U.S.- Latin American Relations

In this second edition of Whirlpool, Pastor provides an overview of US Latin American policy under Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton, with special attention devoted to the role played by Congress. Next he looks at the recurring challenges faced by the United States -- how the United States has tried but often failed to manage succession crises, stop revolutionaries, promote elections, and encourage development. Pastor offers a series of far-reaching policy recommendations for exiting the whirlpool, based on a renunciation of unilateral intervention and a forging of a freer trade area. This second edition is thoroughly updated, with detailed new considerations of the cases of Nicaragua and Mexico in particular, and of the concept of hemispheric community.

The Reagan record-the man, the administration, the internal political wars, and the lack of coordination-is thoroughly explicated. The Bush administration, including the Panamanian intervention, is also analyzed. Bilateral relations are illuminated in the essays concerning Cuba, Mexico, and Brazil. Throughout, the writers look to the future to warn us not to dismiss the importance of these countries.

At the start of the 1960s, revolution in the "Third World" challenged the established order, as discontent with the status quo fueled attempts to revoke colonialism and the strangleholds on power maintained by entrenched local oligarchies. This book examines the causes of revolution in Latin America in the sixties and the various responses crafted to stop it, in particular, the Alliance for Progress, a program which represented the best products of American developmental and counterinsurgency theory. Equally important, however, is an examination of the independent policies implemented by Latin American elites, policies often in direct opposition to those pursued by the U.S.

Teachers, students, experts, policymakers, and citizen activists all should welcome this authoritative, systematic, single-volume sourcebook of who makes foreign policy, how it is made, and what U.S. policy has been since the 1960s. Well-known experts assess all the significant literature and research about U.S. policy in the region over the last three decades and analyze the role and procedures of foreign policymaking through regional institutions, key factors and major players in the United States, and special issues such as interventionism, human rights, democratization, and peacekeeping efforts.

"This book is a solid overview that is more concerned with what happened than why it happended, and a work that can be a starting-point for those who want an introduction to US-Central American relations or a dependable reference for the more knowledgeable. Although primarily concerned with getting the most important facts recorded, Findling knows when to stop and present interpretative insights (as in his page on the New Deal, which he handles critically and well). Comets come and go, but this book should have a good life as an analysis that serves as a useful reference to a relationship that remains, unfortunately for Central Americans and US foreign policy, too little understood." The International History Review