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1 Neocolonialism, Monroe Doctrine and Latin America New Dictionary of the History of Ideas | 2005 | Becker, Marc |Copyright Anti-colonialism: Latin America Over the past five hundred years, Latin America has experienced three and possibly four periods of colonization, all of which gave rise to anti-colonial movements. The first period symbolically began with Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas on 12 October 1492, launching three centuries of Spanish, Portuguese, and British colonial control over the hemisphere, with the French, Dutch, Danish, and other European powers competing for slices of the action in the Caribbean. In most of Latin America, this period came to an end with the wars of independence from about 1810 to 1825. Political independence ushered in a second period (known as neocolonialism), in which the countries of Latin America were still subject to foreign economic control—this time largely by the British. During the third period, corresponding to the twentieth century, this economic dependency shifted from the British to the United States, and anticolonial responses increasingly assumed anti-imperialistic characteristics. The twenty-first century arguably introduced a fourth period of neocolonialism, in which Latin America has become subject to control through the maquiladora system to transnational capital not necessarily rooted in one country and in which the export commodity is labor rather than raw materials. Independence The Latin American movement most closely associated with anti-colonialism corresponds to the period at the beginning of the nineteenth century during which most of the region gained its political independence from European colonial powers. This "postcolonial era began before many territories became colonial," Robert Young notes, and "before some European imperial powers, such as Germany and Italy, had even become nations themselves" (p. 193). As in the United States, independence represented a shift of economic wealth and political power from a colonial elite to a domestic elite. In Latin America, this was expressed as a struggle between peninsulares (those born on the Iberian peninsula, i.e., Spain and Portugal) and creoles (those born in the New World). Independence did not result in any corresponding shift in social relations, nor did it result in the abolition of slavery or more rights for women. In fact, without the paternalistic protection of the European crowns the position of peasants and 2 Indians actually worsened. The 1780 Tupac Amaru uprising in the South American Andes is one of the largest, earliest, and most significant anti-colonial movements in the history of Latin America. The leader of this uprising, José Gabriel Condorcanqui (d. 1781), a descendant of the Incas, first attempted to petition for the rights of his people through legal channels. When legal attempts failed, he took the name of the last Inca ruler (Tupac Amaru) and led an uprising that quickly spread throughout the southern Andes. The insurgents sacked Spanish haciendas and obrajes (textile mills), driven by messianic dreams of a renewed Inca empire that would free the indigenous peoples from hunger, injustice, oppression, and exploitation. The Spanish captured Tupac Amaru and other leaders of the uprising six months later and executed them in Cuzco, the former capital of the Inca empire. This did not end the rebellion but shifted its focus south to Bolivia, where under the leadership of Aymara people it entered a more radical, violent, and explicitly anti-colonial phase. In this phase, the insurgents captured and held the city of La Paz for several months and threatened the silver mines at Potosí—a direct challenge to Spanish wealth and power. The Spanish finally captured and executed the leaders and the uprising eventually collapsed. This revolt has sometimes been seen as a forward-looking antecedent to the successful creole independence movements that came forty years later and sometimes as a reactionary messianic movement that sought to return to the time of the Inca empire. Sinclair Thomson positions these uprisings in the context of local struggles against abusive colonial practices and for self-determination and equality. Although the uprising ultimately failed, it reveals a widening gap between the colonial elites and the subaltern masses, as well as a refusal of indigenous peoples to passively accept their marginalized role in society. The Haitian slave revolt provides another stark contrast to the creole independence movements and in essence underscores the lack of a compelling anti-colonial discourse in those events. Haiti was a French colony, and its production of sugar, cotton, and indigo made it one of the most important colonies in the world. Soaring sugar profits for French planters in the eighteenth century led to a dramatic increase in the number of African slaves they imported to work the plantations. By the end of the century, about 80 percent of the Haitian people were overworked and underfed slaves. Nevertheless, Haitian independence movements began in 1789 not as a slave revolt but from the small elite class of planters, who had been influenced by the French Revolution's rhetoric of "liberty, equality, fraternity." For the planters, liberty meant home rule and freedom from French tariff structures. The whites armed