Exporting Democracy: The United States and Latin America

The idea that the United States can and should help Latin America achieve democracy has been a recurrent theme in U.S. foreign policy throughout the twentieth century. By the 1990s, it had become virtually unchallenged doctrine, broadly supported on a bipartisan basis. Yet no systematic and comparative study of U.S. attempts to promote Latin American democracy has ever been published — and the policy community often seems unaware of this history.

In Exporting Democracy, Abraham F. Lowenthal ...