Pirates of the Caribbean: Debt, Diplomacy and Destruction

Today we’re building on the Global Order of Money and Global Order of Power episodes to examine fiscal and force policies more narrowly by focusing on the Caribbean. We’ll be able to pull on threads from our Cuba and Fuck Milton Friedman episodes as well, as we continue to tell the story of U.S. imperialism and policy more globally.

Now for our purposes, we’re talking about most of the territories surrounding the Caribbean Sea, specifically Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. In so many ways, these territories were the proving ground for neoliberalism. But long before that, they were the objects of American and European imperialist attention and victims of economic and human enslavement. Rich in natural resources, but limited in their capacity to defend themselves, most Caribbean countries haven’t had a moment's rest from occupation and plunder for hundreds of years. But in the past 100 years, no country has exerted more catastrophic influence over the Caribbean than yours truly. The real pirates of the Caribbean.

Psycho Vigilante

White sandy beaches. Hiking through luscious tropical rainforests at sunrise. Sipping exotic cocktails with little umbrellas at sunset. Americans love their Caribbean vacations. Come, visit your money in that offshore account and stay at one of our all you can eat inclusive resorts brought to you by hundreds of years of colonial rule! Don’t mind all those skinny cows and dirt lots between the airport and the resort. They’re just there for authenticity.

As you know, I love anecdotes from history that tell the story of America. And nothing quite encapsulates the spirit of our racist/imperialist/paternalistic selves more than a man named William Walker.

Long before the word filibuster was used to describe the parliamentary quirk in Congress that allows the minority to scuttle the will of the majority, it was used to describe private contractors—vigilantes really—who invaded foreign nations to plunder and pillage. Imagine Erik Prince, but in the mid 1800s.

These groups were rather common around this time. The U.S. was steadily advancing across the continental expanse and had laid down declarations to Europe that it wasn’t to trifle in this hemisphere any longer. But the federal government was still weak compared to what it would become, and rogue actors were often able to play out their own expansionist fantasies by raising small armies. Perhaps the most notorious filibuster of the time was William Walker.

Walker hailed from Tennessee and would try multiple times to declare himself the leader of wherever the fuck he found himself, beginning with southern California. After an unsuccessful attempt to find gold, he decided to stick around and anoint himself supreme ruler of the territory and even issued a decree to legalize slavery. After only a couple of short months, he marched into part of Mexico and declared it part of his fiefdom. This guy was a piece of work, for sure.

The Mexicans weren’t having any of it, so they threw him out and his experiment out west came to an abrupt end. But he was far from done. His next move was to organize mercenaries to take over Nicaragua alongside a domestic liberal insurgency. He did just that, but then refused to leave after taking power. The fact that this guy had the stones to do stuff like this was one thing. But it was another thing entirely when the United States recognized Walker as the rightful leader of Nicaragua. This will be a recurring theme, by the way.

So this fucking nutjob establishes Nicaragua as a slave nation, made English the official language and held a rigged election to declare himself president. Pretty impressive stuff. But he made one huge mistake.

He found himself on the wrong side of corporate America when he tried to shake down Cornelius Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt would fund a counter attack that drove Walker out of Central America and killed many of the filibusters that had followed him to glory. Once back in the United States, however, he did what any disgraced slave owning, military operative and mercenary from the United States would do. He went on a speaking tour in the United States.

Ultimately, everyone got tired of Walker’s bullshit, and he was captured at sea on some stupid misadventure and given over to the Hondurans, who killed him immediately.

Just don’t call us colonialists!

So this motherfucker Walker overthrew a whole country and the United States was like, cool, just make it a slave state. My man returned to the southwest U.S. a legit hero. And everyone was cool with this until he ticked off the wrong billionaire. I mean, if this isn’t the ultimate allegory for U.S. growth and interventions, I don’t know what is.

Before we get to the present day, I think it’s important to walk through the history of our relationships with Caribbean nations in terms of attitude and behavior and how these attitudes translated to policy. Because these policies have proven remarkably intractable and signify something much deeper about who we are as a nation, much of which is painfully familiar. And many of these attitudes were just a carry over from our European heritage, whether we want to admit it or not.

