“We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us” was a refrain I heard growing up—common amongst Mexican-Americans and Chicanos, spoken in my family by my mother as a reminder that no matter what the United States portrays Latinos to be, we belong here.
It’s a saying grounded in the historical truth that, as the 1800s marched onwards, so did the U.S. Trampling underfoot people that it did not want for land that it could abuse, the U.S. pressed deeper and deeper into what was then the “Western Frontier.” It used the fragility and instability of its neighbor, Mexico, as a tool to fill Indigenous and Mexican land with white, slave owning Texan settlers and redraw the border again and again.
Now they want to mark the border further south and rename the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.”
This foundation of interventionism, occupation and annexation is the baseline on which American diplomacy towards Latin America is built. Donald Trump’s most recent threats to take over the Panama Canal, send troops into Mexico and occupy Greenland are the most bare manifestation of this common thread in American foreign policy.
Most of the coverage in the media has been focused on Trump’s rhetoric directed towards Greenland—currently a Danish territory governed by the pro-independence Community of the People party. Controlling Greenland has been Trump’s ambition since his first presidency—which he first vocalized around 2017.
The justification is that Greenland is strategically vital to control, with important military bases and the maritime sea lane known as the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom Gap or GIUK Gap. Greenland also has critical natural resources. In fact, it has the largest deposits of rare-earth elements outside of China.
Finally, despite the Greenlandic government’s fierce commitment to independence from both the U.S. and its controlling power, Denmark, Donald Trump has tried to paint annexation as the will of the Greenlandic people. Specifically, when he sent Donald Trump Jr. to the capital, Nuuk, he had a photo-op with Greenlanders in MAGA hats at a hotel. However, this photo-op was later proven to be staged as Trump employees offered free meals to a group of homeless people if they wore the hats and participated in the photo.
However, this focus on Greenland masks the much more sinister and realistic threats against Latin America, specifically Panama. Denmark is a NATO ally with Greenland under its umbrella. Panama, however, has a history pockmarked with invasions, colonialism and economic sabotage coming from the U.S. These threats are precedented.
Panama separated from Colombia in 1903, with the backing of US warships. Immediately upon its declaration of independence, the U.S. pressured the Panamanian government into honoring a treaty that they had signed with Colombia and handing over control of the Isthmus of Panama—the narrowest point of the country. The U.S. secured for itself control over the strip of land that would be turned into the now lucrative Panama Canal and with it, large chunks of land on either side. This territory, known as the ‘Canal Zone’ was not uninhabited. Towns and settlements dotted the countryside as well as the pre-existing Panama Railroad.
U.S. control of the Zone was colonial in nature, even settler-colonial. White Americans who moved with their families to the Zone to govern the canal or those who were deployed with their families, lived in separate towns gated and walled off from the Panamanian communities. A fence was built to fortify the border between Panama and the Canal Zone.
It was governed under Jim Crow laws—splitting the population into “Silver” and “Gold” populations. Silver populations were Panamanian, paid in undervalued Pesos and forced into separate institutions from the U.S., white, “Gold” population. White Americans attempted to form their own identity as “Zonians”—a settler population of bureaucrats, military deployees and their families who were actively hostile to any hint of Panamanian identity.
So hostile, that on Jan. 9, 1964, when a crowd of hundreds of Panamanian high school students marched into the Canal Zone with a Panamanian flag to protest the occupation, white high schoolers joined together in a mob to assault them with the backing of the U.S. military and police. Many Panamanians died in the ensuing fight and later riots in an incident now commemorated in the country as Martyr’s Day.
Outside of Panama, the U.S. has thrown its military around in Latin America at just about any opportunity it could find. It occupied “Santo Domingo” (modern-day Dominican Republic) from 1916 to 1924. It occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1935, Nicaragua from 1912 to 1933 (almost as long as they occupied Afghanistan) and a plethora of other Latin American sovereign states.
They even, relatively recently, put boots on the ground in Panama to oust its military dictator Manuel Noriega in 1989. An interesting turn of events when you consider that Manuel Noriega was previously seen as an ally by the U.S., who funded him as long as he kept arms flowing to anti-communist death squads in Nicaragua.
The American boot on the neck of Latin America was even flexed in 2009 when the CIA encouraged the Honduran military to oust the democratically elected, left wing president.
I rattle off this list of bloody interventions not to bore you, but to show just how frequent and often deadly the relationship between the U.S. and Latin America is. It is a history defined by colonialism, brutality and military intervention. It has killed more people than anyone could tally and has destroyed an entire continent’s infrastructure and living conditions. In the ashes, they prop up dictators and fund death squads.
What remains is the boomerang of a humanitarian crisis as the caravans of migrants that Trump fearmongers about form to escape the conditions the U.S. created.
Donald Trump’s militaristic rhetoric might seem like a ratcheting up if you have had the privilege not to pay attention, but in reality, it’s just taking the mask off a system of interventionism that hasn’t ceased since the late 1800s. It isn’t unique, it’s just overt, and it frustrates me that the majority of the coverage centers around threats against the “Western” nations of Denmark/Greenland and Canada.
It reminds me of coverage around Ukraine and the double standard of empathy. The unconscious bias that Western-aligned nations are less deserving of conflict or somehow specially exempt from it. That the lives of white Westerners matter more when threatened as opposed to that of brown people in the Southern Hemisphere.
Furthermore, the precedented nature is what makes the threats against Panama and Latin America in some way more dangerous. This is not a departure from traditional U.S. policy, it is a continuation of it. These new wars would be easy to sell to a population already primed to see the domination of Latin America as the way of the world and its exploitation as a fact of life.
So, as seen with the anti-war struggles of the past in Vietnam or the present with Gaza, we must stay vigilant and educated on the issue of interventionism in Latin America. If, or when, such an invasion occurs, we must take the steps necessary to innoculate ourselves against xenophobia and stand up against aggression.
I ask you, I beg of you, to take Trump at his word. To care.
