Asymmetry in U.S.–Latin American Security Relations
by Philip Brenner, Louis W. Goodman and Samlanchith Chanthavong
Brenner, Goodman and Chanthavong – Page 1
ABSTRACT
U.S. Latin-American relations have long been governed by the asymmetry in power and
wealth between the “colossus” of the north and the rest of the hemisphere. This disparity has
shaped the security relationship between the United States and Latin America and the Caribbean,
and for much of the twentieth century U.S. concerns about security provided the cornerstone for
its economic and political interactions in the region. The United States has tended to define its
security interests in global terms, as a world power, and to focus on the region when its has
perceived a threat to its global position. In contrast, most other countries in the hemisphere have
defined their security interests in terms of internal threats to the regime, or in response to
regional events. Often they have adopted the rhetoric or official stance of the United States in
order to obtain benefits from or to avoid confrontations with the richer neighbor. In doing so,
they have attempted to serve their own interests under the rubric of the global perspective the
United States has defined, though in practice their actions may have departed from the U.S.
position. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has defined its security interests in
terms of the ambitious goal of world peace under the U.S. umbrella, or Pax Americana. This
quest for global hegemony requires U.S. success in military, economic, and ideological terms. It
thus seeks to remain militarily dominant, to lead the march towards global free trade, and to
establish democracy as the governing norm. These goals shape the way in which the United
States defines its current security interests, which have been broadened to include threats to
globalization and democracy. They also influence U.S. expectations for the armed forces in the
region, and for the way the governments act with respect to economic and political reform.
Meanwhile, the “local” perspectives of other countries in the hemisphere – as small powers –
affect how they define their own security interests. The narrower interests of some countries
may coincide with those of the United States at particular moments, and many may attempt to
construct their responses to perceived security threats in terms of U.S. goals. Thus the United
States and Latin American countries may appear to share a common agenda. But this seeming
concordance masks fundamental differences in the way the hegemonic United States and
poverty-burdened Latin American nations order their priorities. These differences may generate
serious disputes about what constitutes security in the hemisphere, and will shape the way in
which U.S.-Latin American relations unfold.
Brenner, Goodman and Chanthavong – Page 2
Asymmetry in U.S.–Latin American Security Relations
by Philip Brenner, Louis W. Goodman and Samlanchith Chanthavong
The second Inter-American principle that rapidly became a historical myth refers to the equality
of its members. The equality formally recognized in all treaties and in the founding docum
Brenner, Goodman and Chanthavong – Page 3
ents covers enormous asymmetry between a superpower like the United States
and a group of developing countries like the Latin American states. This obvious
disparity has led some authors to speak of a “majority of one” within the OAS.–
Alberto van Klaveren1
Latin America will continue to affect the United States in ways that can only be
described as problematic, particularly in their export of drugs or illegal
immigrants....With the end of the Cold War, no Latin American country, save one
[Mexico], will be of sufficient interest to us to command the kind of attention it
did in the past as part of a larger strategic equation. – Marc Falcoff 2
[Latin Americans] still suffer the unpleasantness of inequality of power, perhaps
somewhat in the way of an adolescent who feels himself morally the equal of his
parents but still has to look to them for a monthly subsidy and the car keys....The
United States will probably continue to make concessions of form for
appearances’ sake, but will not be very generous or even tactful....And
Washington will probably continue to wonder why the open-hearted, wellintentioned, gentle United States is not well loved in the hemisphere. – Robert
Wesson3
A realist would explain the U.S.-Latin American relationship with Thucydides’
aphorism that “large nations do what they wish, while small nations accept what
they must”....Perhaps the most obvious indicator of these asymmetries is that the
Brenner, Goodman and Chanthavong – Page 4
United States continues to spend hundreds of millions of tax dollars each to alter
the behavior of its neighbors, while Latin Americans do not. – Lars Schoultz4
U.S. Latin-American relations have long been governed by the asymmetry in power and
wealth between the “colossus” of the north and the rest of the hemisphere. In particular, this
disparity has shaped the security relationship between the United States and Latin America and
the Caribbean, and for much of the twentieth century U.S. concerns about security provided the
cornerstone for its economic and political interactions in the region.
Of course, some U.S. officials during the twentieth century were animated by nonsecurity interests. We can see a desire to protect private investments, for example, in Secretary
of War Elihu Root’s demand that the United States find a pretext for maintaining a presence in
Cuba after the 1898 war.5 But even then there was also a worry about protecting the isthmian
canal that U.S. policymakers had envisioned. Once the Panama Canal was a reality, U.S.
dominion over the Caribbean – or “America’s lake” as some called it – seemed to be imperative.
Security and economic control came to be seen in Washington as two sides of the same coin, and
the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine provided the justification for intervention on
these grounds.
Other U.S. policymakers may have been motivated by humanitarian visions, hoping to
improve the lives of their southern neighbors. Certainly there was an element of altruism in the
lofty goals of the Alliance for Progress. Yet even the supposed idealist Woodrow Wilson was
willing to abandon his principles in the face of perceived security threats when he ordered an
invasion of Mexico in 1914. And a tough realist such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt was willing
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to accept the loss of U.S. investments in 1938 – when Mexico nationalized its oil – in order to
secure Mexico’s support in a war that the U.S. President feared was impending.6
To assert that security is the primary concern of any state is akin to the claim that survival
is the first concern of any species. It is virtually a natural phenomenon. But problems arise for
cooperation when states perceive their security interests through incompatible frames. The
security interests of most states, their calculus of threat, is often quite different from those of a
great power such as the United States. Toward the end of the twentieth century there was a
fleeting hope that these differences at last might be minimized, and that the grand vision of one
“Americas” might become a real possibility and might guide future U.S.-Latin American
relations. This article considers that possibility in the context of how security interests have
shaped U.S. policy towards the hemisphere in the past one hundred years, and how a new U.S.
definition of its security interests may affect relations in the future.
I. The Emerging Security Framework: 1900-1945
1900 -1933
While the United States sought to exert hegemony in the region in the early 20th Century,
the responses of Latin American and Caribbean nations were not uniform. The manner in which
these nations reacted to U.S. policies was either through accommodation (by necessity or choice)
or resistance, depending on their strengths and their calculation of domestic interests. It was in
this period that the United States emerged as a world power, and it began to perceive the area in
its close proximity in security terms. It would become an element of faith for U.S. policymakers
that the United States could not be effective on the world stage if it had to worry about its “soft
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underbelly.”7 To be sure, this simple idea was elaborated with elegant theories about sea lanes of
communication, about the need to protect U.S. investments, and about the ruthless nature of
European imperialism. Yet the graphic image of vulnerability and the resulting need for stability
provided a continuing rationale for U.S. intervention throughout the twentieth century.8 This
was buttressed by President Theodore Roosevelt’s important modification of the Monroe
Doctrine, which couched imperial intervention in terms that were consistent with the U.S. view
of itself as an exceptional country, different than the European states, because U.S. domination
was allegedly motivated by the noble goal of protecting weaker neighbors.9
Nowhere were big stick policies felt more intensely than in the Caribbean and Central
America. As early as the twentieth century the United States regarded the Caribbean and Central
American region as its sphere of influence. Whether citizens of the Caribbean and Central
America objected to the constant subversion of their sovereignty did not matter, as the United
States was willing to pursue its interests through the use of military force. From 1898 to 1934,
the Caribbean basin alone suffered more than thirty U.S. interventions, in addition to prolonged
military occupations.10
Each time that the United States imposed its hegemony on Central America and the
Caribbean, the smaller nations had little choice but to relinquish sovereignty to the giant. When
certain leaders refused U.S. interference, the United States ignored their decisions and undertook
intervention anyway; other times the United States facilitated the removal of dissenting leaders.
In the Dominican Republic, President Juan Isidro Jiménez faced a rebellion but did not want U.S.
military help to contain it. The United States merely overrode his objection and landed the
marines. Later on, the provisional president Francisco Henriquez Carvajal rejected the U.S.’s
attempt to oversee the Dominican customhouses and treasury. Refusal to cooperate on
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Carvajal’s part led to U.S. non-recognition of his administration and the withholding of state
revenue, which caused the government to become insolvent and left it unable to pay salaries.
The resulting discontent led to protests which were answered by a U.S. military occupation
which lasted from 1916 to 1924.11
Sometimes U.S. military intervention was alternated with what became known as dollar
diplomacy. In order to depose of the Nicaraguan dictator Jose Santos Zelaya, the U.S.
government supported U.S. business interests that funded opposition groups to overthrow
Zelaya. Adolfo Díaz became president in 1911 and negotiated a loan with American banks that
gave bankers control over Nicaragua’s finances, specifically its national bank. Often U.S.supported presidents were too weak to fend off opposition so they would call on the United
States to enforce order.12 Díaz was one of these leaders that had to ask for U.S. military help to
contain instability; and once even offered the United States an opportunity to make Nicaragua a
U.S. protectorate.13
Nations of the Caribbean and Central America were weak and small and therefore
submission to the United States was but a foregone conclusion. However, some nations
willingly engaged in accommodation with the United States in order to further their own national
interests. Brazil’s accommodation to U.S. hegemony, for example, enabled it to compete more
effectively with Argentina for domination in South America. Never intimidated by the United
States, Brazilian leaders recognized that Brazil’s size and distance from North America
discouraged U.S. intervention. But U.S. backing did help Brazil obtain the state of Acre from
Bolivia in 1903. Brazil thus viewed its close relations with the United States throughout the first
part of the twentieth century as more of a partnership, and was the only country from the region
to send troops into World War I with the United States. (More than half of the Latin American
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countries remained neutral.) It even supported U.S. interventions in the Caribbean and the idea
of Pan Americanism which the United States touted. Meanwhile, the United States gave Brazil
preferential economic treatment by removing tariffs on Brazilian coffee, cacao, and rubber. As
early as 1904, fifty percent of Brazil’s exports went to the United States.14
In contrast, Argentina often took the lead in attempts to limit the United States by
persuading it to commit to the principle of non-intervention.15 Like Brazil, Argentina had a
sense of its own right to primacy. It was the second largest country in Latin America and its per
capita income was the highest. Argentina identified itself more with Europe than with the
Colossus of the North, with which it carried out most trade, and U.S. power was neither
attractive nor intimidating, largely because of the great distance between the two countries. 16 In
response to Roosevelt’s articulation of the Monroe Doctrine “corollary,” for example, the
Argentine press asserted that their country was duty-bound to defend the sovereignty of Latin
America from the “big stick.”17 Throughout the first part of the century Argentina maintained
the position known as the Drago Doctrine – named for Foreign Minister Luis María Drago, who
had asserted that a country’s public debts were not a sufficient basis to warrant intervention –
despite U.S. pressure to weaken or ignore it.18 Similarly, Chile sought to maintain close ties with
Europe as a way of defending itself against growing U.S. hegemony.19
Mexico’s proximity to the United States was the key reason for its resistance to U.S.
hegemonic advances. The so-called Mexican War of 1846-1848 had left deep scars on Mexico’s
geography and psyche, and it fiercely resisted U.S. claims that the transformation of Mexican
society was properly a U.S. security concern. The defense of sovereignty against U.S. intrusion
was such a widely shared Mexican goal, that President Woodrow Wilson was universally
castigated for sending troops to Veracruz in an effort to overthrow the government of Gen.
