Comprehension is the big problem with Presidents and the American people when it comes to Latin America and the potential for trouble. When one party believes, the other seems to scoff, and there is something in the U.S.'s mind-set that rejects the idea of a serious threat from any nation so close, so poverty-stricken and, as folklore would have it, so naturally inefficient.
United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, talking the day after President Reagan's address before Congress on the Central American crisis, suggested that this nation still suffers from "a cultural snobbery" about that part of the world. Our hemispheric...