Wikipedia

I read the Wikipedia article Latin America-US Relations. Overall, it did a pretty decent job of sketching a broad chronological overview of the subject, linking to articles about specific moments from the history of Latin American-US relations. However, it did seem to place more of an emphasis on the US as an agent interacting with Latin America, not the US and Latin America as different actors interacting with each other as equals. Perhaps that is somewhat unavoidable, given that it is covering one country’s interaction with an entire region, making it easier to construct a narrative with a focus on the one country, not the many. This imbalance in focus does not, however, appear to translate into pro-US bias. Overall, the article does try to be evenhanded and not portray the US in a positive or negative light.

The article could be better sourced. There are several different instances of paragraphs where assertions are made without evidence. For instance, the article asserts that “Some modern observers have argued that if World War I had not lessened American enthusiasm for international activity these interventions might have led to the formation of an expanded U.S. colonial empire” (Banana Wars paragraph 2) without any citation of this argument being made in so much as a blog post, much less a reputable work of history (not that good historians would publish such speculation). The citations that are present are pretty decent, though one link is dead and flagged as such. The Further Reading section is fairly large and contains a good amount of good sources.

I understand the difficulties of writing a good overview that fully covers all topics over roughly two and a half centuries of history, but one issue with the article is an incompleteness. The article briefly discusses US involvement in Venezuelan and Chilean independence (without citations), but not the independence of the other countries of Latin America. It covers the Cold War in Latin America but does not go into specifics about intervention in Nicaragua, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, and so on beyond maybe a sentence. These all deserve their own subheading under a “Cold War” section.

The article also has issues with its writing and flow, mainly relating to the incompleteness mention in the previous paragraph. Topics are brought up one after another without apparent connection between them. This is more of a problem in the earlier part of the article than the more recent events. Besides that, the article’s last section, Academic Research, is present without any explanation of its relevance and spends its opening paragraph discussing one historian’s overview of the study of Latin American-US relations. This section sticks out like a sore thumb, serving no apparent purpose and being unincorporated into the larger article.

Overall, the article is a decent enough historical overview, but suffers from an incompleteness, lack of sources in some areas, coherence, and an overemphasis on the US as a historical actor.