The English title misdescribes the book. US Policy in Latin America: Postwar to Present promises four decades; the Russian title on the imprint page — Evolyutsiya latinoamerikanskoi politiki SShA, "The Evolution of US Latin American Policy" — promises what the book actually delivers, and the authors say so in their own first sentence: "This book presents a study of the evolution of US Latin American policy in the 1970s and early 1980s." The postwar decades get six pages of run-up. Guatemala 1954 appears twice, in passing. The Bay of Pigs is named once, as Playa Girón, in a paragraph about a Congressional resolution of April 1985. The Cuban missile crisis is "the Caribbean crisis of 1962" and is mentioned only as the origin of a diplomatic understanding the Reagan administration wanted out of. This is not a history of American intervention in the hemisphere. It is a close, current, professionally sourced study of Washington's regional policy from Nixon to Reagan's second term, and it should be read as that.
Who wrote it: A. N. Glinkin, V. F. Martynov and P. P. Yakovlev, three Soviet Latin Americanists, translated by Patricia Beriozkina. The footnotes place them precisely. They cite their own earlier work in Latinskaya Amerika, the Soviet journal of the field, and in SShA: ekonomika, politika, ideologiya; Glinkin's Recent History of the Countries of Central America (Moscow, 1975) is cited in the apparatus. Their introduction describes the book as "part of the continuing research of Latin American specialists in the USSR" and lists six predecessor volumes going back to 1960. These are working area specialists, not propagandists on assignment, and the difference shows on every page where the subject is Washington.
The date on the spine is not the date of the book. The imprint signature reads 014(01)-87, and the English edition is 1987, but the evidence stops nearly two years earlier. The latest datable event I can find anywhere in the text is the sixteenth OAS consultative meeting of 29 July 1985. The book cites the International Court of Justice's provisional measures on the mining of Nicaraguan harbours, ordered in May 1984, but not the Court's judgment on the merits of 27 June 1986 — a decision that would have been the single most useful citation in the entire volume, and which no author writing after that date would have omitted. Iran-Contra, which broke in November 1986 and confirmed the book's central charge about the contras from inside the American executive, is likewise absent. Gorbachev appears once, in a single sentence about a meeting with Raúl Castro; Chernenko is described as "the late General Secretary," which places composition after March 1985. So: a manuscript closed in the second half of 1985, in the first months of the Gorbachev period but written entirely out of the preceding one, issued in Russian and then in English in 1987. Read it as a 1985 book. Argue with it as a 1985 book.
It is right about a great deal, and an introduction that hedged here would be worthless. The record of United States conduct in Latin America between 1945 and 1985 is among the best-documented criminal records of the twentieth century, and by 1985 most of it was in the public domain — through the Church Committee, through the ITT hearings, through the American press itself. Glinkin, Martynov and Yakovlev worked from that material, and their sourcing is the sourcing of a serious book: the Department of State Bulletin, US Congressional hearings and Joint Economic Committee reports, UNCTAD documents, SIPRI, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Financial Times, Le Monde, alongside Pravda and Granma.
The ITT chapter is accurate. The company plotted against the Popular Unity government before Allende took office; the CIA worked with it; Frank Church's subcommittee established this in 1973 and the book quotes Church to the effect that the two were so intertwined it was hard to say where one ended and the other began. EXIMBANK cut Chile's credit a month after the nationalisation of Anaconda and Kennecott. The Inter-American Development Bank lent Chile $11.6 million across the whole Popular Unity period against an average of $30 million a year before it, and the World Bank lent nothing at all — the book gives the figures and names Robert McNamara's justification. That is a documented credit blockade, and the book documents it.
