Anti-interventionism in the Name of the Law: Latin American Anti-imperialisms in the Face of the Modern US and Hemispheric Redefinition of the Monroe Doctrine, 1880–1930

Although the Monroe Doctrine was originally formulated as a U.S. unilateral policy principle, in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century it began to be redefined in relation to both the hemispheric policy of Pan-Americanism and the unilateral and interventionist policies of the U.S. in Central America and the Caribbean. Although historians have devoted a great deal of attention to Latin American anti-imperialist ideas and movements, there was a distinct influential legalist tradition within the broader Latin American anti-imperialist ideology especially concerned with the nature and application of the Monroe Doctrine, which has been largely overlooked. The purpose of this paper is to trace the rise and decline of this tradition situating it in its historical context and assessing its legal critique of the Monroe Doctrine.

As I will show in the paper, modern versions of Latin American anti-imperialism were not exclusively embedded of the language of modernist writers and intellectuals. Pioneering versions of Latin American anti-imperialism were also advocated by prominent international lawyers, diplomatic figures and public intellectuals, such as Roque Sáenz Peña (Argentina), Vicente Gregorio Quesada (Argentina), Carlos Pereyra (Mexico), Isidro Fabela (Mexico) and the young Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring (Cuba). These figures advocated an anti-imperialist ideology which combined the cultural rhetoric of modernism with the rather practical language of international law and diplomacy. The impact of the Mexican Revolution, U.S. intervention in Veracruz (Mexico) in 1914 and in the Dominican Republic in 1916 led to the revival and expansion of this continental tradition. In the late 1920s, in the context of the Anti-imperialist Congress of Brussels (1927) and the Sixth Pan-American Conference held in Havana (1928), this legal tradition reached its peak and soon began to decline in the early 1930s, a time when the U.S. bound itself at least formally to the principle of non-intervention.