Harold Pinter acknowledgement speech

[Occhidiangela]

I don't really get it?.  Before I ask if you consider the US' actions in southern america a kind of european   garbage cleaning, maybe I should just ask you to explain it again.
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I'll try to be concise. America took on the mantle of Empire, in some quarters reluctantly, after the Empires of Europe self destructed in two massive Imperial Wars. In the process America tried to clean up some of the mess while undertaking another Imperial face off with Imperial Russia/USSR: mixing the two turned into a very dirty business, similar to the Great Game and the Race for Africa undertaken by various European Imperial powers in the 19th century.

The "get hands dirty in South America," the Banana Wars before FDR's Good Neighbor policy, had as a root cause the problems of the Monroe Doctrine, trying to keep European Expansion out of South America in the 1800's, and small nations continually on the brink of default to European Banks, and later American Banks, from the mid 1800s to early 1900's. Defaults risked European intervention, oftern referred to as gunboat dimplmacy, so American gunboat diplomacy was often used to re-establish credit, or effect a temporary seizure of the customs houses to get payments back on schedule and prevent a government going into default. Customs houses were one of the frew sources of hard currnency in a lot of Latin American countries. The "reschedule of payments" would preclude an Imperial intervention from Europe, or so some will argue.

The problem of corruption in most Banana Republic guaranteed a continual cycle of default, debt, and intervention. Considering the French supported Hapsburg intervention in Mexico in 1861 (Maxamillian and Loius Napoleon) American mistrust of Imperial Europe was well grounded.

A good, short, book on the topic: The Banana Wars: United States Intervention in the Caribbean, 1898-1934 : United States Intervention in the Caribbean, 1898-1934 by Lester D. Langley

For an insider's view, albeit biased due to his bitterness at being not selected as Commandant of the Marine Corps: War Is a Racket Smedley D. Butler Major General Butler, USMC, spent much of his career undertaking various Banana Wars.

The WW II follow on anti-Communist struggle in Central and South America was both a subset of the Neo Imperial face off with Russia/USSR, and a follow on to a very old cycle of corruption and intervention. The economic ties go back to the early 19th century and the Independence movements vis a vis Spain and Portugal. It all fell under the Monroe Doctrine, an explicit attempt to marginalize or minimze European Imperial influence in the Western Hemisphere.

A decent ref for post FDR action is: The Banana Wars: A History of United States Military Intervention in Latin America from the Spanish-American War to the Invasion of Panama by Ivan Musicant (also a former Marine) I haven't read this one, I read the others, but have been advised by other history buffs to put it on my "must read" list.

The entire policy and process has been fraught with "dirty deeds, (done dirt cheap?)" at regular intervals.

Occhi