Good Neighbor Policy
The Good Neighbor policy came from both Republican
president Herbert Hoover (1929-33) and Democrat president Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-45), for the
United States realized that its military interventions in Latin America were
counter-productive. Hoover began the switch in policy; FDR baptized,
publicized, and glamorized it.
President-elect Hoover made a seven-week goodwill tour of
Latin America. Although he went on a battleship, a conveyance that suggested the
"battleship diplomacy" which the US had been conducting, he did
generate some good will. In fact, he suggested a solution of the Tacna-Arica
boundary dispute between Peru and Chile; negotiations were successful in
1929. It was during this trip that he used the term "good neighbor."
Once in the presidency, Hoover implemented the policy change. In his
inaugural address, he explained that the United States had no desire for
territory or economic or other domination of people. Further, he said he
did not like the presence of US Marines in Nicaragua and Haiti. The Marines were
there to insure that the governments of those two countries did what the US
wanted. In 1930, his administration publicly adopted the Clark Memorandum
written by J. Reuben Clark, Undersecretary of State, in 1928. The Memorandum
repudiated the Roosevelt
Corollary, pointing out that the Monroe Doctrine was based on the United
States versus Europe, not the United States versus Latin America . Theodore
Roosevelt, for reasons of his own, had reinterpreted the Monroe Doctrine to say
that only the US could collect debts owed by Latin American nations and to
justify US military intervention in the Caribbean region. the Clark
Memorandum did not repudiate intervention, however. It said that
interventions could not be for debt collection. The Great Depression of the
1930s caused revolutions in several Latin American nations, such as Argentina,
Brazil, and Chile, and instability throughout the region. The United States
stayed on the sidelines; it even recognized the dictatorship of Getulio Vargas
of Brazil. The real test of whether the policy had changed was not how the US
reacted to the big Latin American countries, for it had never sent troops into
them, but the small nations of the Caribbean region. In 1932, it negotiated a
treaty with Haiti in which the US agreed to withdraw its military forces but
still would maintain control over Haitian finances. Haiti rejected the treaty
because of the financial supervision but it was clear that the US was shifting
its policy. In 1933, the Marines left Nicaragua.
Franklin Roosevelt, who became President in March, 1933,
followed Hoover's lead and went even further. At the Seventh Pan-American
Conference held at Montevideo in December 1933, Secretary of State Cordell Hull
voted for non-intervention. When the pro-US dictator Gerardo
Machado was overthrown in Cuba in 1933, Roosevelt had Sumner Welles mediate.
Welles managed to get a new pro-US government installed. In 1934, the US, for
its part, abrogated the Platt
Amendment which had given the US to intervene in Cuba at will. That
same year, the troops left Haiti, marking the first time since 1915 that US
troops had been occupying Latin American territory. At the 1936 Buenos Aires
meeting of the Pan-American Conference, the US offered to make the Monroe
Doctrine multilateral. The Conference endorsed the non-intervention
principle and agreed to consult in the face of danger.
A major reason why the FDR administration wanted better
relations with Latin America was the rise of fascism in Europe and military
imperialism in Japan. It wanted allies not enemies. It persuaded oil companies
to negotiate with the Mexican government, which had expropriated most oil
companies there in 1938, even though many in the US wanted it to act against the
leftist government of Lázaro Cárdenas. In 1938, at Lima, the Pan-American
Conference agreed to take action against Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy
and to meet on the call of any member foreign minister. At Panama City in
1939, the Pan-American Conference declared a "chastity belt" of
300-1,000 miles around the Americas. At Havana, Cuba in 1940, it agreed that
European colonies in the Americas could be taken and administered jointly by
American republics to keep them from falling into Axis hands.
Franklin D. Roosevelt on August 14, 1936,
in Chautauqua, New
York, stated his views.
020904
