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The United States and Latin America Since the End of the Nineteenth Century

By Carlos Alberto Contreras

Published as “United States Policy toward Latin America Since 1945” in Modern America

Examined: A Reader, edited by Jerry Baydo (National Social Science Press, 2003)

In order to fully understand the complexities of U.S. policy toward Latin America in the modern

era, it is important to have a general sense of the patterns that were established since the end of

the nineteenth century. Indeed most of the flashpoints of the Cold War era in this hemisphere,

from the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba to the Iran-Contra affair in Nicaragua, trace their roots to

the patterns that were established at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th

century. It is during that period that the die is cast in terms of U.S. policy toward the region.

From that period forward, the emphasis of U.S. policy toward the region will shift according to

the political winds of the time, but the essence of U.S. policy toward Latin America, namely, that

of protecting and promoting U.S. economic and strategic interests, will remain constant. What

we will see during the Cold War will, in many ways, be a continuation of the relationships

established at the turn of the 20th century. One of the overarching themes of U.S. policy toward

Latin America will be its quest for stability in the region, whether for the sake of protecting its

economic interests, as a barrier to European intrigue in the early part of the 20th century, or to

ward off Communist influence, whether real or imagined, during the Cold War. Before delving

into a detailed analysis of U. S. policy toward Latin America after 1945 then, what follows is a

brief overview of the United States and Latin America during those formative years.

The US has played an active role in the hemisphere, promoting and protecting its

economic and political interests since the end of the 19th century, particularly after 1898 when

the U.S. war with Spain solidified American hegemony in the region. In international relations,

hegemony denotes a preponderant influence in a particular region. In addition to dominating a

region, a hegemonic power will also establish and enforce the “rules of the game.” If less

powerful nations in that region challenge those rules, or seek a path that diverges from those

rules, hegemonic powers have historically, through a variety of means, reserved for themselves

the “right” to “discipline” those wayward nations. In the Western hemisphere, the United States

emerged as the undisputed hegemonic power at the end of the 19th century, a fact laden with all

sorts of consequences for its less powerful Latin American neighbors. In the course of the

twentieth century, the U.S. has pursued its economic and strategic interests in the Americas with

little interference from powers outside of the hemisphere. Indeed, the fate of many of the smaller

Latin American countries, especially those closer to the United States, depended on decisions

made in Washington. Sometimes the interests of both would dovetail, as they would in the

1990’s when U.S. policymakers and the elite of most Latin American countries pursued policies

of economic integration through frameworks such as the North American Free Trade Agreement

(NAFTA), or the Free Trade of the Americas initiative (FTAA). When they did dovetail,

relations between the U.S. and Latin America would be relatively free of conflict as they worked

to achieve a common goal for the hemisphere. However, when Latin American interests

diverged from the U.S. vision for the hemisphere, as they often did during the Cold War,

relations between the U.S. and Latin America were often conflictive. That is to say, when Latin

American nations diverged from the U.S. prescribed “rules of the game,” they incurred the wrath

of the United States government. As we shall see below, in a classic example of the relationship

between hegemonic powers and smaller and less powerful nations existing in its “sphere of

interest,” when countries like Guatemala, Cuba, or Chile put into place development policies that

U.S. officials perceived as counter to the interests of the United States, the U.S. government

brought its power to bear and sought to reverse those development policies, by force if

necessary.

In 1898 the last islands in the hands of Spain’s shrinking empire became part of the

emerging U.S. empire. The U.S. had declared war on Spain and invaded Puerto Rico, Cuba and

the Philippines. Though cast in terms of “liberating” the peoples of those islands, the Spanish

American war was fundamentally about securing hegemony in the region, that is, promoting and

protecting United States strategic and economic interests. Indeed the foreign policy goals of the

McKinley administration had been established in his 1896 presidential campaign: spurring

overseas commerce and “civilizing” other peoples around the world. When “that splendid little

war,” as Ambassador John Hay called it in a letter to Theodore Roosevelt, was over, Puerto Rico,

the Philippines and Guam had become U.S. dependencies. Cuba was occupied militarily for

three years and, though not formally incorporated into the U.S. empire, the U.S. continued to

exert hegemony over Cuba for decades, mainly through the Platt Amendment. This amendment

was inserted into the Cuban constitution by American occupying forces, giving the U.S. the right

to intervene in Cuban affairs for the protection of “life, property, and liberty.” The U.S. also

secured a naval base in Guantanamo that it continues to hold to this day.

Having secured the annexation of Hawaii in the same year at the behest of U.S.

entrepreneurs such as Sanford Dole, the United States was in the midst of an ambitious

expansionist process that mirrored the classic text on naval strategy that was being outlined by

Navy Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan. In The Influence of Sea Power, Mahan crystallized what

many policymakers had been arguing, namely, that military and economic power go hand in

hand and that it was vital to the United States to have a powerful two ocean navy, a trans-

isthmian canal, and military bases to protect the sea lanes of communication and transportation

(SLOCTs). Having control over these shipping lanes, the reasoning went, would in turn increase

U.S. commerce, and as a consequence increase national wealth. Commodore Robert Schufeldt, a

precursor of Mahan, argued for the importance of developing a powerful two ocean navy, with

the U.S. merchant marine and the U.S. Navy as “joint apostles.” Mahan further argued that

because the United States was a late comer to the acquisition of an empire (compared to

European powers that had been busily carving up Asia and Africa), the U.S. should make up for

lost time and seize key maritime straights and canal routes in the Americas. Having secured

hegemony in the Caribbean after the war with Spain in 1898, U.S. policymakers then turned their

attention to securing a trans-isthmian canal, stripping Colombia of its province of Panama in

1903 in order to have full control over the SLOCTs, and everything that that implied.

Construction of the Panama Canal signaled the last stage in a process that would allow

the United States to have full control over the SLOCTs, have unfettered access to Latin

American raw materials, secure new markets for American products, and secure new sources of

investment for U.S. companies. Congressman Charles Miller of California had said a few years

earlier that Latin America would become “our India,” referring to the British colonization of that

region and the advantages that it had for England. Copper from Chile, nitrates from Peru, tin

from Bolivia, rubber and sugar from Brazil, coffee and cacao from Colombia, and oil from

Venezuela, to name but a few products, could now quickly make their way to either coast of the

United States. In addition, with the active support of State Department officials, American

manufactured goods such as machinery and capital goods could now flow much more freely

throughout Latin America. And just as importantly, new areas for direct foreign investment by

U.S. firms were being brought into the American economic orbit. Some examples of these firms

were companies that specialized in building infrastructure projects such as railroads, dams, oil

wells, and deep port facilities as well as mining companies that specialized in tin, aluminum and

oil extraction- all products that the expanding U.S. economy demanded in ever higher amounts.

