La corrección como principio de legitimidad: intervención, hegemonía y desarrollo en la relación Estados Unidos–América Latina

Abstract

This article aims to offer a genealogical reading of the relationship between the United States and Latin America by shifting the analytical focus from the conventional categories of intervention, hegemony, and development toward the historical problem of the legitimation of power. Methodologically, the study adopts a genealogical perspective inspired by Michel Foucault and engages with critical political economy and dependency theory through a long-term historical reconstruction. Rather than treating these categories as alternative strategies, sequential phases, or normatively opposed approaches, it argues that they function as variable intensities of a single principle of correction through which thresholds of governability, rationality, and political responsibility are administered and evaluated. The analysis shows that this regime of correction does not originate in U.S. foreign policy, but in internal technologies of government within the modern-capitalist order, where self-government, economic discipline, and republican legitimacy were early and tightly articulated. From this perspective, Latin America is not approached as a peripheral or derivative arena, but as a central historical field for the experimentation, stabilization, and legitimation of these practices from the nineteenth century to the present. The article concludes that the persistence of development, hegemony, and intervention as legitimate languages of hemispheric power does not reflect stable doctrinal coherence, but rather the durability of a normative criterion that allows the exercise of power to be graduated without appearing arbitrary, and that contemporary dynamics represent a reconfiguration of this regime marked by the intensification of sanctioning registers.