Carter’s New Look. US Foreign Policy in Latin America, 1977-80

Based on a representative sample of documents on Latin American policy produced by the Carter administration, 1977-81, the essay provides the scholarly debate with some hints to the US awareness of empire-building in the crucial years that the Soviet government, out of a growing sense of détente disillusionment and incumbent defeat in the final rush to co-hegemony shared with Washington, forcibly chose to launch its globalized challenge to the ‘free world’.