Backyard Empire: The United States in Latin America

Let's ReThink History

For two centuries the United States has treated the Western Hemisphere as its sphere of influence — and how, and why, is a messier and more revealing story than the textbook version. From the war with Mexico and the USS Maine to the Cold War interventions, the corporations that drew their own borders, and the invasions of Grenada and Panama — told from primary documents, declassified cables, and peer-reviewed scholarship. Narrated by AI voices from sourced, human-reviewed research.

  1. 15h ago

    How Sugar Barons Stole the Hawaiian Kingdom

    Everywhere else in this series, the empire owned the economy. In Hawaiʻi, it took the country. This episode of Backyard Empire tells three linked stories. In January 1893, a committee of mostly American sugar businessmen — backed by the U.S. minister and Marines landed from the USS Boston — overthrew Queen Liliuokalani and ended a sovereign kingdom; five years later the U.S. annexed the islands by a joint resolution of Congress, over the objections of most Native Hawaiians. The families behind it ran Hawaiʻi for half a century as the 'Big Five' (Castle & Cooke, Alexander & Baldwin, C. Brewer, American Factors, Theo H. Davies) — controlling sugar, shipping, banking, and politics, and dividing a multi-ethnic plantation workforce by ethnicity. That held until 1946, when the workers struck together under the ILWU, shut nearly every plantation for 79 days, and broke the oligarchy. This is the series' limit case — an enclave that annexed a nation. We keep the Native Hawaiian perspective central, note the 1993 Apology Resolution, and keep the contested questions (overthrow vs revolution; legality of annexation-by-resolution) open. Narrated by AI voices from sourced, human-reviewed research.

    50 min

  2. 16h ago

    How Corporate Monoculture Built Slave Empires in Sugar and Henequen

    After the United States took the Caribbean stage in 1898, American capital turned whole societies into single-crop suppliers. This episode of Backyard Empire follows monoculture as a system of control. In Cuba, US sugar corporations like the Cuban-American Sugar Company bought out local planters, built mill-town enclaves, and left workers dependent on the tiempo muerto, the 'dead season' of hunger between harvests, while the Platt Amendment kept the door open for US intervention. In Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, absentee American sugar companies took the best coastal land. And in Mexico's Yucatan, the henequen 'green gold' boom — the fiber for the binder twine of the world's mechanical reapers — ran on a secret 1902 pact between International Harvester and the Molina export house, and on the debt peonage of Maya laborers and deported Yaqui prisoners, the system John Kenneth Turner exposed in Barbarous Mexico. The capital here is overwhelmingly American. We keep the disputed numbers contested and the human cost — bondage and hunger — at the center. Part one of a two-part set; the companion covers Hawaii. Narrated by AI voices from sourced, human-reviewed research.

    32 min

  3. 18h ago

    The British Company That Owned an Argentine Forest — and Massacred Its Workers

    For half a century, a forest in northern Argentina supplied the world with the chemical that turned hides into leather — and a single British company owned the forest, the towns, the railways, the police, and the money the workers were paid in. This episode of Backyard Empire tells the story of La Forestal — The Forestal Land, Timber and Railways Company — and the quebracho/tannin enclave it ran in the Gran Chaco from 1906 to 1963: how a provincial debt handed it some two million hectares of 'axe-breaker' forest; the closed enclave it built (company towns, company scrip, its private police the Gendarmeria Volante, suppressed schooling) while controlling the world's tannin supply; the 1919-1921 strikes by the anarcho-syndicalist FORA; and the 1921 massacre, when the company's police and the paramilitary Patriotic League killed hundreds of workers and their families. Then the ending: ~90% of the forest cut, the company gone in 1963, ghost towns and a ruined landscape left behind, while the same British capital shifted to cheaper African wattle. The capital was British, not American — the U.S. enters only as a leather market; the death toll (~500-600) and company-vs-state responsibility are kept contested. Narrated by AI voices from sourced, human-reviewed research.

    43 min

  4. 22h ago

    The Nickel Mine That Got Its Critics Killed

    In the 1960s, foreign companies won the right to mine nickel on Q'eqchi' Maya land at Lake Izabal, Guatemala — a 40-year concession on terms so generous that a group of professors at the national university formed a commission just to read the contract. They concluded it was a giveaway, and within months the men on that commission began to die. This episode of Backyard Empire traces the concession handed out by the post-1954 military state, first to the American Hanna Mining Company and then to Canada's INCO through its EXMIBAL subsidiary; the forced displacement of the Q'eqchi' Maya amid a U.S.-backed counterinsurgency; and the assassinations of 1970-71 — Julio Camey Herrera killed, Alfonso Bauer Paiz wounded, and the wheelchair-using congressman Adolfo Mijangos Lopez gunned down just weeks before the company got its favorable terms. Then the long tail: the mine's revival under Canadian HudBay and Russian-owned Solway, the El Estor evictions and killings that produced lawsuits in Canadian courts, and the 2023 Inter-American Court ruling. The capital was American, then Canadian, then Russian — not primarily U.S.; the American thread is the U.S.-backed military state that guarded the concession. Narrated by AI voices from sourced, human-reviewed research.

