by Marie Arana
Turmoil and civil unrest continued to addle the country until 1876, when Porfirio Díaz seized the helm and clamped down on Mexico for thirty-five consecutive years. Finally, under that strict mano dura, material progress began to be made. But for all his efforts to turn the tide and open the economy to a flood of foreign investment, Díaz was all too reliant on ruthless, crude force to address his every challenge. Corruption, repression, rapacious profiteering became Díaz’s trademark, even resorting to the old Spanish practice of shaking down the masses when funds were short. Small farmers, struggling tradespeople, the poor—all paid a steep price in the process. Lands owned by the indigenous were considered uninhabited, open territory, and Díaz’s government moved quickly to dispossess tens of thousands of Indians, handing over a land area the size of California to foreign speculators and investors. In this, Díaz was merely emulating his neighbors: the practice of selling off one’s land and one’s industries—the very infrastructure of a country—was endemic by now throughout Latin America. Whereas Spain had protected its interests relentlessly, siphoning off America’s riches for its own prodigal purposes, dictators such as Díaz were all too willing to auction their countries to the highest bidder, and North American and European capitalists rushed in to buy. In the process, Díaz had all the chieftains of the Yaquis and the Mayans chained together and dumped in the Pacific Ocean. Half of the tribes’ male populations were murdered or deported to the Yucatán. The priorities were made clear.
Eventually the Mexican people had enough of this. In 1910 they erupted in another defiant revolution, and this time it proved far more destructive than the one that had devoured the country a hundred years before. Tens of thousands of campesinos rushed to take action against their landlords, prosecuting a fierce race war that would ultimately topple Díaz’s rule, install Francisco Madero as president, and then—just as precipitously—prompt a ruthless military coup backed by none other than the ambassador of the United States. One prominent Mexican historian reckons that no fewer than seven hundred thousand of his countrymen died in the violence. A quarter million more fled for their lives to the United States. Industrial production screeched to a halt as ranches, haciendas, and cities were demolished until Mexico resembled nothing so much as a ghostly postapocalyptic desert. As if this weren’t enough blood to offer up to the gods of war, the enduring divide between powerful and powerless soon resulted in another wave of butchery: the pro-Catholic Cristero rebellion of the 1920s, which pitted Christian peasants against secular, anticlerical government forces, spread like a brushfire through the Mexican countryside and devoured seventy thousand more souls.
THE CONTEST FOR NICARAGUA
1847–1934
The war will come, my darling,
And . . . the barbarian hordes
trying to rob all we are and love.
—Gioconda Belli, “Canto de guerra”
Nicaragua, struggling to shed Mexico’s influence, remove itself from its neighbors’ vicissitudes, and gain its own foothold as an independent country, didn’t survive much more than two decades before it was invaded by British forces in 1847. Clearly, it was seen as territory to be had, irrespective of whoever happened to inhabit it. Within three years, in a staggeringly brazen move, Britain and the United States signed a treaty granting unfettered access to an interoceanic trade route through Nicaragua. It was a unilateral decision enacted with an easy handshake between London and Washington and sealed without Nicaraguan consent.
The sting was lethal and immediate. A nascent nation, bullied by predators, had been stunned once more into slavish surrender. And, indeed, come 1856, it seemed as if that capitulation would be complete: a North American adventurer named William Walker tramped into Managua, handily duped the local politicians, assumed the presidency, and eventually sought annexation by the United States. His first order of business was to reinstate slavery. The logic was simple: Nicaragua’s assets, especially as a workforce, were crucial to US ambitions. Nicaragua had productive gold mines as well as highly lucrative coffee plantations. There was money to be made; a highly industrialized, booming American economy to support. As blatant as the American intervention was, protests against it didn’t do much good. For the next fifty years, US warships menaced the shores, and eventually, in 1910, a fully functioning puppet government answering to Washington was established.
