o Rico and a de facto protectorate over Cuba as a result of the Spanish American War of 1898. It intervened in internal affairs in Panama/Colombia in 1903 to obtain the rights to build the Panama Canal. Under the Roosevelt (Theodore) Corollary, it reserved the right to intervene in Latin America whenever its interests were threatened by outside powers or civil disorder and sent forces at various times to Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti and Nicaragua.
Under President Woodrow Wilson the United States intervened militarily in Mexico in the name of Mexican self-determination, but that effort was ineffective. In general, the aim of American foreign policy in the region was to preserve order and stability, and toward that end supported local elites and protected private American property rights, rather than attempting to come to terms with Latin American sensibilities wounded by repeated American interventions and torn by internal revolution. Fearful, however, of German influence during World War I, Wilson took the first tentative steps toward enlisting international cooperation from Latin American states through Pan-American treaties. The administrations of Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover in the 1920s belatedly began to come to terms with the force of revolutionary nationalism in Mexico by mediating settlements of disputes between the Mexican government and foreign oil companies over the Mexicans' expropriation of their concessions.
The nations of Latin America, which depended largely on exports of primary products, were impacted adversely by the collapse of world commodity prices during the Great Depression. By the mid-1930s, the administration of Franklin Roosevelt saw free international trade as a necessary precondition to international economic recovery and negotiated Reciprocal Trade Agreements with many Latin American nations. According to Gilderhus, "overall, the Roosevelt administration attached more importance to trade expa...