Latin America

Thu Aug 1, 2024, 02:36 PM

Since at least the Spanish-American War, the United States has helped develop Latin American militaries and police forces, providing training, up-to-date technologies, and technical assistance. While we might conventionally consider questions about security and questions of political economy as separate spheres of analysis, a close look at how economic shifts affect security concerns, and how security assistance shapes political and economic transformations, indicates the persistence of a strong relationship between security objectives and political economy. Outlining these links reveals trends of change within continuity. Even as Washington’s effort to endow Latin American states with powerful security apparatuses has reconfigured the possibilities for US capital to reap easy rewards from its alliances with elites in Latin American and the Caribbean, the purposes and forms of US security assistance have both shifted and remained, in important ways, unchanged.

In fact, an examination of the historical record demonstrates that the security assistance of each period helped to create the security challenges of the next one, which new rounds of assistance would in turn confront. In the current period, reverberations are being felt throughout the hemisphere—including here in the United States—because of the “War on Drugs,” fought from the Andean highlands to the US-Mexico border and beyond. But what I call, drawing on Greg Grandin, the “long counterrevolution” started in the nineteenth century, as the United States increasingly exerted its influence throughout the Americas.1

Gunboat diplomacy and occupation as security cooperation
As the Spanish Empire collapsed at the turn of the twentieth century, the United States saw an opportunity for regional self-aggrandizement at a key moment of global uncertainty. The Spanish Empire’s decline had already been occurring for over a century when the United States occupied Cuba and Puerto Rico in 1898, but recent economic crises provided new opportunities.2 Thanks to the Monroe Doctrine, the independent republics across Latin America maintained strong, if not always willing, ties to the United States. Economic upheavals in the region from the 1870s through the 1890s created a new purpose for the United States, which was to bend local economies to the desires of US elites. Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine further entrenched this orientation, by commanding the United States to exercise “international police power” to maintain political and economic stability.

Direct invasion or overt occupation was the occasional form of US intervention in Latin America (17 in the century after 1898), and the construction of security forces afterward, with or without occupation, ensured Roosevelt’s corollary would remain in effect.3 These early US occupations saw the creation of new security forces—for example, the US Marines’ assistance to Nicaragua’s Guardia Nacional—designed to foster the most basic forms of economic development while also repressing revolutionary movements that might rebel against the prevailing socioeconomic order.

More:
https://items.ssrc.org/from-our-fellows/the-long-counterrevolution-united-states-latin-america-security-cooperation/