In 1846, the US sent a small force into Mexico with the aim of bringing about a war, and started the Mexican-American War. The US prevailed, expanding its territory far into Mexico, and killed ~25,000 mexicans in the process, as part of an ideological goal of white supremacy in north america called manifest destiny. The shift in the Mexico-U.S. border left many Mexican citizens separated from their national government. For the indigenous peoples who had never accepted Mexican rule, the change in border meant conflicts with a new outside power.
In 1896, the US fought the Spanish-American War largely over economic interests in the Caribbean, primarily Cuba. Historian Eric Foner writes: "Even before the Spanish flag was down in Cuba, U.S. business interests set out to make their influence felt. Merchants, real estate agents, stock speculators, reckless adventurers, and promoters of all kinds of get-rich schemes flocked to Cuba by the thousands. Seven syndicates battled each other for control of the franchises for the Havana Street Railway, which were finally won by Percival Farquhar, representing the Wall Street interests of New York. Thus, simultaneously with the military occupation began . . . commercial occupation."
From 1895-1917, the Banana Wars refers to the military intervention on behalf of US business interests in Central America and the Caribbean (8 countries in total) after the Spanish American War. In Honduras, for example, the United Fruit Company and Standard Fruit Company dominated the country's key banana export sector and associated land holdings and railways, and saw insertion of American troops in 1903, 1907, 1911, 1912, 1919, 1924 and 1925
In 1903 the US backed its puppet state Panama's secession from Columbia. The Panama Canal was under construction by then, and the Panama Canal Zone, under United States sovereignty, was then created. The zone was transferred to Panama in 2000.1
In 1912, the US military invaded Nicaragua after intermittent landings and naval bombardments in the previous decades. It was occupied by the U.S. almost continuously from 1912 through 1933. With the onset of the Great Depression and Augusto C. Sandino's Nicaraguan guerrilla troops fighting back against U.S. troops, it became too costly for the U.S. government and a withdrawal was ordered in 1933.
In 1914, the US military invaded Veracruz, Mexico, after US sailors were arrested by the Mexican government for entering off-limits areas, in the Tampico Affair. Over 200 were killed in the invasion.
From 1915–34, Haiti was occupied by the US, which led to the creation of a new Haitian constitution in 1917 that instituted changes that included an end to the prior ban on land ownership by non-Haitians. Including the First and Second Caco Wars.[ At least 15,000 Haitians were killed.
From 1916-24, the US occupied the Dominican Republic, with repeated actions in 1903, 1904, and 1914.
In 1928, the Columbian army killed ~800-3000 striking workers in Cienaga, Columbia, after the US threatened to invade with U.S. Marine Corps troops if the Colombian government did not act to protect the United Fruit Company's interests, in the Banana Massacre. The banana plantation workers were demanding written contracts, eight-hour work days, six-day work weeks and the elimination of food coupons. The troops set up their machine guns on the roofs of the low buildings at the corners of the main square, closed off the access streets, and after a five-minute warning opened fire into a dense Sunday crowd of workers and their wives and children who had gathered, after Sunday Mass, to wait for an anticipated address from the governor.
In Smedley Butler's (A former US general and medal of honor recipient) 1935 pamphlet, War is a Racket, he recounted his experience as being an agent of American Imperialism: “I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”1
In 1941, the US used its contacts in the Panama National Guard, which the U.S. had earlier trained, to have the government of Panama overthrown in a bloodless coup. The U.S. had requested that the government of Panama allow it to build over 130 new military installations inside and outside of the Panama Canal Zone, and the government of Panama refused this request at the price suggested by the U.S.
In 1953, A 2011 release of British intelligence files revealed that US and British MI5 forces overthrew the government of Cheddi Jagan, the elected leader of British Guyana. They showed how British spies kept up intense scrutiny on Cheddi Jagan and his wife Janet, who together founded the People's Progressive party (PPP) to campaign for workers' rights and independence from British rule for the sugar-producing colony in northern South America. Churchill and the US feared that the Jagans were communists, although MI5 found no foreign ties. Churchill dispatched a warship, HMS Superb, and brought hundreds of troops by air and sea to secure key sites. An outraged Cheddi Jagan appealed by telegram to Britain's opposition Labour party for help. Leader Clement Attlee replied curtly: "Regret impossible to intervene."
