United Fruit, CIA, Do Business in Guatemala, Cold War Style: 3) Precursor to Civil War and an Export Model for Anti-Communists a

Comparative politics, Economics and society,, International Relations, Politics, Regional History

fortnight after Jacobo Árbenz Guzman fell on his sword, resigning the presidency of Guatemala, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, who had led the so-called “Army of Liberation”—the US-financed and trained rebel force which had invaded the country—was made president of Guatemala’s ruling military junta. Despite Washington’s professed intention to rebuild Guatemala through comprehensive reforms into a “showcase for democracy”, the US’s ongoing preoccupation with the drive to eliminate communism in the region took precedence [Brockett, Charles D. “An Illusion of Omnipotence: U.S. Policy toward Guatemala, 1954-1960.” Latin American Politics and Society, vol. 44, no. 1, 2002, pp. 91–126. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3177112. Accessed 4 Aug. 2020].

Árbenz’s resignation speech 

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Doubling down on communism
America’s ‘Liberator’ for Guatemala however took a blanket approach to the communist witch hunt, his repressive crackdown targeted anyone suspected of opposing his increasingly dictatorial regime. Political opponents, labour leaders, remnants of the Árbenzista peasantry, were all rounded up (over 3,000 were arrested by Castillo Armas and an unknown number liquidated). Non-communists were routinely caught up in the purge, including ordinary farm workers from local agrarian committees. Árbenz’s agrarian land reform system was dismantled, the land appropriated from United Fruit Company (UFCo) was returned to it. Resistance to Castillo Armas’s removal of peasants from their lands acquired during the revolution was met with repression by the regime. Castillo Armas also had to deal with insurrections by disaffected left-wing Ladino officers (remnants of the military remaining loyal to Árbenz and Areválo), fighting a guerrilla insurgency from the highlands (Brockett).

Árbenz and his supporters spent 73 days in asylum in the Mexican Embassy before an inglorious exile  

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Armas’ presidency, which ended in 1957 when he was assassinated by an Árbenz sympathiser, was a disaster for a recovering Guatemala. The fallout from the Armas regime’s soaring debts and entrenched corruption was that it became almost completely dependent on US aid. The deteriorating situation under Ydígoras (the new president) led him to declare a “state of seize” in 1960, suspending civil liberties and establishing military rule. An attempt by a group of dissident military officers to overturn Ydígoras’ increasingly oppressive government triggered a civil war in Guatemala which lasted 34 years and claimed the lives of approximately 200,000 civilians, including a genocidal “scorched earth” policy conducted against the indigenous Q’eqchi Maya community [‘Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, American Republics, Volume V’, Office of the Historian, www.history.state.gov/]

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the Guatemalan junta post-democracy 

“Guatemala as domino” – a blueprint for coups in Latin America and the Caribbean
Post-1954 the US continued to provide Guatemalan security forces with “a steady supply of equipment, training and finance, even as political repression grew ferocious”. The type of practices rehearsed in Guatemala—covert destabilisation operations, death squad killings by professional intelligence agencies—were lessons learnt for dealing with future ‘maverick’ regimes trying to chart a different political and economic path to that acceptable to Washington [Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War, (2011)].

The most tragic and wide-reaching legacy of the 1954 Guatemala coup is that it provided a model for future coups and instability in the region set off by a heightened Cold War. The US followed the Guatemala playbook in orchestrating the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by reactionary exiles in 1961 – albeit with a very different outcome. The US’ toppling, with British complicity, of the democratically elected Jagan government in British Guiana in 1964 had familiar reverberations to 1954: Washington’s fear of confronting a communist government in the hemisphere after the Cuban Revolution resulted in “an inflexible and irrational policy of covert subversion towards a moderate PPP government” in British Guiana [Stephen Rabe, U.S. Intervention in British Guiana: A Cold War Story, (2005)]. The CIA and right-wing dissidents within the Brazilian military colluded in a coup which overthrew the liberal government of João Goulart in 1964 (golpe de 64), replacing it with an uncompromising military junta. Washington’s involvement was prompted by Goulart’s plans to nationalise the Brazilian oil industry and other large private businesses. The same techniques and rhetoric were employed in the Dominican Republic coup/counter-coup in 1965. Most notoriously the Guatemalan putsch was to have echoes in the 1973 coup d’état in Chile which violently removed Marxist president, Salvador Allende. This was in response to Allende’s move to nationalise foreign businesses including US-owned copper mines and telecommunications giant I.T.T. US president, Richard Nixon, in fact had already tried to prevent Allende from taking office after the socialist won the Chilean elections fair and square in 1970 [‘Chilean president Salvador Allende dies in coup’, History, www.history.com/].

