Throughout the 20th century, why did the U.S. choose to back so many corrupt and/or ruthless people, governments, and regimes?

by strongerthenbefore20
  • Examples
  1. Fazlollah Zahedi during the 1953 Iranian coup d'état
  2. Carlos Castillo Armas during the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état
  3. Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco during the 1964 Brazilian coup d'état
  4. The Contras during the Nicaraguan Revolution
  • To be clear, I know that the most common justification for backing these types of people and groups was to support the fight against communism. My question is why did the U.S. always seem to choose the worst possible people to support? Were there really no better options available to choose from?
Extreme-Flounder

My focus is on Central America, but the pattern here holds true for Latin America and beyond. As you note, this was a highly ideological decision from the United States, and while it was ostensibly based on the fight against communist, for many decades, any minor threat, perceived or real, to US business interests and their local elite intermediaries, would almost invariably meet with an entirely disproportionate response.

To give a bit of background before the cases you mention, in Central America, national sovereignty was more or less completely ceded to US businesses by the end of the 20th Century. For example, when Honduran President Francisco Bertrand made overtures towards raising tariffs on banana exports by half a percentage point, the United States embassy wrote him a letter urging him to resign. This was no empty gesture. The US military intervened in Honduras eight times in the first quarter of the 20th Century alone.

American companies controlled not only vast swathes of arable land and mining concessions, but also owned utilities companies, railways, ports, and telecommunications - essentially all the infrastructure of a modern state. Of course, all of this occurred in what remains the poorest region of the mainland Americas.

This is the context that gave rise to peasant and indigenous movements, such as the 1932 Salvadoran Peasant Uprising. Their cause was one that remains extremely relevant to Latin American society today - land reform, essentially breaking up the large latifundia estates that had existed since Spanish/Portuguese colonisation, and turning over uncultivated land to disenfranchised and hungry peasants.

This is not a radical or inherently communist idea. In fact, the United States promoted similar land reform efforts in Japan following the Second World War. However, when US business interests were threatened, the response was brutal. The US embassy turned a blind eye to the massacre of the Salvadoran Peasants, killing up to 40,000.

Interestingly, the leftist guerrilla movements of the later 20th Century were keenly aware of this continuity, and would deliberately harken back to this period. Peasant leader Farabundo Martí was the namesake of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front in El Salvador, Nicaragua's Sandinistas named themselves after anti-imperialist guerrilla Augusto Sandino, and the little-known Honduran guerrillas dubbed themselves Los Chinchoneros after the nickname of 19th Century peasant leader Serapio Romero.

Generally speaking, this unequal social order would remain more or less static throughout Central America until moments of massive social upheaval, such as the Nicaraguan Revolution of the 60s - 70s, the Salvadoran Armed Conflict, and the peaceful uprising in Guatemala to oust dictator Jorge Ubico in 1944.

This last example is an excellent case study for US involvement with extremely unsavoury characters. Following Ubico's ouster, the Guatemalan people elected philosophy professor Juan José Árevalo president in the country's first democratic elections. Árevalo was a liberal reformer at heart, and kept on the US's good side by keeping his reforms mostly social, and refusing to legalise the Guatemalan Workers' Party (PGT).

When he was succeeded by former military officer, Jacobo Árbenz, however, the country crossed a red line. Árbenz legalised the PGT and even invited some of its members to very minor advisory roles within his administration. His major crime, however, was promoting land reform. For the United Fruit Company, this was one step too far. Not only did Árbenz promise to turn over uncultivated land of a certain size to the peasantry, he based his compensation plan on what landowners had valued their properties in their previous tax declaration.

United Fruit lobbied hard for intervention, and was well connected to the halls of power. CIA head Alan Dulles was a United Fruit Lawyer, while his brother, John Foster Dulles, negotiated the company's land dealings in Guatemala and Honduras. What followed helped set a blueprint for foreign interventions for years to come, and thanks to declassified CIA documents, we have a clear insight into how it occurred.