Tunnel to Canto Grande:
The Story of the Most Daring
Prison Escape in Latin American
History by Claribel Alegria and Darwin Flakoll, Curbstone Press, 1996, 193 pp., $12.95 (paper).
On July 9, 1990, 48 political prison-
ers from the Ttipac Amaru Revo-
lutionary Movement (MRTA)–
including the group’s leader Victor
Polay Campo-escaped from the
Canto Grande penitentiary through
a 330-yard tunnel that their com-
paheros on the outside had dug into
the prison compound. Six weeks
after the escape, Nicaraguan poet
Claribel Alegrfa and her husband
Darwin Flakoll spent a week with
the guerrillas in a secret safe house.
They came away with 55 hours of
tape, which they cobbled together
into this fast-paced, insider’s
account of the escapade.
The escape was quite a feat. The
MRTA bought a plot of vacant land
on the outskirts of the prison, built a
house on it, and then began the
Herculean task of excavating a tun-
nel through the boulder-strewn,
compacted earth. The tunnel was
not a primitive rabbit hole; it had a
ventilation system, lighting, and a
stuccoed roof and timber frame to
prevent cave-ins. A team of dig-
gers–15 at its peak-took almost
three years to accomplish the task.
The flip side of the story concerns
how the prisoners-including Polay
in the maximum-security pavilion–
could so easily elude their captors
once the tunnel broke through the
surface. The authors detail how the
tight security procedures which had
been followed when Canto Grande
first opened in 1986 unravelled as a
result of budget constraints, over-
crowding and corruption.
Alegria and Flakoll are unapolo-
getically sympathetic to the MRTA.
At times, their earnestness gives a
schmaltzy quality to the story that
can be off-putting. Nonetheless, the
book is a gripping pageturner replete
with close calls, personal conflicts,
and a dramatic denouement.
America/Ambricas: Myth in the
Making of U.S. Policy Toward
Latin America by Eldon Kenworthy, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995, 189 pp., $35.00 (cloth), $14.95 (paper).
In this fascinating study, Eldon
Kenworthy uses a highly original
and effective mixture of approaches
to provide fresh insights into the
forces that shape U.S.-Latin
American relations. Focusing on the
“founding” myths that have always
underpinned the assertion of U.S.
hegemony in the hemisphere,
Kenworthy looks at four recurrent
ideas that form the basis of what he
considers to be the “America/
Americas Myth.”
The first of these ideas, ignoring
all evidence of indigenous culture,
is that the western hemisphere was a
blank slate on which God wrote a
page of human history with
Europeans as central protagonists.
The second is that “freedom” and
“progress” and, more recently,
“democracy” are linked to advances
in material well-being, and are all
outcomes of the heroic intervention
of these European actors and their
descendents. The third idea is that
the civilizing project began and still
excels in the United States and that
the country must, therefore, be the
vanguard of the region, and by
extension, of the entire world. The
last concept-a negative one-is
that the advances in civilization
brought about under U.S. leadership
necessarily provoke the emnity of
the old world, which may endanger
the hemisphere’s security.
Having set out the elements cen-
tral to the construction of the myth,
Kenworthy goes on to demonstrate
how these ideas are promoted, sus-
tained and reinforced to the point
that they come to shape relations in
the hemisphere. To do this, he looks
at an intriguing array of sources
including political cartoons and
editorials in the mainstream media,
political speeches and press brief-
ings, State Department documents,
and congressional testimony. In
Kenworthy’s analysis, these
sources constitute a kind of “adver-
tising” that promotes U.S. foreign-
policy goals based on the four
founding elements of the myth. He
uses Reagan’s policy towards
Nicaragua to illustrate the role of
the myth in the formulation of poli-
cy. Thus, the heart of the book is
devoted to a case study focusing on
the efforts of the Reagan adminis-
tration to win support for the contra
war-both in Congress and among
the general population.
Kenworthy breaks new ground by
applying semiotics to explore the
hidden strategies, manipulation, and
control of public opinion that are
necessary to sustain U.S. hegemony
in Latin America. In a remarkable
achievement, Kenworthy manages
to make discourse theory-so often
presented by others in a manner
both arid and incomprehensible-at
once meaningful and accessible.
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