Chapter 13

In This Chapter

Exchanging Spanish control for British and American

Staging military coups and counter-coups

Discovering the real Evita

Latin America experienced a very difficult time in the twentieth century. For much of the period these countries were ruled by military dictators and dominated by the economic might of the United States. All too often, the gap between rich and poor grew so large that many workers were reduced to living in shanty towns on the outskirts of the big cities. The native peoples of South America were often even worse off, as their homelands were bulldozed to make way for the expanding cities. Some countries managed to establish democratic rule for a time, but for the most part Latin America fell victim to brutal dictatorships and an endless cycle of military coups.

Latin America and Its Colonial Past

Geographically ‘Latin America’ means the continent of South America, Central America, which includes Mexico and Panama, and the Caribbean islands. This area is called ‘Latin America’ because the Spanish and Portuguese ruled it and their languages, which are derived from Latin, are still spoken there.

Ethnically Latin America, especially Brazil, is very mixed. Most of the people are a mixture of Spanish or Portuguese and native blood, but the region has also assimilated large numbers of people from Africa, Europe, and Asia. The black people of Latin America are mostly the descendants of slaves brought over by force during the slave trade. During the nineteenth century large numbers of Irish and Welsh settled in the region; more recently immigrants have arrived from Asia, especially Japan.

Yet you can’t really understand Latin America today unless you’ve got a grasp of its colonial heritage. The people never forget that in ancient times their ancestors produced great civilisations, like the empires of the Incas, the Maya, and the Aztecs, which were destroyed by the Spanishconquistadores back in the sixteenth century while the Portuguese muscled in on Brazil. The Spanish and Portuguese held onto their Latin American possessions through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries even though their own countries were rapidly losing their old power and influence: In fact, holding on to Latin America so fiercely was their way of trying to retain a bit of their old power and influence. (If you’re intrigued by all this, you’ll find the whole story in European History For Dummies (Wiley)).

Four main ethnic groups lived in colonial Latin America:

Spanish and Portuguese people born in Europe

Spanish and Portuguese people born in Latin America, known as Creoles. Creoles often intermarried with native people

Natives, or ‘Indians’ as they were mistakenly known

Africans brought over by force to work as slaves

Colonial Latin America had a governing class of great landowners – typically either European or Creole – who owned vast estates and had hundreds of natives and slaves to work on them. The powerful Catholic Church supported the governing classes and told all Catholics to do the same. So when ordinary people turned against their governments, which they did in due time (see the later section ‘Throwing Off the Foreigners’), they usually turned against the Church as well.

Oh, Columbus!

Each year countries throughout the Americas mark 12 October as Columbus Day, the day the famous explorer first landed in the New World. Originally a day of celebration, nowadays Columbus is regarded more as a villain than a hero. His landing had a disastrous impact on the native peoples of America – if they weren’t massacred or didn’t die of European diseases, they got worked to death as slave labourers – and people in Latin America are gradually turning this date into a day of protest against what they see as Columbus’s legacy: Poverty and oppression throughout the Americas. Statues of Columbus have been toppled and streets named after him have had their names changed.

Throwing Off the Foreigners

The Caribbean island of Haiti was the first Latin American country to eject its colonial rulers. In the 1790s the African slaves rose up, threw their French rulers out, and declared a ‘black republic’ along the lines of equality and fraternity the French Revolution was proclaiming to the world. Other countries in the region weren’t very keen on the idea of slave risings, mainly because they owned slaves themselves and didn’t want them getting ideas. But that doesn’t mean other Latin American countries didn’t want to do a little revolting themselves. The Creoles in particular were keen to take control from the Spanish but they didn’t want slaves joining in and fighting for their own freedom.

The Creole leaders who fought for independence in South America in the nineteenth century are still regarded as national heroes, but they were often just as brutal and oppressive as the Spanish rulers they helped to get rid of. They had no intention of spreading freedom to the slaves or native peoples of Latin America. All too often the military figures who ruled South America in the twentieth century thought along exactly the same lines.

South America: The years of revolution

South America got its chance to throw its rulers out partly because of ideas of liberty and equality inspired by the French Revolution (details in European History For Dummies by Sean Lang) but mainly because in 1808 Napoleon invaded Spain and Portugal and forced their rulers to flee. Far away in South America, the Creoles saw this event as their chance to strike.

Big in Brazil

Probably the easiest handover of power was in Brazil, which was ruled by Portugal. With Napoleon’s armies close on their tails, the Portuguese royal family fled to Brazil in 1808 and set up their court in Rio de Janeiro. They liked it so much they decided to make Brazil a kingdom in its own right. Rio became the capital of Brazil and the capital-in-exile of Portugal. Even after Napoleon finally fell in 1815, the Portuguese royal family stayed in Brazil until, in 1820, the Portuguese government got fed up with this arrangement – well, it was odd, you must admit – and tried to turn Brazil into a colony again. The king thought perhaps he’d been away too long and hurried back to Lisbon to take charge, while his son Dom Pedro simply declared Brazil an independent empire, with himself as Emperor Pedro I. Brazil remained an empire until a military coup in 1889 overturned the emperor and set up a republic.

The bloody end of Spanish South America

While the Napoleonic wars were raging in Europe, the Creoles of Spanish South America fought a fierce campaign to drive the Spanish out while simultaneously checking over their shoulder in case the slaves or the natives were staging their own revolts against their Creole masters. The campaign was led by a number of military rulers known as caudillos (‘strongmen’), such as José de San Martin in Argentina, Simon Bolivar in Venezuela, and Bernardo O’Higgins in Chile.

