That's not to say he doesn't know what he's talking about, as he's obviously knowledgeable, and knows how to downplay, over emphasize or completely ignore that knowledge depending on necessity. His revisionism seems to want to please the right people, and unfortunately for the population of Central America and the Caribbean, their not the right people, and providing any sort of balanced or accurate critique of their political relationship with the US probably won't do as much good for him as reinforcing the American mythology that this review talks about.

Good use of words like "script" and "personal agenda" by the way, you hit it on the nose with those ones.

"Crandall’s central and most controversial claim is that democracy has been made unquestionably stronger in the Caribbean after the United States intervened with overwhelming military force."

Isn't there always going to be a defining question in Central America, while it remains under Washington's thumb, namely – "What is the the state's purpose? In whose interests does it make policy?"

It seems to me that a genuine democracy is impossible in the region, because its logical endpoint would be the assertion of a national interest that exists apart from Washington's goals. Is there any country in Central America, within living memory, other than Guatemala, that has been able to pursue any sort of self-determination? Isn't this, in large part, Venezuela's sin, to simply not dance to the US's tune?

When Guatemala pursued such a nationalist program in the Ten Years of Spring, the US launched a counter-revolution to counter a non-existent Communism, an act whose effects persist to this day, namely, that Guatemala is saddled with a 'democracy' and a 'national government' that is both the sort of weak state the US appears to desire, but that also produces massive social problems, with almost zero trust (rightly) in the legislature, the justice system (1% conviction rate for some serious crimes), and the office of the President, who is regarded as a self-interested puppet with strings pulled from the US. Politically, there is no way out of this, as the parties here all compute the basic fact that to deviate from compliance with the US is to also forsake any hope of being able to govern. What exists is a paralysed nation, where, quite literally, institutions, in the absence of ideological differences, fight over status, or the most trivial of details, while the country's urgent problems go unaddressed. For example, facing a growing crisis of hunger in the rural areas, Guatemala's congress spent most of October locked in a constitutional stand-off with the President over judicial appointments.

Meanwhile, the capital has become a fractured and fractious study in the sort of 'society' that emerges from a failed police force, public education system, public healthcare, where anybody who can, goes private, and the rest live right alongside in various degrees of poverty.

Of course, perhaps without a US-sponsored counter-revolution and 36 years of civil war the situation would be even worse, but precisely how things could be any worse is difficult to imagine. What seems most obvious to myself is that, in a US-created ideological vacuum, absent any ability to effect real change or to genuinely act in the national interest, the political class necessarily becomes full simply of self-serving, unprincipled, easily corruptible careerists, because what else is there to do but line your own pockets?

To typify such pursuits as somehow 'the Latin American way' etc, is to get things the wrong way round. Central America rightly has many proud examples of men and women of principle, but the conditions under which they might flourish appears, sadly, to have vanished for now.