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Victoriano Huerta – even by Huerta’s main opponent Venustiano Carranza, who stood to gain
from the intervention. President Carranza again denounced U.S. intervention in 1916, when
Pancho Villa’s attacks prompted the United States to consider making war against Mexico. It
was the greater U.S. security concern about German intervention and the likely U.S. entry into
the European war that led Wilson to accept a face-saving commission as the solution to the
problem of hot pursuit of Villa. All the while, Carranza refused to accept anything less than the
unconditional withdrawal of U.S. forces, a demand to which Wilson acquiesced in February
1917.20
The Good Neighbor Policy, 1933-1945
As Latin America’s economic ties to Europe weakened after World War I, and the
continent became preoccupied with the emerging threat of fascism, European influence waned in
the New World. The United States, in turn, felt secure enough in its status as the regional
hegemon to abandon the use of military force to achieve policy objectives.21 President Franklin
D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy reflected this confidence. The United States articulated its
new commitment to respecting sovereignty by supporting the 1933 Montevideo Inter-American
Conference resolution and the 1936 Buenos Aires conference protocol on non-intervention.22
The United States applied the Good Neighbor Policy to the Caribbean when it agreed to Cuban
demands to abrogate the Platt Amendment in 1934, ended control of the Dominican Republic’s
national customs, and signed a treaty prohibiting U.S. intervention in Panama (outside of the
Canal Zone). However, the United States interpreted its non-intervention commitment
narrowly, because it was quite ready to interfere in the domestic affairs of hemispheric neighbors
with non-military means, using a variety of ample resources to exert political and economic
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pressure.23 Its guiding concern in the way it intervened during this period was security, and the
perceived threat of European fascism. Often the United States took an accommodating stance in
situations that traditionally would have provoked a military response, as it sought to fortify Latin
American cooperation against the Axis powers.
This fear was most evident in U.S. relations with Mexico. In 1938 President Lázaro
Cárdenas instituted major social reforms which redistributed expropriated land to farmers and
nationalized most of the oil industry. Though the Mexican government offered compensation, the
companies rejected the offer (claiming they wanted to be paid also for the oil remaining
underground), and they called on the U.S. government to intervene to protect their properties.
Though Roosevelt’s advisers were sympathetic to the corporations, the President sided with his
ambassador, Josephus Daniels, and rejected interference. He viewed good relations with Mexico
as strategically more important than protecting oil interests in the face of a potential Axis threat
in the hemisphere. Any continuing conflict concerning the oil nationalization issue might have
driven Mexico to sell oil to Germany and Italy.24 Thus, Mexico was able to stand its ground and
resolve the conflict peacefully with the United States as the two governments ended up
negotiating levels of compensation.
The attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 showed the fruits of the Good Neighbor policy as
most Caribbean and Latin American nations demonstrated their solidarity with the United States
The nine nations of Central America and the Caribbean almost immediately declared war on
Japan, while Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela severed relations with the Axis powers early in
1942.25 Brazil again sided with the United States, even though it had increased its trade
significantly with Germany in the 1930s.26 President Getulio Vargas had sought to promote U.S.
and German competition for Brazil’s favor during this period, which resulted in a 1935 trade
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agreement with the United States that made Brazilian imports duty free. Roosevelt also turned a
blind eye to Vargas’s fascist leanings – his Estado Novo centralized presidential authority and
eliminated state institutions that could check his power.27 By the end of the decade, Brazil made
a clear turn towards North America. When Germany attempted to expand its influence among
the German community in Brazil, Vargas outlawed foreign groups and required all Germans to
become Brazilian citizens.28 Brazil’s provident decision to declare war on the Axis powers, and
to offer raw materials and strategic bases to the United States, was quite profitable. It received
73 percent of the lend-lease military equipment destined for Latin America, and the United
States provided major assistance for infrastructure development, which included a steel mill.29
All but two Latin American and Caribbean nations cut relations with the Axis countries
by early 1942. A reluctant Chile finally broke relations with the Axis powers in 1943, and
Argentina remained neutral until 1944. It only declared war in March 1945.30 At the 1942 Rio
Conference, Argentina rejected a resolution requiring countries to sever relations with the Axis
powers, and as a result the revised resolution merely “recommended” the severance of ties,
which Argentina nevertheless chose to ignore.31 The divergence in viewpoints of the two
countries resulted in clashing policies. The United States responded by withholding lend-lease
military equipment from Argentina, by threatening to impose economic sanctions on Argentine
goods, and by refusing to recognize the government of General Edelmiro Farrell when it
overthrew General Pedro Ramírez’s regime, seemingly in response to Argentina’s break in
relations with the Axis. The Argentine stance was prompted in part by domestic political
pressure from the ethnic German and Italian communities, and from a well developed Argentine
sense of national pride, which inclined the government to demonstrate that it would not bow to
U.S. pressure.32
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II. The Cold War
A New Security Paradigm
There is widespread agreement that the Cold War shaped much of U.S. policy toward
Latin America for the 45 years after World War II. The key factor that made the struggle against
communism determinative was that policymakers’ perceptions of the security environment
became more important than the reality of threats to U.S. power and safety.33 Their perceptions
were guided by a set of ideological assumptions established early in the period, which divided
the world into two hostile camps, the western one dominated by the United States and the eastern
one dominated by the Soviet Union. Policymakers believed that most global events could be
tallied on a “zero-sum” balance sheet: a gain for the Soviet Union would necessarily be a loss
for the United States, and vice-versa. Thus, they argued, U.S. policy toward a country should be
guided by the single criterion of whether or not it stood with the United States against a global
communism whose head lay in Moscow.34 This argument rested on the view that global
communism was monolithic and aggressive, and that U.S. interests formed a seamless web. Just
as a tear in a fish net will let the fish escape regardless of where the hole forms, so the resulting
U.S. global containment strategy assumed that a defeat anywhere was a defeat everywhere. If
the United States did not defend supposed interests even in its own backyard, then Soviet agents
might be encouraged to attack U.S. interests in Asia and Africa, or even in Europe. As the
dominoes fell so would U.S. security.35
It is remarkable how quickly after World War II a consensus emerged among U.S.
policymakers that the new security paradigm should guide the giant’s foreign policy. By 1950
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dissent from it was tantamount to making oneself irrelevant in policy circles, and such
ideological narrowness hindered Washington’s ability to perceive events in Latin America
accurately. U.S. policy followed accordingly, shaped by misperceptions that the global crusade
against communism generated. Political scientist Jorge Domínguez captures this succinctly in
noting that
the Cold War emerges as significantly distinctive in U.S. relations with Latin
America because ideological considerations acquired a primacy over U.S. policy
in the region that they had lacked at earlier moments.36
Even before the consensus had coalesced in Washington, the United States sought to
impose it on the hemisphere through the 1947 the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal
Assistance or “Rio Pact,” which declared that an attack on one American country was an attack
on all American states. Latin Americans welcomed the Rio Treaty and the new Organization of
American States (OAS) created in 1948, because both codified “good neighbor” principles of
non-intervention and mutual respect. There was widespread hope that institutionalization could
moderate U.S. dominance in the region, and enable the weaker countries to overcome the
enormous asymmetry of power that World War II had exacerbated.37 Yet both institutions
reflected the global Cold War agenda of the United States, which “closed off several previously
available policy alternatives,” as political scientist Peter Smith explains. “It was no longer
possible,” he asserts,
to seek protection from a rival European power, as Bolívar and others had
done....It was implausible to pursue subregional hegemony, as Brazilians and
Argentines had once imagined. It was useless to formulate high-minded doctrines
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of diplomacy or international law, as...Drago had attempted, since the United
States simply refused to recognize adverse decisions by the World Court....38
Latin American acquiescence gave the United States a level of comfort that allowed it to
turn its attention away from the region in order to focus on Europe and Asia. As it spent large
sums to rebuild Japan and Europe, which were on the front line of the Cold War, Washington
sent little to Latin America. Instead it encouraged its neighbors to thwart their development by
relying on the export of primary products, and by attracting foreign investors who might finance
production of such goods.39 As the U.S. economy expanded and Europe began to recover, these
exports initially enabled the economies of most Latin American countries to grow also. But
within a decade, the region began to experience uncontrollable inflation and a declining balance
of trade as prices for raw materials fluctuated. Latin America’s economic troubles quickly
became the primary concern for governments in the hemisphere, in part because of the potential
these circumstances had for de-stabilizing the region, while Washington continued to dwell on
the communist threat.40 The aid that did come from the north focused on Washington’s primary
concern, as the United States began to provide military aid and training to countries with which it
had forged mutual defense agreements.
To be sure, the United States did not impose military aid on an unwilling Latin America.
In Central America and the Caribbean, where authoritarian rule predominated, military dictators
found it easy to shift their rhetoric to comply with Washington’s anti-communist crusade.
Critics of a regime could be easily defiled as “communists,” in order to secure aid. U.S. support
for the overthrow, in 1954, of the democratically elected government in Guatemala showed that
Washington would not tolerate deviance from the national security framework. State
Department analysts had warned in the late 1940s that reformist President Juan José Arévalo’s
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policies demonstrated communist sympathies. His democratically elected successor, Jacobo
Arbenz, went further by nationalizing United Fruit Company land, in exchange for compensation
the company believed was insufficient (though it was based on the taxes that United Fruit had
paid). While the corporation’s complaints found an especially receptive audience in the
Eisenhower Administration – several of whose key officials had had business relations with
United Fruit – a consensus had already formed in Washington that Guatemala was both ripe for
communist penetration and that the Arbenz reforms were a harbinger of worse to come. In early
1954 the United States turned to the OAS, where it expected support for a strong resolution that
would legitimate intervention to oust the Guatemalan government.41 Though the hemispheric
organization refused to comply, and approved only a mild statement against extra-hemispheric
intervention, Arbenz judged correctly that his administration would need to defend itself from
U.S. attacks. Unable to buy weapons from the United States for Guatemala’s defense, he
obtained small arms from Czechoslovakia. The purchase of guns from a Soviet satellite was all
the proof Washington needed that Guatemala was a national security threat. It opted to depose
Arbenz through covert action, and then supported the new military rulers.42 This action was seen
by Latin American leaders as a clear sign that the United States would disregard sovereignty in
the region if it clashed with its larger interests.
