Latin America’s Long Fight Against the US for Sovereignty

By John Perry – May 13, 2025

John Perry reviews the book AMERICA, AMÉRICA: A New History of the New World, by Greg Grandin.

“An American team will win the next soccer World Cup,” a Nicaraguan boy once told me. It took me a second to realize he meant Brazil or Argentina, not the United States.

Greg Grandin’s new book shows that “America” (or, in Spanish, América) was the name used for the whole hemisphere by the late 17th century. In the 18th, the great liberator Simón Bolívar set out his vision of “our America”: a New World free of colonies, made up of distinct republics living in mutual respect.

He even cautiously welcomed the newly declared Monroe Doctrine as a rejection of European imperialism. Bolívar died without realizing his dream of a Pan-American international order but, Grandin argues, his ideals live on in Latin America today.

The visionary Bolívar was under no illusion that an expanding United States would behave respectfully towards its neighbors. Already, by 1825, politicians in Washington began to insist that their countrymen were the only “Americans,” claiming hemispheric superiority.

The tussle over words was symptomatic of a widening rift. From Mexico southwards, many of those who had liberated their republics from Spanish rule were idealists who (at least, in theory) recognized the universal rights of all their peoples. But the prosperity of a growing United States depended on “stolen Indian land and slave labor” and, within two decades, the stealing of half of Mexico to form the state of Texas.

Worse was to follow. In 1855, the adventurer William Walker did “Texas all over again.” His mercenaries invaded Nicaragua and – recognized by Washington – installed him as president.

Chilean radical Francisco Bilbao summarized the fears this raised in Spanish America: “Walker is the invasion. Walker is the Conquest. Walker is the United States.” A Costa Rican newspaper said he threatened the whole of “Latin America” (the first known use of the term).

By the end of the 19th century, the United States had intervened militarily in Honduras, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Colombia as well as Mexico and Nicaragua. Washington began to use the so-called defense of “human rights” to spin its foreign-policy objectives when it suited U.S. interests, as it did when Spain harshly repressed those fighting for the independence of its last remaining colony, Cuba.

Spain lost, but instead of gaining full independence Cuba became a de facto U.S. colony and Cubans’ human rights barely improved.

The Bolivarian Dream 

Grandin’s argument is that Pan-American, humanist internationalism was first kindled in response to the horrors of the Spanish conquest (“the greatest mortality event in history”).

The Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas and other scathing critics of Spain’s atrocities in the 16th century established the principles of a common humanity that would be developed further by Bolívar and his successors.

The “Bolivarian dream” might have been taken to a global level after the First World War with the establishment of the League of Nations, of which many Latin American countries were founding members. But lacking U.S. support and dominated by the old imperial powers of Britain and France, the League soon failed.

Idealism receded in the inter-war period when Latin America became the focus of the U.S.’ nascent military-industrial complex. Huge arms imports fed massacres of rebellious workers, brutal suppression of dissidents and the pointless and chaotic Chaco war which cost 150,000 lives in the 1930s when Bolivia and Paraguay fought over what turned out to be a non-existent oil field.

U.S. marines again pillaged Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

Eventually, however, a kind of Pan-American idealism resurfaced in the U.S. in the form of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “good neighbor” policy which – had it been sincerely implemented – would have eschewed intervention and conquest.

FDR even added that the constitutional arrangements in Latin American republics were not something that warranted U.S. interference. The New York Times felt able to announce in 1934 that the era of imperialism “nears its end.”
Grandin is rather too effusive in his praise for a policy that to a large extent was a rebranding. He doesn’t mention that 1934 was also the year in which the guerilla leader Augusto César Sandino was assassinated in Nicaragua after the country ended its 20-year-long occupation by U.S. marines.

The Washington-backed Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua would last until 1979. FDR is alleged to have excused his own role in this by remarking that “Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”

Nine years later, Pan-Americanism provided the basis for FDR’s model of a post-war world order based on cooperation and social justice. According to diplomat Sumner Welles, it would be “the cornerstone in the world structure of the future.” Latin Americans would go on to play a significant role in drafting and getting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted.

At that moment, Grandin argues, Washington had the luxury of “an entire resource-rich hemisphere” eager to work with it to create a new world order.

It would be short-lived. A brief social democratic interlude in Latin America after the Second World War, paralleling that in Europe, was eclipsed after the final Pan- American conference, held in Bogotá in 1948.