By the early twentieth century, the United States was ready to project its power throughout the

Western hemisphere over the next century.

American hegemony thus secured, the process of economic expansion into Latin America

intensified, with the newly revamped State Department actively supporting the expansion of U.S.

firms into the region. American copper companies expanded their operations in Mexico and

Chile. With the active support of the State Department in negotiating contracts for drilling

rights, U.S. oil companies like Standard Oil (later Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Conoco, among

others, after it was broken up), expanded throughout Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, and

Colombia. By the 1920’s, U.S. oil companies had overtaken their European counterparts like

Shell and British Petroleum. Financial institutions such as Chase Manhattan Bank, the City

National Bank (later Citibank), and J.P. Morgan also greatly extended their interests. And lastly,

fruit companies such as the United Fruit Company (which later changed its name to Chiquita

Banana after their main export product), became major economic entities throughout the circum-

Caribbean in countries such as Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Cuba. With

U.S. officials routinely pressuring Latin American governments to grant concessions to U.S.

companies instead of to their British or German competitors, American corporations such as the

United Fruit Company (UFCO) came to own thousands of acres of land as well as railroad

networks, telegraph and telephone grids, fleets of refrigerated ships and even port facilities.

Indeed, more than mere fruit companies, they were rapidly becoming vertically integrated

multinational corporations, owning not only the lands on which bananas were produced, but the

refrigerated ships on which they were shipped, the port facilities from which those ships were

loaded, the railroads on which those bananas were brought to port, the telegraph lines on which

communications concerning market conditions were carried, and even the energy plants that

produced the electricity that the companies needed. UFCO, the largest and most well known of

these companies, owned so much land and infrastructure throughout the circum-Caribbean, that

one of its nicknames was “the octopus” because it had its “tentacles” everywhere. U.S.

entrepreneurs came to have so much economic power that their political power was inevitable.

In some of the Central American republics, they were a de facto part of the ruling alliance, along

with the landed elite and the militaries of those countries. Indeed, the name “banana republics”

comes from the way that American entrepreneurs in banana producing nations like Honduras

routinely bribed government officials, secured concessions through shady deals, and even

financed insurrections against governments that pursued policies not to their liking.

With this growing U.S. economic power in the region in the first decades of the twentieth

century, came the flexing of even more political power, often through military means. Through a

combination of dollar diplomacy and gunboat diplomacy, American economic and political

power expanded even more throughout the region. U.S. companies routinely appealed to the

U.S. government for protection when their interests were threatened. The expansion of sugar,

coffee and banana plantations perpetuated a system of huge inequalities where a few at the top

owned the vast majority of land, and those at the bottom, often people who had been squeezed

off of their lands, barely eked out a living. These inequalities would often lead to violence,

especially during economic downturns. When this happened, the U.S. Marines were often being

dispatched to Latin America to “restore order”. These military interventions were justified under

the Roosevelt Corollary. The Roosevelt Corollary had been a classic statement of the United

States’ intentions to establish and enforce the “rules of the game.” Proclaimed in his 1904 State

of the Union Address, it stated that “chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a

general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately

require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of

the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in

flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police

power.” Whereas the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 had proclaimed a “hands off” to Europe of the

Western Hemisphere, the Roosevelt Corollary of 1904 would turn the United States military into

a hemispheric policeman in protection of U.S. and European economic interests (the protection

of European interests was also made explicit so that European governments would have no

excuse to invade Latin America in the protection of their economic interests). Through this

unilateral proclamation, the United States reserved unto itself the “right” to discipline Latin

American nations when required by international finance and commerce.

By the time of the Great Depression, American companies had accumulated huge

investments in the region and the “footprint” of the United States in the region was deep, wide

and readily recognizable. By 1929, 40 percent of all U.S. investments abroad were in Latin

America. And because U.S. economic expansion went hand in hand with military expansion,

from 1898 to 1934 there were over 30 military interventions into Latin America. Major General

Smedley Darlington Butler of the United States Marine Corps, who led many of these military

interventions, issued a scathing critique of this brand of “open door imperialism” in the region in

1933. Upset at having been passed over for the position of commandant of the U.S. Marine

Corps, he let loose with this explosive and revealing statement: “I spent thirty-three years…

being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was

a racketeer for capitalism…I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of

Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American

sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City

[Bank] boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American

republics for the benefit of Wall Street.”1 By the 1930’s the entire circum-Caribbean had been

effectively converted into “an American lake,” in the words of U.S. policymakers, and “open

door imperialism” as Congressman Charles Miller had alluded to, was an accomplished fact.

Though democracy was one of the stated goals of the numerous military interventions by

the United States in Latin America, far from promoting democracy, the military interventions

actually retarded it. To U.S. policymakers however, framing the debates about military

interventions around promoting democracy and “uplifting” oppressed peoples imbued U.S.

policy with a higher mission, projecting the image of moral clarity. As Woodrow Wilson said

during World War I, he wanted to “make the world safe for democracy.” Regarding Latin

America, he said that he wanted to “teach those South Americans to elect good men.” But

stripped of its rhetoric, U.S. policy toward Latin America was designed to protect and promote

U.S. economic and strategic interests. In fact, the U.S. came to prefer “aristocratic republics,”

nations that would be ruled by the tight-knit ruling alliance of the nation’s elite and its military.

It was those governments, with their emphasis on law and order that could from the view of

Washington, best guarantee the stability necessary to guarantee investments, especially those of

the United States.

As a result, the military’s hand in governance in Latin America was strengthened during

the first decades of the twentieth century because of U.S. support for those regimes, just as it

1 Lester Langley, The Banana Wars: United States Intervention in the Caribbean, 1898-1934 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2002), p. 213.

would be during the Cold War. It was the military, after all, that was best equipped to maintain

law and order and guarantee stability. In a typical military intervention, the United States would

come into a country, depose a ruler, find interlocutors among the elite of the country in question,

take control of the customs houses, occupy the country until “order” was established, supervise

new elections, and create and train a local national guard which it would often leave in power

upon leaving. In this way, some ambitious members of the National Guard would seize power

and often never relinquish it. These men would then assume dictatorial powers and the United

States would back them as long as they could keep “order” and protect U.S. economic interests.

