The Reluctant Giant: Japan and the Latin American Debt Crisis

1990 ◽  
Vol 22 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Stallings

The debt crisis has been the dominant feature of Latin American economic and political life since 1982. While the Reagan Administration gave greater priority to Central America, it nevertheless managed the international response to the debt crisis. US management initially seemed logical for several reasons: US hegemony worldwide, the traditionally close relationship between the United States and Latin America, and the leading exposure of US banks in Latin American debt. During the period since 1982, however, two of these three elements have changed. Japan has challenged US hegemony, although it certainly has not displaced the United States, and Japanese banks have caught up with their US counterparts as holders of Latin American debt.2 Despite their lack of traditional relations with Latin America, then, the Japanese are becoming increasingly – although perhaps reluctantly – involved in the region.

1993 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Samuel Fitch

The US military presence in Latin America has declined significantly over the last two decades, particularly in the major countries of the region. Despite the determined efforts of the Reagan administration to reverse that trend, with few exceptions the present ability of the United States to influence the Latin American militaries is far removed from the dominant role it played in the 1950s and 1960s. Given the pressures in Washington for further cuts in military aid programs, the trend toward declining US influence and increasingly divergent US-Latin American military interests is likely to continue in the 1990s. Although the United States will continue to be a major force in the region, the primary instruments of US influence are likely to be economic, rather than military-to-military relations.


2011 ◽  
Vol 68 (02) ◽  
pp. 209-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dalia Antonia Muller

In a famous account of his travels, titled El destino de un continente, the Argentine writer Manuel Ugarte describes his somewhat disconcerting encounter with the Cuban ex-president José Miguel Gómez while traveling through Latin America during the 1920s. Ugarte, a committed advocate of panhispanismo—the idea that Spanish America was and should be unified by its shared Spanish heritage, especially in light of the “threat” from Anglo- Saxon culture—had come to Cuba to give a series of lectures. Shortly after one of his presentations, the Argentine was introduced to Gómez, who took Ugarte to task for his criticism of Cuba's close relationship to the United States. “You reproach us,” Gómez said, “for not defending our legacy of Spanish civilization, but what have all of you [Latin Americans] done to encourage us, to support us, to make us feel that we are not alone?” Taken aback and made suddenly self-conscious by the accusation, Ugarte concluded that the Cuban was admonishing him for failing to uphold the very principles he was espousing in his lectures. “It seemed as if, through the voice of her representative, all Cuba was saying, ‘It is not we who broke the link; it was you who broke it in allowing it to be cut.’” After some time and much thought, Ugarte came to the realization that “Cuba was not alone responsible for the Cuban situation. Some responsibility was also borne by Latin America.” Through his encounter with Gómez, Ugarte was forced to recognize the limitations of framing what he referred to as the “Cuban situation” exclusively in the context of a cultural war between the United States and Spain. Indeed, the expresident's challenge inspired him to reconsider Cuba's nineteenth-century struggles with both Spanish colonialism and U.S. imperialism in a distinctly inter-Latin American context.


Author(s):  
Quintijn B Kat

Abstract The strategies of subordinate states in hegemonic or asymmetrical relations have been widely studied by international relations scholars. Such works generally focus on how a subordinate state can influence the hegemon's behavior so as to address and further the interests of the subordinate state. The relation between subordinate-state agency and the hegemonic system, the makeup of the hegemonic order, itself receives less attention. Through analysis of two cases of US hegemony in Latin America, this article examines how subordinate-state agency may strengthen or weaken the hegemonic system and, as such, makes a case for subordinate-state agency as an underpinning element of hegemony. It explores Colombian agency in the design phase of Plan Colombia as contributing to US hegemony, while Bolivian agency under the presidency of Evo Morales is examined as a challenge. In both instances, it was the United States, rather than the Latin American states, that took on a passive role, leaving the initiative with Colombia and Bolivia. Therefore, instead of reaffirmations of active one-way US hegemony versus passive subordinate states, the paper proposes to understand both cases as demonstrating the importance of subordinate-state agency in the configuration of the hegemonic system.


