History

The Monroe Doctrine by Carlos Alberto Contreras

Published in World Scholar: Latin America and the Caribbean. Gale/ Cengage Learning,

2012.

The Monroe Doctrine was one of the most significant policy statements affecting geopolitics in

the Western Hemisphere. The doctrine was issued in 1823 to restrict Europe’s presence in the

Americas, and was applied selectively and reinterpreted over the next two centuries in ways that

accommodated U.S. expansionist policies in the hemisphere. Ultimately, the way in which it was

applied violated Latin American sovereignty and self-determination.

Nineteenth Century

At its core, the Monroe Doctrine unilaterally proclaimed that the “American continents, by the

free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be

considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” With most Latin

American countries having already declared independence, U.S. officials worried about three

possibilities: that France would expand further in the Americas, that Russia would press its

claims on the Pacific Northwest, and that Spain would back its political claims to its former

colonies with military maneuvers. President James Monroe (in office 1817–1825) preferred a

joint British and American proclamation, but Secretary of State John Quincy Adams persuaded

the president to act independently. Adams argued that the United States did not need the British,

who might in fact prove to be unhelpful allies if the United States expanded its borders. The

United States also declared its opposition to the extension of monarchism in the hemisphere by

the European powers: “we should declare any attempt on their part to extend their political

system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.”

Given that the United States had little power to back up the Monroe Doctrine—and in fact did

little to put it into practice until 1865, in its efforts to drive the French out of Mexico—Europe

largely ignored it. It was the U.S. expansion into Mexico’s northern territories in 1848 that

contributed to conditions in which Europe later felt it had to directly intervene, marking, in the

eyes of the Americans, the first important violation of the Monroe Doctrine. In addition to the

loss of half its territory as a result of the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), Mexico was

experiencing costly internal conflict that stemmed from divisions between liberals and

conservatives. In 1861, when Mexico declared that it would not pay interest on its foreign debts,

England, Spain, and France resolved to launch a military intervention into Mexico to recover

those debts. England and Spain withdrew when it became clear that French emperor Napoleon

III would install Archduke Maximilian of Austria as emperor of Mexico. The United States, then

in the midst of its Civil War (1861–1865), could do little more than protest this European

incursion into the Americas. Once the Civil War was over, the United States increased its

pressure on France to leave and dispatched troops to the border with Mexico. Mexican president

Benito Juárez, who had been waging guerrilla warfare against the French occupying forces,

welcomed this U.S. show of force but ultimately regained control of Mexico without the help of

U.S. troops. In 1867 Juárez ordered Maximilian’s execution and shipped his corpse back to

France.

In the late nineteenth century, U.S. economic power in the hemisphere grew, putting teeth into its

defense of the Monroe Doctrine. In 1895 Richard Olney, secretary of state under President

Grover Cleveland, issued a response to British expansion into Venezuela, stating that “today the

United States is practically sovereign on this continent and its fiat is law.…” Under the Olney

Corollary, the United States claimed the right to intervene in diplomatic issues concerning the

Western Hemisphere even when it was not directly involved.

Twentieth Century

From 1902 to 1903 Britain and Germany, seeking to collect on debts owed to them by

Venezuela, imposed a naval blockade. The United States refrained from involvement other than

to put pressure on the parties to settle the matter. Two years later, however, President Theodore

Roosevelt, as part of his State of the Union speech, made a statement with the hope of

forestalling further European interventions in the hemisphere. This statement declared the United

States the sole hemispheric “police power” in the enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine. Although

commonly referred to as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, Roosevelt’s statement

in fact transformed the meaning of the doctrine: it marked a historic shift from forbidding

European incursions into the United States’ hemispheric neighbors, as the doctrine had held

during the nineteenth century, to a potential justification of U.S. military power throughout the

hemisphere even without the provocation of European involvement. While assuring the

European powers that the United States would henceforth assume responsibility for guaranteeing

order and the collection of debts in this hemisphere, the statement was also a warning to the

Latin Americans themselves that the United States would intervene militarily if it deemed

necessary. U.S. investors now controlled vast amounts of land in Latin America as well as key

natural resources, such as oil and copper. As U.S. economic interests in Latin America expanded

and U.S. military power grew (such as securing exclusive rights to build the trans-isthmian canal

in Panama), it was this new interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine that U.S. policymakers

followed, intervening militarily in Latin America no fewer than thirty times between 1898 and

1930.

Cold War

In 1954 in Guatemala, a Central Intelligence Agency–led coup overthrew Jacobo Arbenz, the

country’s democratically elected and reformist president. This coup, occurring during the Cold

War (1947–1991) between the United States and the Soviet Union, demonstrated how the

Monroe Doctrine again changed as a tool of U.S. interests. Citing “the intrusion of Soviet

despotism” as a challenge to the Monroe Doctrine, the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration

ordered the covert operation to overthrow Arbenz after his land reform affected 400,000 acres of

unused land owned by the United Fruit Company, a U.S. multinational corporation. Although

admitting there was no proof of actual Soviet infiltration, Eisenhower saw Arbenz as “soft” on

communism. As the U.S. ambassador to Guatemala had said about Arbenz, “If the president is

not a communist, he will certainly do until one comes along.” This episode established the

principle that the Monroe Doctrine now applied to internal subversion as well as to external

threats, and extended it “to include the concept of outlawing foreign ideologies in the American

Republics,” as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles stated at the Inter-American Conference in

Caracas in 1954 following the overthrow of Arbenz

Throughout the Cold War, U.S. policymakers used a combination of diplomatic isolation, covert

operations, direct military interventions, and the bolstering of the region’s military dictators to

seal off the hemisphere from Soviet influence. The Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba was a failed

attempt, organized by the CIA and authorized by President John F. Kennedy, to overthrow the

Soviet-backed Fidel Castro regime in 1961; subsequent covert efforts to have Castro assassinated

also failed. The Richard M. Nixon administration unsuccessfully used covert tactics to prevent

Salvador Allende, the democratically elected socialist president of Chile, from taking office in

1970. The administration gave tacit approval to the Chilean military’s violent ouster of Allende

in 1973. Finally, the Ronald Reagan administration organized and armed the Contras in their

effort to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua in the 1980s as well as efforts to

bolster some of the region’s military dictatorships. Cold War fears were behind military

interventions in the Dominican Republic in 1965 and Grenada in 1983.

Since the 1990s

When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, U.S. policymakers stopped looking at Latin

America through the prism of the Cold War and relaxed their efforts to cordon off the

hemisphere from an enemy that no longer existed. The new focus of U.S. policy was on the

economic integration of the region through trade agreements. As Latin America dismantled its

dictatorships and consolidated its market-opening policies in the 1990s and into the twenty-first

century, the Monroe Doctrine largely disappeared from the language of U.S. foreign policy. With

the rise of the threat of terrorism after the September 11, 2001, attacks and the increased drug

cartel violence that has exacerbated a security crisis in Mexico and some Central American

countries, it remains to be seen whether the United States may revive the Monroe Doctrine in the

future and intervene for different reasons.

Carlos Alberto Contreras

Bibliography

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