Troubled Neighbors

The Story of US-Latin American Relations from FDR to the Present

Henry Raymont

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429983061
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Politics

At one time the US and Latin America defined themselves in common as new and American, in contrast to the old, European order, and they enjoyed a period of friendship and cooperation based on that sustaining sense of commonality. With the advent of the Cold War, however, hemispheric solidarity and alliance faded fast, as the US became preoccupied with other regions of the world it deemed of deeper strategic significance. The United States and Latin America now largely define each other as negative reference points, instead of as neighbors and allies. In Troubled Neighbors, Henry Raymont-journalist for four decades, author, lecturer, teacher, and consultant-presents a journalist's observations on the pendulum swings in US-Latin American relations over the past half-century. The book is organized chronologically, with a chapter devoted to each of the administrations from FDR to Bill Clinton and an epilogue covering the first term of the George W. Bush administration. Straightforward organization: The book is chronologically organized, with a chapter devoted in turn to each administration from FDR to George W. Bush. Experienced author, an expert in the field._

Chapter One
Introduction

Misunderstanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past. But a man may wear himself out just as fruitlessly in seeking to understand the past, if he is totally ignorant of the present.

MARC BLOCH, 1942

The societies that cannot combine reverence toward their symbols with freedom of revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy or from slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows.

ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD

The history of relations between the United States and Latin America is marked by contradictions and an erratic course. US policy on the one hand has been described as idealistic, the reflection of a benign nation willing to share its democratic experiment with the rest of the world, and on the other hand as seeking to impose on its neighbors to the south some of the colonial policies it has repudiated since the time of the Revolutionary War.

Latin America continues to be a singularly elusive, perplexing subject for US policymakers. In five decades of reporting on inter-American affairs, the question I have encountered most frequently and puzzled over most often is, Why does Latin America seem to be such an impenetrable subject in the United States? Or, to put it another way, why has Latin America been considered such a marginal subject by practically every administration in Washington after Franklin Delano Roosevelt? Sometimes the question is aired in ceremonial speeches by a momentarily puzzled secretary of state and a few ritual newspaper editorials in the midst of a crisis; more often it is repeated by frustrated Latin American leaders.

The much reiterated thesis that the New World was scattered geographically and developed by two predominant and rival cultures—Iberian Roman Catholicism and northwest European Protestantism—should not obscure, as it frequently does, its common characteristics and the unity of force it exerted on the rest of the world. When differences become overdrawn, it is useful to remember the origins of those settling the New World, as simply described by the Colombian historian German Arciniegas: "The peoples of the Americas were commoners—plain Perezes in the Hispano-Indian colonies, plain Smiths in the English. Europeans who had been docile vassals in Europe emigrated to America as bold adventurers."

Was not post-Columbian America settled by people seeking new frontiers and status in a hemisphere free of the oppressiveness of the old order? Did not both North and South America wage fierce wars to free themselves from the royal autocrats of Europe? Is not a measure of the New Worlds identity the convergence of Indo-American, European, African and Asian cultures that produced the American miracle?

Aside from certain elements derived from the traditional Amerindian societies, Latin America's social institutions, cultural values and norms and economic and political systems have been fundamentally Western in character. With these antecedents, there came to be a New World version of Western civilization, best characterized by the hemisphere's unique mestizo culture. A sense of our New World commonalities was shared, if sometimes tenuously, by the founding fathers of the United States and the Latin American patriots alike. Clearly the experiences of the United States and Latin America over the past two centuries have an abundance of differences and divergences. But they also have enough similarities as New World nations to require a more balanced view about one another, a sense of proportion and context that makes comparison fruitful and exciting.

And yet since World War II, when the two halves of the hemisphere confronted each other in international forums, it has become increasingly evident that they have almost ceased to communicate. As recently as the 1980s, Washington and most Latin American capitals held differing views on everything from Central America to Cuba, from the foreign debt, illegal drug traffic and immigration to the invasions of Grenada and Panama and the role of the OAS. For years hemispheric divergences were so frequent that they were considered normal relations. This is tragic in view of the period of friendship and cooperation that preceded the Cold War and was haltingly revived by John Kennedy

Those old enough to remember the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1933 to 1945 know that there can be convergence, that differences and divergences are not inexorable but tend to be cyclical and that they need not always dominate US-Latin American relations. Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy was unparalleled in taking hemispheric relations to the most constructive level in this century. It fashioned an unprecedented regional alliance recalling the unifying vision of Simon Bolivar and the democratic convictions of the founding fathers that there is something distinctive about the way of life and the ideals of the societies this side of the Atlantic. A whole new spirit of cooperation sprang into being. For the first time in a hundred years hemispheric solidarity actually existed.

