LATIN AMERICA UNDER SIEGE IN THE 20th CENTURY: PART 7.

By Prof. JR Monroy

The History of Latin America in the 20th century is marked by foreign intromission and invasion of US Marines in the Caribbean region and Mexico and Central America. The Mexican Revolution (1910), and the peasantry rebellion leading by Pancho Villa and radical Zapata, was a menace to the US's new territories occupied in California, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas. A geo-political strategy will soon be implemented by the US State Department, to secure its ultra-mar possessions including Puerto Rico, Cuba and Philippines. The map shape of US is going to be transformed into a local military and industrial power in the region which will secure its ideological and political control mainly in Central America and Hispano-Republics in the Caribbean Basin. The creation of the Panama Canal in 1909 was a successful international business which opened a new maritime route of communication between the industrial States of the Atlantic and the Pacific Coasts of North America.

With the Great War in 1914 in Europe a new phenomenon occurred. Firstly, the US economy starting a process of diversification and industrialisation, with control of the Caribbean and Central America local economies, all of them were transformed in passive agencies providing mainly tropical commodities, cafe, cacao, bananas or sugar to the list of US commodities supplied to the European conflict. In three years trading with tropical commodities to Britain, France, Russia or Germany, the US capitalism was transformed into a strong monopoly leading by a financial capitalism ruled by a powerful banking elites.

Secondly, as much intensive exploitation of the rich lands in Central America by this monopoly capital, less desfavorable were the social conditions of the thousands of small and medium landowners who were pushed to end their collective farming style and to transform them in semi-industrial workers of the thousands of plantations in Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Panama. It was a period of local crisis and discontent in the masses of peasantries, who in the 1920's and 1930's challenged the local oligarchies and foreign capital in a political attempt to imitate the Mexican Revolution or to evoque the nobles ideals of the Founder Fathers of the Independence War of the 182o's. However, the monopoly capital was dominant and finally transformed Central America and Hispano Caribbean Republic in an appendix of a US international economy. Sadly, US capitalism created its own China wall, imposing protectionism and military control from Panama, Mexico to Puerto Rico, Cuba and Dominican Republic.

What was the situation in South America during this period, shall we say 1920-40? Venezuela facing the Caribbean's basin until 1900's was in a position of dormant under the illiterate dictatorship Juan Gomez, who opened the country to the US companies to explore and exploit the oil discoveries in Maracaibo's region. The US automobile revolution of Henry Ford with its technological inventions changed the society and created a new demand for oil and gas which was in abundance in the coast of Venezuela. Soon, the country was transformed in a semi-colony with absolute economic, financial and political influence by the US petroleum Corporations. Corruption was a new style of local government and soon Juan Gomez was replaced by another General more keen to accept foreign imposition and to obey to the new rulers of the Venezuelan petroleum economy. From the 1930's to 1940's the Venezuelan economy was transformed from a rural to an export - petroleum under the private ownership of the Oil Corporations.

Colombia's post Great War was with internal conflict or civil wars, its economy basically was mono-export of coffee to US market. The creation of the Republic of Panama earlier in the 1900's - which was part of the country territory - created a national frustration and serious problems of security and social unrest. Politically the country was divided in antagonism by ideological disputes between Liberal and Conservatives. Years of fratricides rivalries, which was a negative social obstacle to find a suitable political stability. Colombian oligarchs were unable to create a social and political order and their political conducts was to follow a pattern of regional caudillos or montoneros without a vision of an stable Oligarch Republic as it was in Chile from 1833-1925 or in Argentina 1920-1945. In summary, La Gran Colombia's dreamed by Simon Bolivar and its generals, in less than 70 years, collapses and vanishes to confront the new social and economic challenges of the post World War I years.

In Southern Cone of South America two nations survived the economic crisis of 1918 which affected the major European nations, they were Chile and Argentina. Argentina has the privilege to profited during the four years European conflict. The local landowners in collaboration with the international capitalism succeeded in consolidating an economy exporting wheat and creating a national industry based in the livestock through a chain of refrigeration plants which were supported by the international financial capitalism to satisfy the increased demand of livestock by the European nations which were unable to produce it because of the conflict years and the interruption of the Atlantic maritime trade.

Argentine livestock's bonanza from 1918 to 1931, created an internal political disputes and challenges by middle classes and industrial proletariat against the old system of government and to the oligarch rulers. Soon the middle stratus found its own political organisation through the Radicalism who propitiate a series of social and political reforms to democratise the oligarchy Republic. At the same time, years of massive European emigration increased the population in Buenos Aires and in others cities, creating serious problems of social mobility increasing the phenomenon of unemployment and delinquency. Finally the old rulers were electorally defeated by the emergent middle class in the 1929, creating a new chapter of democratic reforms, which by 1939, a third political element irrupted ended with this democratic movement, Argentine military cast were now prepared to replace any democratic social change in the local society, they were in a privilege political position to stopping any democratic change in the national society. The popular movement sustained by middle and popular classes needed to wait until the end of 1940's with the emergency of the leadership of General Juan Domingo Peron and its popular and national movement pro-democracy and social reforms.

In Chile after the 1891 bloody Civil War, the traditional Conservative landholders organised the country accordingly to their vision excluding any possible social and democratic reforms in the 1833 authoritarian constitution. Chile's map changed after 1879-1884 incorporating new territories gained during the War against Peru and Bolivia. Tarapaca and Antofagasta, two provinces in the North, were rich in minerals, nitrate or saltpetre. More than hundred thousand miners were working and exploiting these minerals. British, US, German, French alongside Chilean investments were exploiting and exporting this strategic commodity for their own markets. A sustancial transformation occurred in the chilean society between 1884 and 1925. Chilean economy changed from a traditional rural of landholders to a mono-export of saltpetre to the European and US markets. New social classes has emerged from the exploitation of the mines. An industrial proletariat in the Northern provinces demanded political and social reforms to the Conservative rulers.

The old political dichotomy of the 19th century, between Liberal and Conservatives, was now confronted to an alliance between a middle and working classes, creating a popular movement from 1912 to 1925, when finally A radical Liberal with popular support defeated in free election to the Conservative candidate. In summary we can say that election of Arturo Alessandri Palma President of Chile in 1920-25 was the beginning of transition period of political, economic, educational reforms to modernise the Chilean Society. This is a time when the nitrate as the main resources to the balance of payment was replaced by the greatest copper mines, who were exploited by two US companies.

In summary: the awakening of the popular movement in Chile is a process of several decades in which new political parties contributed with their experiences to organising the national trade union movement and starting changing the social composition of the National Congress electing representatives from middle and working classes from Radical Party, Socialist, Falangist, Ibanist (followers of General Carlos Ibanez del Campo), nationalists, even Communist. Since then, the political conformation of the Chilean Congress was cosmopolitan, an interesting new social conformation of the Lower Chamber, however, Senate still preserved the old and traditional class style of the great landholder of the Central Valley, who keeping influencing political decision related to introduce social reforms, especially labour - relations in the countryside, dominated by Conservative landholders.

This social process was also a political movement which finally succeed in 1938 with the democratic election of President Pedro Aguirre Cerda and his government of a series of political, cultural and social reforms. This period in Chilean history will be dominated by a new middle class movement, politically represented by the Radical Party and later Falange Nacional. An interval of four years with a coalition named: Popular Front (1938-1943). To be continued: Part 8.

Copyright (c). All Rights Reserved JRM Publications. Prohibited any reproduction without the author's consent. London July 21st 2021.