page_title: Anti-Americanism
section_title: Latin America
hierarchical_section_title: Anti-Americanism / Regional anti-Americanism / The Americas / Latin America
caption_attribution_description: Español: Día de la Memoria 2016.
context_page_description: Anti-Americanism is a sentiment which espouses dislike of the American government or opposes its policies, especially its foreign policy, or espouses dislike or hatred of the American people and the United States in general.
  Political scientist Brendon O'Connor of the United States Studies Centre in Australia suggests that "anti-Americanism" cannot be isolated as a consistent phenomenon, since the term originated as a rough composite of stereotypes, prejudices, and criticisms which evolved into more politically-based criticisms. French scholar Marie-France Toinet says that use of the term "anti-Americanism" is "only fully justified if it implies systematic opposition – a sort of allergic reaction – to America as a whole."
  Discussions on anti-Americanism have in most cases lacked a precise explanation of what the sentiment entails, which has led to the term being used broadly and in an impressionistic manner, resulting in the inexact impressions of the many expressions described as anti-American. Author and expatriate William Russell Melton described that criticism for the United States largely originates from the perception that the U.S. wants to act as a "world policeman".
context_section_description: Anti-Americanism in Latin America has deep roots and is a key element of the concept of Latin American identity, "specifically anti-U.S. expansionism and Catholic anti-Protestantism." An 1828 exchange between William Henry Harrison, the U.S. minister plenipotentiary rebuked President Simón Bolívar of Gran Colombia, saying "... the strongest of all governments is that which is most free", calling on Bolívar to encourage the development of a democracy. In response, Bolívar wrote, "The United States ... seem destined by Providence to plague America with torments in the name of freedom", a phrase that achieved fame in Latin America.
  In the 1836 Texas Revolution, the Mexican province of Texas seceded from Mexico and nine years later, encouraged by the Monroe Doctrine and manifest destiny, the United States annexed the Republic of Texas - at its request, but against vehement opposition by Mexico, which refused to recognize the independence of Texas - and began their expansion into Western North America.  Mexican anti-American sentiment was further inflamed by the resulting 1846–1848 Mexican–American War, in which Mexico lost more than half of its territory to the United States.
  The Chilean writer Francisco Bilbao predicted in America in Danger (1856) that the loss of Texas and northern Mexico to "the talons of the eagle" was just a foretaste of an American bid for world domination. An early exponent of the concept of Latin America, Bilbao excluded Brazil and Paraguay from it, as well as Mexico, because "Mexico lacked a real republican consciousness, precisely because of its complicated relationship with the United States." Interventions by the U.S. prompted a later ruler of Mexico, Porfirio Diaz, to lament: "Poor Mexico, so far from God, and so close to the United States". Mexico's National Museum of Interventions, opened in 1981, is a testament to Mexico's sense of grievance with the United States.
  The Spanish–American War of 1898, which escalated Cuba's war of independence from Spain, turned the U.S. into a world power and made Cuba a virtual dependency of the United States via the Platt Amendment to the Cuban constitution. The U.S. action was consistent with the Big Stick ideology espoused by Theodore Roosevelt's corollary to the Monroe Doctrine that led to numerous interventions in Central America and the Caribbean, also prompted hatred of the U.S. in other regions of the Americas. A very influential formulation of Latin-American anti-Americanism, engendered by the 1898 war, was the Uruguayan journalist José Enrique Rodó's essay Ariel (1900) in which the spiritual values of the South American Ariel are contrasted to the brutish mass-culture of the American Caliban. This essay had enormous influence throughout Spanish America in the 1910s and 1920s, and prompted resistance to what was seen as American cultural imperialism. Perceived racist attitudes of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants of the North toward the populations of Latin America also caused resentment.
  The Student Reform that began in the Argentinian University of Cordoba in 1918, boosted the idea of anti-imperialism throughout Latin America, and played a fundamental role for launching the concept that was to be developed over several generations. Already in 1920, the Federación Universitaria Argentina issued a manifesto entitled Denunciation of Imperialism.
  Since the 1940s, U.S. relations with Argentina have been tense, when the U.S. feared the regime of General Peron was too close to Nazi Germany. In 1954, American support for the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état against the democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán fueled anti-Americanism in the region. This CIA-sponsored coup prompted a former president of that country, Juan José Arévalo to write a fable entitled The Shark and the Sardines (1961) in which a predatory shark (representing the United States) overawes the sardines of Latin America.
  Vice-President Richard Nixon's tour of South America in 1958 prompted a spectacular eruption of anti-Americanism. The tour became the focus of violent protests wh
caption: The Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice in Buenos Aires, commemorating the victims of the Dirty War in Argentina, 24 March 2016
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