Things went well for American interests in Nicaragua until ordinary Nicaraguans laboring in the mines and fields decided things weren’t going very well for them. Until then, Nicaraguan violence had been low-grade, intermittent—random eruptions in an otherwise easily subjugated country. But by 1927, resentments exploded into a full-fledged guerrilla war. The next two decades were not unlike the bloodyminded conquest that had gripped that territory and decimated the population four hundred years before. Augusto Sandino, commander of the Army to Defend the National Sovereignty, launched a war, hoping to eject US forces and businessmen for good. But the US Marines, like the conquistadors who had preceded them, proved formidably stubborn. Not until 1934, seven years and five hundred spirited guerrilla skirmishes later, did the United States finally withdraw, leaving Sandino in power and its command to Nicaraguan military officer Anastasio Somoza García.
It was clearly understood, however, via a clear directive by the American ambassador, that Somoza was to have Sandino killed. Although to the rest of the world Sandino seemed to have achieved the picture-perfect revolution—a non-Soviet, non-Marxist uprising by a young, moderate population pitting itself against the embodiment of corrupt, dictatorial rule—the United States left no doubt that it would not tolerate Sandino’s brand of nationalism. President Theodore Roosevelt’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine had put it plainly: the United States had every right to interfere in cases of flagrant and “chronic wrongdoing” in any Latin American country. And Sandino, as far as American interests were concerned, was a flagrant wrongdoer.
An unrepentant enemy and critic of the United States until the very end, Sandino was executed as he was exiting a gate of the presidential palace in Managua on February 21, 1934, alongside his brother and his top generals. Events raveled quickly after that: the country reverted to puppet status, a fiercely coercive regime was put in place, and Washington’s choice, General Somoza, reigned unchallenged, ruthlessly imposing his sword as freely as any Spanish potentate had done before him. By the end of his reign, as many as fifty thousand Nicaraguans had been murdered and three hundred thousand more were either disappeared or rendered homeless by the government. Protected and funded by the United States, General Somoza—and eventually his sons—would rule Nicaragua with a hard hand for more than forty-three years.
THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
1900–1960
The fukú ain’t just ancient history. . . . If you even thought a bad thing about Trujillo, fuá, a hurricane would sweep your family out to sea, fuá, a boulder would fall out of a clear sky and squash you, fuá, the shrimp you ate today was the cramp that killed you tomorrow.
—Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
The harsh mill of souls was repeated again and again as Latin America stumbled from newly minted independence into the twentieth century. On the island of Hispaniola, the first permanent settlement Columbus established when he conquered, enslaved, and virtually exterminated the Taíno, violent rule had been the norm for more than four centuries. Buffeted by the aspirations of Spain, France, England, Holland, and the United States, the island had long been seen as a strategic target, a valuable port of trade. There was no stopping the savage disruptions on its shores: the constant flow of Spanish warlords; the fugitive slaves who raced down-mountain from time to time to kill and bedevil them; the invasion by nine thousand English soldiers ordered by Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell and led by Admiral William Penn; the brazen French buccaneers who constantly marauded the coast and preyed on sea traffic; the rich, powerful Dutch and Portuguese slave traders whose barbarism was all too well known in the ports; the rabid ne
ver-ending wars with Haiti. For twenty-two years, between 1822 and 1844, the part of the island now known as the Dominican Republic was occupied by Haiti in a brutal reign of counterrepression: Spanish was outlawed as a language, whites were forbidden to own land, all Church property was confiscated, and all relations with the Vatican were severed. Most landowners fled to other parts of the world.
The Dominicans entered the 1900s battered by a brutal and capricious history. They had seen thirty-eight governments flit past in the course of fifty years—an average of fifteen months for every rule. The new century brought little relief to that instability. Twelve administrations came and went from the presidential palace in sixteen years. The United States, seeing the potential havoc to its interests, moved quickly to occupy the capital and restore order. A series of American generals and puppets proceeded to rule the island for the next eight years. But although the United States officially packed up and exited Santo Domingo in 1924, the US Marines remained in neighboring Haiti for another decade. American influence would never quite leave the island.
