ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the foreign policies and certain international interactions of the Latin American and Caribbean states. Latin Americans increased their efforts to adopt more independent foreign policies, often in concert with one another and with some success. Foreign policy analysis became an important research effort, using concepts from general decisional theories and from the comparative study of political systems. Most foreign policy analysts tend to focus on the domestic factors behind Latin American and Caribbean decision making and to emphasize the primacy of domestic politics. External actions are considered to be means for protecting individual or group interests, furthering goals such as internal economic development and political stability, or satisfying nationalist causes. Latin American states have formulated policies and carried on interstate relations on several geographic levels: the overall Latin American—Caribbean region; the several subregions; the Western Hemisphere, to include especially the United States; and the extrahemispheric world.