This is the way that Rafael Trujillo, who was immortalized in Mario Vargas Llosa’s classic novel

The Feast of the Goat, seized power in the Dominican Republic and ruled with an iron fist from

1930 to 1961. Trujillo became one of the classic “pro-U.S. dictators” that would be one of the

U.S.’ staunchest allies through the second World War and well into the Cold War. Trujillo

would even proclaim himself to be “the foremost anti-Communist of the hemisphere,” winning

accolades in Washington because of it.

Anastasio Somoza, who came also to power in Nicaragua in this way during the early

1930’s, provides another example of the emergence of “pro-U.S. dictators” who would go on to

become staunch U.S. allies in the following decades. In the 1920’s Nicaragua had been occupied

directly by U.S. forces and converted into a protectorate of the United States. In order to

guarantee stability upon its departure, the U.S. created the Nicaraguan National Guard and

appointed Anastasio Somoza as its commander. The U.S. marines finally withdrew from

Nicaragua in 1933 and Somoza seized power to himself in 1936. Somoza would then rule with

an iron fist until his death in 1956. And after that, the Somoza dynasty continued through his

sons Luis, then Anastasio “Tachito” Jr., until 1979 when “Tachito” was overthrown by the

Sandinistas. Anastasio Somoza became a staunch ally of the United States. As to critiques of

the way that Somoza ruled with an iron fist while enriching his family and cronies, FDR is said

to have quipped about Somoza, “he may be a son of a bitch, but at least he’s our son of a bitch”

during a visit by Somoza to Washington in 1940. Fulgencio Batista, the dictator Cuba who

dominated politics directly or indirectly from 1933 to 1959, also gained power in this way. He

too became a staunch ally of the U.S., ruling Cuba with an iron fist with the support of the

United States until he too was overthrown, in this instance by Fidel Castro in 1959.

As the marines were departing from Central America and the Caribbean in the 1930’s,

power was being transferred to “strong men” like Somoza, Trujillo, and Batista who would keep

in place policies favorable to U.S. investors, the elite within their countries, and very

importantly, to U.S. policymakers. U.S. interests would just as effectively be served with men

like these in power. This is the context for the Good Neighbor Policy, which FDR enunciated in

1933 arguing that “the definite policy of the United States from now on is one opposed to armed

intervention.” While the Good Neighbor Policy was certainly a departure from the numerous

U.S. military interventions launched before 1933, the pursuit of U.S. interests in the region did

not change. By this time, hegemony in the full sense of the word had been secured, especially in

Central America and the Caribbean. In many ways, direct U.S. interventions were no longer

necessary. Men like Batista of Cuba, Somoza of Nicaragua, Ubico of Guatemala, and other

“clients” of the United States were firmly pro-U.S., putting into place policies that U.S. investors

and U.S. policymakers favored. In addition, as World War II loomed in the late 1930’s, the

Roosevelt administration needed close allies in this hemisphere. The need for hemispheric

collaboration became increasingly urgent by the close of the decade and it continued to cultivate

the support of the Latin American militaries.

As the U.S. entered the Second World War, the Latin American nations allied themselves

firmly with the United States. Indeed, the pro-U.S. dictators who had gained power with U.S.

support were the first to join. Some nations even provided small forces, but the largest

contribution by far was in joining with the United States in forging new national security

arrangements to protect the hemisphere from outside threats, and by providing the United States

with a whole host of agricultural products and raw materials such as oil, copper, iron ore, tin,

aluminum, and other raw materials necessary to wage war and to keep U.S. industry rolling.

Mexico’s contribution to the war effort was a whole host of raw materials including oil, copper,

iron ore, as well as an air force squadron it dispatched to the Philippines. It also contributed over

300,000 agricultural workers known as “braceros” to U.S. fields in order to keep U.S.

agricultural production going as the men who had previously worked there went off to war.

Mexico was not a pro-U.S. dictatorship like its Central American and Caribbean neighbors, in

fact its 1938 expropriation of U.S. oil companies that refused to abide by a Mexican Supreme

Court decision almost caused it to be invaded by the United States. But the prerogatives of the

looming war forced cooler heads to prevail and Mexico too became a strong ally of the United

States. Even the Walt Disney Company pitched in to promote this new hemispheric

collaboration with a new animated film “The Three Caballeros”, where a Brazilian duck and a

Mexican rooster join forces with the American Donald Duck.

The Cold War

As World War II ended and the new dangers of the Cold War were becoming apparent to

U.S. policymakers, U.S. officials continued to place great importance on stability, hemispheric

collaboration, and the solid ties between the United States and the Latin American militaries.

These patterns would then spill into the Cold War, when the U.S. concern for “containing”

Communism would lead U.S. policymakers to side even more with “strong men” like the

military dictators who had solidified their power during the Good Neighbor Policy. By ruling

with an iron fist, they had already proven that they could be counted on to keep order. By

crushing revolts from below in the 1920’s and 1930’s from folks who chafed at the policies these

dictators were putting into place, they had already shown their penchant for guaranteeing

stability. By decapitating armed movements for “National Liberation” like the one the

Nicaraguan radical nationalist Augusto Cesar Sandino was waging against the U.S. military

occupation of Nicaragua in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, military “strong men” like Somoza

had already shown their dislike for radical nationalists. And by joining with the United States in

its struggle against fascism during World War II, they had already demonstrated their loyalty to

the United States. So, from the perspective of Washington, as the Cold War intensified after

1947, who best to keep Latin America firmly on the side of the United States and keep

Communists at bay?