This very bloody war didn’t end until 1824 when Simon Bolivar became president of the brand new federation of Gran Colombia, which covered the old Spanish colonies. However, even Bolivar couldn’t stop the different states of Gran Colombia quarrelling over territory. He tried to restore order by declaring himself Dictator of Gran Colombia in 1828 but it didn’t make any difference. Bolivar died in 1830 and so, in effect, did Gran Colombia. In its place emerged the separate states of South America that we know today.

Independent South America was a very good place to be if you had a huge estate and believed in Power for the Rich. Unfortunately, South America was very poor and needed a big injection of foreign money, which at that time usually meant British money. The South American republics depended so heavily on Britain that they had effectively left the Spanish empire and joined the British one.

The heroes of South American independence were generals who led their people to military victory in war and then set up military dictatorships at home, like the ruthless General Rosas of Argentina. They had elected parliaments but the elections were rigged so that power still rested with the military. Staging a military coup was thus the only way to change government. This pattern continued right the way through the twentieth century.

Equally bloody revolution in Mexico

Mexico threw off Spanish rule in 1821. Independent Mexico was split between conservatives such as President Antonio de Santa Anna, who wanted a strong centralised empire, and radicals such as the fiercely anti-clerical Benito Juarez, who took power in 1861. That event prompted the French emperor Napoleon III to invade Mexico and install an Austrian prince, Maximilian, as emperor, but the Mexicans fought a fierce guerrilla war against the French and beat them at the Battle of Puebla on 5 May 1862 – Cinco de Mayo – still an important national festival in Mexico. The French scarpered; Maximilian stayed and the Mexicans shot him. Mexico became a republic again and in 1876 the radical José Porfirio Diaz was elected president. He stayed in office until he was finally overthrown in the Mexican Revolution of 1911.

Good Neighbour is Watching You: US Influence in Latin America

Latin America could never afford to ignore its mighty neighbour to the north, the United States. The (north) Americans regarded Latin America as ‘Uncle Sam’s back yard’, which was another way of saying that they wanted to control it. The famous Monroe Doctrine warned the Europeans to keep their paws off the American continent or face war with the United States. As British power declined, the United States increasingly moved into the region as the main investor in Latin America. US investment meant, in effect, US control. The official term was a ‘Good Neighbour’ policy: The sort of neighbour who tells you what to buy when you go to the shops. This involvement had other effects, too.

Have a banana?

One of the results of having their economies completely dominated first by the British and then by the United States was that the Latin American states had to produce goods for export to satisfy these foreign markets. Many of them became heavily dependent on only one or two crops such as coffee, cocoa, or bananas. Whoever controlled these key trades effectively controlled the country; small, corrupt, and unstable Latin American states soon became known as ‘banana republics’.

(South) America for the (North) Americans!

The British had been quite prepared to use force to protect their interests in Latin America. In the 1890s they sent troops into Chile, Brazil, and Nicaragua to stop governments threatening to nationalise private business. ‘Hmm, why didn’t we think of that?’ thought Washington, so when Britain and Venezuela squared up to each other in a boundary dispute in 1895, the United States announced it was standing shoulder to shoulder with Venezuela and the Brits had better give way or it would be war. Very sensibly, the Brits backed off. From then on it was the US who called the shots in Latin America.

1898–1902: US pushes Spain out of Cuba and takes over. US also gets Puerto Rico in the party bag at the end.

1903: US helps Panama win independence from Colombia and gets a 99-year lease on the Panama Canal zone. Which wasn’t the reason for helping the Panamanians at all – how could you possibly think that?

1904: President Theodore Roosevelt issues his Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine saying the US is a ‘civilised nation’ so it can do what it likes in the savage Caribbean. All in the interests of international law and order, you understand.

1912: US takes over Nicaragua. Just to protect US interests.

1914: US invades Mexico. Aim: To bring down the Mexican government. Result: Mexicans unite against the US. Oops.

1915: US takes over Haiti. Just to protect US interests.

1916: US General Pershing invades Mexico to catch rebel leader Pancho Villa but can’t find him.

1916: US takes over the Dominican Republic. Just to protect US interests.

1917: Puerto Ricans become US citizens. Which is very handy because they can now be drafted to fight in a world war.

1926: US takes over Nicaragua. Again. Just to protect US interests. Again.

Life in Latin America: The Middle Years

At the start of the twentieth century Latin America had two major problems:

Neo-colonialism: That means economic dependency on another country to such an extent that you might as well be one of its colonies. The obvious ‘neo-colonial’ power in the early years of the century was the US (refer to the preceding section, ‘Good Neighbour is Watching You: US Influence in Latin America’).

Latifundismo: That means domination of the country’s economy and society by the landowning classes on large estates. Many Latin American countries had very powerful (and small) ruling classes.

Latin American nationalists who wanted their countries to be truly free would therefore have to stand up both to the US and to the conservative, and usually pro-American, latifundismo within their own countries. Dealing with these two wasn’t going to be easy.

Down Mexico way

Mexico had always been one of the more radical countries in the region. In 1911 the Mexicans staged a revolution and overthrew President Porfirio Diaz, who’d been in power since 1876 and was becoming increasingly autocratic in his old age. The revolution was followed by a rather complex multi-party power struggle – revolutions often are – but the key moment came in 1917 when Mexico unveiled its new revolutionary constitution. It said:

All land to be nationalised, and the villages can take over land from the big private estates (haciendas)

Full rights and social benefits for all workers

No more church schools – all education to be run by the State

Radicals all over Latin America asked Santa to send them a Mexican constitution for Christmas – it seemed the perfect model for running a modern republican state. Unfortunately, the Mexican government didn’t seem in a hurry to implement the new constitution. President Carranza gave women legal rights but he didn’t implement the more radical parts of the constitution. He certainly didn’t want the peasants taking land from the big estates.

