ABSTRACT
This chapter helps to develop a broader understanding of how the exercise of US power concerned Latin Americans in the 1960s and 1970s. Ideas about dependency and US exploitation were extraordinarily powerful in Cuba because Castro emphasized his revolution's triumph against US power and domination, rather than his victory against Fulgencio Batista. These ideas remained important, but their meaning evolved as independence movements in Africa and Asia forced the European colonial powers to dismantle their empires in the 1950s. Nationalism was also powerful in Panama, although here psychological issues connected to the canal and the US-administered Canal Zone, rather than economic issues, were most potent. Peru's military leaders, whose counterparts elsewhere in Latin America feared that economic nationalism might lead to communism and instability, opposed the settlements, and they ousted Belaunde in 1968. US companies learned in Mexico in the 1920s that confrontational policies might spur economic nationalism and hoped to avoid the same fate in Venezuela.
