Nothing altruistic about foreign aids; multilateral agencies come in many colors and shapes like World Bank,Asian Bank, US Aid and IMF. Less developed countries leaders succumbed to the temptation of selling their sovereignty to the devils. The lucrative loans for infrastructure loan is not meant for social development to benefit the poor mess instead to ensnare the host countries for political allegiance and control. Who benefits! The local oligarchy. The book reinforce my believe of the deception of the great American power.

This Book is an utter invention. At least the parts I know about it are just a confused reading of newspapers and nowhere near the exclusive access the author pretends to have. What he says about Venezuela is wrong, disconnected with reality, and chronologically confused. The Unites States is still the main client for Venezuela's oil and this is 5 years after the publication of the book.

Something bothered me throughout the book. The premise that all the problems in Latin America are caused by the US intervention is a common position for left wingers in the sub continent. This left wingers tend to ignore the elephant in the room: Chile. After Pinochet Chile basically became a developed nation. Shouldn't that be the model for the rest of Latin America? The left ignores that and so does the author. He mentions Chile 8 times in passing and mostly in connection with Allende and Pinochet. Nothing about the Chile of today. This book was written by a socialist and it is very unlikely that such a leftist came from the origins he mentions. This book is an invention which, unfortunately, turns out boring and poorly written.

I'd advise you not to waste time with this book.

John Perkins lifts the lid on the workings of what I am convinced is the American Empire. Perkins worked as an 'Economic Hit Man' for years pursuing the coordinated interests of the American State and Corporate sector. This involved visiting 3rd world countries, performing an inflated economic assessment of their future growth prospects, persuading them to take out enormous loans they will never be able to afford to repay to pay American companies to build massive infrastructure projects that won't deliver the promised results. The local elites and politicians get rich, the American corporations get rich, the poor get trampled over and then get left footing the bill for the loans they had nothing to do with taking and which they receive no benefit from. When they inevitably cannot afford to repay the loan they become the pawns of the American state, who can then force them to vote their way at the UN, or accept American military bases on their soil, or get them to imprison and torture their enemies. This quote demonstrates the premiss nicely:-

For every $100 of crude taken out of the Ecuadorian rain forests, the oil companies receive $75. Of the remaining $25, three-quarters must go to paying off the foreign debt. Most of the remainder covers military and other government expenses - which leaves about $2.50 for health, education and programs aimed at helping the poor

This book rings true to me. Everything I have read about Iraq supports what this book has to say, and it also resonates for me because I've been reading a lot about the Roman Empire recently and it sounds an awful lot like what they did in their day.

This book also put me in mind of The Names by Don Delillo, which explored similar themes in 1981, over 20 years before this was published (because he's a brilliant and prescient genius), The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohson Hamid, and the work of Graham Greene (who makes an appearance in the book when the author meets him in Panama).

US imperialism will somehow always be worse than u think