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Rabe, Stephen G. The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. xxxvii + 247 pages. Paper, $19.95.
Historian Stephen G. Rabe's The Killing Zone is a powerful indictment of United States policy in Latin America during the Cold War. Rabe effectively argues that covert and overt U.S. interventions in Latin America from 1952 to 1990 were responsible for ushering in brutal dictatorships from Chile to Guatemala mat killed hundreds of thousands of their citizens in an effort to suppress movements seeking greater political and economic inclusion. In contrast to Cold War triumphalism that dismisses Latin America's dead as "collateral damage" in a noble crusade to save the world from totalitarianism, Rabe makes a convincing case that the United States' primary goal was to maintain its historical domination of Latin America and the Caribbean rather than to defend itself against communist expansion into these regions.
The Killing Zone is an engaging synthesis of the literature on recent United StatesLatin American relations that, as Rabe himself admits, contains few new revelations for scholars of Latin American history and politics. The Killing Zone, however, provides an accessible and detailed account that will likely surprise undergraduate students and the general public, particularly in the United States. Rabe relies...