In 1954, the CIA overthrows the democratically elected Guatemalen Jacobo Árbenz in a military coup in operation PBSucess. Arbenz threatened to nationalize the Rockefeller-owned United Fruit Company, in which CIA Director Allen Dulles also owns stock. Arbenz is replaced with a series of US-backed right-wing dictators whose bloodthirsty policies will kill over 100,000 Guatemalans in the next 40 years, until 1996. The coup has been described as the definitive deathblow to democracy in Guatemala.1
In 1958, The United States supported the Batista dictatorship in Cuba. Batista aligned with the wealthiest landowners who owned the largest sugar plantations, and presided over a stagnating economy that widened the gap between rich and poor Cubans. Eventually most of the sugar industry was in U.S. hands, and foreigners owned 70% of the arable land. As such, Batista's increasingly corrupt and repressive government then began to systematically profit from the exploitation of Cuba's commercial interests, by negotiating lucrative relationships with both the American Mafia, who controlled the drug, gambling, and prostitution businesses in Havana, and with large U.S.-based multinational companies who were awarded lucrative contracts. To quell the growing discontent amongst the populace—which was subsequently displayed through frequent student riots and demonstrations—Batista established tighter censorship of the media, while also utilizing his Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities secret police to carry out wide-scale violence, torture and public executions; ultimately killing anywhere from hundreds to 20,000 people. After the Cuban revolution, the CIA launched a long campaign of terrorism against Cuba, training Cuban exiles in Florida, Central America and the Dominican Republic to commit assassinations and sabotage in Cuba. These include the cuban embargo, and over 638 failed assasination attempts on fidel castro. 1
In 1959, following the US occupation of Haiti, The U.S. military helps "Papa Doc" Duvalier become dictator of Haiti. He creates his own private police force, the Tonton Macoutes, who terrorize the population with machetes. They kill over 100,000 during the Duvalier family reign. The U.S. does not protest their dismal human rights record.
In 1961, the CIA sent 1,500 Cuban exiles to invade Castro’s Cuba in the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion. B26 bombers attacked cuban airfields, providing initial air support. The planners had imagined that the invasion would spark a popular uprising against Castro -– which never happened. Several hundred were killed in the action. Castro's government returned the captured invaders for medical supplies. 1
After the Failed bay of pigs invasion, the CIA began Operation Mongoose, a series of covert operations to disrupt and destabilize Cuba. The operation included economic warfare, including an embargo against Cuba, “to induce failure of the Communist regime to supply Cuba's economic needs,” a diplomatic initiative to isolate Cuba, and psychological operations “to turn the peoples' resentment increasingly against the regime.”[ The economic warfare prong of the operation also included the infiltration by the CIA of operatives to carry out many acts of sabotage against civilian targets, such as a railway bridge, a molasses storage facilities, an electric power plant, and the sugar harvest, notwithstanding Cuba’s repeated requests to the United States government to cease its terrorist operations.[[ In addition, the CIA orchestrated a number of assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, head of government of Cuba, including attempts that entailed CIA collaboration with the American mafia. 1
In 1961, the CIA assassinated Rafael Trujillo, a murderous dictator responsible for the deaths of more than 50,000 people, who Washington had supported since 1930. Trujillo’s business interests had grown so large (about 60 percent of the economy) that they had begun competing with American business interests. The US later provided troops on the side of the loyalists in the 1965 Dominican civil war, to ensure US interests. 1
In 1961, in Ecuador, the CIA-backed military forces the democratically elected President José María Velasco Ibarra to resign. Vice President Carlos Arosemana replaces him; the CIA fills the now vacant vice presidency with its own man. 1
From 1961 onward, The US School of Americas, a US Department of Defense institute in Fort Benning, Georgia, was assigned the specific goal of teaching "anti-communist counterinsurgency training," to CIA-supported right wing paramilitaries. It trained more than 19,000 students from 36 countries in the western hemisphere, including several Latin American dictators, and, during the 1980s, included torture in its curriculum.
In the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously agreed that a full-scale nuclear attack and invasion was the only solution, nearly plunging the world into nuclear war.
In 1964, A CIA-backed military coup in Brazil overthrows the democratically elected government of Joao Goulart. The junta that replaces it will, in the next two decades, become one of the most bloodthirsty in history. General Castelo Branco creates Latin America’s first death squads, or bands of secret police who hunt down communists and political opponents for torture, interrogation and murder. Later it is revealed that the CIA trained the death squads. Thousands were tortured, and hundreds were killed.
In 1965, The US intervened in the Dominican Civil War, providing air support and 1,700 marines. This later transformed into an Organization of American States occupation of the country. 1
In 1968, a CIA-organized military operation in Bolivia led by cuban exile and CIA agent Félix Rodríguez captures legendary guerilla Che Guevara, defeating the Ñancahuazú Guerrilla. The Bolivian president ordered his immediate execution to prevent worldwide calls for clemency, and the drama of a trial. Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie aka "The Butcher of Lyon", advised and possibly helped the CIA orchestrate Guevara's eventual capture.
