Backyard Empire: The United States in Latin America

Most of this series is about things dug out of the ground. This one is about the wires and the current — the telephone systems and power grids a modern country can't function without, owned by foreign corporations. International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT) owned the phone systems of Cuba, Chile, and beyond; the American & Foreign Power Company owned the electric utilities of Cuba and nine more Lat...

Strip the banana plantation of its bananas and the copper mine of its copper, and what's left is the system: a zone of foreign-owned production, walled off from the national economy, exempt from taxes, with a young disposable workforce and the law bent to keep them quiet. That system came back as the maquiladora. This episode of Backyard Empire — the series' modern capstone — follows the enclave e...

The bag of 'C&H Pure Cane Sugar from Hawaiʻi' in an American kitchen was the end of a long, engineered chain. This episode of Backyard Empire — a companion to the Hawaiʻi overthrow episode — looks at the economic and human machinery of sugar. After Native Hawaiians were dispossessed of their land, a tiny haole elite came to control nearly half the islands and planted them in cane. Because the Nati...

Everywhere else in this series, the empire owned the economy. In Hawaiʻi, it took the country. This episode of Backyard Empire tells three linked stories. In January 1893, a committee of mostly American sugar businessmen — backed by the U.S. minister and Marines landed from the USS Boston — overthrew Queen Liliuokalani and ended a sovereign kingdom; five years later the U.S. annexed the islands by...

After the United States took the Caribbean stage in 1898, American capital turned whole societies into single-crop suppliers. This episode of Backyard Empire follows monoculture as a system of control. In Cuba, US sugar corporations like the Cuban-American Sugar Company bought out local planters, built mill-town enclaves, and left workers dependent on the tiempo muerto, the 'dead season' of hunger...

For half a century, a forest in northern Argentina supplied the world with the chemical that turned hides into leather — and a single British company owned the forest, the towns, the railways, the police, and the money the workers were paid in. This episode of Backyard Empire tells the story of La Forestal — The Forestal Land, Timber and Railways Company — and the quebracho/tannin enclave it ran i...

In the 1960s, foreign companies won the right to mine nickel on Q'eqchi' Maya land at Lake Izabal, Guatemala — a 40-year concession on terms so generous that a group of professors at the national university formed a commission just to read the contract. They concluded it was a giveaway, and within months the men on that commission began to die. This episode of Backyard Empire traces the concession...

At the turn of the twentieth century the modern world ran on rubber — and rubber grew wild in one place: the Amazon. This episode of Backyard Empire follows the boom that built marble opera houses a thousand miles up the river and, on the Putumayo, produced one of the era's great atrocities. We trace the bicycle-and-automobile tire demand that made jungle sap a fortune; the surreal wealth of Manau...

For half a century, three mining families owned Bolivia's tin — and through the tin, owned Bolivia. Simon Patiño ran his empire from New York and Europe to keep it beyond Bolivian taxes; with the Aramayo and Hochschild houses he formed the oligarchy Bolivians called La Rosca, 'the screw.' This finale of Backyard Empire's 'The Mines' arc traces how that grip drew blood: on December 21, 1942, the ar...

High in the Peruvian Andes, an American company spent the twentieth century turning a landscape and its people into inputs. This episode of Backyard Empire — part two of 'The Mines' — follows the Cerro de Pasco Corporation's mechanism: the La Oroya smelter's smoke ruined the surrounding farmland, the company bought the dead fields cheaply and fenced the rest, and self-sufficient Andean communities...

Chile sits on the richest copper on earth, and for most of the twentieth century two American companies owned it. This episode of Backyard Empire — the first of a three-part 'The Mines' arc — traces what happened when Salvador Allende was elected in 1970 promising to nationalize Anaconda's and Kennecott's mines. After the 1971 nationalization, Washington answered on two tracks the Church Committee...

After the Supreme Court broke up the Standard Oil trust in 1911, the largest piece — Standard Oil of New Jersey — didn't shrink. It went south, and then it went global. This episode of Backyard Empire follows the oil giant across Latin America and into one of the most disquieting corporate stories of the twentieth century. First, the resource wars: how Standard Oil bought concessions from strongme...

For most of the twentieth century, one American company decided who governed, who worked, and who ate across much of Central America and the Caribbean. It grew bananas — but it also owned the railroads, the ports, and the politics. Latin Americans called it El Pulpo: the Octopus. This episode of Backyard Empire traces the United Fruit Company from an 1899 Boston merger to a hemispheric empire — an...

In the remote lowlands of 1960s Bolivia, American doctors raced to stop a lethal hemorrhagic fever the locals called "Black Typhus" — and a few years later, U.S.-trained Bolivian Rangers cornered and killed Che Guevara not far away. Did mousetraps and medicine help defeat a revolution? This episode of MARU & the Hunt for Che follows two threads of U.S. activity in eastern Bolivia. First, the Middl...