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 CIA headquarters in Virginia, USA

CIA hit-list for Guatemala
CIA documents declassified in the 1990s reveals lists were compiled as early as 1952 of individuals in the Árbenz government “to (be) eliminated immediately in event of (a) successful anti-Communist coup”. Because the names were deleted during the agency declassification it can’t be verified if any of the assassinations were actually carried through [‘CIA and Assassination: The Guatemala 1954 Documents’, (Edited by Kate Doyle & Peter Kornbluh), The National Security Archive, www.nsarchive2.gwu.edu].

Footnote: the removal of Árbenz from Guatemala didn’t mean the CIA and Washington were done with the deposed president. The CIA continued its campaign to trash the reputation of Árbenz in exile, even though, personally, he was a politically impotent figure by this time. The CIA found it useful to continue to smear Árbenz as a “Soviet agent”, tying him to the ongoing US crusade against communism in the hemisphere [Ferreira, Roberto Garcia. “THE CIA AND JACOBO ARBENZ: HISTORY OF A DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN.” Journal of Third World Studies, vol. 25, no. 2, 2008, pp. 59–81. JSTOR, www.jstor.og/stable/45194479. Accessed 6 Aug. 2020].

Nixon and Armas

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PostScript: A mea culpa of sorts
Decades later the US government through President Clinton issued an apology, not for the 1954 coup, but for the US’ role in the human rights abuses of the civil war in Guatemala, which slaughtered thousands of civilians. It wasn’t until 2011 that the Guatemalan government (under President Colom) apologised for the “historic crime” against Árbenz and his family [‘Apology reignites conversation about ousted Guatemalan leader’, (Mariano Castillo), CNN, 24-Oct-2011, www.edition.cnn.com; ‘Clinton apology to Guatemala’, (Martin Kettle & Jeremy Lennard), The Guardian, 11-Mar-1999, www.theguardian.com].

US I.T.T. (International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation) entreated the Nixon administration to wage “economic warfare” and take other covert measures against the Allende regime to ensure its ouster from power, ‘Papers Show I.T.T. Urged U.S. to Help Oust Allende’, New York Times, 03-Jul-1972, www.nytimes.com

back in Guatemala, President Armas and the latifundios (rich conservative landowners opposed to the Árbenz agrarian policy) provided a in-synch chorus, echoing the US charges of communist collusion by Árbenz

 

United Fruit, CIA, Do Business with Guatemala, Cold War Style: 2) Democracy to Coup D’état

Comparative politics, Economics and society,, International Relations, Military history, Political geography, Regional History

CCACBF24-9484-466C-AD4D-9150E57E5250With the go-ahead from incoming president Eisenhower in March 1953, Allen Dulles and the CIA continued the covert plot to undermine and destabilise the Árbenz government. The highly-orchestrated assault on the Árbenz regime took place on several fronts. Washington blocked a much needed loan from the World Bank to Guatemala and imposed an arms embargo on the country. The CIA forged an alliance of neighbouring states which were hostile or potentially hostile to Árbenz. The dictators running Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Dominican Republic and Venezuela didn’t require much persuading. Success by Árbenz in redistributing Guatemalan land could easily inspire the peasantries in their own countries to make similar demands, so the tiranos-caudillos were only too happy to get on-board with the CIA’s mission and pass on valuable intelligence about Guatemala to the US, and in the case of Nicaragua’s Somoza, Dominican Republic’s Trujillo and Venezuela’s Jiménez, help finance and arm the anti-Árbenz rebels.

