Steve Ellner (ed.), Latin America's Radical Left: Challenges and Complexities of Political Power in the Twenty-First Century (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), pp. xiv +291, £18.95, pb.
sources published by the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series, which is insufficient, as FRUS represent a minority of US documents available. Similarly, the author supports several claims grounded solely on policy-makers’ memoirs (see, for instance, the figure on ‘Chilean subversive threat’ based on Augusto Pinochet’s accounts, p. ). Given that autobiographies and memoirs tend to be highly selective and partial in the presentation of facts, they should never be used in isolation to support claims. To sum up, Darnton’s audacity in trying to deal with many different and complex cases of state rivalry and rapprochement in Cold War Latin America constitutes the book’s source of both strength and weakness. His book does provide interesting insights, but they should be taken more carefully than Darnton suggests.