the slaves to fight 3 the French, but instead, under the leadership of Toussaint L'Ouverture (1743– 1803), slaves took advantage of the opportunity to revolt and destroyed the old society. The result was perhaps one of the few true social revolutions the world has ever seen, in which members of a mass movement completely obliterated the ancien régime and claimed power for itself. By the time Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Haitian independence in 1804, the sugar economy had disappeared, having been displaced by subsistence agriculture. The example of a black slave republic sent a terrifying chill through creole elites, which had begun to agitate for independence elsewhere in Latin America. The only other independent country in the hemisphere, the United States, refused to recognize the Haitian government. The dangers exemplified by the first successful anticolonial movement in Latin America put the brakes on other independence movements, delaying their completion by perhaps a generation. Neocolonialism By the 1820s, most of Latin America had gained political independence from its colonial masters. With Iberian mercantile restrictions gone, northern European (and particularly British) capital flooded the region. As critics have noted, a legacy of colonization was a blocking of moves toward industrialization, which would have represented little gain for colonial powers. This trend continued with the British (and later the United States) extracting raw materials from and importing finished goods into the region. The infrastructure, such as the railroad systems, was designed to transport products from mines and plantations to seaports rather than to integrate a country. The economic benefits of this trade accrued to foreign powers, with wages and living standards remaining depressed as resources were drained away from the domestic economy. Neocolonialism also led to cultural shifts. For example, predominantly Catholic Latin American countries implemented freedom of religion in order to encourage foreign investment from Protestant powers. Despite formal independence, external economic forces determined many of the domestic policies in Latin America. This irony has come to be known as neocolonialism. Nineteenth-century examples of neocolonialism include the export of Peruvian guano and Chilean nitrates, which fueled an agricultural boom in Europe. Neocolonialism, and Latin America's subsequent falling behind relative to economic growth in northern industrial economies, was not inevitable nor was it the only possible option. In The Poverty of Progress, E. Bradford Burns points to Paraguay as a viable example of autonomous economic development. The country's leaders eliminated large estates and emphasized domestic food production, and they restricted foreign penetration of the economy. Rapid 4 economic development without outside foreign development alarmed the elitist governments in the neighboring countries of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, who feared the model Paraguay offered to the poor in their own countries. Their opposition led to the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870), which devastated Paraguay and destroyed this alternative model to neocolonialism. The concept of formally independent countries that remained economically dependent on outside powers first was articulated in Marxist circles in the 1920s, though the term neocolonialism was not introduced until the 1960s. It has always been closely associated with anti-imperialism, as was demonstrated at the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, Cuba, which linked anti-colonial struggles in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Although U.S. neocolonial control is largely a twentieth-century phenomenon, it is rooted in the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, which declared Latin America to be part of the U.S. imperial sphere of influence. Anti-Imperialism When the Haitian sugar economy collapsed with the slave revolt at the end of the eighteenth century, much of this production shifted to the neighboring island of Cuba. As a result, while other colonial economies stagnated, leading to elite discontent with European rule, the Cuban economy took off, undercutting any impetus for a serious anticolonial movement. As a result, the island remained a Spanish colony until the end of the nineteenth century. José Martí (1853–1895) perhaps best represents Cuban anticolonial movements. Born to peninsular parents (his father was a Spanish official), he was a teenage rebel who was exiled to Spain for his political activities and later worked in the United States as a journalist. He was killed in battle on 19 May 1895, when he returned to the island to join the anti-colonial struggle. Much of Martí's ideology emerged out of the context of nineteenth-century liberalism, but his contact with radical movements in the United States also imbued his anti-colonialism with aspects of social revolution. Rather than seeking to merely change one elite for another, as had happened when colonialism ended in most other American republics, he wanted true social changes. He was an anti-imperialist and a revolutionary nationalist who worked against economic dependency as well as for political independence. Martí, like Venezuelan independence leader Simón Bolívar (1783–1830) before him and Argentine-born