Latin America-u.s. Relations

The histories of the United States and Latin America are intimately related. Consider both that St. Augustine (the oldest city in the United States), Pensacola, New Orleans, San Antonio, Santa Fe, and many others were once Spanish towns and that citizens of Hispanic background now form the second largest minority in the United States. The relationship has been accompanied by cultural and demographic exchanges that have profoundly influenced all of its participants.

British colonization after 1607 was part of a "grand design" to wrest all the New World realms from Spain. The British soon converted their Caribbean colonies into sugar plantations worked by African slaves. The North American colonies were of less economic significance to this mercantilist development, participating mainly as suppliers of foodstuffs and lumber to the Caribbean and as its competitors in the production of cotton and tobacco. Continental militia, sharing the same goals as the British, took part in wars with Spain. One of the benefits was the conquest of Spanish Florida in 1763, resolving years of border struggles with Georgia.

But when the British continental colonies declared independence, it was with Spanish aid, and independence inspired Spanish colonials to revolt later. There were several uprisings, largely fueled by resentment over taxes levied to pay for Caribbean defense. The desire of Spanish colonial elites to separate was attenuated, however, when the 1791 Haitian Revolution was captured by its slaves. The loss of the strategic Haitian ports forced Napoleon Bonaparte to sell Louisiana for a trifle to the United States. The Americans, far from acknowledging their Haitian benefactors, joined the other slave powers in refusing to recognize Haitian independence.

Other independence movements broke out in the South American colonies soon after Napoleon invaded Spain in 1807. The United States did not recognize these insurgencies, much less offer them aid. It was becoming evident that these aristocratic "revolutionaries" were still less democratic than the monarchies of Europe. But opportunism was also at work: the United States did not want to endanger negotiations with Spain to acquire Florida (which that country had regained from Great Britain in the peace of 1783) and to draw a western boundary that would strengthen U.S. claims to Oregon. Only in 1823, when Latin American independence was already assured, did President James Monroe threaten sanctions should European powers attempt to recolonize. This "Monroe Doctrine" was also designed to discourage Russian expansion in the Pacific Northwest. In effect the declaration of a sphere of influence, it avoided challenging the legitimacy of remaining European colonies and renounced intervention in European affairs.

The Spanish viceroyalties soon broke up into small, weak, and often quarreling states (there were sixteen by 1839), and Portuguese Brazil became a unified empire under a Portuguese prince. Simon Bolivar, the most important independence leader, failed to form a regional organization at a congress he gathered at Panama in 1826. This suited the United States: it saw an advantage in Latin American fragmentation and pressed on these states most favored nation treaties whose intent was to forestall a common market among them.

America's belief in its "manifest destiny" resulted in the 1840s in the annexation of Texas and the defeat of Mexico and the absorption of half its territory in the Mexican War. In Central America, the United States achieved by midcentury an agreement with Great Britain that amounted to a joint sphere of influence. From Colombia it obtained the right to build a railroad across the isthmus of Panama (then part of Colombia). Private expeditions attempted to overthrow governments in Nicaragua and Cuba, a naval expedition was dispatched to landlocked Paraguay but was prevented from sailing upriver by Argentina, and a scientific expedition was sent down the Amazon to scout its potential for settling Virginia planters and their slaves.

Civil War in the United States offered European powers an opportunity to attempt recolonization. In 1863, Napoleon III, urged on by Mexican conservatives, enthroned a European prince in that country. But harried by the forces of the legitimate government under Benito Juárez and uneasy at the prospect of assistance from the northern army after the defeat of the Confederacy, Napoleon allowed his puppet to fall by 1867. Meanwhile, the Dominican Republic, fearing invasion by Haitian armies, invited the Spanish to reestablish colonial rule, but after a few years of mismanagement, expelled them again. A group of speculators close to President Ulysses S. Grant nearly persuaded the Senate to annex the Dominican Republic, failing by one vote.

Economic development in the United States magnified its power relative to the rest of the hemisphere. By 1880 its population was greater than all of Latin America's. Trade increased and stimulated a flow of capital. Latin America became a major source of foodstuffs and industrial raw materials and an important outlet for American goods--kerosene, lumber, grain, ice, and coal--and for manufactures such as barbed wire, sewing machines, rifles, windmills, and locomotives. American entrepreneurs went to the southern continent to build railroads, buy plantations, and open trading houses. The first multinational companies--United Fruit, Standard Oil, and W. R. Grace among them--invested there. In the 1880s, a modest statistical and cultural exchange bureau, the Pan-American Union, was created.

Cubans began fighting for independence in 1868. The United States had earlier considered annexing the island, but usually it supported Spanish control, lest its slaves rebel or the island fall under the influence of the British. In 1898, however, when Spain already wanted to abandon its colony, the United States intervened in behalf of the revolutionaries. The pretext was the mysterious blowing up of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor, but the impulse for war with Spain was broad and deep, fanned by newspaper accounts of Spanish atrocities and by a desire to emulate the European imperialist powers. Spain was easily defeated. The U.S. Congress had sworn to respect Cuban independence, but the insurgent government was barred from the peace conference and Cuba was subjected to military occupation. Spain turned over Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, which joined Hawaii and Samoa as U.S. colonies. Cuban legislators meeting to draft a constitution were given to understand that the U.S. Army would not withdraw until they ratified the Platt Amendment, which granted the United States the right to intervene and to build naval bases there.