In South America’s more economically developed countries, Washington’s emphasis on
the communist threat reinforced the military in a relatively unstable context of economic and
social change, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. As elites sought a way to protect their positions
of dominance and privilege, and the military sought to defend la patria from dissolution or the
threat of an alleged alien force such as socialism, an alliance of convenience emerged throughout
Latin America.43 Many of the resulting dictatorships followed what political scientist Guillermo
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O’Donnell has described as a “bureaucratic-authoritarian model,” in which a professional cadre
inside and outside the government worked closely with the military to exclude large sectors of
the country from both political participation and political benefits, such as subsidies or
redistributed wealth. At the same time, the coalition restored key components of a nation’s
wealth to the elite, as it opened opportunities for foreign capital to gain a foothold.44
U.S. complacency about Latin America lasted for only a decade after the Rio Treaty was
signed. Washington was shocked when Vice President Richard Nixon’s 1958 “goodwill tour”
through South America was met by hostile, sometimes violent, crowds. The widespread protests
forced a reexamination about the extent and significance of poverty and discontent in the region.
This effort was given a jolt a few months later, when bearded revolutionaries overthrew the
dictatorship of Cuba’s Fulgencio Batista. For more than half a century, the United States had
treated Cuba as a veritable possession, its “the pearl of the Antilles”, the jewel of its hemispheric
hegemonic crown. The Cuban revolution, historian Thomas Paterson explains, fundamentally
“challenged Washington’s presumption that its word was fiat in the Western Hemisphere.”45
The Cuban “Threat”
Cuba’s Revolution engendered waves of student protests against Latin American
governments and the United States, and inspired revolutionary and guerrilla movements across
Latin America and the Caribbean. To President John F. Kennedy’s advisers, the popular
outbursts raised the specter that Latin American and Caribbean nations would follow Cuba’s
example. Five days after the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, the Deputy National Security
Adviser observed that one of the central threats posed by the Cuban revolution was its
attractiveness to other Latin Americans. “The roots of Castroism,” W.W. Rostow argued,
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lie in Latin American poverty, social inequality, and that form of xenophobic
nationalism which goes with a prior history of inferiority on the world scene. The
vulnerability of the Latin American populations to this form of appeal will depend
on the pace of economic growth; the pace at which social inequality is reduced;
and the pace at which the other Latin American nations move towards what they
regard as dignified partnership with the U.S. What is required here is a radical
acceleration and raising of sights in the programs being launched within the
Alliance for Progress.46
The Cuban “threat” thus gave impetus to the Alliance for Progress, an ambitious program
intended to stimulate economic growth, promote social reform, and strengthen democracy
throughout the hemisphere. Latin American analysts had long insisted that the discontent which
fed support for revolutionary movements was rooted in the lack of social reform, especially the
unequal ownership of land. It appeared that the United States finally had listened. The Kennedy
administration promised that U.S. public and private sources, along with international financial
institutions, would provide over $20 billion to the region over a ten year period. In turn,
recipient countries were asked to invest $80 billion in the project. The combined resources were
expected to generate an annual growth rate of at least a 2.5 percent in each country, which would
then enable the governments to finance projects in the health and education sectors, thereby
raising the population’s standard of living and eliminating the attractiveness of the revolutionary
option.47
A review of the causes for the Alliance’s failure – nearly all of the Latin American
countries involved did not even approach the minimum growth targets, and few introduced basic
reforms that attacked the endemic inequalities in the region – would certainly begin with its
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overly lofty and unrealistic goals. Moreover, the United States failed to provide all of the
promised funding, and there were numerous problems with the administration of the program.48
One strategy that may have undermined the central core of the program was Kennedy’s
insistence that military aid be an integral part of the Alliance, because he believed social reform
and economic growth could not succeed where instability prevailed. Notably, U.S. military
assistance to the region increased from $48 million in 1958 to $92 million in 1962, and averaged
more than $100 million each year in the mid-1960s.49 Military training focused on
counterinsurgency techniques, because “insurgencies were destabilizing movements, assumed to
be Communist inspired,” as historian Thomas Paterson explains.50 This argument found a ready
audience among Latin American officers, who were often allied in each country with the very
groups that had been preventing social reform. Under these circumstances, the reform goals of
the Alliance had little hope for success.51 The net effect was a strengthening of the institutions of
the armed forces in the region without a corresponding strengthening of the civilian institutions
necessary for good governance.
In strengthening the armed forces, the United States intimated that its first priority was
stability, not democracy. This preference was made clear in 1964, when Assistant Secretary of
State Thomas C. Mann articulated the view – known as the Mann Doctrine – that the United
States would support any anti-communist regime that advanced U.S. economic and political
interests, without privileging those that were governed democratically.52 Notably the Mann
Doctrine emerged at the end of a two year spate of coups in seven Latin American countries:
Argentina, Peru, Guatemala, Ecuador, Dominican Republic, Honduras, and Brazil. By 1979, the
armed forces had deposed civilian governments in nineteen Latin American nations.53 The
Alliance for Progress did not cause the coups but it often reinforced tendencies already under
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way. (To be sure, in several instances U.S. agencies did encourage or gave support to coup
plotters – and in 1965 U.S. marines intervened on the side of the military to end a civil war in the
Dominican Republic.54) As economies stagnated and inequality remained pervasive, tensions
mounted throughout Latin America. These internal problems themselves encouraged each
military to resort to the traditional conviction that it was a “reservoir” of national integrity. In
relying on the U.S. cold war framework, which interpreted local activists as elements of the
international communist threat, the armed forces had both a national security rationale for their
coups and the assurance that more aid would be forthcoming from the North.
Conflict in Central America
During the 1980’s, Central America became the main focus of Washington’s ideological
crusade against the Soviet Union.55 The “loss” of Central America was one of the symbols
Ronald Reagan used in the 1980 presidential campaign to suggest the perfidy of the Carter
Administration. Republicans charged that casting “off traditional anti-Communist allies for the
sake of some vague moral idealism...in the hostile international environment of realpolitik,”
political scientist William LeoGrande notes, was “the height of folly or worse.”56 Starting in
1981, then, the United States defined events, and U.S. interests, in Central America solely in
terms of the East-West struggle. Though at times U.S. policy was couched in the language of
cooperation and respect for diversity, the Reagan Administration’s singular focus on the Soviet
threat made a lie of its claim to appreciate the distinctiveness of each country’s security needs. 57
With the alleged aim at first of “drawing a line” to contain communism in Nicaragua and
prevent its spread to El Salvador, and then of rolling back communism by overthrowing the
Nicaraguan government, the United States also opened a sharp rift with Latin America. Reagan
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Administration officials were convinced that U.S. credibility was fundamentally at stake because
the battleground was in the very backyard of the superpower. If the United States allowed the
Sandinistas to remain in power, and the coalition of insurgents in El Salvador even to share in
power, then the Soviet Union would be encouraged to attack U.S. interests in other parts of the
world, which would dangerously weaken the superpower’s essential security. 58 In contrast,
many Latin Americans assessed that the conflicts in Central America were rooted in the internal
conditions of each country. Instability emerged from the political repression, exclusion, and
poverty which characterized four of the five countries in the region, not as a result of external
Communist machinations. The greatest external threat to long stability, they believed, would
come from direct U.S. military intervention, which they feared was a real possibility as
Washington’s frustration with the conflicts grew. This concern was deepened in October 1983
when the United States invaded Grenada having, for some years, put strong pressure on the
Cuban-influenced New Jewel Movement of Maurice Bishop.59
The increasing threat of a U.S. invasion prompted four Latin American states – Mexico,
Colombia, Venezuela, and Panama – in 1983 to take an unprecedented initiative in trying to end
the Central American conflicts. Dubbed the “Contadora Group,” after the Panamanian island on
which their first meeting occurred, they called for a regional dialogue to remove all foreign
troops from the region, to end foreign intervention, and to achieve respect for each country’s
sovereignty and self-determination. Political scientist Terry Karl succinctly explained the
significance of this effort by observing, “For the first time in the postwar era, Latin American
nations have put forward their own definitions of collective security, thereby challenging some
of the basic assumptions underlying the Inter-American System established after World War
II.”60 In 1985, Argentine, Brazil, Peru, and Uruguay formed the Rio Support Group to give
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Contadora’s activities a higher profile and greater backing. The Contadora and Rio processes
did contribute to the peace agreements in the region by offering an alternative to the U.S.
military intervention and in raising the profile of the crisis to attract international attention. They
also highlighted the very different ways in which the United States and the rest of the hemisphere
identified the nature of the threats facing them, and the responses that were appropriate for
promoting security.61
III. Post-Cold War Relations
The Hegemonic Vision
As the Cold War ended, the United States felt almost more exhausted than triumphant.
Its military spending in the 1980s had left a gargantuan debt. Despite President George H.W.
Bush’s surge in popularity during the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. public preferred to turn inward
and responded positively to Gov. Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign focus on domestic issues (“it’s
the economy, stupid”). In fact, Japan and China seemed poised to dominate the next epoch,
which analysts contended would be guided by economic might and which they soon dubbed as
the “Asian Century.” A popular 1991 book even envisioned a “coming war” between Japan and
the United States.62 U.S. foreign policy seemed rudderless without the Cold War to give it an
organizing principle for key decisions, and Bush was broadly criticized for lacking what he
himself called the “vision thing.”63
In this context, Latin America offered a convenient fall back for U.S. policymakers.
There was little doubt that the United States remained dominant in the hemisphere, and an
absence of hemispheric criticism in response to the 1989 invasion of Panama suggested a rare
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acquiescence to U.S. hegemony. Flashpoints that had turned Latin Americans against the United
States – especially in Central America – began to dull in 1990, as the Nicaraguan election
deposed the Sandinistas government, and mediation efforts brought the El Salvadoran civil war
to an end. The return to electoral democracy throughout the region also provided a political basis
to reassert the premise which lay at the heart of the Monroe Doctrine, that the countries of the
Americas shared a common and distinctive culture. In part as a result of the economic crisis of
the 1980s, military governments in the region began to lose whatever popular support they had
garnered from bringing repressive stability to their countries. From 1979 to 1990 nearly every
authoritarian regime in the region gave way to elected governments at least nominally committed
to democracy. The mix of factors that engendered the transition to democracy was different for
each country, though there was an unmistakable pattern across countries of increased citizen
participation and civil society demands for an end to repression and a return to electoral
politics.64
Prospects for the resurgence of Pan Americanism were bolstered even in the economic
realm. Between 1980 and 1990 Latin American debt increased from $242 billion to $431 billion
in 1990. Per capita output plummeted by 8.3 percent in these ten years, and unemployment rose
dramatically, exacerbating the region’s inequality.65 The so-called “lost decade” made the
recently elected governments eager for foreign investment and ready to accept neoliberal
conditionality and an export-led model of development, which came to be known as the
“Washington Consensus.”66 If, as some believed, the post-Cold War world was going to be
characterized by regional economic blocs, then the “Americas” – led by the United States –
could be an idea whose time had finally arrived.67
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This hegemonic vision would cap a century that had started with President Theodore
Roosevelt’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which justified U.S. pre-emptive intervention to
protect weak states from falling into the hands of rapacious European imperialists. Such
intervention introduced a variant to nineteenth century imperialism, because U.S. occupation was
always temporary – usually long enough to insure that a compliant regime was secure. But like
European imperialism, U.S. domination was premised on the intention of guaranteeing U.S.
security and economic interests with coercive force. In contrast, hegemonic domination was
premised on the expectation in both the north and south that the benefits would be mutual and
that U.S. supremacy was necessary and welcome.
