Why am I passionate about this?
I've been interested in U.S.-Latin American relations ever since my junior year in college when I studied abroad in Chile, a country that had only two years prior been run by dictator Augusto Pinochet. Often referred to as America’s “backyard,” Latin America has often been on the receiving end of U.S. machinations and expansions. In terms of the history of American foreign policy, it's never a dull moment in U.S. involvement in its own hemisphere. I have now had the privilege to work inside the executive branch of the U.S. government on Latin America policy, stints which have forced me to reconsider some of what I had assumed about U.S. abilities and outcomes.
Russell's book list on U.S. involvement in Latin America
Why did Russell love this book?
I read historian Shattered Hope while a graduate student at an American university and it forever changed my sense of the complexity and nuance of Cold War-era U.S. interventions in the Americas, in this case, Washington’s overthrow of a democratically-elected leftist head of state: Jacobo Árbenz. Two decades hence, I love the book even more for its boldness and historical rigor but also the author's willingness to break taboos like the widely-held notion that there was little communistic influence in Árbenz’s government.
1 author picked Shattered Hope as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
The most thorough account yet available of a revolution that saw the first true agrarian reform in Central America, this book is also a penetrating analysis of the tragic destruction of that revolution. In no other Central American country was U.S. intervention so decisive and so ruinous, charges Piero Gleijeses. Yet he shows that the intervention can be blamed on no single "convenient villain." "Extensively researched and written with conviction and passion, this study analyzes the history and downfall of what seems in retrospect to have been Guatemala's best government, the short-lived regime of Jacobo Arbenz, overthrown in 1954, by…