An (Incomplete) Outline of U.S. Interventions in Latin America

This is a work in progress and there is much that could be added. It doesn’t include Drug War or migration related interventions, and it only scratches the surface of economic intervention. I don’t attempt to address much of anything from 2025 onward. It is offered to highlight our long, sordid history of intervention and the belligerent path that brought us to where we are today. It can also help us understand something of the Latin American perspective relative to current imperialist aspirations.

Please comment if you find errors or have anything succinct to add. Obviously, I’m trying to keep it as brief and to the point as possible.

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1493 - Spanish colonization of the Americas begins on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) after the initial 1492 voyage of Christopher Columbus.

The Spanish Empire claimed jurisdiction over the New World in the Caribbean and North and South America The exception is Brazil, which was ceded to Portugal by the Treaty of Tordesillas.

Spaniards saw the dense populations of indigenous peoples as an important economic resource and the territory claimed as potentially producing great wealth for individual Spaniards and the crown. Religion played an important role in the Spanish conquest and incorporation of indigenous peoples, bringing them into the Catholic Church peacefully or by force. The crown created civil and religious structures to administer the vast territory. Spanish men and women settled in greatest numbers where there were dense indigenous populations and valuable resources for extraction (Wikipedia).

1521 - The Destruction of Tenochtitlán. Located where Mexico City now sprawls, Tenochtitlán was the capital of the Aztec Empire and a thriving metropolis of an estimated 250,000 people (the population of London in that same period was 50,000). The Spanish, led by Cortes, defeated the indigenous population, with 100,000 to 240,000 killed. As many as 40,000 Aztec bodies were floating in the canals or awaiting burial after the siege. Almost all of the Aztec nobility were dead, and the remaining survivors were mostly young women and very young children. The survivors marched out of the city for the next three days (Wikipedia).

The indigenous population at the time was devastated due to a smallpox epidemic, which killed much of its leadership. Because smallpox had been endemic in Spain for centuries, the Spanish had developed an acquired immunity and were affected relatively little in the epidemic. The Spanish victory was a critical stage in the Spanish colonization of the Americas (Wikipedia).

July 24 1783 - Simón Bolívar, the Great Liberator, is born in Venezuela.

1801 - In Harvest of Empire, Juan Gonzalez lists 19 invasions (filibusters) into Spanish Colonies and Latin American republics by U.S. citizens and their allies (not the government) between 1801 - 1860.

1804 - Haiti’s successful revolution overthrows French rule. It was the first and only successful revolution led by slaves. The U.S. refused to recognize Haiti until 1862. For 150 years after 1804, 80% of Haiti’s revenues were used to pay off debts to France. Ongoing interventions eroded the revolution’s promise. Woodrow Wilson ordered intervention of U.S. troops in 1915, which turned into an occupation until 1934. During that time, Haiti turned into a de-facto U.S. plantation colony. The U.S. also established the National Guards who terrorized the country for decades. The result was weakened civil society and an authoritarian state apparatus that crushed all dissent. Dictators ruled until Jean-Bertrand Aristide came to power in 1990 (Chomsky and Prashad).

1808 - Latin America’s revolutionary spark is Napoleon’s invasion of Spain (Gonzalez).

1810 – 1821 - Mexico’s War of Independence (Guerra de Independencia de México). More than 600,000 die — 10% of the population. Venezuela lost half of its population of nearly one million (Gonzalez).

1823 - James Monroe (5th U.S. president) articulates the Monroe Doctrine, claiming American domination of the entire Western Hemisphere.

April 27, 1830 - Simón Bolívar dies in Colombia.

1846 - The U.S. initiates the taking of Texas. War with Mexico starts with this and it sets the stage for further violations of Mexican sovereignty. The Monroe Doctrine was barely two decades old when it was overshadowed by the more overtly racist cry of Manifest Destiny in 1845. Proponents saw Latin Americans as culturally and politically inferior. It was a natural expression of American exceptionalism that meshed with the concurrent surge of pseudo-science promoting white European superiority (Gonzalez).

1846 - The Panama Canal treaty is signed.