guerrilla leader Ernesto "Che" Guevara (1928–1967) after him, called for a unified America to confront the common problems left by a legacy of European colonization. After Martí's death, with Cuba on the verge of gaining its independence in 1898, 5 the United States intervened in order to control the economic wealth of the colony for its own benefit and to prevent the establishment of another black republic on the Haitian model. Disguising its efforts as altruism, the U.S. Senate passed the Teller Amendment, which declared that the United States would not recolonize the island. Although this legislation thwarted the imperial intent of the United States to annex the island, the 1901 Platt Amendment declared "that the government of Cuba consents that the United States may exercise the right to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property and individual liberty" (Bevans, pp. 116–117). This led to a unique colonial situation, in which Cuba had a civilian government but not one that could be called a democracy. The island became an extension of Miami, and U.S. intervention promoted and perpetuated corruption, violence, and economic stagnation. This set the stage for the successful 1959 Cuban Revolution, which freed the country from economic colonization, much as independence in 1898 had freed it from Spain's political colonization. After the triumph of the revolution, Cuba became a global leader in postcolonial anti-imperialist struggles. Although the Teller Amendment prohibited the annexation of Cuba to the United States, the legislation stood mute on Spain's few remaining colonial possessions in the Caribbean. Most importantly, this led the United States to occupy the island of Puerto Rico, a territory it continues to hold in the twenty-first century. In fact, after Namibia was freed from South African control in the 1980s, Puerto Rico became the sole remaining item on the agenda of the United Nations's decolonization committee, although anti-colonial struggles continue elsewhere, notably in French Polynesia. For the United States, Puerto Rico remains an unresolved and seemingly irresolvable colonial question. In the early twenty-first century the island is an Estado Libre Asociado (literally, Associated Free State, but defined by the United States as a commonwealth), which means that it is an unincorporated territory that belongs to, but is not part of, the United States. This leaves Puerto Rico subject to the whims of the United States, and its residents with few legal avenues through which to address offenses committed against them. As an example of the colonial relationship, residents on the island were made U.S. citizens during World War I so that they could be drafted to fight in Europe, but even in the early twenty-first century they do not have the right to political representation in Washington. However, the economic advantages of their status, including the ability to migrate freely to the United States to work, create a situation where only a small percentage of Puerto Ricans favor independence for the island, but resentment at the island's colonial status is nonetheless widespread and deeply felt. 6 Anti-colonial sentiments in Puerto Rico flourished during the second half of the twentieth century, and in part gained a focus around political campaigns to halt U.S. naval bombing practice at Vieques Island. In 1941, with World War II on the horizon, the United States military acquired most of the land at Vieques as an extension of the Roosevelt Roads Naval Station in order to develop a base like Pearl Harbor for its Atlantic fleet. Noise from bombs and low-flying airplanes engaged in practice maneuvers disturbed inhabitants and disrupted the fishing economy. The later use of napalm, depleted uranium, and other experimental weapons left the area heavily contaminated. The imperialist nature of the military's occupation of Vieques quickly gave rise to popular sentiments against the navy's presence and calls for them to leave. Finally, on 19 April 1999, two offtarget bombs destroyed an observation post, killing David Sanes Rodríguez, a local civilian employee. This triggered a massive civil disobedience campaign that finally forced the navy to leave Vieques on 1 May 2003. Independence leaders such as Pedro Albizu Campos and Rubén Berríos Martínez provided leadership to the campaigns, seeing Vieques as an important part of an anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggle. Their slogan became "Today Vieques, tomorrow Puerto Rico." Non-Spanish Caribbean European colonization of the Caribbean began with Colombus's arrival in 1492, and the region was so highly valued that it remained under the control of various European empires longer than any other part of the hemisphere. Spain maintained—and then lost—control over the largest and most populous islands of Cuba, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico, known as the Greater Antilles. Other European powers, including the British, French, and Dutch, intruded into the Spanish domain and established a significant presence, particularly on the smaller islands, known as the Lesser Antilles, where descendants of African slaves and Asian indentured workers imported to replace the decimated indigenous population led many of the anti-colonial movements. As they did in Africa and Asia, modern nationalist anti-colonial movements in much of the