Most closely identified with the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Good Neighbor policy established the practice of nonintervention as the hallmark of United States loreign policy toward Latin America. American policymakers hoped that ending U. S. intervention (especially military and political intervention) in the domestic affairs of Latin American countries would create healthy economic and political ties among the nations of the Western Hemisphere and combat the challenges presented by the Great Depression and by the increasing global tensions that would culminate in World War II.
Historians disagree about the degree to which the Good Neighbor policy had its origins in the Republican
Administrations of the 1920s but agree that the first significant steps toward a noninterventionist policy toward Latin America occurred during the Hoover presidency. President Herbert C. Hoover rejected Theodore Roosevelt’s “corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, which had asserted the right of the United States to intervene in the affairs of nations in the Western Hemisphere if necessary to maintain order. Hoover ended American occupation of Nicaragua and committed to do the same in Haiti, but these good-faith attempts at ending military intervention were largely overshadowed by widespread dissatisfaction in Latin America at the passage of the Hawley-Smoot Tarill Act in 1930, which reduced imports to the United States.
Franklin Roosevelt’s actions toward Latin America expanded Hoover’s noninterventionist policy into what is now known as the Good Neighbor policy. FDR’s first major step toward this end came in his support for a resolution stating that “no state has the right to intervene in the internal or external affairs of another.” This resolution, passed at the 1933 Pan-American Conference held in Montevideo, Uruguay, where the American delegation was led by Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Assistant Secretary of State Sumner Welles, was followed by a number of substantive actions to implement the policy, ending 30 years of armed intervention by the United States in Latin America. Roosevelt honored Hoover’s commitment to withdraw the United States military from Haiti, leaving troops in the Panama Canal Zone as the last American military forces remaining outside United States territory. In 1934, FDR abrogated the Cuban constitution’s Platt Amendment, a stipulation that authorized United States intervention in Cuban domestic affairs. Roosevelt maintained the policy of the “good neighbor” even when it was put to its greatest test when the Mexican government nationalized the Mexican oil industry, including property belonging to several American oil firms, in 1938. Rejecting pressure from business interests to use armed force to reclaim the American property, Roosevelt negotiated a compensatory settlement between the Mexican government and the oil corporations.
The Good Neighbor policy reflected an increasing tendency toward hemispheric regionalism in foreign policy. This regional approach allowed the United States to pursue international measures for economic recovery and, later, defense, while maintaining a safe distance from increasingly complicated European affairs. The good faith generated by the approach of the “good neighbor” allowed the United States to establish economic agreements with many Latin American nations under the auspices of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act. Diplomatically, the Good Neighbor policy achieved its most notable success in December 1938, when the United States joined with the other republics of the American continents to sign the Declaration of Lima, agreeing to consult each other if war threatened any portion of the Western Hemisphere. This expression of solidarity was the first of its kind among the nations of the Western Hemisphere. After the U. S. entrance into World War II, this cooperation continued among the republics of North and South America as all but Argentina agreed to sever diplomatic relations with the Axis powers at the Rio de Janeiro Conference of January 1942. Throughout the war, the nations of the Western Hemisphere collaborated in mutual defense against potential German submarine attack and sent troops to aid Allied forces.
While many of the connections initiated in this era between the United States and its Latin American neighbors were maintained after World War II, the Good Neighbor pledge of nonintervention was not sustained in the postwar era. The beginning of the cold war and fears of the spread of communism once again brought American military presence into Latin America to quell political instability.
Further reading: Irwin F. Gellman, Good Neighbor Diplomacy: United States Policies in Latin America, 19331945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); Bryce Wood, The Making of the Good Neighbor Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961).
—Mary E. Carroll-Mason
World History
