The Geopolitical Environment: Latin America

During the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, many observers of Latin America’s1 history and politics commented on what they perceived as the region’s increasingly assertive posture in the international arena. By the mid-1970s, the study of Latin America was being complemented by a veritable plethora of academic works which sought to document and analyse the growing complexity that progressively characterised the external behaviour of these countries. The critical message conveyed by these studies was that active foreign policies were no longer the exclusive domain of highly developed nations. Rather, small and middle-sized countries, even in the geopolitical sphere of a major superpower, could assert influence with respect to their neighbours, with the hemispheric superpower itself or with other countries outside the hemisphere. Also, as one recent survey of the literature on Latin America’s international relations reveals, three themes are recurrent: the desire to maximise national and regional autonomy; the quest for development through intraregional cooperation; and the persistent presence of the United States as a major factor in the region’s external and domestic options.