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With the U.S. occupation grinding into a quagmire in 2004, Vice President Richard Cheney called for the “Salvador option” in a nationally televised debate, implying a reliance on local paramilitary forces to impose order. Sadly, as Greg Grandin reminds in his provocative new book Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States and the Rise of the New Imperialism, historical amnesia prevented most Americans from understanding the horrific precedent to which Cheney was referring.

Under the guise of democracy promotion, human rights, and “rooting out guerilla subversion,” the United States during the 1980s gave crucial financial and military support to political reactionaries and death squad operatives in El Salvador who slaughtered upwards of 80,000 people, including over 900 civilians by the elite U.S. trained Atlcatl battalion in the village of El Mozote. This was in a war fought against predominantly progressive forces backed by the Catholic Church, who sought a modicum of equality and justice in a nation long dominated by an exploitative ruling oligarchy.

In Empire’s Workshop: Latin America and the Roots of U.S. Imperialism, Greg Grandin, professor of Latin American History at New York University, raises such examples as signs that the ideology behind current U.S. intervention the Middle East was actually shaped much closer to home. “In their search for historical precedents for our current imperial moment,” he writes, “intellectuals invoke postwar reconstructions of Germany and Japan, ancient Rome, and nineteenth-century Britain but consistently ignore the one place the United States has projected its influence for more than two centuries.”

Grandin convincingly argues that Latin America served as a crucible in which the ingredients of current U.S. foreign policy were first blended. It’s where this country first exerted imperial power in the name of promoting democracy. It’s where today's alliance of neoconservatives, evangelicals, and capitalists first joined forces around foreign policy. And it’s where figures like Abrams, Reich, and Negroponte first put their ideas into action. For in the Reagan-era conflicts in Central America the neocons “had near free rein to bring the full power of the United States against a much weaker enemy in order to exorcise the ghost of Vietnam,” and begin to rebuild confidence in the righteousness and effectiveness of U.S. dominance.