United States involvement in regime change in Latin America

Based on Wikipedia: United States involvement in regime change in Latin America

In 1954, the Central Intelligence Agency helped overthrow the democratically elected president of Guatemala because he threatened the profits of a fruit company. The head of the CIA and the Secretary of State had both worked as lawyers for that same company. This wasn't an aberration. It was standard operating procedure.

For more than a century, the United States has intervened repeatedly in Latin American politics, toppling governments, backing dictators, training death squads, and engineering economic chaos. The pattern is so consistent, so documented, so openly acknowledged in declassified files, that it reads less like conspiracy theory and more like foreign policy.

The Banana Republic Era

The phrase "banana republic" sounds almost quaint today, conjuring images of casual clothing stores rather than its darker origin. But it describes something quite specific: small Central American and Caribbean nations whose economies and governments were effectively controlled by American fruit companies, backed by American military force.

This era began after the Spanish-American War of 1898. Spain lost. Cuba gained nominal independence. Puerto Rico became American territory. And the United States, fresh from continental expansion, turned its attention southward.

The justifications varied. Sometimes it was protecting American business interests. Sometimes it was preventing European powers from gaining influence. Sometimes it was simply that a government seemed too friendly to workers and too hostile to corporations. The method was consistent: send in the Marines.

The United Fruit Company—known today as Chiquita—became the most powerful force in several Central American nations. It owned the railroads. It owned the ports. It owned the electrical utilities. It owned vast plantations. And when governments threatened any of this, the company had friends in Washington who could make problems disappear.

Guatemala: The Template

Jacobo Árbenz won Guatemala's presidential election in 1951. He was a reformer, not a revolutionary. His main crime was proposing that uncultivated land owned by the United Fruit Company should be redistributed to landless peasants. The company owned 550,000 acres but actively farmed only 15 percent of it. Árbenz offered to buy the unused land at the value the company itself had declared for tax purposes.

This was unacceptable.

United Fruit launched a lobbying campaign in Washington, painting Árbenz as a communist threat. The company had extraordinary access. Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, had been a lawyer for United Fruit. His brother John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State, had also represented the company. The public relations officer for United Fruit was married to President Eisenhower's personal secretary.

In 1954, the CIA orchestrated a coup. Árbenz was overthrown and replaced by a military dictatorship. Guatemala would spend the next four decades under authoritarian rule, including a civil war in which the military killed an estimated 200,000 people, mostly indigenous Mayans.

The Guatemala operation became a template. Find a leader whose policies threaten American business interests or seem sympathetic to leftist ideas. Label them communist. Fund opposition groups. Train rebels. Apply economic pressure. If necessary, support a military coup. Install someone more cooperative.

Cuba: The One That Got Away

The pattern nearly repeated in Cuba, but with a crucial difference: it failed.

American involvement in Cuba predates the Cold War. After the Spanish-American War, the United States occupied Cuba from 1898 to 1902, then again from 1906 to 1909, then sent Marines from 1917 to 1922 to protect American-owned sugar plantations. The Platt Amendment, imposed on Cuba's constitution, gave the United States the right to intervene in Cuban affairs whenever it deemed necessary.

For decades, Washington supported Fulgencio Batista, a dictator whose regime was notoriously corrupt and brutal but reliably friendly to American business. When Fidel Castro's revolution overthrew Batista in 1959, the United States lost not just an ally but extensive economic holdings on the island.

In April 1961, the CIA launched the Bay of Pigs invasion. Cuban exiles, trained and equipped by the United States, landed on Cuban beaches expecting to spark a popular uprising. It didn't happen. The invasion was crushed within three days. Castro not only survived but was strengthened, his warnings about American imperialism seemingly validated.

Over the following decades, American intelligence agencies made numerous attempts to assassinate Castro. Some plans were almost comically elaborate—exploding cigars, poisoned diving suits, a seashell rigged with explosives. None succeeded. Castro died of natural causes in 2016, having outlasted ten American presidents.

Brazil: The Domino That Mattered

When people discuss Cold War interventions, they often focus on small nations. But the most consequential American-backed coup may have been in Brazil, the fifth most populous country in the world.

João Goulart became president of Brazil in 1961. He was a social democrat, not a communist, but his policies concerned Washington. He proposed land reform. He wanted to limit how much profit foreign companies could take out of the country. He extended voting rights to illiterate Brazilians and enlisted soldiers.

