For more than a century, U.S. presidents have successfully removed Latin American leaders. What you need to know about US involvement in coups in the region.
What we know now about rising tensions between the U.S. and Venezuela
Tensions between the US and Venezuela are rising, but why is the US paying attention to this South American country?
Infamous Panamanian Marine General Manuel Noriega was sent as a prisoner of war. Salvador Allende, Chile’s first socialist president who died in a U.S.-backed military coup. Jacobo Arbenz was Guatemala’s progressive president who resigned after his military was fooled by CIA propaganda.
Will Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro be next?
If President Donald Trump has his way, the Venezuelan dictator will join a growing list of Latin American leaders dating back to the early 1900s that U.S. officials have urged to step down.
Few of the ousted leaders are household names in the United States, where Latin American politics attracts little attention. But senior U.S. officials are keeping a close eye on neighboring countries and have moved repeatedly to overthrow their leaders.
“The idea that we now want to decide the future of Venezuela is nothing new,” Stephen Kinser, author of a book on U.S.-orchestrated regime change around the world, told USA TODAY. “What is happening now is part of a long tradition in which the Caribbean and its neighbors are being asked to accept the global political reality that there are implicit limits on what small countries can do in the vicinity of large powers.”
Official reasons for U.S.-backed coups in the past have included everything from defending U.S. business interests and citizens to establishing a better government.
White House officials say Mr. Maduro is the leader of a drug-trafficking cartel designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department. President Maduro denies any link to the illegal drug trade.
The public reason for intervention is usually a cover story, Kinser said, and the simpler explanation is that the White House won’t tolerate opposition in its own backyard.
“It’s definitely not a drug problem. Venezuela is a minor player,” said Kinser, who also worked as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times based in Latin America. “President Maduro is rebellious and does not accept the geopolitical reality that these countries should respect American hegemony.”
Historians say U.S. efforts to forcefully dictate the shape of the Western Hemisphere can be traced back to the early 1900s, when President Theodore Roosevelt established the outcome of the Monroe Doctrine and signaled that the U.S. was prepared to intervene by force. The Monroe Doctrine of the 1800s called on European powers to stay away from the region.
In November, the White House said it would act to extend the Monroe Doctrine as a corollary and create “a hemisphere of governments working together against narco-terrorists, cartels, and other transnational criminal organizations.”
“This is a direct extension of the Roosevelt Corollary 121 years later, the Monroe Doctrine,” said Christopher Nichols, a Woodrow Wilson scholar at Ohio State University. “It’s an extension to ensure that the United States explicitly intervenes without just cause and doesn’t bother appealing to the international community.”
As President Trump continues to bomb ships off the coast of Venezuela and considers land attacks, let’s take a look at past U.S.-backed regime changes in the region, how U.S. leaders accomplished them, and what has happened since.
Nicaragua’s “Dangerous Dictator”, 1909
The first successful action by a U.S. president to overthrow a Latin American leader occurred in 1909, when Nicaraguan President José Santos Zelaya resigned after President Howard Taft deployed warships off the coast of Nicaragua and Marines across the border in Panama.
According to Encyclopedia Britannica, Zelaya came to power in 1893 as the leader of a rebellion. U.S. leaders initially praised Zelaya. President Roosevelt called him a “great and good friend.”
American businessmen were frustrated when a Central American president imposed regulations. Business executives supported the Nicaraguan rebellion, and Taft’s government sent in the military after Mr. Zelaya executed two rebel American mercenaries.
According to the State Department, Taft saw the U.S. intervention as a move to “remove a dangerous dictator and establish a better government.” The agency said Nicaraguans viewed the U.S. intervention as a ruse to take over the railroads and banks.
Nicaragua’s state news agency, Nicaragua Investiga, said what followed Zelaya’s ouster was “years of U.S. territorial control and, as a result, control of the country’s financial policy by Wall Street bankers.”
Banana King targets Honduras, 1911
According to Encyclopedia Britannica, Honduran President Miguel Dávila, installed by Zelaya, was next to be overthrown in 1911.
In “Overthrow: A Century of American Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq,” Mr. Kinser writes that Zelaya’s disciples clashed with American businessmen after trying to impose regulations and limit the amount of land that could be owned in the country.
Rebel forces funded by American banana king Sam Zemley invaded. U.S. officials banned further fighting and Mr. Dávila resigned.
Honduras’ newly installed president, Manuel Bonilla, gave Mr. Zemurray, also known as “Sam the Banana Man,” approximately 35,000 acres of banana land and $500,000.
Mr. Zemley became president of United Fruit Company, the company that sells the Chiquita brand of bananas commonly found in grocery stores.
CIA deceives Guatemala, 1954
According to Encyclopedia Britannica, Mr. Zemurray played a key role in the next regime change in the region, the ouster of President Jacobo Arbenz, a former minister of war who came to power with support from the military and the Guatemalan Communist Party.
Arbenz’s attempts to redistribute idle land owned by Zemley’s United Fruit Company and raise taxes on the company alarmed Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.
The Central Intelligence Agency, led by Mr. Dulles’ brother Allen Dulles, responded by organizing an army of Guatemalan exiles, and Mr. Arbenz resigned after his unit refused to fight troops massing across the border between Honduras and El Salvador.
Kinzer said among the intelligence agencies’ tricks were flying planes emblazoned with Guatemalan rebel insignia over the country and setting up a fake radio station in Miami that broadcast fake troop movements to give the impression of a large-scale rebel movement.
US hangs Humpty Dumpty on the wall in Chile, 1973
Peter Siaveris, a political science professor at Wake Forest University, said by phone from Chile that U.S. involvement in Allende’s ouster was indirect but important.
Although American troops were never sent to the country, President Richard Nixon imposed an “invisible blockade” and the CIA provided funding to right-wing groups. Among them are the conspirators who stopped soon-to-be dictator Augusto Pinochet’s rise to the top of the military and ultimately killed the general.
“The United States was not substantively involved in the actual coup,” Siaveris said. But “the United States pushed Humpty Dumpty against the wall, and the United States made Humpty Dumpty very unstable, making it really easy for Pinochet to come along and push him off the wall.”
Pinochet’s regime was brutal. Thousands were killed, many more were tortured, and tens of thousands fled into exile. The author of several books on the country said that democracy was restored decades later only because the country’s institutions remained strong and its people continued to adhere to its democratic traditions.
The outcome is likely to be even worse in Venezuela, where democracy has not been effectively practiced for decades and the country remains deeply divided among regional powers loyal to Maduro, Siavelis said.
“The fundamental problem is that you don’t have a plan for the next day,” he says. “It’s easy to overthrow a weak regime like Maduro’s. What’s really difficult is stabilizing a polarized country with no democratic tradition or infrastructure, as we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