Caribbean emerged in the aftermath of World War II, with its emphasis on the values of democracy and self-determination. As Cary Fraser argues, independence movements in the Caribbean must be understood in the context of these broader decolonization efforts. During the second half of the twentieth century, some of the islands gained their independence, although the British, French, and Dutch still retained colonial control over several smaller islands. Many of the residents benefited economically from access to European 7 welfare systems, which dampened anticolonial agitation. Even after independence, many of the colonies maintained close relationships with their mother countries, leaving imprints on their political culture that marked them as significantly different from Latin America. For example, the former British colonies remained part of the Commonwealth and retained the British queen as their monarch. As the European empires collapsed, U.S. economic, political, and ideological interests gained increased hegemony over the Caribbean. Tourism and providing tax havens for foreign banks and corporations became the area's primary roles in the global economy. An example of the United States' ambiguous commitment to self-determination and its growing neocolonial control was its successful efforts to unseat Cheddi Jagan and his People's Progressive Party from the presidency of British Guiana in the early 1960s. United States opposition to Japan, who was influenced by Marxist ideology and maintained friendly ties with the communist world, indicated that the Caribbean (as well as Latin America in general) would remain within the U.S. sphere of influence.. Bibliography Barreto, Amílcar Antonio. Vieques, the Navy, and Puerto Rican Politics. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. Bevans, C. I., ed. Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States of America, 1776–1949. Vol. 8. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971. Burns, E. Bradford. The Poverty of Progress: Latin America in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Fraser, Cary. Ambivalent Anti-colonialism: The United States and the Genesis of West Indian Independence, 1940–1964. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994. Geggus, David Patrick, ed. The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World. Columbia: University of South Carolina, 2001. Pérez, Louis A. The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. 8 Thomson, Sinclair. We Alone Will Rule: Native Andean Politics in the Age of Insurgency. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. Young, Robert J. C. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford and Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001. Monroe Doctrine From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Monroe Doctrine is a policy of the United States introduced on December 2, 1823. It stated that further efforts by European countries to colonize land or interfere with states in the Americas would be viewed as acts of aggression requiring U.S. intervention (however, the wording referred to the entire Western Hemisphere, which actually includes much of Europe and Africa). The doctrine was introduced by President Monroe when he was enraged at the actions being executed around him.[1] The Monroe Doctrine asserted that the Americas were not to be further colonized by European countries but that the United States would neither interfere with existing European colonies nor meddle in the internal concerns of European countries. The Doctrine was issued at a time when many Latin American countries were on the verge of becoming independent from the Spanish Empire. The United States, reflecting concerns raised by Great Britain, ultimately hoped to avoid having any European power take over Spain's colonies.[2] The US President, James Monroe, first stated the doctrine during his seventh annual State of the Union Address to Congress. It became a defining moment in the foreign policy of the United States and one of its longest-standing tenets, and would be invoked by many U.S. statesmen and several U.S. presidents, including Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and others. It would have been nearly impossible for Monroe to envision that its intent and impact would persist with only minor variations for almost two centuries. Its primary objective was to free the newly independent colonies of Latin America from European intervention and control (thus ensuring US national security). The doctrine put forward that the New World and the Old World were to remain distinctly separate spheres of influence, for they were composed of entirely separate and independent nations.[3] Background 9 As the revolutionary Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) ended, Prussia, Austria, and Russia formed the Holy Alliance to defend monarchism. In particular, the Holy Alliance authorized military incursions to re-establish Bourbon rule over Spain and its colonies, which were establishing their independence.[2] Allowing Spain to re-establish control of its former colonies would have cut Great Britain from its profitable trade with the region. For that reason, Great Britain's Foreign Minister George Canning proposed to the United States that they mutually declare and enforce a policy of separating the new world from the old. The United States resisted a joint statement because of the recent memory of The War of 1812, leading to the unilateral statement. However, the immediate provocation was the Russian Ukase of 1821[4] asserting rights to the Northwest and forbidding non-Russian ships from approaching the coast.