In 1920 Carranza was overthrown and murdered in a coup. Cue chaos and civil war:

1920: Moderate President Obregon takes office. Concentrates on reconciliation and reconstruction. These cannot be achieved, he decides, by implementing the more radical bits of the constitution. So he doesn’t.

1924: Not quite so moderate President Plutarco Calles takes office. He allows a little bit of land distribution but not so as you’d notice. He also closes all Catholic primary schools. Result:

1925–9: War between President Calles and the Catholic Church. Church suspends all church services in protest at closure of Catholic schools. Catholic guerrilla group the Cristeros intimidate and murder state schoolteachers and kill former President Obregon. In his fight with the Church, President Calles becomes increasingly autocratic.

1929: Wall Street Crash. American investment in Mexico slumps. Mexico’s National Revolutionary Party calls for radical change. You know, like actually implementing Mexico’s constitution.

1933: National Revolutionary Party wins the election. New President Lazaro Cardenas redistributes land and starts a major industrialisation drive.

1938: President Cardenas nationalises oil companies. Which is a very patriotic step but Mexicans are getting tired of Cardenas.

1939: Right-wing President Camacho elected. He undoes all the changes Cardenas introduced, suppresses freedom of speech, and starts arresting trade unionists.

Mexico had seemed to show how you could follow a successful radical policy in Latin America, but the dream had gone sour. By the 1940s and 1950s Mexico’s government was as authoritarian, oppressive, and corrupt as any other in Latin America.

Argentina – the Peron years

Argentina had started the century as Latin American State Most Likely To Succeed. Thanks to the invention of the refrigerated ship, Argentina had found a huge overseas market for its beef exports and it looked forward to a new century of prosperity and plenty. Well, the cattle ranchers did.

Like much of Latin America, Argentina was heavily dominated by Britain. Much of Argentina’s industry was supported by British investment and British influences could be seen throughout Argentine society, especially at the upper end. The Argentine upper classes enjoyed taking tea on the lawn while watching polo and reading Country Life.

But underneath this happy façade Argentina was changing.

Industrialisation: Under radical president Yrigoyen (1916–22) Argentina industrialises rapidly. This produces a large urban working class who are very open to radical ideas. Industrialisation also produces a middle class who look conservative, especially when they go into politics or the army, but aren’t.

Inequality: As long as Argentina’s wealth depends on exporting beef, power lies in the hands of the big landowners. A huge gulf opens up between them and Argentina’s poor.

Investment: Argentina has a large balance of payments deficit, which means it is importing more than it exports. This situation makes the country heavily dependent on foreign investment and loans. These foreign investors can, and do, intervene in Argentina’s internal affairs.

When countries industrialise rapidly they don’t usually have much time to think about feeding or housing their workers properly, and Argentina was no exception. In 1916 the shipping workers came out on strike demanding better pay and conditions. The British didn’t want their lucrative trade with Argentina jeopardised, so they put pressure on Buenos Aires to put the strike down, by force if necessary. So the government sent troops in to crush the strike – it wouldn’t be the last time.

1919: ‘Tragic week’: Government sends troops against strikers and Jews.

1922–8: Trouble in the shops: Under President Alvear prices go up and wages go down.

1930: Crisis: The Depression hits Argentina. General José Uriburu seizes power in a military coup.

Uriburu tried to show that all you need do to pull a country out of international economic meltdown is to arrest a few lefties and pinkoes. His brutal purges of opponents may have made him feel better but they did nothing for Argentina’s economy, which was in freefall. With the world putting up trade barriers and no one buying Argentine beef, the country was more in debt to foreign investors than ever.

Enter Juan Peron

In 1943 a group of army officers overthrew General Uriburu and took power, promising a big industrialisation drive, full rights for women, and work for all, as long as the workers didn’t join any of those pesky trade unions. The workers, who had every intention of joining those pesky trade unions, decided that these soldier boys weren’t quite the saviours they’d thought and both sides lined up for confrontation. The situation was looking very ugly when in 1946 the Minister of Labour, the only truly popular character in the government, stepped forward and put himself up for election. He won and became president of Argentina. His name was General Juan Peron.

Peron was one of those middle-class professional soldiers with radical ideas. He appealed directly to the workers – the descamisados (‘shirtless ones’, because they couldn’t afford clean shirts) – to Argentina’s ethnic minorities, and especially to women. And to one woman in particular.

Evita!

You’ve seen the film, you’ve got the CD, now meet the woman. Eva Duarte (or Evita – ‘little Eva’ – as the public called her) was an ambitious young actress who captivated the then-Colonel Juan Peron. She certainly proved surprisingly good for him: She was glamorous, popular with the crowds, in short a major political asset. Women were playing an increasingly important part in radical Argentine politics and Eva appealed very strongly to them: She got them the vote, the right to divorce, and in 1947 she even started up a Peronist Feminist Party.

The powerful Argentine military, however, thought her a jumped-up little gold-digger and blocked Peron’s proposal that she become vice president. Her Eva Peron Foundation to give money to charitable causes was wildly popular until people began asking awkward questions. Some people complained of being forced to contribute; others just pointed out that the money would have been better spent on trying to eradicate poverty itself, instead of handing out sweets and shoes. What the public didn’t know was that Eva had cancer: She finally died, with her husband next to her, on 26 July 1952. Argentines really did weep in the streets at the news and ‘Evita’ instantly became a sort of saint, whose memory was always invoked whenever times got hard. In that sense, Evita was probably more significant after her death, as a symbol of Argentina’s glory days under Peron, than she was when she was alive. So maybe the musical got it right: Argentina didn’t need to cry for her.

