American foreign policy toward Latin America in the 80s and 90s : issues and controversies from Reagan to Bush /

This addition to Wiarda's prolific stable of monographs on US-Latin American relations is unique in its analysis of motives for US policy change from the Carter to the Reagan-Bush administrations. The book's first part devotes considerable attention to the influence of American electoral politics, the composition of the National Security Council and other White House staff, and vacillating vigor and engagement of the presidential incumbent in shaping Central American policy. The breadth of scholarship is wide, and a willingness not to shy away from policy prescription is also evident. Later chapters, devoted to European-Latin American relations, the likelihood of "Fidelismo's" collapse, and the future of domestic political stability in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean are well written and accessible. However, they do not incorporate new or novel explanations of state-society relations. For example, Wiarda's analysis of political culture fails to incorporate critical analyses of the consequences of military authoritarianism, as well as political development as does David Pion-Berlin's account of the relationship between economic doctrines and political repression in Southern cone states, The Ideology of State Terror: Economic Doctrine and Political Repression in Argentina and Peru (CH, Jan'90). General readers and students, lower-division undergraduate through graduate. D. L. Feldman; University of Tennessee