Shapiro Blasts U.S. Latin Policy

Anyone previously skeptical of the need to revise and standardize United States policy in Latin America will be convinced by Samuel Shapiro's concise study, Invisible Latin America.

Seldom has a scholar assembled such an impressive array of quotations in which American dignitaries say the "wrong things"--or used the quotations so effectively. Shapiro quotes a statement by Senators Ellender of Louisiana and Eastland of Mississippi that "Latin America needs . . . more dictators like Trujillo." Similarly, during the 1962 Cuban crisis a Congressman declared that "for a good many years down in Latin America, on forty different occasions, American armed forces . . . moved into countries south of the border. . . . But lately we have adopted this mamby-pamby policy of attempting to turn to Latin American countries, to ask their permission."

Shapiro is unimpressed by the United States' record from James Monroe to John F. Kennedy, and he appeals for a new, enlightened policy that discards any remnants of the Monroe Doctrine, the Big Stick, and dollar diplomancy.

The answer to "fidelismo," he asserts, is not military dictatorship and rabid anti-Communism but rather efforts toward representative democracy. He presents a list of seventeen major policy prescriptions, ranging from a guarantee of free trade and price stabilization agreements to serious shake-ups in the Alliance for Progress; he cautions that the Alliance should not be "a panicky series of loans and grants that will have no more permanent effect than a handout to an alcoholic beggar."

Shapiro's analysis of Latin American problems centers around six case studies: Guatemala as the prototype of the paternalistic dictatorship, Peru as the conservative "democracy," Venezuela as the liberal democracy, Cuba as the revolutionary regime, Mexico as the post-revolutionary government, and Bolivia as the typical test case for the Alliance.

The treatment of Castro's rise to power and the United States' Cuban policy is probably one of the best in print. Yet some passages suffer from an almost-doctrinaire leftist approach. This orientation leads to simplifications which are, at the very least, unrealistic. For example, in his discussion of American involvement in the the invasion of Guatemala in 1954, Shapiro calls the overthrown Arbenz regime the best one the Guatemalan peasants had ever seen; he ignores almost entirely the torture and terror that, as other studies have revealed, stemmed from the growing Com- munist influence over Arbenz. Perhaps the most unfortunate simplification is Shapiro's title--the "invisible" Latin America which lies "behind the facade known to tourists.