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Kelly, Philip. Checkerboards and Shatterbelts: The Geopolitics of South America. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997. Maps, tables, bibliography, index, 256 pages; hardcover $40, softcover $7.95.
The long, recently abandoned period of armed forces rule in South America, especially in the major Southern Cone states, increased scholarly attention to the way military governors thought about international politics. Particularly revealing were the geopolitical assumptions underlying their foreign policy decisions and actions (and, ominously, domestic matters as well). Philip Kelly was among those few scholars outside of Latin America who elucidated the influence of geopolitical theories originating in the nineteenth-century German realpolitik, "scientific," organic-state schools on the thinking of Southern Cone military men and their civilian allies. The old school of organic concepts does not offer a serious theory of international relations or a satisfactory basis for policy; the military regimes were discredited largely because of the national security rationale for brutal repression at home. But it does serve as an interpretive guide for the analyst to comprehend the actions of military men and their civilian allies who subscribed to it.
In Checkerboards and Shatterbelts, Kelly seeks to enlarge his earlier analysis. He expands the geographic scope to include all of South America and the continent's strategic relationship with the United States. Thus he adds the Northern Tier circum-Caribbean entities to those of the Southern Cone (Guyana and Suriname are of peripheral concern) and includes analyses of the geopolitics of the rest of Latin America and of U.S....