Yankee No! Anti-Americanism in U.S.–Latin American Relations

Abstract

The horrors of September 11, 2001, thrust the subject of “anti-Americanism” into bold relief across the news media, the Internet, and the minds of people all over the world. Since then, the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the abuse of prisoners in Baghdad have fanned the flames of anti-Americanism to their highest level in history. Therefore, the urgency of Alan McPherson’s excellent book increases daily during these tumultuous and sanguinary times. The United States would do well to heed his conclusion, that “arrogance in the face of aggression eventually produce[s] more aggression” (p. 169). Uncovering the roots of the thing called “anti-Americanism” in Latin America, McPherson identifies the primary factors that shaped its development, such as ambivalence toward the combined promise and threat of the United States. His account goes back to the nineteenth century, when the love-hate pattern of inter-American relations first emerged. José Enrique Rodó’s turn-of-the-century critique, Ariel, articulated the opposition to expanding U.S. imperialism to the south. But the event that showed how thin Latin America’s patience with U.S. domination had worn was Richard Nixon’s 1958 baptism by fire (or rather, by saliva and rocks) in Venezuela. There, Vice President Nixon’s goodwill tour of South America backfired when mobs spit on him at the airport, then assailed his motorcade in an impoverished section of Caracas. That close call made Dwight Eisenhower take urgent notice of a region largely ignored by U.S. policy since Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy of the 1930s. All of this history is covered concisely in the book’s introduction.Close on the heels of the debacle in Venezuela came the triumphant entry of Fidel Castro into Havana, the first of McPherson’s three case studies. The rise of Castro precipitated a dramatic spike in anti-American policy. Following a brief wait-and-see honeymoon, the relationship with the new Cuban regime soured as 1959 wore on and as “interventions” by government-inspired groups of Yankee-weary Cubans led to the expropriation of U.S-owned property. However, although the Cuban Revolution has received much attention in the historiography of U.S.–Latin American relations, the 1964 Panama riots that McPherson takes as his second case study have been largely ignored. The display of the Stars and Stripes at a high school in the Canal Zone sparked the outrage, which the Panamanian elite subsequently stoked but eventually extinguished when they had achieved goals of their own. The 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic, McPherson’s final case study, dwarfed the scale of previous run-ins with Latin American antagonism. The massive U.S. airborne landings in Santo Domingo served Lyndon Johnson’s policy of preventing “another Cuba.” The intervention stymied an uprising in the Dominican capital that demanded the restoration of leftist president Juan Bosch, recently ousted by a military coup. U.S. troops hemmed in these “Constitutionalists” and wore them down over the course of a year. They then orchestrated an election that brought Joaquín Balaguer, former puppet president to dictator Rafael Trujillo, to power for a long period of authoritarian rule. Mission accomplished.McPherson’s taxonomy of anti-Americanism identifies three variants: revolutionary (Cuba), conservative (Panama), and episodic (the Dominican Republic). The respective U.S. responses to these challenges were panic, pragmatism, and containment. These are cogent categories that come across clearly in the three detailed case studies, and they can be applied to other manifestations of anti-Americanism in other places at other times. The research that went into this volume is impressive, requiring wide travel on the part of the author. Comprising sources from archives in four countries, the study is a model of multiple-archive research. Oral history also plays an important role in reconstructing and lending color to the account. McPherson interviewed more than 50 participants, including subjects such as Napoleón de Bernard, who threw the first punch in the 1964 Panama riots. The resulting narrative is written in a direct and witty style that makes the book accessible to a wide audience, while still being of great interest to specialists.Yankee No! is a timely call to form a new genre of scholarly inquiry into the global phenomenon of anti-Americanism, which has not been treated widely heretofore. It is high time to examine the origins and outcomes of these negative sentiments, ranging from vague dislike to visceral hatred of the United States, and not just for citizens of this country. As anti-American feelings have found increasingly violent forms, people of many other nations have been bloodily impacted by terrorism that attacks not only the traditional targets of anti-American aggression, such as embassies, but also the allies of the United States.