During the Cold War, the US established a range of policies, including isolationism, detente policies, rollback policy, and the containment policy. In particular, the containment policy had a great impact on Latin America. Overall, the relationship between Latin America and the US was changed significantly by the Cold War, with the region becoming a battleground between two different ideological systems – capitalism and communism.
Before the Cold War, both geographic and economic concerns had driven US policy towards Latin America. However, following the end of WWII and the Eastern Europe efforts to rebuild, George Kennan, the principal draftsman of the US foreign policy in the Soviet Union, promoted containment to prevent the spreading of communism, not only across Europe but worldwide. The outcome was a bipolar world that featured proxy wars fought across the Third World by clients and surrogates of the two superpowers ( Grandin, 2011). Historically, the Latina American countries were considered to be part of America, were not allowed to be neutral as the US expected them to be its ally. In contrast, the Soviet Union wanted to gain access to Latin America, which was considered an American sphere of influence.
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The containment policy resulted in the Guerrilla movements which proclaimed Marxist ideologies and used armed struggle to achieve their goals. Such insurgencies were funded, armed, and morally supported by Cuba, and indirectly the Soviet Union. In the long run, the uprisings were unsuccessful, and they left the Latina America shuttered as a result of civil wars ( Grandin, 2011) . Consequently, the culmination of the Cold War left Latin America restoring and rebuilding its shuttered nations with minimal or no support from either the Soviet Union or the United States.
Reference
Grandin, G. (2011). The last colonial massacre: Latin America in the Cold War . University of Chicago Press.