1847 - The U.S. war on Mexico begins in earnest and in the fall the invasion extends to the outskirts of Mexico City. Here, as a prelude to the final battle, 4,000 Mexicans were killed or wounded, 3,000 were captured, and nearly 1,000 Americans were killed, wounded, or missing (Zinn). The Americans took Mexico City in September 1847, and Mexico surrendered soon afterwards. The Treaty of Guadalupe was signed in February 1848. While there were calls for the U.S. to take all of Mexico, it ended up taking 55 percent.

It’s estimated that over the course of the war, 25,000 Mexicans died, and there was mass reporting of looting, civilian massacres, rape, and terror at the hands of the Americans. The extent of the brutality and racism of U.S. troops was so severe it drew public condemnation from generals, including Ulysses S. Grant, and tribunals were established to try American war criminals. Grant, who helped win the war, concluded that it was “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger nation against a weaker nation” (more information).

U.S. plantation and slave owners were some of the most politically powerful elites of the day, and the Alamo, the taking of Texas, and the overall war on Mexico, had much to do with extending the range of slavery. Simón Bolívar’s condemnation of slavery infuriated U.S. plantation owners. By 1850 all the former Spanish colonies had abolished slavery (Gonzalez).

1850s - Several U.S. investors agitate for taking more of Mexico (Gonzalez).

1853 and 1854 - U.S. interventions in Nicaragua.

1862 - France’s Napoleon III used Mexico’s inability to pay its foreign debt as pretext to invade the country. After occupying Mexico City, Napoleon installed an Austrian Archduke, Ferdinand Maximilian, and as emperor, with support from Mexican conservative Catholic elites. Mexicans fought back. Liberal rebels wage a five-year-long guerrilla war that drove out the French, after which they executed Maximillian (Grandin, End of the Myth).

1898 - The Spanish-American War. The U.S. takes Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam. On the whole, outright territorial annexation in Latin America ended with this war. A more disguised yet far more extensive system of financial domination takes its place. Latin America has long served as an incubator for the American multinational corporation (Gonzalez; Greg Grandin wrote a book entitled Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism, published in 2006).

1899 - A merger creates the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita), which came to control the lives of hundreds of thousands in Costa Rica, Cuba, Honduras, Colombia, and Guatemala, toppling governments along the way. As U.S. owned plantations spread into Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and Guatemala, millions of peasants were forced from their lands (Gonzalez).

1904 - The Roosevelt Corollary. An addition to the Monroe Doctrine articulated by President Theodore Roosevelt in his 1904 State of the Union Address. It included this language: “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 United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.” While the Monroe Doctrine had been verbal and defensive in warning European powers to keep their hands off countries in the Americas, Roosevelt changed this into an aggressive military “obligation” of the U.S. to intervene in Latin America to maintain stability in these areas (Source).

1906-1909 - U.S. military interventions and occupations in Cuba.

1907 - U.S. military intervention in Nicaragua.

1908 - U.S.-backed coup in Venezuela, bringing then Vice President, Juan Vicente Gómez, to power. “Gómez would rule the country either directly or through puppet presidents, until his death in 1935. His regime was one of inconceivably medieval brutality. His enforcers were fond of shackling political prisoners in leg irons that rendered many victims permanently disabled — and those were the “lucky” ones. The unlucky ones were hanged to death by meat hooks through their throats or testicles” (source).

1911-1912 - U.S. military interventions in Honduras.

1912 - U.S. military intervention in Cuba.

1912 - U.S. military intervention in Panama.

1912-1913 - U.S. military interventions in Nicaragua.

1913 - Henry Lane Wilson, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, is complicit in the murder of Francisco Maduro, president of Mexico and a key figure in the Mexican Revolution which has been called the “first great third world uprising against U.S. economic, cultural, and political expansion.” The killing radicalized opposing forces—those for a new order of social justice, and those standing for the old. It moved the nation towards its brutal civil war in which three to four million people would perish, out of a population of about fifteen million (Grandin, América)

1914 - U.S. military intervention in the Dominican Republic.

