The United States and Latin America: a turbulent history

Summary

HistoryExtra Podcast Summary

Episode Title: The United States and Latin America: A Turbulent History
Host: Danny Byrd
Guest: Greg Grandin, Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History at Yale University
Date: January 30, 2026

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Main Theme

This episode explores the long, complex, and often fraught relationship between the United States and Latin America. Historian Greg Grandin traces the evolution of engagement, influence, and intervention from the post-independence era through the age of empire, Cold War, and into the late-20th century’s war on drugs—highlighting changing US motives, tactics, and regional perceptions along the way.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Origins of the US-Latin America Relationship

• "Backyard" – Historical Attitude or Myth?
  • The perception of Latin America as the “backyard” of the US is not timeless.
  • At the time of US founding, the region was Spanish America under colonial rule. Early US leaders, like Jefferson, saw Spain's potential decline as an opportunity for American gain, not yet as a neighborly relationship with republics.

    "As an historian, we don't like to use the word always because every historical phenomenon is historical. It has a particular beginning." (Greg Grandin, 03:22)

• The US transitioned from dealing with a decaying empire (Spain) to navigating the emergence of independent republics after the Spanish-American wars for independence (early 19th century).
  • The Monroe Doctrine (1823) marked a shift to hemispheric diplomacy among new nation-states.

2. Expansionism and Early Intervention

• Expansionist impulses date back to colonial days, with westward movement shaping American ambitions.
• The 1763 Proclamation Line by the British (restricting colonial expansion) fuelled revolutionary fervor, alongside more familiar issues like taxation and slavery.
• Acquisition of territory (from the Mississippi River to the Pacific) was a continual goal, culminating in events like the Louisiana Purchase and Mexican-American War.

  "There was a push west and of course, the Louisiana Purchase, then Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal... and then the annexation of Texas in the 1840s and the Mexican American War pretty much filled out the continent for the United States." (Greg Grandin, 08:49)

3. Methods of US Influence: Not Just Coups

• The US’s first regime change operation in Latin America was in the 1820s, orchestrating a coup in Mexico via networks of Freemason lodges.

  "So that was the first incident in the 1820s in which the US actually effectively carried out a form of regime change." (Greg Grandin, 09:31)

• Economic methods:
  • Gunboat diplomacy to force trade treaties upon South American nations.
  • US capital flooded post-Civil War Mexico, dominating infrastructure and resources, making the Mexican Revolution (1910) an anti-corporate revolt.
• Identity formation:
  • The term “Latin America” originated in opposition to US and British “Saxon” aggression and intervention.

4. Criteria for US Support and Opposition

• Consistency hinged on cooperation and stability, with later rationalizations invoking democracy or human rights.

  "They back the countries that are cooperating with US interests, whatever they are at the time... Another criteria is stability and with it comes the ability to protect US property relations." (Greg Grandin, 17:18)

• The Spanish-American War (1898) was a watershed, shifting motives from naked interest to humanitarian rhetoric.

  "That intervention was one of the first that was done in the name of humanitarian rights." (Greg Grandin, 18:47)

5. The Cold War—A Major Break and Intensification

• US-Latin America relations underwent a profound transformation from FDR’s “Good Neighbor” policy (favoring sovereignty, supporting local economic nationalism) to a hard anti-communist line post-1947.
• US wartime investment built Latin American militaries to fight fascism; afterwards, those same tools were redirected against the left.

  "In 1947, basically Washington sends a clear signal that the fight is no longer against fascism, it's against your old allies, the communists." (Greg Grandin, 21:57)

• The abrupt and often violent switch sparked cycles of internal polarization and repressive regimes.

6. Latin American Views of the US: Model and Menace

• Perceptions have varied by class, era, and personal disposition.
• Early reformers admired US dynamism but doubted their societies could replicate it due to entrenched hierarchies.
• Intellectuals like Francisco Bilbao saw the US as "Sparta" to Latin America's "Athens," with dependency theory emerging as a major critique.

