Colossus (14 page)

The Panama Canal was opened in 1914 and remained under direct American control until 1979. But plans had also existed to build a canal farther north through Nicaragua; indeed, before volcanic eruptions there in 1902 caused consternation in the U.S. Senate, that country had seemed to offer the more likely route (via Lake Nicaragua).
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American business interests in the country were scarcely enormous: total U.S. investment there
amounted to no more than $2.5 million in 1912, compared with $1.7 billion for Latin America as a whole.
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However, when the Nicaraguan dictator José Santos Zelaya appeared to be flirting with an Anglo-French syndicate—and when two Americans were executed for their part in a rebel attack—the United States broke off diplomatic relations. Zelaya was forced to resign, and a new government was installed, with American backing, under Adolfo Díaz, former treasurer of the La Luz and Los Angeles Mining Company.
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In 1912, at his request, three thousand marines were sent to quell a revolt against him; a small detachment of a hundred remained there for thirteen years, propping up his regime.
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The fruit of this intervention was the 1916 Bryan-Chamorro Treaty, which, in return for $3 million, gave the United States exclusive rights to build a canal through Nicaragua as well as a naval base on the Gulf of Fonseca.
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In Cuba too business interests and strategic calculation pointed to recurrent intervention rather than annexation—dependence but not occupation. Though the defeat of Spain in 1898 had offered the opportunity to take over the island, American troops were there only briefly. McKinley had talked merely of “ties of singular intimacy and strength” between Cuba and the United States.
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The form these would take was specified in Senator Orville H. Platt’s Amendment, incorporated in the Cuban Constitution in 1902, which gave the United States the right to intervene if necessary “for the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property and individual liberty.”
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The amendment precluded any bilateral strategic arrangement between Cuba and a rival foreign power, thus giving the United States an effective veto power over the island’s foreign policy. It circumscribed the country’s future borrowing. And it entitled the United States to establish naval bases on the Cuban coast; the first to be leased was Guantánamo Bay on the eastern tip of the island.
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It was not long before the right of intervention in Cuban political life was exercised. When a revolt threatened to topple a newly elected president in September 1906, a force of marines was deployed and a provisional government established under an American governor-general. But even the once-bullish Roosevelt now professed to “loathe the thought of assuming any control over the island such as we have over Puerto Rico and the Philippines.” By now he had largely lost his faith in the idea that “thickly peopled tropical regions” like Cuba could be
run “by self-governing northern democracies.”
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Two and a half years later the American troops left, having installed a new president.
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They returned briefly to the island in 1912, to quell a revolt by former slaves, and again from 1917 until 1922, when the losing side refused to accept the election of President Mario Menocal. It was no coincidence that Menocal was the managing director of the Cuban-American Sugar Company.
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The Dominican Republic was placed in a comparable condition of political and economic dependence, just short of outright conquest. “I have,” declared Roosevelt, “about the same desire to annex it as a gorged boa-constrictor might have to swallow a porcupine wrong-end-to.”
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Instead the tried-and-tested imperial method was adopted of controlling the collection of customs, the government’s principal source of revenue. Under the
modus vivendi
of 1905, the United States was empowered to retain up to 55 percent of customs receipts for the purpose of debt service. What Lord Cromer was to late-nineteenth-century Cairo, Professor Jacob H. Hollander of Johns Hopkins University became to Santo Domingo, determining the size of its debt and the allocation of its customs revenues.
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As in Cuba and Nicaragua, however, finding suitable puppets proved problematic. The assassination of President Ramón Cáceres in 1911 plunged the country’s government into confusion, prompting the United States to oust one would-be successor and install another.
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In 1914 a new Dominican president defied American demands for yet more stringent fiscal controls; when a revolution broke out, there seemed no alternative but once again to send in the marines. Finally, in November 1916, the country was placed under American military government, and it remained in that condition for six years. It was, said Wilson solemnly, “the least of the evils in sight in this very perplexing situation.”
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To the west, in neighboring Haiti, the story was similar. Between 1900 and 1913 the United States dispatched small detachments of troops no fewer than sixteen times, but still the island’s politics lurched from crisis to crisis; there were no fewer than six presidents in the four years from 1912 to 1915. When President Guillaume Sam was murdered in the latter year, Wilson once again dispatched the marines, who established order after considerable bloodshed.
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That September a new president was installed on condition that he accept a treaty similar to the Platt Amendment. In this case Haiti’s finances, police, press and public works were put under
American supervision. The American naval commander in charge of the operation imposed
de facto
military rule in coastal towns.
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Thus began a history of spasmodic intervention in Central America and the Caribbean that has continued to the present day. As a policy it has been, to put it mildly, disappointing. Indeed, when one compares the two territories in the region that the United States formally annexed—Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands (purchased from Denmark in 1916)—with the countries it sought to control by indirect means, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that annexation might have been better for all these places. Between the wars American enthusiasm for the Roosevelt Corollary faded; the Wilsonian belief that the people of the region could somehow be “taught … to elect good men” lost credibility. In 1924 the marines pulled out of the Dominican Republic.
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Any pretense of interest in democratic government in Honduras was abandoned in the course of the 1920s; by 1932 the United Fruit Company, which dominated the country’s banana production, was content to coexist peacefully and profitably with the authoritarian Tiburcio Carías Andino, who ruled the country until 1948.
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“Intervention,” Herbert Hoover told reporters shortly after being elected president, “is not now, never was, and never will be a set policy of the United States.”
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In fact, his successor, Franklin Roosevelt, lost little time in intervening in Cuba; the upshot, however, was another military dictatorship under a young sergeant named Fulgencio Batista. In 1934 the Platt Amendment was effectively torn up; all that survived of American control over Cuba was the Guantanamo Bay base. That same year Roosevelt pulled the American troops out of Haiti too.

