From a Whorehouse to a White House
excerpted from the book
Overthrow
America's Century of Regime Change
from Haiti to Iraq
by Stephen Kinzer
Times Books, 2006, paper
p56
During the last decades of the nineteenth century, the ideals
of social and political reform swept across Central America. Visionary
leaders, inspired by European philosophers and nation builders,
sought to wipe away the feudal systems that had frozen their countries
into immobility. One of them, President José Santos Zelaya
of Nicaragua, took his nationalist principles so seriously that
the United States felt compelled to overthrow him.
p57
Zelaya was six weeks short of his fortieth
birthday when he was sworn( in as president of Nicaragua. He proclaimed
a revolutionary program and set out to shake his country from
its long slumber. He built roads, ports, railways, government
buildings, and more than 140 schools; paved the streets of Managua,
lined them with street lamps, and imported the country's first
automobile; legalized civil marriage and divorce; and even founded
the nation's first baseball league, which included a team called
"Youth" and another called "The Insurgency."
He encouraged business, especially the nascent coffee industry.
In foreign affairs, he promoted a union of the five small Central
American countries and fervently embraced the grand project that
had thrust Nicaragua onto the world stage: the interoceanic canal.
Every American president since Ulysses
S. Grant had pushed for the canal project. In 1876 a government
commission studied possible routes and concluded that the one
across Nicaragua "possesses, both for the construction and
maintenance of a canal, greater advantage, and offers fewer difficulties
from engineering, commercial and economic points of view, than
any one of the other route. Slowly the project gained momentum.
In 1889 a private company chartered by Congress began dredging
near Nicaragua's Atlantic coast. It was undercapitalized and went
broke shortly before Zelaya came to power.
One group of men cheered this failure.
They were members of a Paris-based syndicate that owned a great
swath of land across Panama, where French engineers had tried
and failed to build a canal. These men stood to become very rich
if they could find a buyer for their land. The only possible customer
was the United States government, but it was pursuing the Nicaragua
route. Persuading Washington to change course would require a
highly sophisticated lobbying campaign o direct it, the syndicate
hired a gifted New York lawyer who understood better than anyone
else of his generation how to bend government to the will of business.
As American corporations began expanding
to enormous size in the late nineteenth century, they encountered
a host of organizational and political problems.
p59
When debate over the canal bill began in the Senate, Mark Hanna
delivered a passionate speech favoring the Panama route, illustrating
it with a frightening though highly fanciful map purporting to
show zones of seismic danger in Central America. His speech and
behind-the-scenes lobbying, closely coordinated with Cromwell's
parallel efforts, produced the desired result. On June 19, 1902
... they voted for the Panama route by a margin of forty-two to
thirty-four. Soon afterward the House reversed itself and also
accepted that route.
p60
During the years when it appeared that the canal was going to
be built across Nicaragua, American officials got along well with
President Zelaya. In 1898 the American minister in Managua wrote
in a dispatch that Zelaya "has given the people of Nicaragua
as good a government as they will permit him .... Foreigners who
attend to their own business, and do not meddle with politics
which does not concern them, are fully protected." Two years
later, Secretary of State John Hay praised Zelaya's "ability,
high character and integrity." The American consul at San
Juan del Norte, which was to be the Caribbean terminus of the
canal, called him "the ablest and strongest man in Central
America" and reported that he "is very popular with
the masses, and is giving them an excellent government."
After Congress chose the Panama route,
this admiration quickly turned to disdain. American officials
who had once viewed Zelaya's campaign to promote Central American
unity as noble began to see it as destabilizing. His efforts to
regulate American companies, once thought of as symbols of his
self-confident nationalism, started to look defiant.
"To the State Department, Nicaragua
was no longer a country that needed to be coddled or cared for
in preparation for future usefulness," the American historian
john Ellis Findling later wrote. "Rather, it was now a country
that needed to be watched carefully and kept in line."
President Roosevelt plunged into the canal
project with unrestrained vigor. Before he could build anything
in the Republic of Panama, however, he had to resolve one remaining
problem. There was no such thing as a Republic of Panama. Panama
was a province of Colombia, and Colombian leaders were reluctant
to surrender sovereignty over the proposed canal zone ...
p61
The United States had little experience in fomenting revolutions.
It did, however, have one model. A decade earlier, the American
diplomat John L. Stevens had devised a simple plan that allowed
a handful of people with little popular support to overthrow the
government of Hawaii. Roosevelt decided to adapt that plan for
Panama. He would encourage Panamanian "revolutionaries"
to proclaim independence from Colombia, quickly give them diplomatic
recognition, and then use American troops to prevent the Colombian
army from reestablishing control.
p63
Roosevelt was eager to resolve troubles with foreign nations peacefully
when possible, and he took great pride in the fact that during
his presidency, the United States never started a conflict in
which a single life was lost. He had no sympathy for idle ruling
classes like those that had long dominated Central America. In
José Santos Zelaya, a man of restless intellect, impatient
energy, and reformist zeal, he may even have seen a reflection
of himself. As late as 1908, he was still addressing the Nicaraguan
leader as his "great and good friend."
