“The Alliance for Progress is but a cunning shift in the strategy of the United States. Your fundamental purpose is still economic domination in our hemisphere.” The prevalence of this point of view among Latin American university students—as well as among many contemporary intellectuals—explains Professor John P. Powelson’s central purpose in writing this book. His primary concerns are, first, to make intelligible to Latin American readers the forces in the United States which have shaped its attitudes toward economic life and, secondly, to rectify the misconceptions which Latin Americans have formed of the American economic system and its intentions toward their nations.

Through his intimate contacts with Bolivian and Mexican students in their own university classrooms, the author has familiarized himself with their most candid reactions to historic and recent American policies. He finds among them a spreading conviction that United States design toward Latin America has been undeviating—to keep it perpetually weak. The Alliance for Progress, they argue, simply masks under a new image the ends formerly sought by forceful intervention, the Good Neighbor policy, and various inter-American approaches. They berate another kind of “alliance,” the one which has long existed, they say, between the ruling cliques in their own nations and private investors, supported by public policy, in the United States. From this line of thought they move easily to criticism of foreign aid programs as nothing more than a new method of preventing the balanced development of their national economies.

Without whitewashing either the aims or policies of the United States, Professor Powelson seeks to explain to his Latin American readers the deeply-rooted transformation which he feels has taken place in the American character since 1933. He interprets the developments which followed the depression of 1929 as an “unprecedented social revolution”—one which sharply modified the capitalist ethic, immensely broadened the influences of the national government, and, most important, notably alerted the American conscience to social injustice. Foreign aid, in his view, represents the application to the international plane of this striking metamorphosis at home. In 1933, for example, the United States could rebuff Grau San Martín’s plea for Cuban workers; in 1959, on the other hand, it responded to Fidel Castro’s revolution by promoting the Alliance for Progress.

With this thesis as his point of departure, the author undertakes a careful and sympathetic scrutiny of the agonizing problems handicapping Latin America’s economic development: agrarian reform; impact of monopoly; private vs. state control; overemphasis upon primary products; control of inflation; economic integration; and national economic planning. With both tact and objectivity, he contrasts United States and Latin American attitudes toward the many obstacles that frustrate economic and social change, and he attempts to reconcile the divergences. Frequently, he appraises also the contrasting influences of the capitalist and Marxist ethics on Latin American economic thought.

In directing his explanations to those students who condemn the United States for economic aggressiveness, the author effectively utilizes quotations from the comments and papers of their contemporaries in the two Latin American universities where he has served. Besides the gleanings from his academic posts on both American continents, he has brought to this study the fruits of first-hand experiences with the International Monetary Fund and several governmental agencies in Latin America. His interpretations, therefore, should be useful to American businessmen, foreign service officials, and tourists, as well as to students. Apart from occasional technical passages which appear to be addressed primarily to economists, historians will find innumerable suggestions to improve their understanding of the recent Latin American past.