Anglais

Often referred to as “America’s backyard,” Latin America has been considered by political leaders in the United States as belonging within its ordained sphere of influence since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 warned European powers not to interfere in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere: a source of land, labor, raw materials, and markets for its exports. Affairs in the region were topics of hot public debate during the 1980s and 1990s, when Americans were confronted with their country’s role in bloody wars in Central America, militarized counter-narcotics campaigns, and a free trade agreement (NAFTA) criticized by some Republicans for the loss of U.S. jobs and by anti-globalization and human rights activists for paving the way for the exploitation of Mexican workers. After dropping somewhat under the radar, concerns about Latin America resurfaced during the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, who sought to exploit fears about illegal immigrants, criminals, and drugs seeping into the country at its southern border. Concerns and issues growing out of relations between the United States and Latin America have thus been critical to political causes, campaigns, and movements on both the right and left in the United States. US policies in Latin America, moreover, inspired a whole generation of so-called “revisionist” scholars of the Cold War era, who sought to show how US foreign policy had followed an expansionist logic from the nation’s beginnings, and to illuminate the grave political, economic, and social consequences of American empire for the countries subjugated by its power. 

While such concerns should spark the intellectual curiosity of students seeking to master this question, they are somewhat tangential to the task at hand. Indeed, the question we have before us on relations between the United States and Latin America between 1933 and 2017 takes a conventional approach to the subject that draws heavily from the theoretical frameworks and scholarship of the field of international relations, and, to a lesser extent, from the fields of diplomatic history and American government (in other words, the study of American political institutions and processes). The main objective is to understand the political dynamics, strategic and economic interests, and ideologies that shaped US policies in Latin America, the goals of these policies, and their consequences for the United States and for countries in the region. As for the political forces driving these policies, the influence of non-state actors (for example, multinational corporations, human rights and environmental advocacy groups, the Catholic Church) should not be overlooked, but the focus remains primarily on policymakers and institutions in Washington (the Executive Branch, the State Department, the CIA, and the US Congress), Latin American political leaders, inter-American and international organizations, and the interventions of other nations in the Western Hemisphere. 

In terms of periodization, aside from the early period of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration in the 1930s and 1940s, the Cold War represents the heart of the chronological framework, with the decades following 1989 viewed through the lens of the transition to a multipolar landscape in which US hegemony in the region became increasingly more complicated and the geopolitical stakes in Latin America more varied. In terms of geography, the question requires particular attention to Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, though relations with the countries of South America, from Colombia to Chile in the West, and from Venezuela to Argentina in the East, are to be studied in moments when affairs in these countries posed significant strategic geopolitical threats to the United States.