Waltzing with a Dictator; The Marcoses and the Making of American Policy

New York: Times Books, 1987. First Edition [stated]. Hardcover. Good/Fair. 25 cm. ix, [1], 533, [1] pages. Frontis maps. Illustrations. Occasional Footnotes. Appendix. Author's Note. Sources and Notes. Bibliography. Index. Some wear and small tears to DJ edges. Inscribed by author on fep. Front board weak and has been restrengthened with glue. Raymond Bonner is the author of numerous books, an investigative reporter who also been a staff writer at the New York Times, and The New Yorker and contributed to The New York Review of Books. His latest book, Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong, was published by Knopf in February 2012. Bonner is best known as one of two journalists who broke the story of the El Mozote massacre, in which some 900 villagers, mostly women, children and elderly, at El Mozote, El Salvador, were slaughtered by the Atlacatl Battalion, a unit of the Salvadoran army in December 1981. From information found on-line. Bonner is a formidably energetic journalist. He has spared no effort to prove that the entire period of Marcos's "constitutional authoritarianism," dating from his 1972 invocation of martial law to his 1986 overthrow, was the fault of the U.S. In fact, Bonner is happy to charge that virtually everything wrong with the Philippines over the past ninety years or so can be traced to American desire for strategic advantage (the Clark Air Force and Subic Bay military bases). Perhaps Bonner's most startling accusation is that Marcos's plan to invoke martial law in the Philippines was made known to, and tacitly approved by, President Richard M. Nixon. In Bonner's view, the United States got dictatorship in the Philippines because Washington wanted it, opting at almost every turn for Marcos's brand of authoritarianism over democracy and human rights. This makes the U.S. responsible for poverty in the Philippines and for the growing Communist insurgency.