After 1947, U.S. policymakers began to see any opposition to the free market capitalism

which it envisioned for the hemisphere as “creeping Communism.” Throughout Latin America

in the 20th century, there had always been sporadic resistance to free market capitalism. The

Mexican Revolution, for example, that exploded in 1910 drew widespread support from peasants

who had been squeezed off of their lands as sugar plantations, for example, expanded as Mexico

opened itself to world flows of trade and investment from the 1870’s to 1910. Its new

constitution of 1917 sought to reverse those injustices through a massive program of land reform

(away from large plantations and to its numerous landless peasants). It was also deeply

nationalist, arguing that the subsoil rights to oil, copper, and other minerals that had fallen under

foreign hands, would now revert back to the Mexican state and that Mexico itself would develop

them. The Mexican constitution of 1917 would serve as a model for other Latin American

nations that had had similar experience to Mexico’s. After the Great Depression, many more

Latin American countries (or sectors within those countries) rejected untrammeled free market

capitalism and its accompanying “open door imperialism” because of the devastating

consequences the Depression had on their countries. Because they were mainly raw materials

producers, the collapse of coffee, rubber, oil and other commodity prices devastated their

economies, leading more Latin American countries to put into place policies of economic

nationalism. Some larger countries like Mexico, Argentina and Brazil, because of their size and

power, had more leverage when their policies came under attack. When Mexico nationalized

American and British oil companies in 1938 for example, it did not suffer an invasion by the

home country of those companies that sought to “roll back” those policies, like Guatemala would

in 1954. Mexico was able to take advantage of its size, its numerous raw materials, its 2,000

mile border with the United States, and the looming second world war to its advantage and to

continue putting into place its economic nationalist policies. But smaller countries like

Guatemala with neither the size nor the power of Mexico, would ultimately adhere to

Thucydides’ dictum that “large nations do what they want and small nations accept what they

must.” Following Mexico’s lead, Guatemala attempted to put into place policies of land reform

and economic nationalism that were more “reformist” than “radical.” But by 1954, U.S.

policymakers viewed all deviations from U.S. led free market capitalism as “creeping

Communism” and even Guatemala’s relatively mild policies were too “pink” for U.S.

policymakers.

Efforts on the part of Guatemala’s government in 1954 to put into place a program of

land reform and to reign in the power of the United Fruit Company (it would later change its

name later to “Chiquita” Banana) would eventually bring about the first “regime change” of the

post-war era, and usher in the Cold War for Latin America. It is necessary to spend a bit more

time to fully understand the dynamic of this episode because it inaugurates the Cold War for

Latin America and sets the tone for what is to come in the hemisphere from 1954 until the fall of

the Berlin Wall in 1989. In a pattern that would be seen throughout Latin America, Guatemala

had been incorporated into the world economy on the basis of its agricultural exports, most

notably bananas and coffee. The advent of railroads and refrigerated ships allowed nations like

Guatemala to specialize in the production of these agricultural products. Continuing the trend

discussed above, multinational corporations came to have an enormous influence in the economy

of the region. Political control was held by a tightly knit landed oligarchy buttressed by the

military and foreign investors. In the case of Guatemala, a series of military dictators had

effective control of the country from the 1870’s all the way up to 1944. They were favored by

the elite and foreign investors because of their ability to “maintain order.” These dictators

provided the owners of the plantations, whether Guatemalan or American, with an “ideal

investment climate” by having those plantations pay little by way of export and import taxes,

outlawing labor unions, and when necessary sending in the troops to “keep a lid on things.”

When the banana workers at the United Fruit Company demanded higher wages, General Ubico,

who dominated Guatemalan politics from 1931 to 1944, said that he didn’t want them to get

higher wages because of the example that it would set throughout Guatemala.

The United Fruit Company, which had been founded in 1899 with the consolidation of

two smaller companies, came to be the largest landowner in Guatemala, and a major landowner

throughout the circum-Caribbean. While steadily expanding the UFCO’s ownership of land in

Guatemala and the rest of the Central American isthmus, Sam “the banana man” Zemurray was

expanding the company’s reach into transportation networks. By the early 1950’s the United

Fruit Company controlled 96% of Guatemala’s railroad grid, Guatemala’s only Atlantic harbor at

Puerto Barrios, and Guatemala’s only telegraph and telephone lines. It was also Guatemala’s

largest landowner and largest employer. It owned 566,000 acres of land, and employed over

40,000 people. It was, in effect, a “state within a state.”

The pro-U.S. General Ubico was ousted in 1944 by a group of nationalist junior officers

who had a different world view than Ubico and the dictators who had preceded him. Elections

were held shortly thereafter and a university professor named Juan Jose Arevalo emerged as

president, beginning a decade of social reform for Guatemala. Modeling their new constitution

of 1945 after the Mexican constitution, he and Jacobo Arbenz, who succeeded Arevalo in 1950,

began putting into place new labor legislation and a program of land reform to begin to

ameliorate Guatemala’s inequalities. Workers were emboldened by the new labor code which

gave them rights they had never had before, such as the right to unionize and strike. The United

Fruit Company, on the other hand, as Guatemala’s largest employer began to openly criticize the

new labor code as “bad for business.” Echoing Cardenas’ program of “Mexico for the Mexicans”

and Vargas’ “Brazil for the Brazilians,” Arbenz argued that he wanted to convert Guatemala

“from a dependent country with a semi-colonial economy, to an economically independent

country.” He wanted to reduce Guatemala’s dependence on the United Fruit Company and to

diversify Guatemala away from producing just bananas and coffee. To this end, he began

building a new electric power plant to free Guatemala from its reliance on U.S. owned power

companies. He also began building a new highway connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific to free

Guatemala from UFCO’s control of the rail grid. He also began to put into place policies to

build “national” industry, to free Guatemala from its reliance on foreign investors.

The United Fruit Company’s as well as the United States State Department’s opposition

to Arbenz’s policies was steadily growing as Arbenz implemented his reformist policies, but

what assured his downfall was his implementation of his program of land reform. In 1953

Arbenz announced that in order to begin tackling the problem of so many landless people in

Guatemala, he would begin expropriating some of the unused lands of the country’s large

landowners. UFCO being the largest landowner, would be the most affected. Almost 40% of

UFCO’s unused land would be expropriated by the government, with compensation coming in

the form of 25 year bonds bearing a 3% interest rate. The valuation of the property would be

done on the basis of the value of the land declared on their 1952 taxes. UFCO had deliberately

undervalued its property in order to pay as little in taxes to begin with, so when the Guatemalan

government offered them $627,000 as compensation, they argued those properties were worth

$15.8 million and that they were being “robbed.” The United Fruit Company was intent on

having Arbenz’s legislation reversed not only because its property in Guatemala was affected,

but because of the precedent that this expropriation might set. After all, UFCO had huge

landholdings throughout the region in nations like Honduras, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Cuba.

