Series Editor: Jürgen Buchenau
The books in this series will introduce students to the most significant themes and topics in Latin American history. They represent a novel approach to designing supplementary texts for this growing market. Intended as supplementary textbooks, the books will also discuss the ways in which historians have interpreted these themes and topics, thus demonstrating to students that our understanding of our past is constantly changing, through the emergence of new sources, methodologies, and historical theories. Unlike monographs, the books in this series will be broad in scope and written in a style accessible to undergraduates.
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This edition first published 2016
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Cover image: President Theodore Roosevelt collecting debts and patrolling Central America and the Caribbean with his “big stick”, cartoon by William Allen Rogers, 1904. The Granger Collection / TopFoto.
To Luc and Nico, with all Papa’s love
Each book in the “Viewpoints/Puntos de Vista” series introduces students to a significant theme or topic in Latin American history. In an age in which student and faculty interest in the Global South increasingly challenges the old focus on the history of Europe and North America, Latin American history has assumed an increasingly prominent position in undergraduate curricula.
Some of these books discuss the ways in which historians have interpreted these themes and topics, thus demonstrating that our understanding of our past is constantly changing, through the emergence of new sources, methodologies, and historical theories. Others offer an introduction to a particular theme by means of a case study or biography in a manner easily understood by the contemporary, non-specialist reader. Yet others give an overview of a major theme that might serve as the foundation of an upper-level course.
What is common to all of these books is their goal of historical synthesis. They draw on the insights of generations of scholarship on the most enduring and fascinating issues in Latin American history, and through the use of primary sources as appropriate. Each book is written by a specialist in Latin American history who is concerned with undergraduate teaching, yet has also made his or her mark as a first-rate scholar.
The books in this series can be used in a variety of ways, recognizing the differences in teaching conditions at small liberal arts colleges, large public universities, and research-oriented institutions with doctoral programs. Faculty have particular needs depending on whether they teach large lectures with discussion sections, small lecture or discussion-oriented classes, or large lectures with no discussion sections, and whether they teach on a semester or trimester system. The format adopted for this series fits all of these different parameters.
In this ninth volume in the “Viewpoints/Puntos de Vista” series, Professor Alan McPherson provides an interpretation of history of United States occupations in Latin America, with a focus on the twentieth century. Somewhat provocatively, Professor McPherson places political motivations – not economic or cultural ones – at the causative center of the repeated decision of United States policymakers to send troops to occupy Latin American territory and thus violate the sovereignty of Latin American nations. To make his case, Professor McPherson aptly distinguishes these government-sponsored military occupations from the more broadly defined concept of interventions, and even from the privately sponsored filibuster expeditions that figured significantly in United States imperialism in Latin America during the nineteenth century.
This volume’s publication is timely, coinciding with a fascinating period in inter-American relations. As the United States is finally taking historic steps to mend relations with socialist Cuba – a nation that was a repeated victim of United States occupations at the turn of the twentieth century – this volume helps us understand why and how the United States government once came to view Latin America as its own backyard and sent military expeditions to the region with astonishing regularity.
I wish to thank Viewpoints/Puntos de Vista Series Editor Jürgen Buchenau and Peter Coveney at Wiley for believing in this project. The three anonymous reviewers were very helpful. Thanks also to Dominic Granello for bringing me heaps of books, articles, and documents, and for cobbling together the bibliography. As always, Heather Dubnick did a wonderful job with the index. Finally, I owe a debt to all the collaborators of my Encyclopedia of U.S. Military Interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean, on whose shoulders I stood to draft this book.
