Marcia Esparza, Henry R. Huttenbach, and Daniel Feierstein, eds., State Violence and Genocide in Latin America: The Cold War Years. New York: Routledge, 2010. 272 pp. $150.00

This volume's primary objective is to demonstrate that the systematic killing of civilians by right-wing governments in Latin America during the Cold War qualifies as genocide, opposing the common argument (based on the definition in the 1948 Genocide Convention) that political groups, unlike ethnic or national ones, are excluded from such consideration. The contributors largely succeed at making this case. The book provides 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 wide-scale 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 in...