<P> The Ostend Manifesto of 1854 was a proposal circulated by American diplomats that proposed the United States offer to purchase Cuba from Spain, while implying that the U.S. should declare war if Spain refused . Nothing came of it . Diplomatically, the US was content to see the island remain in Spanish hands so long as it did not pass to a stronger power such as Britain or France . </P> <P> The United States tried to bring an early end to the War of the Pacific in 1879, mainly because of US business interests in Peru, but also because its leaders worried that the United Kingdom would take economic control of the region through Chile . Peace negotiations failed when a stipulation required Chile to return the conquered lands . Chileans suspected the new US initiative was tainted with a pro-Peruvian bias . As a result, relations between Chile and the United States took a turn for the worse . Chile instead asked that the United States remain neutral and the United States, unable to match Chilean naval power, backed down . </P> <P> US Secretary of State, James G. Blaine, created the Big Brother policy in the 1880s, aiming to rally Latin American nations behind US leadership and to open Latin American markets to U.S. traders . Blaine served as United States Secretary of State in 1881 in the cabinet of President James Garfield and again from 1889 to 1892 in the cabinet of President Benjamin Harrison . As part of the policy, Blaine arranged for and lead as the first president the First International Conference of American States in 1889 . Blaine went on to live for a few years in Mexico following his success in their relations . </P> <P> The Venezuelan crisis of 1895 occurred over Venezuela's longstanding dispute with the United Kingdom about the territory of Essequibo and Guayana Esequiba, which Britain claimed as part of British Guiana and Venezuela saw as Venezuelan territory . As the dispute became a crisis, the key issue became Britain's refusal to include the territory east of the "Schomburgk Line", in the proposed international arbitration, which a surveyor had drawn half a century earlier as a boundary between Venezuela and the former Dutch territory of British Guiana . By December 17, 1895, President Grover Cleveland delivered an address to the United States Congress reaffirming the Monroe Doctrine and its relevance to the dispute . The crisis ultimately saw the Britain Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, accept the United States' intervention to force arbitration of the entire disputed territory and tacitly accept the United States' right to intervene under the Monroe Doctrine . A tribunal convened in Paris in 1898 to decide the matter, and in 1899, awarded the bulk of the disputed territory to British Guiana . For the first time, the Anglo - Venezuelan boundary dispute asserted for the first time a more outward - looking American foreign policy, particularly in the Americas, marking the United States as a world power . This was the earliest example of modern interventionism under the Monroe Doctrine, in which the U.S. exercised its claimed prerogatives in the Americas . </P>

Why has the united states played such a prominent role in latin america and the caribbean