The United States and the Latin American Sphere of Influence. Vol. 2. Era of Good Neighbors, Cold Warriors, and Hairshirts, 1930-1982

This brief account (with its attachment of approximately thirty pages of “documentary vignettes”) of United States policy toward Latin America since the Good Neighbor era perhaps should have been subtitled “An Essay in Reactionary Revisionism.” Unlike the first volume, essentially a book of readings on Caribbean intervention during the first third of this century, this work represents a distillation of Smith’s thoughts on what has gone wrong in our approach to hemispheric problems. In places, particularly in his account of Truman’s and Eisenhower’s policies, Smith persuasively argues that these two leaders did not, as their critics charged, neglect Latin America. In other places, particularly in his coverage of United States programs from the Alliance for Progress to Carter’s human rights campaign, Smith’s frustration over misguided altruism and futile efforts to “win the hearts and minds” of our Latin American neighbors obtrudes in the text. Smith at least makes clear where he stands: we cannot purchase the friendship of Latin American governments with aid programs; “decent democratic regimes” (as JFK discussed in the early 1960s) operate in an inhospitable climate in Latin America; and, in a choice that United States Ambassador to the United Nations Kirkpatrick will applaud, we should prefer authoritarian regimes to totalitarian ones.