ABSTRACT
Latin America and the United States share a long historical relationship in which, from the Latin American perspective, the drawbacks have often outweighed the benefits. Of course, there were many times, perhaps less well remembered, when the ‘good’ outweighed the ‘bad.’ The predominant metaphors for understanding the U.S. relationship with Latin America have been either ‘the bull in the china shop’ or Porfirio Diaz’s lament–‘so far from God, so near to the United States.’ In the contemporary era, however, there is a sense of a fundamental change in the relationship, due to the combination of global challenges to U.S. leadership and a diversification of Latin America’s international relations (Lowenthal and Mostajo 2010; Domínguez and Covarrubias 2014).
