ABSTRACT
The level of interest in Latin America plunged dramatically a few years after the craze of the late 1930s and early 1940s, and the disinterest persisted for a decade and a half until a sudden recovery of concern late in the postwar period. Reviews were undertaken within the administration by the Commission on Foreign Economic Policies and by Milton Eisenhower, the president's brother and principal Latin American adviser, who toured Latin America in 1953. On the positive side, those who still portrayed Latin America as a potential Garden of Eden were, by and large, non-specialists, and members of Congress must be counted among the most ill informed. Modernization theory concurred in this deemphasis; it saw in the application of capital and modern technology the means for overcoming many of Nature's limitations, as illustrated by the comment that "modern science and invention have leveled the mountains that once limited the association" of the peoples of Latin America.
