Into the new millennium: an age of uncertainty

European Union (EU)

A political and economic community of nations formed in 1992 in Maastricht by the signing of the Treaty on European Union (TEU). In addition to the agreements of the European Community, the EU incorporated two inter­governmental — or supra­national — ‘pillars' that tie the member states of the EU together: one dealing with common foreign and security policy, and the other with legal affairs.

According to conventional wisdom in the 1980s, the United States was, in part by default, losing some of its dominance in the Western Hemisphere. The revolutions in Central America, the growing independence of the Latin American economies and the reluctance of the United States to intervene abroad in the post­Vietnam era were seemingly bringing to an end the era of the Monroe Doctrine. Statistics seemed to confirm this: American trade (including arms shipments to) and direct investment in the Western Hemisphere had, in fact, been in constant decline since the 1950s. Moreover, the Americans had been forced to accept the survival of a communist regime in Cuba and even the Reagan administration was reluctant to intervene openly in places other than the small island of Grenada. By the end of the Cold War, it appeared therefore that Latin America was destined for a new era of independence and, perhaps, prosperity that would, in the long run, result in ever-diminishing American influence (let alone hegemony) in the southern half of the Western Hemisphere.

Yet, throughout the 1990s, it was clear that the economic dependency of Latin America on the United States remained strong. In part this was due to the traditional disparity in wealth. In the 1990s the gross domestic product of the United States was still seven times as high as that of all of Latin America; meanwhile, the Latin American population, which had been roughly equal to that of the US in 1950, was 75 per cent higher in the 1990s (436 million compared with 250 million).

In fact, the post-Cold War era in the Western Hemisphere began with an American military intervention. On 20 December 1989 13,000 American troops joined a group of similar size that permanently guarded American rights in the Panama Canal area to capture Manuel Noriega, the notorious leader of the Panamanian Defence Forces who had earlier in the month had himself declared the chief of government. In early 1988 Noriega, a former intelligence chief and ally of the Reagan administration, had been convicted for money-laundering and drug-trafficking by a US federal court in Florida, but instead of accepting an offer of immunity if he left Panama, Noriega had struck a defiant note. Finally, the Bush administration, identifying the Panamanian leader as a symbol of the illegal drug trade, launched ‘Operation Just Cause' without consulting the member states of the OAS. Noriega was captured and eventually tried and convicted in Miami. Amid wide protests throughout Latin America (as well as much of the rest of the world), the American public generally cheered the intervention as a victory in the so-called ‘war on drugs'. Perhaps underlying this was a certain satisfaction that the United States had been able to wield its power so effectively and unilaterally.

In 1994 American marines were, once again, poised for intervention in the Caribbean, this time in Haiti. On this occasion the cause had little to do with drugs. Instead, the supposedly non-interventionist Clinton administration launched ‘Operation Uphold Democracy' as the result of a mounting refugee crisis in Haiti caused by the actions of a succession of repressive regimes. Throughout the 1980s the Reagan and Bush administrations had repatriated Haitians attempting to flee the brutal regime of Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc' Duvalier; only 28 of the almost 23,000 Haitian ‘boat people' were given asylum in the United States. Duvalier was ousted in 1986 and Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a populist priest, won a democratic election in 1990. In September 1991, Aristide himself was ousted in a military coup that was roundly condemned by the OAS and the United States alike. This time, as the flow of refugees escalated, the American coastguard gave temporary safe haven to thousands of Haitians at the Guantanamo Bay military base in Cuba. By the time Clinton, who had called for a more active policy against the military regime in Haiti, took office in early 1993 the prospect that up to 200,000 Haitians would take to the seas was creating a difficult humanitarian and political crisis. Reinforcing the pressure on the new administration was the awareness that public opinion in the United States was clearly concerned about a rapid increase in the number of immigrants of Caribbean descent.

As various mediation efforts to curb this flow of refugees failed, the United States stepped up military pressure and in September 1994 the president openly called for the government of General Raoul Cedras to resign. Eventually, the military rulers agreed to step aside and accept the return of Aristide, who was by no means uniformly supported within the Clinton administration, in exchange for an amnesty.

Wilsonian internationalism

Woodrow Wilson's notion, outlined in his so-called fourteen points, of trying to create a new world society, which would be governed by the self-determination of peoples, be free from secret diplomacy and wars, and have an association of nations to maintain international justice.

see Chapter 21

Haitian military itself was gradually demobilized. However, the country has remained politically unstable and economically chaotic up to the present day.