In 1969, amid a collapsing economy, labor and student strikes in Uruguay, CIA operative Dan Mitrione initiates a campaign of torture and violence against the left-wing student group Tuparamos. Former Uruguayan police officials and CIA operatives stated Mitrione had taught torture techniques to Uruguayan police, including the use of electrical shocks delivered to his victims' mouths and genitals. It has been alleged that he used homeless people for training purposes, who were executed once they had served their purpose.
Starting in the 1970s, a CIA-backed coalition of right wing governments in Argentina, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil, began Operation Condor, a campaign of political repression and state terror involving intelligence operations and assassination of opponents, with the stated aim of "eliminating Marxist subversion." Victims included dissidents and leftists, union and peasant leaders, priests and nuns, students and teachers, intellectuals and suspected guerillas. An estimated 30,000 to 80,000 leftists or sympathizers were killed. 1
In 1971, A CIA operative told a reporter he delivered a strain of the African Swine Fever virus from an army base in the Canal Zone to anti-Castro Cubans. An outbreak of the disease then occurred in Cuba, resulting in the slaughter of 500,000 pigs to prevent a nationwide animal epidemic. It was labeled the "most alarming event" of 1971 by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization.1
In 1971 in Bolivia, after half a decade of CIA-inspired political turmoil, a CIA-backed military coup overthrows the leftist President Juan Jose Torres, eventually being kidnapped and murdered by CIA backed right wing death squads, as part of Operation Condor. In the next two years, dictator Hugo Banzer will have over 2,000 political opponents arrested without trial, then tortured, raped and executed. Banzer wwas trained at the U.S.-operated School of the Americas in Panama and later at Fort Hood, Texas. A few years later the Catholic Church denounced an army massacre of striking tin workers in 1975, Banzer, assisted by information provided by the CIA, was able to target and locate leftist priests and nuns. His anti-clergy strategy, known as the Banzer Plan, was adopted by nine other Latin American dictatorships in 1977.
On 11 September 1973, The CIA backed a military coup to remove democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende, in favor of right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet. His US-supported regime was characterized by the systematic suppression of political parties and the persecution of dissidents to an extent that was unprecedented in the history of Chile, backed by the neoliberal free-market economic policies of the Chicago Boys. Over-all, the regime left over 3,000 dead or "dissappeared", tortured thousands of prisoners, and forced 200,000 Chileans into exile. He's known for the Villa Grimaldi, a torture complex, and his Caravan of Death, a Chilean Army death squad guilty of countless atrocities, including dropping pregnant women and teenagers out of helicopters in the ocean, and executions where prisoners were shot by parts, over extended periods of time. Pinochet's forces are conservatively estimated to have killed over 11,000 people in his first year in power. 1, 2
In 1976, The CIA backed an overthrow of Argentinan leader Isabel Martínez de Perón by right wing anti-communist dictator Jorge Rafael Videla. In 1983, two years after the return of a representative democratic government, he was prosecuted in the Trial of the Juntas for large-scale human rights abuses and crimes against humanity that took place under his rule, including kidnappings or forced disappearance, widespread torture and extrajudicial murder of activists, and political opponents as well as their families at secret concentration camps, and harboring nazis. An estimated 13,000 -30,000 political dissidents vanished during this period. Videla was also convicted of the theft of many babies born during the captivity of their mothers at the illegal detention centres and passing them on for illegal adoption by associates of the regime. In his defence, Videla maintains the female guerrilla detainees allowed themselves to fall pregnant in the belief they wouldn't be tortured or executed. 1
In 1976, several CIA-linked anti-Castro Cuban exiles and members of the Venezuelan secret police DISIP were responsible for a terrorist bomb attack on Cuban flight 455, killing 73 people. CIA venezuelan operative Luis Posada Carriles, one of the bombers, fled and was granted amnesty in the US in 2007. 1
In 1979, the US-backed dictator Anastasios Samoza II falls, beginning the popular Nicaraguan Revolution. Remnants of his Guard will become the Contras, who fight a CIA-backed guerilla war against the left-wing Sandinista government throughout the 1980s, with Reagan authorizing covert support to anti-Sandinista forces. 1
In 1979, The CIA began to destabilize Grenada after Maurice Bishop became president, for his marxist, pro-cuba, anti-racism, and anti-apartheid stances. The previous leader, Eric Gairy, was a British/US puppet who furthered imperialist interests in the region, sacked the treasury, presided over 47% unenemployment, and a 200% cost of living increase. His right wing gang / secret police, the Mongoose gang, ruthlessly tortured Leftists, sending his police to Pinochet's Argentina to learn torture techniques, and even murdered Maurice's father. Under Bishop's leadership, Women were given equal pay and paid maternity leave, and sex discrimination was made illegal. Organisations for education (Center for Popular Education), health care, and youth affairs (National Youth Organization) were also established, as well as free education and health care. A literacy campaign lowered it to less than 5% in 3 years. The campaign against him resulted in his overthrow and the invasion by the U.S. of Grenada on October 25, 1983, with about 277 people dying.