But, as often seems to happen in history, every golden age is finite, followed by decline and, hopefully, resurrection. World War II had barely ended, just weeks after FDR's death, when the Cold War began and the Good Neighbor policy was cast aside by the zeal with which Roosevelt's successors, beginning with Harry S. Truman, turned the containment of communism on a global scale into the exclusive priority of US foreign policy.

Having accepted Washington's official wartime rhetoric about inter-American "friendship and cooperation" as a genuine sentiment, perhaps mistaking a spiritual goal for a geopolitical reality, Latin Americans reacted restlessly and with dismay at Washington's postwar tendency to dismiss them as practically irrelevant to the East-West power equation. True, Latin Americans had not suffered the devastation of World War II; nonetheless, their frustration was understandable. During a time of unchallenged US supremacy, Washington possessed the leverage to push for democratic reform rather than deal with opportunistic dictatorships. And a small fraction of Marshall aid might have been applied with great profit to meet Latin America's looming economic and social problems.

During the 1950s, as Latin America was battling the effects of a worldwide recession and a gathering storm of social discontent, ancient anti-US attitudes enlivened the political scene. There was widespread resentment over the fact that while the Eisenhower administration devoted enormous economic resources to counter communism in Europe and Asia, in Latin America the primary emphasis was on lecturing fiscal conservatism. A New York Times survey reflecting the prevailing mood in 1956 recognized that

Latin Americans feel slighted because they consider themselves neglected economically and point out bitterly that this fiscal year the Eisenhower Administration has earmarked only $96,000,000 for the region compared to nearly $5 billion asked for global aid. . . . On the political side nationalism is producing noticeable restiveness in regard to United States' leadership and there is much talk these days about ending economic and political dependence on the "Colossus of the North.¹

By early 1958, it could have been foretold with mathematical certainty that if Washington failed to respond to democratic stirring and economic grievances across the region, the hemispheric solidarity that had prevailed during World War II would be in mortal danger. Latin America was now looking for urgent remedies, preferably in cooperation with the United States but no longer in awe of Washington's latest word. Had it not been for Washington's obdurate indifference, the deterioration of the hemispheric relationship would have been neither so acute nor irreversible. Cuba's spiteful embrace of communism might have been averted.

The stage had been set, unnecessarily, for confrontation by two blocs, of which one would turn to a Third World strategy and the other to the industrialized nations; both seemed prepared to forgo an inter-American system that had been in the making since 1898. Few events in hemispheric history have made a deeper impression on contemporaries or on posterity than the striking reluctance of postwar US administrations to respond to Latin America's appeals for greater attention in terms of political influence and economic needs.

Consequently, hemispheric solidarity faded fast and with it the importance of hemispheric alliance. The inter-American system, once confidently hailed as a model for the free world, no longer offered viable solutions to the hemispheres profound political, economic and social problems. Instead, it became the object of derision. Not long ago, a Mexican foreign minister and Nobel Prize laureate called the regional system "a disgrace to the memory of Bolivar." In the United States, a former undersecretary of state said the regional alliance was "obsolete" and suggested that Washington consider withdrawing from the OAS.

During the four decades I spent in Washington, where I arrived in the final year of the Truman administration in 1951, I encountered an intellectual climate indifferent to Latin America, in sharp contrast to the preceding decades. Even the most intelligent internationalists, when talking about Latin America, sounded much like Isaiah Berlin's description of certain British attitudes: "there generally is something curiously remote and abstract about their ideas."

When these internationalists think about the neighbor republics at all, they think of them in terms of their treatment by the United States and Europe and discuss them "as wards or victims, but seldom if ever in their own right, as peoples with histories and cultures of their own; with a past and present and future which must be understood in terms of their own actual character and circumstances." The price that is paid for this treatment—spiritually, intellectually and politically—cannot be overestimated. That is what Gabriel Garcia Marquez meant in his Nobel Prize speech when he said: "The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary."

Yet the founding fathers of the US republic, just as much as the independence leaders of Latin America, predicated their struggle on the conviction of the New World's uniqueness—that it was something new in geography, history, experience and people that separated republican America from monarchical Europe. In the general way of life there was less to differentiate North Americans from Latin Americans, compared to the differences between the monarchies of the Old World and the republics of the new. One needs only roam the streets of any major US city today to realize how Latin American culture is permeating US society, from what we read and eat and listen to the barrios of New York, Los Angeles, San Antonio, Chicago, Washington and Boston.

The more I ponder the inconsistencies and misunderstandings that have marked US—Latin American relations during the past half century, the deeper it seems to me the mystery of something like a mental block that keeps Latin America outside the US Weltanschauung. The contradiction of their uniqueness as siblings of the New World, compared to other regions, on the one hand, and of a curious tendency to obscure commonalities by belittling their importance and stressing divergences, on the other, is startling.