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⬆️ Dulles Bros Inc

Within the turbulent atmosphere of Guatemala CIA pursued a strategy of divide-and-rule. The US dangled the carrot of future armaments before the country’s military high command –  the arms withheld from them would be made available on the proviso that they were prepared to break with their loyalty to Árbenz. [Bowen, Gordon L. “U.S. Foreign Policy toward Radical Change: Covert Operations in Guatemala, 1950-1954.” Latin American Perspectives 10, no. 1 (1983): 88-102. Accessed July 28, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/2633365].

Peurifoy and anti-communism in one country
At the same time the US State Department also utilised diplomatic channels to lever pressure on the Guatemalan regime. The State Department purposefully chose John Peurifoy as the new ambassador to Nicaragua. Peurifoy came with the right credentials to ‘help’ in Guatemala. As US ambassador to Greece in 1950 he interfered in post-civil war Greece to consolidate an anti-communist climate in the country. As Washington’s man-on-the-ground in Guatemala Peurifoy played a key role in destabilising the Árbenz government. The ambassador  approached the task of rooting out communists in Guatemalan politics very zealously, describing a meeting with Àrbenz thus, “I came away definitely convinced that if President is not a communist, he will certainly do until one comes along, and that normal approaches will not work in Guatemala” [‘The Ambassador in Guatemala (Peurifoy) to the Department of State, Office of the Historian, www.history.state.com/]. The CIA’s anti-Árbenz propaganda campaign also secured the assistance of the Catholic Church in Guatemala, whose priests infused their sermons with censure of the government.

Washington parachutes ”anti-red troubleshooter” into Guatemala
(New York Times) ⬇️


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Self-appointed gatekeeper of the Western Hemisphere
Historians have debated the reasons for Washington’s persistently determined pursuit of the Guatemalan democracy. In the early to mid-Fifties the mania of anti-communism was at its peak in America. Eisenhower had been elected in 1952 pledging to stop the spread of the “communist scourge” both at home and globally. In such a charged climate the US Administration found itself very disposed towards seeing developments in Guatemala under Árbenz as evidence of a Soviet beachhead in the region, as a violation of the Monroe Doctrine, and therefore justification for Washington to intervene in Guatemala’s affairs [‘Upholding the Monroe Doctrine: American Foreign Policy in the 1954 Guatemalan Coup d’Etat’, (Nadjalisse C. Reynolds-Lallement), [Dr. Karen E. Hoppes HST 201: US History June 5, 2013], http://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/].

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A symbiosis of political and economic interests?
The consensus among historians is that Cold War politics was the prime mover for the US, and that the economic interests and profitability of United Fruit Company (UFCo) in Guatemala always was secondary in the scheming – although as Gordon has argued, there was a reciprocal relationship between the two at play, the US’ government’s “Cold War and anti-communist hysteria provided public cover for government action on behalf of UFCo, (the company’s) personnel facilitated the CIA’s Cold War task of subverting the Árbenz government” [Gordon, Max. “A Case History of U. S. Subversion: Guatemala, 1954.”Science & Society 35, no. 2 (1971): 129-55. Accessed July 27, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/40401561].

Notwithstanding the fact that local communists held some sway over the Guatemalan labour movement, their impact on decision-making within the Árbenz government was at best minimal. Árbenz’ objectives on taking control were not doctrinal but pragmatically liberal ones – political liberalisation, creation of a middle class, modernisation of the country, to free the Guatemalan economy from dependency on world coffee prices and from control by foreign corporations𝄪 (Gordon). Try as they may, US apologists arguing that the intervention was saving the country from communism have failed to make any plausible, even indirect, connexion between the Árbenz government and the Soviet Union. Immerman’s view is that the State Department confused communism and nationalism [cited in Bowen).

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⬆️  JF Dulles, Time’s “Man of the Year, 1954”

Isolating the Western Hemisphere’s outlier state 
With former UFCo lawyer John Foster Dulles guiding US foreign policy, the diplomatic isolation of Guatemala was complete when it cajoled the other members of the Organisation of American States (OAS) into accepting its anti-communist resolution in the region at the Caracas meeting early in 1954. The US, with assistance from the UK, also blocked Guatemala’s efforts to secure UN intervention against those seeking to destabilise its democracy.