Eyeing Caribbean nations was a thing long before Walker. As president, Thomas Jefferson sought to exclude all European influence from the hemisphere, believing that anything touching the United States and pretty much everything in the Caribbean belonged to the United States. It wasn’t a matter of if, but when.

The first official policy to this end came only a few years later under President Madison with something called the No Transfer Resolution of 1811. It was essentially  a response to the continued Spanish presence in the hemisphere. The Louisiana Purchase under Jefferson didn’t include western Florida, which was still under control of the Spanish government and home to the Seminoles and other native peoples. Importantly, this resolution was proposed by then Secretary of State James Monroe, who would of course be the namesake of the doctrine that governed our attitude in the hemisphere for most of our history.

It’s important to recognize that the Caribbean was on the receiving end of imperialism and colonialism long before us. In fact, the United States was a welcome participant to some in the struggle for Caribbean independence given the brutal and sordid history with western European powers, who regarded their role as colonists as necessary under what Rudyard Kipling termed the “White Man’s Burden.”

But, in the United States, there was a sensitivity to colonialism, at least as a concept. The whole idea was too reminiscent of our own founding, and there was a keen awareness of how this type of relationship could foster revolutionary feelings toward the oppressor. So when we did get involved, we stopped short of referring to our occupations or support as colonization and considered them protectorates instead. Intended in the most paternalistic and patronizing way possible, of course.

When the U.S. defeated the British once again in the War of 1812, it began to see its place in the world a little differently. Two generations on from the Revolution, the scrappy young nation began cultivating a professional political class determined to expand the nation under a philosophy called the Monroe Doctrine, undoubtedly a familiar concept to most Unf*ckers.

We were pressing our interests against Mexico, pushing further west, and had booted the Spanish from Florida. There was a curious alliance among political adversaries that found common ground in the idea of expansionism. So enormous figures of the day like John Quincy Adams, who was then serving President Monroe, had strong generals like Andrew Jackson to do the dirty work clearing out indigenous tribes from their lands.

Here’s Adams on Cuba to illustrate how deep our paternalism ran:

“There are laws of political as well as of physical gravitation; and if an apple, severed by the tempest from its native tree, cannot choose but fall to the ground, Cuba, forcibly disjoined from it own unnatural connexion with Spain, and incapable of self-support, can gravitate only towards the North American Union, which, by the same law of nature, cannot cast her off from its bosom.”

Building on the No Transfer Resolution under Madison, the Monroe Doctrine plainly stated that no intervention in our hemisphere by European powers would be tolerated, saying, “We should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.” In so many ways, this very statement would foreshadow American policy for the next two hundred years, particularly during the Cold War and the War on Terror.

The rest of the 19th Century would in fact be a deliciously evil mix of the Monroe Doctrine and the concept of Manifest Destiny, a term coined by writer John O’Sullivan in 1845 that essentially argued it was our god given destiny to press ocean to ocean.

A Tale of Two Islands

As we grew up as a nation and created formal doctrines that telegraphed to the world our approach to foreign affairs, the Caribbean remained a fascination for U.S. leaders. Walker style vigilantism subsided and was replaced by formal military interventions and occupations whenever it suited our needs. But the one thing that remained was the tension between occupation and colonialism. For some, this was a magnanimous approach to addressing our interests abroad. For others, it was a difference without a distinction. Nevertheless, the procedural hurdles the U.S. would create to intervene without crossing some imaginary colonialist line was real.

One example of this tension were the back-to-back amendments at the turn of the 20th Century regarding Cuba. The first was called the Teller Amendment, proposed by Senator Henry Teller, which expressly stated that the United States would not exercise permanent control over Cuba, even though we were at war with Spain over Cuban independence. The war that would make Teddy and his Rough Riders famous in America. Shortly thereafter, another motion called the Platt Amendment superseded and weakened Teller by claiming the right to “intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty.” This statute remained in place until 1934.

