When many of us were in school, we learned that the Monroe Doctrine committed the United States to protect Latin American nations, newly freed from Spanish and Portuguese rule. European powers could keep whatever colonies they still had in the Americas, but couldn’t take more. But what looked like a noble policy isn’t necessarily so.
On its 200th anniversary, we know that nothing in it has stopped U.S. expansion at Latin expense. Space in this letter allows only a sample. Back in 1848, Mexico lost half its territory to the U.S. In 1905, Theodore Roosevelt’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine announced that if the U.S thought a Latin nation too unstable, it could intervene and remodel its government.
A long series of U.S.-engineered interventions has followed. Among the hemispheric heads of state thereby overthrown were Guatemala’s Jacobo Arbenz (1954); the Dominican Republic’s Juan Bosch (1964); Chile’s Salvador Allende (murdered in 1973); Grenada’s Maurice Bishop (1983); and Panama’s Manuel Noriega (1989).
The U.S. shrugged when a 2009 military coup toppled democratically elected Manuel Zelaya in Honduras. He had opposed environmentally harmful U.S. investments there. So had Indigenous activist Berta Caceres, murdered in 2011. As was also the case when a Salvadoran death squad murdered Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980, no condolences came from our government.
If the U.S. wants to get serious about liberty and justice for all, and respect for international law, it’s time to ditch the Monroe Doctrine. Adios, Monroe.
John Raby
Scarborough
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