It takes two to tango!

The tango is one of Argentina’s most important cultural gifts to the world and it even played a part in Argentine politics. Peron was one of many who feared that Argentina was going down the pan because its men had lost their macho image and the tango, with the man throwing the woman around like a sack of old potatoes, seemed just the thing to instil a bit of manliness back in the Argentine breast.

Aficionados (ardent followers) will point out that tango exists in different forms and that most people get to see the rather tame version designed for tourists. Tango developed out of Spanish flamenco but got rid of all the stamping and clamping roses in the teeth. It was meant to be a dance you could do between the tables in a crowded nightclub – that’s why tango dancers appear to walk in a straight line. The idea is that the man is a gaucho (cowboy) getting off his horse, striding into the saloon (a bit saddlesore, hence the bent legs), and sweeping a girl off her feet. Being a practical chap, he keeps a hand open behind his back for someone to pay him, and he holds the girl in the crook of his arm so she doesn’t get too close to his sweaty armpits. How thoughtful.

We must be due for a military coup by now

Peron was a radical leader: He nationalised foreign companies operating in Argentina and brought in a proper system of social security. But after Eva died, Peron’s fortunes began to crumble. Argentina’s economy had done well during the Second World War, but by the 1950s the United States and the Europeans were offering serious competition again. Argentina began to go into the red and Peron had to turn to those old get-me-out-of-economic-trouble cards: Foreign investment and borrowing more than you can afford. As the situation worsened his rule became harsher: Critics were arrested and tortured and he attacked the Church, which is always a risky policy in Latin America. Worse: He alienated the army. In 1955 the army launched a coup and sent him into exile.

But after Peron things didn’t get better: The economy was still weak, unemployment was up and so were prices. Argentina’s answer to any economic problem was ‘If in doubt, stage a military coup’: Between 1930 and 1973 Argentina had thirty military coups. By 1973 civil war seemed around the corner, with students and workers rioting against the military government. Juan Peron came out of retirement and was elected president, but not even he could restore order. He died in 1974 and handed over power to his third wife, Isabelita, but in 1976 she was overthrown in yet another military coup. This coup brought a military junta (council) to power that would plunge Argentina into its darkest period yet.

Argentina’s years of terror

Argentina’s military rulers from 1976 to 1982 ruled the country through terror. During what became known as the ‘dirty war’ waged against Argentina’s people, some 30,000 people simply ‘disappeared’ into torture cells set up in small police stations and disused schools up and down the country. These weren’t all left-wing activists either: To be classed as an enemy of the regime you only needed someone with a grudge to denounce you. Men and women were taken, and any children were handed over to other parents to be brought up as their own.

In 1977 four brave women staged a demonstration in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires demanding to know news of their children and they were soon joined by a group of grandmothers who had given up trying to get news of their own children but thought they might have a chance of tracing their grandchildren. Every week an ominously silent – and ever larger – group of mothers and grandmothers would gather in the Plaza de Mayo with posters and photos of the Disappeared, making sure the world knew what was going on.

Democracy, good; nearly bankrupt, bad

Ironically, it was military action which finally brought the military government down. In 1982 the junta, led by General Leopold Galtieri, tried that classic tactic for uniting an angry country: Launch a foreign war. He ordered the invasion of the Falkland Islands, British-owned and settled but long claimed by Argentina, where they are known as the Malvinas. At first the public went wild with joy but when the British fought back and retook the islands, public joy turned to anger. All the pent-up fury about years of military oppression burst out: The military junta fell and for the first time in years Argentina elected a democratic government.

In 1989 Argentina elected Carlos Menem as president. Menem was a charismatic figure and he managed to reduce the power of the military, but he couldn’t cut government spending and by 1999 Argentina was virtually bankrupt. Inflation went crazy and money became worthless. The country was in political and economic turmoil as the new century dawned.

Meanwhile, back with the neighbours . . .

Latin America was badly hit by the worldwide slump of the 1930s. Both the export market and foreign investment collapsed. Many Latin American countries needed strong leadership through the economic crisis; all too often army officers thought that this was a job for SuperDictator and his sidekick, Tortureman.

Chile: Has a military coup in 1927.

Nicaragua: Engages in a guerrilla war against occupying American troops that lasts from 1927 to 1933.

El Salvador: Brutally suppresses a peasant rising in 1932.

Brazil: Experiences a military coup in 1930.

Uruguay: Experiences a military coup in 1933.

Nicaragua: Sees the assassination of the guerrilla leader Sandino in 1934. In 1937 General Somoza sets up a family dictatorship.

Most dramatic was a territorial dispute between Bolivia and Paraguay over the Gran Chaco region. Landlocked Bolivia wanted it, mainly because this region would give the country access to the Atlantic. The fighting was extremely bloody, and an economic disaster for Bolivia (it lost). Under the peace terms, Paraguay got some Bolivian land and Bolivia got a narrow passage to the sea as a consolation prize.

A second world war? No thanks!

Latin America’s military governments had a lot in common with fascist regimes in Europe (see Chapter 5 for more on these regimes). But when the Second World War started, Latin America stayed neutral and took advantage of the fighting to muscle in on the Europeans’ trading markets. President Vargas of Brazil wanted US investment to build up his country’s iron and steel industry and suggested ever so carefully that if the Americans didn’t help, he just might have to turn to the Germans for the money instead; suddenly the Americans were fumbling for their cheque books.

After the war many Nazis fleeing from the Allies made their way to South America, where some of them, like Klaus Barbie, the infamous Gestapo chief in Lyon who made his way to Bolivia, advised the military regimes there on how to operate a secret police force and rule a country by terror, though most of the regimes had it down to a fine art already.