Grandin highlights the murder of the Colombian progressive Jorge Eliécer Gaitán and the subsequent mayhem (the “Bogotazo,” witnessed by both Fidel Castro and Gabriel García Márquez) as instrumental, because it occurred during the conference.

It enabled the U.S. delegation to successfully push through anti-communist resolutions. The event also saw the creation of the Organization of American States (OAS), which was never a progressive body and soon afterwards legitimized military coups in Venezuela and Peru.

Practically all of Latin America had, by 1950, reverted to dictatorships. Backed by the U.S. military industrial complex, death squads and repression became commonplace.

Repression & Revolt

Covert action eclipsed even mildly progressive forces, epitomized by the C.I.A.’s 1954 coup against the democratically-elected Jacobo Arbenz government in Guatemala.

This began more than three decades of repression and revolt in Central America in which 100,000s of people would die. Washington engineered 16 Latin American regime-change operations between just 1961 and 1969.

Grandin under rates the Cuban revolution as a turning point, singling out liberation theology, economic theories of dependency and radical literary and artistic movements as the agents of a fresh wave of change during the 1970s that he calls a second Enlightenment.

It is exemplified by Salvador Allende’s short-lived left-wing government in Chile and the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. Grandin captures the feeling that many people had at that time, that political struggle and solidarity were key to an individual’s self-actualization and this was nowhere more evident than in Latin America’s radical efforts to change its realidad social.

With Trump in the White House, US Influence in Latin America Is on Decline

If Latin America could be inspiring, it could still also be horrifying.

Military dictator Augusto Pinochet’s Chile allowed the Chicago School to use Chile to pioneer neoliberalism, laced with corruption, and it was exported to Mexico, Argentina and then globally.

President Ronald Reagan’s response to the Sandinista revolution was to finance the Contra war that killed 30,000 Nicaraguans, and in the process rejecting a ground-breaking judgment by the International Court of Justice against the U.S. mining of Managua’s harbor.

President George H. W. Bush’s 1989 invasion of Panama was another blatant violation of the supposed principle of non-intervention, his action blessed by the ever-compliant OAS.

As a North American himself, it is unsurprising that Grandin is in despair at the evolution of both domestic and foreign policy in the U.S. He notes that it has rendered nearly worthless the international law and institutions that Latin America helped create. He laments that U.S. presidents pay little attention to wise advice from Latin American governments which refuse to join its wars and argue for reconciliation in Ukraine, Palestine and Iran.

If he is more optimistic about Latin America, he acknowledges the danger of the rise of the right (Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, Javier Milei of Argentina and Daniel Noboa of Ecuador, et al). Latin America “teeters between the dark and the light,” he says.

Yet he believes the “indomitable spirit of Latin American humanism” will prevail. Writing in The New York Times, Jennifer Szalai accuses Grandin of engaging in “mythological thinking” and glossing over Latin America’s many defects.

On this, as a resident of Latin America, I side with Grandin. My criticism is a political one.

Grandin notes that, by the end of the 19th century, the term “anti-imperialism” had entered the vocabulary of Latin American intellectuals, referring not only to Spain but to the imperial designs of the U.S.

While anti-imperialism crops up throughout the book, he fails to acknowledge how fundamental it is.

Take the example of Honduras — a country that Washington has treated as a long-term lackey, which temporarily broke free only to be reined in by a coup in 2009 and the imposition of corrupt, neoliberal governments.

Under Xiomara Castro in 2021 it broke free again, but she has to be continually on the watch for new interference by Washington. U.S.-inspired coups, covert action and more recently economic sanctions and “lawfare” have deposed or undermined progressive leaders across Latin America.

Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua have had to curtail U.S. intervention (masquerading as “democracy promotion”) to preserve peace and maintain their revolutionary progress. They deserve more respect for their achievements than Grandin offers them.

Furthermore, a book which fully recognizes the struggle against a reborn Monroe Doctrine should have space between its covers for key figures such as Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Evo Morales in Bolivia and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua.

Above all, the omission of Hugo Chávez Frías, who led Venezuela’s new Bolivarian government for 14 years and inspired leftists across the hemisphere, is inexcusable.

It was Chávez, speaking at the U.N. General Assembly after George W. Bush, who said that the podium “still smells of sulfur.”

In fact, Simón Bolívar’s anti-imperialism – as well as his humanism – are indeed still alive in Latin America.

 

(Consortium News)