UFCO began mounting a public relations blitz in the United States, making the rounds in

Washington and taking out ads in newspapers and magazines accusing the Arbenz government

of being “Communist.” An important factor behind the United Fruit Company’s clout was that it

was very well connected in Washington. For years, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had

been connected to UFCO’s management as executive partner in the law firm of Sullivan and

Cromwell. Sullivan and Cromwell was the law firm that represented United Fruit. In addition,

the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (the CIA), Allen Dulles who also happened to be

John Foster Dulles’ brother, was also a partner at the law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell and had

been billing UFCO since the 1930’s for his visits to Guatemala and his work on their behalf.

The Eisenhower administration, as successive administrations would throughout the Cold

War throughout Latin America, chose to see the push for nationalism and reform in Guatemala

as Communist inspired. Though articulated in the context of Indochina on April 7, 1954, the

framework of the “domino theory” was applied to Guatemala just a couple of months after.

Eisenhower said: “First of all, you have the specific value of a locality in its production of

materials that the world needs. Then you have the possibility that many human beings pass

under a dictatorship that is inimical to the free world. Finally, you have broader considerations

that might follow what you would call the ‘falling domino’ principle. You have a row of

dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the

certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have the beginning of a disintegration

that would have the most profound influences.”2 Policymakers in the Eisenhower administration

believed that the Arbenz government was not yet, but that it soon would be under the domination

of Communists loyal to Moscow. As early as 1950, right after the election of Arbenz, the U.S.

ambassador to Guatemala, John Peurifoy had stated that Arbenz “was not a communist, but he

will certainly do until one comes along.” Vice-president Nixon added later that “Arbenz is not a

Guatemalan president, he is a foreigner manipulated by foreign powers.” The State

Department’s Policy Planning Staff, Louis Halle admitted that "the international Communist

movement is certainly not the cause of the social revolution in Guatemala, but it has made the

same efforts there that it has made everywhere else to harness the revolutionary impulses -

nationalism and social reform alike- and exploit them for its own purpose.” The State department

records show that U.S. officials had no conclusive proof that actual Communist influence in

Guatemala was growing, much less Soviet infiltration, but State Department officials were

convinced that Arbenz would be “soft” on Communism. So, U.S. officials argued that to prevent

actual Communism from gaining ground, the Arbenz government had to be crushed. This

reasoning would pervade Washington’s thinking throughout the Cold War and would solidify the

pattern of coddling military dictators throughout Latin America, who quickly learned to use this

Communist paranoia to their advantage.

In a decision that would be repeated in Cuba in 1961 and in Nicaragua in the 1980’s, the

Eisenhower administration ruled out overt action, a direct invasion by U.S. troops, in favor of

2 David F Schmitz, Thank God They're on Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1921-1965 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999), p. 199.

covert action, a secret invasion by proxy. Indeed, utilizing covert action would become the

standard approach employed by U.S. policymakers during the Cold War when attempting to

bring down governments that violated the “rules of the game.” Eisenhower’s presidential order

called for “organizing a counter-movement, capable of using force if necessary, based in a

cooperative neighboring republic.” The task of recruiting, training, and arming this “third” force

that was to bring down the Arbenz government fell to the CIA. The “cooperative neighboring

republic” from which the operation was launched was Honduras, which was ruled by a pro-U.S.

military regime.

Once Arbenz was overthrown in June of 1954, Col. Carlos Castillo Armas, whom the

CIA had recruited to lead the operation, promptly proceeded to “roll back” Arbenz’s policies.

But before he could be formally recognized by the United States, he needed to establish his

democratic credentials. So he called for elections, banned all political parties from participating,

staffed all of the polling booths with soldiers and promptly “won” a plebiscite by 486,000 yes

votes to 400 no votes. He immediately reversed the land reforms of the Arbenz government,

outlawed the banana workers union, outlawed the Guatemalan Communist party, jailed his

political opponents and even banned such “subversive” books as Les Miserables. The United

States immediately recognized him and began providing economic and military assistance

totaling over $46 million in three years. On a visit to the region in 1955, Vice President Nixon

was sufficiently impressed by Castillo Armas to declare that he “was a good man with good

intentions” and that Castillo Armas wanted the U.S. to “tell me what you want me to do and I

will do it.” Nixon then hailed the Guatemalan operation a success, arguing that “the first concern

of the United States with the Central American republics related to the maintenance of their

political stability.” He then went on to compare Castillo Armas favorably with another client of

the U.S., Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua, who also, “really desires to do what the United States

wants him to do.”3

The status quo in Guatemala was returned, and though Castillo Armas was assassinated

three years later, military governments allied with the oligarchy would rule continuously until the

end of the Cold War, with devastating consequences for Guatemalan civil society. These

military governments, which the United States solidly backed because they were an important

part of U.S. anti-communist goals, unleashed a brutal war on peasants, labor activists, students,

3 Ibid., 197.

and indigenous people. The logic of this anti-communist alliance, which is often referred to as

the “national security doctrine,” identified the Latin American militaries as key allies in the U.S.-

led defense of the “Free World.” The United States would handle any outside threats to the

hemisphere and the Latin American militaries would be responsible for dealing with the “internal

enemies of freedom,” with counter-insurgency being their special role. In this way, as the Cold

War intensified, university students, labor organizers, and peasants, especially indigenous

peasants, all got swept into the vortex of the Cold War. A U.N. commission on Guatemala’s

civil war, convened after the Cold War, documented those atrocities. It found that the

Guatemalan military, and para-military organizations allied with the government with names like

Ojo por Ojo (“An Eye for an Eye”) and Mano Blanca (“White Hand”), were responsible for

ninety percent of the 200,000 people who were killed or “disappeared” during Guatemala’s 35

year civil war. It also found that ninety percent of those 200,000 were unarmed civilians, and

that seventy five percent of them were Maya Indians from the highlands of Guatemala.

Addressing the issue of U.S. collaboration with these military regimes, President Clinton issued a

public apology to the people of Guatemala on a state visit there in March of 1999, stating: “For

the United States, it is important that I state clearly that support for military forces or intelligence

units which engaged in violent and widespread repression of the kind described in the report was

wrong, and the United States must not repeat that mistake.”

