,
25 tweets,
5 min read
Read on Twitter
So I'm waiting out flight delays at LaGuardia and following the Elliot Abrams hearings, and thinking about how this moment resonates so keenly with the time the US used a Venezuelan crisis to accomplish larger imperialist goals over a century ago. THREAD AHOY!
2. In the later 19th/early 20th centuries, Venezuela--like many Latin American nations--struggled with an inordinately high foreign debt load, contracted over generations, and at highly unfavorable terms as European financiers viewed the region like a mosquito views a vein,
3. At the turn of the century, Venezuela had even descended briefly into civil war. After it ended, the new Venezuelan president Cipriano Castro was faced with demands from European powers (esp Britain and Germany) that his nation pay its debt *and* indemnities from the civil war
4. Castro refused, seeing the demands as both infeasible and a threat to Venezuela's sovereignty. (The story of foreign debt in LatAm is much more complicated story than one would think-Victor Bulmer-Thomas's Economic History of LatAm since Independence is the best source here)
5, As a result of Castro's stand, Britain, Germany, and Italy undertook a jouint blockade of Venezuela. Perhaps Castro hoped that the US would intervene under the asupices of the Monroe Doctrine--not a futile hope, as the rabidly interventionist Theodore Roosevelt was president.
6. TR never met a foreign intervention he didn't like (especially in LatAm, a region whose people he saw as racially inferior), but the Monroe Doctrine was seen as only applying to seizure of territory by European nations in the W hemisphere, not naval incursions and blockades.
7. So the US, apparently with assurances from Germany and GB that no land grab would occur, allowed the blockade to proceed. Led byt he German naval force, the blockading powers dismantled Venezuela's small navy and increased the pressure on Castro. But he refused to give in.
8. Now ths crisis was at a boiling point; at the end of 1902, Castro had agreed to submit the European claims to international arbitration. Germany, which had originally agreed to arbitration earlier in 1902, now balked. So what would happen-would the Germans invade Venezuela?
9. There was ample precedent for invasion and forcible seizure of customs revenue to collect debt payments. Germany and France had done this at Veracruz, Mexico, in the 1860s, for example. But TR refused to countenance a European military action in the "American hemisphere"
10. The way TR told the story later, he threatened the German ambassador with sending a US fleet to shell the German ships. Coincidentally, Commodore Dewey had a sizable fleet "on maneuvers" in the Caribbean at this time. #hmmmm Whatever happened, tho, Germany agreed to arbitrate
11. In the end, Venezuela was forced to surrender 30% of current and forthcoming customs revenues to its creditors, further damaging its economic and political sovereignty. As for Roosevelt, he'd successfuly applied the Monroe Doctrine to claim US sovereingty in the W hemisphere.
12. Well, apparently Twitter ate the remainder of this thread, so let me pick it up here: What this successful "road test" of an enhanced Monroe Doctrine did for Roosevelt was give him the confidence to pursue a canal zone in Panama, which was currently part of Colombia.
13. But TR, as well as an engineer with the French de Lesseps engineering company named Philippe Bunau-Varilla, were working on that. (Congress had already set aside $40MM for a canal once the territory was acquired.) After Colombia rejected a preliminary treaty by the US
14. to acquire the canal zone under *very* generous terms, B-V, with a wink wink from Roosevelt, deployed a junta of exiled Panamanians he'd been working with in NYC to lead a Panamanian "revolution" to achieve independence--which they did in 1904.
15. (It was helpful that several US naval vessels packed with Marines parked off the Panamanian coast, right where Colombian ships might conceivably have brought counter-insurgency forces to Panama)
16. After Panama's "victory," Bunau-Varilla (still living in New York) appointed himself ambassador to the US and negotiated the Hay-Bunau-Varilla treaty and the US got the Panama Canal zone under really favorable terms--for a century!
17. So what does this have to do with Venezuela? Well, TR gained enough confidence from his flex in 1903 to essentially steal Panama from the Colombians (who TR called a bunch of "dagos" and "monkeys" in the way of "My canal"--he was an appalling racist, to boot).
18. So much confidence, that in his 1904 annual message to Congress, he articulated what;s known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine: the US has the right to intervene anywhere in the W hemisphere to prevent any "disorder" that would lead to *European intervention*
19. It's a pre-emptive intervention doctrine, plain and simple. And under its auspices, the US has intervened militarily in Latin American over FIFTY times (often leaving occupying forces, and supporting horrendous regimes like Pinochet in Chile and Armas in Guatemala) since 1904
20. Without the Venezuelan Crisis of 1902-03 as a way to test-drive this muscular interventionism, Roosevelt and the US might well have been more reticent about fomenting an astrotrufed revolution in Panama. And from there, who knows what interventionism might have looked like.
21. (It's likely the US would have still be interventionist in Latin America, for sure, but the timing and scope might have been different). So the Venezuelan "Crisis" of the early 20th century proved to be a watershed moment in the US's claiming imperial sovereignty over LatAm.
22. This is the context, then, that renders current US interventionism in Venezuela so troubling. One does not have to be a Madurista to have a really bad feeling about where Bolton, Abrams, et al. are taking things. Because we've heard this song before.
23. The long and bloody history of US interventionism in Latin America, always in contravention of the stated American ideals of freedom & justice, cannot be understood without the Roosevelt Corollary.
24. And the Roosevelt Corollary cannot be understood without knowing the story of US interventionism in Venezuelan affairs over a century ago. From those roots, over 100 years of exported violence, repression, and misery has grown. And now we might be seeing it again. /fin
Coda: I'm now stuck here for another 6 hours, so I could've made this even longer (kidding, kidding 😉)