In 1920 or so, Rafael Trujillo, a small-time Dominican criminal who joined the military and graduated to small-time police work, caught the eye of the US Marines who were occupying the island at the time. They offered him the opportunity to train for the municipal police force. Within five years, he was its commander in chief. The occupying Americans saw him as stabilizing figure in a potentially precarious era, and their support was unequivocal. Certainly he was on their side, a manipulatable pawn.
In 1930, running for the presidency, Trujillo threatened to torture and murder anyone who dared support the opposing candidate, and so, quite logically, he won the presidential palace in a landslide. In a dictatorship marked by decadence and corruption, he proceeded to arrogate all profits to himself and militate against any and all who opposed him. One after another, he eliminated enemies through outright force or intimidation. To keep them under his thumb, he placed the country under martial law, established a secret police, censored the press, killed dissidents. He also renamed the capital after himself—the ancient, historic Santo Domingo became Ciudad Trujillo—in the event anyone had doubts about who was in command.
In 1937, in a stunning show of racial absolutism, Trujillo ordered the massacre of more than twenty thousand Haitian immigrants who had crossed the island border to find work on the Dominican side. Although he had risen to power via American muscle—installed by US Marines and maintained for thirty-one years—he met his undoing via American pragmatism: the CIA, finally, out of pressure from Washington, began maneuvering to oust him from an increasingly embarrassing office. In 1961, after a failed attempt to assassinate his sworn enemy the president of Venezuela, Trujillo was gunned down by a gang of assassins, some of them identified as soldiers from his own army. In his wake, he left behind an untold number of human rights atrocities. He bequeathed the country one thing more: an abiding culture of fear.
COLOMBIA
1900–1948
It’s the sound of things falling from on high, a fitful yet perpetual sound, a sound that never ends.
—Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling
In those formative, postrevolutionary years, Colombia, favored since the conquistadors’ days for its rich veins of gold, its emeralds, its fertile fields, provided yet another version of the volatile Latin American story. From the day Venezuelan liberator Bolívar declared its independence from Spain, the new republic went on to suffer rabid internecine wars between Bolívar’s generals, one sputtering rebellion after another, a string of unstable governments. Even as the country entered the twentieth century, it erupted in the War of a Thousand Days, a bitter battle between liberals and conservatives over the price of coffee. The liberals represented the coffee growers, the laborers, and a laissez-faire economy; the conservatives, who had just snatched the presidency in a highly suspect election, were landed aristocrats out to get as much as they could from the booming coffee business. As many as 130,000 Colombians died in the carnage, farmlands were burned, banks fell to ruin. In the ensuing chaos, Panama, which had been part of Colombia since the wars of independence, now seceded boldly with the aid of the US government. For years, the United States, which had taken over the construction of the Panama Canal, had craved full control of the isthmus. In 1903, as US government reports describe it, President Theodore Roosevelt took full advantage of Colombia’s disarray to achieve what he had long wanted. Having prodded Colombian revolutionaries to war in the first place, Roosevelt’s administration now moved through the rubble to establish exclusive control, in perpetuity, over the Canal Zone.
Violence in Colombia became so commonplace during those years that ancient regional and tribal conflicts sprang from the mists of time to be fought anew by the descendants of rivals. Centuries of cultural, ethnic, and racial differences became fodder for new belligerence, and, in the process, bandits and drifters took to the streets to take rank advantage of the chaos. They stole, raped, ransacked the countryside, and plotted vendettas against ancient foes. A culture of bloodletting rushed from the past to plague the present. The scorpion, as in Aesop’s tale, stuck to his nature and stung. So endemic was the murderousness that few were surprised when liberals celebrated their victory at the polls in 1930 with a series of massacres and assassinations and a spree of looting and burning, especially of churches, and especially in the state of Santander, where the fighting had been most fierce.