1914-1918 - U.S. military interventions in Mexico. This includes the 1914 occupation of Veracruz (more info). In A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn describes the indiscriminate shelling of Veracruz: In two days, 1,300 shells were fired into the city. A reporter for a New Orleans paper wrote, “The Mexicans variously estimate their loss at from 500 to 1,000 killed and wounded, but all agree that the loss among the soldiery is comparatively small and the destruction among women and children is very great.”

1915 - U.S. intervention and occupation of Haiti, including the taking over of institutions. Thousands killed, torture, other war crimes. The occupation lasted for 19 years.

1917 - Mexico creates the world’s first social-democratic constitution.

1917-1922 — U.S. marines sent to Cuba to 1922 to protect American-owned sugar plantations.

1924 - The U.S. withdraws from the Dominican Republic, and Rafael Leonidas Trujillo (U.S. trained) positions himself as dictator. Notorious for corruption and ruthlessness, he was elected president in 1930. For the next 30 years, either as president or through handpicked successors, Trujillo perfected the most notorious dictatorship in the hemisphere (Gonzalez). Thousands were kidnapped, raped, tortured, jailed, executed and massacred. Opponents in exile were also murdered. His cruelty is memorialized by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in The Autumn of the Patriarch.

1934 - The nineteen year occupation of Haiti ends.

1944 - As the tide started to turn toward Allied victory in WWII, a wave of social-democratic energy swept over Latin America, which had played an instrumental role in U.S. contributions to the war. From providing massive quantities of raw materials and strategic air bases, to committing to mutual defense and targeting fascists on their home soil, the countries of Latin America not only contributed a great deal to the war effort but suffered severe economic hardship as a result. They expected their contribution to be recognized and rewarded as a part of the overall rebuilding effort. They expected aid from the U.S. to assist in their industrialization and raising of living standards, indeed, they had been promised as much by Vice President Henry Wallace in 1943 as a core part of FDR’s Good Neighbor policy. With those expectations came the hope that raised wages and living standards would stabilize the region’s politics. But by this point the U.S. was already actively working to undermine progressive forces in favor of free markets and U.S. hegemony in Latin America (Grandin, América).

1945 - The U.S. bullies counterparts at the Inter-American Conference on War and Peace to accept a resolution calling for all Latin American countries to work for the elimination of economic nationalism in all its forms, including the exercise of economic sovereignty against the advantages of multinational corporations. The intent is the exploitation of people and resources for the primary benefit of multinationals. Exploited countries were allowed to produce goods but not in competition with the U.S.

1946 - Chileans elect Gabriel González Videla president, continuing an anti-fascist coalition. Videla wasn’t in office a month before the U.S. State Department, acting on behalf of New York banks, cut Chile off from credit and loans because it was unhappy with his pro-union policies. In a story all-too thematic in Latin American history, Videla was caught between rising inflation (due to U.S. economic intervention) and demands for better pay and living standards. He broke his alliance with the left and cracked down hard on unions, sending hundreds of striking mine workers to military prison camps and banishing thousands. As they were in Bolivia and Paraguay, U.S.-supplied tanks were used in the assault. Videla also passed a law stripping thousands of communists of the right to vote, thus crushing the Party (Grandin, América).

1948 - The Marshall Plan commits $13.3 billion from the U.S. to 17 European countries to rebuild war-torn regions, remove trade barriers, modernize industry, and prevent the spread of communism. Latin America received a pittance (between 1945 and 1951, Washington gave Belgium and Luxembourg more direct aid than it did all Latin America). Latin America’s desperate poverty would continue as structural inequity solidified into a system where development of the first world depended on the underdevelopment of the third (Grandin, América). The treatment of Latin America as a vast resource colony continues to this day in the form of “free trade” policies and neoliberal economics.

1948 - Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the wildly popular Liberal Party leader, is gunned down in broad daylight in Bogotá. Gaitán well understood that the U.S. could no longer be considered a force for global democracy and he accused the U.S. of arming Colombian fascists. After the murder, peasants and oil workers rebelled and right-wing forces responded with massive violence. Some of modern Latin America’s first death squads were created to aid in the terror and thousands of Liberal Party members were killed (Grandin, América).

