North America and Neo-Colonialism: Week 9 Reading

While the term neo-colonialism is usually applied to the period after 1960, when the former metropoles of European imperialism created policies that sought to economically subvert their former colonial subjects in Africa and Asia, the situation of Latin America during the period of the United States' predations was very similar. Although the United States did not seek to establish formal colonies, their form of land dispossession mirrors the policies of the French as they gradually chewed away at states like Algeria and Lebanon to create zones of entirely French-owned arable land and mineral deposits. Areas of Spanish colonization in the Western Hemisphere were always seen as targets of invasion and subversion. Approximately one third of the territory of the modern United States was at one point under the dominion of the Spanish Empire and then independent Mexico before being seized through a combination of illegal settlement and armed conquest. The seizure of Texas and the Southwest were culminations of the pernicious, deeply violent sentiment among Americans known as "Manifest Destiny" that had been honed in their protracted campaign of genocide against the Aboriginal groups caught within their progressively expanding boundaries.

Even after the United States had achieved its transcontinental ambitions, the desire for territory was still a driving principle of its foreign policy. Under the auspice of expelling imperial influence from the Western Hemisphere, the U.S. conquered all the remaining Spanish territory in the Caribbean and the Pacific and claimed the acquired lands for themselves at the conclusion of the war. Once they had relatively uncontested dominion over Latin America, the U.S. began to protect regimes that would embrace heavily imbalanced export policies and topple those that dared to try and have domestic policies that weren't beneficial to American trade. This policy of low-frequency military intervention coupled with complete economic domination during peacetime laid the foundations for the distinct flavour of American imperialism that would shape the landscape of the post-WWII world. The United Fruit Company became a term synonymous with American hegemony for many Latin American revolutionaries and dissidents of the 20th century because of its role as a stay-behind enforcer of the American economic agenda. The mercantile forces that governed the UFCO became ever-richer off of the exploitation of Latin American land and labor, thus increasing their capacity to enforce and expand their influence. While the defining impetus of revolution in Latin America during the 19th century was overt European colonialism, the character of the 20th century struggle was clearly defined by resisting American economic domination.