[5][6] Effects of the Monroe Doctrine International Response Because the U.S. lacked both a credible navy and army at the time, the doctrine was largely disregarded internationally.[3] However, the Doctrine met with tacit British approval, and the Royal Navy mostly enforced it tacitly, as part of the wider Pax Britannica, which enforced the neutrality of the seas. This was in line with the developing British policy of laissez-faire free trade against mercantilism: fast-growing British industry was ever seeking outlets for its manufactured goods, and were the newly independent Latin American states to become Spanish colonies once more, British access to these markets would be cut off by Spanish mercantilist policy.[7] The Special Relationship The Monroe Doctrine was as a precursor to the Special Relationship. Similar to the United Kingdom's proposal to the United States of a League of Nations nearly 100 years later, Canning's proposal "injected ideas into the American decisionmaking process in such a manner that they imperceptibly seemed to be a part of Washington's own".[8] Latin American reactions in the 1820s The reaction in Latin America to the Monroe Doctrine was undeniably upbeat. 10 John Crow, author of The Epic of Latin America, states, “[Simón] Bolívar himself, still in the midst of his last campaign against the Spaniards, Santander in Colombia, Rivadavia in Argentina, Victoria in Mexico—leaders of the emancipation movement everywhere— received Monroe's words with sincerest gratitude”.[9] Crow argues that the leaders of Latin America were realists. They knew that the President of the United States wielded very little power at the time, particularly without the backing of the British forces. Furthermore, they figured that the Monroe Doctrine was powerless if it stood alone against the Triple Alliance.[9] While they appreciated and praised their support in the north they knew that their future of independence was in the hands of the powerful Great Britain. In 1826, Bolivar called upon his Congress of Panama to host the first “Pan-American” meeting. In the eyes of Bolivar and his men, the Monroe Doctrine was to become nothing more than a tool of national policy. According to Crow, “It was not meant to be, and was never intended to be a charter for concerted hemispheric action”.[9] During the first half of the nineteenth century, it was Great Britain’s preoccupation with exerting its power on the rest of the world that led it to decide to support the Monroe Doctrine. At the time, South America as a whole constituted a much larger market for British goods than the United States. Crow argues that it was ultimately the support of Great Britain, not the Monroe Doctrine, which protected the sovereignty of Latin America’s newly independent nations.[9] Post-Bolivar In 1836, the United States government objected to Britain's alliance with the newly created Republic of Texas on the principle of the Monroe Doctrine. On December 2, 1845, U.S. President James Polk announced to Congress that the principle of the Monroe Doctrine should be strictly enforced and that the United States should aggressively expand into the West, often termed as Manifest Destiny. In 1842, U.S. President John Tyler applied the Monroe Doctrine to Hawaii, told Britain not to interfere there, and began the process of annexing Hawaii to the United States. In 1852, some politicians used the principle of the Monroe Doctrine to argue for forcefully removing the Spanish from Cuba. In 1898, following the SpanishAmerican War, the United States obtained Puerto Rico and the Philippines from Spain and began an occupation of Cuba that lasted until 1902. 11 The doctrine's authors, chiefly future-President and then secretary-of-state John Quincy Adams, saw it as a proclamation by the United States of moral opposition to colonialism, but it has subsequently been re-interpreted and applied in a variety of instances. President Theodore Roosevelt asserted the right of the United States to intervene to stabilize the economic affairs of small nations in the Caribbean and Central America if they were unable to pay their international debts. This interpretation, intended to forestall intervention by European powers that had lent money to those countries, has been termed the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.[10] In 1863, French forces under Napoleon III invaded and conquered Mexico, giving the country to Austrian-born Emperor Maximilian. Americans proclaimed this as a violation of "The Doctrine," but were unable to intervene because of the American Civil War. This marked the first time the Monroe Doctrine was widely referred to as a "Doctrine." After the civil war came to an end, the U.S. brought troops down to the Rio Grande in hopes of pressuring the French government to end its occupation. Mexican nationalists eventually captured the Emperor and executed him, reasserting Mexico's independence. In the 1870s, President Ulysses S. Grant and his Secretary of State Hamilton Fish endeavored to replace European influence in Latin America with that of the United States. Part of their efforts involved expanding the Monroe Doctrine by stating "hereafter no territory on this continent [referring to Central and South America] shall be regarded as subject to transfer to a European power."