A mere generation later, in 1932, Colombia became embroiled in another war—this time in a border spat with Peru—over territory in the Amazon rain forest. The Peruvian president, sensing the Colombians were distracted by internal problems and lacked a strong military defense, decided to take back a sliver of land Peruvians had always considered theirs. A bitter struggle followed, and the respective military forces—tattered at best—went at each other viciously in the wilds of the Putumayo jungle. Not until the Peruvian president was shot dead by an assassin’s bullet was a nervous truce reached. That awkward peace reigned in Colombia for a blessed few years, even as the conservative-liberal divide continued to vex the country. Now, nearing the mid-twentieth century, the nation’s conservatives were chafing under twelve years of uninterrupted liberal rule. When a conservative president was finally elected in 1948, liberal fury broke loose and found its voice in a full-throated, eloquent orator. His name was Jorge Gaitán. Soon what little order there was began to ravel in perilous ways, and Colombia descended headlong into a violence hitherto unknown in postindependence America.
Gaitán was the highly charismatic leader of the Colombian Liberal Party, a former education minister who had staked his career on decrying violence and empowering the lower classes. He was staunchly anti-Communist, reserving his most bitter criticism for the primitive, homicidal tactics so prevalent among revolutionaries during those Cold War years. His speeches, vibrantly delivered and laced with vivid images of a world made of better angels, were captivating, inspiring. But when he was assassinated in cold blood on April 9, 1948, under mysterious circumstances, Gaitán’s death changed the course of Colombian history and galvanized the Left in much of Latin America. News of his assassination was greeted by a spontaneous burst of outright barbarity.
It wasn’t clear who had pounded three bullets into the head and neck of the beloved orator. Someone made the accusation and pointed at a young man—a hapless drifter—who happened to be present on the scene. The unfortunate youth was seized by the mob, lynched, pummeled to death, stripped naked, and dragged through the streets, marking the way with his blood. The Nobel Prize–winning novelist Gabriel García Márquez, who was witness to the deed, claimed that three well-dressed men had been involved: one who pointed at the sorry vagrant and blamed him for the crime, and two others who slipped away quietly in a shiny, new car.
But the killing didn’t stop with the lynching. No more than ten minutes after the words “They’ve murdered Gaitán!” rang out in the streets, Bogotá was overrun with rioters. Within ho
urs, they were surging through the capital, leaving hundreds of dead in their wake. El Bogotazo, as the uprising was subsequently named, would eventually crash through the rest of the country in waves of raw fury that pitted liberal and conservative armies against each other, lasted ten years, and left the fertile fields of Colombia strewn with more than three hundred thousand corpses. One man’s death—blamed variously on the CIA, the Colombian Communist Party, the Soviet Union, Fidel Castro, random student revolutionaries, and the newly elected right-wing president, Mariano Ospina—had razed the capital’s heart, sparked a homicidal civil war, forcibly displaced three million souls, and brought the country to financial ruin. At no time in memory, aside from the bullet that took the life of Austrian archduke Francis Ferdinand and sparked the First World War, had a slug of steel cost so much human life and suffering.
As fate would have it, none other than the young Fidel Castro was casting about Bogotá in 1948 when Gaitán was killed. Castro had gone to Colombia to protest, among other things, General Trujillo’s reign of terror in the Dominican Republic, the Pan American Conference (precursor to the Organization of American States), and the United States’ designs on the Panama Canal. At every opportunity during that trip—in student meetings, revolutionary cells, visits to politicians—Castro excoriated his declared enemies, the hidebound dictators that had proliferated throughout South America for the past one hundred years. According to him, Fascism, capitalism, imperialism, all aided and abetted by the colossus to the north, were cancers to be rooted out. Dictators were the ruin of Latin America, he insisted, and many of the most noxious had gathered right there in Bogotá for the Pan American Conference. “Trujillo was there!” he reflected later. “All of them were there.” He had traveled to Colombia to rail against them, but he was also there to recruit Colombians to his revolutionary cause.
