Good Neighbor Policy

The Good Neighbor Policy was the guiding framework of United States relations with Latin America beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt's first inaugural address in March 1933, in which he pledged to dedicate the nation to the policy of the "good neighbor" who respects the rights of others. It marked a formal repudiation of the interventionist posture associated with the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (1904), under which Washington had claimed a right of police power in the hemisphere and repeatedly deployed Marines to countries such as Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.

In practice the policy had several concrete components:

• At the Seventh International Conference of American States in Montevideo (December 1933), Secretary of State Cordell Hull signed the Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, whose Article 8 declared that "no state has the right to intervene in the internal or external affairs of another."
• The United States withdrew its remaining occupation forces from Haiti in 1934 and abrogated the Platt Amendment with Cuba the same year, ending the formal U.S. right to intervene there (though the Guantánamo Bay lease was retained).
• Washington accepted, without military reprisal, Mexico's 1938 expropriation of foreign-owned oil companies under President Lázaro Cárdenas, negotiating compensation rather than coercing reversal.
• Reciprocal trade agreements under the 1934 Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act expanded commercial ties across the region.

Strategically, the policy also served U.S. interests by consolidating hemispheric solidarity ahead of and during the Second World War, culminating in inter-American defense cooperation and the 1947 Rio Treaty. Critics note that non-intervention coexisted with continued U.S. support for friendly authoritarian regimes, including Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua and Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. The doctrine's spirit eroded during the Cold War, when covert interventions—Guatemala in 1954, the Dominican Republic in 1965—resumed under anti-communist rationales.