Latin American leaders had not forgotten the experience of past relations with the
“hovering giant,” as political scientist Cole Blasier evocatively had characterized the United
States.68 But they had few options. Expanded Asian and European trade relations would have
been desirable and were pursued. But the Japanese bubble economy burst in 1991, and Europe
was mired in efforts to work out a viable union while Germany, the wealthiest country on the
continent, focused on ways of absorbing the costs of unification. The electorate that voted for
the new Latin American presidents seemed tired of ideological battles. Their demands for
pragmatic solutions resonated with the elected officials themselves, several of whom had studied
in the United States and were more comfortable with refining technical models fashioned in
Washington than with imagining new approaches. From their perspective, the Washington-led
solution was the only viable one available. Protectionism linked to import-substitution had been
tried and failed. The success of the Cuban model appeared to have depended on the largesse of
another superpower, and in 1990 the United States was the only great power with much interest
in the region.
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As often occurs in circumstances of asymmetry, the weaker powers opted to make a
virtue out of necessity and to imagine that the giant would be benign. Latin Americans
convinced themselves that the past would not be prologue to the future, because circumstances
had removed the pretexts and stimulus for U.S. intervention. Their desire to maintain democracy
in the hemisphere, and their acceptance of the Washington economic model, seemed to vitiate
potential threats to U.S. interests. Illegal drug trafficking and isolated patches of insurgency in
Colombia, Peru and Mexico appeared to be the only security concerns, and the leaders of the
effected countries shared with the United States a common view about how to handle this
security agenda. As political scientist Abraham Lowenthal observed, there was a hemispheric
consensus that “Nearly five hundred years after the visit of Christopher Columbus, the countries
of the New World find their destinies intertwined.”69
Thus in 1994, at the conclusion to the first summit of hemispheric leaders in 27 years, it
was possible for each country to sign a document that declared:
The elected Heads of State and Government of the Americas are committed to
advance the prosperity, democratic values and institutions, and security of our
Hemisphere. For the first time in history, the Americas are a community of
democratic societies. Although faced with differing development challenges, the
Americas are united in pursuing prosperity through open markets, hemispheric
integration, and sustainable development....We reiterate our firm adherence to the
principles of international law and the purposes and principles enshrined in the
United Nations Charter and in the Charter of the Organization of American States
(OAS), including the principles of the sovereign equality of states, nonintervention, self-determination, and the peaceful resolution of disputes.70
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The Americas had come of age, and many believed the new unity could define the interAmerican relationship for many years if it were based on U.S. cooperation and partnership rather
than on coercion.
Beneath the Facade of Unity
The vision of a united western hemisphere emerged, in part, from a consensus that the
post-cold war world was likely to be multi-polar, organized around three integrated regions: the
Americas, Europe and East Asia. In this scenario the United States would commit itself to the
hemisphere and would recognize that its own prosperity depended on a growing Latin America
to which it would now become inextricably tied. U.S. interests would thus become more aligned
with its neighbors as the giant acted more like a regional power than a global superpower.
Comforted at the start of 1990s by the dream of an integrated, prosperous “Americas,”
most of the countries then set to work independently on their own agendas for development.
Some of these involved bilateral agreements with the United States, which placed a few of the
countries in more favored positions than others. Some plans focused on sub-regional integration.
Some were based on a strategy of expanding ties to global partners and to extra-hemispheric
trade. Beneath the facade of unity, then, forces that encouraged disintegration began to generate
small cracks. It was possible to paste over these fissures during much of the decade, because the
dynamic growth of the United States provided a kind of glue that held the Americas together.
But even by 1998, at the second Summit of the Americas, the hemispheric heads of state had
difficulty finding a common ground except around non-controversial issues such as the need for
increased spending on education.71 A few illustrative cases indicate how the course that
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individual countries charted in the 1990s contributed to tensions which characterize the
contemporary environment in which U.S.-Latin American security relations will develop.
Mexico: As the immediate neighbor of the United States, Mexico had long regarded the
United States with ambivalence, fearing its dominance while seeking to benefit from the
proximity.72 During the Cold War, its often criticized U.S. intervention and supported leftleaning governments towards which the United States was hostile.73 Mexico’s rejection of its
former nationalistic stance at the close of the 1980s was thus a sharp break from the past.
Coinciding with the end of the Cold War its enthusiastic embrace of a free trade relationship with
the United States had a greater impact than any other on the way Latin American countries
viewed the United States. The impetus for the change came from the 1982 debit crisis, which
Mexico resolved by accepting some IMF conditionality. By the end of the decade Mexican
leaders believed they could make lemonade out of what many viewed at first as a lemon. By
pointing to external pressure as the rationale for opening the country to foreign direct investment,
officials hoped they could lower barriers which had stifled new capital flows into the country. In
any case, there was a consensus that the old formulae for development were no longer viable.74
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was the most significant
institutional expression of the new relationship. Meanwhile Mexico took several other major
steps to attract capital, despite widespread public opposition to these changes, which included the
support of peso stabilization (which depleted the Treasury and led to the 1994 liquidity crisis),
ending the ejido system, and forsaking preferential treatment as a nominally Third World country
in order to obtain membership in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Above all, it would align its economy closely to the United States, and tie its development
strategy to the fortunes of its rich neighbor by counting on U.S. corporate investment and exports
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that would satisfy U.S. demand.75 By 2001, nearly ninety percent of Mexico’s merchandise
exports were sent to the United States and their value had jumped from $32.3 billion in 1990 to
$140.7 billion.76
Sonora, which shared a border with the United States and had numerous maquila
industries, was the Mexican state that derived the greatest economic benefit from the new
arrangement. Understandably, a popular Mexican governor – Vicente Fox – hoped to reproduce
the seemingly successful model of export production throughout the country when he became
President in December 2000. But the U.S. recession, border delays due to 9/11 security
measures, and U.S. congressional antipathy to Fox’s guest worker proposals (which were critical
for relieving Mexican unemployment problems) dashed his dreams.77 By 2002 it became clear
that the Mexican decision to base its development on links to the U.S. juggernaut made the
country quite vulnerable, because the 1990s boom obscured the need for fundamental internal
reforms, such as improving the educational system and ending corruption. Meanwhile Mexico’s
attraction as a source of cheap labor was vitiated by competition from other Latin American
countries and from China.78
MERCOSUR, Brazil and Argentina: The development strategies that Argentina and
Brazil pursued in the 1990s, and their distinctive relationships to the United States, indicate how
regional politics added cracks in the base of hemispheric unity. Both countries sought to
integrate themselves into a globalized world economy by adopting the dictates of the so-called
“Washington consensus” – increased privatization, lower tariffs, reduced regulations on the
movement of capital, and less government spending – and they did achieve great success in
controlling inflation. But their different strategies created vulnerabilities which made cooperation
between them more difficult even as they shared apprehension about U.S. leadership.
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One visible expression of their wariness about the United States was MERCOSUR, the
Common Market of the South, which they began to develop in 1991 with Paraguay and Uruguay.
Hoping that a customs union would strengthen their bargaining position vis-à-vis the emerging
European Union and anticipated North American free trade area, the MERCOSUR countries
remarkably set aside historic differences among themselves to inaugurate the union in 1995.79
Early on there was optimism that it might achieve its aims, especially when the U.S. Congress
refused to give “fast track” trade negotiating authority to the President, who had intended to
bring Chile into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Chile then turned to
MERCOSUR and became an associate member. But MERCOSUR suffered in part from bad
timing. Within a year, the Argentine economy began to slide into recession, which had a ripple
effect on its neighbors. Meanwhile, Brazil had begun to develop its own bilateral plans with the
United States, and in its fragile circumstances was unable to prop up the other MERCOSUR
members.80
Argentina had been often characterized in the 1990s as the “poster child” for
neoliberalism. After the 1989 election of Carlos Menem as president, Argentina abandoned its
historic antagonism towards the United States shifted its focus towards integrating the nation into
the world economy by lowering tariffs, relaxing controls over the movement of capital, and
privatizing.81 As political scientist Javiar Corrales notes, it “introduced some of the most farreaching market-oriented reforms in the world.”82 Argentina also moved to align itself with the
United States politically, and to accept U.S. leadership, which led the Washington to support
Argentina as an associated member of NATO.83
Economic changes began to stabilize the Argentine peso in 1991 after the government of
Carlos Menem pegged the currency to the U.S. dollar, which brought in foreign investment.