  "A lot of the critique of the United States was rooted in this notion that the United States was part of a system of exploitation." (Greg Grandin, 28:19)

7. Case Study: Fidel Castro and Generational Perceptions

• Castro’s evolution from U.S. admirer (writing as a boy to FDR offering resources) to adversary highlights the postwar shift in US engagement.

  "When he was a young boy, he sent FDR a letter and he offered up all of Cuba's iron ore in order to build ships for World War II." (Greg Grandin, 29:41)

• The younger generation (post-1947) recognized quickly that US ideals of Pan-American partnership had been supplanted by aggressive anti-communism.

8. The Drug War: New Excuses, Old Patterns

• Declared in 1973 by Nixon, the “War on Drugs” became a permanent, bipartisan rationale for intervention, with early operations in Mexico echoing Vietnam-era militarization.

  "The DEA worked with the Mexican military and Mexican police to carry out something like a scorched earth campaign." (Greg Grandin, 32:02)

• The DEA operated with less scrutiny than CIA or FBI, while repressive regimes frequently played roles as both drug producers and ostensible enforcers against the trade.

9. The Two Main Threads in US-Latin American Relations

• Latin America’s dual function for the US:
  1. Socialization: It has repeatedly imposed limits on US expansion and required moral or political reckoning about the use of power.
  2. Workshop: The region serves as a proving ground for US political, economic, and military innovations and coalitions—from the New Deal to Reagan-era conservatism.

  "Latin America, to go back to your original question, serves these two functions. One, it socializes the United States and... it also serves as a kind of workshop for rising ascendant political coalitions to work out their tactics to become governing hegemonic coalitions." (Greg Grandin, 38:24)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the word Latin America and intervention:

  "It's exactly in the politics of intervention and the experience of intervention where Latin America identifies itself as Latin in opposition to... Saxon America."
  (Greg Grandin, 13:47)

• On FDR’s transformative policy:

  "FDR and the New Deal is not just a kind of political experiment that's taking place within the United States, but that there's a continental New Deal..."
  (Greg Grandin, 20:37)

• On the war on drugs:

  "From that point forward, the war on drugs becomes its own logic. It's kind of outside the purview of politics. Nobody really criticizes the DEA the way they criticize, say, the CIA or the FBI."
  (Greg Grandin, 32:55)

• On Latin America’s teaching role:

  "Latin America shows the United States that there are limits... the complexities of the hemisphere as it is."
  (Greg Grandin, 34:15)

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Important Segment Timestamps

• Origin of "Backyard" Concept and Early US Attitudes:
  [03:13] – [05:29]
• Expansion and Early US Interventions:
  [05:44] – [09:07]
• Means of Influence (Coups, Economic Domination):
  [09:20] – [14:42]
• Criteria for US Support/Opposition:
  [17:00] – [19:52]
• Cold War Shift and its Impacts:
  [20:05] – [26:15]
• Latin American Perceptions of the US:
  [26:38] – [29:29]
• Fidel Castro Case Study:
  [29:36] – [30:58]
• The War on Drugs:
  [31:11] – [33:49]
• Overarching Patterns and Contemporary Reflections:
  [34:03] – [38:43]

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Flow & Tone

Greg Grandin’s conversation is richly detailed but accessible, blending analytical commentary with narrative storytelling and occasional wry humor. The interviewer, Danny Byrd, poses broad questions that allow Grandin to draw sweeping connections while grounding abstract historical trends in vivid examples. The tone is intellectual but not esoteric, and the discussion is unflinching, often critical of US motives and outcomes, while remaining historically nuanced.

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Conclusion

This episode offers listeners a comprehensive, critical, and engaging overview of US-Latin America relations. It highlights how cycles of intervention, economic entanglement, and ideological battlegrounds have alternately shaped and been shaped by both US domestic politics and Latin American responses, with legacies that persist into contemporary policies and perceptions.

Transcript

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[Danny Byrd]

Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. The relationship between the United States and Latin America has been back in the headlines recently following the U.S. s military operation to capture Venezuela's President and President Trump's announcement that that the U.S. would run the nation until it deems that there can be what he termed a proper and judicious transition. But has the United States always had such a contentious relationship with the wider region? And when did influence start tipping into intervention? In this episode, Danny Byrd speaks to Greg Grandin about the long, turbulent history of U.S. latin American relations, from westward expansion to the Cold War.

