U.S.- Latin American Relations

Teachers, students, experts, policymakers, and citizen activists all should welcome this authoritative, systematic, single-volume sourcebook of who makes foreign policy, how it is made, and what U.S. policy has been since the 1960s. Well-known experts assess all the significant literature and research about U.S. policy in the region over the last three decades and analyze the role and procedures of foreign policymaking through regional institutions, key factors and major players in the United States, and special issues such as interventionism, human rights, democratization, and peacekeeping efforts.

In this second edition of Whirlpool, Pastor provides an overview of US Latin American policy under Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton, with special attention devoted to the role played by Congress. Next he looks at the recurring challenges faced by the United States -- how the United States has tried but often failed to manage succession crises, stop revolutionaries, promote elections, and encourage development. Pastor offers a series of far-reaching policy recommendations for exiting the whirlpool, based on a renunciation of unilateral intervention and a forging of a freer trade area. This second edition is thoroughly updated, with detailed new considerations of the cases of Nicaragua and Mexico in particular, and of the concept of hemispheric community.

The Reagan record-the man, the administration, the internal political wars, and the lack of coordination-is thoroughly explicated. The Bush administration, including the Panamanian intervention, is also analyzed. Bilateral relations are illuminated in the essays concerning Cuba, Mexico, and Brazil. Throughout, the writers look to the future to warn us not to dismiss the importance of these countries.

An in-depth analysis of the developing relationship between the United States & Latin America during the critical period from the Mexican War to the Panama Canal treaty. This volume examines the relationship of U.S. relations with Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, Central America, Peru, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay & Paraguay from the perspective of both the United States & the individual Latin American countries.

In this book, William LeoGrande offers the first comprehensive history of U.S. foreign policy toward Central America in the waning years of the Cold War. From the overthrow of the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua and the outbreak of El Salvador's civil war in the late 1970s to the final regional peace settlements negotiated a decade later, he chronicles the dramatic struggles - in Washington and Central America - that shaped the region's destiny. LeoGrande's central argument is that our Central American policy was driven by the specter of Vietnam and conflicting views on how to avoid repeating that history. Throughout the book, LeoGrande interweaves three principal thematic threads: how events in Central America came to be considered threatening to the United States, how debates within the executive branch over the appropriate response shaped policy, and how conflicts between the White House and Congress constrained presidential options.

In examining the subtext of the discourse that U.S. leaders reproduce unconsciously, Kenworthy explores the boundary between discourse analysis, which rarely moves beyond texts, and policy analyses that emphasize rationality.