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While the new capital stimulated overall economic growth, and fueled consumer spending, it did
not increase employment and was based on an over-valuation of the Argentine peso. In response
to International Monetary Fund dictates to “rationalize” the economy, and as a consequence of
privatization, many Argentines lost their jobs. This reduced tax revenues and contributed to a
growing government debt. In turn, the increased debt led to more borrowing in order to maintain
hard currency reserves on which the peso’s value depended. At the same time, the strong peso
hurt Argentina’s exports and encouraged further importation. The new economic strategy ended
in December 2001, after four years of recession. Argentina defaulted on its $140 billion foreign
debt as the economy collapsed, President Fernando de la Rua resigned, and three presidents
succeeded him within the span of two weeks. By the end of 2002 more than fifty percent of
Argentines were living in poverty and the official unemployment rate hit an historic high of 22
percent.84
Brazil’s accommodation to the Washington Consensus was an indication that it perceived
there were few alternate options, not that it agreed with the U.S. hegemonic vision. This was
starkly symbolized by President Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s economic program and his
acceptance of IMF strictures. When he was a university professor in the 1970s, Cardoso’s
scholarly research focused critically on questions about Latin America’s dependence and the
North’s financial domination over poorer countries.85 Still, Brazil resisted pressure to endorse
fully the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). It hoped to slow progress towards the FTAA
while it strengthened MERCOSUR so that it would be able to retain its own power within South
America, and not be subject to the dictates of the United States, whose enormous wealth Brazil
believed would overwhelm other countries within the FTAA.86
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Even though Cardoso’s economic policies stabilized Brazil’s inflation, it failed to make a
dent in the country’s structure of inequality – which has the fourth worst income distribution in
the world87 – or strengthen the economy sufficiently to withstand external shocks. Its currency
suffered severe setbacks in 1999 as a result of turmoil in Asia and Russia, and by the end of 2002
it had accumulated an external debt of $270 billion.88 The Inter-American Dialogue summarized
these conditions by observing that
For the past five years, Brazil’s economy has been flat; in only one year has
growth exceeded 2 percent. Wages are low, jobs are scarce, massive income and
wealth inequalities persist, and criminal violence has become more pervasive and
more vicious.89
Most Brazilians thus perceived that accommodation with Washington’s agenda had not produced
the promised benefits and that a new approach was needed. Their election of Luis Inacio (Lula)
da Silva as president in 2002 threatened to widen the cracks in the facade of hemispheric unity.90
Lula had been a prominent critic of Brazil’s embrace of free market capitalism, and his campaign
focused on the need to reorient policies to improve conditions for Brazil’s poorest citizens. But
with his electoral mandate behind him, Lula has heeded the IMF and other creditors in order to
avoid the possibility of financial default, by attempting to maintain tight control over government
spending and a low inflation rate.91
Drugs and Terrorism
While economic issues were a source of division within the hemisphere, two security
concerns – drugs and terrorism – provided a basis for common U.S.-Latin American agenda. Yet
even here the potential for disagreement lurked close to the surface. The United States has tended
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to focus narrowly on drug production and trafficking; Latin America and the Caribbean view the
issue of drugs in terms of stability and the threat that drug trafficking poses to state authority. It
weakens democratic institutions by creating an environment of disorder that ignores laws and
challenges the ability of the state to protect its citizens.92
The United States is the largest consumer of illegal drugs; out of the 575 metric tons of
cocaine available in the world in 1994, the United States consumed approximately 300 metric
tons of that amount.93 Colombia has been the top producer of cocaine, while Peru produced most
of the available coca leaves. Mexico, the United States, and Colombia are also the main
producers of marijuana in the world. Mexico is the chief transit point through which drugs enter
the United States, while countries such as Panama, the Dominican Republic, and Ecuador also
serving as other transit points.94
Complicating the international drug war is the problem of internal struggles which have
continued for decades. In Colombia, for example, the pact formally ending La Violencia in 1958
may have served the interests of the elite, but the large percentage of people living in poverty
remained poor. Insurgent movements arose initially out of this circumstance, and were
committed to changing Colombia’s class structure. Yet in the 1990s – partly as a consequence of
successful efforts to wipe out coca production in Bolivia and to destroy drug cartels in Medillin
and Cali – Colombian insurgents became involved in narco-trafficking.95 At that point, the drug
war and the forty-year old civil war became intertwined.
Some officials within the government and military in Colombia have taken advantage of
the U.S. concern about drugs in order to obtain resources to combat the insurgency. The military
views U.S. aid for counter-narcotics activities such as military training, equipment, and weapons
as a means to assist the military’s efforts to fight guerrillas, regardless of whether they are
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involved in narco-trafficking. U.S. resources, such as DEA agents and helicopters, which were
previously confined to efforts aimed at drug interdiction and eradication have recently been
transferred to antiterrorist operations. Meanwhile the Colombian government views the
strengthening of its authority as its most important goal, and it is aware that if it takes advantage
of the United States’s concern over drugs, it can obtain assistance to achieve its goal of fortifying
control of state institutions.96 Despite State Department reports that list Colombia as one of the
“major drug transit or major illicit drug producing countries” in the world, and among the
countries in which people suffer the greatest level of human rights abuse, Secretary of State
Colin Powell has focused on policies which Colombian President Uribe-Velez has put in place to
confront insurgent movements, especially the FARC and the ELF, and praised the Colombian
government’s efforts to address the problem of terrorism.97 The Bush administration has made
Colombia the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid, which totaled more than $500 million in
2002.98
While most countries in the region cooperate with the United States in its counternarcotics activities, not all Washington’s policies are agreeable to them. The U.S. certification
process has been one such contentious issue in U.S.-Latin American relations. Certification is
the unilateral process in which the U.S. government annually examines how diligent and
effective Latin American and Caribbean efforts have been in combating drug production and
trafficking. Decertification can lead the United States to refuse financial assistance to the
country and also to vote against loans for it in international financial institutions. Latin American
countries have been critical of the U.S. certification process, because it is unilateral and has not
been applied to the United States itself. They also charge that it lacks consistency, as nations
that are important to U.S. interests at a particular time are certified even if they have not
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addressed the drug problem successfully. In 1997, the Colombian and Mexican legislature each
passed resolutions that attacked the process.99
The heavy U.S. emphasis on “winning” the drug war in military terms also has the
potential to drive a wedge between the United States and several Latin American countries.
Political scientist Richard Millet explains that
The Colombian conflict represents the greatest security issue in the region.
Dealing with its tangled roots, multiple facets, and international dimensions
presents a special challenge....Strengthening Colombia’s ability to prosecute the
war is obviously a key element, but in the regional context, such potential good
news for Colombia could spell bad news for its neighbors – as illegal armed
elements and criminal organizations would certainly then attempt to transfer more
of their operations across borders.100
Thus, even on issues where Latin American countries and the United States may find common
cause, the unity of the hemisphere is at best fragile.
IV. The Enduring Problem of Asymmetry
The promise of Western Hemispheric unity, which had seemed inevitable at the start of
the 1990s, rested on the hope that the United States would define its interests largely in terms of
the Americas. In fact, the northern colossus did not maintain its focus on Latin America. As the
U.S. economy and global influence grew in the 1990s, its ambitions also grew. By the end of
the Clinton Administration, the hegemonic model that was supposed to guide the hemisphere
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became the template for U.S. global policy. Thus Samuel Berger, the National Security Adviser,
proclaimed in 2000:
In 1992, the United States was widely seen as unlikely to sustain its global
engagement in the absence of an overriding threat. It was lagging
competitively....America today is by any measure the world's unchallenged
military and economic power, having completed the first peacetime expansion of
our global reach since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. The world counts on us to
be a catalyst of coalitions, a broker of peace, a guarantor of global financial
stability.101
Berger’s assertion echoed that of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who had characterized
the United States as the “indispensable” nation.
This assumption quickly became the justification for U.S. global policy when the new
Bush Administration adopted the mantra in its response to the September 11 terrorist attacks.
The President’s September 2002 National Security Strategy declared:
The United States possesses unprecedented—and unequaled—strength and
influence in the world.....The U.S. national security strategy will be based on a
distinctly American internationalism that reflects the union of our values and our
national interests. The aim of this strategy is to help make the world not just safer
but better....While the United States will constantly strive to enlist the support of
the international community, we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to
exercise our right of self defense by acting preemptively against such terrorists, to
prevent them from doing harm against our people and our country....102
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While such a declaration hardly masks the hegemonic pretense that lies at the root of current
U.S. policy, the broader implication has been articulated more directly by conservative analysts
who had worked on precursors of the National Security Strategy. Prominent among this group is
Robert Kagan, who argued plainly in a 1998 article that “the benevolent hegemony exercised by
the United States is good for a vast portion of the world's population. It is certainly a better
international arrangement than all realistic alternatives.”103
A hegemon, or any great power, generally will interpret its interests in global terms. As a
result, it will view problems differently from less powerful countries, which define their interests
more locally. Here lies the fundamental source of dissonance between the United States and the
rest of the hemisphere. U.S. officials define security in terms of threats to a stable order over
which they hope the United State will rule. They believe that the United States must be able to
project overwhelming global power so that there is a worldwide perception of its invincibility. It
must convince “pariah” states which resist its “leadership” that dissent will incur significant
retribution. This security agenda shapes U.S. foreign policy priorities as the United States
attempts to strengthen and legitimate what officials perceive to be the sources of U.S. power.
During the Cold War, economic relations were a weapon in the U.S. arsenal against the Soviet
Union. Similarly, today the United States wields economic power, albeit indirectly through
global financial markets and multi-lateral institutions. This power, reinforced by the United
States’ global military dominance and the attractiveness of its “soft power” promotion of
individual liberty, facilitates a hegemonic position which it uses to justify national interests and
such actions as U.S. military intervention, claiming to be the only country that can act as the
protector of private property and the integrity of financial markets.104
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In contrast, states without a hegemonic vision or tradition, such as those in Latin
America, are likely to see the U.S. impetus to intervene, and to engage in pre-emptive conflict
for the sake of global order, as irrational or even threatening. Latin American leaders
increasingly have felt trapped between U.S. demands and domestic political demands, between
supporting the hemispheric hegemon and acting on the basis of their own judgment about what is
best for their countries or a sub-region. This was evident in April 2002, when U.S. officials
seemed to approve of the coup against Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s democratically elected
president.105 As political analyst Peter Hakim observed, the “Bush administration's
comments...contrasted sharply with the reaction across Latin America. The region's heads of
state, who were meeting in San Jose, Costa Rica, immediately condemned the coup....Latin
America confidence in Washington's commitment to democracy had been severely shaken.”106
For these elected leaders, whose states recently had emerged from authoritarianism, the
disruption of Venezuelan democracy posed a security threat to them. Their first priority was to
affirm a commitment to democracy. For U.S. national security officials, though, their delayed
and ambivalent condemnations of the coup belied a more complex set of priorities related to the
war with Iraq. A similar divergence was evident the following year in the reaction of Chile and
Mexico – both members of the UN Security Council – to U.S. demands for their support on a
war resolution against Iraq. The leaders of both countries had to weigh the political
consequences of strong domestic opposition to the war and the economic consequences of
threatened U.S. retaliation.107
The decisions by Chile and Mexico were made even more difficult by the fragility of
most Latin American economies today. Whatever the cause of the stagnation – and there is an
abundance of competing explanations – it is clear that the modest economic growth in the 1990s
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neither ameliorated widespread poverty nor reduced the income disparities that make Latin
America the least egalitarian region in the world.108 For example, forty percent of Mexico’s
wealth in the year 2000 was still concentrated in the hands of the top ten percent of population,
while approximately fifty percent of the population earned only $4 per day, despite increased
Mexican trade with the United States as a result of NAFTA.109 More generally, the UN
Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean reports that 43 percent of the 500
million people in Latin America lived in poverty at the start of the millennium; nearly one in five
were classified as indigent, which meant on average that they earned less than $365 per year. Yet
the annual per capita Gross Domestic Product for Latin America was $3,836.110 More than fifty
percent of the region’s wealth belongs to the top one-fifth of the population, while the bottom
fifth owns only 4.5 percent.111 The U.S. recession exacerbated these economic circumstances,
especially for countries such as Mexico and Argentina which tied their fortunes closely to the
U.S. market or dollar.
The dual problems of poverty and inequality are the greatest threat to the region’s
security. Underdevelopment is both a cause of internal conflict and a source of diminished
legitimacy for Latin American governments. In turn, the loss of legitimacy is likely to engender
political stability, which undoubtedly would impede further economic development. Indications
of this phenomenon are evident in the increasing number of protests against privatization,
reduced government spending and unregulated free trade, which are three key elements of the
development model the United States (and international financial institutions) have pressured
Latin American leaders to adopt. In July 2002, Peruvians protested against the privatization of
public electrical generators, as the government was on the verge of selling them to a Belgian
company for $167 million. President Alejandro Toledo was consequently forced to suspend the
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deal.112 Widespread anger in Bolivia, sparked by the privatization of Cochabamba’s water
supply, nearly gave the 2002 presidential election to Evo Morales, head of the coca growers’
union and an outspoken critic of privatization.113 At the same time, the police in Ecuador
collided with protestors who were demonstrating against the Free Trade Area of the Americas
initiative.114 The thrust of the protests has been that U.S. hegemony is not a solution for the
region’s poverty. As a consequence, democratically elected officials in Latin America face the
dilemma of satisfying two increasingly contradictory sets of demands as they try to respond
positively to both their constituents and to Washington.
