By Ben Norton / Geopolitical Economy Report
The United States has militarily intervened in practically every country in Latin America.
The CIA has backed dozens of coups d’etat against democratically elected left-wing governments in Latin America, in an attempt to impose US imperial hegemony in the region and serve US corporate interests.
Today, more and more US government officials, especially those in Donald Trump’s two administrations, have invoked the 200-year-old colonial Monroe Doctrine to claim that Latin America is supposedly Washington’s “backyard”, that the US empire should control it, and that China and Russia cannot have relations with the countries in the region.
Given that the US government constantly violates the sovereignty of countries in Latin America, it makes perfect sense that several governments in the region have deepened their partnership with China and Russia, because they see that Beijing and Moscow actually respect their independence and have helped them to economically develop, while Washington has only sought to exploit them.
History of US imperialism in Nicaragua
A perfect case study of the devastating effects of US imperialism in Latin America is Nicaragua. The Central American nation has been invaded by the United States multiple times. The Nicaraguan people have endured relentless attacks by the US empire, not just for decades, but for centuries.
Central America finally won its independence from Spanish colonialism in 1821, after hundreds of years of struggle. However, just a few decades later, the US empire replaced the Spanish empire. Washington tried to colonize the region to exploit its resources and geostrategic location to benefit the business interests of oligarchic US “robber barons” like Cornelius Vanderbilt, who sought to build an inter-oceanic canal through Nicaragua.
In 1855, a multimillionaire US mercenary leader named William Walker invaded Nicaragua. Walker was an ardent colonialist who believed in the colonial doctrine of “Manifest Destiny”. Backed by his colonial mercenary army of “Filibusters”, Walker declared himself to be the unelected so-called “president” of Nicaragua. He then reinstated slavery in the territory he controlled through violence and corruption.
Central America had abolished slavery in 1824. The so-called “enlightened”, “democratic” United States did not abolish slavery until 41 years later, in 1865, after years of bloodshed in a brutal civil war. Many US colonialists like Walker had profited from slavery, and wanted to expand the barbaric system into other parts of the world as they expanded the US empire. Walker was eventually defeated by the people of Nicaragua and he was expelled. But before he left the country, he burned down the major city Granada.
Despite Walker’s defeat, the US empire still desperately sought to colonize Nicaragua. So in 1912, the US military invaded and occupied the country, turning it into an unofficial US colony. The people of Nicaragua rose up against the US empire. A revolutionary leader named Augusto César Sandino created a guerilla army to resist the colonial US military occupation. He called it the Army in Defense of the National Sovereignty of Nicaragua.
Sandino led a revolutionary guerilla war against the US military occupiers for several years, and eventually defeated them in 1933, expelling the foreign colonialists. However, although the US military was defeated, Nicaragua was not able to regain its sovereignty, because a year later, in 1934, Sandino was betrayed and killed by a US puppet, Anastasio Somoza García, the leader of Nicaragua’s National Guard, which had been created by the US military to serve as a tool of Washington’s imperial power.
Somoza was educated in the US and came from a very wealthy right-wing oligarchic family in Nicaragua, which collaborated with the US empire, and profited handsomely from this treachery. Somoza assumed power as dictator of Nicaragua. After his death at the hands of revolutionary Rigoberto López Pérez in 1956, his son Anastasio Somoza Debayle took over the dynastic dictatorship. The Somozas were obedient US puppets, and they brutally exploited working-class Nicaraguans on behalf of US corporate interests, terrorizing all political opposition.
In the 1970s, the people of Nicaragua took up arms and waged a revolutionary struggle against the Somoza dictatorship. The socialist Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) was inspired by Sandino’s revolutionary war against the US colonial occupation, and fought its own war against a neocolonial US puppet regime.
The Sandinistas toppled Somoza and created a new revolutionary left-wing government on the 19th of July, 1979. Finally, Nicaragua was able to restore its sovereignty. But the US empire never sleeps. Washington immediately launched another neocolonial war on Nicaragua. The CIA created far-right death squads, known as the “Contras” (short for “counterrevolutionaries”).
With staunch US government support, the Contra terrorists assassinated Nicaraguan government officials; blew up civilian infrastructure; raped, tortured, and killed civilians; and burned down schools and hospitals. To help fund their US proxy war on Nicaragua, the Contras also trafficked drugs — and many of those narcotics ended up in US neighborhoods, especially poor, majority Black neighborhoods, which fueled the crack epidemic in the 1980s.
Journalist Gary Webb exposed the CIA’s role in this drug trafficking scheme, in his book Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. The US government punished him by destroying his career. Webb later died in very mysterious circumstances. In 1984, the government of Nicaragua filed a lawsuit against the United States at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the top UN legal authority, located at the Hague.
Nicaragua won this case in 1986. The Hague found the US government guilty of carrying out horrific crimes, including bombing civilian infrastructure, putting mines in civilian ports, and overseeing other acts of terror. The ICJ ordered the US government not only to cease all of these crimes, but also to pay Nicaragua reparations. Washington showed itself to be a complete rogue state; it ignored the Hague’s ruling and continued to wage this criminal terrorist war.
Still to this day, the US government has refused to pay Nicaragua the reparations that it is legally owed according to international law. A former commander of the CIA-backed Contras published a very revealing article in the New York Times in 1986, titled “Terror Is the Most Effective Weapon of Nicaragua’s ‘Contras’”. This was written by Edgar Chamorro, who was a member of one of the most powerful and wealthiest oligarchic families in Nicaragua….
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