front cover of Eclipse of the Assassins
Eclipse of the Assassins
The CIA, Imperial Politics, and the Slaying of Mexican Journalist Manuel Buendía
Russell H. Bartley and Sylvia Erickson Bartley
University of Wisconsin Press, 2015
This is a stellar, courageous work of investigative journalism and historical scholarship—grippingly told, meticulously documented, and doggedly pursued over thirty years. Tracking a Cold War confrontation that has compromised the national interests of both Mexico and the United States, Eclipse of the Assassins exposes deadly connections among historical events usually remembered as isolated episodes.
            Authors Russell and Sylvia Bartley shed new light on the U.S.-instigated “dirty wars” that ravaged all of Latin America in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s and reveal—for the first time—how Mexican officials colluded with Washington in its proxy contra war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. They draw together the strands of a clandestine web linking:
  • the assassination of prominent Mexican journalist Manuel Buendía
  • the torture and murder of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique Camarena
  • the Iran-Contra scandal
  • a major DEA sting against key CIA-linked Bolivian, Panamanian, and Mexican drug traffickers
  • CIA-orchestrated suppression of investigative journalists
  • criminal collusion of successive U.S. and Mexican administrations that has resulted in the unprecedented power of drug kingpins like “El Chapo” Guzmán.
            Eclipse of the Assassins places a major political crime—the murder of Buendía—in its full historical perspective and shows how the dirty wars of the past are still claiming victims today.

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front cover of Imperial Russia and the Struggle for Latin American Independence, 1808–1828
Imperial Russia and the Struggle for Latin American Independence, 1808–1828
By Russell H. Bartley
University of Texas Press, 1978

This study, the first of its kind in English, examines Russian responses to the independence movement in Latin America during the early nineteenth century. From a strictly presentist perspective, the investigation of this subject contributes to the historiography of colonialism and of Latin America's relations with the major world powers. In addition, it rounds out the story of foreign interests in the emancipation of Spanish and Portuguese America, while at the same time shedding new light on the history of Russian overseas expansion.

The study probes the major determinants of Russian responses to the struggle for independence of colonial Latin America and evaluates, from a European perspective, the actual impact of tsarist policy on the course of those historic events. Drawing on a wide range of printed materials and on hitherto unused manuscript sources from the archives and libraries of Spain, Portugal, Brazil, and the USSR, it isolates Russian New World objectives during the first decades of the nineteenth century and relates those objectives to the formulation of tsarist policy toward the insurgent Iberian colonies.

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