Volume 16, Number 5 · March 25, 1971
Latin America as US Empire Cracks
By E.J. Hobsbawm
The Alliance that Lost Its Way
by Jerome Levinson, by Juan de Onís
(A Twentieth Century Fund Study) Quadrangle Books, 381 pp., $7.95
The Containment of Latin America
by David Green
Quadrangle Books, 384 pp., $10.00
Politics and Social Structure in Latin America
by James Petras
Monthly Review, 382 pp., $9.50
Politics and Social Forces in Chilean Development
by James Petras
University of California, 377 pp., $3.45
Down There
by Jose Yglesias
World, 181 pp., $7.50
The Quest for Change in Latin America
by W. Raymond Duncan, by James Nelson Goodsell
Oxford, 562 pp., $12.50
No empire in our century has been more powerful and apparently unchallengeable than that of the US in Latin America, and no imperialists have pitched their claims higher—though for various reasons most North Americans have persistently disliked being labeled as such. The British long ago recognized the fragility, and eventual impermanence, of their Indian empire, the French the uncertainty of their African one. Both were only too well aware that, where the relationship with their dependents happened to be informal and economic, it called for a considerable degree of political flexibility. Only the US has not merely taken its permanent supremacy south of the Rio Grande and Key West for a fact of nature, but formulated it in terms which exclude the slightest abrogation.
Review, 5829 words
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