While the US has often portrayed itself as the champion of democracy and freedom in the Western Hemisphere, protector against outsiders and even a partner in Pan-American development, its neighbors have not always shared this image. Instead, the “Colossus of the North” has, in their eyes, made unilateral declarations of policy, intervened to protect murky interests and acted as a domineering patriarch. These images, and the experiences and actions that underpin them, often have made US relations with its American neighbors conflictive, even though goods, citizens and ideas cross borders. Moreover, experiences have varied among nations: while Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America have been constant foci of American activity nations to the south have sometimes negotiated alternate ties with each other and with Europe.

US values have been embodied in statements that betray perceptions of Latin American weakness. The 1823 Monroe Doctrine of President James Monroe warned Europeans (without any ratification) not to intervene further in the Western Hemisphere.

This vision later gained more force when used to justify US appropriation of territory in the west and claims of hemispheric interests. President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 corollary allowing the US to intervene in problem nations of the hemisphere, turned protector into policeman. While Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy (1935–45) sought a new appearance of partnership, including concessions to Latin American sovereignty, relations of power scarcely changed. US concerns expanded even more as the Cold War raised the specter of communism in Latin America.

Twentieth century US actions have betrayed deep ambivalence. Intervention to restructure debt or establish order, for example, also meant the US dictated terms by which Haiti, Cuba, Panama or Nicaragua might regain their autonomy. During the Cold War, professed ideals of freedom were sacrificed for stability of US political and economic interests. Bloody dictators were supported and popular movements suppressed with massive US aid, military support and CIA assistance. Leftist movements were destabilized by diplomacy and covert operations. Cuba, Mexico and Nicaragua, perhaps, best illustrate this pattern of intimate conflict, but the scenario extended as far south as the Allende regime in Chile.

US individuals and corporations have also made investments in Latin America (again, especially in nearby states), and have encouraged trade and “development.” Loans and foreign aid have facilitated development programs, but have also insisted on neo-colonial dependencies and have created crushing debts. Medical, religious, scientific, agricultural, academic and even revolutionary assistance from the north each have created solutions and problems. Controlling disease or bolstering production, for example, raises new dilemmas if the US prevents population control or land reform.

Many US citizens, meanwhile, view Latin America through ignorance or stereotypes of laziness, instability or carefree abandon—combining Disney’s Three Caballeros (1945), noir nostalgia (Gilda, 1946; Havana, 1990), Carmen Miranda and news of seemingly endless war and poverty Despite serious Latin American voices in scholarship, the arts and media (Univision, Telemundo), stereotypes remain strong.

Perhaps the most tragic dimension of this misunderstanding and pain has been the experiences and interests that the United States and Latin America actually share—their creation within patterns of global migration and exchange in the early modern period, their experiences as post-colonial republics, links to Europe, Africa and Asia, pre-contact American cultures and ongoing hybridization, even their landscapes. Latin Americans have watched Hollywood movies (including condescending stereotypes); visited, immigrated and even sought refuge in the US; competed in resources, production and sports; shared art, food and literature; and faced common problems of environmental degradation, the growth and distribution of drugs or the spread of AIDS. Exchanges among Latin Americans and debates over the rainforest, efficient development or preferred media products provide alternative discourses the US often fails to hear.

Through all this, the powerfully ambivalent US position as insistent leader has often betrayed the very freedom the US proclaims. The cry “Yankee go home,” from decade to decade, nation to nation, reminds us that despite interventions that may resolve problems locally for many intervention itself—and the presumption of a right to do so—remains the problem.