The operations in Panama and Haiti were clear expressions of continued American hegemony in the Caribbean region. Yet in both cases the justification for intervention was remarkably different from those of the Cold War years. Both the Bush and Clinton administrations used the rhetoric of Wilsonian inter­nationalism and referred to the need to uphold democracy, but in truth the post­Cold War policy was closely linked to American domestic considerations. In Panama, the Bush administration rationalized intervention as part of its war against drugs; in Haiti, the obvious concern was the prospect of 200,000 poor, mostly uneducated and non-white refugees arriving on US shores. To be sure, the operations were mostly successful in meeting their goals: Noriega was captured and imprisoned, the flow of refugees from Haiti stalled, and both Panama and Haiti were unquestionably ‘more democratic' after US intervention. Yet, another lesson of the intervention was also obvious: even in the post-modern age the United States was a regional hegemon capable of intimidation and military action against smaller countries in its neighbourhood.

The changes that took place in the first post-Cold War decade in the Western Hemisphere hardly amounted to a revolution. In the political and economic spheres the United States retained, and in some ways strengthened, its dominant position vis-à-vis its neighbours, while in the military field American troops did engage in small-scale military interventions, although the justifications were rather different from those of the Cold War years.

In the new millennium, though, the North—South relationship started to look rather different. Anti-American attitudes, which had been always prevalent in the region, hardened, with more than half of Latin Americans polled in 2007 proclaiming a negative view of the United States. This reflected in part the global trend towards criticism of the United States that increased after the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. In a more regional context, though, the antipathy towards the colossus to the north was a legacy of the historically unequal relationship that continued to bedevil Washington's dealings with its southern neighbours. At times, as in the case of the United States' continued attempts to isolate Cuba or the Bush administration's open campaign in favour of right-wing candidates in Nicaragua's 2007 presidential election, there was a distinctive Cold War flavour to US policies.

In many ways these policies appeared to be counter-productive. In Nicaragua the return of Manuel Ortega, the leader of the Sandinista revolution of the 1970s, to the presidency in 2007 through free elections was clearly a blow to the Bush administration. Cuba, where the ailing Fidel Castro passed the reins of leadership to his brother Raoul in 2006, remained defiant. Such defiance was in part made possible by the generous economic support of the most flamboyant of the twenty- first-century anti-Americans, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. As president of his oil­rich country since 1999, Chavez spearheaded a ‘Bolivarian' revolution, which was designed to free Venezuela from American influence by using the abundant oil

revenue at his disposal, and to create a regional network of like-minded countries. His public stand against the United States included a much-publicized visit to Iraq in 2000 as part of a tour of OPEC nations and the severing of decades-old military ties with the United States.

see Chapter 13

Whether Chavez represents the future, in other words a conflict-ridden North-South relationship in the Western Hemisphere, remains to be seen. What is clear from the vantage point of 2008, however, is that the United States is no longer as dominant a presence in Latin America as it was in the last decades of the twentieth century. Economically, owing in large part to globalization, the increase in trade within the region and the diversification of its external trade relations, Latin America is less dependent on the United States now than at any time since the Second World War. Politically, it has left behind the dark era of dictator­ships (often promoted by the United States) and has, in most cases, consolidated democratic governance. Equally importantly, since 11 September 2001, the United States has not regarded Latin American countries as presenting more than a ‘potential' threat to its security interests. Although there is no denying the United States' preponderant influence in the region, the Western Hemisphere can no longer be regarded as merely Washington's ‘backyard'.

Debating the impact of the Cold War in the Western Hemisphere

One of the basic questions worth asking about the US-Latin American relationship during the Cold War is: how did the structure of interaction in the Western Hemisphere differ from that in Eastern Europe? For accounts that discuss the level of symmetry in the two cases, see Gaddis Smith's The Last Years of the Monroe Doctrine (New York, 1993) or Walter LaFeber's Inevitable Revolutions (New York, 1983).

Although the various American covert and overt interventions have created much controversy, a more complex debate has to do with the goals and results of the Alliance for Progress initiative. While the early interpretations tended to stress the 'good intentions' behind the Alliance, later scholarship has tended to stress the lack of firm direction and the way in which it veered between at times 'conservative'and at times more 'progressive' aspects of the Alliance's intentions. The latest works exploring the Alliance for Progress in detail are Stephen Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999) and Michael Latham, Modernization as Ideology (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000). The causes of Latin American resentment towards the United States, an issue that the Alliance for Progress tried to address, are also discussed in these two books.

For a fuller understanding of the United States' policy towards Latin America, it is also important to explore the prevalent 'Northern' attitude towards the 'South'. As Lars Schoultz, among others, has argued, the 'belief in Latin American inferiority is the essential core of the United States policy toward Latin America'(Beneath the United States, Cambridge, MA, 1998, p. xv). How far American policy towards Latin America can be explained within such a 'cultural' paradigm is, of course, open to debate. A more 'realist'version can be found in Cole Blasier, Hovering Giant: US Responses to Revolutionary Change in Latin America (Pittsburgh, PA, 1986).