Content area
Full text
Thomas C. Field , Jr. , From Development to Dictatorship: Bolivia and the Alliance for Progress in the Kennedy Era (Ithaca, NY, and London : Cornell University Press , 2014), pp. xix + 272, $45.00, hb.
Reviews
From Development to Dictatorship has many virtues. It is a meticulously researched history of US intervention in a Latin American country in the Cold War era. It provides new information on, and a new interpretation of, the 1964 military coup that overthrew the presidency of Víctor Paz Estenssoro, one of the leaders of Bolivia's 1952 national revolution. It is a case study of the involvement of the US government (including the CIA, USAID and State Department) in a small country that was not of apparent significance to most US citizens. This is highly relevant today as observers attempt to untangle the country's ever more complex interventions around the world. And it is a refreshing corrective to the misuse of the term 'liberal', which Field demonstrates does not mean politically 'progressive' in the sense of supporting human or labour rights or favouring social democratic reforms.
The Alliance for Progress was a US aid programme inaugurated after the Cuban Revolution of 1959 ostensibly to foster development in Latin America in an effort to make socialism appear less attractive. In addition to development, during the era of the Alliance for Progress the United States actively armed many of Latin America's militaries to make them better able to defeat leftist insurgencies should the development practices fail to win heart and minds. In From Development to Dictatorship Field shows that the Kennedy administration decided it could work with the government of Bolivia even though after the 1952 Revolution it had enacted a significant agrarian reform and the country's tin...