With the murder and the uprising that followed, communist and other reformers more readily than ever become part of the Red Scare and Cold War narrative. In Latin America, the conservative backlash against the social democratic opening accelerates. By the end of 1948, nearly every government in the region had fallen to dictators or taken a sharp right turn. A great deal of the shift was due economic pressure from the U.S. (Grandin, América).

With the help of the CIA, Klaus Barbie, former head of the Gestapo in Lyon, France is set up in Bolivia to teach death squads how to torture. The CIA teams up with the Catholic Church and the Israeli secret services to get SS officer Walter Rauff, who during the war killed tens of thousands with his mobile gassing vans, first to Ecuador and then to Chile. There, he built a network of refugee Nazis and put them at the service of the region’s militaries and intelligence agencies (Grandin, América).

1948 - In Venezuela a coup with direct U.S. support overthrows the Country’s first democratically-elected president.

U.S. investment soars during this period of “jackboot stability.” High-ranking U.S. diplomat George Kennan writes in a memo from 1950 that “We must concede that harsh governmental measures of repression” are necessary to establish stability. In a top secret memo dated May 4, 1948, Kennan called on the U.S. to wage a permanent, global psychological war. (Grandin, América). Kennan’s recommendations were accepted by Truman and actualized under the auspices of the Office of Policy Coordination and the damage done in Latin America and elsewhere is beyond calculation but includes, according to Grandin, “the CIA’s first real regime change,” which took place in Guatemala in 1954.

1950 - In Colombia, when the racist, ultra-conservative Laureano Gómez is elected president in 1950 with no opposition, President Truman immediately sends a congratulatory telegram. It is part of U.S. efforts to direct the rightward shift away from fascism toward fighting communism and aligning with U.S. economic interests. Included in the repression and death toll at the hands of the Gómez government are priests and nuns advancing Catholic social doctrine, along with Protestant missionaries who had their own conversions upon seeing the suffering of the Colombian people. Hundreds of Protestants, mostly Colombians, but several U.S. citizens are killed (Grandin, América).

1952-1959 - Fulgencio Batista takes power in Cuba in a coup. The U.S. provides crucial political backing during his rise and the 1952 military coup.

1953 - The CIA orchestrates a coup of the democratically-elected government in Iran.

1954 - According to Greg Grandin, the U.S. “used every instrument at its disposal to destabilize” and overthrow Guatemala’s reform-minded and democratically elected president Jacobo Árbenz. Justified by the lie that Árbenz was controlled by communists, Guatemala’s diplomats were isolated. U.S. businesses applied economic pressure and created an economic crisis. The CIA applied psychological warfare to create “dissension, confusion, and fear.” When the coup finally came, the U.S. installed Carlos Castillo Armas, who modeled himself after Hitler. “Pure murder followed: the reversal of the land reforms, the execution of a generation of activists, the mass imprisonment of peasants, and the beginning of a four-decade civil war that would climax in acts of genocide committed against the country’s majority Mayan population” (Grandin, América).

1959 - Knowing full well that the Colombian military was “killing reformers of all kinds,” Eisenhower sends a team with experience fighting in Vietnam to Colombia to make the already existing paramilitaries more effective killing and terror machines. Throughout the 1950s, as a loyal U.S. ally, Colombia received more military aid from Washington than any other Latin American country. No restrictions were placed on the use of the weapons, which ultimately included napalm. Colombia’s civil wars fused with drug cartel violence and continue to this day (Grandin, América).

1959 - The Cuban Revolution. Fidel Castro takes power and quickly becomes a powerful force for anti-colonial liberation throughout Latin America. The CIA begins to arm counterrevolutionaries in Cuba and encourage them to attack Cuban institutions outside the country (embassies in Haiti and Dominican Republic were attacked in 1959). Cuba is also attacked. Havana is aerial bombed on Oct. 21, 1959; sugar cane fields napalmed on Jan 12, 1960.

