The United States and the Latin American nations have been linked geographically since colonial times, and in the late-eighteenth century, U.S. merchants began trading with Spain's New World colonies. During this period, Latin American revolutionaries increasingly looked to the United States as a political model, a successful example of a colony throwing off the yoke of the European power and establishing a republic. Despite strong pressures from some U.S. leaders such as Henry Clay, who supported the Latin American revolutions, many Americans looked southward with apprehension, fearful of upsetting the Spanish, from whom they wanted Florida. Nevertheless, with some U.S. support, almost all of the Latin American republics won their independence by the middle of the 1820s.
The first major U.S. pronouncement regarding the Western Hemisphere and Latin American nations came in 1823. British officials approached U.S. diplomats about issuing a joint declaration that would deliver a warning to European powers conspiring with the Spanish crown to reimpose Madrid's control over Latin American nations. Instead, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams pushed President James Monroe to issue a unilateral statement (see Monroe Doctrine). The two-part document argued that the Europeans could no longer colonize the New World or seek to reimpose their rule. It also stated that a European nation could not transfer an existing colony to another European nation. While the British navy was the real force preventing the Europeans from acting, the Monroe Doctrine became the cornerstone of U.S. actions in Latin America for more than a century.
Initially, efforts to cooperate against foreign incursions failed. The Latin American nations unsuccessfully sought U.S. assistance against foreign interventions, principally the Falklands/Malvinas crisis in Argentina in 1831 and the Baker's War in Mexico in 1838. Most of the exchanges that occurred were economic. While the British remained the dominant economic power in the region, U.S. merchants and bankers made significant inroads. Brazilian coffee, Cuban sugar, and Mexican mining materials flowed northward while U.S. finished and agricultural goods flowed southward. The two regions became increasingly interdependent.
Over time, tensions developed between the United States and the Latin American nations over U.S. territorial expansion. The primary target of U.S. intentions was Mexico. In 1835, Americans living in Texas overthrew Mexican control and established a republic. In 1846, following the U.S. annexation of Texas, a war erupted over boundary disputes (see Mexican-American War). The United States defeated Mexico. In the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, the United States took more than one-third of Mexico's territory, including California, which provoked anger in Latin America and fears of territorial dismemberment.
The efforts of individual Americans in the 1850s further caused problems. Filibusters such as General Narciso López and William Walker tried to annex new lands including Cuba and Nicaragua. They ultimately met their deaths, but the perception of Americans as land-and power-hungry became the common stereotype among Latin Americans. Some positive relations developed during the 1860s. The United States finally recognized the republic of Haiti once Southern congressmen left during the U.S. Civil War. More important, Washington pressured Napoleon III to withdraw his troops from Mexico. Ultimately Benito Juárez's forces expelled the French and executed Emperor Ferdinand Maximilian in 1867.
In the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War, the focus returned in both regions to internal development. As U.S. industrial might grew, American entrepreneurs and bankers spread throughout Latin America looking for investment opportunities. These included men such as Minor Keith, who established the forerunner of the United Fruit Company in Central America, and W. R. Grace, involved in mining in Chile. With the assistance of compliant Latin American elites who provided optimal investment and labor conditions, U.S. businessmen became the most important foreigners in Latin America by the end of World War I.
As economic investment increased, so did U.S. government efforts to create a favorable business environment in Latin America. In October 1889, President Benjamin Harrison and Secretary of State James G. Blaine invited the Latin American republics to Washington, D.C., for a conference. Blaine presided over the meetings, which included discussion of reduced tariffs, the arbitration of disputes, and the construction of a Pan American railroad. Remembering past U.S. transgressions, Latin Americans suspiciously questioned American motives. The conference's only major accomplishment was the establishment of the Commercial Bureau of the American Republics (forerunner of the Pan American Union) to collect and distribute economic and technical information. Still, the Washington conference established a precedent that eventually implemented many of the ideas of Blaine and others regarding the hemisphere.
