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1. Introduction
The Monroe Doctrine was originally formulated in 1823 as a US foreign policy principle of non-intervention of Europe in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere, but in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century it was redefined in relation to both the hemispheric policy of Pan-Americanism and the expansionist and interventionist policies of the US in Central America and the Caribbean. Indeed, it became a central subject of controversy among international lawyers across the Americas alongside the proliferation of supporters and anti-imperialist critics of the doctrine in this period. Within the broader Latin American anti-imperialist traditions, a distinct legal and diplomatic trend emerged between 1880 and 1933 that was especially concerned with the nature and application of the Monroe Doctrine as an elastic and flexible principle to legitimize US interventions in the region. International law and social science scholarship have largely overlooked this specific tradition. The purpose of this article is to explore the rise of a Latin American anti-imperialist legal tradition and its derivations in Argentina, Mexico, and Cuba. In particular, it assesses legal critiques of the Monroe Doctrine constructed by Carlos Pereyra (Mexico), Isidro Fabela (Mexico), Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring (Cuba), Roque Sáenz Peña (Argentina), and Vicente Quesada (Argentina) and their implications for current debates about US exceptionalism and elastic behaviour in international law and organizations, especially since 2001. The article argues that by denouncing the Monroe Doctrine and early notions of US legal exceptionalism, these jurists generated the grounds for the formation of a new revisionist Latin American legal sensibility, one that proposed an enduring regional defensive approach and a pioneering critique of US exceptionalism.
In the context of the Seventh Pan-American Conference (1933) held in Montevideo, the principles of non-intervention, sovereign equality, and state independence were famously institutionalized. This achievement has typically been portrayed as a direct derivation of the debates over the codification of American international law within the Inter-American System.1 However, this article argues that this Latin American anti-imperialist legal tradition, which gained prominence following the Mexican Revolution and reached its peak in the 1920s, made a pioneering contribution to the development of anti-interventionist legal approaches in the region, anticipating the achievements of Montevideo before they became central within the Pan-American Conferences. Although the Montevideo Conference contributed...