It is right that the Carter administration's human rights policy was selective to the point of fraud, and it proves the point with the strongest available example: in defiance of Congressional legislation of June 1976 barring military assistance to the Chilean junta, Pinochet received up to $120 million in American arms in 1977–78. It is right that Reagan lifted the Carter sanctions imposed after Chilean secret police murdered Orlando Letelier in Washington, that Jeane Kirkpatrick went to Santiago to announce agreement with the junta, and that in January 1983 the IMF granted Pinochet roughly a billion dollars while US law nominally prohibited assistance to gross violators of human rights. It is right about the CIA's contra manual published in October 1984 — the book quotes its instructions to tear out electrical wiring, put dirt in fuel tanks and scatter nails on roads — and right about the mining of Nicaraguan harbours, and right that a Soviet ship was among those damaged. Its account of American logistical support to Britain in the Malvinas war, down to the use of Ascension Island and the transfer of Sidewinder, Shrike, Harpoon and Stinger missiles, is detailed and, so far as the published record goes, sound.
Its narrative of the invasion of Grenada on 25 October 1983 is the best thing in the book: hour by hour, the Pearls airport landing at five in the morning, the paratroop drop near St George's, the assault on the Cuban construction workers' camp, the eleven warships, the escalation from under two thousand troops to nearly six thousand, the destruction of a hospital. And it is right, and worth saying loudly in 2025, that the wave of Latin American condemnation was general — Bolivia, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Guyana, Venezuela, Peru, Brazil and the Dominican Republic are each quoted or cited, from official statements and parliamentary resolutions. The book's central thesis, stated in its introduction — that "changes in US policy with regard to the region are only relative inasmuch as although the forms, methods and specific strategic objectives may be different, the policy essentially remains the same" — was not Soviet cant in 1985. It was, on the evidence assembled here, correct.
None of that is diminished by what follows. It is the reason for taking what follows seriously.
The overthrow of the Popular Unity government is the strongest case any indictment of American policy in the hemisphere can make, and this book cannot make it. Allende's name occurs six times in the whole volume. The eleventh of September 1973 is never narrated. There is no Track II, no Kissinger, no order to make the economy scream, no murder of General Schneider. The coup enters the book in a single sentence, at the end of a passage about corporations:
"It was the transnationals which decisively prepared the ground for the fascist overthrow, and, as was the case with ITT, staged the coup."
That is an explanation with no Chileans in it. Not the officer corps, not the Christian Democrats, not the gremios, not the truck owners' strike, and above all not the Chilean working class, which is absent from its own defeat. The monopolies staged the coup; the Chileans were the terrain it was staged on.
This is not carelessness. Economism of this kind performs a function. If the defeat was manufactured abroad, then no question arises about the strategy pursued at home — and the strategy pursued at home was the Chilean Communist Party's, which was Moscow's, the peaceful and constitutional road to socialism through an elected government administering a state it had not touched. The Progress list carried whole volumes celebrating that road. A book that examined why it ended in the National Stadium would have had to examine them. So the book does not examine it, and the reader is left with a Chile in which the only agents are American ones.
The counter-argument was made at the time, from the left, by people who had just got out alive. On 28 September 1973, seventeen days after the coup, the Peruvian revolutionary Hugo Blanco — flown out of Santiago via the Swedish embassy — and the Argentine socialist Eduardo Creus gave an interview in Mexico City, printed in Intercontinental Press on 8 October 1973 under the title "Eyewitness Account of Repression in Chile." Blanco describes the raids that preceded the coup, carried out under the Arms Control Law passed by the parliamentary right in late 1972: "The UP did not actively oppose it, however. The UP deputies abstained and Allende did not veto it." He describes the government's instruction that workers guard the factories without occupying them, so that after a day's work in the battle of production they should "stay on at night doing guard duty," with the result that "it was essentially the vanguard that was trapped in the factories when the military launched its attack."
Asked directly what the Chilean experience had shown about the theory of the peaceful road to socialism, Creus answered that it "did not have much to do with reality," and gave the reason: "on many occasions when the workers occupied the factories, it was the Allende government itself that cleared them out." On the arms that did exist: "The left organizations had a lot of guns. But these weapons were not in the hands of the workers. They were kept in special arsenals by the leaderships." And on the coup's outcome: "with the proper organization, the resistance could have assumed gigantic proportions."
