Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, 2nd Edition
I assigned this book for my US Policy in Latin America class at UC Merced. It lays out how the US government helped overthrow Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically elected president of Guatemala, during the Cold War when he instituted a land reform that threatened the economic interests of the United Fruit Company. But it's a case study that applies pretty well to the rest of US coups in Latin America. What I appreciate is how it first lays out the rise of the United Fruit Company and then details all the different actors that played "psychological warfare" by creating a narrative that his overthrow was led from within. It pays special attention to the role of journalists who helped paint negative portrayals of the socialist president, and the role of radio in trying to convince the Guatemalan public that the movement was homegrown. I think the saddest part came when it described how Arbenz failed to lead a resistance movement, and how the Guatemalan people were waiting for him to give a signal, any signal, so they could rise up to defend his revolutionary government. Another interesting aspect is the way that Guatemala shaped Ernesto Che Guevara's political ideology and convinced him of the need for armed struggle against imperialism. As he remarked at the time: "The former president (Arbenz) should have retreated to mountains with a band of armed workers and peasants to fight indefinitely" (Schlesinger and Kinzer, 184). Finally, the book explains how Guatemala fit within the larger context of US-Latin America relations and how the rest of Latin American leaders responded to the US intervention. As you can imagine, the whole world was watching, and both the Central Intelligence Agency and US Department of State wanted to make an example of Guatemala. I highly highly recommend it.
Julia Preston and Samuel Dillon, Opening Mexico: The Making of a Democracy
Opening Mexico details the history of Mexico's political transition to electing President Vicente Fox in 2000 for the Partido Accion Nacional (PAN), after 70 years under the national party of the Mexican Revolution, the Partido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI). It pays special attention to the political movements of the 1980s and 1990s and is a gripping tale of how the PRI was unprepared and unwilling to accept its defeat in the 1988 presidential elections to the Partido Revolucionario Democrático (PRD) led by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, Lázaro Cardenas's son. It honestly reads like a thriller. From the description of the new technology which used computers to report ballot numbers, to the quick thinking that PRI officials had to maneuver to hide Cárdenas's victory. The book also details how the PAN grew in political support at the state level in Chihuahua and Baja California, and how Vicente Fox and Andres Manuel López Obrador rose to power in Guanajuato and Tabasco respectively. While the previous book shows you how to stage a coup in Latin America, this one shows you how to steal an election at both the state and national level. But more importantly, it helps answer the question: what are the factors that lead to a political democracy?
Laura Briggs, Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico
I read this book a long time ago, when I was an undergrad at UCSD for a class called "Medicine, Race, and the Global Politics of Inequality" taught by Charles Briggs. It opened my eyes to the history of birth control and why Puerto Rican women were chosen as the ideal subjects on which to test "the pill." Laura Briggs argues that Puerto Rican women were targeted because their fertility was defined as problematic. Unsure of what side effects might come from the new medicine, doctors were reluctant to test the pill on white women on the mainland. The latter chapters address Puerto Rican migration to the US northeast and later depictions of Puerto Ricans in popular culture, including West Side Story. Obviously, efforts to limit the reproduction of women of color have a long history that is still relevant today, as recent reports have appeared about immigrant women being sterilized while in ICE detention facilities. If you're interested in the topic, you may also want to check out the documentary La Operación (1982), which depicts the mass sterilization of Puerto Rican women in the 1950s and 1960s, Elena Gutierrez's Fertile Matters: The Politics of Mexican-Origin Women's Reproduction (2008) which addresses the relationship between anti-immigrant movements and the Zero Population Movement in the 1970s and the sterilization of Mexican immigrant women in Los Angeles, and the documentary No Más Bebes (2015), which interviews the women in Madrigal vs. Quilligan (1981), the class action lawsuit against the Los Angeles County Hospital which coerced Mexican immigrant women to have hysterectomies performed after delivering their babies. There is no shortage of material for this sad sad story.
Steven Epstein, Impure Science: Aids, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge
Along a similar vein is the last book on this list. It also has to do with bioethics and informed consent, but this time in relation to the AIDS virus. This book piqued my interest in clinical regulations and research on human subjects. What I remember most profoundly is its description of clinical trials and the use of placebo medicine for control groups. Basically, when they were testing new treatments for the HIV virus, scientists ran a trial with two different groups. The first group was given the experimental medicine and was observed for side effects. The second group was given a placebo, or sugar pill. This was the control group. Scientists wanted to compare the two groups to test the effectiveness of the medicine, as well as to observe for possible negative side effects. Was this ethical? Well, the problem is that during the trials, the first group seemed to be improving, while the participants in the second group were getting worse and worse, some of them dying. Scientists didn't know back then how the virus worked or why the medicine was working, and didn't know what long term side effects the medicine could have on participants. But the test subjects couldn't wait any longer. They could clearly see that some were getting better while others were dying. So they protested. They informed doctors that they refused to be guinea pigs and started interfering with the clinical studies by taking the active pills and cutting them in half to share amongst those who they presumed were given placebos. Obviously this messed up the whole experiment, but also showed that more thought had to go into clinical trials, and called into question how these trials should be run going forward. I think the most important aspect was learning about patients' rights as well as weighing how you get people to participate in scientific studies that may benefit society down the road, but at the cost of human life. What responsibility do scientists have to the people that join their studies? If it's clear to everyone that the medicine is working, when do you end a trial? How else can you study the effectiveness of a treatment without endangering human life? Very relevant again to the current COVID 19 vaccine, not to mention the LGBTQ rights movement. Another important aspect of course, is the way LGBTQ people were denigrated as the virus emerged, which was originally called Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (GRID). At the time I discovered this book I also remember watching And the Band Played On, which is a documentary that addresses many of the same issues, although I remember hearing from some activists that they didn't appreciate the depiction of LGBTQ people in the film. Either way, this book is very very good. Check it out.