Introduction

This introductory chapter reviews the history of United States (US) foreign policy towards Latin America. Drawing on the existing literature on Latin America's 'left turn', it also sketchs the contours of the New Latin Left (NLL). Debates over the goals of US foreign policy echo IR's paradigmatic fissures, but in a way that cuts across IR's established (meta-)theories. There is a large body of scholarship on the history of US foreign policy in Latin America written from a revisionist angle. The revisionist literature points us in the direction of a critical approach. The left–right model of understanding and classifying politics has an enduring applicability to the Latin American context. The differences between the anti-neoliberal governments of the new left and those classified as neoliberal reformers must not be overplayed. Elected in 1998, Hugo Chávez became the most potent symbol of the region-wide turn to the left.