This isn’t in response to any particular article but to a whole raft of articles I’ve seen lately. People in South and Central America or people who have ties to the people of Latin America are strongly predisposed to blame the entire region’s problems on the United States. I’ve seen at least a dozen articles over the last week or so to that effect.
I won’t dispute that the U. S. has intervened in the affairs of Latin American countries and continues to do so or argue that our interventions have been benign. The record says otherwise. If it had been up to me I would not have so intervened but most of the intervention took place before I was born.
What I dispute is that we caused their problems. I think they have the causality backwards. Every repeat every country colonized by either Spain or Portugal has similar problems and those problems have moved us to intervene in those countries. We didn’t create a Mexico divided by race into social classes. That predates the existence of the U. S. let alone U. S. intervention.
As proof I would submit that even Latin American countries in which we have barely intervened have very similar problems and that countries South and Central American countries that weren’t colonized by Spain or Portugal tend to be more prosperous than those that were.
Spot on.