Erin ’s Reviews > Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire > Status Update

As Contra death squads massacred and raped their way through the Nicaraguan countryside, President Reagan called them "the moral equal of our Founding Fathers".

Cocaine was famously one of the titular ingredients in Coca-Cola; home shoppers could order morphine and hypodermic needles from Sears Roebuck & Co catalog.

Decades of civil war and US corporate and military interference have made the Northern Triangle of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador one of the most dangerous parts of the world to live in.

More importantly it sought to reclaim a mythical sense of past "greatness " by restoring the power of those it saw as "real Americans" who were usually understood to be white and native born( this passage is talking about the 1920s...but)

Anti-vagrancy laws were meant to intimidate freed Black citizens.

In 1970, Noriega was made Panama's chief of military intelligence. A year later he was formally put on the payroll of the CIA

Apartheid was billed as a mark of American modernity.

In 1954 the CIA orchestrated the overthrow of Guatemala's president, Jacobo Arbenz. America accused him of Communists sympathies but his real crime was trying to expropriate uncultivated farm lands and redistribute them to the poor.

Those who had gone to Cuba with the idea that they were going to save a people who were fair skinned were shocked to learn that most of the Cuban army and 40% of its officers were Black.

The American empire had a spoon in everybody's soup.