[Interviewer]

I'd like to begin with the word backyard, which comes up a lot when talking about US Latin American relations. But has the US Always regarded Latin America in that way?

[Greg Grandin]

As an historian, we don't like to use the word always because every historical phenomenon is historical. It has a particular beginning. When the United States came into being, what is Spanish America was part of the Spanish Empire, the Spanish colonial system. And at the time, the founders of the United States looked at the Spanish Empire more in terms of larger geopolitics, like how it was going to negotiate with monarchies in Europe. Europe. There was a sense that Spain was somehow kind of like the way the Ottoman Empire would look later, about to come apart. But Thomas Jefferson thought that Spain was in a position to come apart very slowly, so that would benefit the United States, so it would be able to absorb different pieces of what was the Spanish Empire. And in fact, that is what happened. So right at the beginning, it was less about Latin America as a continent of independent republics, and it was more with dealing with Spain as an empire. But then around the. Of the issuance of what we call a Monroe Doctrine. Don't worry, I'm not going to go. I'm not going to go on a tangent on the Monroe Doctrine. But 1823, that was around the time that it was fairly clear that Spanish America was winning its wars of independence. And unlike the United States, the Spanish American wars of independence were much longer, much more violent, much more destructive of human lives, of property. They had multiple theaters of operation. There was Mexico, there was northern South America. That was led by Simon Boulevard. So it was a much more chaotic experience. But by 1823, it was fairly clear that Colombia was independent, Mexico was about to become independent, and the United States political leaders began to make the transition from dealing with the decomposing empire to dealing with newly constituted republics. And in some ways, Spanish America, they didn't call themselves Latin America yet. Spanish America was the United States inauguration into the world of national diplomacy. Say, all of a sudden they had to deal with other nation states within the Western Hemisphere.

[Interviewer]

And on the back of that, where does this perception of we have an interest as the United States in this region, we can extend into this region, or if we feel threatened, we have a right to impose our will on this region. Where does that first become a thing?

[Greg Grandin]

Well, the expansionist impulse is present right at the beginning of British colonial settlement. I mean, the idea of moving west and getting from, whether it be, you know, looking for more religious freedom than once settled in the Chesapeake or once settled in what is now New England looking for more land, there was a sense of moving west was, was part of the experience of British colonialism. And the founders of the United States inherited that to some degree and in some ways the, the American Revolution. One of the causes of the American Revolution was exactly that. The British, after the Seven Year War imposed in 1763, what they called the Proclamation Line, basically around the fall line of the Appalachian Mountains. Fall line meaning where the rivers start to flow east rather than west. London declared that that land was off limits to white settlement. It wanted to secure the land for its indigenous allies. I mean, it wasn't purely humanitarian. Britain wanted access to the fur trade and wanted monopoly of the fur trade, which was also a part of that. But the backlash towards that Proclamation line was pretty intense already. Like Benjamin Franklin, George Washington had staked out large tracts of land in the Ohio Valley that they intended to sell. So we know that there's been a lot of discussion about the role of slavery in the American Revolution and debate about that. Less discussed is this reaction by British colonists that they were being penned in by the Proclamation line. And that's. So that's 1763 and the U.S. revolution is 1776. So you could see that there's a, you know, a 13 year difference between those two. And, and then once the US wants war of Independence, that line of course was swept away. And in a lot of the debates in Paris over the Paris Treaty, which was basically European monarchies, Spain and France and Great Britain recognizing the independence of the United States, much of the debate had to do where the western boundary would be. And Spain and France and Great Britain tried to keep the western boundary maybe a little bit further west than the Proclamation Line, maybe at the foothills of the western side of the Appalachian. But the United US Diplomats insisted on the Mississippi river, and that's what they got. And from that point forward, there was a constant push. People like Thomas Jefferson, who was an expansionist even he understood, along with people like Alexander Hamilton, that they didn't want to go west too fast. They didn't want to spread out the country. You know, they didn't want to attenuate the country. They wanted to make sure manufacturing everything was. Energies were channeled towards Boston, towards Virginia, you know, not towards Kentucky and not down the Mississippi River. So Jefferson floated the idea of prohibiting navigation on the Mississippi river for a certain amount of time, just a slow western migration. And he practically had a revolt in Kentucky over that. And they had to give it up right away. And so there was a push west and of course, the Louisiana Purchase, then Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal, which freed up an enormous amount of western land, and then just the march west towards the Pacific and then the annexation of Texas in the 1840s and the Mexican American War in the 1840s pretty much filled out the continent for the United States.

