U.S. Policy of Aid to Latin America

As a practical matter, financial assistance to Latin America began in the twentieth century with the accession of Theodore Roosevelt to the presidency. The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, promulgated in 1904 by President Theodore Roosevelt, did not treat the subject of foreign aid to Latin America specifically, but it laid the groundwork for a whole range of American attitudes toward Latin America that prevailed through the series of policies and programs that were to constitute the substance of foreign aid in the region. The Roosevelt Corollary was one of a series of enunciated policies toward Latin America that came about in the first years of the twentieth century, chiefly in the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. In order to appreciate the tenor of the foreign policy, it is useful to examine the tenor of the president himself.

With his aristocratic background, Theodore Roosevelt assumed power in a nexus with a progressive belief in reform. In this regard, he served as a reform police commissioner of the city of New Y

ure, taxation, housing, and education, while the United States promised financial assistance for social progress; and (4) the launching, on March 13, 1961, under a new Democratic administration, of the plan for the Alliance for Progress, multilaterally approved in August 1961 at the Conference of Punte del Este (3:32). The significance of this scheme of action is that it indicates the gradual institutionalization of economic assistance. As will be seen hereafter, this institutionalization was more than as it were "good" news about U.S. foreign aid to the region. It was also the source of attitudinal friction between the region and the U.S. Meanwhile, however, one can also see an emerging category of thought regarding foreign aid to the region which considered aid on its own terms at least as significantly as aid in terms of posting Americanism against communism. It must be said that the record also indicates a persistence of anticommunist "influencepeddling" as a fundamental fact of U.S. assistance abroad. Nevertheless, Campos notes that the Kennedy administration's Alliance for Progress took a "more pragmatic attitude regarding neutralism, contrasting with the moralistic view in t