Since the enunciation of the Monroe Doctrine (1823), U.S. policy towards the countries to the south has reflected the tensions between a self‐interested appraisal of North American economic and military interests and an idealistic declaration of commitment to democracy. As the Monroe Doctrine indicates, the United States has viewed the New World as superior to the Old World, and the United States itself as the leader and protector of the Western Hemisphere. Yet the ideas of a common moral, political, and economic superiority in the New World and U.S. responsibility for the region have often produced impatience with the pace and direction of development in the Caribbean and Latin America. When impatience led to U.S. military intervention, the use of force was sometimes aimed at advancing the economic interests or national security of the United States and sometimes directed at keeping European influence out of the region.
As part of its expansionism, the United States government caused the Mexican War (1846–1848) and annexed the northern third of Mexico. In the middle of the nineteenth century, adventurers or “filibusters” like William Walker led privately armed groups into Nicaragua and other Central American and Caribbean countries with the hope of luring the United States government into annexing them. They were blocked, however, by local resistance as well as northern opposition to the expansion of the slave South before the Civil War.
For most of the nineteenth century, the United States viewed the newly independent Latin American countries as struggling underdeveloped nations. Projecting their own biases, North Americans believed that this economic underdevelopment was a result of what they considered to be racial inferiority, enervating tropical climate, and a restrictive Spanish cultural heritage in Latin America.
Although there were a few incidents that might have served as pretexts for war, such as the Chilean Crisis (1891) and the Venezuelan Crisis (1895), it was not until 1898 that the United States joined the European race for formal colonies. As a result of the Spanish‐American‐Cuban War (1898) and the Philippine War (1899–1902), the United States conquered and annexed the former Spanish colonies of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. It also made Cuba a protectorate, administering it directly through U.S. military governors from 1898 to 1902.
It was not primarily through formal colonies, however, but through economic, cultural, and strategic influence backed up when deemed necessary by military force that the United States exercised its hegemony in the region. President Theodore Roosevelt encouraged and protected the Panamanian revolt against Colombia with a U.S. warship. With the construction of the Panama Canal (1904–14), the Caribbean and Central America came to be seen as vital to U.S. national security. The U.S. Army directly governed the U.S. Canal Zone. The goal of U.S. hegemony had been announced in the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (1904), authorizing U.S. intervention ostensibly to prevent European intervention. The Panama Canal and Roosevelt's doctrine provided the reason and the rationale for the United States's “protectorate policy” toward the region. On nearly twenty occasions in the first three decades of the twentieth century, U.S. presidents sent troops into Caribbean and Central American countries, most often the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Mexico. Historians differ over whether the primary motive of Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson was to make the area safe for U.S. business, preclude European competition and intervention, or to maintain stability to protect U.S. strategic interests.
In the first half of the twentieth century, North Americans came to believe that economic underdevelopment in Latin America was less a result of indigenous factors than exploitative control of agriculture, mining, and transportation by European nations. This attitude and World War I helped North Americans replace Europeans as the major investors in the region. After the war, as the United States reduced its military role overseas, the Marines were withdrawn from the Caribbean basin, but they often left behind a U.S.‐trained national guard to help maintain order and governments favorable to the United States. In his Good Neighbor policy, announced in 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt formally ended the “protectorate policy” and accepted the principle of nonintervention. His emphasis on mutual respect built on reciprocal trade agreements helped to build a healthy new relationship that produced hemispheric solidarity against Germany and Japan in World War II.
The United States leadership continued after World War II through new organizations. These included global institutions such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, and the United Nations. They also included strictly regional bodies and agreements, most importantly the
During the Cold War, from 1947 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, U.S. national security policy toward Latin America was directed against the spread of communism. At the Caracas meeting in 1954, a majority of the OAS foreign ministers supported a U.S. res olu‐tion declaring communism incompatible with the inter‐American system. President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized a covert action program run by the Central Intelligence Agency, which later that year overthrew the leftist, Guatemalan democratic regime of President Jacobo Arbenz, whose land reform had threatened the United Fruit Company and who was believed to be closely associated with communists. With the support of Eisenhower and his successor, President John F. Kennedy, the CIA developed a plan to overthrow Fidel Castro, who had led a successful takeover in Cuba in 1959 and had then launched a sweeping socialist revolution under his own rule with increasingly close ties with the Soviet Union. The CIA‐sponsored invasion by Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 proved a disastrous failure.