As they had with Guatemala, U.S. policymakers would continue to view Latin America

and its perennial struggles with development through the lens of its East-West struggle with the

Soviet Union. By the 1950’s, U.S. officials were already operating under the assumption that in

this hegemonic battle of global proportions, there was going to be a tradeoff between stability

and democracy. Cold War administrations in the United States made the strategic calculation

that dictatorships would be more efficient in combating communism than any other form of

government, democracies included. Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, told

U.S. diplomats in Latin America to “do nothing to offend the dictators, they are the only people

we can depend on.”4 Latin American dictators, many of whom had seized power with U.S.

support in the early decades of the twentieth century, would go on to become Cold Warriors par

excellence while also using the Cold War to solidify their power at home. From Trujillo in the

Dominican Republic, to Perez Jimenez in Venezuela, to the Somozas in Nicaragua, they were

4 Ibid., 185.

openly trying to outdo each other in terms of establishing their anti-communist credentials to

their U.S. patrons. Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua was perhaps the most adept of these dictators

at cultivating allies in the corridors of Washington in order to continue receiving economic and

military aid from the United States and solidify his position in his country. In 1950 he explained

to a U.S. military attaché that he had met the leftist threats at home and that he had put his “foot

firmly on the spark of communism.” Choosing his language carefully, his public

pronouncements always contained statements such as “communism is a cancerous growth which

has to be cut away.” He and his sons who succeeded him after his death were rewarded with

solid support from the United States until the last Somoza, “Tachito,” was overthrown in 1979.

It was perhaps inevitable that from these clientelist relationships, the Latin American

dictatorships became dependent on U.S. military and economic aid. Some would be so

dependent on this type of aid that during the Reagan administration alone, the military

governments of tiny El Salvador received over five billion dollars in military and economic aid.

In the middle of the 1980’s this amounted to over $800,000 per day, at times reaching almost

100% of the central government’s revenue.

The fall of the Arbenz government would send a chilling warning to nationalist leaders

throughout Latin America, and indeed the entire Third World, who thought of pursuing

nationalist policies or development policies that challenged the power of U.S. corporations.

Indeed the Guatemala episode further radicalized entire sectors of Latin America. Nationalist

reformers saw the writing on the wall: reformist governments that put into place measures that

deviated from Washington’s vision for Latin America would be overthrown and replaced by

pliant dictatorships that would return the status quo. Thus, many Latin Americans increasingly

questioned U.S. power and the military dictatorships that it was showing a preference for and

came to embrace more radical solutions to Latin America’s problems. Not least among them

was a young Argentine physician by the name of Ernesto “Che” Guevara who was in Guatemala

as the Arbenz government was being overthrown. “Che” had gravitated to Guatemala because of

Arbenz’s reformist policies, and was promptly thrown into exile as Castillo Armas solidified his

power there. As fate would have it, “Che” was exiled to Mexico, which still fancied itself a

“revolutionary” government and had indeed supported Arbenz’s policies (the Guatemalan

constitution that Arbenz was putting into place had been modeled after Mexico’s). In exile in

Mexico too was another group of young radicals, Fidel Castro, his brother Raul and several

others, who were organizing a return to their homeland to overthrow the pro-U.S. dictator of

Cuba, Fulgencio Batista.

Cuba was another nation that had entered the world economy an agro-exporter, mainly of

sugar, tobacco, and coffee, and whose pattern of development had led to severe inequalities.

When its leaders sought a different path of development to ameliorate those inequalities, it got

swept into the whirlpool of the Cold War. Cuba had attained its “independence” as a result of

the first hegemonic impulses of the United States in the region, and as a result, pro-U.S. military

dictators in alliance with the landed oligarchy had ruled Cuba since it was converted into a

protectorate of the United States. Cuba had even been ruled directly by U.S. military generals

twice, from 1898 to 1902 and from 1906 to 1909. Fidel Castro, “Che” Guevara, and the rest of

the bearded revolutionaries who sailed from Mexico to “liberate” Cuba engaged the Batista

regime in hit and run guerrilla tactics, while cultivating support from students, intellectuals, and

members of the middle class who were critical of the military dictatorship and who resented

Washington’s hegemony in Cuba. They overthrew the Batista regime in 1959, purged the

Batista army, and began to put into place a massive program of land reform and nationalist

policies designed to limit the power that foreign investors had come to have in Cuba. Cuban

landowners and companies such as UFCO and the West Indian Fruit Company whose properties

were affected were to be compensated with interest bearing Cuban currency bonds, with the

valuation of the land to be based on the companies’ 1958 tax returns. As was the case in

Guatemala, the owners had undervalued their landholdings to pay as little in taxes as possible,

and as a result, argued they were being robbed. They also began to publicly raise the specter of

communism. While the program of land reform proceeded, Castro also began a program of

urban reform that included for example, a reduction in electricity and telephone rates, bus fares,

and medicines, all of which also alienated the Cuban business owners as well as the U.S.

multinational corporations that owned the utilities. In order to have support for his nationalist

programs abroad, Cuba began seeking out allies within the “non-aligned” movement, nations

such as Indonesia, Egypt and India that were not allied with either the United States or the Soviet

Union. These nations had been sympathetic to nationalist reformers because of their experience

with European Imperialism. Castro also sought to cultivate support from nations that had been

waging their own “anti-Imperialist” struggles and were undergoing a process of “de-

colonization.” Examples of such countries were the Congo from Belgium, Rhodesia from

England, and Algeria from the French. On a trip to New York in 1960, Castro even met with

American critics of U.S. Imperialism, such as Malcolm X.

A dispute over oil, and an ensuing tit-for-tat with the United States, is what eventually

drove Castro to seek the protection of the Soviet Union. He decided to buy cheaper oil from the

Russians rather than from Venezuelans. When the U.S. oil companies refused to refine this

“red” oil, he expropriated them. The U.S. retaliated and imposed a boycott on Cuban sugar.

