"Our little region over here that has never bothered anyone..."

- Henry Stimson, U.S. Secretary of War

Increasing numbers of illegal migrants from the Dominican Republic cross the Mona Passage each year to Puerto Rico to find work

President Wilson strongly advocated the notion of a nation's right to self-determination. However, he also believed that although "all people might want freedom…whether they could gain and preserve it depended on race." This racist view undoubtedly extended to Latin America resulting in Wilson's "moralistic concern for teaching Latin Americans how to govern themselves."

Walter LeFebre calls the "Wilson Corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine: "only American oil interests receive concessions. President Wilson intervened in both Haiti and the Dominican Republic, leaving both countries in ruins.

1980: April: A junket to Guatemala to visit with government officials and death squad leaders includes top officials and executives from a plethora of right-wing American organizations, including the Young Americans for Freedom, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, the Young Republicans' National Federation, the American Conservative Union, the Conservative Digest, and such right-wing activists as Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus and John Laxalt, president of Reagan's campaign organization Citizens for the Republic, and brother of Reagan campaign chair, Senator Paul Laxalt. Another meeting takes place in the spring, in California, between Reagan and Guatemalan hotel magnate Eduardo Carrette, the man whom Guatemala's dictator General Lucas Garcia has asked to be his new ambassador to the US and a leading figure in Amigos del Pais, a pressure group comprised of businessmen and landowners which Guatemala's recently-resigned Vice President Dr. Francisco Villagran has compared to the John Birch Society. The Amigos are paying $11,000 a month in retainer fees to Deaver and Hannaford, a public relations firm headed by Reagan confidante Michael Deaver, which handles advertising for the Republican presidential campaign. Deaver will become Reagan's Deputy Chief of Staff. Lobbyists for Republican associates of the Amigos are pressuring Congress to "lend a sympathetic ear" to the Amigos' current lobbying campaign for the restoration of military aid and training for the Guatemalan military. Other Reagan advisors who have recently visited Guatemala include including Roger Fontaine, Reagan's future National Security Council assistant for Latin American affairs, and retired Lieutenant General Daniel Graham, a member of Reagan's defense advisory committee, who will also visit El Salvador for President Reagan. Fontaine, an established hard-liner in regional matters, is the former director of Latin American Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, perhaps the nation's most conservative academic-activists center for Latin American affairs. He will bolster Guatemalan hopes in an interview published in the Miami Herald where he will say, "It's pretty clear that Guatemalans will be given what aid they need in order to defend themselves against an armed minority which is aided and abetted by Cubans."http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Foreign_Policy/GuatemalaJul89_Nairn.html

It is important to recognize that at this point in history, U.S. hegemony in the hemisphere was unquestionable. "The dominant position the United States had built up in the Caribbean region enabled the president to eschew gunboat diplomacy and inaugurate the Good Neighbor Policy." U.S. decision-makers could now afford to explore non-military means of sustaining security in the Caribbean.

However, security for whom is subjective -- while the US is good at blowing things up, it is less skilled at providing basic resources to nurture long-term democracy. It's as if we only have weed killer, and expect prize tomatoes to grow without care and feeding.

On 28 April 1965, U.S. military forces found themselves in the Dominican Republic protecting U.S. interests for the fourth time in 58 years. Franklin D. Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy and the actions of three U.S. administrations (Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson respectively) resulted in the eruption of hostilities in the Dominican Republic in April 1965.

From 1930 to 1945, the U.S. shifted from Dollar Diplomacy and intervention to the Good Neighbor Policy. Rather than seeing the Good Neighbor Policy as a totally new departure from our previous policies since 1823, Smith sees the Good Neighbor Policy as the culmination of these previous trends. He sees it as the culmination and triumph of imperial conquest. The same goals persisted: protection of U.S. geostrategic and economic interests. The goals of economic penetration, security, and hegemony continued but what changed were the means used to achieve those goals.

There were costs incurred in the policy of dollar diplomacy. The U.S. had troops stationed in Nicaragua and fought a guerrilla war there. U.S. interventions in Cuba were also costly. Troops were stationed in the Domincan Republic and in Haiti. Latin Americans saw U.S. intervention as imperialism and stated so at Pan American Conferences such as those in Havana in 1928 and Montevideo in 1933. The Latins favored the juridical equality of states, opposed U.S. intervention, rejected the idea of protecting corporations through military means, and rejected the unilateralism of U.S. policy (where the U.S. did whatever it wanted without consultation with Latin American countries)

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What made the good neighbor policy possible was the changes in the international system. In the aftermath of World War I, Europe was devastated and European countries were not in a position to challenge the U.S. in the western hemisphere. The United states had become dominant economically as direct and portfolio capital investment increased rapidly from 1919 to 1929. U.S. security interests were not as tthreatened. Also, WWI had taught a lessons to the U.S. about the possible perils of having hostile neighbors to the south while fighting in Europe or elsewhere in the world (e.g., the Zimmerman note to Mexico just prior to WWI). Better to emphasize cooperation, multilateralism, trade, non-intervention. As the 1929 depression hit and as war loomed in the horizon in the 1930's, Latin American cooperation became even more critical in sustaining U.S. economic and geostrategic interests.

Smith points out that the good neighbor policy was applied unevenly and that the U.S. used economic leverage to achieve its policy objectives. For example, in Cuba we opposed a democratic revolution in 1933, declaring it communist and supporting a military regime by Batista. This Batista was the same dictator Fidel Castro would remove from power in 1959. In the countries where we applied Dollar Diplomacy (Nic., D. Rep., Haiti), we worked hand in hand with dictatorships which we left in place after U.S. troops departed (the Somozas in Nicaragua, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic). We used loans to protect $5 billion in investments in Latin America. We created the Export-Import Bank whereby we made loans to Latin American countries for the purchase of U.S. goods (really a subsidy to American producers). The Reciprocal Trade Acts were used to create inducements and to tie Latin countries to U.S. objectives such as military preparedness, coordinating security against domestic Nazi groups, providing U.S. military bases once the Second World War began (e.g., Brazil), etc. The sugar quota with Cuba and coffee agreements with Brazil and Colombia gave the U.S. great leverage with those countries whose economies depended on those agreements with the U.S.

In short, Smith argues the Good Neighbor Policy reflected changes in the international system that allowed the United States to shift to economic means to achieve its policy objectives rather than naked and direct military intervention and control. In that sense, there is a parallel between the Good Neighbor Policy and the policy of the U.S. towards Latin america in the post-Cold War era of the 1990's.

Besides this overall understanding of Smith's argument, you need to know the specifics of U.S. policy during the Good Neighbor era. Focus on knowing the means used to achieve U.S. ends between 1930 and 1945. There is no substitute for a close reading of the Smith text Talons of the Eagle.