As a result of the Soviet‐Cuban threat of expanding communism in the Western Hemisphere, the United States developed major economic and security measures. The Alliance for Progress was designed to promote economic development and democracy (the “modernization” theory that undergirded it was, however, criticized by many Latin Americans as controlled “dependency”). Although it stimulated some economic development, it did not promote either democracy or social reform. The United States also engaged in increased anti‐communist military activities.
In the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962–63), triggered by the Soviet introduction of nuclear weapons to the island, Kennedy imposed a successful naval blockade of Cuba, and the missiles were withdrawn in exchange for a U.S. pledge not to invade. Although ending the blockade, the United States continued to use some covert means but primarily economic embargos to undermine Castro, who, nevertheless, continued to rule one of the few remaining communist nations at the end of the century.
During the Cold War, fear of communism had led to considerable U.S. military involvement in the region. In part this involved the training of Latin American military officers in counterinsurgency techniques at schools on U.S. Army installations in the Panama Canal Zone and in the United States. Sometimes it involved direct use of U.S. forces, as in 1966, when President Lyndon B. Johnson sent troops into the Dominican Republic, fearing, inaccurately most scholars agree, that instability there might lead to a communist takeover. Sometimes it was CIA activity rather than direct U.S. military involvement, as in 1973, when President Richard M. Nixon authorized covert operations to help topple the Marxist president of Chile, Salvador Allende Gossens, who was overthrown by Gen. Augusto Pinochet in a bloody coup. Emphasizing human rights, President Jimmy Carter reduced aid to authoritarian governments such as those in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile and refused to use military force to defend the Somoza regime in Nicaragua against leftist rebels. Following Panamanian riots, Carter also negotiated the treaties (1978) transferring control of the U.S.‐built and ‐defended canal to Panama in 2000.
In 1979–80, leftist revolutions in Nicaragua, Grenada, and El Salvador raised the possibility of expanded communist influence and led to increased U.S. military involvement. President Ronald Reagan built up the U.S. armed forces and often threatened force, but although he provided Army advisers and military and economic assistance to hard‐line, anti‐communists in Nicaragua and El Salvador, he sent troops into battle in the region only once, in the liberation of the island of Grenada in 1983 following a left‐wing coup there.
The end of the Cold War enabled President George Bush to depoliticize the North American perceptions of threats to U.S. security in Nicaragua and El Salvador and to join with other nations in negotiating peace and free elections there. He and his successor President Bill Clinton reduced Latin American debt and encouraged trade liberalization through the creation of a North American Free Trade Agreement (1993) among the United States, Canada, and Mexico. However, direct U.S. military force was used by Bush in 1989 to capture Panamanian strongman General Manuel Noriega, who was connected with Colombian drug traffickers. In 1994, Clinton dispatched U.S. troops to overthrow the military junta which had overthrown the president of Haiti, but a last‐minute settlement led U.S. forces to arrive as transition peacekeepers rather than an invading force.
At the end of the twentieth century, although the U.S. provided aid against leftist guerrillas in Colombia, the main involvement of the U.S. military in Caribbean and Latin American countries focused on a relatively new role for the armed forces: trying to prevent the flow of illegal drugs into the United States. This mission was performed directly through the protection of U.S. borders and approaching air corridors and indirectly through the provision of U.S. equipment and military advisers to countries believed to be sources or transit routes for illegal drugs bound for the United States.
[See also Cuba: U.S. Military Involvement in; Cuban Missile Crisis (1962–1963); El Salvador, U.S. Military Involvement in; Grenada, U.S. Military Involvement in; Haiti, U.S. Military Involvement in; Iran‐Contra Affair (1986); Mexican Revolution, U.S. Military Involvement in the; Nicaragua, U.S. Military Involvement in; Panama, U.S. Military Involvement in.]
Bibliography
- J. Child, Unequal Balance: The Inter‐American Military System, 1938–1978, 1980
- Cole Blasier, The Hovering Giant: U.S. Responses to Revolutionary Change in Latin America, 1910–1985, 1985
- David Healy, Drive to Hegemony: The United States in the Caribbean, 1898–1917, 1988
- Robert A. Pastor, Whirlpool: U.S. Foreign Policy Toward Latin America and the Caribbean, 1992
- Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions,
2nd ed. , 1993 - John A. Britton, Revolution and Ideology: Images of the Mexican Revolution in the United States, 1995; and James William Park, Latin American Underdevelopment: A History of Perspectives in the United States, 1870–1965, 1995
