Latin America's democratic crusade: the transnational struggle against dictatorship, 1920s–1960s

In this sweeping book, historian Allen Wells seeks to dispel the notion that the years prior to the Cuban Revolution in 1959 were marked by a simple regional struggle for power between communists and non-communists.Rather, he maintains, the Cold War 'grafted itself onto an earlier transnational struggle between democracies and dictatorships', one that still resonated as late as the Nicaraguan revolution in 1979 (p.547).Latin America's democratic crusade is divided into two parts.The first part lays out the wellsprings of the movement to end widespread personalist rule.This movement had its origins both in the university reform movement of the 1920s and in the reaction to the United States' interventions in countries like Nicaragua and Cuba.These two elements provided the necessary preconditions for the post-1945 antidictatorial movement.The second part looks in much greater detail at the confrontation between reformists and dictators, predominantly in the circum-Caribbean.Here, Wells analyses the collapse of the postwar democratic wave in the late 1940s and the re-democratization that occurred a decade later (before the ramifications of the Cuban Revolution led to a more durable and transformative authoritarian turn in the 1960s).The author's approach differs from the existing scholarship, which has analysed developments either in an exclusively national historical context or within a comparative political science framework of weak democratic waves and authoritarian recrudescence.One of the book's main strengths, particularly in the later period, is its emphasis on the transnational nature of this intra-Latin American political struggle involving democrats (a synonym for reformers)-who were often obliged to seek asylum and assistance in each other's countries at different junctures-and were often recruits for armed expeditions against despots such as Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic.Wells moves beyond earlier circumscribed accounts of the Caribbean Legion of the late 1940s to paint a much more fine-grained yet holistic picture embracing the entire period.He also revealingly elucidates the transnational nature of the dictators' modus operandi of repression, embodied in the loosely affiliated La Internacional de la Espada, a precursor of the more institutionalized Operation Condor of the 1970s.The book also focuses on the roles of a host of distinctive personalities, in particular the singular career of the Venezuelan politician Rómulo Betancourt, upon whose voluminous correspondence the author draws extensively.He also draws attention to the now largely forgotten role played