Lawrence Heilman's study adds to a growing literature on United States–Bolivia relations since the Second World War. Its uniqueness lies in the author's background as a long-time foreign service officer with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). That background indelibly shapes the narrative, contributing to both its strengths and its weaknesses.

The book's biggest virtue is its focused examination of US aid programmes in Bolivia since the 1940s. After the 1952 revolution the Eisenhower administration greatly expanded aid to the moderate reformist government of the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (Nationalist Revolutionary Movement, MNR), which it saw as a bulwark against the Left. Heilman provides many details about specific aid programmes of the 1950s, particularly those targeting the education, healthcare and agricultural sectors. That aid prefigured the continent-wide Alliance for Progress of the 1960s, which involved the creation of USAID in 1961. The story of the USAID mission in Bolivia occupies most of the book. To tell it Heilman relies on his own experience in USAID starting in 1967, interviews with other USAID officials and a trove of USAID documents. Some of the resulting details are original and valuable. For example, there are many helpful statistics on economic development and social welfare. The book also uses Bolivia as a case study ‘to describe the culture of a USAID Mission’ (p. 4). It illuminates much about the agency, including how aid officials understood their roles within US foreign policy and USAID's relation to other branches of the US government.

As a work of scholarship, however, the book leaves much to be desired. While Heilman makes extensive use of archival sources and secondary literature, specialists will notice some problems. Few Bolivian or non-English sources are cited, many important scholarly studies are neglected and the author relies mostly on US sources to assess US aid, its impacts and even Bolivian political history.

The author's ideological predispositions also lead him to dubious conclusions. One of Heilman's goals is to showcase USAID's ‘long list of significant accomplishments’, lest they remain ‘unsung’ (p. 234, book epigraph). At one point he refers to aid officials of the 1950s as ‘white knights’, with no indication of irony (p. 60). This celebratory view is tenable only if certain inconvenient facts are omitted. For instance, Heilman's reference to Guatemala in the 1950s fails to mention the 1954 CIA-backed military coup. His discussion of US food aid in the 1950s neglects the widespread Bolivian critique that the food imports undermined Bolivia's farm sector. The chapter on the Alliance for Progress implies that it sprang from genuine US good will, rather than from the need to prevent repetitions of the Cuban Revolution. For later decades, Heilman makes no mention of the US role in the murder of coca farmers or the subversive aims of Washington's ‘democracy and governance’ programmes in Bolivia, which have channelled millions of dollars to right-wing forces. He instead depicts President Evo Morales’ 2013 expulsion of USAID as unprovoked. He even minimises the massacre in 2003 by Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada's government of at least 64 protesters: after the protests allegedly turned violent, ‘the military, trying desperately to contain the demonstrators, retorted with small arms fire’; a ‘confused’ President Sánchez then resigned in order ‘[t]o avoid further bloodshed’ (p. 249).

Some of the book's most important revelations are unintentional. Heilman occasionally quotes, without comment, US officials speaking candidly about their efforts to undermine Bolivian self-determination. A mission director from the 1980s is quoted on the need for anti-drug operations to ‘substantially elevate the economic, physical and legal risk of growing coca’, a chilling statement given the many killings of coca farmers by the US Drug Enforcement Agency and its Bolivian allies (p. 183, emphasis added). An Obama-era directive refers to the role of USAID and the State Department in ‘elevating American “civilian power” to better advance our national interests and to be a better partner to the US military’ (p. 274). Such quotations cry out for analysis, yet pass unremarked.

Heilman is not uncritical of his government. In fact, one of his aims is to identify the problems with USAID programmes. But his critiques are limited to details: USAID's poor record-keeping, its overly grand ambitions, ‘its shortcomings in identifying and reporting accomplishments’ (p. 246). The overarching objectives of US policy and the power asymmetry between Washington and Bolivia are mostly ignored. Though the book's subtitle promises an examination of whether USAID was a ‘partner or boss’ in Bolivia, Heilman fails to examine power in any real way. His conception of the issue is narrowly focused on the ‘management style’ of USAID agents. Bolivians must ‘take the leadership role’ in ‘building Bolivian institutions’, says Heilman; US officials should resist the temptation to do everything for them (p. 81). Bolivian institutions themselves are not up for debate. Diverse Bolivians have clashed with Washington over that question, but their criticisms go virtually unmentioned.

Sociologist Karl Mannheim once distinguished between ‘functional’ and ‘substantial’ rationality (Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction, trans. Edward Shils (Routledge, 1940), pp. 52–60). Bureaucratic institutions may encourage independent thinking as long as it is functional to their objectives. The substance, however, is not to be questioned. Heilman seems an earnest humanitarian and a critical analyst of US policies in Bolivia. But his critiques remain within the bounds of functional rationality, neglecting the more substantial matters implied in the book's subtitle. His perspective suggests, albeit unwittingly, how individual bureaucrats can have sincere intentions yet never question the larger goals of their institutions.

USAID in Bolivia is ultimately more valuable as a window onto the institutional and ideological workings of USAID than as a study of Bolivia or the United States–Bolivia relationship. The book succeeds in ‘describing the culture’ of USAID. Much of the description is just inadvertent.