A Short History of U.S. Interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean

Alan McPherson

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781118954010
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

A Short History of U.S. Interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean presents a concise account of the full sweep of U.S. military invasions and interventions in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean from 1800 up to the present day.

• Engages in debates about the economic, military, political, and cultural motives that shaped U.S. interventions in Cuba, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Guatemala, Mexico, and elsewhere
• Deals with incidents that range from the taking of Florida to the Mexican War, the War of 1898, the Veracruz incident of 1914, the Bay of Pigs, and the 1989 invasion of Panama
• Features also the responses of Latin American countries to U.S. involvement
• Features unique coverage of 19th century interventions as well as 20th century incidents, and includes a series of helpful maps and illustrations

1
Expanding the Continental Republic, 1811–1897

Growing and spreading out into unoccupied regions, assimilating all we incorporate.

U.S. Secretary of State John Calhoun, describing his country’s goal¹

Throughout the nineteenth century, U.S. citizens grabbed land from those beginning to call themselves “Latin Americans,” whether they lived in present-day Texas, California, or Florida. The nineteenth was the century of continental expansion – of taking and settling in what would later form the 48 contiguous states of the Union. What distinguished the nineteenth century’s expansion from the twentieth’s was the idea of settlement. U.S. settlers were intent on building their homes and plantations on these new lands. They were also determined to form a majority that would dominate the political system and render original inhabitants second-class citizens. The leading cause examined in this chapter, therefore, was land hunger.

The leading consequence, logically enough, was the more than doubling of the size of the United States between 1811 and 1897 and the corresponding loss of land for the Spanish or Latin Americans. Peoples in Mexico, the Caribbean, and the still-Spanish empire paid a permanent price for U.S. land hunger.

Spaniards, Latin Americans, and Native Americans mostly contested this naked expansionism. It usually began with significant violence against their persons and property, and the U.S. intention to keep the land also drew resistance. The war that Mexico fought against the United States from 1846 to 1848 was the greatest instance of contestation.

Given the brashness of continental expansion, collaboration was rare. Certainly, some Floridians or Mexicans acquiesced to U.S. power since they were powerless to resist it. More active collaboration marked filibusterism, since some filibusterism had Latin Americans seeking to annex their lands to the United States.

Contexts for land expansion were many and crucial. Accelerating the westward movement of U.S. settlers was the struggle between slave states and nonslave states in the Union, which would lead to the U.S. Civil War of 1861–1865. U.S. policymakers also saw themselves competing – and winning – against other empires in North America, including the French, Spanish, and Russian, but especially the British. Also buttressing westward expansion was an ideology that combined racism, religious fervor, and nationalism. These trends reinforced the U.S. sense that military interventions were defensive: if the United States failed to take territory to its south, such failure would somehow endanger the growth – even the survival – of U.S. democracy.

The First Ever Landing: Sally and the Sandwich, 1800

The first ever landing of U.S. marines outside of war anywhere came in Latin America as early as 1800. The U.S. Navy looked to weaken French forces in what was known as the “Quasi-War” with France from 1798 to 1800. On May 12, the U.S. sloop Sally, a small, square-sailed ship, reinforced by men from the larger USS Constitution, landed outside Puerto Plata, in the Dominican Republic, at the time still a colony of the supposedly neutral Spanish. The Sally’s target was the Sandwich, a speedy British packet or mail ship recently commandeered by the French. While men from the Sally boarded the Sandwich, marines and sailors drove metal spikes into the touch-holes of not so neutral Spanish cannons so that their charges could not ignite. The takeover lasted five minutes.

The “audacious, but clearly illegal” capture of the Sandwich signaled the growing assertiveness of U.S. forces against European powers in the Americas.² There were several more such landings in the nineteenth century. But this first landing did not qualify as a full-blown intervention, nor was it meant to help spread U.S. power through the North American continent.

The No Transfer Resolution, 1811

What was arguably the first true U.S. intervention in Latin America can be traced to a few words from the U.S. Congress.

