Suppose we reversed the clock a hundred and thirty years, back to the 1890s, when a greed-driven Gilded Age United States began to insert itself into Central America’s affairs.
Suppose the U.S. never noticed that the continent’s long tail from Mexico to South America was rich in fertile, tropical land lined with easy seaports on both coasts from which to ship produce back to the States.
Suppose the politicians in D.C. weren’t tempted by the vulnerability of that land’s population, since it was governed by a collection of small, weak nation states that were still disheveled in the wake of throwing off Spanish colonial rule.
Suppose our government and the United Fruit Company never conspired to deploy a military-corporate complex to that foreign soil and begin feasting on its resources. Suppose U.S. forces didn’t commandeer huge swaths of territory, forcing people off their countries’ best farmland so that our private corporations could create sprawling banana and coffee plantations and toxic mining operations.
Suppose, once we’d usurped all of the region’s best natural resources, we hadn’t then implemented devastating free trade policies that ensured all the resulting revenue could flow unimpeded straight back to the U.S. forevermore.
If, over the last hundred and thirty years, the U.S. had minded its own business, the citizens of Central America might be just fine today. They’d still have access to their own fertile soil and clean water. They’d be in a position to manage their homeland’s natural resources in ways that benefited their own communities’ health and wealth. They’d be self-sufficient and in control of their own destinies.
But that’s not what happened.
As we’ve seen summarized in the last few articles and essays, what happened is this: those in power in the U.S. saw an opportunity to make money and decided to take it, the people whose lives and livelihoods were at stake be damned. Our government and corporations conspired to strip whole populations of their sustainable ways of life, rope them into the lowest ranks of an exploitative global economy, and rig the laws and regulations to ensure that all the products and profits of their land flowed directly to the U.S.
That’s why today so many people in Central America are destitute and desperate. Not because of some moral failing or lack of effort on their part. Because of the U.S. Because of us.