Kristian Gustafson, Hostile Intent: US Covert Operations in Chile, 1964–1974 (Washington D.C.: Potomac Books, 2007), pp. xiv+317, $29.95, hb.
America ; but no such hesitation inhibited the International Co-operation Agency and the PASB. Eradication, not control or incidence reduction, was a goal so singlemindedly pursued that PASB personnel were forbidden to use the word ‘control ’. The eradication campaign was justified with the argument that the cost of an eradication campaign was less than the cost of the damage caused by one year of malaria, and was complemented by programmes of agrarian reform, peasant resettlement and the ‘march to the seas ’. Schoolteachers and public health officials were enlisted in the struggle against peasant opposition. While having some incidental benefits, like reducing the incidence of dengue transmitted by the Aedes aegypti, the campaign aroused much resistance at the local level. Attempts to persuade indigenous Mexicans of the benefits of ‘Western ’ medicine were often halfhearted, since translators into indigenous languages and anthropologists were scarce. Furthermore, there was little time for persuasion, given the speed with which a temporary mobile unit appeared in a village, sprayed houses, took blood samples, informed the authorities about feverish cases, and moved on. The tide slowly turned against the campaign. Physicians pointed to the risks posed to the lives of sprayers, fears of human cancer and problems of miscarriages among farm animals, as well as contamination caused by poor storage conditions. Anthropologists underlined the failure of campaigns to take either lack of health education or indigenous concepts of medicine (mosquitoes were seen as inconveniences to be smoked out, not a menace) into account. Campaign leaders like Fred Soper both assumed that peasants led static lives, when many were migrants who built new homes, and overlooked the damage to diet and income, when DDT killed hens and bees. By 1966 the campaign had stagnated. The Cold War entered a new phase ; a loss of impetus from above combined with resistance from below to cause a reappraisal of health policy ; and mosquitoes developed a new resistance. National concern at the fragmentation of the public health system was reinforced by the WHO, which stressed the urgency of a transition to national plan for basic health services, in which better mechanisms of assessment and surveillance would take a part. A shift from an emphasis on eradication to one on control seemed successful. No malariaattributed death was recorded in 1982. This new work is a model of its kind. It will be welcomed by Mexicanists, historians of medicine and social policy, and of the peasantry and of the professions alike. Some studies of the same period on similar and parallel themes in South American countries, especially Venezuela, would be most welcome.