So while not explicitly stating that we would take it over at any given time, Platt gave the United States a very open and one-sided policy rationale to intervene in Cuban affairs pretty much anytime it wanted.

We covered a great deal of our relationship with Cuba in our Cuba (Not So) Libre episode. Much transpired between the Spanish-American War and Castro revolution in 1959, but I want to move to neighboring Puerto Rico for a moment to highlight a stark difference in our approach to these islands. What happened around the time of the Platt Amendment with respect to Puerto Rico is really interesting because it charted a very different path for Puerto Rico. For reference, I'm pulling from an outstanding article and episode from Manny Faces production News Beat.

As the U.S. entered the war in Cuba in 1898, it also invaded Puerto Rico. And make no mistake, this was a full on colonization of the island, though we don’t refer to it as such. Two decades later, Woodrow Wilson, who we’ve talked about a lot lately, pulled off another incredibly racist and imperialist move. From News Beat:

“Besides creating a legislative system and reforming Puerto Rico’s municipal government, the Jones Act, signed into law in March 1917 by President Woodrow Wilson, imposed U.S. citizenship to all Puerto Ricans born on and after April 25, 1898. The following month, he addressed a joint session of Congress to request a declaration of war against Germany and the United States’ entrance into World War I. Eighteen thousand Puerto Ricans are then conscripted and sent off to battle across Europe.”

Since our unwelcome involvement in Puerto Rico, we have subjected the Puerto Rican people to what can only be described as atrocities. From mass sterilizations to unwarranted incarcerations, we have held the island inhabitants under our thumb since the beginning in ways that very few Americans know or appreciate to this day. As citizens of a so-called protectorate, Puerto Ricans have some access to the American system, but not full access. For example, Puerto Ricans can’t vote for president and can’t import or export goods unless it’s via U.S. ships. Again, from News Beat:

“A 1976 tax loophole basically exempted manufacturers and large corporations from having to pay income taxes, which resulted in American companies, mostly pharmaceuticals, transplanting to Puerto Rico. These became the island’s largest employers, and also solidified a decades-long shift away from what had been historically an agricultural economy. Its 1996 repeal and 2006 phase-out resulted in the mass exodus of those economic drivers and job providers, ratcheting up the already grossly popular issuance of municipal bonds—which had the golden designation of being triple-tax exempt: meaning exemption federal, state and local taxes. When those bonds were downgraded to junk status by credit ratings agencies in 2014, the government was blocked from issuing more, leading to the passage of the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) by the U.S. Congress in 2016, which imposed a Financial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB) that’s been mandating deep austerity measures cutting into education and social services, government jobs, and so much more. To add insult to so much injury, Puerto Rico is blocked from bankruptcy protection, too, due to a controversial amendment by then-Republican U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond in 1984.”

“Diplomacy”

In many ways, the Puerto Rican experience is tantamount to our entire world view and how we developed methods through violence, one-sided diplomacy—an oxymoron for sure—and economic gangsterism. The roots of our economic gangsterism can be found in something we termed “dollar diplomacy,” which like most policies wasn’t all good and wasn’t all bad. In fact, much like the Marshall Plan coming out of World War II, there was a lot to like about this strategy.

So again, we’re back to around the turn of the 20th Century, a pivotal time in the history of the Caribbean and Central America, as it related to U.S. foreign policy, at least. The European nations were finally losing their iron grip on these countries, with the U.S. flexing its muscle in the region. In some cases, we offered some salvation at first; in others, it was simply frying pan into the fire.

Dollar Diplomacy began in Central America and would come to typify our economic strategy. It was a way for nations to refinance expensive European debt with American funds on more favorable terms. The fear was that debt default to these nations would inspire European interventions to force repayments. So rather than deal with encroachments to our newly defined territory under the Monroe doctrine, we refinanced the deals.