[Interviewer]

Now, when people hear the words US intervention in Latin America, they likely imagine military coups during the Cold War. But what are the other methods that show how Washington has sought to impart its will on the wider region throughout history?

[Greg Grandin]

Well, the very first coup that the United States carried out was in Mexico in the 1820s, when the US diplomat, Joel Poinsett, he's the one who sent back a red flower that became known as the poinsettia that was associated with Christmas. He noticed that Great Britain was imposing its influence on Mexico through Freemason lodges, through the Scottish Rights Freemason lodges. So Poinsett organized a whole network of York Freemason lodges that would represent interests of the United States. And New York Freemasons basically staged a coup and seized control of the government and installed a government that was much more friendly to the United States. So that was the first incident in the 1820s in which the US actually effectively carried out a form of regime change. And coups have been. Obviously regime changes have been a major mode of modality of US projecting its power. But. But then also gunboats sailing down the Atlantic coast of Brazil and up the Parana and Amazon rivers and forcing in many ways, free trade treaties on Paraguay and what became Uruguay and Argentina. So in the 1900s, you're more apt to see gunboats, as I mentioned, imposing trade treaties, or the Cyan gunboat that was anchored off of the coast of Nicaragua that basically completely destroyed the town of Greytown. There was a conflict between British and US interests regarding transport routes across Nicaragua. Right. To get to California. This was after the Gold Rush and when migrants and settlers were moving west. Not all of them went across the continent. Some of them sailed down to Panama or Nicaragua. So control over those routes was between British and US interests. Cornelius Vanderbilt was the big name in many of these conflicts. In trying to beat back British interests, you had William Walker, a Tennessee mercenary who seized Nicaragua and he declared himself president in the 1850s and he re established slavery even though Nicaragua had abolished slavery 30 years earlier. And he was an ally of Cornelius Vanderbilt and he was also an ally of Southern slavers. One dynamic that you see prior to the Civil War is that much of the foreign policy apparatus of the federal government was controlled by southern states. And their interest was in defending slavery where it still existed in places like Brazil and Peru, expanding it if they could. There were plans to expand southern slavery up the Amazon that never came to power. And basically defending Southern interests through a very aggressive Latin American policy. In the second half, after the Civil War ended slavery and brought about national abolition and national emancipation, you had Republicans taking over the foreign policy apparatus of the United States. And now you begin to see the beginnings of corporate interests in Latin America. Mexico, for instance, becomes, after the Civil War becomes the first what we would call nation building project of the United States in which US capital from Boston and Philadelphia and New York floods Mexico and basically takes over the whole infrastructure of a state whose economy is increasingly being oriented toward export, agricultural and mineral exports. On the one hand, US businesses are taking over ports and railroads and trolley systems and the electrifications of cities, telegraphs also. On the other hand you have, you begin to see mining interests, these big names, Hearst is one of the big names, but also the Guggenheims taking over large percentages of the mining and agricultural industries of Mexico. So all of Mexico becomes really a dependent nation that is built by US capital, oriented towards export and controlled by US interests. And we'll jump just to jump ahead a little bit, the Mexican Revolution in 1910 in many ways was the third world's first anti economic nationalist revolution. It was a revolution against basically the United States corporate control of much of Mexico. To a large degree, it wasn't the only motivation of the revolution, but you can understand the Mexican Revolution in those terms. You also begin to have financial interests becoming deeper and deeper, burrowed into Spanish American politics. By now we can call it Latin America. It was that intervention by William Walker when he declared himself President of Nicaragua, that opponents and intellectuals began to identify themselves as Latin Americans in contradistinction to Saxon Americans. So the Latin Americans were more humanist and universal. They embodied the ideals of the redemptive power of the New World. And the Saxon Americans were capitalists and utilitarian and instrumental and grubby and interventionist and imperialists. So that that's where the word Latin America comes from. It's. It's exactly in the politics of intervention and the experience of intervention where Latin America identifies itself as Latin in the as opposed to an intervention as Saxon America.

