Latin America
The Spanish- and Portuguese-derived societies south of the United States
Also known as: Latin America, Latin American
The Spanish- and Portuguese-derived societies south of the United States — a civilizationally distinct zone whose national-character pattern Quigley analyzes in the Mexican essay and whose Cold War politics he tracks throughout T&H (T&H 67).
Quigley's Framing
Latin America is treated as a distinct civilizational offshoot of the Iberian Mediterranean — a society in which the circum-Mediterranean personality structure (honor-coded, familistic, suspicious of impersonal institutions) was transplanted to the New World and combined with indigenous and African populations. The resulting societies are read as structurally different from the Anglo-American settler states to the north, with weaker institutional impersonality, more patrimonial politics, and a chronic vulnerability to caudillo cycles.
Strategic Role
In the twentieth-century narrative Latin America is the U.S. sphere of influence under the Monroe Doctrine and its later reinterpretations. T&H covers the inter-war oil and tariff politics, the Good Neighbor policy, the wartime alignment, the Cold War interventions (CIA-organized coups in Guatemala 1954 and Brazil 1964, the failed Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis), and the U.S. counterinsurgency programs of the 1960s. Quigley is critical of the readiness with which the post-1945 American national-security state intervened in Latin American politics on the assumption that any leftward movement was Soviet-directed.
Cited in
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 67 Quigley
Latin America — the Spanish- and Portuguese-derived societies south of the United States.
- mexican-national-character Quigley
The circum-Mediterranean personality structure was transplanted to the New World through Spanish and Portuguese colonization.