Getting to know Uncle Sam

The Panama Canal is a navigation channel located between the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. The canal crosses the narrowest point of the Isthmus of Panama, with an extension of 82 km. This strait is considered one of the great engineering works of the 20th century because it operates through locks at each end that lift ships to Gatun Lake, an artificial lake created to reduce the amount of work required to excavate the canal to 27.5 meters above sea level and then lower them to the level of the Pacific or the Atlantic. Prior to its opening, the natural passages used between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans were the Strait of Magellan and Cape Horn, located at the southern tip of Chile.  However, not many people are aware that after the construction of this engineering marvel, there was an intervention by the U.S. government to take over the jurisdiction of this channel. It is for this reason that for a more comprehensive understanding of this historical process, we offer you a...

CIA activities in Laos had their beginnings in the 1950s. In 1959, US Special Operations Forces (military and CIA) began training some Laotian soldiers in unconventional warfare techniques as early as the fall of 1959 under the code name "Erawan". As Ahern (2009) rightly points out is that under this code name, General Vang Pao, who served the Lao royal family, recruited and trained his Hmong and Iu-Mien soldiers. The Hmong and Iu-Mien were targeted as allies after President John F. Kennedy, who refused to send more U.S. soldiers into battle in Southeast Asia, took office. Instead, he called on the CIA to use its tribal forces in Laos and "do everything possible to launch guerrilla operations in North Vietnam with its Asian recruits." General Vang Pao then recruited and trained his Hmong soldiers to ally with the CIA and fight against North Vietnam. The CIA itself claims that CIA air operations in Laos from 1955 to 1974 were the "largest paramilitary operations...

If you head to your kitchen right now, there's a good chance you'll find a banana ready to be enjoyed. Over the years, this fruit has become highly popular in households around the world. Nonetheless, bananas are a fragile fruit, mainly because they spoil quickly. So, the only way for the trade of bananas to be profitable is to have huge plantations of the fruit. And the only way to achieve this amount of massive banana production is through the absolute control of the supply chain. It is for this reason that in 1900, the different banana companies from the United States decided to merge and create a single company called "The United Fruit Company". The purpose of this decision was to finally control the entire production chain. It was at this time that this mega-company set its sights on Central America with the aim of achieving the longed-for control of the aforementioned supply chain. However, this control meant also controlling the entire life of the workers in th...

Carlos Castillo Armas, the CIA-backed leader of Operation PBSuccess, driving into Guatemala City. Source: National Archives First of all, it is important to clarify that the coup d'état that rocked Guatemala in 1954 was the result of the covert operation called PBSUCCESS (CIA Cryptonym). As Mainwaring & Schenoni (2018)  rightly points out. this operation was organized by the U.S.CIA to overthrow Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, the democratically elected President of Guatemala, for opposing the interests of the United Fruit Company and for allowing members of Guatemala's communist party - the Guatemalan Labor Party - to influence the most important decisions of his government.  The Árbenz government presented a series of reforms that U.S. espionage considered communist and attributed to Soviet influence. They then spread the fear that Guatemala was going to become what CIA Director Allen Dulles called "a Soviet beachhead in America " (enemy position for invasion). These accu...