Winner of the William M. LeoGrande Prize

For over a century, the United States has sought to improve the behavior of the peoples of Latin America. Perceiving their neighbors to the south as underdeveloped and unable to govern themselves, U.S. policy makers have promoted everything from representative democracy and economic development to oral hygiene. But is improvement a progressive impulse to help others, or realpolitik in pursuit of a superpower's interests?

In this subtle and searing critique of U.S. efforts to 'uplift' Latin America, Lars Schoultz challenges us to question the fundamental tenets of the development industry that became entrenched in the U.S. foreign policy bureaucracy over the last century.
--Piero Gleijeses, author of Visions of Freedom

In this masterful work, Lars Schoultz provides a companion and follow-up to his classic Beneath the United States...A necessary and rewarding read for scholars and students of U.S. foreign policy and inter-American relations.
--Renata Keller, The Americas

Lars Schoultz, William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor Emeritus of Political Science, received his B.A. and M.A. from Stanford University and his Ph.D. from UNC. His area of special interest is inter-American relations. He has held a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship in Buenos Aires to study Argentine electoral behavior, two postdoctoral research grants from the Social Science Research Council to study United States policy toward Latin America, and a Ford Foundation grant to study U.S. immigration policy. 

He has been a MacArthur Fellow in International Peace and Security and held residential fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and at the National Humanities Center. Schoultz is the recipient of the Tanner Award (1982), the Class of 1994 Award (1994), and the William Friday Award(2006), all for teaching excellence, and he is a member of the Order of the Golden Fleece and the Order of the Grail/Valkyries, both student honoraries. 

He is the author of Human Rights and United States Policy Toward Latin America ( Princeton, 1981), The Populist Challenge:Argentine Electoral Behavior in the Postwar Era (UNC, 1983), National Security and United States Policy Toward Latin America (Princeton, 1987), Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy Toward Latin America (Harvard, 1998), That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution (UNC, 2009), and In Their Own Best Interests: A History of the U.S. Effort to Improve Latin Americans (Harvard, 2018). His single-authored articles have appeared in The American Political Science Review, 

The American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Politics, International Organization, The Journal of Politics, The Journal of Latin American Studies, The Latin American Research Review, and Political Science Quarterly. He is a past president of the Latin American Studies Association, which in 2019 honored him with the Kalman Silvert Award.

Source: Department of Political Science at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill