Chapter 06 Summary

CHAPTER 6

From the 1880s through the 1920s the United States extended its influence – economic, cultural, political, and military – throughout Latin America, part of the trend of "New Imperialism" that was also extending European and U.S. power into new corners of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia at this time. As the United States rose to world-power status, Latin America was incorporated into the new global order on unequal terms with the emerging U.S. hegemon.

U.S. ascendancy was greatest in the Caribbean basin. In 1898, U.S. forces intervened in Cuba's war for independence and expelled the four-hundred-year-old Spanish Empire from the Americas, annexing Puerto Rico and turning Cuba into a protectorate, where Cubans governed only so long as they upheld U.S. economic and political interests. U.S. Marines occupied Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua for years at a time, violently suppressing local resistance and installing governments that would uphold the rights of U.S. and European business, and leaving behind newly trained local security forces to enforce order thereafter. U.S. power and diplomacy outmaneuvered European rivals and separated Panama from Colombia, allowing U.S. investors and engineers to build and control the new Panama Canal.

Where U.S. Marines didn't tread, U.S. investors nevertheless did. U.S. (and European) oil companies transformed the environments of Mexico's Gulf coast and Venezuela's Caribbean coast in pursuit of a new energy source – petroleum. By the 1920s U.S. capital and technology were reshaping even once-distant regions like Peru, interior Colombia, and the Brazilian Amazon.

Though the most powerful, Washington was not the only expansionist power in the hemisphere. Brazil annexed remote interior areas from several neighbors. Chile seized valuable territory from Bolivia and Peru in the War of the Pacific. Yet even Chile, prosperous and faraway, developed an enduring sense of "Yankeephobia," a mix of fear, envy, and resentment that came to be shared by Latin Americans up and down the region.