The Weight of Ideology in the Attitude of Latin American Countries Toward the United States

There is an expectation that the ideological position of ruling parties in Latin America predicts the attitude of its government toward the United States. In this sense, leftist governments would be hostile to Americans, while right-wing governments would be friendly. The proposal of this paper is to use data on the coincidence of votes of United States with 17 Latin American countries (Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela) in the General Assembly of the United Nations, in contrast with the position of the ruling party in the left-right scale, as evaluated by parliamentarians from other parties in each country. From these data, the paper employs statistical analysis and checks the correlation between the variables, in order to answer the expectations about the weight of ideology in the attitude of Latin American countries toward the United States.