There is a strange historical irony here. In the first century of their independence, and again in the Roosevelt era, the United States and Latin America defined their identity partly, if not mainly, by affirming that they were not Europe. But during the postwar years the US-Latin American dialogue became so estranged that each was casting not the Old World but the other as a negative reference point. This is one of the great anachronisms of our time and deserves closer examination.

Ir is therefore useful to remember that exclusion of and divergences with Latin America were not always the rule in US-Latin American relations. During World War II and the early years of the Cold War, most Latin American governments supported Washington on every major foreign policy issue. The US global agenda was accepted, if at times grudgingly, in the name of hemispheric solidarity.

To understand current Latin American attitudes and preoccupations, we must understand the forces that have shaped them. Since independence, Latin America's quest for self-identity has taken place mostly in the form of a constant dialogue with the United States. As Octavio Paz put it: "The US image is always present among us, even when it ignores us or turns its back to us; its shadow covers the entire continent." Under the impact of every new phase in their shared history—frontier, colonial, independence, civil war, manifest destiny, the Big Stick policy, dollar diplomacy, the Good Neighbor policy, Peronism—the peoples of Latin America and the United States set about reinterpreting the meaning of their existence and the mystery of their fate.

The idea of hemispheric cooperation continues to exert far from negligible appeal in Latin America, especially in an era of economic interdependence that no country can hope to face in isolation.

Note

1. Tad Szulc, "Latin Nationalism Challenges Policy of U.S., Survey Shows," New York Times, April 13, 1956, p. 6.

Chapter Two
The Past as Prologue

The Old World's Vision of the New

En general el américano está hecho para sufrir en silencio los desdenes del europeo. . . . Así, amigos de Europa, no hay por que alarmarse ante las novedades de América, que también tienen su vejez. [As a rule, the Americas are sentenced to suffer in silence the disdain of the European. . . . So, my European friends, there is no need for alarm in the face of America's novelties, which are also ancient history.]

ALFONSO REYES¹

La libertad del Nuevo Mundo es la esperanza del Universo. [The New World's freedom is the hope of the universe.]

SIMÓN BOLÍVAR

Amerika, du hast es besser
Als unser Kontinent, das alte. . . .
Dich stört nicht im Innern,
Zur lebendiger Zeit,
Unnützes Erinnern
Und vergeblicher Streit.
Benutzt die Gegemvart mit Glück!
[America, you're better off than
our Continent, the old one. . . .
You have no inner qualms,
to distract vital time with
useless Memories
And vain strife.
Utilize the Present with felicity!]

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, Faust

Latin America is the only one of the world's great subdivisions where the human being is still entirely human. . . . The South American continent may prove some day to be the last repository and custodian of humane Christian values that men in the European motherlands and in North America—overfed, overorganized, and blinded by fear and ambition—have thrown away.

GEORGE KENNAN, Memoirs

The history of US—Latin American relations since the New World colonies emancipated themselves from the European monarchies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries shifts uneasily from moments of lyrical friendship to long stretches of acrimony and misunderstandings. It is a history that can be treated as the history of New World self-awareness, applying equally to both halves of the hemisphere: every change in the socioeconomic and political-cultural constellation would give rise to another version of the New World phenomenon.

Nonetheless, one of the most persistent questions heard these days in the northern and southern halves of the Western Hemisphere is, What do we have in common? The obvious and immediate reply is, both belong to the New World. If one common denominator was more powerful than any other, it was that the American continent was not Europe but something new in history, in people, new in nature and in experience.

Since independence two profoundly rooted but conflicting strains have existed in the way North Americans view their neighbors to the south—as siblings born of the same New World roots or as an alien culture brought to the hemisphere by a decadent, imperial Spain in opposition to the progressive, virtuous, Anglo-American north. Sometimes these two strains battle each other in the same North American breast; more often large segments of opini...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Prologue
• Acknowledgments
• 1 INTRODUCTION
• 2 THE PAST AS PROLOGUE: THE OLD WORLD'S VISION OF THE NEW
• 3 CONVERGENCE: THE ROOSEVELT ERA
• 4 TRANSITION: HARRY S. TRUMAN
• 5 THE EISENHOWER ERA
• 6 JOHN F. KENNEDY
• 7 LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON
• 8 RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON
• 9 GERALD FORD
• 10 JIMMY CARTER
• 11 THE REAGAN ERA: A CHRONICLE OF AN ADMINISTRATION FORETOLD
• 12 GEORGE H. W. BUSH: RETURN TO PRAGMATISM
• 13 BILL CLINTON AND THE POLITICS OF TRADE
• 14 EPILOGUE
• Index