The Last Years of the Monroe Doctrine

When president James Monroe issued his 1823 doctrine that the United States would brook no foreign intervention in our hemisphere, it quickly became as sacred to Americans as the Declaration of independence and the Constitution. But in the years after World War II-notably in Guatemala in 1954, in Brazil in 1963, in Chile in 1973, and in El Salvador in the 1980s-the U.S. government's policy of supporting repressive regimes in Central and South America hastened the death of the protect.