President Trump hints that the United States will attack Venezuela’s homeland even though there is no declaration of war or other congressional authorization for such a hostile act. Trump has been a norm breaker, but in this instance, he would not be, for the United States has a long record of invasions and incursions into Caribbean countries. I heard from several people who had watched Ken Burns’s The American Revolution that his version was not the history that they had been taught in school. Even fewer of us were taught about our colonial adventures in Latin America.
Although Americans coveted Cuba throughout the nineteenth century and the United States had tried to purchase the island from Spain, America sent troops into Cuba during the Spanish-American War of 1898. Even though the conflict was concluded before the year’s end and even though Cubans had been fighting for their independence from Spain for decades, America occupied the island until 1902. We pulled out and allowed Cuba its independence only after she agreed to the Platt Amendment which permitted the United States to intervene when needed for “good government” and agreed further to lease us Guantanamo Bay in perpetuity for a handful of dollars. With the Platt Amendment as justification, we had troops in Cuba from 1906 to 1909, sent them back in 1912, and ruled Cuba militarily from 1917-22.
American troops, however, have been sent to more Caribbean places than Cuba. Using civil unrest as a justification, the United States sent troops into the Dominican Republic in 1916. They stayed there for eight years. More recently, 42,000 of our troops were ordered into the Dominican Republic in 1965. They left a year-and-half later.
We did not ignore the other part of Hispaniola. We occupied Haiti in 1915 and continued to do that for two decades, finally withdrawing our troops in 1934. In 1994, the United States again sent troops into Haiti to “restore democracy” and did again ten years later as part of a multinational force. Haiti, however, remains a troubled, failed country.
Our Haitian occupation was long, but we occupied Nicaragua even longer, from 1912-1933. We say that our Afghanistan war was our longest, but our armed forces were in Haiti and Nicaragua for nearly as long.
During the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917), the United States occupied Veracruz and sent troops to chase Pancho Villa.
We, however, intervened with more than just our military in Latin American countries. In 1954, the CIA led the overthrow of the Guatemalan government; the CIA directed the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Moreover, the United States has tried to coerce our neighbors through sanctions, boycotts, and embargoes including those on Cuba and Nicaragua.(We did not limit such actions to the Americas. Daniel Immerwahrin “The United States Is an Empire” collected in Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, Myth America: Historians Take the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past [2022], states that the United States during the Cold War secretly interceded sixty-four times in other countries to oust a government or tilt an election, often in support of authoritarians.)
Our actions in the Caribbean were designed in part to keep Europe out of the Western Hemisphere, following our self-proclaimed Monroe Doctrine, which, by the way, has no basis in international law. Thus, part of the reason for our occupation of Mexico’s Veracruz was to keep Germany, with whom Mexico was friendly, at bay. We occupied Nicaragua for those decades partly to make sure that no other country would build a waterway to compete with the Panama Canal.
Sean Mirski in We May Dominate the World: Ambition, Anxiety, and Rise of the American Colossus (2023) also suggests that the United States was discomfited by some countries’ debt. Some Latin American countries borrowed profligately from Europe and could not pay their bills. Under international law, the creditors were entitled to use force to collect the money owed to them. This was often a simple procedure when tariffs were the chief source of a country’s revenue. The creditors were allowed to seize the customhouse and collect the duties. The United States was concerned about this kind of European intervention in the Western Hemisphere with the additional concern that the Latin American countries would grant the Europeans more concessions in order to have their sovereignty restored. Facing these possibilities, America thought it was better for it to intervene and use the customs revenues to pay the Europeans. This was often beneficial for the Latin American countries where corruption was so endemic that little tariff revenue made its way to the public fisc. The Americans did not skim the money, or at least not at the same rates, as the native tax collectors. As a result, the debtor nation often saw its revenues increase.
Europe learned to play America in these circumstances. European interventions were expensive, and those foreign powers often actually wanted America to do it instead. America soon recognized that the debt and corruption problems would recur unless the countries became stable and lived within their means. This then required United States to become more involved in the internal affairs of the Latin American countries often leading to military interventions and authoritarian governments.
This pattern can be seen in the Dominican Republic which, in 1907, agreed that United States could appoint a receiver to collect customs duties until the outstanding Dominican debt was paid. Even so, or perhaps as a result, the next decade saw an eight-year occupation of the Republic by the United States.
America, however, intervened, invaded, occupied, and meddled because of more than concern about Europeans getting footholds in the Americas. We were also seeking to protect our own businesses. Our first occupation of Haiti came at the urging of what is now Citibank. Many American businesses urged the occupation of Veracruz. American companies often had massive holdings in Caribbean countries. For example, by 1926, United States companies owned 60% of Cuban sugar industry and imported 95% of the sugar crop.
The United States also claimed an interest in preventing communists from getting power in the Americas. For example, Lyndon Johnson said he was sending troops into the Dominican Republic to protect American lives and property but also to prevent establishment of communist dictatorship. Reagan placed embargoes on Nicaragua because of fears the country was becoming communist.
However, as Stephen Kinzer says specifically about Foster Dulles in The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (2013), America foreign policy in general “could not distinguish between indigenous nationalism and imported communism.”
Furthermore, our foreign policy has often conflated support for large, multinational corporations with opposition to communism. Guatemala is a case in point. Seventy years ago, Jacobo Árbenz, the head of the Central American country, wanted land reform. He meant to purchase uncultivated acreage for the government to be redistributed among the people. Eighty-five percent of the United Fruit Company’s vast holdings in Guatemala were in those very uncultivated lands. The corporation cried “communism.” They cried even more when Guatemala offered to pay what United Fruit claimed the land was worth for tax purposes. The corporation wanted ten times that amount. Our country’s response: Overthrow the Central American government, which we did.
Over the years our interventions succeeded in keeping European countries from grabbing significant influence in the region. They also succeeded in increasing the profits and influence for a number of multinational companies. They may have kept the price of bananas and other commodities lower than otherwise. However, they did not improve the lives of most of those in the region, and they did not improve the working lives of most Americans. Finally, our actions did not lead to democracies or stable governments, and thus our interventions continued.
Now the United States seems poised for military action on Venezuela’s home soil. It is almost impossible to gauge the likelihood of success because the goals are murky. A stated goal has been the elimination of “narcoterrorism” to reduce overdose deaths in this country. If that were the real reason, we could declare victory now. Few of the drugs bought in the U.S. come from Venezuela, and these drugs cause almost none of the overdose deaths. Maybe we want Venezuela’s oil. They have a lot of it, and it’s being inefficiently managed. The real goal, however, seems regime change. We want Nicolas Maduro to leave office. Many people do. He is an illegal, brutal ruler overseeing a failing economy. It is not surprising that many citizens have now left Venezuela. But even if regime change is the goal, it is not clear why Trump and Rubio are singularly fixated on Caracas and not other countries with brutal rulers. Rubio may have a far too personal interest. His family fled Cuba, and Rubio has always resented Venezuelan support of Cuba.
History does not necessarily repeat itself, but history often holds lessons. We have forced many regime changes in Caribbean countries. Peace and bonhomie seldom followed. Instability with harsh conditions for the people of those nations often has. Whither Venezuela?