| Map 1 | Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean |
| Map 2 | South America |
| Figure 1.1 | The Battle of Chapúltepec, September 13, 1847. Painting by Sarony & Major, 1848. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. |
| Figure 2.1 | The wreck of the Maine in Havana Harbor. Photo by Underwood & Underwood, 1903. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. |
| Figure 2.2 | A rare reversal of imagery, in which Cubans accuse the United States of “infantile diplomacy.” Cuban Minister to the United States Gonzalo de Quesada holds a “potpourri” filled with “trade reciprocity,” “American aspirations,” and “general political treaty.” By the Cuban-American Reciprocity Bureau in Washington, D.C., 1902. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. |
| Figure 3.1 | President Theodore Roosevelt collecting debts and patrolling Central America and the Caribbean with his “big stick.” By William Allen Rogers, 1904. |
| Figure 4.1 | Marines patrolling around a Dominican hut. U.S. National Archives RG 127-G Photo 515012. |
| Figure 5.1 | Augusto Sandino, center, and generals, 1929. National Archives. |
| Figure 6.1 | President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Haitian President Sténio Vincent in Haiti, 1934. United States Marine Corps. |
| Figure 7.1 | Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz talking to a crowd on June 18, 1954, a day into the U.S.-led invasion of his country. Courtesy of Associated Press. |
| Figure 8.1 | President Lyndon Johnson, leaning at center, in a meeting with advisers about the Dominican intervention on its first day, April 28, 1965. By Yoichi Okamoto, White House Photo Office. Lyndon Baines Johnson Library. |
| Figure 9.1 | A US Army M113 armored personnel carrier during the 1989 invasion of Panama. By PH1 (SW) J. Elliott. Department of Defense. |
Map 1 Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean
Map 2 South America
Has the United States sent people down here to teach us how to behave?
Desiderio Arias1
In April 2015, heads of state of all American republics gathered at the Summit of the Americas held in Panama City, Panama. On his way from the airport, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro stopped to lay a wreath at a monument commemorating the 1989 U.S. invasion of the host country. He called the intervention “an unforgivable attack on the people of Panama” and swore to the cheering crowd, “Never again a U.S. invasion in Latin America!”
U.S. President Barack Obama agreed with that last part. “The days in which our agenda in this hemisphere so often presumed that the US could meddle with impunity, those days are over.” 2 Calling himself “a student of history,” Obama added, “I’m certainly mindful that there are dark chapters in our own history in which we have not observed the principles and ideals upon which the country was founded.” At the same time, however, he refused to let the past determine the present: “I’m not interested in having battles that, frankly, started before I was born.”3
Was it fair for Maduro to bring up a generation-old invasion? Was Obama dismissive or appropriate? Was it really the case that U.S. interventions were a thing of the past?
These questions and more can be answered only by those with a firm background in the history of U.S. military interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean. This book surveys those interventions, from the No Transfer Resolution in 1811 to the drug wars of the 21st century. It narrates a few dozen of the most important interventions among the thousands of military landings by U.S. troops.
This book’s definition of interventions is broad but not sprawling. It includes all dispatches of large groups of U.S. armed forces by the U.S. government to territories in the Western Hemisphere south of the Rio Grande (now) separating the United States and Mexico and including (now) Florida. It also includes the use of armed non-U.S. citizens funded, trained, and equipped by the U.S. government. These were “proxy wars,” in which Washington went to war through a stand-in – usually an army of locals combating their own country’s head of state. The definition of intervention also covers declared wars, actions otherwise allowed by the U.S. Congress, and blatantly illegal mobilizations. And it comprises interventions that were requested by heads of state in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The definition does not include private U.S. forces landing on Latin American shores without the approval of their government. Chapter 1 does survey private filibustering expeditions, mostly in the 1850s, because they illustrated important motivations and assumptions by U.S. citizens who embraced territorial expansion. But it does not consider them to be official U.S. interventions. It also does not include small military groups sent as part of a diplomatic body, or to train Latin American militaries. Finally, the definition does not include nonmilitary U.S. meddling. Spying, aid, military training, diplomatic arm-twisting, support for dictators, cultural programs, and pressures to open up markets to U.S. trade are common examples of programs that certainly qualify as U.S. pressure on Latin America but nevertheless do not rise to the definition of an intervention. As with small group missions, the book discusses many of these because they provide context. But they are not themselves military interventions.
A host of U.S. military forces carried out interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean. The most frequent were members of the U.S. Marine Corps, who were officially part of the U.S. Department of the Navy after 1834 but largely independent. They made their reputation as a rapid-response amphibious force – traveling by water like a navy, but disembarking and fighting like an army. “Bluejackets,” the name given to servicemembers of the U.S. Navy, often accompanied them. In other interventions, such as the land-based Punitive Expedition of 1916–1917, the U.S. Army took the lead. The cavalry, rangers, paratroopers, and pilots have also participated. As in any other military action, some at times displayed uncommon valor. For that courage during actions in Latin America, U.S. servicemembers won 162 Medals of Honor.
