Empire’s Workshop & US Imperialist History in Latin America
Empire’s Workshop & US Imperialist History in Latin America
Today’s passage comes from historian Greg Grandin’s 2006 book “Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism” – a work recommended by no less an authority than the late Hugo Chávez, the then-President of Venezuela and a man who survived his own encounter with Pig Empire imperialism during a failed 2002 American-backed coup attempt against his government. Please note that while I am loathe to truncate content when quoting from such a great book, this passage contains two edits (as denoted by the ellipses) where I was required to remove a brief overview of the use of American “soft power” in Latin America – for the moment, we’re going to focus primarily on economic warfare (sanctions) and U.S. military interventions; whether by invasion, by proxy or by fomenting coups inside foreign countries.
The first and most obviously stunning thing you’ll notice about this quotation is both the elongated timeline and the stupefying volume of U.S interventions in Latin America. Over a span of more than a century and despite a near-constant churn of changing U.S leadership, the American crowning jewel of the Pig Empire has flexed some form of military or coercive economic power against almost every single nation in South and Central America; often on multiple occasions and typically with disastrously violent results.
It should also be noted that long before the United States even existed as a nation, much of what is now called Latin America had already been invaded and forced into a brutal colonial relationship with various Western European empires, like Spain, Portugal and France – sparking further atrocities that would continue well into the modern global era. Understanding this horrifying colonial history is important because of the drastic effect it has had on racially-influenced class dynamics frequently exploited by the Pig Empire to exert control over Latin America. The upper class elite in the region are typically members of families descended from those early, Western European colonizers. While the lower classes are over-represented among indigenous people and Afro-Latin Americans, who like their African American counterparts, endure still under the legacy of slavery and (still ongoing) exploitation that has prevented the accumulation of familial wealth to be passed down through the generations.
Although the timeline in the above passage runs from William Walker’s private invasion of Nicaragua in the 1850′s until roughly the end of the Cold War, and the U.S. invasion of Panama (a nation that only exists because of a prior American military intervention in Latin America), as the author notes in “Empire’s Workshop” the United States has coveted control of Latin America and the Caribbean almost from the moment our nation came into being. Indeed, the U.S. imperialist aspirational project in Latin America eventually soured strong, early American relations with the Spanish Empire, as tensions between the two empires grew, first in Florida and then in what is now Cuba; ultimately erupting into the Spanish-American War of 1898.
Furthermore, as Grandin details elsewhere in the book, this military and economic coercion has marched virtually in lockstep with the business interests of American capital and corporations like Standard Oil, Ford Motors and the infamous United Fruit Company; even during the so-called “soft power” years under Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor Policy” the Pig Empire continued to core away at Latin American sovereignty and left wing economic reforms on behalf of ruthless U.S. business enterprises that in some cases, actually participated in the violence.
Finally it’s important to remember that the exertion of coercive American power did not stop at the end of the Cold War either. Including the 2002 U.S backed coup attempt against Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and the two most recent attempts to topple his successor Nicolás Maduro, we can trace a distinct, unbroken line of election interference, economic warfare and Pig Empire-supported coups throughout Latin America – regardless of whether Bush, Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama or Trump have resided in the White House.
Each of these invasions, interventions and violations of sovereignty too were packaged and sold to a disturbingly credulous American public and international community as acts of civilization, humanitarianism or protective justice. Yet even after almost two-hundred years of U.S. attempts to “help” Latin America, the results have always been the same – war, violence, corruption, exploitation, fascist dictatorships, brutal suppression of left wing voices, the continued genocide of indigenous peoples, death squads, endless crushing poverty for the majority of the populace, as well as the further enrichment of American capital and the right wing elite in the countries we target.
Processing this vast, five-hundred-plus year history of Western colonial exploitation and American imperial violence in Latin America is important in the context of the American-backed slow-motion coup in Venezuela, because it brings up a number of extremely germane questions.
Questions like, why the heck would this time be any different? Why would anyone believe that this time, the mainstream media isn’t just reporting what “anonymous officials” in our bloodthirsty, warmongering government tell them? Why would anyone believe that a few thousand affluent protestors on screen from Caracas represented the will of a nation of thirty million people? Why would anyone believe that this time, it’s not about the oil? Why would anyone believe it’s just an accident Latin America has seen a clean sweep of far right, pro-US governments in recent years? Why would anyone believe that this time, it really is about human rights? Why would anyone believe that this time, unhinged sociopath John Bolton is telling the truth? Why would anyone believe that Trump suddenly cares about the suffering people in “sh*thole countries?”
Most importantly however, it brings up the question of why after Iraq, Libya and two centuries of Pig Empire interventions in Latin America, anyone would believe “the people of Venezuela” want our help at all?
– nina illingworth