Perhaps the most dispiriting case of all was Nicaragua, which by the mid-1920s was in the grip of civil war between rival Liberal and Conservative factions. In went the marines once more, this time to thwart a coup attempt by Emiliano Chamorro, back went Diaz to the presidential palace and along came Henry L. Stimson to broker some kind of settlement. In the summer of 1927 he might have succeeded, but for the obstinate resistance of one Liberal commander, Augusto César Sandino.
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Elections were held in 1928, and again in 1932, but the marines found themselves embroiled in a grueling guerrilla war against the Sandinistas, whom not even the precocious use of airpower could dislodge from their mountain fastnesses. By 1932 the question being asked by many Americans was:
“Why are we in Nicaragua and what the hell are we doing there?”
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One correspondent to the
New York Times
sounded a note that has proved especially resonant: “We ought to go down there and clean up that situation or get out of there and stay out. There’s no use us sending a handful of our boys down there to be butchered.”
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(In fact, total U.S. fatalities were 136.) In January 1933 the last marines were withdrawn. Thirteen months later Sandino was executed by the first Nicaraguan-born commander of the U.S. trained National Guard, Anastasio Somoza Garcia, who two years later installed himself as president. The Somoza dictatorship was to endure for two generations, until 1979.

This was not the way Wilson had planned it. The dream of using American military force to underwrite American-style governments in Central America had failed miserably. There was only one true democracy in the entire region by 1939, and that was Costa Rica, where the United States had never intervened. In some respects, to be sure, the United States had succeeded in establishing itself as the hemispheric hegemon it had for so long claimed to be. As an investor it grew in importance, gaining on (though not quite surpassing) the previously dominant British. As a diplomatic arbiter between the quarrelsome republics of the south it also played an influential role, particularly in the 1920s.
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But as a liberal empire, seeking to export its own political institutions to Latin America, it had achieved precious little. All that Franklin Roosevelt could do was to dress up failure as “good neighborly” tolerance. Somoza might, alas, be a “son of a bitch,” but as Roosevelt’s secretary of state is said to have pointed out, he was nevertheless “our son of a bitch.”
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The most damning verdict of all on American policy came from General Smedley D. Butler, the most decorated marine of his generation, in an article he wrote for the magazine
Common Sense
in 1935:

I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. 1 helped make Honduras “right” for American fruit companies in 1903…. Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best
he
could do was to operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three
continents
.
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This would always be the most damaging allegation against American imperialism: that for all its high-minded statements of intent, it boiled down to a Wall Street racket.

And what of Mexico, which had inspired Wilson’s doctrine of democratic intervention? In 1914 American patience with the Huerta regime ran out, and a small force of marines was sent to seize control of the key port and oil terminal of Veracruz and prevent the importation of German arms. Doubly beset by U.S.-backed rebel forces and a tax strike by the U.S. oil companies, Huerta resigned, surrendering power to the rebel leader Venustiano Carranza.
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The Carranza regime was nothing if not a product of American policy. Yet within two years the United States acted in a way that seemed calculated to undermine Carranza’s authority, by sending American troops across the Mexican border in pursuit of Pancho Villa, a former Carranza ally turned renegade.
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Before long General John J. Pershing’s “punitive expedition” was deep inside Mexican territory, failing to find Villa, but skirmishing with the regular Mexican Army.
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Alarmed at the prospect of a full-scale American-Mexican war, Wilson drew back, and Pershing was forced to “sneak home under cover like a whipped cur with his tail between his legs.”
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Not for the last time in its history, the United States had embarked on a manhunt, had failed to catch the man and had ended up alienating an erstwhile ally.
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The endemic violence of Mexican politics meanwhile continued unabated.
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And before long a new and portentous word began to be applied to the heirs of the Mexican Revolution: American observers began to detect symptoms of the “Bolshevik virus” (though at this stage the influence of nationalists like Carlos Calvo was unquestionably greater than that of Lenin).
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Article 27 of the new Mexican Constitution of 1917 asserted that all subterranean mineral rights belonged to the Mexican nation, posing an implicit threat of nationalization to American
oil companies.
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It was bad enough that Smedley Butler had tried to “make Mexico… safe for American oil interests in 1914.” What was perhaps worse was the possibility that he might have failed.