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Between 1988 and 1994, United States-Latin American relations were radically transformed. Cold War era imperatives that had shaped LatinAmerican foreign policies-the threat of revolutionary violence, the ideological components of economic nationalism, and the ferocious anti-Communism of military rule-no longer drove decisionmaking in Washington on domestic and foreign policy questions. At the same time, -what seemed the essential building blocks of US policy in the early 1980s were also set aside. These include the morass of Central American insurgency, low intensity warfare, and the threat of Soviet and Cuban Communism. With what seemed incidental ease, American leaders dusted off a decades-old policy, dollar diplomacy. Between 1988 and 1994, that policy became the core of what American leaders believed was the US national interest in Latin America. Dollar diplomacy not only established the terms of how the US government dealt with Latin America. It also set essential parameters for how Latin American governments would approach a vast array of domestic and foreign policy matters including banking, money supply, industrial growth, as well as a range of social and cultural problems; with chilling speed, without precedent, and in the face of only sporadic political opposition, Latin American leaders adopted these policy parameters as their own. The result has been a revolutionary economic shift in Latin America with perilous implications for the majority-and an equivalent upheaval in US-- Latin American relations.
Much earlier in the century; president-elect William Howard Taft had described dollar diplomacy toward Latin America as bringing together three important developments in US-Latin American relations-US advances in industry, trade and finance; Latin American nation-building around projects that highlighted close economic ties with the US; and the growing tendency of the US to intervene militarily in Latin America. In the future, Taft wanted to emphasize the first two, as had his predecessors in the White House for more than a decade. But he was intent on eliminating the latter component of US-Latin American ties-American military and administrative intervention in the internal affairs of Latin American countries. Taft wanted a less complicated, less draining, and more stable American economic and business predominance in the region, one governed by the same kinds of order that ruled Wall Street and the American financial community@ For this, Taft believed that Latin American...