In the aftermath of the Washington conference, the United States began flexing its newfound strength, developed as a result of rapid industrialization and the building of a modern navy. In 1891, its navy had a showdown with Chile over a riot involving U.S. sailors on leave and then influenced the outcome of a rebellion in Brazil in 1893. Two years later, Washington forced London to negotiate with Venezuela a disputed boundary along the Orinoco River.
The most significant event of the 1890s was the U.S. intervention in Cuba. In 1895, the Cubans rose in revolt against the Spanish under the leadership of José Martí and General Máximo Gómez. The vicious fighting and sensationalistic reporting in the United States raised American concerns about the rebellion. In 1898, President William McKinley asked for a declaration of war following the publication of a private letter written by the Spanish minister in Washington, Enrique Dupuy de Lôme, that made derogatory comments about the U.S. president, and the sinking of the battleship Maine, which exploded in Havana harbor.
The war went well for the United States and produced victory in a short time (see Spanish-American War). The United States took possession of Puerto Rico and control of Cuba. Ultimately U.S. troops withdrew from Cuba in 1902, but only after imposing the Platt Amendment, which effectively gave the United States control over an independent Cuba. It prohibited the Cuban government from entering into treaties with foreign nations, provided for U.S. military bases, and conceded Washington the right to intervene in Cuban affairs to preserve stability.
The victory in the Spanish-American War cemented U.S. hegemony over the Caribbean. In the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, the United States exercised what he called a "big stick." In 1903, he helped the Panamanians win independence from Colombia and won the United States the right to build and control the Panama Canal (completed in 1914). U.S. troops intervened in the Dominican Republic (1904) and Cuba (1906), following the issuing of the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine that granted the United States the right to intervene in periods of crisis to maintain order and stability and prevent European intervention. In the eyes of many Latin Americans, such paternalism made the United States as repressive as the Europeans.
The situation did not improve as Roosevelt's successors intervened in Latin America. President William Howard Taft (1909–1913) practiced "Dollar Diplomacy" and Woodrow Wilson (1913–1921) promised greater respect for democratic principles in relations with Latin America, but his rhetoric failed to match his actions. During Wilson's term, U.S. troops occupied the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, and Nicaragua. U.S. threats against other nations led many Latin Americans to denounce the United States for violating basic ideas of democracy, self-determination, and international law. Mexico's constitution of 1917 reflected a growing anti-Americanism by limiting U.S. ownership of lands and protecting the rights of its workers.
Despite Latin American disillusionment with the United States, World War I ensured more hemispheric interdependence. Great Britain, France, and Germany lost substantial ground during the conflict. More American entrepreneurs flooded into Latin America looking for investment opportunities, despite efforts by Latin American nationalists to stem the tide through industrialization and the development of internal markets. In addition, American culture, especially popular culture, became a fixture in Latin America. American movies and music increasingly became popular with Latin Americans. Similarly, Latin Americans increasingly influenced American culture.
The United States continued to play a significant role in Latin American politics in the 1920s. While U.S. troops remained in Haiti and Nicaragua, they were withdrawn from the Dominican Republic in 1924, but not before putting in place the machinery for the rise of the dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina (who ruled until 1961). In 1929, President Herbert Hoover finally began to withdraw troops from Nicaragua and Haiti. In the case of the former, the United States left in place a National Guard under the control of Anastasio Somoza García, who established a family dictatorship that ruled until 1979.
President Hoover set in motion the events that led to the rise of the Good Neighbor Policy proclaimed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. In his inaugural address, he called for a Latin American policy based on the "good neighbor" that respects the rights of other nations and in turn receives the respect of those nations. Soon after, at the Seventh International Conference of American States meeting in Montevideo, Uruguay, Secretary of State Cordell Hull backed a resolution disavowing intervention in the internal affairs of other nations. The administration followed its words with deeds, refusing to directly intervene in Cuba in 1933, although the ultimate result was the establishment of the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.
