"W hen Hitler swallowed Czechoslovakia in 1938 and then divided Poland with Stalin in 1939, my parents' generation decided, coming home from the war, to place the sovereignty of nation states at the heart of the United Nations Charter. With the operation in Venezuela, our generation has to ask, and not for the first time, whether anything now survives of a legal doctrine designed to protect the weak from the strong."
"Every Latin American can recite the twentieth century litany of American violations of Latin American territorial integrity. When, in 1954, the democratically elected president of Guatemala launched a land reform program that damaged the interests of the United Fruit Company, the Central Intelligence Agency, on President Dwight Eisenhower's orders, arranged a coup that sent Jacobo Árbenz into exile. When Fidel Castro overthrew the Batista government in Cuba, President John F. Kennedy ordered the abortive Bay of Pigs operation, in 1961, to topple the Castro Regime."
Hitler's conquest of Czechoslovakia and the partition of Poland led postwar leaders to center national sovereignty in the United Nations Charter. The Monroe Doctrine, established in 1823, treated Latin America as an American sphere of influence and made regional sovereignty contingent on US discretion. US interventions repeatedly violated that sovereignty: the 1902 Panama Canal intrusion, the 1954 CIA-backed coup in Guatemala after land reform harmed United Fruit, the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion aimed at toppling Castro, and the 1973 Chilean coup linked to the Nixon administration. Recent operations involving Venezuela indicate continued erosion of legal protections for weaker states.
Read at The Walrus
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