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⬆️  Rebel troops attacking Guatemala City
(Source: www.latinamericanstudies.org)

End-game: The putsch and its denouement
By late 1953 Eisenhower had given the “green light” to the invasion plan that became Operation PBSUCCESS in 1954. The US propaganda campaign intensified a few months later with saturation airdrops of anti-Árbenz leaflets across the country. Concurrently, the US Embassy in Guatemala City employed  blocking equipment to jam the government’s official wireless channels and replace it with misinformation discrediting the Árbenz regime (Bowen). The CIA chose a renegade, expat Guatemalan officer on the outer with Árbenz to lead the coup attempt. From Honduras, Colonel Castillo Armas, with a small force of Guatemalan exiles and mercenaries and financed largely by the CIA, invaded the country. At first repulsed by Árbenz’s troops, the rebels fortunes turned around after Peurifoy persuaded JF Dulles to provided them with air cover. US-piloted planes duly strafed Guatemala City and other towns. American intimidation and terror had a telling psychological effect on the population. Guatemalan army commanders, fearful of a full US military intervention, defected from Árbenz, and refused to allow the president to arm the peasant militia to resist the invaders, this prompted a demoralised Árbenz to resign his office in June 1954 and seek asylum in the Mexican Embassy. After some jockeying for power within the country’s military junta Castillo Armas emerged as the new (US recognised) national leader, hurling Guatemala once again into the void of a crippling military dictatorship [RABE, STEPHEN G. “The U.S. Intervention in Guatemala: The Documentary Record.” Diplomatic History 28, no. 5 (2004): 785-90. Accessed July 30, 2020.www.jstor.org/stable/24914824.]

⬇️ Mexican artist Diego Rivera’s graphic take on the Guatemalan putsch   

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forcing it to seek arms from Czechoslovakia, allowing the US to fling further mud, characterising it as an evidence of Árbenz’s ongoing collusion with communism

 revealingly, the New York Times at the time described Peurifoy as “a man of action rather than a diplomat”, The New York Times, 18-July-1954

as Moye has noted, the Guatemala crisis provided a convenient and fairly easy way for the Eisenhower administration to demonstrate its promised “victory over communism”  [MOYE, LAURA. “The United States Intervention in Guatemala.” International Social Science Review 73, no. 1/2 (1998): 44-52. Accessed July 31, 2020. www.jstor.og/stable/23883544/].

a foreign policy position of the US, first enunciated in 1823, warning off European powers from interfering with the governance of existing countries on the American continent

𝄪  at the time of Guatemala’s to transition to a democratic state, the US accounted for 77% of its exports of 65% of its imports. UFCo functioned in Guatemala (and elsewhere in the region) as a “state within a state”, controlling 42% of the Guatemalan land and benefitting from light tax and import duty burdens [‘Background on the Guatemalan Coup of 1954’, www.umbc.edu/].

Marks offers a contrary view, that the Árbenz government did pose a genuine communist threat, had a tendency towards authoritarianism itself and that the president had lost the confidence of the majority of Guatemalans by 1954 [MARKS, FREDERICK W. “The CIA and Castillo Armas in Guatemala, 1954: New Clues to an Old Puzzle.” Diplomatic History 14, no. 1 (1990): 67-86. Accessed July 30, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/24912032]. Although Rabe et al have countered that Marks’ conclusions rely on early State Department documents that have been discredited

 Getchell contends that in fact the USSR were “unwilling to prop up what they considered a bourgeois-democratic revolution” [‘Revisiting the 1954 Coup in Guatemala: The Soviet Union, the United Nations, and “Hemispheric Solidarity”’, (Michelle Denise Getchell), Journal of Cold War Studies, 17(2):73-102. April 2015. DOI: 10.1162/JCWS a 00549]

United Fruit, CIA, Do Business with Guatemala, Cold War Style: 1) 1944 Revolution to FBFortune

Economics and society,, International Relations, National politics, Political geography, Regional History

From the late 19th century to the Second World War Guatemalan politics followed a familiar path to most states in Latin America at the time – dominance by caudillos – military strongmen who were favourably disposed towards foreign investment and economic exploitation, especially from the USA.  Under General Jorge Ubico (president 1931-44), this practice intensified with massive concessions given to Guatemala’s biggest foreign investor, the US United Fruit Company (UFCo), and to the country’s wealthy landowning class.