In 1980, In El Salvador, The Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, pleads with President Carter to stop aiding the military government slaughtering his people. Carter refuses. Right-wing leader Roberto D’Aubuisson has Romero shot through the heart while saying Mass. The country soon dissolves into civil war, with the peasants in the hills fighting against the military government. The CIA and U.S. Armed Forces supply the government with overwhelming military and intelligence superiority, as well as over 3000 tons of US made bombs, training death squads to roam the countryside, committing atrocities like that of El Mozote in 1982, where 800 civilians were massacred. By 1992, some 63,000 Salvadorans were killed. Back then Salvador was controlled by a mafia of 13 families who owned 50% of the land and wealth. The 13 families were heavily linked with the United States. CIA provided weapons and military training to the Salvadorean Army, as well as $6B in aid, and US military training in Panama. As soon as the CIA discovered the priests were indoctrinating the masses, they began killing them.
In the 1980s the CIA supported Battalion 316, a torture/assassination squad in Honduras, which kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds of its citizens. Battalion 316 used shock and suffocation devices in interrogations , and prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves. Declassified documents and other sources show that the CIA and the U.S. Embassy knew of numerous crimes, including murder and torture, yet continued to support Battalion 316 and collaborate with its leaders. These constitute war crimes.1
From 1982-89, The U.S. government attempted to topple the government of Nicaragua by secretly arming, training and funding the Contras, a terrorist group based in Honduras that was created to sabotage Nicaragua and to destabilize the Nicaraguan government.As part of the training, the CIA distributed a detailed "terror manual" entitled "Psychological Operations in Guerrilla War," which instructed the Contras, among other things, on how to blow up public buildings, to assassinate judges, to create martyrs, and to blackmail ordinary citizens. In 1986, the Nicaraguan government under the Sandinistas shoots down a C-123 transport plane carrying military supplies to the Contras. The lone survivor, Eugene Hasenfus, turns out to be a CIA employee, as are the two dead pilots, contradicting Reagan's claims that the US was not aiding the contras. 1
In 1987, the former CIA Station Chief in Angola in 1976, John Stockwell, testified to Congress and told a grisly tale of US involvement on behalf of business interests in Latin America. He cited covert operations in Nicaragua, Panama, Guatemala, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. Over the course of his testimony, he estimated that given the bombings of water supplies and other essential infrastructure, the invasions, the coups, that the United States, on its quest for empire, has been responsible for 6,000,000 deaths. The CIA retaliated by suing him into bankruptcy. 1
In the 1980s and 1990s, the U.S. supplied military equipment and substantial aid for the Columbian government in their civil war to fight against FARC, known as Plan Columbia. The weapons, ostensibly delivered for use against narcotics traffickers, was being used by the Colombian military to commit abuses in the name of “counter-insurgency.” One estimate is that 67,000 deaths have occurred from the 1960s to recent years due to support by the U.S. of Colombian state terrorism. Another 1994 Amnesty International report, stated that more than 20,000 people were killed for political reasons in Colombia since 1986, mainly by the military and its paramilitary allies.
In 1989, The U.S. invades Panama to overthrow a dictator of its own making, General Manuel Noriega, with the stated goal of "Defending democracy and human rights in Panama". Noriega had been on the CIA’s payroll since 1966, collecting at least $100,000 per year from the U.S. Treasury. As he rose to be the de facto ruler of Panama, he became even more valuable to the CIA, reporting on meetings with Fidel Castro and Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua and supporting U.S. covert wars in Central America, and had been transporting drugs with the CIA’s knowledge since 1972. By the late 80s, Noriega’s growing independence and intransigence had angered Washington. Between 500-4,000 people died in the US invasion.
In 1990 in Haiti, Competing against 10 comparatively wealthy white candidates, leftist priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide captures 68 percent of the vote. A few months later, the CIA-backed military deposes him in a coup. More military dictators brutalize the country, as thousands of Haitian refugees escape the turmoil in barely seaworthy boats. The CIA "paid key members of the coup regime forces, identified as drug traffickers, for information from the mid-1980s at least until the coup." Coup leaders Cédras and François had received military training in the United States. As popular opinion calls for Aristide’s return, the CIA begins a disinformation campaign painting the courageous priest as mentally unstable.1
In 1996, investigative journalist Gary Webb exposed a CIA-run business of selling cocaine produced in Nicaragua, to help fund the anti-communist Contras in their fight against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. These drugs were mostly sold to black communities in California, and helped spark the Crack epidemic. Several of the US dealers such as such as Ross and Oscar Danilo Blandon, were found to have CIA and DEA ties. Webb's reports were suppressed in the news media. In 1997, Webb stated: "If we had met five years ago, you wouldn't have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry than me ... And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I'd enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn't been, as I'd assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job ... The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress." In 2004, Webb was found dead in his home, shot in the back of the head twice. His death was ruled a suicide.