The Cold War Years and Beyond

After the war, the United States faced a dilemma in Latin America. On the one hand, the US was the world’s leading democracy, devoted to the ideals of freedom and liberty. On the other hand, it was fighting the Cold War against the Soviet Union and could not afford to give its enemy a toehold on the American continent. The military regimes in Latin America were so brutally oppressive that the region’s jungles and mountains were full of left-wing guerrilla movements who looked to the Russians for help. So the US had to hold its nose and support Latin America’s repressive military governments. The Americans did sometimes suggest that their protégés might do something about their people’s chronic poverty, but not many took much notice. They reckoned the US would back them whatever they did and by and large they were right.

Guatemala – don’t fight the fruit

Before the Second World War, Guatemala’s economy depended almost entirely on exporting fruit through the US-owned United Fruit Company, which effectively controlled the country. In 1944 the Guatemalans elected a progressive government committed to dealing with the country’s appalling poverty, and in 1951 President Jacobo Arbenz announced that the government would take over all unused land so it could be put into agricultural production.

Unfortunately, a lot of that land belonged to the United Fruit Company, which got on the phone to Washington DC and by an extraordinary coincidence in 1954, the US government backed a military coup that toppled President Arbenz. The new government scrapped Arbenz’s land programme and gave the United Fruit Company its land back. It also sent death squads out into the countryside to massacre whole villages and force the native people into exile. When Archbishop Casariggo protested, he was kidnapped by right-wing vigilantes. By the 1990s the country was torn apart by civil war.

The Guatemalan coup of 1956 had one important consequence. A wealthy young Argentine visiting the country was so disgusted by the American action that he decided to devote his life to anti-American communist revolution. His name was Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara.

Great poster, Che

Alongside General Kitchener, Che Guevara can claim to be pictured on one of the twentieth century’s most famous posters. His black-on-red photo, showing him all rough and unshaven and wearing a beret, was for years the must-have for every student bedsit wall. In fact Che, who came from a very well-heeled family in Argentina, usually dressed rather smartly but who wants that on their wall? As a young man he toured South America on a motorbike and saw for himself how the poor could be exploited by ruthless landowners or factory bosses (as shown in the film The Motorcycle Diaries), but it was the US-backed coup in Guatemala in 1954 that finally turned him into a professional revolutionary and instilled his hatred for the United States. He joined in with Castro’s guerrillas and helped plan the campaign that toppled General Batista in Cuba. He served in Castro’s government, trying to plan Cuba’s industry along independent socialist lines, but was itching to get back to the jungle, so in 1965 he resigned and went off to lead the communist guerrillas trying to bring down the military government of Bolivia. Unfortunately the military government of Bolivia proved too strong for him and in 1967 he was killed fighting against its US-trained troops.

Che Guevara was an important symbol of revolution, but apart from helping Castro his influence on events was, frankly, fairly limited.

Cuba

Cuba in the 1950s was virtually an extension of the United States. Under the terms of the Platt Amendment, the US had the right to intervene in Cuba’s internal affairs whenever it wanted to, which was often, and it kept a large naval base at Guantanamo Bay in case it ever came in useful. Cuba’s economy served America’s needs and Americans got used to hopping over to Havana for a fun weekend. Cuba’s middle classes did very well out of this close relationship with the US; unfortunately, little of the money trickled down to the poor.

General Batista, who seized power in 1952, wanted to run Cuba along fascist lines, but in 1956 one of his leading opponents, Fidel Castro, started a guerrilla resistance movement. Batista’s regime was so oppressive and corrupt that many Cubans supported the rebels and by 1958 even Batista’s army was giving up on him. At New Year 1959, the rebels entered Havana and Batista had to flee into exile. Fidel Castro was the new ruler of Cuba.

Because we know that Castro became a great enemy of the United States, it’s easy to assume that he was always an out-and-out communist. He certainly became a communist later, but the evidence suggests that he wasn’t anything of the sort when he took power. Castro was a nationalist and just wanted Cuba to govern its own affairs. He didn’t trust the Americans, but he was prepared to work with them. The Americans didn’t trust Castro overmuch either, but they were prepared to work with him. For now.

You’re playing with the big boys now, Mr Castro

In 1960, a year after Castro seized power, John F. Kennedy was elected president of the United States. Kennedy knew that many world leaders viewed him as young and inexperienced. Or, to put it another way, a push-over. His opposite number in Moscow was Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, a tough old Bolshevik who thought he could make mincemeat of Kennedy. Both of them looked to Cuba as the place to play out their particular brand of he-man diplomacy.

Bay of Pigs invasion, 1961

Anti-Castro Cubans in exile in the US were plotting to bring down Castro’s government. President Kennedy allowed the CIA to help them with weapons and transport but he wouldn’t allow US troops to get involved. This decision was a recipe for disaster:

What was meant to happen: Anti-Castro Cubans land at the Bay of Pigs on the south coast of Cuba, overcome the border guards, and are greeted as liberators by happy crowds dancing all night in the streets. Fidel Castro is put on trial and shot for being left wing and growing a beard.

What actually happened: Cuban border guards shot the invaders to pieces and President Kennedy refused to send help. Kennedy looked a fool and Castro grew his beard even longer.

Only after the Bay of Pigs did Castro announce that he’d taken up Marxism-Leninism. That doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have done so anyway, but it does show that any chance of co-operation with his powerful neighbour had completely disappeared. The attack also helped unite Cubans behind Castro: He had always said the Americans would attack and he’d been proved right.

