The piece I chose to analyze is called, The Summit of the Americas is an Instrument of U.S. Hegemony in Latin America. This article centers on the Biden administration excluding certain countries from attending this years summit of the Americas and it analyzes this exclusion as a U.S. soft power tactic. This display of soft power is a relic of the American government’s cold war strategy in Latin America. The evidence of the U.S.’s cold war strategy is prevalent all throughout the region.    

Following the end of the minimal intervention good neighbor policy the U.S. began putting its finger on the scale to a greater effect. As can be seen in chapter 10 of Problems in Modern Latin America the US cold war strategy led to heavy interventionism. A perfect example of this is in section 4 of that chapter that recounts the church committee, Which exposes the U.S. government’s plots to assassinate Latin American leaders (Dawson 2019, 251). Doing so to prop up their own leader in those countries in order to disseminate American hegemonic views onto their societies.This is where the summit of America’s ties into the remnants of American cold war strategy towards Latin America. Not only is the summit of America’s facilitated by the OAS, an instrument of American hegemony, who the U.S. government gave political cover to in supporting a coup in Bolivian in 2019; It also paradoxically props up America as the arbiter of democracy, which given their track record with Latin-American countries is seemingly controversial. When the U.S. secretary of state for Western hemisphere affairs, Brian Nichols, describes the meeting as a key moment to confront the current challenges to democracy in the the hemisphere as a justification for excluding countries from the meeting, again while ignoring the U.S.’s historical role in supporting anti-democratic governments in Latin America it comes off as dishonest. The sentiment was expressed by many of the countries that were invited. The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) made this clear when they said that their fourteen nations would withhold their attendance if countries were excluded given that it is ” the summit of the Americas is not a meeting of the United States.” Mexican president AMLO also agreed to boycott the meeting which caused the White House to do more political posturing in order to try to convince Obrador to attend. Shortly thereafter Luis Arce, Bolivian president who came to power after the coup that the OAS supported with the political cover of the U.S., agreed not to go; As well as Honduran president Xiomara Castro who has vivid memories of a U.S. supported coup, in which her husband Manuel Zelaya was run out of the country. The U.S. government’s view of itself as a unipolar hegemon, at least in this hemisphere, can be observed through the rhetoric of the government officials. When deputy assistant Secretary of State for Western hemisphere affairs Karri Hannan Describes countries not attending as “[losing] an opportunity to engage with the United States” it shows how US government clearly views itself as the hemespheric decision maker and the country others must come to, to then decide their agendas.

The rest of the article does a great job by presenting the historical facts about U.S. interventionism in Latin America to further prove their point. Whether it be a general anti-Castro Latin American agenda or plan Columbia written by Joe Biden the US has a interesting record in working with Latin America and for these countries to have a say about the U.S.’s role in their development is a great step in the true autonomy of Latin-American countries.

Work Cited: https://jacobin.com/2022/05/the-summit-of-the-americas-is-an-instrument-of-us-hegemony-in-latin-america.

Problems in Modern Latin American History : Sources and Interpretations, edited by James A. Wood, and Anna Rose Alexander, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/baruch/detail.action?docID=5743856