In 2009, a coup in Honduras has led to severe repression and death squad murders of political opponents, union organizers and journalists. At the time of the coup, U.S. officials denied any role in the coup and used semantics to avoid cutting off U.S. military aid as required under U.S. law. But two Wikileaks cables revealed that the U.S. Embassy, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was the main power broker in managing the aftermath of the coup and forming a government that is now repressing and murdering its people, including popular leader Berta Cáceres. The two men who killed Berta Cáceres were trained in the US. A former soldier with the US-trained special forces units of the Honduran military asserted that Caceres' name was included on a hitlist distributed to them months before her assassination.[ According to a February 2017 investigation by The Guardian, court papers purport to show that three of the eight people arrested in connection with the assassination are linked to the US-trained elite troops. Two of them, Maj Mariano Díaz and Lt Douglas Giovanny Bustillo, received military training in the US.,2
Following a series of terrorist attacks against Cuba (such as the bombing of Cuban commercial flight 455, that originated from anti-Castro Cuban exile groups in the US, such as Alpha 66, the F4 Commandos, the Cuban American National Foundation, and Brothers to the Rescue), the Cuban government sent spies to infiltrate these insurgent groups operating in Miami. Afterwards, the Cuban government then provided 175 pages of documents to FBI agents investigating Posada Carriles's (a former CIA operative) role in the 1997 terrorist bombings in Havana, but the FBI failed to use the evidence to follow up on Posada. Instead, they used it to uncover and imprison the Cuban spies, known as the Cuban Five. [[. The Cuban Five said they were spying on Miami's Cuban exile community, not the US government. They were imprisoned from 1998, until their eventual release via a prisoner swap in 2014. The terrorist bomber Posada Carriles (who admitted to planning 6 bombings of Havana Hotels and Restaurants) lived in Miami and was safeguarded by the US government until his death in 2018. 2
In 2017, Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, leaving 3.4 million without electricity and fuel, and causing an estimated $50 Billion in damage. 55% of Puerto Ricans have no potable water, in one of the worst humanitarian crises in decades. In marked contrast to the initial relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina and the 2010 Haiti earthquake, on September 22 the only signs of relief efforts were beleaguered Puerto Rican government employees. The US response has been dismal, leading many to believe that the US prefers a decapitalized Puerto Rico. On September 29, San Juan Mayor Cruz held a press conference to plead for aid and to highlight failures by FEMA, saying, "This is what we got last night. Four pallets of water, three pallets of meals, and 12 pallets of infant food — which, I gave them to the people of Comerío, where people are drinking off a creek. So I am done being polite. I am done being politically correct. I am mad as hell." Cruz continued. "So I am asking the members of the press, to send a mayday call all over the world. We are dying here... And if it doesn't stop, and if we don't get the food and the water into people's hands, what we are going to see is something close to a genocide." In response President Donald Trump wrote on Twitter: "Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help." 1
On Nov 10, 2019, newly re-elected Bolivian President Evo Morales was forced to resign by the Bolivian military as part of a US-backed right-wing coup. Right-wing violence in the wake of Evo's re-election ( a landslide victory of > 10% the next runner ) included the kidnapping of Evo's brother and sister, cutting the hair of a leftist mayor, painting her red and parading her down the street, forcing her resignation, burning the town hall, the firebombing of several leftist government members' houses, and street clashes in Cochabamba, Potosi, and La paz resulting in deaths and injuries. The Radio Education Network of Bolivia (Erbol) has released 16 recordings, 2, which uncover talks between U.S. officials, Bolivian opponents, and former military, outlining the coup strategy. In a three-part plan outlined by U.S. officials, former President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada (2002-2003) is mentioned. Lozada had Carlos Mesa (the principal opponent of Morales in the last election) as his vice-president and currently lives in the U.S. U.S. senators Bob Menendez, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio are some of the American officials mentioned in the audios, linked to the Bolivian opposition planning a coup against President Evo Morales. A Wikileaks cable confirmed that the US was using Mesa to undermine Evo for years. The US government (through USAID) spent over $97M dollars to try to topple Morales and fund separatists in his first 7 years in office. World leaders have condemned the coup. The primary reason for the coup: a fight over Bolivia's lithium, a crucial mineral required for smartphone and electric car batteries. Bolivia is estimated to have over 70% of the world's lithium reserves, and was on the cusp of completing a deal with China and kicking out several French, US, and South Korea mining firms. Over the next few days, over 68k fake twitter accounts were created supporting the coup, many coming from airforce bases in Virginia. Debunking US propaganda on Bolivia.
