Venezuela, 1992. CIA agent Eva and her Cuban counterpart, Mauricio, must deal with each other, imprisoned crime lord Pran, journalist Mónica, and Swiss banker Günther Müller while reacting to Hugo Chávez, the charismatic and volatile Venezuelan leader.

There is one country in the Americas that the Bush Administration regards as a significant threat to U.S. interests, and it is not Cuba. Oil-rich Venezuela's democratically-elected government has survived repeated, U.S.-supported attempts to undermine its power, including a short lived military coup. Its leader, President Hugo Chávez, is neither communist nor capitalist, and instead claims to be creating an alternative 21st Century socialism that courts international capital. What is the real story behind this leader of Latin America's lurch to the left? Is it a new petro-populism in the tradition of Peron and Fujimori, or is it truly a progressive, home-grown democratic revolution that will address the massive economic and social inequalities plaguing the region for more than three centuries? The curiosity of a North American living in Venezuela and the expertise of two Venezuelans—one an adviser in the Presidential Palace, and the other a journalist with a weekly column in one of Venezuela's leading newspapers—bring insiders' answers to outsiders' questions, such as: Is Chávez a dictator? What was the role of the Bush Administration in the 2002 military coup? What is Chávez's political platform? Does Chávez work with terrorist governments to undermine U.S. interests?

William Krehm was a correspondent for Time magazine in the 1940s and during this period he wrote a day-by-day account of what he saw and learned on this assignment. The countries he covered included El Salvador, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Panama, Honduras, the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Very little of what he wrote ever appeared in Time, due to the unwillingness of the magazine's editors at the time to offend the large corporations which had investments in the region, but Krehm's research eventually became a book that vividly describes the tyrannical and corrupt forces that controlled most of the Central American countries, with American support. At the time, no U.S. publisher was willing to issue such a controversial book, but it was translated into Spanish and widely distributed throughout Central and South America. Now it is being published for the first time in English, and it will prove invaluable to those who are closely following historical developments in that very volatile part of the world. Gregorio Selser, the well-known Mexican journalist, introduces each chapter with notes bringing the history of the countries covered up to date and tracing the changes that have taken place. An essential background work.