Castro then retaliated and expropriated U.S. owned nickel mines, sugar mills and utilities. With

the U.S. market now closed, Castro began selling sugar to the Soviet Union and purchasing

technology and equipment from them. By the beginning of 1961 the United States had broken

diplomatic relations with Cuba and had imposed a total economic embargo on Cuba that would

last into the 21st century. The CIA was also pursuing a variety of efforts to assassinate Fidel

Castro. A 1975 Senate Select Committee on Governmental Operations disclosed at least eight

CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro from putting explosives in his trademark cigar, to bombing

the Cuban delegation at the U.N., to poisoning his wet suit. In April of 1961, the Kennedy

administration gave the go ahead to the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, a proxy force of 1,500

anti-Castro Cubans that would be organized, trained and armed by the CIA. This invasion of

Cuba, though a spectacular failure that Kennedy later regretted, combined with the assassination

attempts, and other attempts at sabotaging the Cuban economy led Castro to a military alliance

with the Soviet Union. By this time he had declared himself communist, but by then, the point

was moot. In what would become of the most dangerous flashpoints of the Cold War, in mid-

1962 a U.S. spy plane took photographs of nuclear missile installations under construction in

Cuba. By October, a U-2 had taken a clear picture of a missile. President Kennedy issued an

ultimatum to the Soviets to remove them at once. The Soviets agreed to remove them after

obtaining a secret agreement from the United States that it would not invade Cuba. Despite

continued CIA attempts on Castro’s life and sporadic attempts to sabotage the Cuban economy

by attempting to introduce a virus to the Cuban countryside that would kill its coffee plants, for

example, the direct military threat from the United States had ended.

The Alliance for Progress, announced with great fanfare in 1961 in response to the Cuban

revolution, seemed to herald a new policy thrust for the United States. Arguing that “those who

make reform impossible will make revolution inevitable,” the Kennedy administration designed

this program to create “prosperous democracies” that would be “socially just.” To this end, the

United States spent about twenty billion dollars to try to reduce revolutionary pressures by

stimulating economic development and political reform. In the end, the Latin American

economies targeted grew little, the social inequalities were never ameliorated, and instead of

promoting democracy, six military men overthrew democratically elected governments during

the Kennedy administration alone, sixteen by the close of the Alliance for Progress in the 1970’s.

The reality was, that transforming those societies and making them more “just” proved more

difficult than providing their leaders with weapons and counter-insurgency training. Kennedy’s

anti-communist crusade in Latin America, a region which he referred to as “the most dangerous

area in the world,” ultimately led Kennedy and successive administrations to back military

regimes in the same way and for the same reasons as before the Alliance for Progress.

In but one example of the way that the U.S. anti-communist crusade led to the mutilation

of the Alliance for Progress’ original goals, Brazilian generals overthrew the Goulart

administration with the knowledge and collaboration of the U.S. ambassador and the U.S.

military attaché in 1964. President Goulart had been making overtures toward urban workers

and contemplating land reform. The military, fearing that Goulart would allow a coalition of

peasants and workers, moved to “eliminate the danger of subversion and communism” and

seized control of the country. The U.S. ambassador would later say that it was “the single most

decisive victory for freedom in the mid-twentieth century.” In a private interview, Robert

Kennedy would say that without the military coup, “Brazil would have gone Communist.”

In Chile, a socialist president, Salvador Allende, was democratically elected in 1970.

Upon his election, Henry Kissinger, then head of the National Security Council under president

Nixon, said “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the

irresponsibility of its own people.” Before Allende even took office, the U.S. based International

Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) offered one million dollars in support of the CIA’s efforts to

prevent Allende from even taking office. The U.S. copper giants, Anaconda and Kennecott were

fearful of the nationalization of the copper industry and also mounted a bitter campaign against

Allende. In Washington, there was never a question that Allende would have to be removed

from office. The decision was made to apply economic pressure on Chile to “make the economy

scream,” in Nixon’s words, as well to promote a military coup to take out Allende. The strategy

worked. In 1973, General Augusto Pinochet led a military coup, vowing to “extirpate the cancer

of Marxism.” As Pinochet solidified his power, over 3,000 Chileans were killed or disappeared

in the aftermath of the military coup, including the American Charles Horman who was made

famous in the film Missing. Recently declassified documents at the Gerald Ford Library reveal

that in a meeting between Kissinger and Gen. Pinochet, Kissinger apologized to Pinochet for any

hiccups of protest coming from the U.S. Congress and reassured the general that despite the

human rights abuses he would still retain full and unconditional U.S. support.

The old patterns of coddling dictators reasserted themselves and led to a vicious cycle of

violence for Latin America, belying the notion that there was anything “cold” about the Cold

War. The social injustices that were being perpetuated by U.S. backed dictators fanned the “anti-

Imperialist” movements and movements for “national liberation,” and ultimately produced a

violent explosion in the 1970’s and 1980’s, especially in Central America. As guerrilla

movements such as the Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation (FMLN) emerged in El

Salvador intent on demolishing these dictatorships, the U.S. responded with counter-insurgency

training and massive military aid so that those military regimes could dismantle the guerrillas. In

this “low-intensity warfare,” however, it was not only the guerrillas who were targeted, but

students, labor leaders, peasant organizers, and even Jesuit priests who were preaching

Liberation Theology (the notion that the church should identify itself with the poor and join them

in their struggle to achieve social justice). In El Salvador, they were all labeled “internal

enemies” and as a result over 80,000 people were killed during that country’s civil war.

A similar process played itself out in Nicaragua. For decades the Somoza dynasty ruled

Nicaragua with an iron fist, with the solid support of the United States. Their rule has been

described by many as “government by kleptocracy,” (a word that isn’t in Webster’s but perhaps

should be) because by 1979 when the last Somoza was overthrown, the family owned twenty

percent of Nicaragua’s arable land, the only national airline, the nation’s maritime fleet, and the

lion’s share of the nation’s businesses. The inequalities in Nicaraguan society were never

ameliorated and in fact were made worse as the Somozas’ grip on power went into its fifth

decade. As was the case with all military dictatorships, as all legal avenues of expressing

discontent were shut off, guerrilla movements such as the Sandinista Front for National

Liberation (FSLN) emerged in the 1960’s with the aim of bringing down those dictatorships and

transforming Nicaraguan society. They named their movement after Augusto Cesar Sandino,

who had waged the first “anti-Imperialist” struggle against the U.S. occupation of Nicaragua in

the 1920’s and who was executed by the orders of Anastasio Somoza Sr. in 1934. The

Sandinistas toppled the regime of “Tachito” Somoza in 1979, who fled with most of the

Nicaraguan treasury to a safe exile in Miami (he would shortly thereafter be assassinated in

Paraguay by a bazooka blast that ripped through his bullet proof Mercedes Benz). Modeling

themselves on the Cuban revolution, the Sandinista government began implementing literacy

campaigns, land reform and began expropriating industries, most of which belonged to the

“family dictatorship” of the Somozas. The Reagan administration then orchestrated a “counter”

revolution to bring down the Sandinista government by insurrection. In another example of

covert action, the U.S. recruited, trained, and equipped the “Contras” (the Spanish word for

“counter”, to denote “counter-revolutionaries”) to bring down the Sandinista government.