Nevertheless, Roosevelt was indirectly
responsible for Zelaya's overthrow, because he propounded the
principle that justified it. Since 1823, U.S. policy in the Western
Hemisphere had been shaped by the Monroe Doctrine, a unilateral
declaration that the United States would not tolerate any attempt
by European powers to influence the course of events in the Americas.
Once work began on the Panama Canal, Roosevelt decided to go further.
In 1904 he proclaimed the "Roosevelt Corollary" to the
Monroe Doctrine, which asserted the right of the United States
to intervene in any country in the Western Hemisphere that it
judged to be in need of intervention.
If a nation shows that it knows how to
act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political
matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear
no interference from the United States. Chronic wrongdoing, or
an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties
of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately
require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western
Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine
may force the U.S., however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of
such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international
peace power.
p64
... the Philadelphia-based La Luz and Los Angeles Mining Company
... held a lucrative gold mining concession in eastern Nicaragua.
Besides his professional relationship with La Luz, Knox was politically
and socially close to the Fletcher family of Philadelphia, which
owned it.
The Fletchers protected their company
in an unusually effective way. Gilmore Fletcher managed it. His
brother, Henry Fletcher, worked at the State Department, holding
a series of influential positions and ultimately rising to undersecretary.
Both detested Zelaya, especially after he began threatening, in
1908, to cancel the La Luz concession.
Encouraged by the Fletcher brothers, Knox
looked eagerly for a way to force Zelaya from power.
p65
In the summer of 1909, [Philander Knox] began orchestrating a
campaign designed to turn American public opinion against Zelaya.
He seized on several minor incidents in Nicaragua, including one
in which an American tobacco merchant was briefly jailed, to paint
the Nicaraguan regime as brutal and oppressive. He sent diplomats
to Nicaragua whom he knew to be strongly anti-Zelaya, and passed
their lurid reports to friends in the press. Soon American newspapers
were screaming that Zelaya had imposed a "reign of terror"
in Nicaragua and become "the menace of Central America."
As their sensationalist campaign reached a peak, President Taft
gravely announced that the United States would no longer "tolerate
and deal with such a medieval despot."
With this declaration, the United States
pronounced Zelaya's political death sentence.
p67
On December 1, Knox wrote the Nicaraguan minister in Washington
an extraordinary letter demanding that Zelaya's government be
replaced by "one entirely disassociated from the present
intolerable conditions." Nicaraguan schoolchildren study
it to this day.
It is notorious that President Zelaya
has almost continually kept Central America in tension or turmoil
.... It is equally a matter of common knowledge that under the
regime of President Zelaya, republican institutions have ceased
in Nicaragua to exist except in name, that public opinion and
the press have been throttled, and that prison has been the reward
of any tendency to real patriotism ....
Two Americans who, this government is
now convinced, were officers connected with the revolutionary
forces, and therefore entitled to be dealt with according to the
enlightened practice of civilized nations, have been killed by
direct order of President Zelaya. Their execution is said to have
been preceded by barbarous cruelties. The consulate at Managua
is now officially reported to have been menaced...
The government of the United States is
convinced that the revolution represents the will of a majority
of the Nicaraguan people more than does the government of President
Zelaya .. . . In these circumstances, the President no longer
feels for the government of President Zelaya that respect and
confidence which would make it appropriate hereafter to maintain
with it regular diplomatic relations.
There was no mistaking the seriousness
of this message. "We are stricken to the heart, we are paralyzed,"
the Nicaraguan minister said after receiving it. Zelaya was also
taken aback. He appealed to Mexico and Costa Rica, whose leaders
were on good terms with the Taft administration, to intercede
on his behalf, but they refused. Then he proposed that a commission
made up of Mexicans and Americans come to Nicaragua to investigate
the Cannon and Groce cases, and promised to resign if it found
him guilty of any wrongdoing. Taft replied by ordering warships
to approach both Nicaraguan coasts, and the marines to assemble
in Panama.
The Knox Note, as it came to be known,
made clear that the United States would not rest until Zelaya
was gone. Given the American military forces arrayed against him,
he had no alternative but to comply. On December 16, 1909, he
submitted his resignation. In his farewell speech to the National
Assembly, he said he hoped his departure would produce peace "and
above all, the suspension of the hostility shown by the United
States, to which I wish to give no pretext that will allow it
to continue intervening in any way with the destiny of this country."
A few days later he boarded a ship at the Pacific port of Corinto
and sailed into exile.
p70
"On that day [August 21, 1910]," New York Times correspondent
Harold Denny later wrote, "began the American rule of Nicaragua,
political and economic."