Not all Latin American nations have been targets of U.S. intervention. U.S. hegemony or control yes, but not military intervention. Almost all U.S. interventions took place in Mexico, Central America and Panama, and the Caribbean. These areas had in common that they were (1) geographically close to the United States, therefore easier to get to from U.S. naval bases and more integrated into the U.S. economy; (2) poor, and, with the exception of Mexico, small, so unable to beat back a force of even a few hundred or a few thousand marines; and (3) strategically valuable, located as they were in the waterways leading to the Panama Canal. Not for nothing did Alexander Hamilton in 1787 call the Caribbean basin “the American Mediterranean.”4
Interventions occurred not only in American republics with Latin-based languages such as Spanish and French, but also in the English-speaking Caribbean. And, in the nineteenth century, interventions took place in Spanish Florida and elsewhere in what was to become the continental United States.
South America contained some of the problems that might prompt an intervention further north, but U.S. officials deemed South American nations to be too far, too big, and too powerful to warrant interventions. Even in Mexico, where the United States intervened repeatedly, no serious thought was ever given to occupying the whole country. The experiences of fighting Mexicans during the Mexican War of 1846–1848 and the Punitive Expedition were enough to help banish the thought.
To help readers navigate through the stories in this book, each chapter’s introduction will suggest how to fit them within the book’s five themes. These themes are easy to remember as the Five C’s: causes, consequences, contestation, collaboration, and context. Each should be considered in every intervention.
U.S. officials, usually presidents, ordered interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean for a variety of reasons, and the student of interventions should keep in mind that variety is the most important characteristic of interventions. This book focuses first and foremost on the motivations of U.S. policymakers, and it argues that the most prominent cause of interventions – the one that those who ordered interventions most talked about – was the goal of political stability and political cultural change. When Desiderio Arias, the former Minister of War, suspected in 1916 that the United States was in the Dominican Republic to “teach” him and his compatriots “how to behave,” he was right on the mark. From spreading U.S. civilization in the nineteenth century, to President Woodrow Wilson’s desire to see only constitutional changes of power in Mexico, to fighting fascists in World War II, to keeping communism contained to Cuba in the Cold War, to restoring democracy in the 1990s, U.S. interventions in the region harbored above all political motives.
Interventions also had economic motivations, and these were, in some instances, the dominant impetuses. Some marines landed just to protect U.S. corporations. Some secretaries of state made sure Wall Street got its loans paid off. To be sure, it was and is legitimate for diplomats to want to protect and promote their country’s investments and markets abroad. And those concerns often were foremost in their conversations. But U.S. soldiers who managed interventions on a day-to-day basis worried a lot less about economics.
Many interventions also reflected the prevailing culture of those who ordered them. Racism and paternalism were especially prominent in U.S. culture (not to mention Latin American culture), especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “Scientific” textbooks taught whites that race was a fixed biological fact and that there existed a limited number of “races” among humans – “Caucasian,” “Mongolian,” “Ethiopian,” “Malay,” “Australian,” “American,” and so on. It also indicated that some races were inferior while others were born to dominate. Biological theories about evolution influenced social scientists to devise Social Darwinism, or the theory that, in society too, some races were more “fit” to “survive.” Feelings of racial superiority sometimes led U.S. forces to commit heinous atrocities. Those feelings, however, did not necessarily lead “whites” to want to annihilate those civilizations they thought inferior. Sometimes they felt a paternal obligation to protect or teach so-called uncivilized peoples. Whatever the form culture took, it helped justify interventions again and again.
In some situations, finally, U.S. officials were primarily concerned with geostrategic issues. They looked at a map, pointed to where great empires had overseas possessions, and felt they should have some too. Transportation was often key: ports, railroads, canals, and sealanes always needed protection in order that troops could be moved quickly in case of war. In the Caribbean basin, the major U.S. concern lay with protecting strategic chokepoints such as the Panama Canal. This tended to be the case especially in times of global war.
But political behavior was, to Washington, the lynchpin of all other troubles in Latin America and the Caribbean. The region was ripe for economic investment and exploitation, but in U.S. eyes, constant fighting among aspirants to presidential palaces kept merchants from exporting or workers from even wandering onto highways, where they might be kidnapped into armies. Yes, cultural change – more English or Protestantism, for instance, or an “Americanized” primary education – would also be nice, said U.S. officials, but these officials often found that Latin American politicians were too set in their ways to allow such change. And it was irresponsible debts owed by presidents to European banks that called forth gunboats and thus U.S. marines to prevent those gunboats from landing.
