The problem with LAm was not so much US interventionism -the problem was that LAm was sitting pretty vis a vis most of Europe (aside from the UK&#x2F;France), at the turn of the last century.  They had natural resources and they could have exploited them to their advantage, but they didn&#x27;t.  You had a few &quot;caudilloes&quot; a great peasant population which did not have a tradition of education and generational social climbing (you must remember they were very far flung and rural).<p>When the US went in meddling, it&#x27;s not like we messed something good in those places, they were going down anyway, due to many varied issues (see Mexico, Venezuela or Peru, proud anti-imperialists) and arguably where we did mess around, like Chile and Argentina, Colombia, Panama things are better off than in the places which languish in Garcia-Marques&#x27;s feudal time warp.<p>It&#x27;s almost as though LAm, tied somewhat spiritually to Spain (or the Iberian pen.), followed down Spain&#x27;s footsteps to relative irrelevance.<p>We did mess up in a few places, due to realpolitiks, but I don&#x27;t think things would have turned out better without our intervention  --I don&#x27;t see it realized in the places we didn&#x27;t intervene down there.