The Alliance that Lost Its Way
by Jerome Levinson, by Juan de Onís
(A Twentieth Century Fund Study) Quadrangle Books, 381 pp., $7.95
The Containment of Latin America
by David Green
Quadrangle Books, 384 pp., $10.00
Politics and Social Structure in Latin America
by James Petras
Monthly Review, 382 pp., $9.50
Politics and Social Forces in Chilean Development
by James Petras
University of California, 377 pp., $3.45
Down There
by Jose Yglesias
World, 181 pp., $7.50
The Quest for Change in Latin America
by W. Raymond Duncan, by James Nelson Goodsell
Oxford, 562 pp., $12.50
No empire in our century has been more powerful and apparently unchallengeable than that of the US in Latin America, and no imperialists have pitched their claims higher—though for various reasons most North Americans have persistently disliked being labeled as such. The British long ago recognized the fragility, and eventual impermanence, of their Indian empire, the French the uncertainty of their African one. Both were only too well aware that, where the relationship with their dependents happened to be informal and economic, it called for a considerable degree of political flexibility. Only the US has not merely taken its permanent supremacy south of the Rio Grande and Key West for a fact of nature, but formulated it in terms which exclude the slightest abrogation.
As Jerome Levinson and Juan de Onís point out in their lucid and valuable book,
The US security interest in Latin America, as traditionally conceived, consists of three propositions:
1) (dating from the Monroe doctrine in the early nineteenth century): The United States must keep potentially hostile extracontinental powers out of the hemisphere in order to deny them a geographically convenient basis from which to attack.
2) (dating from the days of Elihu Root in the early twentieth century): The United States, having become a capital surplus nation, must seek outlets for this surplus, generally abroad and particularly in Latin America….
3) (dating from the onset of the cold war in the late 1940s): The political apostasy of a Latin American country would cause the United States to lose face, weaken its influence in other parts of the world, and undermine the confidence of important European countries in the ability of the United States to lead the “free world” struggle against the monolithic communist bloc. [Pp. 321-2.]
The dating, the rationale, and the formulation of these propositions are open to challenge, but not their essential content, which implies that the US can not only keep any power out of the hemisphere but also prevent any Latin American government from doing anything Washington disapproves of. Both these assumptions rest on the overwhelming economic and politico-military domination of the hemisphere. The second predates the century. The first became a reality when US capital and enterprise replaced the British as the dominant factor in this part of the world, and has been steadily reinforced ever since. Everywhere else the US recognizes rivals, though perhaps weaker ones. In Latin America it does not, because none exists or is even visible.
Probably only Latin Americans are fully conscious of the effects of this assumption that the US is supreme, and they inferior, though it sometimes penetrates into the historical record. “They don’t think like us,” Thomas Mann, LBJ’s State Department man on Latin America, is reported as saying. “Their thought processes are different. You have to be firm with them” (Levinson and de Onís, p. 151). Doubtless this public servant thought he was merely stating “the obvious,” just as his well-known support for US business in Latin America …