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Belize (to the west of Guatemala) was the colony of British Honduras till 1964

By 1944 the economy in Guatemala was effectively monopolised by a “Big Three” oligopoly of US corporations – UFCo, in commanding control of the banana industry, International Railways of Central America, with its stranglehold (together with UFCo) over the country’s rail and ports facilities, and Electric Bond and Share, which controlled over 80% of Guatemala’s electricity supply. Poverty among the bulk of the rural population was endemic, agricultural workers earned between five and 20 centavos a day. 72% of the country’s land was held by just 2% of the population and there was an over-reliance on food imports because of the under-utilisation of land. Ubico’s oppressive rule was iron-tight and likened by international visitors to a “police state” [Gordon, Max. “A Case History of U. S. Subversion: Guatemala, 1954.” Science & Society, 35, no. 2 (1971): 129-55. Accessed July 27, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/40402561].

A40-1300530 - © - JosÈ Enrique MolinaGuatemala. Izabal. Banana plantation.

(Source: AFAR)

The spring of democracy 1944-1954
In 1944 a coalition of middle class professionals, teachers and junior army officers, with the backing of trade unions, forced Ubico’s removal [Juan Gonzalez, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America, (2011)]. This “Guatemalan Revolution” paved the way for free elections and an overwhelming victory for liberal professor Juan José Arévalo. The Arévalo government followed a moderate reformist path, establishing civil rights, a social welfare apparatus and achieved considerable success in improving national literacy levels. Arévalo was succeeded in 1951 by another democratically elected government, this time led by former soldier and defence minister Jacobo Árbenz. The progressive Árbenz moved beyond his predecessor in introducing much-needed, comprehensive agrarian reforms, something Arévalo had carefully avoided for fear of antagonising Guatemala’s landed elite and being branded pro-communist [‘Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952-1954, Guatemala’, Office of the Historian, www.history.state.gov/].

President Árbenz Guzman 
(www.wikia.org)

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Decreto número 900
This put the Árbenz regime on a collision course with UFCo and the US government. The government’s Agrarian Reform Law (Decree 900) allowed for the expropriation of all Guatemalan land more than around 600 acres in size that was not under cultivation (which nonetheless only added up to less than 5% of all private land-holdings). UFCo’s reaction was to complain to Washington that Árbenz’s land reforms threatened its monopolistic position in Guatemala. The Company’s resolve to resist the Guatemalan move was hardened by the government’s offer of about $627,000, a figure derived from UFCo’s own estimate of the land value for tax purposes. The US State Department then demanded compensation from Guatemala of over $15,800,000 for UFCo’s properties in the country  [‘Decree 900’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org/].

Árbenz’s ‘gift’ to the landless masses
(Source: Life Mag.)

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Upturning democracy: the build-up to the coup
UFCo turned its energies to lobbying Washington to secure its assets and investments in the small Central American country. The US government however had its own (wider) agenda in mind. With America in the grip of the “Second Red Scare” of McCarthyism in the early 1950s, the US chose to see Árbenz’s anti-colonial land reforms (an attempt by the Third World agrarian country to extricate itself from a backward feudal mode of existence) as prefiguring an encroachment of communism onto the Guatemalan political landscape. The US government, operating through the agency of the CIA, initiated a smear campaign against the Árbenz regime, using misinformation and infiltration to try to undermine its legitimacy within the country and the region. By 1952 the decision had been made to intervene in Guatemala. President Truman authorised the CIA to launch Operation PBFORTUNE, with the complicit involvement of Nicaraguan dictator Somoza García (Snr), but when its cover was prematurely blown the operation was quickly aborted. Plans in Washington for the coup d’état were shelved – for the time being, and the CIA and its co-conspirators resumed the covert task of subverting and destabilising the increasingly isolated Guatemalan government.

