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Reviewed by:
  • Dictators, Drugs, and Revolution: Cold War Campaigning in Latin America, 1965-1989
  • Russell Crandall
Dictators, Drugs, and Revolution: Cold War Campaigning in Latin America, 1965-1989. By Sewall Menzel. Bloomington: AuthorHouse, 2006. Pp. x, 322. Illustrations. Maps. Index. $18.50 cloth; $13.00 paper.

Sewall Menzel's book takes the reader back to the "dark days" of the United States' counter-insurgency efforts in Latin America, and Central America in particular, during the Cold War. Starting with the U.S.-led intervention in the Dominican Republic in 1965 and lasting through the start of the drug wars in the Andes in the 1980s, U.S. Army officer Menzel had a direct hand in these harrowing and still controversial policies and events.

Menzel explains how many of his Special Forces colleagues had cut their teeth with respect to counter-insurgency doctrine and training during service in Southeast Asia during the 1960s. Now that this theater had calmed down, at least for the U.S. military, Washington sent many of these same officers to Latin America to train often weak and unprofessional militaries in the ways of counterinsurgency—namely "counter-communist insurgency." For Menzel, his role was to carry out "military operations in the form of 'campaigns'" that had become "part and parcel of the political and socioeconomic solutions advocated by Washington for this part of the Cold War battlefield" (p. 4).

Part memoir, part political history, Menzel's book is well worth reading. Above all, most scholars (including this reviewer) of U.S.-Latin relations during the Cold War were not involved in the operational level of U.S. policies. Thus, Menzel's accounts provide us with a unique vantage point into these controversial episodes. One suspects that many scholars will not see eye to eye with all of Menzel's conclusions or ideological perspective, but this is all the more reason not to ignore this book. Also, it merits mentioning that Menzel is not an apologist for all U.S. policies—he is stinging in his critique of Washington's covert operation that overthrew Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz in 1954.

Russell Crandall
Davidson College
Davidson, North Carolina
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