1960 - Eisenhower formally authorizes the CIA to overthrow the Cuban government and authorizes Castro’s assassination. According to Eisenhower’s assistant secretary of state for Latin America, economic sanctions put in place are meant to decrease “real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow the government.” With the revolution having the support of the vast majority of Cubans, the same official writes that the “only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment…based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship” (Grandin, América). In the end, there were an estimated 634 assassination attempts on Fidel Castro’s life, attempts by the CIA and Cuban exiles (source).

1960 - A CIA-backed coup overthrows Pres. Patrice Lumumba of the Congo. He was executed in 1961. The coup and execution send a clear warning to Cuba. In May 1962, Cuba reluctantly agrees to host Soviet missiles for protection and deterrence (Chomsky & Prashad).

1960 - The CIA begins efforts to overthrow Ecuadoran President José María Velasco Ibarra after he refuses to break relations with Cuba. In November 1961, Velasco is overthrown in a military coup. His replacement turned out to be less than favorable to the United States, causing the CIA to adopt the same destabilizing tactics against his government (source).

1961 - The Bay of Pigs Invasion launched under the pretense that Cuba was Soviet controlled.

1961 - The U.S. is involved in the murder of right-wing dictator Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. An internal CIA memorandum states that an investigation into the murder disclosed “quite extensive Agency involvement with the plotters.” The CIA describes its role in “changing” the government as a “success” in that it assisted in moving the Dominican Republic from a totalitarian dictatorship to a Western-style democracy (source).

1961 - U.S. backs right-wing military coup in El Salvador, overthrowing the short-lived, reformist civil-military Junta that had taken power just three months prior (source).

1962 - President John F. Kennedy imposes a comprehensive economic embargo on Cuba, expanding previous restrictions by President Eisenhower. In his diary, JFK writes, “My idea is to stir things up on the island with espionage, sabotage, general disorder.” The CIA establishes relations with anti-Castro groups throughout Latin America with the intent of forming a “goon squad program” to counter pro-Castro elements (Grandin, América).

As early as 1962 the CIA was warning Kennedy that the Catholic Church couldn’t be counted on in the fight against communism because of the “left-wing drift” in Latin America. Since its founding the CIA used religion as a weapon in its psychological operations. Liberation Theology becomes a specific target. (Grandin, América).

1963 - A right-wing military coup ousts President Juan Bosch, the Dominican Republic’s first democratically elected leader in nearly four decades. While the bloodless overthrow was executed by local generals and business elites who feared Bosch’s progressive agrarian reforms and tolerance of communist groups, declassified documents detail the CIA’s extensive involvement (source).

1963 - The CIA played a clear, covert role in the July 1963 military coup in Ecuador, which overthrew President Carlos Julio Arosemena Monroy. Driven by Cold War fears of Cuban influence, the CIA spent years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund anti-communist propaganda, manipulate student groups, and orchestrate destabilization campaigns (source: AI overview).

1963 - March 1963 Guatemalan coup d’état was a U.S.-backed power grab led by Colonel Enrique Peralta Azurdia, which ousted the administration of President Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes. The Kennedy administration secretly supported the military overthrow to prevent former left-wing President Juan José Arévalo from returning to power in upcoming elections (source).

1963 - A military takeover ousts democratically elected Honduran President Ramón Villeda Morales ten days before a scheduled election, initiating two decades of military rule (source). The Kennedy administration opposes the coup, but the incoming Johnson administration formally recognizes the military regime on December 14, 1963.

1964 - U.S.-backed coup in Brazil after 2 consecutive governments take a hardline against the International Monetary Fund. Planning for the coup goes deep into the Kennedy Administration and was fulfilled under Lyndon Johnson. The military regime that took over created a neofascist national security state, with torture and repression at the center.

1960s - According to Greg Grandin, despite the repression, the 1960s in Latin America “was a period of such intense intellectual vitality is should be considered equal to Europe’s Enlightenment.” The “new sociology” of Camilo Torres was spreading and laying the foundations of Liberation Theology. Martín-Baro founded Liberation Psychology. And politically, there were many keeping alive the spirit of Simón Bolívar and the intellectuals and diplomats that followed (Grandin, América).

1970 - Richard Nixon declares an economic war on Chile after the democratic election of President Salvador Allende.