... This was the first time the United
States government had explicitly orchestrated the overthrow of
a foreign leader. In Hawaii, an American diplomat had managed
the revolution, but without specific instructions from Washington.
In Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, American "regime
change" operations were part of a larger war. The overthrow
of President Zelaya in Nicaragua was the first real American coup.
p72
"Sam the Banana Man" [Zemurray] was one of the most
colorful figures in the history of American capitalism. In New
Orleans he is remembered as a philanthropist who donated $1 million
to Tulane University and paid to build a hospital for black women.
Agronomists still admire his contributions to the science of banana
cultivation. Some Jews consider him an exemplary figure of their
Diaspora, an immigrant from Eastern Europe who arrived at Ellis
Island as a penniless youth and rose to great wealth and power.
In Honduras, people know him as the man who overthrew their government
and took over their country.
It is safe to presume that no one in Kishinev,
today the capital of Moldova, had ever seen a banana when Samuel
Zemurray was born there in 1877. Nor had most people in Alabama,
where the renamed Sam Zemurray landed with relatives when he was
fifteen years old. He found work as a dock laborer in Mobile.
There he watched sailors dump bunches of overripe bananas into
the sea. He came up with the idea of buying them and sending them
quickly to inland towns. Business boomed. By the time Zemurray
was twenty-one, he was worth more than $100,000.
After selling other people's bananas for
more than a decade, Zemurray decided to try growing his own. He
borrowed half a million dollars, some of it at usurious interest
rates of up to 50 percent, and bought fifteen thousand acres of
land in Honduras. Once again he was brilliantly successful, easily
paying off his loans and becoming a major force in the banana
trade. His only problem was the Honduran government.
Like many other American businessmen 1n
Central America, Zemurray considered his land a private fiefdom.
He resented having to pay taxes and abide by Honduran laws and
regulations. That put him in conflict with President Miguel Dávila,
who not only insisted that foreign businesses submit to taxation
but was campaigning to limit the amount of land foreigners could
own in Honduras.
Dávila was a Liberal who had been
a protégé of the deposed Nicaraguan leader José
Santos Zelaya. When Zelaya fell, he lost a vital political and
military ally. Among those who realized this was Sam Zemurray.
He decided that Dávila was now ripe to be overthrown, and
with typical resolve set out to do the overthrowing himself.
The first thing Zemurray needed was a
pretender, someone who could take over the Honduran presidency
and run the country on his behalf. Bonilla, a conspiracy-minded
former general who had once before seized the presidency, was
an ideal candidate.
p74
The United States had a special interest in Honduras at this moment.
Under a series of Liberal presidents, Honduras had fallen into
the habit of borrowing money from European banks. President Taft
and Secretary of State Knox disapproved of this practice, just
as they had disapproved of Zelaya's railroad loan in 1909. They
asked President Dávila to transfer his debt by accepting
a $30 million loan from the American banking firm of J. P. Morgan,
most of which would be used to pay off the European creditors.
To guarantee repayment, J. P. Morgan would take over the Honduran
customs service and oversee its Treasury, in effect turning the
country into a protectorate.
This proposal put President Dávila
in an impossible position. He knew that if he accepted the loan,
many of his fellow Liberals would erupt in anger. If he rejected
it, the Americans were certain to punish him.
p75
Officials in Washington were ambivalent when the Honduran revolution
broke out, but they soon concluded that its success would benefit
the United States. They considered Dávila untrustworthy
because of his well-known Liberal sympathies and feared that,
if allowed to remain in office, he would become a dangerous symbol
of independence who might inspire nationalists elsewhere in Central
America. His doubts about the Morgan loan confirmed his lack of
deference to American power. Bonilla, on the other hand, was eager
to lead Honduras into what would necessarily be a highly unequal
partnership with the United States. It was an easy call.
p76
President Bonilla handsomely rewarded the man who had placed him
in power. Soon after taking office, he awarded Zemurray 10,000
hectares of banana land-about 24,700 acres-near the north coast.
Later he added 10,000 hectares near the Guatemalan border. Then
he gave Zemurray a unique permit allowing his businesses to import
whatever they needed duty-free. Finally, he authorized Zemurray
to raise a $500,000 loan in the name of the Honduran government,
and use the money to repay himself for what he claimed to have
spent organizing the revolution.
With assets like these, it is no wonder
that Zemurray soon became known as "the uncrowned king of
Central America." He was certainly the king of Honduras.
After Bonilla's death in 1913, he controlled a string of presidents.
In 1925 he secured exclusive lumbering rights to a region covering
one-tenth of Honduran territory. Later he merged his enterprises
with United Fruit and took over as the firm's managing director.
Under his leadership, United Fruit became inextricably interwoven
with the fabric of Central American life. According to one study,
it "throttled competitors, dominated governments, manacled
railroads, ruined planters, choked cooperatives, domineered over
workers, fought organized labor and exploited consumers."
Four decades later, this uniquely powerful company would help
overthrow another Central American government.
Overthrow
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