Crisis management: The best foreign policy towards Latin America?

The individual countries of Latin America, for good, ill, or both, have a relatively long historic relationship with the United States, which has been dominated (although not monopolized) by the latter's hegemony. Tracing the history of US relations with Latin American countries is clearly beyond the scope of this essay, but what I would like to show is that, although US policy favors democracy and open markets in its macro-understanding of foreign policy, at the country or issue level, the US government's foreign policy is often more ambiguous if not contradictory.