ABSTRACT
The academic community in the United States bears a considerable responsibility for the prolonged estrangement of Latin America from the United States. The 1960s radicals, whose influence is disproportionately felt in academy to this day, propagated the message that the United States is a greedy, irresponsible, imperialistic power. Susanne Jonas's criticism of the developmentalists contains some important truths: They seem to project a pious hope that development can be achieved without paying the high cost of removing the social and economic obstacles, that the impoverished masses can somehow be upgraded without infringing on the interests of the established elites. Richard Fagen, a professor of political science at Stanford, is a prominent Latin Americanist who has subscribed to dependency theory, sympathized with Fidel Castro's revolution, and consistently criticized both the motives and the conduct of US policy toward Latin America. Like so many other American intellectuals, Fagen was entranced by the Sandinista revolution.
