The primary objective of this edited volume is to demonstrate that the systematic killing of civilians by rightwing governments in Cold War Latin America qualifies as genocide, opposing the common argument (based on the definition in the 1948 United Nations Convention on Genocide) that political groups, unlike ethnic and national ones, are excluded from such considerations. The authors largely succeed in making this case, developing parallel illustrations from four countries in the later stages of the Cold War (Guatemala and Colombia in the 1980s, Argentina and Chile in the 1970s), although—as the authors recognize—these violent episodes have been frequently studied under alternative frameworks such as state terrorism rather than genocide. Taken together, the chapters powerfully depict a prolonged regional pattern of human rights abuses by governments that generally enjoyed some degree of U.S. support, against perceived domestic enemies generally on the political left. The volume is usefully structured to address...

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