Reagan referred to them as “freedom fighters,” and went so far as to say that the Contras were

“the moral equivalent of our founding fathers.” In addition to the military strategy to topple the

Sandinista regime, the U.S. was also applying economic pressure. The U.S. imposed an

economic embargo on Nicaragua, and then pressured the World Bank and the Inter-American

Development Bank to cut off its loans to Nicaragua. In the face of such hostility from the

Reagan administration, the Sandinistas turned to the Cubans for economic and military aid, and

by 1986 the Soviets themselves were providing aid and supplying Nicaragua with most of its

petroleum needs. When the United States Congress shut off the valve of U.S. money that had

been flowing to the Contras, Reagan administration officials undertook a series of measures to

get around the new restrictions, in the process setting off one of the most profound Constitutional

crises of the 20th century, the Iran-Contra Affair. Lt. Col. Oliver North of the National Security

Council (NSC) secretly continued to expand operations in Nicaragua, soliciting money from

Saudi Arabia, the Sultan of Brunei, and Taiwan. The secret efforts to circumvent Congress’s

prohibition of providing lethal aid to the Contras began to unravel when the Sandinistas captured

CIA agent Eugene Hasenfus after shooting down his plane in 1986. Hasenfus let out a

bombshell when he revealed that under the direction of Oliver North, Washington was

continuing to fund the Contras (despite the Congressional ban) with funds diverted from an

equally secret sale of U.S. missiles and other weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of

American hostages in Lebanon. Oliver North was eventually convicted of aiding and abetting

the obstruction of Congress and for shredding official documents. Six of those indicted in the

Iran-Contra scandal, including the Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, National Security

Advisor Robert C. McFarlane, former Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs

Elliott Abrams were eventually pardoned by President Bush in 1992 two weeks before

Weinberger’s trial.

With the implosion of the Soviet Union after 1989 and the Cold War imperatives gone,

the centerpiece of U.S. policy toward Latin America has been the pursuit of policies of economic

integration through frameworks such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA),

and the Free Trade of the Americas initiative (FTAA). The goal of these frameworks is to lower

barriers to trade, and perhaps most importantly to eliminate barriers to investment that many

Latin American countries spent decades putting up as part of their nationalist programs. In this

way, multinational corporations will be able to sell their products freely without interference

from protective tariff barriers, they can also relocate from country to country freely in order to

take advantage of cheaper labor costs and less stringent environmental regulations, and they will

once again be free to own land, mines, and infrastructure projects such as railroads and ports.

These agreements have become “the 21st century version of strategic alliances” in the words of

Richard Feinberg, the former special assistant for inter-American affairs to President Clinton,

who promoted this idea. President George H. W. Bush negotiated NAFTA and proposed the

FTAA for the first time. Though Clinton’s “fast-track” authority was not renewed by Congress

during his second term, Congress did approve the newly repackaged “trade promotion authority”

during the summer of 2002, and the George W. Bush’s administration has picked up where the

Clinton administration left off, hammering out free trade agreements with Chile, the Central

American nations and MERCOSUR, the world’s third largest trade group comprised of

Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. The United States and Latin America now engage in

over $500 billion in merchandise and services trade, with Latin America accounting for 58% of

the U.S. trade with developing countries. Mexico alone has surpassed Japan as the United

States’ third largest trading partner, after Canada and China.

These agreements have been a boon to multinational corporations such as Walmart,

McDonalds, Citibank, and hundreds of other companies that are doing more business than ever

before in Latin America. They have also been a boon to consumers as companies such as Ford,

Levi’s, Dodge, Huffy and hundreds of others have shifted operations to countries such as Mexico

to take advantage of cheaper labor costs and less stringent environmental regulations. Of course

there has also been resistance to these policies, particularly from workers in the U.S. as they see

their jobs evaporate when their companies close in the U.S. and open up south of the border.

There has been resistance in Latin America too. Native peoples in southern Mexico burst on the

scene on January 1, 1994, taking up arms against the Mexican government the day that NAFTA

was to take effect. Calling themselves the Zapatista Army for National Liberation (after

Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata), they declared “war” on “neo-liberalism,” arguing that

these free trade policies convert the land and forests in which they live into commodities.

Former President Salinas, the Mexican president who negotiated NAFTA, is now living in exile

because these free trade policies directly contributed to the collapse of the peso in 1994, with a

massive economic crisis ensuing that cut deeply into the living standards of the majority of

Mexicans.

Further ammunition for critics of this new free trade paradigm is the perceived double

standard of the United States pressuring Latin America to “get prices right,” that is, eliminate

tariff barriers and agricultural and industrial subsidies, while at the same time increasing the

subsidies the U.S. gives to American farmers. In April of 2002, the U.S. Congress approved

$190 billion in agricultural subsidies to U.S. farmers over 10 years.

Despite the vast changes that would sweep the world since the latter part of the

nineteenth century, the cornerstone of U.S. policy toward the region never changed. The stated

goals of the United States toward the region and the language employed to describe it would be

different before, during, and after the Cold War: from promoting democracy and “liberating”

oppressed peoples in the first decades of the twentieth century, to fostering hemispheric unity

and forging new national security arrangements during the Second World War, to keeping

communism out of the hemisphere during the Cold War, to bringing free trade in the Americas

after the Cold War. Underlying these seemingly very different policy thrusts, was a remarkably

consistent set of fundamental policies aimed at keeping the hemisphere firmly within the US

orbit, protecting and promoting U.S. economic and strategic interests specifically, and preserving

the sanctity of private property and the capitalist nature of the hemisphere in general. As

documented in this essay, when Latin American nations pursued policies that adhered to this

vision, the U.S. supported those governments, and when they diverged from it, the U.S.

responded by overturning governments like those in Guatemala and Chile, or frustrating their

efforts to chart a different path, like those in Cuba and Nicaragua.