[11] 1895 saw the eruption of the Venezuela Crisis of 1895, "one of the most momentous episodes in the history of Anglo-American relations in general and of Anglo-American rivalries in Latin America in particular."[12] Venezuela sought to involve the US in a territorial dispute with Britain over Guayana Esequiba, and hired former US ambassador William L. Scruggs to argue that British behaviour over the issue violated the Monroe Doctrine. President Grover Cleveland through his Secretary of State, Richard Olney cited the Doctrine in 1895, threatening strong action against the United Kingdom if the British failed to arbitrate their dispute with Venezuela. In a July 20, 1895 note to Britain, Olney stated, “The United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition.”[13] British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury took strong exception to the American language. The United States objected to a British proposal for a joint meeting to clarify the scope of the Monroe Doctrine. Historian George Herring wrote that by failing to pursue the issue further the British “tacitly conceded the U. S. definition of the Monroe 12 Doctrine and its hegemony in the hemisphere.”[14] The Drago Doctrine was announced on December 29, 1902 by the Foreign Minister of Argentina, Luis María Drago. Drago set forth the policy that no European power could use force against an American nation to collect debt. President Theodore Roosevelt rejected this as an extension of the Monroe Doctrine, declaring "We do not guarantee any state against punishment if it misconducts itself".[15] In the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, President John F. Kennedy cited the Monroe Doctrine as a basis for America's "eyeball-to-eyeball" confrontation with the Soviet Union that had embarked on a provocative campaign to install ballistic missiles on Cuban soil.[16] The "Big Sister" The "Big Sister" policy was an extension of the Monroe Doctrine formulated by James G. Blaine in the 1880s that aimed to rally Latin American nations behind US leadership and to open their markets to US traders. Blaine served as Secretary of State in 1881 in the cabinet of President James A. Garfield and again from 1889 to 1892 in the cabinet of President Benjamin Harrison. As a part of the policy, Blaine arranged and led the First International Conference of American States in 1889.[17] The "Roosevelt Corollary" As the United States emerged as a world superpower, the Monroe Doctrine came to define a recognized sphere of control that few dared to challenge.[3] Before becoming president, Theodore Roosevelt had proclaimed the rationale of the Monroe Doctrine in supporting intervention in the Spanish colony of Cuba in 1898. After he became president, and following the Venezuela Crisis of 1902– 1903, Roosevelt added the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine in 1904. This corollary asserted the right of the United States to intervene in Latin America in cases of “flagrant and chronic wrongdoing by a Latin American Nation”.[18] The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine was invoked to intervene militarily in Latin America to stop the spread of European influence.[18] The Roosevelt Corollary was the most significant amendment to the original doctrine and was widely opposed by critics, who argued that the Monroe Doctrine 13 was originally meant to stop European influence in the Americas.[3] This amendment was designed to preclude violation of the doctrine by European powers that would ultimately argue that the independent nations were “mismanaged or unruly”.[3] Critics, however, argued that the Corollary simply asserted U.S. domination in that area, essentially making them a "hemispheric policeman.[19] It is hard to argue that the Americas are not entirely a United States sphere of influence, with the obvious exceptions of Cuba and Venezuela.[3] The Clark Memorandum In 1928, the Clark Memorandum was released, concluding that the United States need not invoke the Monroe Doctrine as a defense of its interventions in Latin America. The Memorandum argued that the United States had a self-evident right of self-defense, and that this was all that was needed to justify certain actions. The policy was announced to the public in 1930. In 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles invoked the Monroe Doctrine at the Tenth Pan-American Conference, denouncing the intervention of Soviet Communism in Guatemala. This was used to justify Operation PBSUCCESS. U.S. President John F. Kennedy said at an August 29, 1962 news conference: The Monroe Doctrine means what it has meant since President Monroe and John Quincy Adams enunciated it, and that is that we would oppose a foreign power extending its power to the Western Hemisphere [sic], and that is why we oppose what is happening in Cuba today. That is why we have cut off our trade. That is why we worked in the OAS and in other ways to isolate the Communist menace in Cuba. That is why we will continue to give a good deal of our effort and attention to it.[20] The Cold War During the Cold War, the Monroe Doctrine was applied to Latin America by the framers of U.S. foreign policy.