United States policy toward Latin America: A study of proactive versus reactive hypotheses

Abstract

The object of this paper is to examine the factors influencing the interaction between the United States (US) and Latin American countries (LACs). The emphasis is not on the existence of a US foreign policy toward the LACs; such a policy is assumed. Instead, it focuses on two extreme points of view vis-à-vis this policy. At one extreme, the hypothesis is that the US actively pursues a well defined, long-term foreign policy toward the LACs. At the other extreme, the hypothesis is that the US merely reacts to perceived crises in them with ad hoc, short-term policies. The first hypothesis can be expressed with an equation of the form: political conditions in the LACs depend on internal conditions in the LACs, internal conditions in the US, and US policies toward the LACs. The second hypothesis leads to an equation of the form: US policies toward the LACs depend on internal conditions in the US, political conditions in the LACs, and internal conditions in the LACs. To operationalize these equations, several indices are evaluated with aggregated data for the LACs and the US over a period of about 20 years. The relationships above clearly show that the problem is to determine the direction of causality between the set of events in the LACs and the set of US policies. Since causes are assumed to precede effects in time, the problem is solved by studying the impact of several time lags on the values of the correlation coefficients between the indices defined. The equation that seems to better describe the relationships between the US and LACs is analyzed in detail. The results obtained so far provide interesting insights into the internal and external determinants of US foreign policy.