Cuban missile crisis, 1962

In 1962 the Soviet Union planned to station nuclear missiles on Cuba which would be able to reach most of the mainland United States. When US spy planes reported what was going on, President Kennedy ordered an immediate blockade of Cuba. Moscow threatened war if the Americans bombed or invaded the island and as Soviet ships carrying the missiles approached the US blockade, nuclear war seemed frighteningly close. Only a last-minute climbdown by the Russians saved the world from destruction. (You can find out more about the Cuban missile crisis in Chapter 10.)

Castro played a crucial role in the crisis. He was very keen for the Russians to put missiles on Cuba as a way of warning the Americans off any thought of invading and overthrowing him and he never forgave Moscow for backing down in the face of American threats.

Castro’s Cuba

Castro had a good eye for image. He presented himself as a Robin Hood-type figure, protecting the poor from the Big Bad Rich and cultivated the ‘professional revolutionary’ look, chomping a big Cuban cigar and wearing jungle fatigues even in the office. Cuba gained a reputation for exporting revolution, especially in Africa, where Cuban soldiers fought alongside Marxist groups in the 1970s (you can find out more in Chapter 12). Castro oversaw big advances in education and healthcare in Cuba. Getting the economy right proved more tricky.

At first Castro and his Industries Minister, Che Guevara, tried to set Cuba up as an autonomous socialist economy, but an American boycott made this impossible without Soviet help. So in the 1970s Castro tied Cuba into the increasingly stagnant Soviet economic bloc. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Castro had to open the country up to Western investment and tourism or go under. The US still tried to maintain an international boycott of Cuba, especially after Cuba shot down two American aircraft in 1996, but the rest of the world increasingly began to open up economic links with the Castro regime. What no one could predict was whether Cuba could remain a hard-line communist state if it was operating as part of the global economy.

Okay, how about exploding socks?

From the moment Castro overthrew Batista, the Americans came up with a catalogue of amazing ways of getting rid of their Least Favourite Foreign Ruler. First they tried snipers. No joy. So they turned to the Mafia but even they couldn’t penetrate Castro’s security. So the CIA really put its thinking caps on. They sent Castro boxes of poisoned cigars and when he didn’t smoke those, they sent him exploding ones instead. They tried poisoning his shoes when he was in New York to address the United Nations, sticking him with a poisoned syringe disguised as a pen, and they even sent him poisoned handkerchiefs, which was very silly as everyone knows that a good proletarian revolutionary uses his sleeve – why else would he wear green all the time? They tried sending a woman to seduce him with poison pills hidden in her cold cream, but the pills melted and even she drew the line at smearing cold cream on his lips. Castro guessed what was going on and offered to shoot himself to save her the trouble! ‘Right!’ said the CIA, ‘bring in the exploding molluscs!’ The idea was to plant them on the sea bed ready for when he went scuba diving. That’s if the specially poisoned scuba diving suit hadn’t done for him first. It’s been calculated that the CIA came up with 638 different plots to assassinate Castro and at the time of writing (2007) not one of them has worked.

Chile

Chile had a proud history of leading South America’s fight for freedom from the Spanish. Since independence, however, Chile had been dominated by wealthy landowners living very comfortably on their haciendas. As Chile industrialised, it developed a working class who looked to radical left-wing groups to speak for them. President Alessandri tried to take some of the radicals into his government in 1920 but the upper classes weren’t having that and they used their control of the Senate to stop him. The situation was deadlocked until the army took the usual Latin American step of launching a military coup.

Chile’s military government was good at locking up its critics but it had no idea how to cope with the economic crisis the country faced during the Depression. The Chileans tried electing radical governments and they tried electing right-wing governments until finally in 1970 they became the first country in the world to elect an out-and-out Marxist government. It was headed by Salvador Allende.

Allende nationalised the country’s copper mines and all foreign-owned industry, took land away from the rich, gave the workers a pay rise, and kept prices down. The trouble was, he didn’t have the means to pay for all these developments and as the nation sank into economic crisis, the people took to the streets. By 1973 the country had a serious problem of law and order and Allende’s enemies, both in Chile and in Washington, decided to make their move. On 11 September 1973, with covert American backing, army units under General Augusto Pinochet overthrew and killed President Allende. Pinochet promptly set up a brutal and repressive military regime.

Pinochet brought foreign investment into Chile and brought inflation under control. On the other hand, plenty of people still lived in dire poverty and anyone who tried to speak for them was soon in trouble: Pinochet’s regime was notorious for torturing its opponents.

Historians and commentators have very different versions of what happened in Chile in the 1970s. Some argue that Allende was leading Chile to economic collapse and that General Pinochet restored the economy and saved the country from chaos. Others argue that economic recovery was no excuse for the wholesale murder, torture, and repression of the Pinochet regime.

By 1988 Pinochet bowed to intense international pressure and handed power over to a civilian government, which gradually restored some basic freedoms to the Chilean people. In 1998 Pinochet was arrested in London on charges of torture, but he argued successfully that he was too ill to stand trial and the British government sent him back to Chile, where he made a miraculous recovery by the time the plane touched down. After furious debate, the socialist government of Ricardo Escobar decided to grant him immunity from prosecution.

Peru

Like so many Latin American countries, independent Peru was dominated by a small number of very wealthy families. However, when Peru discovered it was sitting on a large oil supply, it developed the same sort of middle and working classes as other industrial states. Industrial classes usually challenge the landed classes for power and Peru was no exception. The native peoples of Peru were also being increasingly marginalised. In 1924 Haya de la Torre formed a radical party called the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance to speak for Peru’s workers and downtrodden, but it took until 1962 for him to get elected president and then he was prevented from taking office by the army.

