For the right and liberals of Latin America, “imperialism” is an anachronistic term with a strong and undesirable ideological load. They associate this concept with the Latin American left of the 20th century, which denounced US political and military interventions in Third World countries during the Cold War. Therefore, they consider that anti-imperialism is a banner of the “outdated left”—they like to use this label—that defends dictatorships such as the Cuban, Venezuelan and Nicaraguan, and that is too idealistic to understand that there are hierarchies in the world, and that the United States occupies the first level, while Latin America is in the third or even fourth place.
However, if we want to understand US foreign policy towards Latin America under the Trump administration, we must recover the concept of imperialism.
It is true that anti-imperialism has been a tradition of the left. For example, Lenin defined imperialism as the phase of capitalism in which large monopolies, banks and states of industrialized powers expand their economic, political and military dominance over peripheral territories to secure markets, resources and investment opportunities. Likewise, the Peruvian intellectual José Carlos Mariátegui argued that imperialism is the process by which capitalist powers organize the world economy in a hierarchical manner, subordinating Latin America as a region that produces raw materials and consumes manufacturing, blocking its autonomous development.
However, thinkers and politicians from other intellectual traditions have also defined and criticized imperialism. For American intellectuals grouped in the Anti-Imperialist League (founded at the end of the 19th century), such as Mark Twain and William James, imperialism was the practice through which the United States extended its military and political domination over other peoples, betraying republican and democratic principles by imposing governments and controlling territories by force.
Similarly, at the beginning of the 20th century, the British liberal John A. Hobson denounced that imperialism is the policy by which a small group of financial and business interests pushes the State to conquer and control territories abroad, using military and diplomatic power to protect their private profits, and forcing both the societies of the conquering country and those of the dominated territory to pay the costs.
In other words, throughout history, figures from different parts of the political spectrum and the world have reflected and denounced imperialism not as a way to promote anti-Yankeeism and defend dictatorial governments (just remember that Trotskyist organizations always denounced imperialism so much of the Soviet Union as of the United States), but with the genuine conviction that imperialism is a mechanism to maintain an integrated but unequal world.
From this perspective, imperialism is a vehicle to build and ensure the continuity of an international system based on the subordination of some nations to promote the economic growth of other countries and, above all, the enrichment of their elites. Therefore, the corollary of imperialism is always violence, marginalization and inequality.
American imperialism has never ceased to exist, but it has changed its intensity, alibis, forms, ideological underpinnings and objectives. The great change under the Trump era lies in the fact that before, American imperialism was based, at the same time, on a universalist project about the modernity desirable for the world – democracy and free markets – and on the defense of the military, political and economic hegemony of the United States in the global order, while now it is only based on the second element and, above all, on the achievement of short-term economic gains.
As is clear in the National Security Strategy of the Trump administration, this achievement of short-term economic gains implies the subordination of Latin America to the needs of the United States. This is an explicit project of unequal integration, in which Latin America (including Mexico) must fulfill the role of providing the United States with raw materials, low value-added products and cheap industrial inputs, while Washington exports high value-added products, technology, fossil fuels and infrastructure to the region. At the same time, Latin America (again, including Mexico) must move away from China in economic, political and infrastructure terms, and favor American suppliers (although this may not always be convenient).