[21] When the Cuban Revolution established a socialist government with ties to the Soviet Union, after trying to establish fruitful relations with the U.S., it was argued that the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine should be again invoked, this time to prevent the further spreading of Soviet-backed Communism in Latin America.[22] During the Cold War, the United States thus often provided intelligence and military aid to Latin and South American 14 governments that claimed or appeared to be threatened by Communist subversion. This, in turn, led to some domestic controversy within the United States, especially among some members of the left who argued that the Communist threat and Soviet influence in Latin America was greatly exaggerated.[who?] The debate over this new spirit of the Monroe Doctrine came to a head in the 1980s, as part of the Iran-Contra affair. Among other things, it was revealed that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency had been covertly training "Contra" guerrilla soldiers in Honduras in an attempt to destabilize and overthrow the Sandinista revolutionary government of Nicaragua and its President, Daniel Ortega. CIA director Robert Gates vigorously defended the Contra operation, arguing that avoiding U.S. intervention in Nicaragua would be "totally to abandon the Monroe doctrine".[citation needed] In a case brought before the International Court of Justice by Nicaragua, however, the court ruled that the United States had exercised "unlawful use of force." The U.S. ignored the verdict. The Carter and Reagan administrations embroiled themselves in the Salvadoran Civil War, again citing the Monroe Doctrine as justification. The conflict was marked by large scale human rights abuses and the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Óscar Romero by right-wing death squads.[23] The Monroe Doctrine was also cited during the U.S. intervention in Guatemala and the invasion of Grenada. Critics of the Reagan administration's support for Britain in the Falklands War charge that the U.S. ignored the Monroe Doctrine in that instance.[citation needed] Criticisms Critics of the Monroe Doctrine, such as Noam Chomsky,[24] argue that in practice the Monroe Doctrine has functioned as a declaration of hegemony and a right of unilateral intervention over the Americas: a sphere of influence “to leave America for the Americans” that would grow stronger with the Roosevelt Corollary. Chomsky points to the work of filibusters, most notably William Walker, who tried to conquer and annex various countries in Latin America.[25] Many Latin American popular movements have come to resent the "Monroe Doctrine", which has been summarized there in the phrase: "America for the Americans". Monroe Doctrine's true objectives, and the sincerity of its proclaimed goals, are often questioned in Latin America[citation needed], especially after the war between the United Kingdom and Argentina in 1982 where the SouthAmerican country did not receive any assistance from the United States. The questioning of the Monroe Doctrine has also gained momentum in the 15 context of disputed US geopolitical legitimacy worldwide, particularly with the Late-2000s financial crisis and the criticized Operation Enduring Freedom Afghanistan. This general loss of legitimacy and political reach Daniel Drezner has argued could be a decisive factor in easing the emergence of BRIC countries [26], of which Brazil may easily come to leverage the general resent against the Monroe Doctrine across latin America. The disputing of the US geopolitical influence over Latin America has been considered part of the concept of a "New New World Order", that is, the inevitable rise of multilateralism in the international relations concordantly to a disputed US legitimacy. In an essay published by EInternational Relations [27] Idriss Aberkane has come to compare the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan to the French invasion of Russia and the disputing of the Monroe Doctrine in South America to a contemporary Spanish uprising under Napoleon's authority. “ Richard Francis Burton wrote “Earth shifts her poles” [28] and the 21st century of Pan-american geopolitics will be marked by a change of polarity the intensity of which is mostly to be decided in Central Asia. When an empire is put at a disadvantage all the frustration it has accumulated in its periphery and on behalf of vassals expands as a gas and breaks all the valves. The Monroe doctrine has produced such a situation and it is in focusing its attention on the Great Game that the U.S. has most lost political hold of Latin America. There economic and strategic alliances have never been more pronounced for the liquidation of the Monroe Doctrine, from the “turn to the left” to the “pink tide”; Argentina, Brazil and Bolivia have shown an unprecedented display of political and economic unity towards Latin sovereignty. - I.J. Aberkane - March 2011 [29] ” References 1. Rodrigue Tremblay (2004). The New American Empire (pp 133-134). Buy Books on the web. ISBN 9780741418876. Retrieved 2008-12-20. 2. a b Herring, George C., From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776, (2008) pp. 153-155 3. a b c d e f Encyclopaedia Britannica, inc. "Volume 8". New Encyclopædia Britannica, Fifteenth Ed.. p. 269. ISBN 1593392923. 