In 1903, Panamanian businessmen, chafing against control by the strife-ridden central government of Colombia, and with U.S. naval support, declared independence. A treaty allowing the United States to build and operate a canal across the isthmus was hurriedly negotiated. The treaty and subsequent arrangements reduced Panama to the status of a protectorate, provided a windfall for investors in the rights of the earlier canal company, and incurred the enmity of Colombia. But the canal, completed in 1914 with West Indian labor, demonstrated U.S. engineering prowess and was strategically and commercially vital. Control of its sea approaches was a major reason for U.S. military occupations, for varying periods over the next two decades, of Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Haiti. Anxieties over imperialist competition also led the United States to purchase the Virgin Islands from Denmark and grant U.S. citizenship to Puerto Ricans.

The United States was much involved in the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910. American investments had weakened the dictator Porfirio Diaz. Rebels were funded by Texan capitalists seeking advantage, as Diaz had been when he had come to power in 1876. The revolution, fueled by resentment of foreign influences, became even more xenophobic when, in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson ordered the capture of the port of Veracruz in a bungled attempt to make amends for U.S. complicity in the assassination of the elected president. In 1916, an unsuccessful expedition to capture Pancho Villa, a general who had raided Columbus, New Mexico, further incurred Mexican resentment.

World War I ruined European trade and investment in Latin America and correspondingly favored the United States, whose manufactures flooded the region. American multinational companies now produced petroleum and other raw materials there, and U.S. bankers became Latin America's principal creditors. This preeminence made it easier for the United States to abandon military occupations in the region. Nonintervention, the keystone of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy, was in fact extracted from U.S. delegates at a Pan-American meeting in 1933 by the Latin Americans, who feared a new intervention in Cuba. (Nevertheless, the United States did encourage Gen. Fulgencio Batista to overthrow the Cuban government.)

As World War II became imminent, the Roosevelt administration sought broader cooperation with Latin America, fearing the consequences of a hostile continent on its southern flank. Thus, when Mexico expropriated foreign oil companies in 1938, an amicable settlement was arranged. The United States aligned the Latin American governments in behalf of its war aims, even though most of them were at the time ruled by generals who admired European fascism. After Pearl Harbor the U.S. military discouraged Latin American armed participation, but Brazil sent an infantry division to Italy, Mexico dispatched an air squadron to the Pacific, and naval units of various Latin American countries saw action. Soon after the war the United States persuaded them to sign mutual defense treaties and to participate in the Organization of American States, a regional organization under the United Nations based in Washington and funded largely by the United States.

By war's end, the military had abandoned power in most of Latin America, partly under pressure from the United States, which would have been embarrassed at the presence of fascist-inspired clients at the founding of the United Nations. But postwar U.S. policy disappointed Latin Americans. The Marshall Plan funded European reconstruction, and a new global economic structure restored the monetary and financial strength of the industrial powers, but ignored Latin America. The special relationship implied by the Good Neighbor policy and the Pan-American war propaganda were abandoned. The United States turned aside free trade overtures and saw the Latin Americans merely as suppliers of raw materials and tropical foodstuffs. The largest of these countries therefore undertook to restrict imports and to subsidize domestic industries. One result of these measures was to draw foreign companies to invest in Latin America, thereby paradoxically increasing friction with the United States as control of these economies appeared to escape even more rapidly from the hands of their citizens.

The United States, preoccupied with the cold war, worried that the region, suffering from poverty and a severe maldistribution of wealth, might fall to communism. To avert such a possibility in Guatemala, the cia intervened there secretly in 1954. When Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba in 1959 and installed a government backed by the Soviet Union, the United States tried to subvert the revolution, culminating in the unsuccessful Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban exiles in 1961. The following year Castro allowed the Soviets to install missiles to defend the island from continuing U.S. threats. In the consequent confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States, the missiles were removed, but Cuba continued to receive Soviet economic and military assistance and served as an inspiration to radical movements all over Latin America. The United States reacted by greatly increasing loans and technical assistance through the Alliance for Progress program and by subsidizing secret police and armies throughout the region. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the invasion of the Dominican Republic on slender evidence of communist penetration. Elsewhere, elites, fearing communist revolutions, allowed civilian governments to be taken over by the military.

The brutal methods of these regimes largely succeeded in crushing subversion. Washington's preoccupation with the region thereupon declined, except for Nicaragua and Grenada where leftist movements had come to power. In 1982, the United States invaded tiny Grenada, and Nicaragua was subjected to harassment by U.S.-funded guerrillas based in Honduras. The Salvadoran army, under siege by Marxist guerrillas since 1979, was provided with arms.

Latin America was stunned by the oil price rises of the 1970s and a subsequent decline in foreign investment. Government-owned sectors were expanded to take up the slack, borrowing the necessary capital from international banks. Their expenditures, however, were largely ill advised or corrupt, and the result was immense foreign debts that by 1980 were unpayable. At that point most of the military governments resigned in disgrace, restoring power to hapless civilians. Although these debts were the main reason for a decline in U.S. trade and investment in the region and the greatest threat to democracy there, the United States did little to deal with the problem.

Nontraditional issues, notably massive illegal immigration to the United States, the drug trade, and environmental degradation, none of which appeared manageable, complicated relations. The bonds with Latin America nevertheless became closer as the cultural and political presence of Americans of Latin American descent grew. Meanwhile, as the United States found itself less competitive in foreign markets, there was a return to discussion of a free trade area that might eventually encompass the hemisphere.

Bibliography:

Alonso Aguilar, Pan-Americanism from Monroe to the Present (1969); John J. Johnson, A Hemisphere Apart: Foundations of U.S. Policy toward Latin America (1990); Robert F. Smith, The United States and the Latin American Sphere of Influence (1981).

Author:

Warren Dean

Latin America-u.s. Relations

Tackle These

Keep Reading