Guerrilla Wars of Central America - Hardcover

Landau, Saul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0297821148 ISBN 13: 9780297821144

Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 1993

Synopsis

From the 1960s to the 1980s revolutionary nationalists in Central America believed that only armed struggle could free their countries from US domination and oligarchical rule. Saul Landau tells the story of three bitter and bloody civil wars. In the 1980s the wars being fought in these tiny nations engaged the entire political world, as the US obsession with the Sandinistas produced the Iran-Contra scandal. In El Salvador the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero focussed world attention on the torture and murder of Catholic priests in Latin America. In Guatemala, US intervention in the 1950s helped to produce the bloodiest sequence of military governments in Central America. These conflicts had their roots in the extreme inequalities of the region and were fuelled by US financial and military intervention, as US policy-makers saw in every regional conflict a Cold War dimension.

About this title

From Library Journal:

In an extended journalistic essay, Landau examines the fate of revolutionary movements in Central America in recent decades as they attempted to oust oligarchies and their U.S. governmental allies. Landau sees the guerrilla fighters in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala as "patriots out to fulfill the visions of those who began the liberationist and independence processes more than a century before." His three country case studies are factually sound and engagingly written, thereby providing a relatively brief overview of Central American conflicts. However, Landau's ideological perspective is never in doubt ("The United States interfered in the internal history of the nations to the south, to the terrible detriment of generations of Central Americans to come"). There has been a spate of books on this topic, many of which provide a more balanced understanding of this turbulent era. Yet Landau does provide a compact account in a single volume on recent Central American history. For Latin American collections.
- James Rhodes, Luther Coll., Decorah, Ia.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Publishers Weekly:

Landau, author of Dangerous Doctrine and a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., here condemns the United States intervention in three Central American countries, with the focus on events during the last two decades. His tendency to view the complex political-military situation in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala in good guy/bad guy terms, his simplistic characterization of imperial hubris ("U.S. policy was genocide, called by other names and justified as anti-communist war strategy") and his romantic view of the guerrillas will dismay readers seeking an objective evaluation. And Landau's sweeping judgments of "the Foggy Bottom crowd," "Ivy Leaguers in policy posts" and "John Wayne types in Special Forces uniforms" are tired.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0297821148
• ISBN 13: 9780297821144
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256