3 - Latin America, the United States and the world, 1960–1990

Summary

There is a large secondary literature on Latin America’s relations with the United States and other major powers since 1960, even though the archival base for it is thin. Most governments have yet to declassify materials to enable scholars to write a professional history for these years. Therefore scholars have often relied on their own interviews and on journalists’ accounts based on interviews, government ‘leaks’, and observations. These sources are not inappropriate. Government officials report that sometimes key decisions were not written down, and that the advent of the telephone, and of jet aircraft transportation that permits frequent face-to-face meetings, have fostered the replacement of written documents by oral communications. Scholars have also used the memoirs of former government officials and the published documents of governments and international organizations. Among the most useful documents with regard to U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America have been the Hearings of the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Inter-American Affairs, in the 1980s renamed Western Hemisphere Affairs.

Certain reports by U.S. public or private groups have been influential. Among these are Nelson Rockefeller, The Rockefeller Report on the Americas (New York, 1969); Commission on United States-Latin American Relations, chaired by Sol Linowitz, The Americas in a Changing World (New York, 1975); The Committee of Santa Fe, A New Inter-American Policy for the Eighties (1980); the Report of the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America (Washington, D.C., 1984), chaired by Henry Kissinger; The Tower Commission Report (New York, 1987); and in the 1980s, the various reports of the Inter-American Dialogue, co-chaired by Sol Linowitz, Galo Plaza, and Daniel Oduber.