United States "Manifest Destiny"
By 1930, over 40 percent of all the arable land in Puerto Rico had been converted into sugar plantations, which were entirely owned by Charles Allen and U.S. banking interests. These bank syndicates also owned the entire coastal railroad, and the San Juan international seaport. This land grab was not limited to Puerto Rico.
By 1930 the United Fruit Company also owned over one million acres of land in Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, Panama, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Mexico and Cuba. By 1940, in Honduras alone, the United Fruit Company owned 50 percent of all private land in the entire country. In Guatemala, the United Fruit Company owned 75 percent of all private land by 1942 - plus most of Guatemala's roads, power stations and phone lines, the only Pacific seaport, and every mile of railroad.
The U.S. government supported all these economic exploits, and provided military "persuasion" whenever necessary. Openly and proudly, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt declared that “It is manifest destiny for a nation to own the islands which border its shores,” and that if “any South American country misbehaves it should be spanked.”
Read more about this topic: Puerto Rican Nationalist Party
Famous quotes containing the words united states, united, states, manifest and/or destiny:
“And hereby hangs a moral highly applicable to our own trustee-ridden universities, if to nothing else. If we really wanted liberty of speech and thought, we could probably get it—Spain fifty years ago certainly had a longer tradition of despotism than has the United States—but do we want it? In these years we will see.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“In one notable instance, where the United States Army and a hundred years of persuasion failed, a highway has succeeded. The Seminole Indians surrendered to the Tamiami Trail. From the Everglades the remnants of this race emerged, soon after the trail was built, to set up their palm-thatched villages along the road and to hoist tribal flags as a lure to passing motorists.”
—For the State of Florida, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“That Cabot merely landed on the uninhabitable shore of Labrador gave the English no just title to New England, or to the United States generally, any more than to Patagonia.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There are obvious places in which government can narrow the chasm between haves and have-nots. One is the public schools, which have been seen as the great leveler, the authentic melting pot. That, today, is nonsense. In his scathing study of the nation’s public school system entitled “Savage Inequalities,” Jonathan Kozol made manifest the truth: that we have a system that discriminates against the poor in everything from class size to curriculum.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“Other nations have tried to check ... the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”
—John Louis O’Sullivan (1813–1895)