The Migrant Caravan is knocking on the doors of the United States to warn them: “it’s your fault we were forced to leave”. The sun is rising, and we must continue our journey through history.
It is the story of a sick love between the United States and Latin America. It is a story more than a century long. It is a story that begins in the early 1900s with the intent of the United States to establish itself as a regional and world power and to transform the Caribbean into a coveted “American Lake.” It is a story that saw Latin America’s dependence increase between the two world wars. It is a story of multinationals, investors, U.S. administrations, international organizations, doctrines, revolutions, coups and the myth of Pan-Americanism. It is also the history of the Cold War, drug trafficking, development projects, the CIA and terrorism. Our Caravan can now set off on a historical journey to discover a history where anti-Americanism has been transformed into hope.
With the end of World War II, the United States found themselves in position of dominance with respect to Latin America. The conflict had made commercial transactions between Latin Americans and the rest of the world virtually impossible, and the war had destroyed, or severely weakened, the power of nations that might have posed a timid threat to American supremacy in the region.
Roosevelt wanted to translate this strong dominance into an international organization, and this theme flowed into the discussions of the Pan American Conference in Chapultepec, Mexico, in February 1945. Here it was declared that any attack on any American state represented an attack on all states in the region. The final act marked the first step in the direction of a post-war military alliance in the Western Hemisphere.
All states at the Chapultepec Conference took part in the establishment of the United Nations Organization (UN).
The United States believed that, prior to the conference, a historic conflict had to be healed: that between the Monroe Doctrine – according to which the United States did not tolerate intervention by European powers in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere – and what was supposed to represent the internationalism of the UN.
Originally, in fact, the UN should have had strong powers on regional issues and the problem was that any intervention of the United States in Latin America could have been prevented by the veto of Great Britain or the Soviet Union.
In the end, four articles, from 51 to 54, were inserted in the UN statute, which in effect safeguarded the ability of the United States to exercise its influence in the western hemisphere without breaking the rules of the new organization.
The articles protected the right of regional collective organizations to resolve disputes and opt for individual or collective self-defense.
In this regard, in 1947, with the United States at the height of its power, the American Republics signed the Treaty of Rio: a collective defense pact that became a model for many other military alliances formed by the United States in the first decade of the Cold War.
The Rio Treaty thus legitimized American intervention and gave a new internationalist emphasis to the Monroe Doctrine.
So in 1951 the Organization of American States was formally constituted to promote coordinated economic, political and military action and to resolve inter-American disputes.
However, there was a strong problem for the United States: nationalism and anti-Americanism were growing in Latin American countries. For many, the logic of dependence and the dominance in the commercial sphere of American multinationals were considered the main culprits of the serious levels of inequality.
For example, in 1950 the GDP of all of Latin America was one-seventh that of the United States which had the same population. In the same year, Latin America accounted for 28% of total exports and 35% of U.S. imports. It should also be noted that the American share of exports from Cuba, Nicaragua and Guatemala was between 70 and 80% of the total.
In practice, the “South” depended on the “North” and this trend was destined to increase during the Cold War, even though the US gaze was focused on Asia and Europe to keep the Soviet Union at bay.
Another important issue was the Soviet Union itself.
The policy adopted by the United States was one of containment. This policy was coined by George Kennan towards communism as a whole and the main concept was to contain the USSR (i.e. to keep it within its current borders) in the hope that internal divisions, failure or evolution of the political context could put an end to what was perceived as the threat of a persistently expansionist force.
In this perspective, it is worth mentioning the case, in 1951, of the new president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, who tried to introduce a progressive taxation system, a new welfare system and to increase workers’ wages. To this was added the expropriation of 400,000 uncultivated agricultural lands of the United Fruit Company, an American company with interests throughout Latin America which became Chiquita Brands in 1984.
The reaction of the company was to put pressure on the U.S. government with the result that the Eisenhower administration approved a CIA plan to overthrow the regime with the help of Guatemalan exiles trained by the U.S. in bases located in Nicaragua and Honduras. In the same vein, between 1953 and 1954, the United States sponsored a resolution of the Organization of American States which declared that the communist control of any country in the Western Hemisphere was a threat to the security of all members. The resolution was passed by 17 votes to one-the vote of Guatemala.
As a last desperate move, Arbenz turned to the Soviet bloc in search of weapons. In May 1954, Czechoslovakian-made weapons arrived, but the following month a small contingent led by Castillo Armas attacked from Honduras. Meanwhile, American planes bombed Guatemala City.
Conseqeuntly, lands were returned to the United Fruit Company, leftist opponents were arrested, and the Guatemalan government remained a loyal supporter of the United States. Such an ally that CIA turned Guatemala into the training ground of the Cuban exiles involved in the Bay of Pigs attack.
Latin Americans’ anti-Americanism and Americans’ fear of communism went hand in hand.
In 1958 the United States had given asylum to Marcos Perez Jimenez, a dictator deposed by Venezuela, and the then Vice-President Nixon in the same year visited the Venezuelan capital, Caracas. There he felt the growing anti-Americanism and all the outburst of the population. The result was an increase in the fear of the threat of communism by the Eisenhower administration which, as a typical move, privileged military assistance over economic assistance, emphasizing the need to make the Latin American public aware of the dangers of communism.