Washington has tended to ignore this dilemma, in part because negotiations aimed at
creating the FTAA seem on track.115 But as analyst Tom Barry suggests, the United States
should not mistake a Latin American willingness to negotiate a trade agreement with
unchallenged acceptance of U.S. dominance:
Countries such as Brazil and Argentina complain that U.S.-dictated terms of
hemispheric integration entail a surrender of their own options for domestic and
regional development. But, as Washington knows well, the greater fear by
recalcitrant nations is that they will be excluded from the largest consumer market
in the world. This paradox explains why the FTAA negotiations continue to
march toward conclusion despite all the complaints about unfair U.S. trade
practices, such as antidumping measures to protect vulnerable sectors, increased
farm subsidies, and arbitrary tariff barriers to deter products produced
competitively in Latin America and the Caribbean.116
Unless the United States can convince Latin Americans that Western Hemispheric economic
unity based on U.S. dominance will address their domestic priorities, the FTAA will not provide
Brenner, Goodman and Chanthavong – Page 39
the United States with an unchallenged leadership position from which it can comfortably pursue
a global security agenda of Pax Americana.
The security agenda for Latin American leaders thus is becoming markedly different
from that of the United States. Washington looks upon security issues narrowly, through the lens
of a hegemon’s priorities, much as the United States had perceived local conflicts in Latin
America during the Cold War exclusively as battles in the larger U.S.-Soviet struggle. In the
same way that some Latin American rulers embraced the U.S. Cold War security agenda, in
order to impose domestic order and to repress opponents whom they designated as threats to
national security, it is likely that some in the region will endorse the new U.S. framework in
order to enlist U.S. support for their own narrow ends. The result may be the appearance of
unity in the hemisphere about security issues. But beneath the facade of unity there will continue
to lurk a fundamental schism, which is rooted in the essential difference between the way that the
hegemonic United States and the non-hegemonic countries in the hemisphere perceive their vital
interests and the nature of threats to those interests. These differences may generate serious
disputes about what constitutes security in the hemisphere, and undoubtedly they will shape the
way in which U.S.-Latin American relations unfold.
Brenner, Goodman and Chanthavong – Page 40
NOTES
1
Alberto van Klaveren, “The Inter-American Political System,” in Latin American Views
of U.S. Policy, eds. Robert Wesson and Heraldo Munoz (New York: Praeger, 1986), p.
23.
2
Marc Falcoff, “Latin America Alone?” American Enterprise Review, vol. 1, No. 1
(January-February 1990), p. 12.
3
Robert Wesson, “Summary and Conclusions,” in Latin American Views of U.S. Policy,
eds. Robert Wesson and Heraldo Munoz (New York: Praeger, 1986), p. 153.
4
Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy toward Latin America
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), p.xii.
5
Schoultz, Beneath the United States, pp. 148-149.
6
James L. McDonald, Overriding Interests: Subversion as an Instrument of U.S. Foreign
Policy, Ph.D. Dissertation, American University, Washington, DC, 1997, pp. 183-185.
7
“Soft underbelly” was a concept used originally by the U.S. military to designate the least
protected area of the United States. For example, the authors of a 1962 military history
of World War II explain, “The Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico were the Atlantic
approaches to the Panama Canal, and also to the "soft underbelly" of the United States
itself--its unprotected Gulf coast” (Stetson Conn, Rose C. Engelman, and Byron
Fairchild, United States Army in World War II: Guarding the United States and its
Outposts, CMH Pub 4-2 [Washington, DC: Center of Military History, United States
Army, 1964], p. 9). The term commonly has been expanded to include the whole
southern U.S. border. For example, a 2002 article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists,
observes, “Millions try each year to slip into the United States through its ‘soft
underbelly’—the U.S.-Mexico border” (Michael Flynn, “¿Dónde Está La Frontera?”
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, July/August 2002, p. 24).
8
Lars Schoultz, National Security and United States Policy toward Latin America
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 34.
9
Anthony P. Maingot, The United States and the Caribbean (Boulder: Westview Press,
1994), pp. 18-25; Schoultz, Beneath the United States, pp. 188-191; Dexter Perkins, A
History of the Monroe Doctrine (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963). Schoultz
summarized the first manifestation of the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary in the Dominican
Brenner, Goodman and Chanthavong – Page 41
Republic by noting (p. 188): “So it was that the Roosevelt administration claimed the
right to control small Caribbean nations, setting the stage for his successor’s Dollar
Diplomacy and creating the expectation, common in our own time, that U.S. financial
guidance – today’s “Washington Consensus” – is the only alternative to economic
chaos.”
10.
Peter H. Smith, Talons of the Eagle: Dynamics of U.S.-Latin American Relations, 2nd
edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 50-51.
11.
Federico G. Gil, Latin American-United States Relations (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1971), pp. 96-97.
12.
Gil, Latin American-United States Relations, pp. 102-5
13.
Schoultz, Beneath the United States, p. 218.
14.
Robert Wesson, The United States and Brazil: Limits of Influence (New York: Praeger,
1981), pp. 8-13.
15.
Smith, Talons of the Eagle, pp. 100-101.
16.
Joseph S. Tulchin, Argentina and the United States: A Conflicted Relationship (Boston:
Twayne, 1990), pp. 16-19; Michael J. Francis, The Limits of Hegemony: United States
Relations with Argentina and Chile during World War II (Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1977), pp. 43-44.
17.
Thomas F. McGann, Argentina, the United States, and the Inter-American System 18801914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), pp. 223-24.
18.
Smith, Talons of the Eagle, pp. 35-36, 102-103.
19.
Smith, Talons of the Eagle, p. 94. Smith notes (pp. 94-95) that “Reformers and
nationalists would continue to denounce the Monroe Doctrine, its corollaries, and its
applications well into the twentieth century.”
20.
Berta Ulloa, “The U.S. Government versus the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1917,” in
Myths, Misdeeds, and Misunderstandings: The Roots of Conflicts in U.S.-Mexican
Relations, eds. Jaime E. Rodriguez O. and Kathryn Vincent (Wilmington: Scholarly
Resources, 1997), pp. 171-178; Schoultz, Beneath the United States, pp. 245-250.
21.
Smith, Talons of the Eagle, p. 64.
22.
Smith, Talons of the Eagle, p. 69.
Brenner, Goodman and Chanthavong – Page 42
23.
Bryce Wood, The Making of the Good Neighbor Policy (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1961); Schoultz, Beneath the United States, chapter 15.
24.
Ulloa, “The U.S. Government versus the Mexican Revolution,” pp. 189-90; McDonald,
Overriding Interests, pp. 151-176, 183-185.
25.
Smith, Talons of the Eagle, p. 84; Gil, Latin American-United States Relations, p. 180.
26.
Smith, Talons of the Eagle, p. 74. Between 1933 to 1938, twelve to twenty-five percent
of Germany’s exports went to Brazil, and Brazilian exports to Germany increased from
eight to twenty percent.
27.
Thomas E. Skidmore, Brazil: Five Centuries of Change (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1999), p. 120.
28.
Wesson, The United States and Brazil, pp. 15-16.
29.
W. Michael Weis, Cold Warriors & Coups d’Etat: Brazilian-American Relations, 19451964 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1993), pp. 11-12; Thomas E. Skidmore
and Peter H. Smith, Modern Latin America, 5th edition (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2001), p. 159.
30.
Gil, Latin American-United States Relations, p. 180; Tulchin, Argentina and the United
States, pp. 87, 91.
31.
Francis, Limits to Hegemony, p. 145.
32.
Tulchin, Argentina and the United States, pp. 84-86; Schoultz, Beneath the United
States, pp. 319-320; Gil, Latin American-United States Relations, p. 180; Francis, Limits
to Hegemony, pp. 214-215.
33
John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar
American National Security Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 92;
Melvyn P. Leffler, “National Security,” in Explaining the History of American Foreign
Relations, eds., Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), pp. 203-205.
34
These assumptions were embodied in a 1950 policy paper prepared for and adopted by
the National Security Council, “NSC-68: United States Objectives and Programs for
National Security (April 14, 1950).” NSC-68 provided a framework and justification for
responses to perceived communist challenges throughout the Cold War. It is reprinted in
Ernest R. May, American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC 68 (Boston: Bedford
Books, 1993), pp. 23-81. In 1999, Paul Nitze the principal author of NSC-68 explained
that in
Brenner, Goodman and Chanthavong – Page 43
the three years preceding NSC-68, President Truman had already
made crucial political decisions regarding the direction of foreign
policy. Most far-reaching of these was his determination to pick up
an exhausted Britain's mantle as a global, balancing power. Thus
those who drafted NSC-68 mapped out an approach toward goals
already set. These goals reflected a courageous and, even at the
time, controversial decision on the part of Truman to commit the
United States to a leading, interventionist role in peacetime world
affairs for the first time in its history (Paul Nitze, “NSC-68 and
U.S. Foreign Policy Today,” SAIS Review, vol. 19, No. 1 (1999),
pp. 1-2).
Kennedy’s Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, recalled in his memoirs how these assumptions
guided his own thinking:
In the events of the postwar period the Communist world posed
our primary challenge with its return to a doctrine of world
revolution, supported by acts of aggression on the ground to bring
it about....it looked as though this mud slide of communism would
continue unless stopped” (Dean Rusk, as told to Richard Rusk, As I
Saw It [New York: Penguin Books, 1991], pp. 128-129).
35
Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, pp. 201-202; Thomas G. Paterson, “Introduction:
John F. Kennedy’s Quest for Victory and Global Crisis,” in Kennedy’s Quest for Victory:
American Foreign Policy, 1961-1963, ed. Thomas G. Paterson (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1989), pp. 10-11; Smith, Talons of the Eagle, chapter 7.
36
Jorge I. Domínguez, “U.S.-Latin American Relations During the Cold War and Its
Aftermath,” in The United States and Latin America: The New Agenda, eds. Victor
Bulmer-Thomas and James Dunkerley (London: Institute of Latin American Studies and
Cambridge: David Rockefeller Center for Latin Americas Studies, 1999), p. 33.
37.
L. Ronald Scheman, The Inter-American Dilemma: The Search for Inter-American
Cooperation at the Centennial of the Inter-American System (New York: Praeger, 1988),
pp. 3-22.
38
Smith, Talons of the Eagle, p. 191.
39.
Skidmore and Smith, Modern Latin America, pp. 362-75; Gil, Latin American-United
States Relations, pp. 256, 217.
