Conspiracy Theories and Latin American History: Lurking in the Shadows by Luis Roniger and Leonardo Senkman (review)

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• Conspiracy Theories and Latin American History: Lurking in the Shadows by Luis Roniger and Leonardo Senkman
• Katerina Hatzikidi (bio)

conspiracy theories and latin american history: lurking in the shadows
Luis Roniger and Leonardo Senkman
Routledge
https://www.routledge.com/Conspiracy-Theories-and-Latin-American-History-Lurking-in-the-Shadows/Roniger-Senkman/p/book/9781032052373
278 pages; Print, $48.95

Countries at war, the death of a prosecutor on the eve of his testimony before Congress, and the massacre of thousands of citizens targeted as "internal enemies" are some of the events, quite distant in time and space, that come under scrutiny in Luis Roniger and Leonardo Senkman's book. What they all have in common are conspiracy theories that attempt to either a posteriori make sense of often large-scale events (such as the war between Bolivia and Paraguay, allegedly motivated by the competition between two foreign oil companies who wanted control of the Chaco region) or a priori convince of the imminent threat a given "enemy" is posing to society at large (as was largely believed to be the case for citizens of Haitian descent in 1937 Dominican Republic). Conspiracy Theories and Latin American History: Lurking in the Shadows meticulously explores conspiracism in Latin America, offering a rich and wide-ranging discussion of an ever-present phenomenon.

No conspiracy theory is deemed wild enough to be unworthy of careful examination. Indeed, the authors caution against sharp distinctions, noting that the boundaries between actual conspiracies and conspiracy theories "are often ambiguous and open to multiple interpretations." In their understanding, conspiracy theories usually have a "factual basis" but "selectively highlight some facts and discredit others" in order to force associations and create narratives about "a conspiratorial master plan." And in a region like Latin America, with a long history of real plots and conspiracies changing the course of events, it is unsurprising that suspicion and conspiracism often find fertile ground.

For Roniger and Senkman, conspiracy theories reveal both an underlying logic that searches for order when sociohistorical conjunctures are experienced [End Page 37] as particularly confusing and chaotic, and a theory of power with tremendous mobilizing potential. Their non-pathologizing approach to conspiracy theories borrows from ethnography when it insists on contextualizing conspiratorial narratives and analyzing the "specific circumstances of their emergence, resonance, and implications." A stated aim of the book is to understand what factors contribute to making certain conspiracy theories attractive at given historical moments and not others. In doing so, the authors place great emphasis on conditions that have the potential to trigger the appeal of conspiracist narratives, namely, "a deep sense of crisis" together with "socioeconomic problems, political instability, and a sense of cultural fracture and institutional weakness." In Latin American societies, a widespread perception of geopolitical and global economic marginality, coupled with a generalized mistrust of media and institutions, can fuel, according to the authors, such narratives even more.

Acknowledging that conspiracy theories can be both bottom-up and top-down, aim to challenge dominant or official narratives or attempt to maintain control, and be situated on either side of the ideological spectrum, Roniger and Senkman assess historical developments against the background of conspiracist interpretations and the political agendas they may have served. The role of modernization becomes central to the authors' analysis of how Latin American elites simultaneously attempted to incorporate and resist changes that came with certain currents of global development. This complex process is argued to have resulted in a "biased, exclusive and often intolerant model of modernization" which held a special place for narratives of hidden or internal enemies. The 1919 "Tragic Week" in Argentina and the 1937 "Cohen Plan" in Brazil are but two of several examples where specific groups were targeted as enemies within the national frontiers of their own countries. While antisemitism shaped these specific cases, different modalities of othering have similarly branded diverse social groups as malevolent, conspiring against and threatening the well-being of society at large. In most such conspiracist narratives, external enemies would pact with national subjects and convert them into internal enemies of the nation and the people.

At the same time, however, the authors argue that the agency of local actors...