Of course, Wall Street would need more assurances than just promises, so the concept of dollar diplomacy was born, whereby the government guaranteed repayment of its debts under threat of U.S. military intervention. Quite a guarantee. We extended this concept to the Caribbean as well by refinancing Dominican debt in 1905, which would set the stage for a full takeover of the country in 1916.

This was a step up in sophistication for the United States, which had relied until this time on something called “gunboat diplomacy.” As Alan McPherson writes in A Short History of U.S. Interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean, “Between 1869 and 1897, Washington sent warships into Latin American ports 5,980 times. Some of these were friendly enough visits, but most of the time U.S. forces landed to oversee a change in political regimes, to quell riots or a civil war, or to enforce a commercial treaty.”

Throughout the first part of the 20th Century, we employed every means at our disposal to bend Caribbean nations to our will. We occupied Nicaragua for 13 years beginning in 1912. We kicked the Colombians out of Panama and recognized it as an independent nation. In return, we basically seized the 10 mile stretch we needed to build the Panama Canal in an agreement with the Panamanians. Except that an agreement usually implies consent from both sides. Huh. Strange.

The Dominican and Haiti were strategically located in the path toward the Panama Canal, so we extended our purview out of fear that Germany would attempt to take them over during the First World War. But always with an eye toward preventing Spain, France and Britain from regaining footholds as well. Our modus operandi was to help kick out the occupiers, let things dissolve in the vacuum, take over their debt, and then step back in under the auspices of the “White Man’s Burden.”

Sometimes we put in place necessary and beneficial infrastructure. Roads, railways, ports, hospitals, sanitation, etc. We did it in Haiti, Panama and Cuba. In many ways, we treated these occupied territories better than the Native American territories and even our poorest white rural parts of the nation. But these projects weren’t the result of benevolence. They were typically intended to stabilize a strong consumer market for U.S. exports and to streamline the economic order to fit the tastes and expectations of American corporations looking to privatize sectors of these economies.

A consistent theme underlying our behavior, which will come as no surprise to anyone, was deep and abiding racism. Our view of these nations was that they were incapable of self governing because of their mixed race heritage or pure blackness. And the darker the citizens of a nation, the greater our hatred has always been toward them. In the Caribbean, there’s no better example than Haiti.

Hating on Haiti

Woodrow Wilson was concerned that the Germans would encroach on American territories, with Haiti being an obvious target, or so he believed. So we took it over. William Jennings Bryan, himself almost president a couple of times, was secretary of state at the time and exclaimed, “Dear me. Think of it. N---s speaking French.” This pretty much summed up the American attitude toward the Haitian people.

In Haiti, we wasted little time taking over everything. Through dollar diplomacy, we took over their debt. Through gunboat diplomacy, we took over the government. And through corporatism, we took over everything else. We gave land to American citizens, tore up the Haitian constitution and installed our own leaders in sham elections. Just like that. On the flip side, we built out the Haitian infrastructure because—as we reconciled in our infrastructure episode last week—there’s always money for bridges, roads, railways, airports and ports so long as they’re in service of moving our goods along safely.

Of course there’s another side to Haiti, literally. The Dominican Republic, on the other side of the island of Hispaniola, didn’t escape our view either. The Dominican resolve against the U.S. was stronger than that of Haiti, and our hatred of the Dominican people was less because they were of a lighter complexion. While we still thought them incapable of self governing, they were higher on the racial pecking order.

Nevertheless, we fully occupied the DR for three years during World War I, again under the pretense of preventing Germany from landing there. We would skirmish with the occupied people and forces on and off for a few years until the signing of the Hughes-Peynado agreement, which essentially refinanced Dominican debt and gave us supervision of financial matters on the island.

So we got what we wanted, and American corporations had assurances that they could safely access the goods and labor of the DR. The island would maintain a brief period of relative calm until a dictator named Rafael Trujillo overthrew the government using the very forces the U.S. marines had trained just a few years earlier. He ruled until the 1960s, with the full support of the United States.

Haiti’s experience, however, remained horrific and only got worse from there.

