LATIN AMERICA: WORLD IN REVOLUTION

This is an angry book, and for most American readers it will be a real shocker. It presents a point of view and an enormous quantity of unpleasant truths which we simply do not find in our news media. Mr. Beals has observed the affairs of South and Central America at first-hand for most of the past half-century; he is intimate with each country; its people, its problems, its rulers. He begins with separate accounts of the turbulent modern political and economic struggles, from the awakening of Mexico in 1910 to the state of affairs in mid-1962. One thread runs through all: US intervention, dollar diplomacy, gunboat diplomacy, CIA meddling. He has the facts, names, figures, all at his fingertips, and the picture grows steadily more disturbing and shameful. Our dirty dealing has been discreditable, out our good intentions no less harmful; such projects as the Alliance for Progress help only ""the oligarcy, the military and the Church""; basic conditions are not improved, ""it means helping the sharks eat the sardines"". Conditions are rapidly worsening, there is ""misery and deterioration, an explosive revolutionary situation everywhere, which has little to do with Communism or any other ideology"" and we must make some radical changes in our policies... A sobering, enlightening critique which makes the reader only too aware of the failures of our corporate and diplomatic representatives down there.