U.S. military interventions were among the most consequential events in the history of Latin America and the Caribbean. They were the direct cause of dozens of changes in governments, almost all giving way to U.S.-friendly leaders. They sometimes ended periods of economic reform or hardened repression, or ushered in a democratic spring. Some saved lives by separating warring factions or otherwise restoring order; almost all killed Latin Americans, sometimes in the thousands. Most reinforced U.S. economic interests and pulled the region closer to the U.S. orbit, or else they opened up new possibilities for U.S. investment in land and exports. Arguably the greatest consequence was the loss of the northern half of Mexico to the United States in the 1840s. In short, U.S. interventions were a consistent recurrence in the life of the hemisphere, indicating the continuing hegemony of the “Colossus of the North” in the military, commerce, investment, culture, and politics. Consequences tended to reflect causes in that they achieved U.S. goals in the short term. But in the long term, they had a habit of creating problems for the United States, such as massive migration flows.
Like Desiderio Arias and Nicolás Maduro, Latin Americans (and many U.S. citizens) criticized U.S. interventions, and many Latin Americans resisted. As with causes, resistance occurred for a host of reasons. Some reasons were selfless, others petty. Some reflected grand ideologies, others desires for local autonomy. Before the Cold War (1945–1992), Latin Americans resisted largely for pragmatic reasons – because U.S. troops were shooting at them, or taking their land, or torturing them, or getting drunk in their cantinas. Directing much of this resistance were politicians. To be sure, many truly loved their nation and were protective of its sovereignty and ready to take up arms for la Patria. But even they usually also had concrete motives, such as wanting a government job or even to be president once the intervention ended. The Cold War was a particularly ideological phase in Latin America’s resistance, when revolutionaries such as Fidel Castro and Ché Guevara were imbued with a potent cocktail of nationalism, anti-imperialism, some version of socialism, and a personal desire for power. The end of the Cold War brought down not only the number and intensity of interventions but also the ideological fervor of their resisters. Resistance went back to being local and concrete, but no less justified or even heroic.
Latin American and Caribbean peoples who met U.S. troops were astoundingly diverse – here is that word again – in their affiliations. In a few instances of traditional confrontations (Mexico in the 1840s, Cuba in 1898 and 1961, and Grenada in 1983 among others), U.S. intervention forces clashed with government soldiers. Some military resistance came from unpaid soldiers – volunteers or forcibly enlisted men (and, on a few occasions, women). These made an important difference, for instance, in ending the Mexican War in 1848. More commonly, marines fought insurrectionary rural guerrillas, whose techniques the marines found to be similar to those of Native Americans in the nineteenth century and who preceded the better-known guerrillas of the 1960s. Finally, on occasions such as Panama in 1903, there was no armed resistance at all.
Every chapter in this book addresses Latin American responses, and Chapter 5 does only that.
One Latin American response that arose to some extent in every U.S. intervention was to collaborate with the invader. In some cases, local governments invited U.S. forces to intervene, usually to prop them up against a political enemy. Others did not invite intervention but welcomed it, sometimes in the hopes that they and their friends could benefit personally, for instance by moving up the political ranks or securing a job. Other Latin Americans were sincere and eager students of U.S. ways of life and government. A final group accommodated rather than collaborated, meaning that they played along with U.S. invaders so as to avoid the consequences of not playing along.
In most interventions, how many resisted versus how many collaborated will never be known. Beware of those who claim that either everyone resisted or everyone collaborated with a specific intervention.
Finally, this book provides context to episodes of military intervention. Sometimes it references global events that drove U.S. or Latin American interests, such as an economic crisis or a larger war. Other times, it explains ideologies or concepts that justified or restrained interventions. These included racism, paternalism, the No Transfer Principle, the Monroe Doctrine, Manifest Destiny, gunboat diplomacy, the Roosevelt Corollary, Dollar Diplomacy, the Good Neighbor Policy, continental defense, anti-communism, democracy promotion, and fear of immigrants.
In an effort to inform the reader, for every intervention it looks at, this book discusses, whenever relevant and available, not only the Five C’s but also the number of and kind of troops involved, casualties suffered on all sides, and the legality – or lack thereof – of the intervention. By doing so, it helps to disseminate often forgotten knowledge, to spark debate, and to promote independent, critical thinking.