...Daniel Masterson Although this is a work of broad perspective, Bermúdez fails to properly place Reagan’s Central American policy in the context of his overall relations with Latin America. While this is a significant flaw, it does not fundamentally detract from what is unquestionably a most...

...Robert Pastor Reagan versus the Sandinistas: The Undeclared War on Nicaragua . Edited by Walker Thomas W. . Boulder : Westview Press , 1987 . Notes. Tables. figures. Index . Pp. xiv , 337 . Cloth . $30.00 . Iran-Contra Affair: Report of the Congressional Committees...

.... The assassination cut short these policy changes” (p. 153). The author also blames “government agents” for assassinating Martín Luther King and Robert Kennedy for their opposition to the Vietnam War (p. 163). In a final example of left-wing McCarthyism, Brown accuses Ronald Reagan and James Casey of “high treason...

...Dario Moreno Carothers’ analysis is balanced and well reasoned, and he avoids the polemics of some of the recent literature. Moreover, he convincingly repudiates the Reagan administration’s self-congratulatory rhetoric. His conclusion that U.S. policy played only a minor role in Latin American...

... Rights and US Cold War Policy toward Argentina (2013), is the best bilateral study we have of US policy toward a South American country during the Jimmy Carter administration. This new book primarily focuses on US relations with Nicaragua during the Ronald Reagan administration. Readers may at times...

... The title of William M. LeoGrande’s latest book could read otherwise, for it is mostly a study of “Central America in the United States,” of Washington’s formulation and execution of policy towards Central America, and not the other way around. Furthermore, it deals mostly with the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan...

... focus on periods—from World War I to the Great Depression, the years immediately following World War II, the Alliance for Progress experiment, and the Reagan era—when U.S. administrations professed to be seeking to promote democracy. The second section features U. S. campaigns to promote one or another...

... their control over Nicaragua, but that they still refused to come to grips with the question of an enforceable solution. In Washington, the administration’s determination to rid Nicaragua of the Sandinistas contributed to its rejection of any solution short of that objective. Bagley suggests that Reagan’s only...

... the debt total and the interest rates charged on it. Virtually all criticize the Reagan administration’s failure to deal constructively with this situation. Among the questions raised consistently is that of whether the U.S. attitude on the issue of human rights in the Latin American countries...

... with each other. They have little in common beyond their concern with Central America in the 1980s. Dario Moreno’s book is a chronicle of the Carter and Reagan policies toward Central America and has little to say about internal Central American development. It pays virtually no attention...

..., Robert Pastor explains how President Ronald Reagan’s administration suffered from excessive anti-Communism and National Security Council input. He states that such overreliance led to the use of tactics often associated with revolutionary regimes like Cuba and Nicaragua. Such incivility, and the flouting...

... discussions about US policy toward Guatemala. Their different strategies which included newspaper reportage, political action, local advocacy, and assistance to refugees allowed them to insert themselves into major debates about human rights policy during the administrations of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan...

... Nicaragua. Thousands went there to work, to live in the war zones as witnesses, or just to briefly experience revolutionary Nicaragua. Many of these individuals became important activists. Peace gives a year-by-year description of both the Reagan administration contra policies and the ACWC responses. He...

..., Oscar Zamora; El camino militar electoral de la administración Reagan para El Salvador versus la negociación política, by Carole Schwartz and Bheny Cuenca; La política latinamericana de la administración Reagan: Del diseño armonioso a las primeras dificultades, by Luis Maira; La crisis en centroamérica...

... of a United States that, in arrogance and ignorance, prides itself on its anticolonial tradition. As LaFeber mentions, in 1975 two-thirds of North Americans polled did not even know who owned the canal. After an outstanding discussion of the treaty negotiations under Carter, LaFeber analyzes the Reagan...

... Latin American adviser on the National Security Council, not surprisingly has few criticisms of Carter’s policies. Margaret Daly Hayes concludes that by 1986, “Nicaragua appeared to be the only crisis with which the Reagan team had not been able to cope adequately” (p. 127). That must be news to, among...

... America. Wiarda and Kryzanek see the Dominican Republic as a crucible of circum-Caribbean politics and economic development; a geostrategic area that President Ronald Reagan has belatedly recognized. Because of discriminatory United States quota restrictions upon foreign-grown sugar cane...

... Both the Reagan and Bush administrations, according to this book, used the so-called War on Drugs as a cover to aid the U.S.-backed Contras in their efforts to overthrow the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Moreover, the authors assert that both administrations utilized the help of known drug...

... are openly critical of the Sandinista government or supportive of Reagan administration policy. The book’s claim of having transcended an ideological perspective is, thus, disingenuous. There are two essays by Jiri and Virginia Valenta and Arturo Cruz, Sr. on the Leninist character of the FSLN...

... is slightly misleading in that the text deals primarily only with United States policy toward Latin America during the 1970s and early 1980s. Even then, its focus is on the Carter and Reagan presidencies, with a more limited discussion of the Latin American policy of the Nixon and Ford administrations...