Wars Next Door
LaFeber, Walter
Wars Next Door INEVITABLE REVOLUTIONS: THE UNITED STATES IN CENTRAL AMERICA by Walter LaFeber W.W. Norton. 357 pp. $18.95. Ignoring its proclaimed principles, the United States has for more...
...For the first time in the Twentieth Century, all of Central America—including Costa Rica and Honduras—faces the serious possibility of regional war arising out of mass-based revolutionary movements...
...A massive U.S...
...And it built them into privileged and sophisticated institutions that in one country after another replaced the oligarchy, or became its senior partner...
...invasion would bring not victory but decades of guerrilla war...
...Walter LaFeber's book, Inevitable Revolutions, is a solidly reasoned and excellently documented exposition of this diagnosis of the causes of social unrest in Central America...
...It identifies a consistent ideology undergirding U.S...
...Ignoring its proclaimed principles, the United States has for more than a century dictated the destiny of the countries of Central America, totally disregarding their wishes or interests...
...officials have "less resembled the defenders of a free world than those who defended the late Roman Empire or the British Empire in Egypt," LaFeber writes...
...Neither the information nor the analysis in Inevitable Revolutions is new...
...ambassadors to Latin America, "since the communists are essentially traitors...
...The Theodore Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (the United States is the policeman who maintains order in the hemisphere) and the Taft modification (use the dollar, but backed by the "moral value" of naval power) have been consistently applied to Central America by all subsequent Presidents...
...He has reported from Central America seven times since 1980...
...Woodrow Wilson believed Central America should enjoy the benefits of the U.S...
...Sectors of the Roman Catholic Church, influenced by Vatican Council II (1962-1965) and the 1968 meeting of the Latin American bishops at Medell, Colombia, took up the cause of the poor...
...In reaction, U.S...
...The feared "psychological mobilization" had begun...
...A dominant concern of Washington policy, as George Kennan pointed out in 1950, was to prevent the psychological mobilization of Latin America against the United States...
...No evidence has yet been presented of significant Sandinista military aid to the popular forces in El Salvador...
...Their policy brought to mind "an antique clock that could no longer tell time...
...system—by force if necessary...
...Though some Catholic leaders have turned against the Sandinistas, the vast majority of Catholics continue to support Nicaragua's leaders...
...Even police repression was acceptable, Kennan told a group of U.S...
...To attain its ends, it has used diplomatic, political, economic, and military power...
...This excellent compendium will undoubtedly influence a broad spectrum of Americans who up to now have seen Central America only through the distorted prism of the mass media...
...What is important is that a mainstream academician with impeccable credentials as a history professor at Cornell and an author of such major works as America, Russia and the Cold War, 1945-1980 should follow the lead of the North American Congress on Latin America and other radical political groups...
...Similarly, only some of the Moravian ministers who are leaders of the Miskito Indians have changed sides...
...The failure of the Alliance for Progress and the collapse of the Central American Common Market triggered a political chain reaction in the 1970s...
...interests from Soviet adventurism...
...In the process, it has distorted the economies of the region by diverting the best land to export crops and controlling the terms of trade...
...The Miller Doctrine, enunciated by Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Edward G. Miller in 1950 and updated by President Johnson for the 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic, justified intervention to protect U.S...
...Franklin Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy, in the words of a Mexican newspaper, transformed Central America "into a league of mestizo dictators, with the United States destined to guarantee their slavery...
...The chasm between a few rich cliques and impoverished masses has widened, and the inevitable result has been revolution...
...The United States taught them to use gas guns, helicopters, and other anti-riot equipment, as well as interrogation techniques that quickly degenerated into torture...
...The United States responded by increasing the level of force...
...On the contrary, the Salvadoran guerrillas still lack the equipment to shoot down such easy targets as helicopters...
...The 1952 Military Defense Assistance Act transformed Latin American armies into police forces designed to maintain internal security, reserving for the United States the authority and capacity to handle regional problems unilaterally...
...Anticommunism provided the ideological antidote...
...Gary MacEoin (Gary MacEoin wrote "Revolution Next Door: Latin America in the 1970s...
...policy throughout the Twentieth Century...
...LaFeber seems to give undue weight to Washington's version of events in Nicaragua...
...There is, however, one judgment this reviewer would question...
...The narrative is carried up to early 1983, and no changes have occurred to affect the author's conclusions significantly...
...it was largely useless but the family could not bear to discard it and lacked the capacity to fix it...
...Far from strangling the Sandinistas, Reagan's pressures have solidified popular support...
Vol. 48 • March 1984 • No. 3