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 Allen Dulles, CIA director

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 drawing inspiration from FD Roosevelt’s American “New Deal” and from Mexico’s nationalising Cárdenas regime

 Árbenz has the support of the small Guatemalan Communist Party and some communists filled minor offices in the administration but there were no communist members in the ruling cabinet

 which had connexions with UFCo through those arch-cold warriors, the Dulles brothers, John Foster and Allen 

 

1898, A Vintage Year for United States Empire Building

Economic history, International Relations, Military history, Political geography, Regional History

 

“God created war so that Americans would learn geography” ~ Mark Twain (attributed)

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The axiomatic nature of the above much-referenced quotation resounds most strongly in the year 1898. In that year the US expanded its offshore territorial acquisitions in different parts of the Pacific and in the Caribbean. It secured the islands of Cuba, the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico as a result of a short, opportunistic, one-sided war with a declining European power. At the same time Washington annexing the Hawaiian Islands, closed the door on four years of ‘independent’ republicanism which followed a successful coup by American businessmen against the indigenous Hawaiian monarchy.

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🔺 Flag of the short-lived Hawaiian Republic


What triggered US involvement in a Cuban conflict against far-off Spain? The immediate pretext was the sinking of the American battleship
Maine in Havana harbour. The explosion is generally believed to have been an accident but leading American newspapers (the Hearst press and to a lesser extent the Pulitzer publications) drove the charge of war jingoism within the country, declaring Spain culpable for the loss of life on the Maine. This and the ongoing reporting of the Cuban insurrection which deliberately exaggerated Spanish atrocities against the Cubans—examples of the “yellow journalism” practiced especially by Hearst—helped to create a groundswell of popular support and agitation for war whilst boosting the newspapers’ sales.

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🔺 “Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!” (source: www.pri.org

Humanitarian concern for the Cuban people?
In response to the charge that the US engineered the war as a grab for territory (á la Mexico 1846), apologists for the US intervention clothed the action in the garb of a humanitarian attempt to free the Cuban people from the colonial yoke of imperial Spain [Foner, Philip S. “Why the United States Went to War with Spain in 1898.” Science & Society, vol. 32, no. 1, 1968, pp. 39–65. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/404402321. Accessed 21 July 2020]. The McKinley Administration in Washington DC also justified it as an imperative to act given the political instability in Cuba, so close to US soil, and certainly Washington as the hegemonic regional power with a self-appointed role as regional ‘policeman’ had an interest in ridding the Western Hemisphere of the remnants of an old European colonial power [‘The Spanish-American War, 1898’, Office of The Historian, www.history.state.gov/].

Contemporary criticisms of aggressive US foreign policy
Washington’s rapid trajectory towards war in 1898 drew a skeptical response internationally. Keir Hardie, British labour leader, stated that he “cannot believe in the purity of the American motive”, seeing rather the hand of “trusts and Wall Street financiers intent on extending American dominance over Cuba, Latin America, and the Far East”. The French government agreed that the professed humanitarian concerns were “merely a disguise for (US) commercial desires” to conquer the Caribbean and Latin America. Non-mainstream press in the US  like the socialist The People and the New York Tribune argued that the US government ’s real aim was to ”divert attention from economic evils at home” and to protect the US’s extensive interests in Cuba [Foner, Philip S. “Why the United States Went to War with Spain in 1898.” Science & Society, vol. 32, no. 1, 1968, pp. 39–65. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/404402321. Accessed 21 July 2020].

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An economics-driven war
In fact economics was the principal driver of America’s intervention in Spanish Cuba. First, the US was massively invested in the island in the 1890s, importing sugar (predominantly), plus tobacco and minerals from Cuba…the US’s Cuban business ventures were valued at about $50 million in 1895 [‘American Business in Cuba 1898-1959: A Brief Overview’, (Lisa Reynolds Wolfe), Havana Project, 17-Aug-2011, www.havanaproject.com]. The Maine was in Havana harbour to protect these same American interests when it met with disaster. So, rather than a humanitarian motive to aid the beleaguered Cubans, the intervention can be seen as pure economic self-interest: “halting a nationalistic revolution or social movement that threatened American interests” and the subsequent withholding of sovereignty to Cubans (and to Filipinos) [Paterson, Thomas G. “United States Intervention in Cuba, 1898: Interpretations of the Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino War.” The History Teacher, vol. 29, no. 3, 1996, pp. 341–361. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4944551 . Accessed 21 July 2020].