A reader may reject that assessment. It is a contested judgement, and it was contested then. What cannot be defended is a book about the destruction of the Popular Unity government that does not know the argument exists. The strategic question — whether a workers' government can hold power through a state apparatus it has left intact — is the question Chile posed to the international left, and this book, published fourteen years later by the state whose party had answered it one way, does not put it.
A small correction while we are here: the book attributes the 1972 exposure of the ITT memoranda to "the American journalist John Anderson." It was Jack Anderson.
Cuba occupies more of this book than any other country, and the treatment is the mirror image of Chile's: everything that happens to Cuba comes from Washington, and nothing happens inside Cuba at all. The book records that scholars found the island "safely socialist," that its "economic and social achievements and continued development of socialist democracy were recognised by the majority of countries in this part of the world," and that more than a hundred American firms — Monsanto, Dow, Union Carbide, Dupont, Coca-Cola, Goodyear, Firestone — enquired about future trade in 1975. All of that is well sourced.
What is missing is anything that would let a reader understand Cuba as a society with its own contradictions. There is no accounting of the Soviet subsidy: nothing on the preferential sugar price, nothing on the oil re-export arrangement, nothing on the terms of Cuba's membership of the CMEA, which the book mentions three times and only in connection with Latin American trade. A study whose whole method is to trace the economic dependence of Latin American states on the United States declines to apply that method once to the dependence it might have measured most exactly.
Two absences are specific enough to name. On 23 August 1968 Fidel Castro delivered the speech endorsing the Warsaw Pact occupation of Czechoslovakia. Intercontinental Press printed the full text across three issues that autumn, together with, on 16 September 1968, the United Secretariat of the Fourth International's reply of 1 September, which opened by "categorically rejecting Fidel Castro's endorsement of the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet and other troops" and insisted in the same breath on defending Cuba against the American blockade. That is the difficult position, and it was taken at the time. The word "Czechoslovakia" does not occur in this book.
In March 1971 the poet Heberto Padilla was arrested in Havana and made to deliver a self-criticism, and the writers who had been the revolution's most valuable friends abroad broke with it. Intercontinental Press of 17 May 1971 carried it on the cover — "Cuban Poet's Arrest: A Blow to the Revolution" — and printed the international letter to Castro. Padilla does not appear in this book either.
There is a third silence that bears directly on the book's own argument. It treats the sixth summit of the non-aligned movement, held in Havana in September 1979 with ninety-four countries represented, as a triumph of Cuban prestige and a defeat for American diplomacy, which it was. It does not mention what happened next. The Soviet Army entered Afghanistan in December; on 14 January 1980 the UN General Assembly deplored the intervention by 104 votes to 18, with Cuba voting against; and Cuba's chairmanship of the non-aligned movement never recovered, its candidacy for the Security Council seat collapsing after scores of inconclusive ballots. The book carries the credit and drops the consequence, three months later, in the same paragraph-sequence.
Here the omission stops being a matter of emphasis. Chapter Three, section four, is titled "Military Policy. The Carter Doctrine and Latin America." It describes the doctrine as announced in the State of the Union message, quotes Carter's undertaking to defend American interests "by all necessary means, including military force," and calls it "the basis of Washington's new adventurist course in international affairs." It observes that "The Carter Doctrine, of course, was primarily anti-Soviet in nature and spearheaded against the socialist countries," and then, in the next sentence, that "The areas close to the borders of the Soviet Union were singled out for special attention."
The State of the Union message was delivered on 23 January 1980. The Soviet Army had entered Afghanistan four weeks earlier. The doctrine's operative sentence was about the Persian Gulf. The area close to the borders of the Soviet Union that had been singled out for special attention was Afghanistan.
The word "Afghanistan" does not occur once in this book. Neither does "Kabul," nor "Hungary," nor "Czechoslovakia," nor "Poland" — and this from a volume whose research closed in 1985, while the war was in its sixth year, four years after martial law was declared in Warsaw and Solidarność, a trade union of ten million, was driven underground. An earlier passage in the same section reproaches Washington for restricting arms sales to Latin America while pursuing "the US policy to stir up tension and accelerate the arms race in the regions bordering the Soviet Union." Twice, within a few pages, the argument walks up to the border and stops.