President Kennedy authorized contingency planning for a coup. When Kennedy was assassinated, Lyndon Johnson continued the policy. On April 1, 1964, the Brazilian military overthrew Goulart with American support.

What followed was a military dictatorship that lasted twenty-one years. Thousands were tortured. Hundreds were killed or "disappeared." And Brazil's example influenced the entire continent. As historian Vincent Bevins has argued, the Brazilian coup was one of America's most significant Cold War victories precisely because of Brazil's size and influence. A military dictatorship in Brazil helped push other South American nations in the same direction.

Chile: Democracy Dies in Broad Daylight

Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile in 1970. He was a democratic socialist who came to power through free and fair elections. President Richard Nixon ordered the CIA to prevent Allende from taking office or, failing that, to make the Chilean economy "scream."

A declassified document called "Annex-NSSM 97" lays out the strategy in remarkable detail. The U.S. government would work through Chilean institutions, particularly the military, to remove Allende. The document explicitly states that America's role should remain hidden. The benefits listed include reducing "the threat of Marxism in Latin America" and eliminating "a potential threat to the United States."

Economic pressure came first. The United States blocked loans to Chile, encouraged businesses to withdraw investment, and worked to destabilize the economy. Then, on September 11, 1973—a date that would gain different significance three decades later—the Chilean military, led by General Augusto Pinochet, launched a coup.

Allende died in the presidential palace. The official story is suicide, though some evidence suggests he was killed.

Pinochet's regime lasted seventeen years. Thousands were executed. Tens of thousands were tortured. An estimated 200,000 Chileans fled the country. The regime became a testing ground for radical free-market economic policies, with American economists—the so-called "Chicago Boys," trained at the University of Chicago—helping to reshape the economy while political dissent was brutally suppressed.

Operation Condor: The Network of Terror

The various dictatorships didn't operate in isolation. In the 1970s, the military governments of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay coordinated their repression through a program called Operation Condor.

This wasn't just information sharing. It was a transnational assassination program. Dissidents who fled one country could be tracked down and killed in another. Political opponents were kidnapped, tortured, and murdered across borders. The program had American support—the CIA and FBI shared intelligence with Condor governments, and Henry Kissinger's State Department was kept informed of the operation.

Juan José Torres, the former president of Bolivia who had been overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup in 1971, was living in exile in Argentina when he was kidnapped and assassinated in 1976. His crime had been convening a "People's Assembly" that gave representation to workers, students, and peasants. Operation Condor reached him even in exile.

The Smaller Interventions

Between the headline-grabbing coups, there were countless smaller interventions. Ecuador saw two CIA-backed coups in the early 1960s, largely because its presidents wouldn't break relations with Cuba. The Dominican Republic's dictator Rafael Trujillo was assassinated with CIA-supplied weapons in 1961, though the subsequent democratic government was itself overthrown in a coup two years later, leading to American military intervention in 1965.

Nicaragua was occupied by American forces from 1912 to 1933, supposedly to protect the possibility of building a canal there. When the occupation ended, it left behind a National Guard that would eventually be commanded by the Somoza family, who ruled Nicaragua as a personal fiefdom for over four decades with American support.

In Panama, the United States backed Manuel Noriega for years—he had been a CIA asset since the 1960s—until relations soured and American forces invaded in 1989 to remove him. The invasion killed somewhere between several hundred and several thousand Panamanians, depending on which estimates you believe.

Haiti: Banking and Bloodshed

Haiti's story is particularly instructive because it shows how explicitly commercial interests drove intervention.

In 1909, Frank Vanderlip, president of National City Bank of New York—now Citibank—began planning to take over Haiti's finances. By 1910, a consortium of American investors had acquired control of Haiti's national bank. The bank then began withholding payments from the Haitian government and funding rebels to destabilize the country, all while earning 12 percent interest on the withheld funds.

In 1915, when an anti-American politician seemed likely to become president, the United States invaded. The occupation lasted until 1934. During that time, the Marines and their local auxiliary force, the Gendarmerie, killed several thousand Haitians while suppressing rebellions. They instituted a corvée system—essentially forced labor—for infrastructure projects, which killed hundreds or thousands more. American personnel were well compensated. Most Haitians remained in poverty.

