ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the bargainig uses of economic, military, diplomatic, and cultural foreign policy instruments chosen by Latin American subsystem actors, and the international patterns they create. Once Latin American barriers to investment and trade were dropped along with their dependence on Spain and Portugal in the early nineteenth century, Britain immediately dominated Latin American commerce and maintained an advantage over other industrial powers. Latin American international economic relations have been dominated since the early 1980s by problems of external debt. An early source of US assistance to Latin America was the Export-Import Bank of Washington, established in 1934 to help promote the recovery of US foreign trade after its sharp decline during the world depression. The United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands tended to concentrate their “Latin American” aid in their American dependencies or former colonies. Latin America was the source of all the cocaine, four-fifths of the marijuana, and two-fifths of the heroin consumed in the United States.
