Research and Developing Planning: Some Issues for Americans:

Extract

We offer the following contribution by Frank Bonilla in this section: 1) because, despite its important message, it does not fit appropriately in the other regular sections of LARR, and 2) because it deals positively with the problem of U.S. research in Latin America, touching upon the repercussions of Project Camelot, reactions to which have previously been allocated space here.

A recent and steadfastly optimistic study of U.S. foreign policy and democratic politics observes matter of factly that “American government frightens and bewilders its friends and its enemies alike.” At the moment, evidence again mounts before the world that we are not only prepared to take the lives and freedom of others on dubious provocation (as in the Dominican case) but also to seriously jeopardize institutions at home on which our own freedom rests. Along the way we have played freely with the careers and life chances of individuals with and without their knowledge or consent. In view of this, there would hardly seem to be any ground for persisting in the belief that reasonable men abroad will continue to look to us for support in rationally pursuing their own political advancement. If there is any reason for believing that we have not morally written ourselves out of a share in these tasks, it rests primarily on the realism, forebearance, and enduring optimism of men abroad who care profoundly about the quality of future political life in their own nations. Having repeatedly experienced political regressions of their own, they may view our own present difficulties with some magnanimity and a differentiating sense of the complex internal forces that have produced them. The Americans to whom these remarks are addressed are thus Americans in the large sense of men of the Americas, and particularly those who continue to hold to the hope that research based social science knowledge can prove a major resource in the achievement of useful human purposes in this part of the world. However, because given present circumstances the action of U.S. social scientists may yet have the capacity to decisively transform and revitalize the prospects for such work rather than continue to disfigure and compromise them, much of this appeal is directed to Americans in this second more restricted sense.