[April 17th marks the 50th anniversary of the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy U.S. invasions and interventions of Latin American nations, leading up to a weekend Guest Post on the Dominican Republic from a colleague, friend, and DR scholar!]
On two conflicts
that are all too representative, and how to remember them specifically
nonetheless.
In one of the
many snarky and pointed footnotes in his novel The
Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008), Junot Díaz (or perhaps his
narrator Yunior, as it’s never quite clear who authors those footnotes and
cases can be made for either man) writes, of the 1965-1966
U.S. invasion and occupation of the Dominican Republic (on which more in
this weekend’s Guest Post!), that “Santo Domingo was Iraq before Iraq was
Iraq.” The same could be said of many other 20th century U.S.
occupations, including another of the Dominican
Republic (between 1916 and 1924), a handful of occupations of
Cuba between the Spanish American War and the Communist Revolution, and of
course the South Asian conflicts in both the
Philippines and (most famously and most frequently
compared to Iraq) Vietnam. Indeed, few histories seem as consistently
central to the American
Century as the occupying, conflicted, controversial, enduring presence of
U.S. military forces around the globe.
In many ways,
the 1909-1910
and 1912-1925
U.S. occupations of Nicaragua simply exemplify those enduring histories. Just
look at some of the quotes from those relevant years on the Stanford timeline
at that first link: “U.S. troops impose a puppet government”; the puppet ruler
“requests U.S. military assistance to control civil unrest,” but “Nicaraguans
resist U.S. occupation and the national hero, Benjamin Zeledón, dies”; as a
result of their presence in the nation “the U.S. acquires the right to build”
canals and naval bases there, “provoking anti-North American sentiment and
guerilla warfare in Nicaragua, and eliciting protests from other Central
American countries”; “when U.S. forces withdraw, rebellions ensue; the marines
return to quell the disturbances”; and so on and so forth. Four different
presidents, from both parties, led the U.S. during those decades, but in Nicaragua,
as in so many other places around the world before and since, the story
remained the same. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, as our French
friends (no strangers to 20th
century international occupations
themselves, of course) might put it.
Yet at the same
time, lumping all such international occupations together is a limited and
ultimately problematic thing to do: for lots of reasons, but mostly because it
reduces these specific situations and histories, and even more so these
individual nations and communities, to interchangeable parts of an ongoing
pattern. Take Benjamin
Zeledón, for example, the lawyer, politican, and military leader who was
killed by U.S. Marines in 1912, at the age of 33, while leading
the fight to depose the U.S.-backed (and perceived U.S. puppet) President
Adolfo Díaz. Zeledón seems to have a great deal in common with José
Martí, but with one crucial difference: Martí led Cuba’s fight against Spanish
occupation, aligning him with the U.S. (as did his prior years of exile in
America); while Zeledón’s battle was against U.S. occupiers and their
Nicaraguan allies. Perhaps that’s one reason why nearly all of the web pieces I
could find on Zeledón, including the two to which I’ve linked above, are
written in Spanish; remembering this man and his story, including it in our
U.S. histories, would force us to think about the effects of our Nicaraguan
occupations in a tangible and unsettling way. I’d say it’s long past time we
did so.
Next
InvasionStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other US-Latin America histories you’d highlight?
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