1971 - The U.S. government supports a coup in Bolivia that topples President Juan José Torres. Torres had displeased Washington by convening an “People’s Assembly,” in which miners, unionized teachers, students, and peasants were represented; and more generally by leading the country in what was perceived as a left wing direction (Wikipedia).

1973 - A coup in Uruguay brings a military dictatorship to power. The U.S. adopts a low key, business as usual approach. A twelve year period of repression ensues.

1973 - U.S.-backed coup topples the Allende government in Chile (Allende commits suicide by gunshot to avoid capture). What follows is the 17 year-long U.S.-backed military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, infamous for political persecution, mass arrests, torture, and disappearances.

The overthrow of Allende represents a turning point in the progress Latin America had made in the previous decades toward social democracy and overall well-being. Chile becomes a laboratory “for dismantling the welfare state and discrediting its theoretical underpinnings” (Grandin, América).

Neoliberalism becomes ascendant, with the International Monetary Fund pushing “structural readjustment,” which, according to Grandin is “also a kind of moral adjustment.” In exchange for new loans, the IMF requires borrowing nations to cut social spending, privatize national enterprises, weaken labor laws, deregulate finance, lower tariffs and subsidies, and remove other trade barriers. This reorientation of wealth toward the already wealthy nations causes suffering on a massive scale, first in Latin America and then in much of the rest of the world (Grandin, América).

1975 - A coup ousts nationalist Peruvian President Juan Velasco Alvarado. The U.S. is accused of undermining his rule through economic pressures.

1976 - A coup overthrows President Isabel Perón in Argentina. The U.S. provides military/financial assistance to the new military junta. A period known as the “Dirty War” follows and lasts until 1983. It was a period of state-sponsored violence with military, security forces, and death squads, hunting down political dissidents and anyone believed to be associated with the left. It is estimated that between 22,000 and 30,000 people were killed or disappeared (source). A year after the coup, a few mothers of the disappeared gathered to demand answers. They received none, and so, they began to march. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo still gather every Thursday to demand truth and justice, and to keep memory alive.

1976 - The bombing of Cubana Airlines flight #455 by Cuban exiles. The terrorist attack killed all 73 people on-board including the Cuban fencing team. One of the masterminds, Cuban-born Luis Posada, was a CIA trained, and highly valued operative, based in Venezuela. Recently released documents reveal his deep ties to the U.S. government (Source). Two of those responsible were arrested in Venezuela, tried, and sentenced to 20-year prison terms. A third, Orlando Bosch, was acquitted in Venezuela. He moved to Miami and was granted an administrative pardon by the George H.W. Bush in 1990, despite being deemed a public security threat. Luis Posada escaped Venezuelan prison, was detained in the U.S. for illegal entry, but released in 2007 and allowed to stay and live out a long life (more info).

1980 - On March 23, Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero, a leading figure in the struggle for human rights in El Salvador, delivered a sermon over national radio which addressed the forces of repression directly: “In the name of this suffering people, whose cries rise to heaven each day more tumultuous, I beseech you, I beg you, I order you, in the name of God, stop the repression.” The very next day, the Archbishop was assassinated. Officers of the Salvadoran military and leaders of right-wing paramilitaries conceived and coordinated the assassination. Though deeply involved in the funding and training of El Salvador’s paramilitaries, the U.S. does little to investigate and hold anyone accountable for the murder (source). In February 1980, just a month before his death, Romero wrote to President Carter asking the U.S. to stop sending arms to El Salvador: “The contribution of your government instead of promoting greater justice and peace in El Salvador will without doubt sharpen the injustice and repression against the organizations of the people,” wrote Romero to Carter. His letter went unanswered. He was murdered a month later with a single shot from a US-made military assault rifle (source).

1981 - President Ronald Reagan signs off on a top secret document, National Security Decision Directive 17, which gives the CIA the power to recruit and support a 500-man force of Nicaraguan rebels to conduct covert actions against the leftist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. A budget of $19 million is established for that purpose (source).