[Interviewer]

That is a very interesting distinct.

[Greg Grandin]

This.

[Danny Byrd]

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[Danny Byrd]

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[Greg Grandin]

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[Greg Grandin]

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[Greg Grandin]

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[Greg Grandin]

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[Interviewer]

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[Greg Grandin]

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[Interviewer]

This next question is a bit of a broad sweep one, but over the decades, the US has supported some Latin American governments whilst undermining others. Stepping back, is there any consistency in who Washington has backed and who it's sought to oust.

[Greg Grandin]

Yeah, there's a couple of criteria. One is cooperation, right. They back the countries that are cooperating with US interests, whatever they are at the time before the Civil War and the slavers coalition of the south were interested in governments in Mexico that would agree to return fugitive slaves, for instance. So it doesn't really matter what the particular interest is, but as long as they're cooperative. So that's one criteria. Another criteria is stability. And with it comes the ability to protect U.S. property relations. So these are really the main criteria. At different points, different level layers of justification are lacquered on democracy, political elections, some degree of political liberalism and freedom. But that's a little bit later when the United States begins to use those criteria as justification for why it supports one regime and not another. It's really not until the war of 1898 when the United States goes to war against Spain and there was a 30 year civil war. Cuba state a colony of Spain. Cuba didn't get its independence with the rest of South America in the 1820s, but there was an, an independence movement that basically broke out in 1868 and continued with ebbs and flows up until 1895, 1896. And they were about to win. They were about to drive Spain off of Cuba when the United States intervened, sent troops in 1898 and basically preempted an organic, local, not Native American, but indigenous independence movement and implanted a form of kind of informal rule. And that intervention was one of the first that was done in the name of humanitarian rights. The brutality of Spain's counterinsurgency was trumpeted by the Hearst press, by the yellow journalism in the United States. There was a sense that something had to be done. The photos of Spanish atrocities, which were certainly real, was seen as justification for US intervention. So in many ways that's a key turning point from the United States projecting its power to Latin America just in defense of naked interests, to using what would later be called human rights or certainly humanitarian intervention as a justification for intervention. So that's a major sea change. And from the, in the 20th century it would ebb and flow. The degree to which the United States would invoke human rights or democracy or humanitarianism as reason for justification.

[Interviewer]

I'd like to turn to that now if we may, because I would like to zone in on the Cold War itself. Does anything fundamentally change during that era in terms of the ideological approach, the scale, or just the excuses for U.S. intervention?

[Greg Grandin]

