Regardless of one’s personal opinion of the Reagan administration’s policies toward Central America, they have undeniably served the cause of scholarship. I would go so far as to credit the president with generating a spate of books on United States relations with Central America inconceivable even a half dozen years ago. Yet, as Leonard’s new contribution to the bibliography indicates, much work remains to be done.
The United States and Central America, 1944-1949 provides valuable lessons both for what it accomplishes and, equally important, for what it fails to accomplish. Leonard has gone far toward filling a historiographic void. Until the recent avalanche of published works, diplomatic histories of the United States and Latin America tended to stop with the Good Neighbor Policy, except, of course, for works concerning Cuba. Then, with the outbreak of civil war in El Salvador and Nicaragua, attention turned to contemporary Central America. For this reason, the CIA intervention in Guatemala provided a logical benchmark. It was as if after a hiatus caused by World War II and the emergent cold war, the history of hemispheric relations began anew in 1954.
Leonard argues persuasively that the years 1944–49 must not be so neglected. During this period, a “middle sector” common to all Central American republics challenged the stranglehold of elitist oligarchies. These businessmen, skilled laborers, professionals, and intellectuals interpreted the Atlantic Charter and Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms as calls to action. They demanded modernization and democratization. The Truman administration, nevertheless, its eyes focused on cold war battlefields, turned a deaf ear, even to its own field representatives who better understood, or cared to understand, Central America’s internal political dynamics. Washington remained but an “observer”; a prime opportunity for moderate reform was missed. Only in Costa Rica and Guatemala did the middle sector triumph, and in the latter case subsequent U.S. policy helped turn the clock back.
Little of what Leonard relates is new, but readers will appreciate his richly documented chapter-by-chapter survey of United States interaction with the individual Central American nations. What they will not appreciate is that Leonard ignores the central question: What should the United States have done differently? Alternatives did exist. Leonard correctly concludes that “American officials failed to pursue a constructive policy toward Central America (p. 66). He nonetheless fails to provide any clues as to what that policy might have been. Intervention?
And what of the culpability of indigenous elements? Leonard constructs his thesis around each nation’s “middle sector, yet he leaves it too amorphous. For example, are all intellectuals by definition progressive? And why are some within the middle sector reformers and others communists or other radicals? Leonard presents no evidence demonstrating that the internal contests were not instances of one elite attempting to replace another, or what he himself dismisses as “ins vs, outs” struggles. The work would have benefited if Leonard had borrowed some of the methods used by social historians. As is, it raises more questions than it even tries to answer.