40.
Tulio Halperín Donghi, The Contemporary History of Latin America, ed. and trans. John
Charles Chasteen (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 250; Skidmore and Smith,
Modern Latin America, pp. 369-371.
41
“Declaration of Solidarity for the Preservation of the Political Integrity of the American
States Against the Intervention of International Communism,” Resolution XCIII (1954),
Organization of American States, in Organization of American States, 1954-1959; Report
Brenner, Goodman and Chanthavong – Page 44
Submitted by the Pan Americanism Union to the Eleventh Inter-American Conference,
(Washington D.C.: Organization of American States, 1959), pp. 2-3.
42
Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hopes: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer,
Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (Garden City:
Doubleday, 1982); Richard H. Immerman, CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of
Intervention (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982). Schoultz, Beneath the United
States, pp. 337-344. U.S. failure to obtain OAS support illustrated how Latin America
viewed U.S. intervention as more threatening than Communism. The CIA-organized
coup led to protests throughout Latin America; Argentina issued a statement supporting
Arbenz, while Chile and Uruguay denounced U.S. actions (Smith, Talons of the Eagle,
pp. 137-38).
43
Brian Loveman, For la Patria: Politics and the Armed Forces in Latin America
(Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1999). On the variety of analytic approaches that
attempt to explain motivations for the behavior of the armed forces in Latin America, see
David Pion-Berlin, “Introduction,” in Civil-Military Relations: New Analytic
Perspectives, ed. David Pion-Berlin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2001), pp. 1-13.
44
Guillermo O’Donnell, Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism: Studies in
South American Politics (Berkeley: University of California, Institute of International
Studies, 1973). Also see: Guillermo O’Donnell, “Tensions in the BureaucraticAuthoritarian State and the Question of Democracy,” and David Collier, “Overview of
the Bureaucratic-Authoritarian Model,” in The New Authoritarianism in Latin America,
ed., David Collier (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).
45
Thomas G. Paterson, Contesting Castro: The United States and the Triumph of the Cuban
Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 242. Also see: James G.
Blight and Philip Brenner, Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba’s Struggle with the
Superpowers after the Missile Crisis (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), pp.
150-152.
46
“Memorandum From the President's Deputy Special Assistant for National Security
Affairs (Rostow) to Secretary of Defense McNamara,” Washington, April 24, 1961, in
U.S. State Department, Foreign Relations of the United, 1961-1963, Volume X, Cuba,
1961-1962 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1997), Document No. 172.
47.
Stephen G. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts
Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1999), pp. 30-31; Thomas C. Wright, Latin America in the Era of the Cuban
Revolution (New York: Praeger, 1991), pp. 70-73.
48
Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World, chapter 7; U.S. Congress, Senate,
Committee on Foreign Relations, Survey of the Alliance for Progress: Compilation of
Brenner, Goodman and Chanthavong – Page 45
Studies and Hearings, Sen. Doc. 91-17, 91st Cong., 1st Sess. (1969); Jerome Levinson and
Juan de Onís, The Alliance that Lost its Way (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1970).
49.
Brian Loveman, For la Patria: Politics and the Armed Forces in Latin America
(Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1999), 166-172; Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in
the World, pp. 127-129; Smith and Skidmore, Modern Latin America, p. 377.
50
Thomas G. Paterson, Meeting the Communist Threat: Truman to Reagan (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 206-207.
51
Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World, pp. 141-145.
52.
Levinson and de Onís, The Alliance that Lost its Way, p. 88, fn. 7; Smith, Talons of the
Eagle, pp. 157-158.
53.
Louis W. Goodman, “The Military and Democracy: An Introduction,” pp. xiii-xx in
Louis W. Goodman, Johanna S. R. Mendelson, and Juan Rial, The Military and
Democracy (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1990); Smith, Talons of the Eagle, p.
155; Loveman, For la Patria, p.167.
54
Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World, pp. 133-135; U.S. Congress, Senate Select
Committee To Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities,
Staff Report, “Covert Action in Chile 1963-1973,” 94th Congress 1st Session, Committee
Print, December 18, 1975; Abraham Lowenthal, Dominican Intervention (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1972); Piero Gleijeses, The Dominican Crisis: The 1965
Constitutionalist Revolt and American Intervention (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1978).
55
Philip Brenner, “Waging Ideological War: Anti-communism and U.S. Policy in Central
America,” in The Socialist Register 1984, eds. Ralph Miliband, John Savile, and Marcel
Liebman (London: Merlin Press, 1984).
56
William M. LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America,
1977-1992 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), p. 54.
57
The so-called Kissinger Commission was perhaps the most refined effort to express a
broad view (Report of the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America,
Washington, DC: National Bipartisan Commission on Central America, January, 1984).
Its 1984 final report asserted:
...the Inter-American system has failed to yield a coordinated
response to the threat of subversion and the use of Soviet and
Cuban proxies....Just as there can be no real security without
economic growth and social justice, so there can be no prosperity
without security. The Soviet and Cuban threat is real (p. 14).
Brenner, Goodman and Chanthavong – Page 46
58.
LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard, pp. 213-14.
59
LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard, pp. 348-349.
60.
Terry Karl, “Mexico, Venezuela, and the Contadora Initiative,” in Confronting
Revolution: Security Through Diplomacy in Central America, eds., Morris J. Blachman,
William M. LeoGrande, and Kenneth E. Sharpe (New York: Pantheon, 1986), p. 271.
Also see: Luis G. Solís, “Collective Mediations in the Caribbean Basin,” in Collective
Responses to Regional Problems: The Case of Latin America and the Caribbean, eds.
Carl Kaysen, Robert A. Pastor, and Laura W. Reed (Cambridge, MA: American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1994).
61.
Alicia Frohmann, “Regional Initiatives for Peace and Democracy: The Collective
Diplomacy of the Rio Group,” in Kaysen, Pastor, and Reed, Collective Responses to
Regional Problems.
62
George Friedman and Meredith LeBard, The Coming War with Japan (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1991). Also see: Stephen D. Cohen, Cowboys and Samurai: Why the
United States is Losing the Industrial Battle and Why it Matters (New York: Harper
Business, 1991); Ezra Vogel, Japan as Number One: Lessons for America (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1979); Smith, Talons of the Eagle, pp. 222-228.
63
Richard J. Barnet, “Reflections: After the Cold War”, New Yorker, January 1, 1990;
Andrew Rosenthal, “The Vision Thing Again, But Some Don’t See It,” New York Times,
March 22, 1990, p. A20.
64.
See, for example: Pamela Constable and Arturo Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies: Chile
Under Pinochet (New York: Norton, 1991), chapters 11, 12; Stephen Haggard and
Robert Kaufman, The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 41, 58-60; Tulchin, Argentina and the United
States, p. 156-58.
65.
Smith, Talons of the Eagle, pp. 239-242, 271-275; Riordan Roett, “The Debt Crisis and
Economic Development in Latin America,” in The United States and Latin America in
the 1990s: Beyond the Cold War, eds. Jonathan Hartlyn, Lars Schoultz, and Augusto
Varas (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992), pp. 133-38; Stephen
Haggard and Robert Kaufman, The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
66
John Williamson. “What Washington Means by Policy Reform,” in Latin American
Adjustment: How Much Has Happened?, ed. John Williamson (Washington: Institute for
International Economics, 1990); Robin Broad and John Cavanagh, “The Death of the
Washington Consensus?” World Policy Journal, Fall 1999.
Brenner, Goodman and Chanthavong – Page 47
67
Robert A. Pastor, Exiting the Whirlpool: U.S. Foreign Policy Toward Latin America and
the Caribbean, second edition (Boulder: Westview Press, 2001), p.295; Augusto Varas,
“From Coercion to Partnership: A New Paradigm for Security Cooperation in the
Western Hemisphere?” in Hartlyn, Schoultz and Varas, The United States and Latin
America in the 1990s, pp. 52-56.
68
Cole Blasier, The Hovering Giant: U.S. Responses to Revolutionary Change in Latin
America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976).
69
Abraham F. Lowenthal, “Changing U.S. Interests and Policies in a New World,” in
Hartlyn, Schoultz and Varas, The United States and Latin America in the 1990s, p. 82.
70
“Declaration of Principles signed by the Heads of State and Government participating in
the First Summit of the Americas,” December 11, 1994; available at
<http://www.summit-americas.org/miamidec.htm>. For an examination of the process
that led up to the summit, see: Richard E. Feinberg, Summitry in the Americas: A
Progress Report (Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 1997).
71
Calvin Sims, “Latin America Fears Stagnation in Trade Talks,” New York Times, April
19, 1998, sec. 1, p. 10.
72
Robert A. Pastor and Jorge G. Castañeda, Limits to Friendship: The United States and
Mexico (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988).
73
The United States tolerated Mexico’s stance, Jacqueline Mazza aptly observes, because it
was seen “as helping the Mexican government solidify its support on the left and
maintain a strong, anti-communist state” (Jacqueline Mazza, Don’t Disturb the
Neighbors: The United States and Democracy in Mexico, 1980-1995 [New York:
Routledge, 2001], p. 14).
74
At the same time, other options such as increased trade with Japan or Latin America, no
longer seemed viable. See: Jorge I. Domínguez and Rafael Fernández de Castro, The
United States and Mexico: Between Partnership and Conflict (New York: Routledge,
2001), pp. 23-25.
75.
Guadalupe González, “Foreign Policy Strategies in a Globalized World: The Case of
Mexico,” in Latin America in the New International System, eds. Joseph S. Tulchin and
Ralph H. Espach (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2001), p. 163.
76
World Trade Organization, International Trade Statistics 2002 (Geneva: WTO, 2003),
Table III.18; available at:
<http://www.wto.org/english/res_e/statis_e/its2002_e/its02_byregion_e.htm>. Also see:
Robert A. Pastor, Toward a North American Community: Lessons from the Old World for
the New (Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 2001); Peter Hakim and
Robert E. Litan, “Introduction,” in The Future of North American Integration: Beyond
Brenner, Goodman and Chanthavong – Page 48
NAFTA, eds. Peter Hakim and Robert E. Litan (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution
Press, 2002), pp. 4-6.
77
Ginger Thompson, “After 9/11, Fox Still Waits for U.S. Moves on Mexico,” New York
Times, September 13, 2002, p. A1; Joseph Contreras, “Adios, Amigos?” Newsweek, 17
December 17, 2001, p. 42.
78
Elisabeth Malkin, “Manufacturing Jobs Are Exiting Mexico,” New York Times,
November 5, 2002, p. W1.
79.
Victor Bulmer-Thomas and Sheila Page, “Trade Relations in the Americas:
MERCOSUR, The Free Trade Area of the Americas and the European Union,” in
Bulmer-Thomas and Dunkerley, The United States and Latin America, p. 84.
80.
The Economist, “The Americas: Another Blow to Mercosur,” 31 March 2001, pp. 33-34.
81.
