Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent

by Eduardo Galeano

In the middle of the nineteenth century the filibusterer William Walker, operating on behalf of bankers Morgan and Garrison, invaded Central America at the head of a band of assassins. With the obliging support of the U.S. government, Walker robbed, killed, burned, and in successive expeditions proclaimed himself president of Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras. He restored slavery in the areas that suffered his devastating occupation, thus continuing his country’s philanthropic work in the states that had just been seized from Mexico. He was welcomed back to the United States as a national hero. From then on invasions, interventions, bombardments, forced loans, and gun-point treaties followed one after the other. In 1912 President William H. Taft declared: “The day is not far distant when three Stars and Stripes at three equidistant points will mark our territory: one at the North Pole, another at the Panama Canal, and the third at the South Pole. The whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it already is ours morally.”35 Taft said that the correct path of justice in U.S. foreign policy “may well be made to include active intervention to secure for our merchandise and our capitalists opportunity for profitable investment.”36 In the same period ex-President Theodore Roosevelt loudly recalled his successful amputation of land from Colombia: “I took the Canal Zone and let Congress debate,” said the proud Nobel Peace Prize winner as he ...

US action is blantantly imperialistic and US presidents are saying the quiet out loud