Introduction

The history of relations between the United States and Latin America is marked by contradictions and an erratic course. US policy on the one hand has been described as idealistic, the reflection of a benign nation willing to share its democratic experiment with the rest of the world, and on the other hand as seeking to impose on its neighbors to the south some of the colonial policies it has repudiated since the time of the Revolutionary War. Latin America continues to be a singularly elusive, perplexing subject for US policymakers. Franklin D. Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy was unparalleled in taking hemispheric relations to the most constructive level. The idea of hemispheric cooperation continues to exert far from negligible appeal in Latin America, especially in an era of economic interdependence that no country is hope to face in isolation.