Nothing New Under the Gun

“The United States appear to be destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty." - Simon Bolivar

It’s probably not an exaggeration to suggest that most Americans remain oblivious to what our government has done in our name over the past 125 years. In the warm, fuzzy glow of our Ken Burns’ documentary brains, we call our economic violence the “spreading of democracy,” but what we have usually proliferated is death and economic chaos to protect the United States’ corporate interests. The ledger of our true history in the Western Hemisphere is written in the red ink of blood and the black ink of oil and fruit. The hypocrisy that exists between our stated democratic principles and military and political actions is thicker than the tropical air.

If Americans were diligent and truly involved in our democracy, they would read history and realize that since 1900, Washington has treated the nations to our south as nothing more than a combination of a private ATM and a strategic buffer zone. We only call them sovereign neighbors. We’ve preached the gospel of the ballot box while bankrolling the men who burned them. From the moment Teddy Roosevelt decided the Panama Canal was his personal shortcut to empire, the American narrative in Latin America has been a masterclass in saying one thing and doing another.

The 20th century was kicked into gear by Roosevelt’s “Big Stick” diplomacy. In 1903, when Colombia wouldn’t play ball on surrendering its territory that contained the Panama Canal, the U.S. didn’t bother to negotiate. Instead, we manufactured a revolution and parked the USS Nashville off the coast. We played the role of spectators and watched Panama “rebel,” and then signed a treaty with a Frenchman who hadn’t been to Panama in years.

Our manufactured rebellion and crisis gave birth to what became known in the hemisphere as the “Banana Republic.” The concept turned into a lived horror for millions. The United Fruit Company, which was the key beneficiary of American interventionism, acted as a shadow government. Deployed from Honduras to Nicaragua, the U.S. Marines were essentially the world’s most expensive security guards for American corporations. We wanted a stable supply of cheap fruit and sugar, which we got, along with a series of hollowed-out nations whose only purpose was to serve the American breakfast table.

We were just getting rolling, though. Mid-century was when our hypocrisy really hit its stride. We told the world we were fighting the “Red Menace,” scary Communism, and that we intended to protect freedom. In 1954 Guatemala, though, we killed it ourselves by overthrowing a democratically elected leader.j

Jacobo Árbenz had the audacity to suggest that idle land owned by the United Fruit Company should be given back to the peasants. In the halls of the Dulles brothers’ Washington, though, “land reform” was rebranded as just a synonym for “Communism.” The CIA, under the guidance of Allen and John Foster Dulles, launched and managed “Operation PBSUCCESS,” a campaign of psychological terror and mercenary invasion. We traded a burgeoning democracy for a decades-long nightmare of military juntas and death squads with a fatality total of more than 200,000. Why? Because we valued the profit margins of a Boston-based fruit company more than the lives of Mayan farmers.

We were a bit less clandestine in the 1970s, and took off our masks long enough to more clearly execute our plans, and people. In Chile, the populace did exactly what we always told them to do and went to the polls. They elected Salvador Allende. Unfortunately, because Allende was a Marxist, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon decided the Chilean people had made the “wrong” choice. How dare they not do what Washington wanted? Nixon issued an order to “make the economy scream,” which was a patent declaration of war against a peaceful neighbor.

The CIA, tired of waiting on the change the U.S. desired, launched a coup in 1973 and bombed the presidential palace. We swapped a doctor in Allende for a tyrant. Augusto Pinochet’s regime became a laboratory for “Chicago School” economics, which required the American government to assist in the disappearance of thousands of “subversives.” We claimed, once again, we were protecting the hemisphere from Soviet influence, but we were actually just ensuring that American copper interests remained untouched, even if it meant turning a soccer stadium into a torture chamber. More than 3000 Chileans were disappeared and 30,000 tortured to achieve America’s political ends of protecting corporate telecom and copper investments.

During the 1980s, Ronald Reagan’s administration took American hypocrisy to its cinematic peak. In Nicaragua, when the Sandinistas kicked out the brutal, US-backed Somoza dynasty, Reagan, who filled his rhetoric with freedom flourishes, refused to perceive the Nicaraguans as a people liberating themselves from the oppression of a dictator propped up by this country. Instead, the Hollywood president began to describe a terrifying threat in our “front yard.” One Texas congressman even campaigned with a TV commercial that explained to his geographically-challenged constituents that Nicaragua was only a few days of hard driving from the Rio Grande.

Reagan backed a resistance group named the Contras, which was nothing more than a loosely-organized gang of failed mercenaries, contract killers, and motorcycle thugs. He described them as “freedom fighters” and compared the wanton murderers to our Founding Fathers. The Contras were, in reality, a brutal insurgency that targeted schools, agriculture cooperatives, and health clinics. When Congress explicitly told the President he couldn’t fund them anymore, the administration went into the basement of the White House and started selling missiles to Iran to keep the blood flowing.

This violation of federal law saw Texas U.S. Senator John Tower, ultimately, investigate and whitewash an international criminal enterprise that was operated out of the White House and managed by future President George H. W. Bush. Historians estimate as many as 50,000 deaths during the Contra conflict, funded by American tax dollars, which paid for frequent attacks on unarmed civilians. No one in Washington was ever held accountable.

The legacy of our meddling in El Salvador is still affecting this country. We poured billions into a military that murdered archbishops and nuns with death squads and justified the killings as containment of communism. The reality was a scorched-earth policy that left a generation of children orphaned and a region so broken that, decades later, their grandchildren would have no choice but to flee toward our borders. Estimates are that 75,000 El Salvadorans were killed in a conflict that was funded by 1980s U.S. tax dollars.

We can easily calculate the wasted treasure of American resources. Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars were funneled into the pockets of dictators and defense contractors. There is a much harder math problem to determine the loss of lives and blood and potential human progress. We have spent a century burning down our neighbors’ houses and then complaining about the smoke drifting across our border. Every time we overthrew a nationalist leader or funded a right-wing militia, we traded long-term regional health for short-term political wins

The United States, in the Western Hemisphere, demands loyalty, not liberty. We want customers, not colleagues. Unfortunately, we are still too blind to see migrant caravans and drug cartels as the chickens of a century of intervention finally coming home to roost. American diplomacy in Latin America has always been a blunt force instrument. What the U.S. has done in Venezuela is only marginally different than our historical interventionist behavior. Trump is just more transparent about stealing natural resources and, ultimately, propping up another flunky, who will gladly bleed his homeland for the U.S. in exchange for wealth and power.

That’s the art of the American deal.