Peru was developing rapidly as an oil-producing nation but despite extensive American investment the country was deeply in debt, especially when oil prices slumped in the 1980s. The economy collapsed, production fell, unemployment soared, and the whole country seemed to be going backwards. Alberto Fujimori, from Peru’s Japanese immigrant community, finally installed a bit of discipline. Fujimori became president in 1990 and brought in a tough regime of economic cuts and constitutional changes to give more power to the presidency. He took firm action against the drug barons and against the ruthless communist terrorist group ‘the Shining Path’. However Fujimori’s brand of discipline meant giving the secret police a free hand to terrorise the people. His regime was deeply corrupt and when he won the 2000 elections with a suspiciously huge majority, his government found itself accused of massive vote-rigging. Fujimori fled to Japan while the Peruvian former United Nations Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar stepped in to oversee new elections.

Contra-versy: Nicaragua and El Salvador

The United States was particularly concerned to keep control of Central America with the vital Panama Canal. Not everyone in the region saw eye to eye with this policy.

Nicaragua

The United States had twice sent troops into Nicaragua, in 1912 and in 1926, because it didn’t like the country’s government. In 1937 the ruthless General Somoza seized power. Somoza hated communists, so the US could rest easy: Nicaragua was in safe right-wing hands as long as he or anyone in his family entourage was in charge, which they were until 1979.

The main opposition to the Somoza family came from a guerrilla group called the Sandinista National Liberation Front, named after Cesar Sandino, the guerrilla leader executed on Somoza’s orders in 1934. The Sandinistas finally forced the Somoza regime to collapse in 1979. At first the US was prepared to work with the Sandinistas but that changed when Ronald Reagan was elected US president in 1980. He decided that the Sandinistas were the spawns of Satan and must be destroyed at all costs, so his administration sent money and arms to the ‘Contras’, a group of former Samoza officers who had started a guerrilla resistance group against the Sandinista government. The Reagan administration even financed his military aid programme by a secret and highly illegal deal to sell arms to the government of Iran.

With Washington funding its enemies, the Sandinista government turned for help to Cuba and the Soviet Union; unfortunately, doing so didn’t help with the economic crisis the country was going through in the 1980s. However, ultimately the Sandinistas fell to something much less spectacular than US-backed rebels: President Daniel Ortega simply lost the 1990 election to his right-wing opponents. For a while civil war seemed imminent, but Ortega accepted a plan put forward by President Arias of Costa Rica (see the next section) and stepped down. The US lifted its sanctions and the Contras laid down their arms. Nicaraguan politics in the 1990s were a confusing picture of splits and faction fighting. The Sandinistas won the local elections of 2000, though, and they remain an important force in Nicaraguan politics.

El Salvador

El Salvador was a coffee republic where power, land, and pretty much all the nation’s wealth lay in the hands of a small group of fourteen powerful coffee planter families. They maintained their control through ruthless repression: The peasant uprising in 1931 was savagely crushed by the military. By the 1970s, however, opposition to the planters was growing fast, much of it voiced by the Catholic Church, which protested against the blatant exploitation of the country’s poor.

In 1980 government agents murdered the Archbishop of El Salvador, Oscar Romero, in his own cathedral. This assassination shocked the world and prompted the different opposition groups to join together in a united front against the government. By 1981 the country was torn apart by a civil war that lasted for ten years. The US, fearful of a communist victory, supported the government.

The man who brought peace to El Salvador was Oscar Arias, president of Costa Rica, one of the very few Latin American countries to remain more or less stable through the twentieth century. In 1987 Arias negotiated the basis for peace in Nicaragua and El Salvador. His recipe:

Free and fair elections (and everyone to abide by the result).

Superpowers keep out. Let the people choose their own government.

In 1992 El Salvador accepted a peace plan along the lines Arias had laid down. The opposition groups gave up the armed struggle and took up the much more vicious game of parliamentary politics.

We all like the idea of the good man who saves the day so giving President Arias all the credit for bringing peace to Nicaragua and El Salvador is tempting. He certainly thoroughly deserved the Nobel Peace Prize he was awarded for his work. But historians would have to point out that his plan probably wouldn’t have worked were it not that by 1992 the Soviet Union had collapsed and could no longer help left-wing guerrilla groups in Latin America. So he had good timing as well as good sense.

Liberation Theology

In the 1980s the Catholic Church in Latin America started speaking up forcefully on behalf of the region’s poor. It wasn’t just telling people to put a peso in the collecting box: The Church was voicing full-blooded criticism of government terror tactics. A Peruvian priest called Gustavo Gutierrez provided the inspiration for this change in emphasis; he wrote a book called Theology of Liberation which argued that Christianity was about justice or it was about nothing. He pointed out that the poor are only poor in the first place because the rich are rich. Other priests took up Gutierrez’s message and a whole brand of preaching developed called ‘Liberation Theology’, led by priests such as Leonardo Boff, Jon Sobrino, and Oscar Romero, the Archbishop of El Salvador murdered by a government hit squad.

Not surprisingly, the governments of Latin America had very little time for Liberation Theology; perhaps more surprisingly, neither had the Vatican. Pope John Paul II had no time for military dictators (he’d been in Poland when the Nazis invaded) but he hated communism even more. He was afraid that Liberation Theology would help communist governments to come to power in Latin America and that Liberation Theologians were letting their concern for justice for the poor get in the way of preaching the gospel to them. He even summoned Leonardo Boff to Rome for a severe reprimand. By the 1990s Liberation Theology had largely died away, but this did not stop priests from speaking out in defence of the poor or dispossessed.

And elsewhere . . .