Marc Hufty, “Argentina: The Great Opening Up,” in Foreign Policy & Regionalism in
the Americas, eds. Gordon Mace and Jean Phillipe Thérien, (Boulder: Lynne Rienner,
1996), pp. 168-73.
82
Javier Corrales, “The Politics of Argentina’s Meltdown,” World Policy Journal, Fall
2002, p. 29. Also see: Mark Alan Healey and Ernesto Semán, “The Costs of Orthodoxy,”
The American Prospect, January 1-14, 2002; Manuel Pastor and Carol Wise, “From
Poster Child to Basket Case,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 2001.
83.
Louis Bélanger and Gordon Mace, “Building Role and Region: Middle States and
Regionalism,” in The Americas in Transition: The Contours of Regionalism, eds.
Gordon Mace, et al. (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1999), p. 160.
84.
Eric Hershberg, “Why Argentina Crashed—And is Still Crashing,” NACLA Report on the
Americas, July/August 2002, pp. 30-32; Larry Rohter, “Once Secure, Argentines Now
Lack Food and Hope,” New York Times, March 2, 2003, Sect. 1, p. 8; Hector Tobar, “The
Good Life Is No More for Argentina,” Los Angeles Times, February 18, 2003, Part 1, p. 1
85
Contrast his major work from the earlier period with a recent compilation of speeches and
essays: Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in
Latin America, trans. Marjory Mattingly Urquidi (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1979); Fernando Cardoso, Charting a New Course: the Politics of Globalization
and Social Transformation, ed. with introduction, Mauricio A. Font (Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).
86.
Maria Regina Soares de Lima, “Brazil’s Alternative Vision,” in Mace, et al, The
Americas in Transition; Smith, Talons of the Eagle, p. 335.
Brenner, Goodman and Chanthavong – Page 49
87.
Tony Smith, “Brazil’s Election Victor Maps his Way to More Social Equality,” New York
Times, November 8, 2002, p. A7.
88.
Joseph Contreras, “Paying for Dreams,” Newsweek, November 11, 2002, p. 43.
89.
Inter-American Dialogue, The Troubled Americas: Policy Report 2003 (Washington, DC:
Inter-American Dialogue, 2003), p. 12. This observation was especially notable because
Cardoso had just become the Co-Chairman of the group when the report was issued.
90.
Larry Rohter, “In Free-Market Slump, Brazil’s Voters Look for Change,” New York
Times, October 5, 2002, p. A3; Anthony Faiola, “Dejected Brazilians Look to Left;
Lula’s Economic Stance May Get Him Elected, Alter Path of Reform,” Washington Post,
October 6, 2002, p. A28.
91
Raymond Colitt, “Lula sets out to straddle two worlds,” Financial Times, January 24,
2003, p. 12; Tony Smith, “Honeymoon In Brazil: Market's Gift To New Chief,” New
York Times, January 8, 2003, p. W1.
92.
Mónica Serrano, “Transnational Crime in the Western Hemisphere,” in The Future of
Inter-American Relations, ed. Jorge I. Domínguez (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 93;
Kenneth Sharpe and William Spencer, “Refueling a Doomed War on Drugs: Flawed
Policy Feeds Growing Conflict,” NACLA Report on the Americas, November/December
2001.
93.
Ivelaw Griffith, “Transnational Crime in the Americas: A Reality Check,” in
Domínguez, The Future of Inter-American Relations, p. 67; Joseph S. Tulchin and Ralph
H. Espach, “Introduction: U.S.-Caribbean Security Relations in the Post-Cold War Era,”
in Security in the Caribbean Basin: The Challenge of Regional Cooperation, eds. Joseph
S. Tulchin and Ralph H. Espach (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2000).
94.
Abraham F. Lowenthal, “United States-Latin American Relations at the Century’s Turn:
Managing the ‘Intermestic’ Agenda,” in The United States and the Americas: A Twentyfirst Century View, eds. Albert Fishlow and James Jones (New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 1999), p. 118.
95
Bert Ruiz, The Colombian Civil War (London: McFarland, 2001), chapters 3, 6, 7.
96.
Ingrid Vaicius and Adam Isacson, “The ‘War on Drugs’ Meets the ‘War on Terror’,”
International Policy Report, February, 2003 (Washington, DC: Center for International
Policy); Sharpe and Spencer, “Refueling a Doomed War on Drugs,” p. 23; Russell
Crandall, Driven by Drugs: U.S. Policy Toward Colombia (Boulder: Lynne Rienner,
2002).
Brenner, Goodman and Chanthavong – Page 50
97
U.S. Department of State, Bureau for International Narcotics Control and Law
Enforcement Affairs, International Narcotics Control Strategy Report 2003 (Washington,
DC: March 2003), p. I-6; U.S. State Department, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights,
and Labor, “Colombia,” in Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - 2002, March
31, 2003 (available at: </g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2002/18325pf.htm>); Glenn Kessler, “Powell
Pledges More Support for Colombia’s Anti-Rebel War; New President is Praised for
Tough Stance on Guerrillas,” Washington Post, December 5, 2002, p. A22.
98.
Vaicus and Isacson, “The ‘War on Drugs’ Meets the ‘War on Terror’,” pp. 2-3.
99.
Serrano, “Transnational Crime in the Western Hemisphere,” pp. 102-103.
100
Richard L. Millett, “Colombia’s Conflicts: The Spillover Effects of a Wider War,” NorthSouth Agenda Papers, No. 57 (North-South Center, University of Miami; September
2002), p. 6.
101
Samuel R. Berger, “A Foreign Policy for the Global Age,” Foreign Affairs,
November/December 2000, p. 23.
102
George W. Bush, “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” The
White House, Washington, DC, September 2002, pp. 1, 6; available at:
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html>.
103
Robert Kagan, “The Benevolent Empire,” Foreign Policy, Summer 1998. He elaborates
these ideas in a recently published book, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in
the New World Order (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003). In 1997, Kagan helped to
create a policy group – Project for the New American Century – made up of several
people who ultimately shaped the Bush National Security Strategy, including: Paul
Wolfowitz (Deputy Secretary of State), I. Lewis Libby (Chief of Staff for Vice President
Richard Cheney), and John Bolton (Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and
International Security). The group’s September 2000 report called for an increase in U.S.
military spending and a strategy of preemption (so that the United States could “perform
‘constabulary’ duties associated with shaping the security environment in critical
regions”) in order to establish a Pax Americana:
Today, the United States has an unprecedented strategic opportunity. It
faces no immediate great-power challenge; it is blessed with wealthy,
powerful and democratic allies in every part of the world; it is in the midst
of the longest economic expansion in its history; and its political and
economic principles are almost universally embraced....The challenge for
the coming century is to preserve and enhance this “American peace.”
See: Thomas Donnelly, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources
for a New Century,” Washington, DC: Project for the New American Century, September
2000), p. iv; available at:
<http://www.newamericancentury.org/publicationsreports.htm>.
Brenner, Goodman and Chanthavong – Page 51
104
The 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review establishes this position in its opening, when it
asserts, “America's security role in the world is unique. It provides the basis for a network
of alliances and friendships. It provides a general sense of stability and confidence, which
is crucial to the economic prosperity that benefits much of the world” (U.S. Department
of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review Report 2001 [Washington, DC: Department of
Defense, 2001], p. 1).
105
Peter Slevin, “Chavez Provoked His Removal, U.S. Officials Say; Administration
Expresses Guarded Optimism About Interim Regime, Calls for Quick Elections,”
Washington Post, April 13, 2002, p. A17.
106
Peter Hakim, “Democracy and U.S. Credibility,” New York Times, April 21, 2002, Sect.
4, p. 4.
107
Larry Rohter, “THREATS AND RESPONSES: A LATIN VOTE; Chile Feels the Weight
of Its Security Council Seat,” New York Times, March 11, 2003, p. A10; Paul Blustein,
“Bush May Use Trade Pacts for Iraq Leverage,” Washington Post, March 15, 2003, p.
A16; Tim Weiner, “U.S. Lays Siege to Mexico's Chief, and So Do Many Others,” New
York Times, March 12, 2003, p. A3.
108
Samuel A. Morley, The Income Distribution Problem in Latin America and the
Caribbean, UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, U.N.
Publication No. LC/G.2127-P (Chile: United Nations, 2001), p. 17. A recent report by
the Inter-American Dialogue pointedly observed that throughout the region “Growth has
come to a standstill, foreign investment has dropped sharply, and unemployment and
poverty have worsened.” See: Inter-American Dialogue, The Troubled Americas, Policy
Report 2003 (Washington, DC: Inter-American Dialogue, 2003), p. iii. Also see: Nancy
Birdsall and Augusto de la Torre with Rachel Menezes, Washington Contentious:
Economic Policies for Social Equity in Latin America (Washington, DC: Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace and Inter-American Dialogue, 2001), pp. 6-7.
109.
Ginger Thompson, “Free-Market Upheaval Grinds Mexico’s Middle Class,” New York
Times, September 4, 2002, p. A3.
110
UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, Social Panorama of
Latin America, 2001-2002, U.N. Publication No. LC/G.2193–P (Santiago, Chile: United
Nations, 2002), p. 14. The levels of indigence and poverty were determined separately for
each country and for urban and rural sectors. For example, the per person indigence and
poverty levels in a Chilean city were, respectively, about $1.25/day and $2.50/day; in a
Bolivian city they were $0.93 and $1.86 (Ibid., pp. 213-214). The calculations excluded
data from the Caribbean. Also see: UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the
Caribbean, Statistical Yearbook for Latin America and the Caribbean 2001, U.N.
Publication No. LC/G.2151-P/B (Santiago, Chile: United Nations, 2002), Part II, p. 199.
Brenner, Goodman and Chanthavong – Page 52
111.
Jonathan Wheatley, “The Mercosur Marriage is in Trouble,” Business Week, January 29,
2001, p. 25.
112.
Juan Forero, “Still Poor, Latin Americans Protest Push for Open Markets,” New York
Times, July 19, 2002, p. A1. Also see: Roger Burbach, “’Throw Them All Out,’
Argentina’s Grassroots Rebellion,” NACLA, July/August 2002, p. 40.
113
Juan Forero, “Bolivian Congress to Decide Tight Presidential Election,” New York Times,
July 2, 2002, p. A4; Jim Shultz, “Bolivia: The Water War Widens,” NACLA Report on
the Americas, January/February 2003, pp. 34-37.
114.
Contreras, “Paying for Dreams,” p. 43.
115
Neil Irwin, “U.S. Seeks to End Many Tariffs; Bush Plan for Latin Trade Causes Debate
in Textile Industry,” Washington Post, February 12, 2003, p. E01.
116
Tom Barry, “Our Backyard Pax Americana,” Americas Program Discussion Paper (Silver
City, NM: Interhemispheric Resource Center, February 17, 2003), p. 7; available at:
<http://www.americaspolicy.org/reports/2003/0302paxam.html>.