Latin American nationalism continued to want an end to U.S. meddling in the internal affairs of countries and the acquisition of greater control over their raw materials.
For this reason, after the failure of the Bay of Pigs and to avoid cases similar to that of Cuba, the Kennedy administration established the “Alliance for Progress” program. This was a program of assistance to Latin America launched in 1961 which aspired to a 2.5% per year increase in per capita income, the establishment of democratic governments, a more equitable distribution of income, agrarian reform and economic and social planning. The Latin American countries committed 80 billion dollars over 10 years, the United States 20. The alliance was dissolved in 1973 after a decade of mixed results.
The central aim of the project was to combat poverty and meet basic needs such as housing, land, work, health, and schooling. The assumption was that, with the creation of a substantial Latin American middle class, the need for military dictatorships as a protective shield to communism would diminish and eventually the entire Western Hemisphere would be transformed into a bastion of modern liberal democracy. Essentially, the alliance did not radically change the relationship between North and South. It could only offer a long-term solution to the structural problems that impeded Latin America’s development.
The lack of immediate results led American politicians in the 1960s to resort to methods of direct or clandestine intervention to counter any threats to stability. An additional problem was that authorities in many of the target countries, such as the U.S. government bureaucracy and private companies that had significant investments in the region, generally opposed any form of social engineering.
By the mid-1960s, in order to reconcile local interests and avoid further irritating nationalists, the United States had dropped the initial prerequisite that tied aid to the implementation of political reforms. As a result, corruption became a constant problem.
Latin American elites appropriated large sums of the aid, refused to engage in meaningful agrarian reforms, and opposed any broad-based plan to introduce progressive taxation.
This was compounded by the fact that U.S. officials had no interest in acting against elites traditionally in their favor, while Congress had specifically prohibited the use of U.S. funds for the redistribution of land to the poor.
Another factor contributing to the lack of results was the fact that there was no interest on the part of companies like the United Fruit Company to support policies that would lead to the raising of wages and the improvement of the social conditions of the low-cost labor force in countries like Guatemala. Essentially, it made little sense for companies to increase their operating costs.
Moreover, American investors encouraged local landowners to use Alliance funds to develop crops for export (such as coffee) rather than for commodity plantations (such as beans).
The tragic result was that while local elites and U.S. financiers made large profits from exports, insufficient food supplies remained a constant problem in Latin America.
Another problem was that there was a demographic explosion: the birth rate grew at 2.5% per year. However, this was accompanied by a high mortality rate.
In 1968, the mortality rate among children under one year of age was still 75 per 100 in Peru, 86 in Chile and 94 in Guatemala. In terms of GDP, growth rates in the first half of the 1960s ranged from 1.6% in Colombia to 3.7% in El Salvador, and usually the results of this growth tended to translate into more money for those who already had it: for every $100 of income generated, only two dollars reached the poorest fifth of the population.
This general situation led to the emergence of many terrorist or revolutionary groups such as the Sandinistas of Nicaragua, the Guatemalan Armed Rebel Forces, the Venezuelan Armed Forces of National Liberation, the Colombian April 19 Movement, the Peruvian Sendero Luminoso or the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front of El Salvador. The United States and most Latin American governments responded to this phenomenon with force.
Washington provided military aid, while many Latin American governments actively repressed all forms of discontent and launched a full-scale hunt for guerrillas. The Johnson administration, concerned about the shift to the left in the region’s largest country, supported a military coup in Brazil in 1964. The result was 20 years of military dictatorship in Brazil, which ended only in 1985 with new democratic elections.
The Chilean case should be mentioned here. In 1970, after the election of Allende, there was the reaction of the Nixon Administration that took a first path made of bribes and clandestine maneuvers to avoid the confirmation of Allende at the ballot by the Chilean National Congress and, once this failed, a second path aimed at encouraging a coup d’état. Once this also failed, a third route was taken. The Nixon administration adopted a long-term strategy to overthrow Allende and install a “friendly” government in Chile.
After three years of economic pressure, during which American aid ceased and general support was granted to the opponents, the Chilean army took command of the country in September 1973. The junta, led by General Pinochet, launched a brutal campaign of repression to rid Chile of the “cancer of Marxism”.
But why was Chile so important? Chile was home to investments by American companies of about a billion dollars in 1970. Fears of nationalization had prompted large companies, such as International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT), to offer the CIA a million dollars to avert Allende’s presidency.
In addition to economic motivations, there was a political one. The success of Allende’s political project had the risk of becoming a destabilizing factor in the region.
In fact, Allende’s government had been a democratically elected government and had not come to power through a coup d’état. Allende had been supported by the Chilean socialists and communists. He could have represented a viable alternative in the Western Hemisphere. He could show that socialism could flourish without outside support from the Soviet Union.
“Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers!” were Allende’s words before he died either by suicide or assassination. The Cold War had made relations with other countries difficult for Latin America and maintained dependence with the United States. The multinationals continued to maintain control and influence politics to the point that a Uruguayan journalist once said “a country is owned and dominated by the capital that is invested in it”. But now we need another break. We still have one last stage. Shortly we will leave again…
