The seizure of faraway lands by America...is a perversion of our national mission.” - President Grover Cleveland, in 1893.
It didn’t start with the U.S.’s Neocon-inspired invasion of Iraq in March, 2003. Whether knowingly or not, the morally bankrupt Bush-Cheney Gang was following an imperial script which is over 110 years old. During that period, the U.S. has “overthrown fourteen governments that displeased it for various ideological, political and economic reasons,” writes Stephen Kinzer, in his riveting book, “Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq.” Why did America betray its values and become itself a brutal colonizer? Well, after you blow away all the baloney about “national security and liberation,” Kinzer reveals: “The U.S. acted mainly for ‘economic’ reasons--specifically, to establish, promote and defend the right of ‘Americans’ to do business around the world without interference.” By “Americans,” Kinzer mostly means the giant multinational corporations.
Each of the respective countries on which the U.S. forced a regime change followed a basic kind of pattern, an M.O., if you please. Unfortunately, for our closest neighbors in Central and South America, they felt, more than any other nations, the consistent brunt of our greedy, violent, murderous and racist reach. Destabilization and intervention were two of our tactics, which often times resulted in horrific consequences for the targeted country and their inhabitants. Kinzer puts it this way: “Almost every American overthrow...left in its wake a bitter residue of pain and anger. Some have led to the slaughter of innocents...The U.S. was willing to support any governing clique, ‘no matter how odious,’ as long as it did America’s bidding.”
Over time, Cuba, Guatemala, Puerto Rica, Panama, Chile, Grenada, Nicaragua and Honduras to our South were subjected to some type of coercive, gangster-like intervention from the U.S. bully. Sometimes, it took the form of a direct invasion by military forces, like in Panama and Grenada. In other cases, the CIA initiated covert activity to bring the targeted regime to its knees.
Take Honduras as a prime example of how “regime change” worked in Central America. What the U.S. did there reads like a script of fiction. Yet, it’s all true. It really did happen. Kinzer shows that in 1910, a “soldier of fortune,” Lee Christmas, conspired with the rapacious Sam Zemurray, a wheeler-dealer planter in Central America, along with an Honduras native, Manuel Bonilla, to take over that country. The conspiracy was hatched in New Orleans. All the wrongdoing was accomplished with the support, on a nod and wink basis, of the U.S. government. Christmas was to supply the muscle for the illegal coup, (think mercenary army). Zemurray provided the money to pay the hired thugs and to purchase the necessary weapons, and Bonilla was to be installed as “The President.” Thanks to some timely gunboat diplomacy from the U.S., via its naval vessels, Marietta and Tacoma, it became a done deal by Nov. 1912. Honduras, a liberal democracy under its then President Miguel Davila, was never the same again.
http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2008/04/01/p24467#more24467
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