ABSTRACT
A feeling of great admiration characterized the attitude of Latin American leaders toward the United States from the era of independence to the closing years of the nineteenth century. Latin American leaders resented the position taken by both the Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower administrations that Latin American developmental loans must be financed for the most part by private capital rather than intergovernmental loans. Latin American leaders in the nineteenth century, seeking to orient their countries in new and progressive directions, regarded the United States and England as their models. In 1899 Rudyard Kipling, renowned for his children's stories and his enthusiasm for empire, wrote a poem challenging the United States to assume its imperial responsibility by taking up "the white man's burden" to civilize its "new caught, sullen peoples/Half-devil and half-child". The US intervention in Panama and the prospect of a US-controlled canal across the isthmus prompted expressions of concern and distrust by many Latin Americans.