Here’s an excerpt from American Imperialism’s Undead, by Raphael Dalleo:

“From 1915 to 1934, then, the United States engaged in a grand nation-building experiment in Haiti. Without having to worry about respecting local political, social or economic relations, U.S. representatives in Haiti were able to socially engineer their vision of a utopia. The main areas of this transformation were the political system and the economy, especially finance and agriculture. Upon arrival, the marines dissolved Haiti’s existing political institutions. In the place of the Haitian army, a new gendarmerie was created that would operate as Haiti’s state during the occupation. The gendarmerie was able to wield virtually unlimited, unchecked power on the island. Thousands of Haitians were killed to establish and maintain this power.”

At the risk of giving you whiplash, I want to fast forward to Afghanistan for a moment. Think of how we occupied it, put in place systems that allowed us to function there, trained their domestic law enforcement agencies, built some infrastructure and then just disappeared. What is happening in the wake of our disappearance from the region is just déjà vu from what we did in Haiti and the Dominican. In fact, the parallels are astounding.

We took what we needed when we needed it, all under the auspices of preventing someone else from occupying the region. We claimed they couldn’t govern without us and when we pulled out, the collapse of institutions that were propped up by our military and our money appeared to prove this point, while missing the larger point. And leaving cleared the way for authoritarian forces to take over. Trujillo in the Dominican, as we said. And in Haiti, something far more evil and insidious.

Even though our troops withdrew from Haiti, our fiscal control remained until the Second World War. But the condition of us ceding financial control was complete satisfaction of our debts, which required Haiti to deplete its gold reserves entirely, leaving the nation flat broke. Out of the ashes of our occupation and financial ruin came a man named François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who was corrupt and utterly ruthless. Little hope would come to the Haitian people when Papa Doc passed away, as his son, referred to as “Baby Doc,” assumed control and reigned even more ferociously than his father. Both men enjoyed the complete support and cooperation of the United States, which saw an opportunity to use Haiti as the “Taiwan of the Caribbean,” essentially a client state of the U.S. that existed for our financial pleasure only.

The Worst Big Brother Ever

Our relationship with the Caribbean nations is, and has always been, that of the worst big brother ever. It’s a story of either extreme interventionist paternalism or extreme indifference, and nothing in between. We’re there for them when it suits our business and political interests or to sit our fat fucking asses on their beaches, and when it doesn’t, we simply ignore them while never ceding enough economic authority for them to pursue true independence or self determination.

We overthrew the governments of Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama and even Grenada. We offered them the promise of protection so long as they gave over their resources and built infrastructure to meet our insatiable demands of global trade. We use them as prisons, as in Guantanamo, cut throughs for trade as in Panama and secure their natural resources like Puerto Rico and Nicaragua. We use them as safe harbor for ill-gotten gains as in the Caymans, Bahamas and Virgin Islands. And when they hint at self determination, we invade.

And in the 1980s, we used them as convenient flash points in the so-called War on Drugs. Leaving behind for a moment how the Reagan administration literally created the drug war out of nothing, which we covered in our Mass Incarceration episode, it also used the levers of trade to further pound these territories into submission when they might otherwise have finally climbed out of the grips of dictatorships. From Samantha Chaitram’s American Foreign Policy in the English-speaking Caribbean:

“During the 1980s, the United States developed unilateral preferential trading schemes…which were tailored to specific geographic regions. The first trade preference program designed for the Caribbean was the Caribbean Basin Initiative (or CBI)…Twenty-four countries were designated as beneficiary countries from the Caribbean and Central America. These countries were eligible for duty-free or reduced tariff access for specific products if they met certain conditions.”

These conditions included declarations of anticommunism and extradition treaties, for example. Overall, as Chaitram notes, “Products excluded from preferential market access were those which were important export products from the Caribbean Basin region, such as textiles and apparel products and petroleum products.”

Effectively, we created one-way benefits for trade and excluded the very things that would have helped the local economies. All while building up a militarized narco network that saw the United States both build the drug trafficking industry through covert CIA operations and enforce it through overt DEA operations that combined to squeeze the region in a wash of illicit drugs and cash and hyper U.S. militarization.

