This week’s readings look at the United States influence within Latin America and the effects that is has on the people living within the region. In the majority of the documents read the average person of the Latin American countries views the United States influence in a negative light, stating the United States is exploiting their countries for their own material good. They also say the United States is acting as a empire, taking over Latin American countries, economically to say the least. The very fact that the United States has so much control over outside nations is an indicator of the likeness of an imperial power, which contradicts the basis of what the United States was founded upon. The United States has always seen itself as a sharply anti-imperial country, since in the beginning they were a colony that we being taken advantage of by the British empire. However almost from the very beginning of becoming a sovereign nation, the United States began to expand west ward. Taking over large territories of land that didn’t necessarily belong to them, but thinking that it was their god given right to claim these lands. They exploited the people living there, and drove them out of their homes. These actions were known as manifest destiny.

Being from the United States, I can say that our nation itself tends to see itself in a superior nation in the sense that the United States tends to know what’s right for all other nations. The United States tends to think that our influence has a positive effect on the nations that we intervene with. However that is far from the truth of the matter. This can be seen in Augusto Sandino’s Political Manifesto, July 1927. He talks about how the United States are the source of bad for his nation and that the oligarchs in the government are the only ones who benefit from these deals with the United States, “Our young country… should be the ones to wear on her head head the Phrygian cap… and not that country raped by Yankee morphine addicts brought here by the four serpents who claim to have been born here in my country.” Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart also talked in How to Read Donald Duck that the popular medias, such as Disney, presented third world countries with the mindset that they were children and should be coddled and treated as if they didn’t know any better, then their gold and riches that the United States found useful would be taken and that prevents these regions from being able to emerge into the world economy.