Strategically located at the gateway to the South American
continent, Colombia has long been a key player in shaping the
United States' involvement with its Latin American neighbors. In
this book Stephen J. Randall examines the course of U.S.-Colombian
relations over two centuries, taking into account the broad
spectrum of political, social, cultural, and economic contacts that
have figured in the interaction. ,br> A leader in the movement
for independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century,
Colombia shared with the United States the aspiration of becoming a
leader for the entire hemisphere. Its early efforts in this
direction - notably its initiation in the 1820s of the first
Pan-American Conference - soon languished, however, as the unequal
growth between the two countries took its toll. By the turn of the
century, after years of destructive civil war, Colombia had slipped
far behind its northern neighbor militarily, economically, and
politically. The United States, meanwhile, had emerged as a great
power, and the first major manifestation of the two countries'
divergence came with the U.S.-supported secession of Panama in
1903--an event that deeply shocked Colombians and tainted their
view of the United States for subsequent generations. During the
twentieth century, Randall explains, a tension in Colombian
politics and culture has persisted between those who advocate an
independent, even antagonistic, stance toward the United States and
those who propound a policy of realism that accepts Colombia's
place as a middle, regional power within the U.S. orbit. For its
part, the United States has continually failed to realize that
Colombians, with their European intellectual heritage stretching
back four hundred years, do not see themselves as an insignificant
Third World nation. The result has been an often strained
relationship, which Randall traces through two world wars, economic
booms and depressions, the Cold War, and, finally, the present-day
guerrilla conflicts and drug trade controversies.
General
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