Even if the CBI was effective, it all came undone during the Clinton years and the passage of NAFTA. NAFTA not only fucked the American worker right in the starfish, but it basically sidestepped any industrial opportunity and advantages the Caribbean basin nations might have ever had.

The False and Deadly Right Wing Narrative

So, to review, we destroy their natural economic potential by turning them from agrarian to industrial economies, with only the U.S. corporations given permission to extract profits. And when these circumstances boil over into a full fledged humanitarian crisis, we turn it into racist political infighting domestically and conveniently absolve ourselves from a hundred years of policy that has contributed to the political, social and economic devastation of these nations. And then… we play the blame game.

(In the audio version of the essay, we play several clips of Fox News commentators shifting blame on forced migration and politicizing humanitarian crises that stem from our interventions and increasingly violent weather events.)

These narratives are allowed to prevail because we don’t know our history. These are the times I like to return to the Tyson Principle, though I admit to failing on this to a great degree. The Tyson Principle is my reminder that we should endeavor to emerge from these episodes with a clear direction, some tangible step forward we can all take. And yet, for most of our shows, I struggle to find that one thing we can rally around. Mostly because we’re always just pulling threads, always uncovering more and more bullshit in an effort to understand why we are the way we are.

So while I struggle again to say, hey, here’s a thing we can do, here’s something we can sign, or pledge or support, whatever—I can say that the very process of researching, writing, interviewing and recording this show has been revelatory. I hope you feel, as I do, that the picture of who we are gets clearer and clearer as we go on, as does my resolve to back progressive ideas and candidates.

The idea of colonialism was anathema to us, given our history of being colonized. But the inevitable allure of power led us to colonize under different names and policies. We’ve been the oppressor for so long, it’s almost as if we can’t see ourselves clearly anymore. The only part of our history we seem able to cling to is that of the plucky revolutionaries who broke free of British rule. But everything after that point just gets mixed into a cauldron of amnesia and bullshit. It’s why we can’t hear the words Critical Race Theory without freaking the fuck out.

It’s why we have such a hard time with forced migration and asylum seekers. We just can’t see our own involvement in the construction of the world we live in and the destruction it brings to others.

But now we’re coming into a life and death period that’s bigger than all of us. Bigger than war. Bigger than structural racism. Bigger than poverty. By denying the Caribbean and Central American nations the opportunity to develop naturally, build organically and determine their own fate, we have condemned them in the face of climate change. These nations who contribute the least to climate change are going to be the most devastated by the effects of it.

Shakespearian doesn’t begin to describe the great tragedy of all of this.

William Walker never really died. He just evolved into all of us. Over the past 100+ years, the defenseless Caribbean nations served as convenient foils or mistresses to our twisted appetite for control. It’s like it’s beyond us to allow anyone to succeed without paying blood tribute to us with their labor and resources. All of the time, money and force used to intervene in the Caribbean could have been used so much more productively. But they were always “less than” because of their blackness. Incapable. Savage. Backwards.

The words might have changed over the years—unless you’re Fucker Carlson—but the intent is the same. And now, we have consigned them to an ugly and ignominious fate at the hands of our industrial greed, so even if we suddenly have a change of heart, it’s almost too late.

If history is an echo from the past heard in the future, then hopefully you heard the echoes of Woodrow Wilson in our treatment of Haiti. Of William Walker in our treatment of Nicaragua. The echo of Milton Friedman in our treatment of everyone over the past 50 years. When we hear these echoes clearly, it helps us understand ourselves so that we can move forward with empathy.

The only way to push back on the corrosive narratives of the right is to speak loudly with new language. In the coming years, more and more migrants will seek shelter on our shores, and if we allow the language of the right wing to drown out history and change the narrative, it will only lead to more death and destruction. And we’ll wonder how the fuck it all happened.

Fuck Woodrow Wilson. Fuck Ronald Reagan. Fuck Milton Friedman.

And Free Puerto Rico.

Here endeth the lesson.