Defined by Doctrine

When attempting to define Latin America in an international context it is uniquely a region that is fundamentally defined by outside factors and prerogatives. Even the label ‘Latin America’ dates from the 1830’s with Frenchman Michel Chevalier, who after a trip to North America and Mexico conceived the concept of a separate ‘Latin’ race that included Spanish and Portuguese speakers that was in a cultural conflict with its German and English ‘Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon neighbors’.[1] It is this cultural ideological doctrine that helped shape later concepts of the United States as an entity separate from its American neighbors to the south. A policy of two distinct and separate America’s in the United States and in much of Europe. While all the blame for this conceptual difference between what we know refer to as Latin America and the United States cannot all be laid at the feet of Chevalier, but it does provide a clear reference of when the idea of ‘America’ became more fractured. The early 19^th century period when Europe and the United States both began to see Latin America as an entity unto itself constituting specific treatment by various diplomatic and ideological dialectics.

In the fourth chapter of Democracy in Latin America by Smith and Sells explore the relationship of Latin America and the United States in these diplomatic and ideological dialectics of the 20^th century. American foreign policy in Latin America is often seen as defined by doctrinal edicts in foreign policy starting with the infamous Monroe Doctrine from 1823 that loosely stipulated that the Americas should be outside the influence of European powers, but while seemingly altruistic had the effect of essentially defining Latin America as a sphere of influence of the United States. While in the 19^th century it had essentially minor impact and was of limited political and diplomatic use its legacy has had a long shadow in U.S. foreign policy.  It is with this initial doctrine that the seeds of American foreign policy actions in Latin American during the 20^th century have their justification.

The various foreign policies based off of the Monroe Doctrine in Latin America has the effect in the 20^th century of regarding Latin America as an American periphery. While Europe had divided Africa and Asia into colonies and spheres of influence under direct control, the U.S. began to look to its south for similar results. Outside threats would define how America would react to political and social action in Latin America rather than examining each counties domestic situation. The U.S.’s policy doctrines the region was consistently based on foreign pressures starting with European imperialism, then fascism, and moving to communism. Each in its time a threat to U.S. global interests and each causing a doctrinal shift in foreign policy to Latin America by whatever U.S. administration was in control.

The largest shift in Latin American policy prior to the Cold War was Theodore Roosevelt’s intervention policy that basically used American military and economic pressure to keep Latin American governments under the American sphere of influence. While his distant cousin Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930’s initiated the ‘Good Neighbor Policy’ toward Latin America it still had the goal of maintaining the U.S.’s political and economic dominance of the region. Stability that benefited U.S. business and political interests in the region would define the century of American doctrine in Latin America. To maintain this stability one Roosevelt put a steel gauntlet on the fist of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America and the nest put a velvet glove on that same gauntlet, and one that was easily removable when convenient.

It is during the Cold War that ‘convenient’ became perhaps the most important term to Latin American governments in American foreign policy doctrine toward the region. It also began a revolving door of U.S. policy doctrines from the Truman policy of containment of communism that became American diplomatic and bureaucratic policy for much the 20^th century. Even Kennedy’s more benevolent ‘New Frontier’ and its diplomatic actions were based off fending off communism. However, the most destructive period of American doctrinal policy in Latin America can be seen to be the Nixon Doctrine. The Nixon Administration directed by Henry Kissinger deconstructed Latin America from a region to individual countries to be traded and bet on at a poker table of international diplomacy with the Soviet Union. To shore these bets on nations it became again ‘convenient’ to have reliable bets in countries not run by chaotic parliamentary systems, but rather by militaries and bureaucracies who benefited from a status quo relationship with the United States. The Nixon Doctrine is a disaster of not just U.S. long term credibility for short term gains, but also terrifyingly banal toward the concept of sovereignty that any person alive today can see a seed of the idea of later ‘preemptive strikes’ popular in present U.S. foreign policy.

The dilemma of examining the topic of Latin America’s role in a larger global context is that it is fundamentally tied to outside perceptions of the region even in name. Furthermore, Latin America’s global position is itself defined by its role in the shadow of not just the U.S., but also Europe throughout its history. Whether that be European colonial and imperial ambitions, but also U.S. desires for a sphere of influence to control and rely upon in global politics and economics. While the U.S. has never had the physical boundaries of traditional empire, its doctrinal policies toward Latin America have been largely the same as one would administer a traditional European empire with Latin American states acting as U.S. proxies with specifically defined limitations. This is ultimately justified because Latin America is the ‘other’ in the Americas, there is the United States and everyone else, justified by cultural labeling and the industrial strength of the U.S. military. The region labeled as Latin America is essentially to the U.S. what Africa was to the European states of the 19^th century, a southern exploitable region that was conveniently labeled to be inferior by its norther neighbor. This behavior is still justified in Latin America by U.S. doctrine for many of the same reasons in the contemporary post-Cold War world. Instead of Chevalier’s cultural labeling the U.S. doctrine toward the Latin American states has been replaced by economic labeling for justification of its actions and the need to ‘develop’ these ‘secondary’ states.

[1]  Walter Mingalo. The Idea of Latin America (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005). pp. 77–80.