In March 2020, the US placed a $15M dollar bounty on the head of the Venezuelan president, Maduro. This is the first time the US has publicly put a bounty on a ruling head of state, accusing Maduro and his government of drug trafficking, and harboring terrorists. The US Drug Enforcement agency itself states that less than 7% of drug movement through south america transits from Venezuela: 93% of cocaine comes from Columbia, a staunch US ally, 4% from Peru, and 3% from Unknown. 2 The US has historically been closely allied with South American drug traffickers, like Honduras's US-Backed president Juan Orlando Hernandez, Panamanian President Manuel Noriega, The Contras, and many more. The US-appointed "president of Venezuela", Juan Guaido, is closely connected to the Columbian cartel Los Rastrojos, a vicious cartel responsible for dozens of kidnappings and murders in Tachira VZ.
The current territory of the United States is located primarily in North America, although some of its currently claimed territory, such as Hawaii, is located in Oceania. The activity of the United States in North America is characterized by its violent settler-colonial expansion across the continent in which acts of genocide against the indigenous North American people were committed to secure ever-increasing amounts of territory and natural resources for the Euro-American settlers, as well as the continued occupation and degradation of their land by the U.S. settler-state. Another key characteristic of the U.S. influence in North America is the legacy of U.S. involvement in and perpetuation of the Atlantic slave trade, a lengthy period in which enslaved African peoples were brought to the Americas to be used and exchanged as property by Euro-American settlers in order to work on the lands which were being methodically wrested from the indigenous population. The United States is also responsible for many atrocities outside of its present-day borders, largely in the Central American and Caribbean regions, which, along with many South American countries, have seen numerous campaigns of political destabilization, acts of terror, and economic and political coercion perpetrated against them by the United States regime.
The territory of what today is the United States was occupied by European colonizers since 1492, and through brutal violence realized the slavery and extermination of indigenous peoples. Together with disease spread by Europeans, up to 95% of the indigenous populations of the Americas were exterminated.[1] This systematic brutal violence against indigenous peoples would later express itself ideologically in the United States through "manifest destiny", which was the belief that the United States was meant to expand its territory through conquest.
A map of the process of Indian Removal, 1830–1838. Oklahoma is depicted in light yellow-green.On March 28, 1830, US Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, beginning the forced relocation of thousands of Native Americans in what became known as the Trail of Tears. The forced relocation placed more than 25 million acres of fertile, lucrative farmland into the hands of the mostly white Euro-American settlers in Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas. More than 46,000 Native Americans were forced by the US military and other settler groups to abandon their homes and relocate to "Indian Territory" which eventually became the state of Oklahoma. More than 4,000 died on the journey from various causes, including disease, starvation, and exposure to extreme weather.[2]
In the case of the Cherokee, removal was implemented by 7,000 troops commanded by General Winfield Scott. Scott's men moved through Cherokee territory, forcing many people from their homes at gunpoint. As many as 16,000 Cherokee were thus gathered into camps while their homes were plundered and burned by Euro-American settlers. Subsequently those refugees were sent west in 13 overland detachments of about 1,000 per group, the majority on foot, enduring inadequate food supplies, shelter, and clothing, suffering especially bad conditions after frigid weather arrived. Escorting troops refused to slow or stop so that the ill and exhausted could recover. Additionally, the refugees had to pay farmers for passing through lands, ferrying across rivers, and even for burying their dead.[3]
From 1500-1900s, European and later US colonists and authorities displaced and committed genocide on the Native American Population. Ward Churchill characterizes the reduction of the North American Indian population from an estimated 12 million in 1500 to barely 237,000 in 1900 as a "vast genocide.. the most sustained on record. Some of the atrocities will be listed above. 1, 2
The Indian Wars is a name given to the collection of over 40 conflicts and wars between Native Americans and US settlers. The US census bureau reports that they have cost the lives of about 19,000 white men, women and children, including those killed in individual combats, and the lives of about 30,000 Indians. The actual number of killed and wounded Indians must be very much higher than the number given... Fifty percent additional would be a safe estimate..1
The Texan-Indian Wars were a series of 19th-century conflicts between settlers in Texas and the Southern Plains Indians. Its hard to approximate the number of deaths from the conflicts, but the Indian population in Texas decreased from 20,000 to 8,000 by 1875. 1
In the 1800s, Indian removal was a policy of the United States government whereby Native Americans were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands in the eastern United States to lands west of the Mississippi River, thereafter known as Indian Territory. That policy has been characterized by some scholars as part of a long-term genocide of Native Americans. 1
From 1785-96, the Northwest Indian War was a war between the US and a confederation of numerous Native American tribes, with support from the British, for control of the Northwest Territory. President George Washington directed the United States Army to enforce U.S. sovereignty over the territory. Over 1,000 Native Americans were killed in the bloody conflict
The Red Sticks, a faction of Muscogee Creek people in the American Southeast, led a resistance movement against European-American encroachment and assimilation; tensions culminated in the outbreak of the Creek War in 1813.
