The Allied defeat of the Axis dictatorships at the end of WWII seemed to offer promise to Latin American democrats, suggesting that shifting political tides would work to replace authoritarian regimes with freely elected ones throughout the globe. Brazil, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala, Peru, and Venezuela (with Argentina under Juan Perón, perhaps, a more ambiguous example) experienced transitions to democracy, although only in two cases (Brazil and Costa Rica) did these shifts last past the immediate postwar decade.
Schwartzberg’s book examines these transitions in detail, focusing on the role of U.S. policy in this process. While the study covers the entire Truman administration, the emphasis is on 1945–48. Although others have written on this period before, Schwartzberg argues that the originality of his approach is to underscore and explain in detail the interaction between U.S. diplomats and policy makers and Latin American political leaders: “the transmission of impulse across...
