the end, though, it wasn’t annexation or war but the leverage provided by debt, along with the promise of more loans and investments to build railroads, that brought Mexico to heel. With no other options, Mexico’s leaders practically handed over the national economy to foreign investors. Led by some of the most storied names in U.S. corporate history—including J. P. Morgan, John Rockefeller and Standard Oil, Edward Harriman, the Astors, the Guggenheims, Joseph Headley Dulles (John Foster Dulles’s great-grandfather), William Randolph Hearst, Phelps Dodge, Union Pacific, and Cargill—U.S. capital
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