In 1813, the Creek War, was a war between the US, lead by the then notorious indian-hunter Andrew Jackson, and the Creek nation, residing primarily in Alabama. Over 1,500 creeks were killed. The war effectively ended with the Treaty of Fort Jackson, where General Andrew Jackson insisted that the Creek confederacy cede more than 21 million acres of land from southern Georgia and central Alabama. These lands were taken from allied Creek as well as Red Sticks. In 1814, Andrew Jackson became famous for his role in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, where his side killed more than 800 Creeks. Under Jackson, and the man he chose to succeed him, Martin Van Buren, 70,000 Indians east of the Mississippi were forced westward.
In 1832, the Chickasaw Indians were forced by the US to sell their country in 1832 and move to Indian Territory (Oklahoma) during the era of Indian Removal in the 1830s.
In 1832, the Black Hawk War, was a brief 1832 conflict between the United States and Native Americans led by Black Hawk, a Sauk leader, in Illinois. The war gave impetus to the US policy of Indian removal, in which Native American tribes were pressured to sell their lands and move west of the Mississippi River and stay there. Over 500 Native Americans were killed in the conflict.1
The Second Seminole War, also known as the Florida War, was a conflict from 1835 to 1842 in Florida between various groups of Native Americans collectively known as Seminoles and the United States, part of a series of conflicts called the Seminole Wars. The Second Seminole War, often referred to as the Seminole War, is regarded as "the longest and most costly of the Indian conflicts of the United States." ~3000 seminoles were killed, and 4000 were deported to Indian territory elsewhere. 1
In 1848, the California Genocide is a term used to describe the drastic decrease in Native American population in California. The population decreased from ~300,000 in 1769, to 16,000 in 1900. 1 ==== California Genocide ====
In 1848, what is now California came under the rule of the United States, which was soon followed by the California genocide, in which the California settler-state and federal authorities incited, aided, and financed violence against the Native Californians. Between 1846 and 1873, it is estimated that non-Natives killed between 9,492 and 16,094 California Natives. Hundreds to thousands were additionally starved or worked to death.[4] The California Act for the Government and Protection of Indians was enacted in 1850 (amended 1860, repealed 1863). This law provided for "apprenticing" or indenturing Indian children to Whites, and also punished "vagrant" Indians by "hiring" them out to the highest bidder at a public auction if the Indian could not provide sufficient bond or bail, effectively legalizing a form of slavery targeting Native Californians.[5] In An American genocide: the United States and the California Indian catastrophe, 1846-1873, author Benjamin Madley writes that the "organized destruction of California's Indian peoples under US rule was not a closely guarded secret" and that "California newspapers frequently addressed, and often encouraged, what we would now call genocide, as did some state and federal employees." Madley also quotes US Indian Affairs commissioner John Collier as saying, "The world's annals contain few comparable instances of swift depopulation--practically, of racial massacre--at the hands of a conquering race."[4]
In 1851, Peter Hardenman Burnett, California state’s first governor, spoke of the "Indian foe" in his second state of the state address, describing how there had been many calls "to resist and punish the attacks of the Indians upon our frontier". Acknowledging that it was expected that the Indians would defend their own land, he added that "Our American experience has demonstrated the fact, that the two races cannot live in the same vicinity in peace." He continued, saying " The white man, to whom time is money, and who labors hard all day to create the comforts of life, cannot sit up all night to watch his property; and after being robbed a few times, he becomes desperate, and resolves upon a war of extermination. This is the common feeling of our people who have lived upon the Indian frontier. [...] That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected. While we cannot anticipate this result but with painful regret, the inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power or wisdom of man to avert."[6]
Governor Burnett set aside state money to arm local militias against Native Americans. The state, with the help of the U.S. Army, started assembling a massive arsenal. These weapons were then given to local militias, who were tasked with killing native people. State militias raided tribal outposts, shooting and sometimes scalping Native Americans. Soon, local settlers began to do the killing themselves. Local governments put bounties on Native American heads and paid settlers for stealing the horses of the people they murdered. Large massacres wiped out entire tribal populations. In 1850, for example, around 400 Pomo people, including women and children, were slaughtered by the U.S. Cavalry and local volunteers at Clear Lake north of San Francisco.[7]
Starting in 1830-50, The Trail of Tears was a series of forced removals of Native American nations, including Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole, Cherokee people and the African freedmen and slaves who lived among them, from their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States to an area west of the Mississippi River that had been designated as Native Territory. The forced relocations were carried out by various government authorities following the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830. "Marshaled by guards, hustled by agents, harried by contractors,they were being herded on the way to an unknown and unwelcome destination like a flock of sick sheep." They went on ox wagons, on horses, on foot, then to be ferried across the MississippiRiver. The army was supposed to organize their trek, but it turned over its job to private contractors who charged the government as much as possible, gave the Indians as little as possible. The Cherokee removal in 1838 (the last forced removal east of the Mississippi) was brought on by the discovery of gold near Dahlonega, Georgia in 1828, resulting in the Georgia Gold Rush. Approximately 2,000-6,000 of the 16,543 relocated Cherokee perished along the way.