Yeah, well, you can't really understand The Cold War. Unless you understand Latin America's role in the 1930s and 40s, backing up the United States in the run up to World War II and then during World War II, basically when Franklin Delano Roosevelt becomes. He's elected president in 1932, he's inaugurated in 1933, and he really presides over enormous sea change in US policy towards Latin America. Latin Americans had long demanded that the United States give up the right to intervention and recognize the absolute sovereignty of individual nations and basically give up a right, you know, declare that the doctrine of conquest is no longer valid. And the US resisted that up until 1933. And Roosevelt, because of this recession of US power caused by the Great Depression, basically exceeds. And in doing so, the whole game changes, right? The whole United States relationship with Latin America and economic national has changed completely. There's a sense in which the United States has finally caught up to Latin America in terms of accepting that conquest and is no longer a valid justification for intervention. And there's a sense that FDR and the New Deal is not just a kind of political experiment that's taking place within the United States, but that there's a continental New Deal, that there's very activist governments trying to rein in the excesses of capital, trying to create distributive states, regulatory states. And FDR is supporting this. He's supporting economic. When nationalists appropriate Standard Oil holdings in Bolivia, first in Bolivia and then in Mexico, FDR lets them do it. And not only that, he gives Mexico money to build a steel factory, gives Brazil money to build a steel factory. As it became clearer that there was a global conflict looming, that the United States was going to have to confront militarism and Nazism and fascism in Europe and Asia. The biggest fear among strategists is that Latin America would be Spain writ large. Right? Because a lot of the socioeconomic variables that gave rise to Franco and Falangeism in Spain were present in all of Latin America. A small landed class controlling an enormous amount of property, mostly servile peasant class, but also an increasingly military, militant peasant unions. Militant labor unions challenging the patriarchal hierarchies of a kind of Praetorian Catholic nationalism or Catholic kind of patriarchy. All the kind of variables that provoked Franco nationalism in Spain is present in Latin America. And the worst fears of geostrategists in Washington was that all of Latin America would go flanking or fascist, and then the United States would be caught between a fascist Europe and a Falangist Latin America. And that didn't happen. And that didn't happen because basically FDR tilted towards the left in Latin America and supported reformers who were trying to build a kind of nationalist state. And almost every Latin American country eagerly joined the Allied forces. Not so much Argentina, but that's another story. But there was a sense that, that the fight against fascism was also at the same time a fight for social democracy. It was a common kind of change in the nature of political culture. Now, just to get back to your question about the Cold War, the reason why you have to understand that period, to understand the Cold War is to understand the switch and how brutal and violent the turnaround was. In 1947, 1948, in the run up to World War II, the United States invested in Latin America an enormous amount of repressive capacity. They sent guns, they sent weapons, they sent tanks, they sent warships, they sent planes, they trained Latin American militaries, they created and professionalized Latin American militaries in the fight against fascism. And then all of a sudden, in 1947, basically Washington sends a clear signal that the fight is no longer against fascism, it's against your old allies, the communists. And a perfect example of this is Chile. Chile had received an enormous amount of weaponry under a Lend Lease program. And Chile had the series of Popular Front governments elected since 1936, including one recently in 1946. But in the face of this militant miners strike in 1948, the left wing president turned, you know, basically urged on by the United States. And he sent a young lieutenant in to basically occupy the northern part of the country and arrest, round up the strikers and put them in detention camps. That lieutenant was Augusto Pinochet. And so basically he was using all the weaponry that Chile was given to fight fascism to basically put down a left wing labor action. So you can kind of see how quick the turn was once Washington, you know, and we don't really have the time to go into all the specifics of what led to Washington switching from being predominantly focused on fascism to be predominantly focused on fighting communism. But it happened at every level in Latin America. So basically the FBI, which before the CIA existed, was how the United States carried out intelligence work in Latin America. You know, in 1947, they switched from keeping their eye and monitoring right wing forces to surveilling and repressing left wing forces. And you see this in one country after another. It's a very sharp break. And the violence of it and the abruptness of it, it kind of sets off the cycle of polarization that happens in the 40s and the 50s and the 60s and the 70s giving way to eventually to insurgent movements on the left and anti communist states on the right. And the United States backs those anti communist states.

[Interviewer]

Given how capricious that story is in terms of what you've just told me about the switch from anti fascism to anti communism essentially during the Cold War, I'm curious to know, how have the different peoples and nations of Latin America seen the US over time? Is it seen as a threat, a model, a partner? And how have those perceptions shaped politics and resistance on the ground?

[Greg Grandin]