Other states in Latin America have had their share of economic ups and downs and military coups. Here’s a quick tour of some of the highs and lows:

Venezuela did very well from oil until prices slumped in the 1980s and the country fell into debt. Venezuelans rioted against President Perez’s economy measures and attempted a very bloody coup. They also accused him (rightly) of corruption. In 1999 Hugo Chavez became president on an anti-corruption ticket, but he soon proved just as bad, taking more power for himself and censoring the press. None of these developments helped Venezuela’s poor.

Brazil’s response to the Great Depression was to set up a military government under President Vargas, which modernised the economy until the next coup in 1945. The new government borrowed so heavily that the country was up to its ears in debt and corruption. The new state-of-the-art capital city, Brasilia, proved a costly failure, so everyone headed back to Rio de Janeiro. The police response to the country’s chronic poverty and high crime rate was to send death squads out to murder people. Meanwhile the native people of the Amazon rainforest were being systematically wiped out by police action and by the government’s policy of deforestation.

Er, it’s only a game, guys

Latin America took to football with tremendous passion and the region has produced some of the game’s legendary players. Best known is the Brazilian footballer Edson Arantes do Nascimento, better known as Pele. Pele’s almost magical control of the ball led Brazil to victory in the 1970 World Cup. Diego Maradona did the same for Argentina in the 1986 tournament, though his goal against England, four years after the Falklands War, was almost certainly a case of hand-ball, as even he seemed to admit. The storm over that incident was nothing compared to the 1969 World Cup qualifying match between El Salvador and Honduras: The two countries actually went to war over it. Even more somberly, Latin America’s most brutal military regimes sometimes used football stadiums to hold and torture political prisoners. Football symbolises the best and the worst of Latin America’s history.

Paraguay was ruled for more than thirty years by a ruthless dictatorship led by General Alfredo Stroessner until he was overturned in a coup in 1989. The democratic government that followed was rocked by allegations of corruption, threats of a coup, and in 1999 the assassination of the vice-president.

Uruguay had a military dictatorship, which, by the 1970s, had made the country ‘the torture chamber of Latin America’. In 1984 huge public protests forced the government to reintroduce democracy, though the new government soon had to deal with a crippling economic crisis.

Mexico struck oil in the 1970s but the country’s poor didn’t see much of the profits. Mexican students protested against the status quo by listening to Status Quo and other rock bands – very loudly. Meanwhile a native Mexican guerrilla force, the Zapatistas, took on the government troops and did win some autonomy for themselves. In 2000 the opposition leader Vicente Fox was elected and started to hold inquiries into previous governments’ record of murder and torture.

Bolivia overthrew its military regime in 1952, but the left-wing regime that followed was overthrown in a military coup in 1964. This was the US-backed military government that proved too strong for Che Guevara (see the sidebar ‘Great poster, Che’ to find out more). Different generals deposed each other but Bolivia remained under military rule until 1982. The civilian government pledged to eradicate the drugs trade even if it meant economic ruin for the country. They did and it did.

Colombia was torn by ten years of civil war in the 1940s and 1950s until left and right agreed to try sharing power. By then drugs barons had taken advantage of the chaos to terrorise farmers into growing coca and make Colombia one enormous cocaine factory. It was also the world homicide capital. As the century drew to its close, not even full-scale military assault could break the power of the drugs cartels.

Grenada overthrew and murdered President Maurice Bishop in 1983. US President Reagan, fearing that Grenada would become another Cuba, ordered an invasion of the island. Grenada returned to democratic government and exporting bananas.

Haiti was ruled by a brutal father-and-son team: François Duvalier, known as ‘Papa Doc’, and his son Jean-Claude, or ‘Baby Doc’. They claimed to have supernatural voodoo powers; they certainly had a terrifying secret police force known as ‘Tonton Macoute’ after the bogeyman in children’s stories. In 1986 ‘people power’ finally overthrew Baby Doc but Haiti’s troubles weren’t over: The military seized power in 1988 and 1991 and three years later US President Clinton ordered the invasion of Haiti to restore the legally elected president, Bertrand Aristide. In 2000 Aristide’s election victory with a not-very-credible 90 per cent brought accusations of industrial-scale vote-rigging. The twentieth century had done little to solve Haiti’s problems.

Panama became a major centre of international trade and finance under General Torrijos in the 1970s but he died in a plane crash in 1981, leaving the way open for the ambitious and erratic head of the National Guard, General Noriega. Noriega was up to his neck in the international drugs trade, and after he seized power in 1989 he started threatening the US. In response, the Americans invaded Panama, forced Noriega out of hiding in the Vatican embassy (they blasted the building with heavy rock music, which did the trick!), and whisked him off to face trial; he got 40 years for drug dealing. Ten years on, in 1999, the US finally handed Panama control of its own canal.

The fundamental things apply

Despite all the military coups and fights for freedom, Latin America’s biggest problems weren’t political at all. A series of natural disasters devastated the region: 23,000 people were killed in Colombia in 1985 when the Nevado del Ruiz volcano erupted, and an earthquake the same year devastated Mexico City. In 1998 Hurricane Mitch hit Nicaragua; the following year heavy rains caused disastrous floods and mudslides in Venezuela; two years later Bolivia had the same, and El Salvador suffered a major earthquake.

By the 1990s world opinion was increasingly worried about changes in the climate. The earth seemed to be building up greenhouse gases that eroded the earth’s protection from the sun and much of the blame seemed to lie with Brazil’s policy of cutting down the Amazon rainforest. Brazil hosted the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, which called on everyone to limit their greenhouse gas emissions but didn’t seem to make much difference.

You can find out more on the environmental debate in Chapter 20.