U.S. Imperialism in Latin America

(Quote of the Week)

The 1938 founding conference of the Trotskyist Fourth International emphasized the special duty of revolutionaries in this country to oppose U.S. imperialist domination of Latin America and its other colonies and neocolonies. In 1823, President James Monroe warned the European powers to cease all colonization and intercession in the Americas, in effect asserting Washington’s claim to the entire hemisphere as its backyard. By the end of the 19th century, the U.S. emerged on the world scene as an imperialist power. Since then, every Democratic and Republican administration has hewed to the Monroe Doctrine, keeping Latin America and the Caribbean under the thumb of the U.S. through military intervention, coups, puppet regimes and economic subjugation.

In Latin America, although confronted with a powerful rival in the form of Great Britain and to a lesser but increasing extent by Japan and Germany, the United States remains the dominant imperialist force. The United States appeared on the scene at a later date than did such countries as Spain, Portugal, Germany, and England, but by the turn of the century it was already on its way to outstripping its rivals. Its rapid industrial and financial development, the preoccupation of the European powers during the [first] World War, and the transformation of the United States into the world’s creditor during that period, facilitated its rise to the top and enabled it to establish its imperialist hegemony over most of the countries of Central and South America and the Caribbean Sea. It proclaimed its intention of maintaining this hegemony against encroachments by European and Japanese imperialism....

The Roosevelt administration, despite all its bland pretensions, has made no real alteration in the imperialist tradition of its predecessors. It has emphatically reiterated the vicious Monroe Doctrine; it has confirmed its monopolistic claims over Latin America at the Buenos Aires Conferences; it has given the sanctification of its approval to the unspeakable regimes of Vargas and Batista; its demand for a bigger navy to police not only the Pacific but also the Atlantic is an example of its determination to wield the armed force of the United States in defense of its imperialist might in the southern part of the hemisphere. Under Roosevelt, the policy of the iron fist in Latin America is sheathed in the velvet glove of demagogic pretensions of friendship and “democracy.”...

The revolutionists in the United States are obliged to rouse the American workers against the sending of any armed forces against the peoples of Latin America and the Pacific and for the withdrawal of any such forces where they now operate as instruments of imperialist oppression, as well as against any other form of imperialist pressure, be it “diplomatic” or “economic,” which is calculated to violate the national independence of any country or to prevent its attainment of such national independence.

—Thesis on the World Role of American Imperialism,” September 1938, reprinted in Documents of the Fourth International (Pathfinder Press, 1973)