Well, it depends, you know, it depends on their own class position. Right. Right from the beginning of Latin Spanish American independence, there were certainly a number of reformers who saw in the United States a certain dynamism that they wished that they could replicate. So Bolivar, for instance, was very much appreciative of the dynamism of the United States and the fast creation of a market society, a settler society of yeoman farmers, the increase in agricultural production, the increase in manufact. But he didn't think that the social foundations for that sort of economic liberalism existed in Latin America. He understood that Latin America, after three centuries, four centuries of Spanish imperial rule, was basically a small class of landlords that presided over an enormous mass of servile, racialized people, required a more activist government in order to bring about virtue. So there was this kind of tension immediately. It's present almost immediately with independence and it carries forward, you know, this Francisco Bilbao, another kind of, maybe the next generation from the revolutionary generation in Latin America was active in the 1840s and 1850s. You know, he understood himself as a liberal. He appreciated the United States. He thought it was a model to emulate. But then after the taking of Texas, and then after the taking of nearly half of Mexico and after William Walker's invasion, he turned, you know, and he's the one who actually coined the phrase Latin America, or if he didn't coin the phrase Latin America, he's the first one to popularize it. And then he created this kind of opposition between the United States as Sparta and Latin America as Athens. So I think that tension, I mean, the United States is wealthy and it's powerful and that's a very magnetic, there's an attraction there. And people both want that, they want to be in it and they want it for their own country. But then Latin America has also developed a coherent critique of why they're not wealthy and, you know, and why they keep on falling into serial political crises. So the notion of dependency theory and economic Theory that spread throughout Latin America in the 20th century began to understand that the wealth of the First World was dependent on, on the immiseration of the Third World. And they charted out the different ways in which that actually was maintained structurally, that there was a rift in the world between the core Europe and the United States and the periphery of which Latin America would be in. So a lot of the critique of the United States was rooted in this notion that the United States was part of a system of exploitation. So that tension between the United States is something to emulate and the United States as, as the reason why we are undeveloped continues throughout much of the 20th century.

[Interviewer]

I wonder if you'd feel comfortable developing that last point a little bit further and maybe refracting it through the personality of somebody like Fidel Castro.

[Greg Grandin]

Yeah, yeah. So Fidel Castro's a perfect example of this. When he was a young boy, he sent FDR a letter and he offered up all of Cuba's iron ore in order to build ships for World War II. And then he asked FDR for a dollar. I think, you know, there was a sense in which Castro is of a generation. He comes of age after the turn has happened. He comes of age in 47, 48. He's politically active as a university student at the beginning of the Cold War. And it was the young generation that was very much attuned to the fact that something had happened. Establishment politicians were very invested in the idea of a kind of Pan American cooperation that existed prior to the Cold War. So they were hesitant to see the sea change that happened with the rise of anti communism, where younger people like somebody like Castro was able to notice that there was a consequential change in Washington's policy. And he's an example of somebody that probably early on imagined the United States as potentially embodying a model to follow, kind of, you know, an inspiration for what would be some kind of socialized democracy to somebody. Certainly after the Bay of Pigs and after taking power and after the way the United States moved very quickly to contain and isolate and overthrow him as an obstacle to be overcome.

[Interviewer]

So by the late 20th century, the drug trade becomes a major rationale for US intervention within the so called Western hemisphere. How did the war on drugs change the game and what old patterns persisted?

[Greg Grandin]

The war on drugs is fascinating. It was declared in 1973 by Richard Nixon. So we're now talking about a war that's been going on for more than half a century, more than 50 years. And the origins go back to the end of The Vietnam War. You know, it's 1973. The United States ends its military involvement in Vietnam. It still occupies still in Saigon until 75, but. But troops are starting to come home, and they're starting to come home addicted to Heroin in early 1973. There's a number of articles, one New York Times that estimates that some units had a 50% addiction rate to heroin. So Richard Nixon is answering questions not just about, you know, when is he going to wrap up involvement in Vietnam, but orders are asking questions. How are you going to treat addicted soldiers? Are they going to be treated as criminals or are they going to be eligible for rehabilitation? So one of the things that Nixon does is create the DEA in 1973, right around this time, the Drug Enforcement Agency, which is the main venue through which the United States fights, fights the war on drugs both at home and abroad. And its very first operations were in Mexico. And Mexican farmers had begun to cultivate poppy to meet a growing demand in the United States, largely driven by returning veterans from Vietnam. And the DEA worked with the Mexican military and Mexican police to carry out something like a scorched earth campaign. More than one observer said that northern Mexico looked something like Southeast Asia in terms of the destruction of villages that were associated with poppy growing. And from that point forward, the war on drugs becomes its own logic. It's kind of outside the purview of politics. Nobody really criticizes the DEA the way they criticize, say, the CIA or the FBI. The CIA has its reckoning with the Church Commission with which investigates its abuses in the Third World. The FBI is called to account for its COINTEL program, which targeted civil rights leaders and anti war leaders in the United States. But an organization like the dea, which is a federal bureaucracy, was pretty much left alone and left to operate. And you increasingly see in Latin America this Catch 22 dynamic or increasingly repressive governments that are brought to power by the CIA become involved in narcotics production, and then the same governments wind up working with the DAA to suppress the narcotics production that they themselves are involved in.

