Monroe Doctrine: For Good or For Bad?

Monroe Doctrine: For Good or for Bad?

The interests of our own Latin America is clearly different from those of that of the United States - but ever since the Monroe Doctrine has been declared, it seemed as if relations between the US and the nations of Latin America stabilized on a friendly note. But we need not feel easy and let our guard down at all, for this issue has had major questionings in the past years already. Is the United States really attempting to protect our nations from any threat of reconquest from outer nations? Or is the US only using the Monroe Doctrine to dominate the Western Hemisphere?

I strongly agree with our nations' government views about this issue: that the United States is only using this as a step forward in monopolizing power around the Western Hemisphere. It might be true that they are defending our nations from European conquest and such, but we are also independent and should be allowed to govern ourselves without any higher power that makes every decision for us, even if sometimes it's not even in the general interest of the masses within nations of Latin America.

But then again, the US might be actually intending to just defend us, since as we are part of its land and territory. Our region is that of a concentrated power with one major rule, just as a Spanish official made this prediction about the United States in 1783: "We have just recognized a new power in a great region where there exists no other to challenge its growth. ... The day will come when it grows and becomes a giant and even a colossus in those regions. Within a few years we will regard the existence of this colossus with real sorrow." And now, as it clearly is seen, the United States is the existing "Colossus of the North", even though it wasn't able to carry out the Monroe Doctrine by itself in the beginning, and with the help of the British navy, it was duly carried on.

Whether their actual intention can be seen more in the positive or negative, we'll only be able to see in the following years to come... just a few years ago, in a dispute between Venetia and Britain, American Secretary of State Richard Olney invoked the Monroe Doctrine and he informed Britain that the United States "... was sovereign in the Western Hemisphere.". The shocking statement even drove more people into doubting the United

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