American Interventions in Latin America: A Recurrent Practice

Published at: 23/05/2025 05:26 PM

American interventions have marked the history of Latin America. Starting in 1823, with the establishment of the so-called Monroe Doctrine and his “America for Americans” discourse used as an anti-colonial plea to prevent the interventions of the European empire on American soil, after most of the colonies of the old continent had become independent, it then became a weapon of war to invade other countries.

In other words, Monroe 's message ended up mutating until it became the right to have its own exclusive area of influence on the continent, through the coercion of the nations that comprise it.

American interventionism in the American continent has been a common and growing practice during the context of the Cold War, between 1947 and 1991, underpinned by the excuse of the distortion of the Monroe Doctrine, the US empire carried out military interventions or destabilizing actions through its secret services, in order to destabilize governments aligned with the communist bloc or who showed sympathy for them; and to demonstrate this, we bring some examples.

On December 20, 1989, in Panama, philologist and analyst Guillermo Castro Herrera recalls that he woke up, like many other Panamanians, “to the sound of bombing explosions in the neighborhood of El Chorrillo, disorder of all kinds was allowed to occur for three days. There was an enormous wave of looting that terrified the population even more... When the troops finally came in, they were greeted as saviors.”

In the case of Panama, Castro Herrera indicated that the ultimate goal was “the control of the country to maintain drug trafficking routes, border control, and others, which are not specific to the fight against communism.”

In the same vein, the professor at the Simón Bolívar Andean University in Quito, Wolf Grabendorff, added that “the United States seized this opportunity to regain control of the Canal, which was always geopolitically one of its main interests in the region.”

Covert operations

The motives of US interventions, direct or covert, have been geostrategic, political or economic, as the case may be, and have varied throughout history. The Spanish politician José Antonio Sánchez Román explained that “the intervention in Cuba, in the war against Spain at the end of the 19th century, is not the same as the interventions during the Cold War. These are different geopolitical and economic contexts,” he also pointed out that military interventions, with the landing of marines, had been common, especially in the first half of the 20th century, and cited as examples those of Haiti and Nicaragua.”

Sánchez Román explained that “in the second half of the last century, the strategy changed, using covert interventions as a tool, through intelligence agencies, supporting opposition groups. The Spanish politician gave as an example the attempt at Bay of Pigs, which failed and highlighted in the same way the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, commenting that “they didn't want to do it directly, but US intelligence was conspiring to bring about the coup d'etat,” he said.

Supporting the elites

Regarding this topic, Professor Grabendorff stressed that “a characteristic of American interventions is precisely that they have not been carried out against the elites; on the contrary, these elites have had the support of the United States to stop some revolution or some important changes in the political system such as agrarian reforms, mainly in the countries of the Caribbean basin”.

Grabendorff insisted that “ideological aspects are not as important as they say, they are always the strong ties that exist between the traditional elites of those countries and their allies in the United States. This is how they justify interventions by stating their ideological reasons, when in reality they have to do with economic interests.”

Neither democracy nor stability

“After an intervention, the country is worse off than before it,” Grabendorff explained, adding that “the clearest effect of the interventions, with the exception of failed attempts in Cuba and Nicaragua, has been to strengthen sectors related to the United States.”

Regarding the effect of US interventions, the politician Sánchez Román assured that the impact has always been negative, arguing that “the war against Spain in Cuba, the occupation of Cuba and Puerto Rico or the overthrow of Allende in Chile, they did not bring more democracy or more freedom to those nations. Neither in Nicaragua nor in Haiti was there more democracy or more stability and much less economic development.” In his opinion, “military interventions or covert interventions have generated, apart from immediate violence, more political and civil polarization”.

Nowadays, there seems to be broad consensus in the rejection of direct military interventions, although other ways of exerting influence in the region remain, such as the application of economic sanctions, for example.

Professor Grabendorff referred to the use of the Monroe doctrine, with which they justify interventions when the US considers its economic stability threatened and noted that “it's a very long story and we are not going to see a long-term change in that American thinking, now they change the discourse with a new argument: they need to guarantee their backyard in their fight against China, especially since the Asian country behaves like a true commercial and financial partner, which is seen by Washington as a major threat.”

AMELYREN BASABE/Mazo News Team