The editor of American Opinion is Robert Welch and one of the 67 numbered pages of this “article,” as the author calls it, is filled with an advertisement of The Life of John Birch. The reader to whom these facts mean anything does not need to be told that the book is a slashing attack on Communists and their “Liberal” dupes or stooges in both Latin America and the United States, particularly in the White House, the State Department, and our schools and colleges at large.
“The purpose of this article,” we are told (p. 2), “is to exhibit the forces in Latin America that are now on our side or would be on our side if they were given any assurance that they would not encounter rebuff and hostility.” Representatives of such forces named on latter pages as victims of such rebuff and hostility include Porfirio Díaz, Victoriano Huerta, and the late Rafael Leónidas Trujillo. Concerning our tardy rebuff to Trujillo, the author writes that “we insanely apply diplomatic and economic sanctions to destroy our last friend in the Caribbean. . .”, whilst “we bleed ourselves to nourish the Kremlin’s satraps in Bolivia, Venezuela.. . .” (p. 67).
After a brief section on the colonial period and another on the independence movement, most of this article deals with the twentieth century. The author appears to have read a considerable number of books, some good, others bad. His historical method is illustrated by his assertion that Laurence Duggan was “identified as an agent of the Soviet Secret Police” (p. 63), without any indication as to when and by whom the identification was made. Facts are mingled with fancy and both are presented from the author’s peculiar point of view, the nature of which has already been indicated. Nevertheless, historians need to be alerted to this sort of thing.