4. See Fur-seal Arbitration, p. 16, for the text of the Ukase of 1821 5. http://books.google.com/books?id=gwP8bQsT908C&pg=PT267&lpg=PT267 16 6. http://books.google.com/books?id=FL_G_WdsCX0C&pg=PA136&lpg=PA136 7. Hobson, Rolf. Imperialism at Sea, Volume 163, page: 63 - further citations in footnotes. Brill Academic Publishers Inc.. ISBN 9780391041059. Retrieved 200910-12. 8. Kissinger, Henry A.. Diplomacy, page:223. 9. a b c d John A. Crow. "Areil and Caliban". The Epic of Latin America, Fourth Ed.. pp. 676. ISBN 0520077237. 10. Herring, George C., From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776, (2008) p. 371 11. Herring, George C., From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776, (2008) p. 259 12. R. A. Humphreys (1967), "Anglo-American Rivalries and the Venezuela Crisis of 1895", Presidential Address to the Royal Historical Society 10 December 1966, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 17: pp131-164 13. Herring, George C. From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776, (2008) p. 307 14. Herring, George C., From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776, (2008) pp. 307-308 15. Herring, George C., From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776, (2008) p. 370 16. “The Durable Doctrine”, Time Magazine (September 21, 1962), [1] accessed July 15, 2009. 17. Lens, Sidney; Howard Zinn (2003). illustrated. ed. The forging of the American empire: from the revolution to Vietnam, a history of U.S. imperialism. Human Security Series. Pluto Press. pp. 464. ISBN 0745321003. 18. a b Theodore Roosevelt (1904-12-06). "State of the Union Address". TeachingAmericanHistory.org. Retrieved 2008-12-20. 19. http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3406400597.html 20. News Conference 42 from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Museum & Library 17 21. Dominguez, Jorge (1999). "US-Latin American Relations During the Cold War and its Aftermath". The United States and Latin America: The New Agenda. Institute of Latin American Studies and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin Americas Studies. p. 12. Retrieved 4 August 2010. 22. "Study Prepared in Response to National Security Study Memorandum 15". NSC–IG/ARA. July 5, 1969. Retrieved 4 August 2010. 23. "Official El Salvador apology for Oscar Romero's murder". BBC News. 201003-25. Retrieved 2010-03-25. "The archbishop, he said, was a victim of rightwing death squads "who unfortunately acted with the protection, collaboration or participation of state agents"." 24. Noam Chomsky (2004). Hegemony Or Survival. Henry Holt. pp. 63–64. ISBN 9780805076882. Retrieved 2008-12-20. 25. Noam Chomsky. "Assessing Humanitarian Intent". The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo, 1999. pp. 41. ISBN 0745316336. 26. Drezner, Daniel. The New, New World Order Foreign Affairs March/April 2007 27. Aberkane, Idriss. Brzezinski on a U.S. Berezina: anticipating a New, New World Order E-International Relations March 31. 2011 28. Richard Francis Burton, 'The Kasidah of Haji Abdu el Yezdi'. [ http://books.google.com/books?id=xWqcT7NoI_gC&dq=burton+the+kasidah&so urce=gbs_navlinks_s Forgotten Books] p.26 29. Aberkane, I. J. 'Brzezinski on a US Berezina: anticipating a New New World Order' E-International Relations, March 31st 2011 permanent link Further reading Samuel Flagg Bemis. John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy. 1949. Donald Dozer. The Monroe Doctrine: Its Modern Significance. New York: Knopf, 1965. Leonard Axel Lawson. The Relation of British Policy to the Declaration of the Monroe Doctrine, Columbia University, 1922. Ernest R. May. The Making of the Monroe Doctrine. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975. 18 Meiertöns, Heiko. The Doctrines of US Security Policy - An Evaluation under International Law, Cambridge University Press, 2010, ISBN 9780521766487. Mellander, Gustavo A.(1971) The United States in Panamanian Politics: The Intriguing Formative Years. Daville,Ill.:Interstate Publishers. OCLC 138568. Mellander, Gustavo A.; Nelly Maldonado Mellander (1999). Charles Edward Magoon: The Panama Years. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Editorial Plaza Mayor. ISBN 1563281554. OCLC 42970390. Merk, Frederick. The Monroe Doctrine and American Expansionism, 1843–1849. New York: Knopf, 1966. Murphy, Gretchen. Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire. Duke University Press, 2005. Examines the cultural context of the doctrine. Perkins, Dexter. The Monroe Doctrine, 1823–1826. 3 vols. 1927. Sexton, Jay. The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America (Hill & Wang; 2011) 290 pages; competing and evolving conceptions of the doctrine after 1823 Gaddis Smith. The Last Years of the Monroe Doctrine, 1945–1993. New York: Hill and Wang, 1994. Argues that the Monroe Doctrine became irrelevant after the end of the Cold War. ISBN 978-0809015689 Grahame, Leopold. "The Latin American View of the Monroe Dotrine." Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 54 (1914): 57–62. A view of what Latin America thinks of the Monroe Doctrine, according to an American. Interesting, viewed somewhat skewed. Bibliography America.gov on Monroe Doctrine – most of the material (as of this writing on 2Dec-2002) was copied from this public domain source. The Encyclopædia Britannica 15th Edition:1974 and The Columbia Encyclopedia Sixth Edition:2008 “Monroe Doctrine.” The New Encyclopædia Britannica (volume 8) 15th Edition: 1993.