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:
“The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name.... We must be impartial in thought as well as in action ... a nation that neither sits in judgment upon others nor is disturbed in her own counsels and which keeps herself fit and free to do what is honest and disinterested and truly serviceable for the peace of the world.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother’s side was not an Indian chief.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“My only rival, the United States cavalry.”
—James Kevin McGuinness, and John Ford. Mrs. Yorke (Maureen O’Hara)
“You should never assume contempt for that which it is not very manifest that you have it in your power to possess, nor does a wit ever make a more contemptible figure than when, in attempting satire, he shows that he does not understand that which he would make the subject of his ridicule.”
—William Lamb Melbourne, 2nd Viscount (1779–1848)
“What time has been wasted during man’s destiny in the struggle to decide what man’s next world will be like! The keener the effort to find out, the less he knew about the present one he lived in.”
—Sean O’Casey (1884–1964)