The sparks were the revolutions against Spanish rule, begun in 1810–1811. France had taken over Spain, and creoles, or Spanish elites born in the colonies, revolted against Spanish officials. The second-strongest power in the Americas after Spain was not the United States but Great Britain, which had by far the most powerful navy in the world and in 1808 shipped 40 percent of its exports to Latin America. So if U.S. politicians feared any people taking advantage of Spanish-American weakness, it was the British.

Since the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the Founding Fathers also had wanted Florida. Spain still owned the colony, divided at the time between West Florida and East Florida, because ports such as St Augustine helped protect Spanish ships against pirates. The British had ceded both to Spain after it lost the American Revolution, but the value of West Florida, which today makes up the coasts of Mississippi, Alabama, and parts of Louisiana, remained high.

President Thomas Jefferson resisted calls to occupy Florida and negotiate later. But when the British attacked a U.S. ship, he reconsidered, especially since he figured he could also wrest Cuba away from Spain. U.S. officials encouraged U.S. citizens in Florida to revolt against Spanish authority and then to ask for U.S. intervention. Jefferson wished “to exclude all European influence from this hemisphere.”³ Here, then, was imperial competition laid bare.

On September 23, 1810, U.S. settlers in West Florida between the Mississippi and Pearl rivers overtook the small Spanish garrison at Baton Rouge and soon applied to become part of the United States. The president was now James Madison, who feared that an intervention could be seen as an act of war, something only Congress could declare, and only in a crisis. So he thought up the potential takeover of West Florida by the British as such as crisis. On October 27, not waiting for Congress, Madison proclaimed West Florida to be annexed.

But the president still longed for a congressional stamp of approval, and he feared British designs on East Florida, which, he wrote, “is also of great importance to the United States.”⁴ So in early 1811, congressional leaders secretly debated what to do about Florida. Secretary of State James Monroe asked for a joint resolution by the House and Senate and, on January 15, 1811, they delivered, proclaiming

that the United States, under the peculiar circumstances of the existing crisis, cannot without serious inquietude see any part of the said territory [West Florida] pass into the hands of any foreign Power; and that a due regard to their own safety compels them to provide under certain contingencies, for the temporary occupation of the said territory …

Embracing those few words, Madison sent U.S. troops to take over West Florida. Occupation was swift and painless.

The public justification for this No Transfer Resolution was not land hunger. It was that troops were there to safeguard the “security, tranquillity [sic], and commerce” of the United States. General Andrew Jackson and his troops had invaded Spanish Florida to strike back against bands of Seminole Indians and free blacks who attacked a U.S. ship and killed about 30 people. Such raids went both ways, with U.S. settlers assaulting Seminoles, but Jackson was not interested in balance. Incursions into foreign territory such as Jackson’s were, to Senator Henry Clay, a matter of “self-preservation” for the United States and totally justified if Spain let chaos reign in its colonies.⁵

Spaniards, among others, contested this deluded U.S. interpretation. “While [U.S. leaders] give to the Spanish government the most positive assurances, that they will never permit any American citizen to commit an act of hostility against the territory of Florida,” wrote a Spanish diplomat in 1812, pointing out U.S. hypocrisy, “[they] give orders not only for the invasion of that province, but … to join the insurgents, and to bring the torches of revolution, plunder, carnage, and desolution [desolation?].”⁶

The consequence of the No Transfer Resolution was momentous. It evolved quickly into the No Transfer Principle, which held that the passing of any Western Hemisphere territory – not just Florida, and not just land adjacent to the continental United States – from the hands of one European power into those of another would be seen as a threat to U.S. security.

The First Seminole War, 1814–1819

The year after the No Transfer Resolution, the United States and Great Britain went to war. After that conflict ended in 1814, the British failed to protect Native American tribes of the Northwest and the South as they had promised, so thousands fled from Georgia and Alabama into Florida, where they hoped they could live undisturbed by U.S. covert agents, settlers, and other unsavory characters. Florida towns of “several hundred fugative [sic] slaves from the Carolinas &am...