The following includes some key moments in the history connected to a few Latin American communities in the U.S. and the countries they emigrated from. This is in no way comprehensive for the region or each country's history. 

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1846 - Mexico: The U.S., fulfilling the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, goes to war with Mexico and ends up with a third of Mexico's territory.

 

July 25, 1898 - Puerto Rico: 16,000 U.S. troops invaded, asserting that they were liberating the inhabitants from Spanish colonial rule, which had recently granted the island’s government limited autonomy. The island, as well as Cuba and the Philippines, were spoils of the Spanish-American War, which ended the following month.

 

1900-1930s - Guatemala and more: By the 1930s the company owned 3.5 million acres of land in Central America and the Caribbean and was the single largest land owner in Guatemala, and the largest employer in Central America by 1930. Such holdings gave it great power over the governments of small countries. That was one of the factors that led to the coining of the phrase "banana republic."

 

1909 - Nicaragua: Liberal President José Santos Zelaya of Nicaragua proposes that American mining and banana companies pay taxes; he has also appropriated church lands and legalized divorce, done business with European firms, and executed two Americans for participating in a rebellion. Forced to resign under U.S. pressure. The new president, Adolfo Díaz, is the former treasurer of an American mining company.

 

1910 - Nicaragua: U.S. Marines occupy Nicaragua to help support the Díaz regime.

 

1911 - Honduras: A business partner of United Fruit, Sam Zemurray, who would one day be head of the company, organized a private coup against the Honduran government in 1911. He and his mercenary partners put their own man in power over Honduras, who quickly gave them a tax-free concession of land for banana growth. For the next decade, Zumurray’s railroads were constructed across the country as he organized massive banana plantations with the choice land the government handed over to him.

 

January 22-25, 1932 - El Salvador: La Matanza, 'the slaughter' in Spanish, as it came to be known – allowed military dictatorships to monopolize political power in El Salvador while protecting the economic dominance of the landed elite. Military government killed an estimated 30,000 people. 

 

1948 - Puerto Rico: becomes commonwealth of the U.S.

 

1952 - Guatemala: The Guatemalan government under Jacobo Arbenz began expropriating unused United Fruit Company land to landless peasants. The company responded by intensively lobbying the U.S. government to intervene and mounting a misinformation campaign to portray the Guatemalan government as communist.

 

1946 - Regional: U.S. Army School of the Americas opens in Panama as a hemisphere-wide military academy. Its linchpin is the doctrine of National Security, by which the chief threat to a nation is internal subversion; this will be the guiding principle behind dictatorships in Chile, El Salvador, Mexico, and elsewhere.

 

June 18-27, 1954 - Guatemala: The U.S. CIA armed, funded, and trained a military force that deposed the democratically elected government of Guatemala and installed a pro-business military dictatorship with Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas as the country’s new president. Armas promptly returned all of the disputed landholdings to the United Fruit Company. He began his term as a loyal servitor of the U.S. and volunteered his flexibility to Vice President Nixon.

 

1960s - Guatemala: By the 1960s, Guatemala disintegrated into a bloody civil war as Armas’ oppressive dictatorship became more hard-line. The civil war between the newly formed leftist guerrillas and the government lasted for over thirty years, costing approximately 200,000 lives, mostly people of Mayan descent. When the U.S assisted in modernizing the government troops in 1965, kidnappings and assassinations significantly increased in a systematic manner. The war’s victims included farm workers, student activists, Catholic priests, and labor leaders who were part of a non-violent social movement. The war was devastating; more people were killed in this conflict than in any other Latin American war. The valiant efforts of the Guatemalan Historical Clarification Commission, which the government initiated at the end of the war, identified the genocide in the Mayan communities. Unfortunately, the report did not soften the culture of violence and racism fueled for thirty years, the effects of which still linger today.

 

March 25, 1961 - Regional: United Nations and the War on Drugs: UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs ushered in a prohibitionist global regime to combat the “serious evil” posed by “addiction to narcotic drugs.”

 

June 17, 1971 - Regional: United States and the War on Drugs: President Richard Nixon declared illegal drugs to be “public enemy number one” and announced an “all-out offensive” to be waged within and beyond U.S. borders in order to “fight and defeat this enemy.” For Latin America and the Caribbean, the “war on drugs” is no mere metaphor, but a lived reality with devastating consequences for millions of people—the brunt of the harms felt by the most vulnerable communities, whether in the form of brutal repression, callous abandonment, or both.

 

September 11, 1973 - Chile: U.S.-supported military coup kills Allende and brings Augusto Pinochet Ugarte to power. Pinochet imprisons hundreds of thousands of Chileans (torture and rape are the usual methods of interrogation), terminates civil liberties, abolishes unions, extends the work week to 48 hours, and reverses Allende's land reforms.

 

1978-81 - El Salvador: A right-wing junta takes over. U.S. begins massively supporting El Salvador, assisting the military in its fight against FMLN guerrillas. Death squads proliferate; Archbishop Romero is assassinated by right-wing terrorists; 35,000 civilians are killed.

 

1980 - Honduras: seeking a stable base for its actions in El Salvador and Nicaragua, tells the Honduran military to clean up its act and hold elections. The U.S. starts pouring in $100 million of aid a year and basing the contras on Honduran territory. Death squads are also active in Honduras, and the contras tend to act as a state within a state.

 

December 11-12, 1981 - El Salvador: The Salvadoran Army's Atlácatl Battalion, under the orders of (U.S. School of the Americas-trained) commander Domingo Monterrosa killed more than 811 civilians in what became known as “the El Mozote Massacre.”

 

1983 - Nicaragua: Boland Amendment prohibits CIA and Defense Dept. from spending money to overthrow the government of Nicaragua-- a law the Reagan administration violates.

 

1984 - Nicaragua: CIA mines three harbors. Nicaragua takes this action to the World Court, which brings an $18 billion judgment against the U.S. The U.S. refuses to recognize the Court's jurisdiction in the case.

 

1984 - El Salvador: U.S. spends $10 million to orchestrate elections there-- something of a farce, since left-wing parties are under heavy repression, and the military has already declared that it will not answer to the elected president.

 

September 21, 1984 - Panama: The School of the Americas was expelled from Panama under the terms of the Panama Canal Treaty, and it moved to Fort Benning, Georgia. 

 

1981 - Nicaragua: The CIA steps in to organize the contras there, who started the previous year as a group of 60 ex-National Guardsmen; by 1985 there are about 12,000 of them. 46 of the 48 top military leaders are ex-Guardsmen. The U.S. also sets up an economic embargo of Nicaragua

 

March 11, 1990 - Chile: The military dictatorship ended after years of resistance and a plebiscite vote. The election of Christian Democrat candidate Patricio Aylwin marked the start of a new era.

 

January 1, 1994 - Mexico: The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA, 1994) went into effect, relaxing trade restrictions between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. 

 

June 30, 2008 - Mexico and more: Supported by the US-financed Mérida Initiative, in 2006 the Mexican government declared a war on the drug cartels that has killed or led to the disappearance of 100,000 Mexicans so far; 90% of the cocaine that enters the US passes through Mexico, a trade that is now valued at between $19bn and $29bn.