitimization offered by different groups—of dictatorial rule? And the opposite could be applied as well. Wells argues, for instance, that “[it] is no small irony that when they finally achieved political success, these democrats governed with a heavy hand.”Footnote ²³ Thus, one might ask for a more careful—and critical—examination of the dictatorial elements of democracy. Similarly, what do we make of the fact that, along with a multiplicity of forms of violence and the monopoly of power, dictators also promised development and progress—imagined as the consolidation of a middle-class society—as a way to overcome political radicalization (a goal similar to the one that reformists pursued to legitimize their own push for democracy)? One might dismiss such calls as pantomime of a “true” democracy. Yet again, I would argue that scholars would be wise to examine such calls to secure social traction among a broad based of groups in order to criticize the intimate relationship between democracy as an idea and dictatorship as a form of rule. Perhaps if we want to see the histories of Latin America beyond binaries, as Wells argues, we should historicize political movements not as dialectical struggles between two unified, cross-class, and coherent revolutionary and counterrevolutionary projects, or between democratic reforms and dictatorial rule. Rather, we could problematize the histories of Latin America as multiple struggles between and among heterogeneous classed, racialized and gendered mobilizations—struggles that were happening within different movements and through which competing conceptions of class rule, as well as multiple opposing forms of domination, were molded, contested, and legitimized.

Taken together, these three books offer an opportunity to think about the histories of democracy. It is indeed clear that transnational approaches have allowed scholars not only to question Eurocentric and U.S-centric histories but also to offer sophisticated counternarratives that have moved Latin America, however imagined, from the margins to the center in histories of democracy. If, as a consequence of modernization and dependency theories, Latin America was often historicized as outside or peripheral to modernity, a failure of liberalism, or the impossibility of democracy, as Muñoz Machado’s arguments demonstrate, more critical scholarship has made the case that Latin America, far from being a passive receptor of global processes that emanated from elsewhere, has historically shaped those processes. My research has been very much been a part of this effort, so I am now convinced that, after two decades of foundational work, we are reaching a point where criticism is giving way to a standardized method—an intellectual reflex, even—keenly celebrated in the historiographical market of ideas about what Latin America is supposed to be.

These histories tend to be framed in a synecdochical narrative. As a synecdoche, we problematize a part—specific social groups, a specific movement, a specific idea, a specific historical problematization—happening in Latin America as the representation of the region as whole. This is often delivered in a romance plot, precisely because, after so many years of silencing the role of Latin America in the histories of the world, we, as scholars, feel obligated to reivindicar the world according to Latin America. This is a way to make us feel good about ourselves and a potential (political) identification with a regionalized identity. Thus, we have traveled from failure to success, from disaster to accomplishment, from a singular example of anti-democracy to a singular example of democracy. Often in comparison to other parts of the world, Latin American histories are mobilized as a way to monumentalize the region as the land of decoloniality, the place where resistance to the colonial matrix of power has materialized, and the unquestionable inspiration for social change. As a result, we have further cemented a hierarchical framework in which Latin America in a global context is uniformly subjugated, and in which any historical actor speaking from Latin America is seen as subaltern, even if they are part of a national or regional elite. We are thus fixated with the idea of (re) discovering the “Latin American agency”—the world that Latin America created, the contributions of América to international law, the crusade for democracy and against dictatorial rule—to argue it participated in the consolidation of global processes and therefore must be historically celebrated. A process of enclosure of Latin American democracy, as particular if not unique, in relation to itself and in perpetual comparisons to other places in the world from which we now need to learn.

Perhaps more significantly, as radically different as the histories of democracy presented in these three books are, it is interesting to note that they share a framework of understanding. They tend to ossify democracy as a timeless yardstick to be used in a transhistorical manner to quantify “how democratic” or “undemocratic” Latin America has historically been in any given moment. This argumentation functions to protect the reliability of a supposedly ideal form of democracy that is immune to questions of power or domination, which obscure their intimate constitutive nature. As Elias Palti has recently argued in a slightly different context: “the concept of ‘modern’ democracy’ represents, in actual fact, the ultimate limit against which the attempts to dislocate teleological perspectives crash…the process of naturalization of the concept ‘modern democracy’ has made it rob itself of its possible thematization, it appears today as the unquestionable premise at the basis of all historical narratives…the concept of the ‘ideal type’ of modern democracy remains as the unthought-of-premise-for all studies in the field.”Footnote ²⁴

Elsewhere I have proposed we need to historicize democracy as an effect of competing discourses, collective subjectivities, and political conflicts through which different historical actors attempted to at once question and naturalize class, race, and gender hierarchies at the core of what democracy was supposed to do in capitalist societies in an asymmetrical transnational context and in different historical moments.Footnote ²⁵ We need to move beyond assuming trans-historically good or bad qualities of democracy—as an ideological chimera of total emancipation or a utopia without hierarchy—to then merely territorialize such qualities according to the presumed authenticity of particular regions. As a result, we see Latin American democracy—or a democracy presumably owned by Latin America—as ontologically better than other versions of democracy across the world. In the process, democracy, however defined, goes unquestioned.

And it is here, I want to argue, that an intersectional approach to transnational histories could offer a different narrative. Greg Grandin’s history of democracy, for instance, focuses on mostly men—philosophers, jurists, diplomats, economists—in the consolidation of an international liberal order. It would be unfair to ask for inclusion of other actors in a book of this scope and argumentative ambition. But I would contend that it is indeed possible to see how, as these elite men shaped international law, they also secured a degree of class continuity and created gendered pacts—beyond nation and region—that sought to legitimize the right to rule—and dominate—in the consolidation of democracy as a capitalist society in a transnational field of power. Democracy is the question we need to historicize.

This is not a call for total histories of Latin America in a transnational context. An impossible task, indeed. Rather, it is invitation to see power in a different light. Here I take inspiration by a provocative question historian Gabrielle Spiegel asked years ago: “If not from nation, society or domicile, from where does social identity derive its shape? If we are citizens of the world and citizens of specific nations, how are the contradictions implicit in this form of multilocality negotiated on both the individual and collective level?”Footnote ²⁶ The integration of transnational histories and the histories of democracy could help us see how class, as intersectional reality, during the last half-century has been one of the major projects to secure democracy as dictatorship of capital. It is an invitation to critically understand—and question—how systems of domination, supported by a diversity of intersectional hierarchies and vast disparities in wealth, have historically become common sense in the name of unquestionable democracy.

The question is simple: What other transnational histories of democracy as the dictatorship of capital does our present need to practice democracy otherwise?