The Early Pan-American Conferences and the Balance of Power in Late Nineteenth-Century Latin America

• In Event: Revisiting the Panamerican Movement

Abstract

Traditionally, much of the historical literature has interpreted the Pan-American Conferences that were held between the 1880s and the 1940s as US-led projects that represented efforts by Washington to assert and exert influence over Latin America and that reflected the establishment, by the late nineteenth century, of US hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. Critics of Pan-Americanism have described the conferences as a manifestation of a “neocolonial” relationship between North and South and have characterized the movement’s rhetoric of hemispheric solidarity as a reflection of the “psychological colonialism” that supposedly permeated Latin America’s political classes. This interpretation is problematic for a number of reasons, however, not least because it treats US hegemony as a constant over the course of more than half-a-century of geopolitical upheaval. Even if US dominance in the circum-Caribbean and beyond was apparent by the 1920s and 1930s, it is important to recall that there was much greater international competition for influence in Latin America at the dawn of the era of Pan-American Conferences. This paper will therefore review the historical context within which the first two conferences took place during the last decade of the nineteenth century, highlighting the diverse political and economic situations of the nations that participated in these gatherings, drawing attention to the range of aims that they pursued, and analyzing the view of the meetings taken by extra-regional powers (particularly the UK) still at that point contending for hegemony themselves.

Authors

• Halbert M Jones, University of Oxford/St Antony's College

• Sergio Silva-Castañeda, ITAM