US intervention in South America

Essay from the year 2004 in the subject History - America, grade: 1,7, University of Melbourne, language: English, abstract: An intervention can be conducted in various ways and the US have engaged in nearly all of them. Although I am aware that economic interventions1have gained in importance in the last decades the focus will be on military interventions. These have mostly been conducted secretly and without the direct involvement of the US military. This gave room for rumours which were fed by anti US prejudice which in itself had developed among university scholars because of the interventionist culture. As time has elapsed many former secret documents are available for researchers and it has become easier to get a more objective view of the motivations of US policy. The very fact that the USA tried to cover up its involvement in these 'operations' indicates that their motivations were probably not of a philanthropical nature. The foundations for the US involvement in Latin America were already laid out in 1823 in the Monroe Doctrine. It proclaimed the primacy of US interests in the Western Hemisphere, and in so doing declared a sphere of influence on a grand scale from which the European presence was proscribed. Until the intervention in Cuba it had little influence because the USA was caught up in the civil war and didn't have the strength and resources yet to challenge the former colonial powers.