1981 - December 10, the Salvadoran Army’s Atlácatl Battalion—created with U.S. government funding and military training—arrived at the remote village of El Mozote after a clash with guerrillas in the vicinity. The entire village is rounded up and the villagers, mostly young children, women, and elderly are murdered in the worst massacre in Latin American history. Men are tortured and killed, women and girls raped and killed, and the bodies burned. Over 800 are murdered and this is followed by a similar massacre in a neighboring village. The Reagan Administration lies about its involvement, seeks to discredit journalists and cover-up the story by calling it “communist propaganda,” and continues to aid the repressive government (more info).

1982 - The U.S. puts Cuba on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list.

1983 - The U.S. invades Grenada and overthrows the socialist New Jewel movement and installs a pro-Western government (more info).

1986 - The International Court of Justice finds the U.S. guilty of waging an illegal war of aggression against Nicaragua. The illegality includes funding the Contra’s, the CIA’s mining of Nicaragua’s harbors, and the distribution of “how-to” torture manuals to anti-Sandinistas. The U.S. is ordered to pay reparations, with Nicaragua asking for seventeen billion dollars. In response, Reagan withdraws from the ICJ’s compulsory jurisdiction and Washington uses its Security Council veto to squash the complaint. Reagan’s withdrawal from the court has been called a “watershed moment” in the unraveling of multilateralism (Grandin, América).

1989 - On the night of November 16, the Salvadoran Army’s Atlácatl Battalion—created with U.S. government funding and military training—enters the campus of the Central American University. The Battalion was already infamous for the massacre of over 800 residents of El Mozote and surrounding villages. On this night the soldiers are looking for Father Ignacio Ellacuría, who had been trying to negotiator a truce between the government and insurgency forces. They found him sleeping in the Jesuits’ dormitory, along with five Jesuit colleagues, including Ignacio Martín-Baró. Atlácatl murdered them all and also killed their housekeeper and her daughter (Grandin, América).

1989 - On Dec. 20, and without consulting Congress, President George H. W. Bush orders the invasion of Panama with 26,000 troops. Hundreds of innocent people are killed and 20,000 homes destroyed. Panamanian citizens have not forgotten and they still demand justice (source).

1990 - On New Year’s Day the Contras in Nicaragua kill two nuns, one of them an American citizen. Two others are wounded.

1991 - First U.S.-backed coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti.

1994 - The Clinton administration agrees to return Aristide to power provided he castrate his political program, privatize almost everything, freeze wages, and sack half the civil service (source).

1998 - Hugo Chávez elected President of Venezuela, winning with 56% of the vote on a platform promising to fight corruption and help the poor. The U.S. initiates economic interventions.

2002 - Under George W. Bush, a failed U.S. military coup against Hugo Chávez in Venezuela (source).

2004 - Second coup against Aristide in Haiti during the George W. Bush presidency. Aristide was disliked by the West for demanding reparations from France and a greater share of profits for workers from multinationals. He was forcibly taken and deposed by the U.S. and flown to South Africa (full report).

2015 - Barak Obama declares Venezuela an “extraordinary threat to national security” (source).

2017 - President Trump announces economic sanctions against Nicolás Maduro and Venezuela, and threatens to attack (source). The U.S. has waged economic war on Venezuela ever since.

2025 - Every year the UN General Assembly votes on a resolution opposing the U.S.-imposed embargo of Cuba (first initiated by President Kennedy in 1962). In recent years, the vote has overwhelming been in favor of ending the embargo. Most recently, in 2025, the vote was 165 in favor, with seven opposed, including the U.S. and Israel.

2025 - The Trump Administration releases its National Security Strategy which clearly states the desire to dominate the Western Hemisphere (more info).

2026 - On January 3rd the United States launches a military strike in Venezuela and captures incumbent Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. Infrastructure is destroyed and an estimated one hundred people, including civilians are killed. Maduro and Flores are transported to New York City to face trial on drug trafficking charges (source).

Notes

Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad, On Cuba: Reflections on 70 Years of Revolution and Struggle, 2024.

Juan Gonzalez, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America, 2022

Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, 2019.

Greg Grandin, America, América: A New History of the New World, 2025

Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 1990.