Historical Dictionary of United States-Latin American Relations (review)

This work is the third in a series of historical dictionaries of U.S. diplomacy published by Scarecrow Press. Joseph Smith is a reader in diplomatic history at Exeter University in England with specialties in U.S.-Latin American relations and the Cold War. This volume generally ignores U.S. relations with the Caribbean countries which will be covered by a later installment in the series.

The Introduction provides a general survey of U.S.-Latin American relations revolving around such topics as pan-Americanism, Dollar Diplomacy, the Good Neighbor Policy, and Cold War diplomacy. The author stresses the unequal relationship that exists between the United States and Latin America and the importance of economic motivation in U.S. policy. There is also a chronology that provides structure for the entries. The entries cover a broad range of topics: persons, institutions, treaties, movements, programs, events, and doctrines. Each Latin American country has an individual entry which focuses on its relations with the United States. All of the twentieth-century U.S. presidents receive an entry on the Latin American policies they followed.

An historical dictionary of slightly more than 200 pages of entries is bound to raise issues of selection and emphasis. Should Cipriano Castro be in there alongside Fidel Castro? Should the entry on "Manifest Destiny" be shorter than the entry on the "Mann Doctrine"? All in all, the author succeeds in conveying a considerable amount of information on a wide variety of topics in a limited amount of space.

The work concludes with two appendices and a bibliography. One appendix provides a list of U.S. presidents and secretaries of state while the second appendix is a brief selection of presidential statements on U.S.-Latin American policy ranging from the Monroe Doctrine to one of Reagan's speeches in 1984 on the crisis in Central America. The bibliography is extensive and mostly parallels the topics covered in the Introduction. With its high cost, the work is a bit expensive for use as a supplementary classroom text but is a bargain as a useful library reference work.