US Policy in Latin America

The English title misdescribes the book, and the Russian one does not. This is not a history of American intervention across four postwar decades; it is a close, current, professionally sourced study of Washington's regional policy from Nixon to Reagan's second term, and the authors say so in their first sentence.

The earlier decades get a brief run-up. What the book actually delivers is the 1970s and early 1980s in detail: the Nixon and Ford policy, the Panama Canal treaties, the Carter human rights turn, the Nicaraguan revolution and the American response, El Salvador, the Malvinas war, the debt crisis, and the Contadora process.

Its three authors - A. N. Glinkin, V. F. Martynov and P. P. Yakovlev - were working Soviet Latin Americanists, and the footnotes place them precisely: they cite their own earlier work in the Soviet journal of the field and in the Americanist quarterly, and describe the book as part of a continuing research programme with six predecessor volumes going back to 1960. These are area specialists rather than propagandists on assignment, and the difference shows wherever the subject is Washington.

The evidence stops nearly two years before the imprint. The latest datable event is the sixteenth OAS consultative meeting of 29 July 1985, and while the book cites the International Court's provisional measures on the mining of Nicaraguan harbours from May 1984, it does not have the Court's judgment on the merits of June 1986.

Translated by Patricia Beriozkina.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.