Initialed notices were written by John P. Dyson, Shepard L. Forman, Laurence Lewis, David M. Pletcher, Robert E. Quirk, Daniel Scroggins, James R. Scobie, Jeffrey Adelman, Irwin Geliman, Janet Holasek, and Thomas G. Powell, all of Indiana University.
Ariel Peralta Pizarro’s search for Latin American “reality” is not very convincing. He avoids nearly all economic and social realities—present-day colonialism and imperialism, the Cold War, U.S. economic and political penetration—and instead romanticizes the early nineteenth-century dictators, Rosas, Francia, the two López, and Diego Portales (a creole dictator) as true expressions of the Latin American ethnos and the mestizo spirit. He has the fond illusion that dictatorships are efficient and honest, democracies inefficient and corrupt. He even believes that Portales was an honest poor man and ignores the fact that the Chilean was suppressing the mestizo upsurge. He adds a contradictory note that dictatorships, since they are supported by the majority of the people, are “democratic.” Out of all the vast world of Simón Bolívar’s philosophy, he pounces on those few passages that seem to corroborate his theory. In short, except for a few nationalistic frills and his emphasis upon authentic mestizo rule, his book is not even as modern as Spanish Falangism, in which his thinking is mostly rooted.
Part of the author’s dilemma is found in the necessity of utilizing the word “Cesarismo,” and he even has to praise the Roman emperors in order to fortify his own ideal world of the “necessary gendarme,” more than a century ago. If those strange monsters of early Latin American independence represent the true genius of Latin America, it is scarcely a civilization worthy of survival.