[Interviewer]

Finally, Greg, looking at everything from the age of colonialism and independence, slavery, through to the Cold War and the war on drugs, what would you say is the main thread running through US Latin American relations? And how is this manifesting today?

[Greg Grandin]

Well, it's a big question.

[Interviewer]

I know, I'm sorry.

[Greg Grandin]

I think, I think. No, I think it's useful to address it on a more abstract level. What is the function of Latin America for the United States? And I think there's two things that it does. One is it socializes the United States to some degree. It's opposition to US imperialism, its opposition to US interventionism, its insistence that the promise of America has to be something more than just compound interest forever. That has to have higher republican virtues, forces on the United States. A notion of limits and a notion, you know, and this is most clear with FDR and 1933, where he accepts the Latin America's demand to recognize the sovereignty of individual nations. But in general, Latin America shows the United States that there are limits. Thomas Jefferson fantasized that what was the United States would reach from the Antarctic to the Arctic and there'd be 2 billion Saxons living in the New World. But the fact of the matter is they had to deal with the complexities of the hemisphere as it is. So there's a way in which Latin America just kind of grounds the United States and its most useful function, it grounds it and teaches it to use its power more effectively, as it did with fdr. But then at other times too, on the other hand, Latin America is also a kind of testing ground for the United States. Certainly it's the place where US businesses first get their first experience over abroad. It's where US banks first become international. It's where US military first has its operations. But more than that, it's also where political coalitions in many ways go to work out their ideas. So again, the two major examples of this are Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Roosevelt's good neighbor policy had the effect of sharpening the vision of the New Deal and bringing together different coalitions by the good relations that FDR created allowed him to sign a series of free trade treaties which strengthened a progressive corporate bloc that undergirded the New Deal order for the next couple of decades. High, you know, capital intensive, labor intensive. They weren't part of the reactionary, you know, agricultural sector or labor expansive textile or furniture making sectors that didn't want to extend labor rights, for instance, to unions. This new corporate bloc basically supported the twin goals of the New Deal state. A gradual expansion of redistribution of wealth and the creation of the middle class and desegregation, the twin goals of the New Deal up through the 1960s and 1970s. So Latin America serves as a kind of venue that allowed that New Deal coalition to gel. And then in the 1970s, as the new Deal starts to fall apart after Vietnam, after rising energy prices, the crisis of the 1970s, the dismal 1970s, Ronald Reagan comes to power. And a nadar of US power in the world, the Iranian revolution just happened, the Nicaraguan revolution just happened. Energy prices are still high, there's stagflation, there's a general crisis among the citizenry confidence. There's a sense that US power is invalid, that capitalism is a moral immoral. He uses Latin America to go on the offensive. Iran Contra in Central America. He worked with very brutal forces in Latin America, death squads in Central America and anti communist militarists in South America. But he still managed to put forward this very sunny universalist kind of vision of capitalism was in Latin America where he remoralizes markets and militarists. And he just like the New Deal, brought together different constituencies, brought together the kind of movement conservatives that brought him to power within traditional conservative sectors, within the neo conservatives, within the Christian conservatives. It was through Latin America that those different constituencies became a coalition and became a governing coalition. So Latin America, to go back to your original question, serves these two functions. One, it socializes the United States and it shows where the limits are to some degree. And then it also serves as a kind of workshop for rising ascendant political coalitions to work out their tactics to become governing hegemonic coalitions.

[Danny Byrd]

That was Greg Grandin speaking to Danny Bird. Greg is Peter V. And C. Van Woodward professor of History at Yale University. His latest book is America America A New History of the New World. And if you've enjoyed today's episode, don't miss the new History Extra podcast series, History behind the Headlines Briefing, in which we explore the longer context behind the latest breaking news. For more information on that, check out the link in the description to this episode.