US Imperialism in Central America; A Legacy of Violence and Murder

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

I sat next to a guy on the plane coming back from Ireland recently and he seemed nice enough and probably was had we continued to talk about superficial issues of little importance when it comes to living or dying on the earth.

I can’t recall how we touched on it but he made some comment about the problems they are having in Europe with immigrants trying to get it to Germany, Italy and other countries.  I discontinued the discussion but ended it informing him that these people were not “immigrants” they were refugees fleeing US bombs and also colonialism and imperialism’s long legacy of plunder in Africa and the Middle East. He had mentioned how Ireland was unable to develop because the British never allowed them to but didn’t seem to see the same process outside of Ireland which I assume was the home of his ancestors. The last thing I recall him saying was he was from Texas and liked wide open spaces.

There was a woman sitting in between us, an urbanite, a New Yorker, but I gathered she was similar in her thinking as when I raised the issue of women and the recent movement against sexual abuse she didn’t disagree but she said something like “It’s all about choices” and then proceeded to tell me how hard it has been for her and she fought basically. It's a bit of a red flag to me that view.

I figured both of them were at the very last conservative, professionals or comfortably off, and more likely Trumpists. I should add as an aside, that the meme’s I see on Facebook, particularly coming from Democratic sites or Democratic Party apologists often portray Trump supporters as the white working class exclusively but this is mistaken as a huge section of the petit bourgeois and middle class support him including some of color. It’s the Shekels baby as my old human resources nemesis used to say and I had a great deal of respect for him. The Democrats hate workers too so it’s useful to blame “backward” white workers for everything as it also keeps the old “divide and rule” magic alive.

What made me think of them is the ignorance that exists in US society when it comes to the global role US capitalism has played historically. It exists in other countries too but the capitalist mass media in the US is very powerful, controlled or outright censored and this and its powerful economy and ability to feed its population in the main (even if it’s stuff that fills the belly but isn’t food) has left the US population very much isolated with regards to the rest of the world and knowledge of its role in history.

As my fellow passenger correctly sees with regard to Ireland, the poorer countries of Central and Latin America will never really develop, will always remain poor as US capitalism to the north guarantees it. Like Africa to British colonialism, the US has traditionally seen Latin America as its own back yard. The US has invaded Mexico alone many times. The US encouraged Panama, which was a part of Colombia, to secede in 1903 so that US capitalism could build a canal across the isthmus. The French had tried before the US but the death toll was staggering. Some 26,000 workers died building the canal. When the US took over in 1903 it was mostly Afro-Caribbean workers that built it.

See: “White employees of the Canal Commission were given comfortable housing, while many black workers lived in railway boxcars or shacks in the forests bordering the work site. In the early years, malaria and yellow fever were rife and accidents were frequent. Records at the wooden museum show that of 5,600 employees killed by disease and accidents between 1904 and the project's completion 10 years later, 4,500 were black.” http://usslave.blogspot.com/2011/07/panama-canal.html

US capitalism’s dominant economic and military power ensures that the canal, although managed by Panama, is defended by the US military. See Panama Canal

I see now that the Trump administration is concerned about the rise in Guatemalan immigration in to the US and a top border official has been sent to Guatemala to investigate. Trump has even threatened sanctions against the Guatemalan government if it doesn’t stop people heading north. The migration “confounds officials” the Wall Street Journal reports today. I don’t know the level of reporting on this in the mass consumption dailies if it’s mentioned at all, but the WSJ also cannot expose the true nature of history.  The Journal talks of the history of “unrelenting violence” that forced northward, “….roughly 70,000 immigrant families and nearly as many unaccompanied children in 2014.” But what is the source of this violence historically?

But more recently, “The causes have become more elusive”, the Journal adds as 42,000 Guatemalans were arrested at the US border between October last year and this August. The US official has been visiting “US government funded or supported projects…” that are designed to help the local economies such as job training and such. Now considering the US government cannot provide such things for US citizens, it doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that a visit from US government officials is a kiss of death. An indigenous rights activist points out that malnutrition is widespread and access to land for agriculture is very limited and if they can’t grow food they can’t eat.  The situation according to the US representative is “not acceptable.”

