The Invaded: How Latin Americans and Their Allies Fought and Ended U.S. Occupations

by Alan L. McPherson

In 1912 the United States sent troops into a Nicaraguan civil war, solidifying a decades-long era of military occupations in Latin America driven by the desire to rewrite the political rules of the hemisphere. In this definitive account of the resistance to the three longest occupations-in Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic-Alan McPherson analyzes these events from the perspective of the invaded themselves, showing why people resisted and why the troops eventually left.

Confronting the assumption that nationalism primarily drove resistance, McPherson finds more concrete-yet also more hatred for the brutality of the marines, fear of losing land, outrage at cultural impositions, and thirst for political power. These motivations blended into a potent mix of anger and resentment among both rural and urban occupied populations. Rejecting the view that Washington withdrew from Latin American occupations for moral reasons, McPherson details how the invaded forced the Yankees to leave, underscoring day-to-day resistance and the transnational network that linked New York, Havana, Mexico City, and other cities. Political culture, he argues, mattered more than military or economic motives, as U.S. marines were determined to transform political values and occupied peoples fought to conserve them. Occupiers tried to speed up the modernization and centralization of these poor, rural societies and, ironically, to build nationalism where they
found it lacking.

Based on rarely seen documents in three languages and five countries, this lively narrative recasts the very nature of occupation as a colossal tragedy, doomed from the outset to fail. In doing so, it offers broad lessons for today's invaders and invaded.

Genres: History

416 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[zack · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now this is my kind of history book—action packed, anti-interventionist, applicable to the present. I’m struggling to think of things to criticize or question, so I’ll start by going over all the positives. First, McPherson expertly tackles a very specific subject in three very specific places during very specific time periods and applies the equally specific lessons they can teach us to the present. Whereas Countryman’s conclusion was basically forgettable, McPherson’s is crucial: the broad cast of characters and set of events he juggles throughout the book are all revisited and wrapped up.

All of this is abetted by the nontraditional narrative format, which follows themes rather than a specific chronological or geographical course. This is not just a scattered, aesthetically disorganized postmodern work tied together by well-crafted chapters. McPherson caps off his discussion of occupation resistance with “Brambles and Thorns,” detailing the atrocities committed and (on rare occasions) endured by American troops. Before he transitions to the various methods of withdrawal, he discusses the cultures and politics of resistance, covering everything from race relations to drug regulations. Of course, all of this is effectively knitted together by the conclusion, which uses PowerPoint-style topic headings to break down “what we’ve learned” in a creative manner. In the end, under the “Beware Nation Builders” heading in particular, we discover that this is not a narrative of “invaded” victory. Therein lies the book’s success: it observes without impressing the bias or distortion of the ex-invader; the villains are human and the heroes, despite being mostly involved in all sorts of military juntas, are sympathetic.

My first question is simple, probably because I enjoyed the book so much. Does McPherson successfully address his thesis? In the end, I felt that I’d read a compelling narrative of American evil and Latin American, not a staunch defense of the argument McPherson presents on page four. I detected some very blatant attempts to attach parts of the narrative to the thesis in the withdrawal section—US officials turning to political reforms to maintain their control over Haiti, for example—but otherwise this appears to be a straightforward, informative take on native resistance.

Also: does The Invaded function as an effective allegory? The first sentence in the book references the Iraq War, and McPherson draws parallels between Monroe Doctrine-style interventionism and the invasion of Iraq from then on. Does the existence of this allegory bolster the relevance of a century-old conflict between an emerging global power and various technologically weaker countries, or does it overshadow it, turning the book into a preachy, twenty-first-century diatribe? My opinion on this is probably already clear. However, it's a question worth asking whenever historians strive to attach tales from the past to present issues. Can the America of today learn from The Invaded, who is it a wholly different country from the vicious Invader McPherson depicts?

[Joe Collins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting book on the forms of resistance to the US military interventions in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua, during the 1910s-30s. This book is broken down into the phases of the resistance and not by the actual timeline. This does cause some confusion when you are bouncing back and forth in time, but it makes sense for the topical theme of the discussions in that chapter. It really is more about the political resistance instead of the military resistance, but it does cover that too. The author does show the contradictions in the various resistance movements showing that they were not as true about what they claimed to be and how popular history likes to think of them. The author avoids coming out and saying that as it appears that me was is bias against the US interventions as well. He also shows that while a few of the US Marines were involved in criminal acts, that it was actually the local trained constabularies that were the real offenders when not supervised by the Marines. The author also shows that most of the resistance movements committed horrific criminal acts themselves. In the end, the interventions were a failure because any good that was done (free press, public schools, public works, fair elections, economic accountability) was losted shortly after the Marines left when all three countries reverted back to the old ways of the ‘Caudillo’.