Good Neighbor Renditions and the Enemy Alien: The Latin American Civilian Internees of World War II and the Integrity of the Good Neighbor Policy

This paper concerns a series of “renditions” of ethnically Japanese, German and Italian internees from their countries of residency in Latin America to the custody of the United States during the Second World War which were enacted through the framework of the Good Neighbor Policy. Despite many revisionist popular and scholarly contentions that the Good Neighbor Policy was an inauthentic application of the rhetoric that it aspired to, which traditionally cast the United States’ relations with Latin America as characterized by an attitude of respectful rapprochement premised on mutual recognition of autonomy, this paper instead uses the case of the “renditions” to argue that Latin America’s diplomatic influence was at least on par with that of the United States during the Good Neighbor Policy, even under the stresses of wartime conditions. However, I also argue that the mutual influence that the Good Neighbor Policy afforded to the United States and Latin America in the context of the “renditions” did not universally benefit Latin American civilians, such as those internees held as a consequence of these policies