    56 min

  5. Jun 16

    How ITT Tried to Buy a Coup: Telephones, Electricity, and the Fall of Allende

    Most of this series is about things dug out of the ground. This one is about the wires and the current — the telephone systems and power grids a modern country can't function without, owned by foreign corporations. International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT) owned the phone systems of Cuba, Chile, and beyond; the American & Foreign Power Company owned the electric utilities of Cuba and nine more Latin American countries. They charged high rates, paid little tax, and resisted local control — until governments began nationalizing them, starting with Castro's Cuba. Then the most notorious case: when Salvador Allende was elected in Chile in 1970 and moved to nationalize ITT's phone company, ITT — chairman Harold Geneen and board member John McCone, a former CIA director — offered money to the CIA (a reported $1 million) and pushed to wreck Chile's economy to stop him, a scandal exposed in leaked memos and 1973 Senate hearings. We keep the crucial caveat front and center: ITT was an eager instigator, not the puppet-master — the CIA ran its own operations (Episode 4) and rejected some ITT proposals. A study in how far a corporation tried to go to protect a monopoly. Narrated by AI voices from sourced, human-reviewed research.

    42 min

  6. Jun 16

    How Capital Flight Replaced Private Armies: Maquiladoras and Fast Fashion

    Strip the banana plantation of its bananas and the copper mine of its copper, and what's left is the system: a zone of foreign-owned production, walled off from the national economy, exempt from taxes, with a young disposable workforce and the law bent to keep them quiet. That system came back as the maquiladora. This episode of Backyard Empire — the series' modern capstone — follows the enclave economy into the present. Mexico's 1965 Border Industrialization Program and then NAFTA built tax-free export zones where U.S. and European apparel brands make clothes through local subcontractors; the factories primarily employ young women under long shifts and poverty wages; mandatory pregnancy testing was used to avoid maternity costs (documented by Human Rights Watch); and independent unions are suppressed through 'protection' and 'paper' unions. The model spread to Central America's Free Trade Zones (Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala) and on to Asia. The heart of it is the new way the system keeps order: La Forestal had a private police force, United Fruit could call the Marines — the maquiladora just threatens to leave. Demand more, and the factory reopens in a cheaper country. We keep the contested questions (exploitative vs. better-than-alternatives) open. Narrated by AI voices from sourced, human-reviewed research.

    54 min

  7. Jun 16

    The Human Machine Behind C&H Sugar: Hawaiʻi's Plantation Labor System

    The bag of 'C&H Pure Cane Sugar from Hawaiʻi' in an American kitchen was the end of a long, engineered chain. This episode of Backyard Empire — a companion to the Hawaiʻi overthrow episode — looks at the economic and human machinery of sugar. After Native Hawaiians were dispossessed of their land, a tiny haole elite came to control nearly half the islands and planted them in cane. Because the Native population had collapsed from disease and would not be made into plantation hands, the planters imported over 300,000 contract laborers from China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and Portugal — and housed them in separate camps and paid them different wages by ethnicity, on purpose, so they could not unite. For decades the early strikes broke along ethnic lines and were defeated. Meanwhile the Big Five integrated forward through the C&H cooperative, refining and marketing their sugar on the mainland at Crockett, California — itself a company town. We end where the system broke: the multi-ethnic workforce uniting under the ILWU after WWII. We keep the disputed figures contested and the workers' experience at the center. Narrated by AI voices from sourced, human-reviewed research.

    42 min

  8. 1d ago

    Blood and Marble: The Amazon Rubber Boom's Forgotten Genocide

    At the turn of the twentieth century the modern world ran on rubber — and rubber grew wild in one place: the Amazon. This episode of Backyard Empire follows the boom that built marble opera houses a thousand miles up the river and, on the Putumayo, produced one of the era's great atrocities. We trace the bicycle-and-automobile tire demand that made jungle sap a fortune; the surreal wealth of Manaus and Iquitos; and the horror beneath it — Julio Cesar Arana's British-registered Peruvian Amazon Company enslaving, torturing, and killing the Huitoto and Bora peoples to tap the trees. We follow the three witnesses who exposed it — Benjamin Saldana Rocca, the American engineer Walter Hardenburg, and the British consul Roger Casement — and the smuggled seeds that, by founding the Asian plantations, collapsed the boom around 1912. Finally, the American coda: Henry Ford's Fordlandia. An honest note throughout: the worst actor was British-registered Peruvian capital, not American, and the death toll is genuinely contested. Narrated by AI voices from sourced, human-reviewed research.

    45 min
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For two centuries the United States has treated the Western Hemisphere as its sphere of influence — and how, and why, is a messier and more revealing story than the textbook version. From the war with Mexico and the USS Maine to the Cold War interventions, the corporations that drew their own borders, and the invasions of Grenada and Panama — told from primary documents, declassified cables, and peer-reviewed scholarship. Narrated by AI voices from sourced, human-reviewed research.

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