the Spanish. Moreover, the mountains hm-ited trade, and slash-md-burn farming ruined "millions of acres of arable land."

Woodward's is the most lucid all- round history of the region in English. Useful surveys include Robert C. West and John l? Augelli's Middle America: Its Lands and Peoples (Prentice-Hall, 1976) and Franklin D. Parker's Central American Republics (Oxford, 1964). Cornell's Walter LaFeber, in Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (Norton, 1984), a...