On March 15, 1890, Argentine diplomat and statesman Roque Sáenz Peña rose to address representatives from across the Americas assembled in the heart of the U.S. capital. The occasion was the First International Conference of American States, an event nearly a decade in the making and notable for the number and range of governments attending. Almost all of the independent nation-states of the Americas had sent delegates at the invitation of the United States. By March, the delegates had been discussing matters of commerce, exchange, and arbitration for several weeks. Most of the Latin American delegations had been in the United States since the previous October. Surely tired from the conference proceedings, Sáenz Peña was nonetheless prepared to tackle the agenda for that day: responses to a proposal, submitted by the United States, for a hemispheric customs union inspired by the German Zollverein. Such an agreement would accomplish one of the host government’s goals for conference and for the U.S.-launched version of hemispheric cooperation known as “pan-Americanism”: increased inter-American commerce. Sáenz Peña and the government he represented disagreed with the idea of a customs union. After introducing a brief formal report co-signed by his Chilean counterpart, the Argentine launched into a wide-ranging rebuttal that invoked statistics, the ideal of free trade, and the Americas’ destiny in global affairs. He ended his speech with rhetorical crescendo, rejecting implicitly the “America for Americans” program of the United States by exclaiming “Let America be for humanity!” The phrase sent a shock wave through the congregated delegates. Cuban poet José Martí, at the conference as a correspondent of an Argentine newspaper, described the scene: “everyone rose to their feet in gratitude, understanding what was left unsaid, and offered him their hands.”
For Martí and others, Sáenz Peña’s speech was a declaration of resistance to regional cooperation for the benefit of the United States alone. They were not alone in this interpretation; as one historian of Argentine diplomacy later noted, Sáenz Peña’s culminating phrase “was to echo through the Pan American corridors for decades” as a challenge to U.S. hegemonic aspirations in the Americas. After observing, and participating, in pan-American events from 1889-91, Martí raised the alarm against pan-Americanism more explicitly in several reports from Washington that circulated throughout the hemisphere, among them the now famous essay “Our America”. Cooperation, according to the Cuban revolutionary, was not bad; the U.S. intentions in cooperation, however, were suspect. He feared that pan-Americanism, though couched in appeals of harmony, would serve to open Latin America to U.S. imperialism. The region’s destiny was in the balance. In response, Martí called for Latin American unity and warned of the pitfalls of mutual misunderstanding and Latin American short-sightedness.
Although it seems that Sáenz Peña and Martí were cut from the same cloth, their critiques of pan-Americanism were quite different. Where Martí saw a potentially existential threat to Latin American independence, Sáenz Peña saw a potential challenge to his country’s economic growth and geopolitical ambitions, including Argentina’s own aspirations for regional hegemony. The latter was more indicative of concerns over pan-Americanism in Argentina and Chile—here referred to as the Southern Cone. Indeed, the governments there were interested in cooperating with the United States and were willing to work within pan-Americanism, so long as it fit their own policy agendas and ideas of regionalism. Rather than merely another tool of U.S. imperialism for Latin Americans to resist, pan-Americanism was a broad, multifaceted set of movements that attracted a wide range of Latin American responses from derision to devotion. In fact, in the decades following Sáenz Peña’s speech, Southern Cone societies produced both some of the most ardent supporters and many of the most vocal critics of pan-Americanism. Southern Cone governments, meanwhile, sought a middle ground between U.S.-defined “Pan America” and Martí’s “Our America”. They gradually accepted pan-American cooperation as both viable and useful and sought to shape the emerging field of internationalism to suit their purposes. In the process, they made pan-American cooperation more Latin American and fashioned a tool to negotiate competing hegemonic aspirations in the hemisphere. Overall, they advanced their own ideas of pan-Americanism—what an Argentine statesman in 1934 would call “our pan-Americanism”—in ways that had enduring implications for hemispheric affairs.