US capitalism will never permit, Guatemala or any of the former colonial countries in Latin America to develop independently just as the man on the plane I described above suggested about Ireland. Haiti will always be a basket case, US imperialism cannot have an independent nation, free of US influence near its borders or anywhere in Central America. The history of US capitalism’s intervention in this part of the world is well known; assassinations, occupations, intervention covert and overt, coups, right wing death squads, this is the US legacy in all of Latin and Central America.

In 1954 a CIA sponsored coup overthrew Guatemala’s democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz on behalf of the United Fruit Co. and other big landowners. Arbenz had introduced land reforms that threatened the domination of the United Fruit Company over Guatemalan society. Only 2% of landowners owned 72% of the arable land, much of it unused. United fruit alone held 600,000 acres of mostly unused land. The Guatemalan colonel that the CIA selected to replace Arbenz immediately outlawed hundreds of trade unions and returned more than 1.5 million acres to United fruit Co.

Instrumental in planning the coup were the Dulles brothers, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, Allen Dulles who was director of the CIA. These two also helped orchestrate the CIA coup that overthrew the secular democratic government of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 and replaced him with the murderous Shah. They were former partners of United Fruit’s main law firm in Washington. By 1985 some 75,000 people were dead or had disappeared at the hands of the Guatemalan dictatorship; a huge amount in this tiny country. Some 150,000 Indians fled to Mexico and beyond. Many of the brothers and sisters we see on the streets as day laborers are from this area.

This is the backdrop to why people from Central America risk life and limb, face violence and rape, to come to the US.  Guatemalans don’t leave their homes, Mexicans don’t leave theirs, because they want to. As I responded to the woman on the plane I refer to above, people do make individual choices but we rarely if ever, choose the circumstance under which this free will is expressed so it’s not so free.

I am a socialist and do not believe this situation will ever change if capitalism is not eradicated. As workers we know that in the US, the education system does not teach working class history. Their mass media does not report on the heroic struggles of the working class and all oppressed people in an honest unbiased way----it can’t. It doesn’t report on a strike or a labor dispute from our point of view.

It is even more biased when it comes to US capitalism/imperialism’s role abroad. The US bought the Philippines off of Spain for $20 million. The British queen Victoria was the Empress of India. She was declared so by the British Parliament; the Indian people had no say in it, especially the workers and poor people. Is this a history of a civilized world? It is not.

Just like we do, the workers and poor people of the world rise up against this oppression, at least try to escape the consequences of it and more often than not by emigration. This is why there are so many Irish and other Europeans here, their ancestors fled poverty, prejudice and discrimination.

Knowing as we do that in the US we are lied to and victimized by the wealthy and those in power, I want to appeal to my fellow working class sisters and brothers to look beyond out borders, to reject the xenophobic and racist lies that are used to explain immigration and mass migrations of people. To reject the false idea that US capitalism is some egalitarian force in the world. We can reject the history of the powerful, of the ruling classes. The Internet gives us the opportunity to seek knowledge and information about history and global relations. I can sit here in my living room and write my thoughts and with the click of a mouse massive amounts of information not shared in the biased capitalist media are available to me.

We are close to another slump or economic crisis as bad or worse than 2008.  It is in our interests as workers to recognize that other workers within the US and outside of it are class allies, not our enemies.

One immediate example. United Parcel Service is a global corporation, employs workers throughout the world. The Teamster hierarchy in the US has just imposed a contract on the workers there that they rejected by majority vote. The Teamster leadership is supporting the employers as they all do. The rank and file teamsters at UPS can win this battle against our own leaders atop organized labor and they can certainly do it with support from workers internationally. All workers throughout the world have the same interests; we are class sisters and brothers. Seeing foreign workers as enemies and competitors or attacking immigrants and not rejecting the capitalist media's lies about why they migrate is against our self interest.

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