Even in 1820, when America was a fledgling nation still insignificant in the eyes of world-class powers such as Britain and France, it still dreamed of an overseas empire rivaling that of Great Britain’s. America’s imperialist tendencies already were manifested in the subjugation of various Native American tribes and a key piece of legislation that would help determine US foreign policy for years to come and have repercussions to this day. That piece of legislation was called the Monroe Doctrine, which established the United States as the sole police power for the Western Hemisphere and called for an end to European interference in American affairs. At the time, the United States was too weak to enforce the Monroe Doctrine. However, this document would set an important precedent for future US int

Another very similar atrocity committed under the Nixon Administration by the hands of (again) the CIA and Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, who is now considered a war criminal in several countries. In 1970, a coalition of communists, socialists, and left-wingers elected socialist Salvador Allende Gossens as president of Chile. Alarmed that Allende, like Arbenz 15 years earlier, was nationalizing industries, Kissinger and the CIA tried to bribe the Chilean Congress and promote a military coup against Allende. When that failed, Kissinger resorted to economic warfare between the US and the Allende government. With the economy now in shambles, a 1973 coalition of conservatives with CIA backing led by General Augusto Pinochet seized power and killed Allende. Like in 1954, Pinochet revoked the reforms of the now-deceased president and installed himself as an absolute military dictator; for the next 17 years, Pinochet ruled Chile as a despot and ordered the “disappearances” of more than three thousand people. Once again, thanks to paranoid foreign policy and the CIA, another perfectly legitimate democracy had been replaced by a brutal dictatorship in the name of anti-communism.

Having firmly established itself as a world power in the Spanish War, the United States adopted a new and more hawkish foreign policy under Theodore Roosevelt. Accusing Latin American governments of “chronic wrongdoing” and “impotence”, Roosevelt issued a corollary to the Monroe Doctine (now called the Roosevelt Corollary) declaring that the United States had sole policing powers in Latin America. Being vastly inferior in both a military and economical sense to the United States, most Latin American countries had no choice but to comply with the Monroe Doctrine; the Dominican Republic became an official protectorate of the United States in 1903 when it defaulted on its loan payments, while Roosevelt sent in troops time and time again to quell violence and assert US authority in places such as Nicaragua, Cuba, and Panama.

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