US Imperialism - Military Forces

My final assignment in my Health Equity and Justice class is going to be a series of blog posts wherein I address US Imperialism in three Central American countries: Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. I will detail how the United States encroached on sovereign nations to further its own political and economic interests. These actions our government executed in the Cold War and beyond have lasting effects on Latin America and the United States to this day. It is my hope that I can connect the actions of our past to the current events affecting the influx of migrants to the US. I will also explore how our actions have led to great health inequities for the migrants coming to the United States. Laying the framework will take up the bulk of these writings. I think it is important to understand how we got where we are today if we are to have any hope of addressing the problems. If we do not understand why the migrants have come to the United States it is easy for our politicians to dismiss these destitute people as lazy opportunists looking for handouts at the expense of the hardworking American taxpayer.

I am looking at a couple of ways in which the US’ policies and actions have worked to undermine several countries in Latin American. After World War II the United States was fearful that communism would spread to our neighbors to the south. To prevent the spread of communism, any actions or ideologies that appeared to lean socialist was squashed. The United States was also interested in advancing its own economic interests. The advancement of economic interests was often supported by US corporations, like the United Fruit Company. More recently there has been the North America Free Trade Agreement and the even more recently, the CAFTA-DR that involved the US, Dominican Republic and six central American countries.

Guatemala

Guatemala held its first democratic elections in 1945 after a revolution ousted the military dictatorship of Jorge Ubico. The newly elected president, Juan Jose Arevalo, granted voting rights, instituted a minimum wage and built 6,000 public schools. In 1951 Guatemalans elected Jacobo Arbenz to succeed Arevalo. In a time of growing fear of communism, Arbenz allowed communists to participate in the political system; in the country of 3 million people, 4,000 registered as communist. This made the US very wary of Arbenz’s political ideology.

Arbenz proposed Decree 900 which would redistribute undeveloped lands held by large property owners to landless farmers, who at the time, comprised 90% of the population. He was looking to end what was essentially a system of feudalism and serfdom but to US eyes it looked suspiciously like socialism. By 1952, Arbenz appropriated 225,000 acres and gave it to 500,000 rural workers and farmers.  The Guatemalan government compensated the landowners from whom the land was appropriated based on the tax assessments of that year. This displeased the large landowners because they had been undervaluing their land to lessen their tax burden.

Up until that point in time, 72% of useable agrarian land was owned by 2% of all landowners. Of that 2% of land owners was the United Fruit Company, a US based business. The UFC controlled 42% of Guatemalan land and paid little to no taxes or import duties. 77% of UFC’s crops went to the US.

UFC had powerful connections to the Eisenhower Administration. The Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, was an attorney whose law firm represented the UFC. The Secretary of State’s brother, Allen Dulles, was the CIA director, on the UFC Board of Trustees and a shareholder in the company. Ed Whitman, the husband of the president’s private secretary, produced a film, “Why the Kremlin Hates Bananas,” which depicted UFC as fighting communism. A result of that film, many journalists went to Guatemala, an expense that UFC paid for, and wrote pieces that showed UFC as fighters on the front lines against communism. Those articles were circulated in the US press.

In the wake of the redistribution of land, Eisenhower feared Guatemala would succumb to communism so Eisenhower used the newly formed CIA to back a coup, which was partially funded by the UFC, in Guatemala in June 1954. The CIA broadcast propaganda and jammed the airwaves. American pilots bombed portions of Guatemala City. The goal was to give the appearance a major invasion was going to take place even though the number of operatives was relatively small. Ten days after the assault began the democratically elected Arbenz stepped down. The CIA installed the dictator Carlos Castillo Armas.

This ushered in a civil war that was fought along the old Colonialism lines that pitted the poor majority of indigenous Mayans against the smaller faction of rich Guatemalans of mixed European and Mayan descent. The civil war started with the exiled remnants of the Arevalo/Arbenz governments who fled to the mountains to start a guerilla insurgency. As the government’s responses to the insurgency became more brutal, the more Mayans joined the fight and the further left they moved. Guatemala received millions of dollars from the United States during this period and tens of thousands of people died. When oil was discovered in Guatemala, efforts to remove Mayans from their land increased. Cattle ranching (primarily exported to the United States) increased, too, which placed further demand on Mayan lands.

The US had a scorched earth policy when it came to rooting out communism. By mid-80s over 150,000 civilians had been murdered in acts labeled genocide by a UN commission. For a detailed timeline of Guatemala through the years please follow this link.

El Salvador

In the continuing effort to root out communism, the United States provided the Salvadoran military support in the form of advisors and hundreds of millions of dollars to their army and other forms of military aid to help fight their Civil war in the 1980s. The war pitted leftist revolutionaries vs oligarchs and US backed generals. US provided training for the Atlacatl Battalion at the United States’ School of the Americas in Panama for 3 months. When the battalion returned, they massacred over 1200 men, women and children in El Mozote in December 1981. Of the 75,000 people killed during the war from 1980 to 1992, 85% was attributed to the US backed Salvadoran government. The US was so focused on stopping the spread of communism that it encouraged or looked the other way at human rights abuses. The Reagan administration denied involvement and tried to cover up the atrocities committed by the Salvadoran government.

Honduras

In 2009, democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya was forced out in a coup. Zelaya angered powerful elites in Honduras by pushing to settle land disputes. The United States turned a blind eye to the ouster of Zelaya, whom they viewed as a leftist in line with Hugo Chavez, and instead of trying to re-install him, they pushed for new elections. In the months leading up to a new election, protesters were silenced through torture, disappearances and murder. After the elections, the new government sold off natural resources and over 100 environmentalist activists were murdered. The Honduran economy plummeted as curfews were put in place, murder rates skyrocketed, and the cocaine trade saw as much as 80% of the smuggling flights pass through Honduras.

US Backed Alliance of Dictators

Another stain on Latin America and the United states is Operation Condor  which was described by Al Jazeera as the Argentinian base of “a U.S.-organized alliance between the dictatorships of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay, created in 1975 and operational until around 1980.” The United States provided military training, financial assistance and intelligence briefings to the involved countries in its effort to stop the feared spread of communism. This alliance led to the disappearance and murder of up to 80,000 of dissidents and civilians.

This post examined the primarily military aspects of US interventions in Central and Latin America. My next post will look at the ways in which trade agreements led to the current crisis of thousands of people seeking asylum in the US.