Starting in the 1870s, The US army, aided by settlers and private hunters, began a widespread policy of slaughtering bufallo and bison, in order to destroy many tribe's primary food source, and to starve Native Americans into submission. By 1900, they succeeded; the bufallo population dropped from more than 30 million, to a few hundred. The country’s highest generals, politicians, and presidents including Ulysses S. Grant, saw the destruction of buffalo as solution to the country’s “Indian Problem.” By destroying the food supply of the plains natives, they could more easily move them onto reservations.1
In 1887, the Dawes Act, and Curtis Act, resulted in the loss of 90 million acres of native-alloted land, and the abolition of many native governments. During the ensuing decades, the Five Civilized Tribes lost 90 million acres of former communal lands, which were sold to non-Natives. In addition, many individuals, unfamiliar with land ownership, became the target of speculators and criminals, were stuck with allotments that were too small for profitable farming, and lost their household lands. Tribe members also suffered from the breakdown of the social structure of the tribes. 1
In 1890, US soldiers killed 150-300 people (including 65 women and 24 children) at Wounded Knee (19-26 people, including two women and eleven children.) on the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the U.S. state of South Dakota. Twenty-five soldiers also died, and 39 were wounded (6 of the wounded later died).[ At least twenty soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor. The event was driven by local racism towards the practice of Ghost Dancing, which whites found distasteful, and the Native Americans arming up in response to repeated broken treaties, stolen land, and their bison-herds being hunted to near extinction by the whites.1
Mound of American bison skulls circa 1892.
Calculated actions on the part of the United States were taken to to destroy the North American buffalo population in order to subjugate Native people. A combination of commercial and recreational hunting, plus the actions of the US Army targeted the buffalo population and brought it to near extinction in the process of U.S. expansion across North America and the ongoing campaign to remove the indigenous peoples ways of life and means of survival. Without buffalo, important values, beliefs, practices, as well as the diets of Northern Great Plains Nations suffered incredible loss. Before European arrival in North America it is estimated that thirty to sixty million buffalo thrived on the Plains. However, by 1900, populations numbered only in the hundreds.[8]
Massive settler hunting parties began to arrive in the West by train, with thousands of men packing .50 caliber rifles, and leaving a trail of buffalo carnage in their wake. The railroads began to advertise excursions for “hunting by rail,” where trains encountered massive herds alongside or crossing the tracks. Hundreds of men aboard the trains climbed to the roofs and took aim, or fired from their windows.[9] Settlers would take aim at the bison from their windows and shoot down several at a time. The hunting train would then slow to a stop for people to skin the animals for coats, or cut out their tongues for culinary delicacies in the cities, then leave the bison to rot.[10]
General Phil Sheridan, one of the foremost "Indian fighters" in the U.S. Army, framed the slaughter of the buffalo as a way to disrupt Native economies, erode their independence, and end their ways of life by forcing Native people into agriculture through the total extermination of the buffalo, saying: "I would not seriously regret the total disappearance of the buffalo from our western prairies, in its effect upon the Indians, regarding it rather as a means of hastening their dependence upon products of the soil". In The Encyclopedia of Native American Economic History, the entry on the economic impact of the mass buffalo slaughter describes how through the deliberate destruction of the buffalo population, the Plains Indians populations were reduced to paupers as was intended by the policies of the U.S. settler state: "By the early 1880s, the U.S. Army's version of total war against the Plains Indians had reached its goal: the buffalo were nearly extinct. Ten years earlier, some of the Plains Indians still had an ample supply of food; by the early 1880s, they were reduced [...] to the condition of paupers, without food, shelter, clothing, or any of those necessities of life that came from the buffalo."[11]
“Nonetheless, the consequences for the Indians, Mexican and Peruvian as well as others, were disastrous. Within little more than a century, the Indian population had declined by 90 percent and even 95 percent in Mexico, Peru, and some other regions (Borah 1962). In Mexico, for instance, from a preconquest population of 25 million (or 11 million, according to an earlier estimate by Cook and Simpson 1948), it had declined to a million and a half or less.”