U.S. efforts to create better relations paid significant dividends during World War II. With the exception of Argentina, whose leaders harbored strong profascist sympathies, Latin American nations wholeheartedly supported the Allied war effort. Mexico and Brazil sent troops to fight, and the others provided valuable natural resources. At the end of the war, the majority of these countries helped create the United Nations in 1945.
With the death of Roosevelt and his replacement by Harry Truman, U.S. policy began to change. While Latin Americans clamored for economic assistance such as Washington was providing to Europe, U.S. policy-makers focused more on creating a solid defensive front against a perceived Soviet threat. At the Rio conference in August 1947, American and Latin American delegates created a regional security organization. The Rio Pact provided that an attack on any nation in the Western
Hemisphere by another state, including other regional states, would prompt action by all signatories.
A year later, the nations convened in Bogotá, Colombia, and created the Organization of American States (OAS). It established an administration for hemispheric consultation and the Advisory Defense Committee to coordinate military activities. Over U.S. objections, the Latin Americans voted for several articles that reflected a fear of a return to old ways. Articles 15 and 16 of the charter prohibited intervention—including economic and diplomatic coercion—into the affairs of other signatory nations.
Despite such pronouncements, the United States grew increasingly apprehensive about possible communist takeovers in Latin America, especially after the fall of China and Soviet explosion of the atomic bomb in 1949, and the Korean conflict that began in 1950. When President Dwight Eisenhower took over in 1953, the United States moved closer to Latin American dictators including Somoza, Trujillo, Batista, and Venezuela's Marcos Pérez Jiménez. Many U.S. officials believed that these dictators provided stability and a welcoming climate for U.S. investors.
The Eisenhower administration faced a dilemma in Guatemala, where nationalists had been in power since 1944. Fears of communist influence increased, especially after the government of Jacobo Arbenz nationalized properties held by the powerful United Fruit Company. The company had powerful friends in the White House including Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Soon the administration instructed the Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow the Arbenz government. In June 1954, a mercenary air force and Guatemalan exile army successfully replaced Arbenz with a dictatorship dominated by Carlos Castillo Armas. The event created a great deal of hostility toward the United States throughout the region.
Two events caused the Eisenhower administration to intensify its focus on Latin America. Visiting Peru and Venezuela in 1958, Vice President Richard Nixon encountered angry crowds upset over U.S. support of dictators in their countries. (In Caracas, he barely escaped from one group.) In addition, in early 1959, Fidel Castro overthrew the Batista government in Cuba and established a socialist state aligned with the Soviet Union, the first in the Western Hemisphere. In the wake of these events more U.S. economic assistance began to flow into Latin America in an attempt to assuage the anger and resentment.
The administration of John F. Kennedy continued the change in orientation started by the Eisenhower administration. In 1961, Kennedy inaugurated the Alliance for Progress to pump billions of dollars in public and private investment into Latin America. Determined to attack poverty, illiteracy, and social injustice, the administration wanted to improve living conditions for the majority of Latin Americans and thereby undermine their anti-Americanism and support for Castro or other communist insurgents. Peace Corps assistance and massive military spending also flowed into the region.
With Kennedy's death, Lyndon B. Johnson continued some of Kennedy's programs in Latin America, although he shifted attention primarily to Vietnam and domestic programs. In 1965, Johnson ordered U.S. troops into the Dominican Republic to stabilize a situation in which U.S. policymakers believed that a Castro-style government was about to be established. OAS cooperation with the effort undermined its credibility (because the OAS was perceived as unquestioningly following the United States) and led to hostile denunciations in all quarters.
U.S.–Latin American relations continued to deteriorate under President Richard Nixon. He and his primary foreign policy adviser, Henry Kissinger, did not want to devote much time to Latin America. Nevertheless, the CIA helped overthrow the democratically elected government of Chilean president Salvadoran Allende, whose nationalist-socialist policies alarmed U.S. officials. Military conspirators led by General Augusto Pinochet murdered Allende and more than ten thousand others in a coup in September 1973. The action severely damaged U.S.–Latin American relations.
Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, had little interest in the region, as attention remained focused on Southeast Asia and the Middle East. The OPEC crisis, and the role Venezuela and Mexico played in the oil shortage by taking advantage of the increase in prices, brought some attention to the region, but not a great deal. By this period, U.S.–Latin American relations had reached a very low point.
When Jimmy Carter took office in 1977, he promised a new U.S. foreign policy that would focus on human rights and reject cooperation with military dictatorships. Immediately Carter helped establish the position of assistant secretary of state for human rights. Washington began to put economic and diplomatic pressure on countries with records of human rights abuses, including Argentina, Nicaragua, and El Salvador.
Carter also focused on reorienting U.S. policy toward Latin America so as to create more favorable perceptions of the United States. This included negotiating the Panama Canal Treaty that returned sovereignty to Panama by 2000. Washington also tried to improve relations with Cuba. It eased travel restrictions and the two countries opened preliminary talks on normalization of relations.
By the second half of his administration, Carter found himself drifting back toward the policies of his predecessors. The efforts at reconciliation with Cuba deteriorated over Cuba's interventions in Africa. When Washington criticized Cuba's human rights record, Castro allowed a massive exodus of Cubans to the United States. In Nicaragua, after having criticized the Somoza dictatorship, the Carter administration tried unsuccessfully to prevent a Sandinista victory. It found itself in a similar situation in El Salvador. In its efforts on human rights, it backed off from criticizing the dictatorships and applied pressure inconsistently. By the time Carter left office, his policies were much like the old versions of U.S. responses.
Carter's successor, Ronald Reagan, never tried to change U.S. policy. He and his advisers, including Jeane Kirkpatrick, criticized Carter's human rights policy, calling it impractical. As a result, the United States closed ranks with such men as Pinochet and Manuel Noriega in Panama. It also began a massive effort to undermine revolutions in Nicaragua and El Salvador. In the former, financing of the right-wing Nicaraguan contra rebels became a major debate in the United States. While Reagan called them the equivalent of the American founding fathers, opponents criticized their tactics and ties to the Somoza dictatorship.
The Reagan administration's strong anticommunist crusade led to some experiments such as the Caribbean Basin Initiative to address economic problems, but most of its efforts focused on covert and military operations to prevent the spread of communism in the region. In 1983, the United States invaded Grenada to stop the construction of an airport that it feared would endanger strategic shipping lines. It continued to funnel money to the contras, even after a congressional prohibition, resulting in the Iran-Contra Affair.
As Reagan left office and George H. W. Bush took over in 1989, conditions in Latin America began to change. In Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Central America, the military governments began to surrender control to civilians. The Bush administration supported these initiatives as well as those designed to end years of state control of industries and utilities and to promote a free-market model. The high point of the Bush administration's efforts was the negotiation and signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1992. Bush also increasingly focused on the Latin American drug trade. In 1989, U.S. troops invaded Panama and removed Noriega for his role in facilitating the drug trade.
Bush left office before the final Senate approval of NAFTA. His successor, Bill Clinton, pushed the treaty through Congress despite dogged opposition from labor unions and environmentalists. The administration also pushed the open market model and dealt with a crisis in Haiti in 1994 when Washington forced out General Raoul Cédras and his allies and installed the legally elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
During the Clinton administration, most Americans shifted their attention from security issues to those of the drug trade, immigration, and the environment, including the signing of the Kyoto Protocols designed to reduce greenhouse gases. While problems erupted over Cuba regarding illegal immigration and the downing of a Cuban exile plane in 1994, leading to passage of the Helms-Burton Act (1996) that tightened U.S. trade and exchanges with the island, the Clinton administration devoted relatively little attention to the region.
At the turn of the twentieth century, it appeared that similar cycles would continue, with periodic outbursts of U.S. interest and conflict in Latin America followed by periods in which policymakers focus on other regions or on domestic issues.
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