This is what the double standard looks like when it is executed by competent scholars. Everything the book says about the illegitimacy of great-power intervention in the affairs of small states — the Dominican Republic in 1965, Grenada in 1983, the mining of Nicaraguan harbours, the doctrine of non-interference invoked from a dozen Latin American foreign ministries — was true, and was equally true of Kabul. The authors could not say so. The book's moral vocabulary was rationed by the state that printed it.
One more instance, because it is exact. Maurice Bishop was placed under house arrest by a faction of his own party and shot with several colleagues on 19 October 1983, six days before the American landing. The book's seven-page account of "The Grenada Tragedy" does not mention this. The reader who works through the invasion hour by hour will not learn from the main text that Grenada's prime minister was already dead. The information is in endnote 23 to Chapter Four, in fourteen words:
"In October 1983, the situation presented itself: a splintering in the Grenada leadership led to tragic events and the eventual murder of Maurice Bishop."
"A splintering." "Tragic events." No names, no politics, no account of how a revolutionary government destroyed itself. The same journal that had campaigned against the invasion under the banner "U.S. Hands Off Grenada!" in its issue of 7 November 1983 published, on 26 December, a long interview with Don Rojas, Bishop's press secretary, who had spoken to him less than an hour before he was killed. Rojas traces the crisis to Bernard Coard's resignation from the political bureau in July 1982 and the proposal of joint leadership in September 1983, and describes the assassination as having been "served up on a platter with all the trimmings" to Washington "by a group of immature, unscientific, and, in many respects, opportunistic elements within the New Jewel Movement who proclaimed themselves to be the most militant and anti-imperialist faction of all." He also states flatly that there was "absolutely no involvement" by Cuba or the Soviet Union in the party's internal collapse. That is how it is possible to oppose an imperialist invasion without lying about what preceded it. The Progress volume chose the footnote.
The tradition this introduction is written from was not united on Afghanistan, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise while making so much of the book's silence. On 3 March 1980 Intercontinental Press printed the declaration adopted by a majority of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International at its meeting of 26–29 January, together with two competing resolutions supported by minorities. The majority did not condemn the intervention; the journal's own editorial columns that winter attacked the Spanish and Italian communist parties for adding their voices to what it called the capitalist propaganda campaign against Soviet military aid. One of the minority texts, "Draft Resolution on the Soviet Intervention in Afghanistan," argued the other way, and argued it in terms that have worn better: "While revolutionary Marxists unconditionally defend the Soviet Union against imperialism, they are not at all obliged to defend every action undertaken by the Soviet bureaucracy, be they progressive or anti-imperialist in their stated motivations."
The difference between that record and this book's is not that our side was right and theirs wrong on the question. It is that the argument was printed. Three positions, in one issue, over the signature of the body that held them. Nothing in the Progress catalogue was produced that way, and nothing could be.
Take the research and refuse the frame. On the mechanics of American power in the hemisphere between 1970 and 1985 — the reorganisation of the OAS, the arithmetic of the arms trade, the credit blockade of Chile, the Santa Fe document, the Kissinger commission, the contra manual, the Malvinas supply chain, the hour-by-hour invasion of Grenada — this is a useful book, and much of what it establishes has only been confirmed by the declassifications of the four decades since. Where it fails, it fails in one direction and one direction only: it cannot see any state but the United States as capable of intervention, cannot see any socialist country from the inside, and cannot name the war its own government was fighting while it was written.
Both halves of that judgement matter. The first, because a reader who is told the whole thing is worthless will discard evidence that is not worthless and will be worse armed against the next intervention. The second, because a book that indicts one superpower's crimes while its publisher conducts a nine-year war it may not mention has surrendered the ground on which the indictment stands. The strongest reply to the Reagan administration's Latin American policy was never going to come from Moscow. It came from the people the book writes about — the Nicaraguans, the Salvadoreans, the Chileans in the cordones — and from those who were prepared to apply the same standard in every direction, including their own.