ABSTRACT
“We went to visit neighbors and found brothers.” 2 So began the text of the Rockefeller report on United States-Latin American relations in 1969. The phrase captures not only a part of the governor’s personal style, but also some themes of inter-American relations. Many scholars and public officials in the United States start their analyses and their policies from the following premises: there is a special relationship between the United States and Latin America, a positive, cooperative, warm, quasi-familial bond quite beyond the ordinary interstate bond; and there is a mutuality of interests among these countries of the Western Hemisphere that resembles family ties in the best sense. In case these premises are not self-evident, it is appropriate to use a rhetorical style more positively effusive than perhaps the facts may warrant.