Even after the occupation officially ended, the United States retained control over Haiti's external finances until 1947.

The Modern Era

The Cold War ended. The Soviet threat vanished. Did the interventions stop?

Not entirely.

The Trump administration's approach to Venezuela was described by the New York Times as "Washington's most overt attempts in decades to carry out regime change in Latin America." When opposition leader Juan Guaidó declared himself president in 2019, the United States immediately recognized him, imposed severe sanctions on Venezuela's economy, and openly discussed military intervention.

Economist Agathe Demarais, in her book "Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests," argues that the sanctions were specifically designed to hasten regime change by making the economy collapse. Whether this constitutes intervention in the traditional sense is debatable. That it represents continuity with a century-long pattern is harder to dispute.

The Pattern

Looking at this history, certain elements recur with striking consistency.

First, the targets. Leaders who proposed land reform. Leaders who wanted to nationalize foreign-owned industries. Leaders who seemed too friendly to workers and unions. Leaders who refused to break relations with Cuba or the Soviet Union. The common thread wasn't communist ideology—many of the overthrown leaders were social democrats or reformers with no connection to Marxism. The common thread was policies that threatened American economic interests or geopolitical preferences.

Second, the methods. Economic pressure. Propaganda campaigns. Funding opposition groups. Training and equipping rebels. Supporting military coups. Occasionally, direct invasion. The CIA developed these techniques, refined them, and applied them repeatedly.

Third, the aftermath. Military dictatorships. Death squads. Torture. Disappearances. Economic policies favorable to American corporations. And often, eventually, the collapse of the installed regime and decades of instability.

Fourth, the justifications. During the Cold War, it was always about stopping communism. Before that, it was about protecting American citizens and property. More recently, it's been about promoting democracy—though the record of actually supporting democratic governments is mixed at best.

The Documentary Record

What makes this history unusual is how well documented it is. Declassified CIA files describe operations in detail. Participants wrote memoirs. Congressional investigations uncovered programs that were supposed to remain secret. The Church Committee hearings in the 1970s exposed assassination plots and covert operations across the globe.

This isn't speculation or conspiracy theory. It's the official record, released by the government itself, available in archives for anyone to read.

Philip Agee, a CIA officer who operated in Ecuador in the early 1960s, later wrote extensively about the agency's methods. His accounts align with the declassified documents. The playbook he described—infiltrating political parties, funding friendly media, organizing labor unions, cultivating military contacts—was used across the hemisphere.

Consequences That Echo

Understanding this history helps explain a great deal about contemporary Latin America. Why do many Latin Americans distrust the United States? Why do leftist movements in the region often take anti-American positions? Why is there such sensitivity about sovereignty and foreign intervention?

The answers lie in living memory. There are people alive today who were tortured by U.S.-backed regimes. There are families still searching for relatives who "disappeared." There are economies still recovering from deliberate destabilization.

When American officials express confusion about anti-American sentiment in Latin America, or wonder why populist leaders who criticize the United States find receptive audiences, this history provides context. The resentment isn't based on propaganda or misunderstanding. It's based on what actually happened.

What It Means

None of this is to say that every Latin American government overthrown by American intervention was virtuous, or that every policy proposed by the United States was wrong. History is complicated. Some of the targeted leaders made serious mistakes. Some of the replacement governments eventually transitioned to democracy.

But the pattern raises uncomfortable questions. How do you reconcile a stated commitment to democracy with repeatedly overthrowing elected governments? How do you square human rights rhetoric with supporting regimes that tortured and murdered their citizens? How do you claim to oppose foreign interference in elections while running covert operations to influence elections abroad?

These aren't rhetorical questions. They're the questions that anyone seriously engaging with American foreign policy has to grapple with. The interventions happened. The documents exist. The bodies are real.

Understanding this history doesn't require adopting any particular political position. It requires acknowledging facts that are, at this point, simply historical record. What you conclude from those facts—about American power, about foreign policy, about the relationship between ideals and actions—is up to you.

But you can't understand Latin America today without understanding what the United States did there for over a century. You can't understand anti-American sentiment without knowing what generated it. And you can't have an informed opinion about current policy without knowing the policy that came before.

The documents are declassified. The history is written. The question is whether we're willing to read it.