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🔺 President McKinley

The contemporary state of the American economy was a factor in America’s timing to act. Economic depression and unemployment was plaguing the country. New markets needed to be found for US goods, this meant not only Cuba and the American ’backyard’, but even extending to the Philippines and the lucrative Chinese market (Paterson). Tom Fiddick argues that the real reason President McKinley backed by the American capitalist class opted for war—having seen Spain‘s failure to pacify the Cuban rebels—was to make certain that the insurectos did not succeed in liberating the island and thereby pose a threat to US business interests in Cuba [Fiddick, Tom. “Some Comments on Philip S. Foner’s “Why the United States Went to War with Spain”.” Science & Society 32, no. 3 (1968): 323-27. Accessed July 22, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/40401358].

 

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🔺 Battle of Guantánamo Bay (Cuba)

US strategy thinking around imperialist objectives was evident prior to the move to war in 1898 – plans were already afoot for the establishment of naval bases in the strategically important Caribbean and in Hawaii, a precondition to expanding economically further into Latin America and into Asian markets. This “game plan” also envisioned US control of the Isthmus of Panama, an objective secured a few years after the victory over Spain (Foner).

Underpinning ideology for upping territorial expansion
The hawkish US foreign policy in 1898 accords with the prevailing 19th century belief of “Manifest Destiny”, a view that settlers in the US were destined to expand inexorably across the continent of North America. Correspondence between key players (T Roosevelt and HC Lodge) disclose that the McKinley Administration was committed—before the outbreak of hostilities—to  “intervention in Cuba as a stepping stone for expansion in the Far East through the acquisition of Spain’s Pacific possessions”. Foner notes that Cuba comprised the ‘fulcrum’ providing the opportunity for US occupancy of the Philippines as “a base at the doorway to China’s markets” for US capitalists. Also shaping this was the influence of Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis—the idea that American democracy was defined by a moving frontier line—if America’s frontier at home was closing off as was thought by some, then the most viable course may be to seek new frontiers abroad. The increasingly dominant current in international thought, social Darwinism, was also informing American thinking…the national assertiveness shown in 1898 can be seen as a quantum leap in the “deliberate, calculated pursuit of United States’ greatness” (Paterson).

🔻 Battle of Manila Bay (Phil.)

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Hawaii, a foothold on the “American Lake”
The groundwork for the US’s absorption of the Hawaiian islands as part of the Manifesto Destiny credo was laid five years earlier when a group of American sugar planters under Sanford B Dole overthrew Queen Liliuokalani, replacing the monarchy with a provisional government with Dole as president. The coup was tacitly recognised by the US government (with US marines despatched to Hawaii to protect US citizens), although President Cleveland tried unsuccessfully to reinstate the monarchy. His successor William McKinley, recognising the strategic importance of Pearl Harbour as a naval base in the war with Spain, “rubber-stamped” the formal annexation of the islands by the US in August 1898 [‘Americans overthrow Hawaiian monarchy, History, www.history.com/].

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🔺 US sailors and marines in Honolulu c.1894

Footnote: A “Spanish-American War”
Thomas G Patterson notes the exclusionist nature of the name given to the 1898 conflict – the omission of reference to Cuba and Philippines in the title—in effect “air-brushing” the native populations out of the conflict—was (Paterson suggests) an attempt by the victors to obscure uncomfortable truths, the denial of full-fledged independence to Cubans and Filipinos once freed from Spanish control, and to try to avoid America’s role in the affair being labelled as ‘imperialist’ (Paterson).

🔻 1900 map (Source: Pinterest)

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PostScript: The Filipino insurgency
After the Spanish defeat Filipino nationalists under Emilio Aguinaldo asserted the Philippines’ independence (proclaiming the First Philippine Republic) in 1899. This action was opposed by the US and a conventional-cum-guerrilla war ensued until 1902 when US forces finally subdued Aguinaldo’s army and the Philippines were made an unincorporated territory of the US (although a number of splinter groups of local insurrectos continued to fight the US military occupation for several years) [‘The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902’, Office of The Historian, www.history.state.gov/].

🔻 Flag of the República Filipino


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 this famous but elusive quote has also been attributed, in slightly modified form, to Ambrose Bierce

  the US government paid Spain $20 million, compensation for the loss of infrastructure in the Philippines  

characterised by sensationalism (eg, eye-catching headlines) typically with scant regard for accuracy

US business giant Standard Oil for instance talked about its ”Manifest Destiny being in Asia” (Foner)

  calling themselves the “Committee of Safety”