Catalogue

Streeter (McMaster Univ.) offers a well-documented account of the Guatemalan "counterrevolution" engineered by the Eisenhower administration and develops an intriguing argument: what happened after the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz--the management of the consequences--reveals more than the coup itself. Streeter claims that US anticommunism was exaggerated and its pro-"liberal developmentalism" doomed because of short-sighted support of the United Fruit Company and other foreign and domestic elites. Hence US actions increased, rather than diminished, Guatemalan nationalism, leading, after President Castillo Armas's assassination, to small deviations from the US line by President Ydigoras, then to dictatorial governments from the 1960s on. Streeter also claims to discern a larger pattern of US "failure" (Iran in 1953) and "success" (Brazil in 1964, Chile in 1973) in managing counterrevolutions once Eisenhower initiated the policy. Curiously, Cuba and Vietnam are not instanced, presumably because even the attempted coups failed. Streeter's work clearly contributes to at least three lines of work on US-Latin American relations: studies of Latin American nations' degrees of freedom from dependency; post-Cold War studies of Cold War episodes; and studies of nationalist, rather than explicitly Marxist, reactions to the "world system" of the Cold War. Graduate students and specialists. T. J. Knight Colorado State University