1977 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Milton Silverman

A survey was conducted on the promotion of 28 prescription drugs in the form of 40 different products marketed in the United States and Latin America by 23 multinational pharmaceutical companies. Striking differences were found in the manner in which the identical drug, marketed by the identical company or its foreign affiliate, was described to physicians in the United States and to physicians in Latin America. In the United States, the listed indications were usually few in number, while the contraindications, warnings, and potential adverse reactions were given in extensive detail. In Latin America, the listed indications were far more numerous, while the hazards were usually minimized, glossed over, or totally ignored. The differences were not simply between the United States on the one hand and all the Latin American countries on the other. There were substantial differences within Latin America, with the same global company telling one story in Mexico, another in Central America, a third in Ecuador and Colombia, and yet another in Brazil. The companies have sought to defend these practices by contending that they are not breaking any Latin American laws. In some countries, however, such promotion is in clear violation of the law. The corporate ethics and social responsibilities concerned here call for examination and action.


2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosa E. Ficek

This article discusses the planning and construction of the Pan-American Highway by focusing on interactions among engineers, government officials, manufacturers, auto enthusiasts, and road promoters from the United States and Latin America. It considers how the Pan-American Highway was made by projects to extend U.S. influence in Latin America but also by Latin American nationalist and regionalist projects that put forward alternative ideas about social and cultural difference—and cooperation—across the Americas. The transnational negotiations that shaped the Pan-American Highway show how roads, as they bring people and places into contact with each other, mobilize diverse actors and projects that can transform the geography and meaning of these technologies.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. e54056 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Jaime Miranda ◽  
Victor M. Herrera ◽  
Julio A. Chirinos ◽  
Luis F. Gómez ◽  
Pablo Perel ◽  
...  

1970 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-301
Author(s):  
Wilkins B. Winn

The Republic of Colombia was the first Latin American nation to which the United States extended a formal act of recognition in 1822. This country was also the first of these new republics with which the United States negotiated a treaty of friendship, commerce, and navigation. The importance of incorporating the principle of religious liberty in our first commercial treaty with Latin America was revealed in the emphasis that John Quincy Adams, Secretary of State, placed on it in his initial instructions to Richard Clough Anderson, Jr., Minister Plenipotentiary to Colombia. Religious liberty was one of the specific articles stipulated by Adams for insertion in the prospective commercial treaty.


1985 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 699-727 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin J. Cohen

The global debt problem influences the foreign-policy capabilities of the United States through its impact on the government's “linkage strategies” in foreign affairs. In some circumstances policy makers are forced to make connections between different policy instruments or issues that might not otherwise have been felt necessary; in others, opportunities for connections are created that might not otherwise have been felt possible. The Polish debt crisis of 1981–82, the Latin American debt crisis of 1982–83, and the IMF quota increase in 1983 are suggestive in this regard. Linkage strategies bred by the debt issue are more apt to be successful when the interest shared by the United States with other countries in avoiding default is reinforced by other shared economic or political interests. They will also be more successful to the extent that the government can supplement its own power resources by relating bank decisions to foreign-policy considerations. Power in such situations, however, is a wasting asset, even when employed indirectly through the intermediation of the IMF.


Significance The GCC imports around 85% of the food its member countries consume domestically, and the share of Latin American products as a proportion of the GCC’s total food imports has increased from 10% in 2015 to almost 14% in 2019. Impacts Pandemic-induced adoption of innovations such as e-commerce will provide opportunities to expand food exports. Post-pandemic recovery in tourism may eventually boost the GCC’s need for food imports. Growth in other markets will be crucial to help reduce LAC’s dependence on key markets such as China and the United States.


PMLA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 123 (5) ◽  
pp. 1700-1702
Author(s):  
Yen Le Espiritu

In her book Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination, avery gordon writes that “to study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it”—the experiential realities of social and political life that have been systematically hidden or erased. To confront the ghostly aspects of social life is to tell ghost stories: to pay attention to what modern history has rendered ghostly and to write into being the seething presence of the things that appear to be not there (Gordon 7–8). By most accounts, Vietnam was the site of one of the most brutal and destructive of the wars between Western imperial powers and the people of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Yet public discussions and commemorations of the Vietnam War in the United States often skip over this devastating history, thereby ignoring the war's costs borne by the Vietnamese—the lifelong costs that turn the 1975 “fall of Saigon” and the exodus from Vietnam into “the endings that are not over” (Gordon 195). Without creating an opening for a Vietnamese perspective of the war, these public deliberations refuse to remember Vietnam as a historical site, Vietnamese people as genuine subjects, and the Vietnam War as having any kind of integrity of its own (Desser).


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