ABSTRACT
Arturo Santa-Cruz, a Cornell-trained scholar of international relations and political economy at Mexico’s University of Guadalajara, is the author of a prodigious number of books and articles on North America. In US Hegemony and the Americas, an impressive and original work, Santa-Cruz sets out to chronicle the ebb and flow of Uncle Sam’s hegemony in the western hemisphere by examining Washington’s economic statecraft, from the 1970s to the present. The author characterises Latin America as a subordinate power, arguing that Washington established hegemony over Latin America via its economic policy, a conclusion that could also apply to other developing regions of the world. His analysis focuses on the years 1971–89 and 1990–2000, the hiccups and heartache of which he scrutinises in detail, including Latin America’s so-called ‘lost decade’ in the 1980s and the controversial yet ultimately successful IMF- and US Treasury-led debt-relief plan.
