#149B Security and United States-Latin American Relations in the 1980s: The Extra-Continental Dimension

By Cole Blasier

From the Introduction

Security as a concept has so many meanings, misuses, and associations that the term itself has become a problem in United States-Latin American relations. Without clear meanings or limits, security has become a catch-all for policy problems.

Confusion about what security means has often complicated the resolution of public problems. Officials have characterized the threat to a "friendly" government by hostile forces as a security problem. The United States' public has then associated that situation with a physical threat. In fact, the episode may have involved only a conflict between opposing political forces in a remote country and may not have posed any direct military threat to the United States.

United States' official behavior toward Latin America since 1945 may be explained by two dominant themes, one explicit and familiar, the other implicit and often oonveniently overlooked. United States' actions with respect to security have been consistently shaped by perceptions of possible Soviet military threats to the hemisphere, and of political threats through Soviet ties with Latin American governments. Sometimes the Soviet threat has been real in a military sense, as in Cuba in 1962. Thereafter, it has been real in a military sense only potentially, and in a political sense actually. At other times the perceptions of a Soviet threat, whether military or political, have been shown in retrospect to be unfounded, as in Guatemala before 1954 and the Dominican Republic before 1965. The operative aspect of United States' official perceptions has often been related to United States' domestic politics.