Contemporary Geopolitics in Latin America

Until the early nineteenth century, Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) consisted largely of European colonies where Great Britain, Spain, Portugal, France, and Holland extracted wealth and resources and sold finished goods. By the 1820s, Mexico and most of South and Central America became independent, with European possessions remaining only in the Caribbean. With the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, the United States signaled to the Europeans that it would not tolerate further colonization in the hemisphere, even if it still lacked the power to enforce the doctrine until later in the century when it became the dominant military and economic power, especially after the Spanish-American War. Until it was challenged by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the United States’ economic, political, and military influence in LAC remained paramount throughout the first half of the twentieth century, with European power greatly diminished by two devastating world wars. The advent of the Cold War placed Latin America and the Caribbean in the center of geopolitical competition, with the United States shoring up anticommunist military dictatorships, and the Soviet Union supporting revolutionary movements across the hemisphere. The early twenty-first century marked the beginning and rapid expansion of Chinese trade, investment, and influence in LAC, driven by economic considerations rather than ideological ones in the case of the former Soviet Union. Today, China is the largest trading partner of most countries in South America, the United States remains the primary trading partner with Mexico and Central America and has deep security ties with the entire region, the European Union is the largest foreign direct investor in LAC, and a diminished Russia still exerts political, if not military or economic, power. Contemporary geopolitics in Latin America and the Caribbean consists primarily of strategic economic competition between China and the United States and to a lesser extent the European Union, as well as competition for political influence along an autocratic/democratic fault line, with China and Russia on one side and the European Union and the United States on the other.