Although dominant internationally after World War I, the United States encountered in the 1920s, as it has more recently, opposition abroad to its efforts to maintain and expand its hegemony in the circum-Caribbean. In Anti-Imperialism and International Competition in Central America, 1920-1929, a brief, well-written volume thoroughly researched in the most appropriate accessible sources, Richard V. Salisbury develops two significant, related histories: that of the emergence of a domestic anti-imperialist movement in Central America and that of simultaneous attempts by the revolutionary regime in Mexico and the Miguel Primo de Rivera regime in Spain to assert their own nations’ influence in the region, as a counter to that of the United States.
The epigraph to Salisbury’s concluding chapter is George Santayana’s familiar admonition regarding the fate of those who fail to learn from history. But the author is cautious in drawing lessons for the present. The United States was in those days a more powerful nation, at least in relation to its principal adversaries. Also, the anti-imperialist movement (indeed isthmian politics in general) was more personalistic and, therefore, easier for Washington to neutralize by pressuring client regimes. Sadly, the soundest link between the eras of Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan appears to be that, in both, U.S. policy toward Central America revealed an abysmal ignorance of regional realities.
One may well question whether the activities of a small number of individual anti-imperialists, even important ones such as Froylán Turcios and Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, can really have amounted to a “movement,” or whether there was any real significance to Spain’s efforts to create an influential role for itself in inter-American affairs. Such quarrels seem minor, however, compared to the solid contribution this book makes to our understanding of an important but little studied period in Central American political, diplomatic, and intellectual history.
