Resolved: The United States FederalGovernment should substantiallyreform its policy toward one or morecountries in Central/South America. Stoa Debate Resources 2025-26
The United States Federal Government should significantly reform its foreign policy toward one or more of the following Central American countries: Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. 2024-2025 NCFCA Debate Resolutions
How can the U.S. best promote prosperity and freedom in Central and South America? Or should the USFG even try, given that past interventions have resulted in (or contributed to) diplomatic and foreign policy disasters? What does the U.S. Constitution instruct in regard to U.S. foreign policy? Here are John Quincy Adams words from his 1821 July 4th speech:
America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, equal justice, and equal rights. She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations, while asserting and maintaining her own.
She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when the conflict has been for principles to which [32] she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama, the European World, will be contests between inveterate power, and emerging right.
Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.
She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.
The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.
In 1823 James Monroe announced the U.S. policy to oppose European colonialism in Latin America. The involvement of European powers in the New World would be viewed as a threat to the United States. However, at the time the U.S. had limited army and navy power and could therefore do little to oppose European or even Latin American countries militarily.
In the 1820s over 70% of Americans were farmers and still 64% in 1850. Though the U.S. still had much fertile future farmland, access to guano was a political priority (“In his 1850 State of the Union Address, President Millard Fillmore spent a full paragraph on tough talk, committing to do anything necessary to make Peruvian guano available to American farmers.”).
An earlier debate topic on U.S. foreign policy commitments noted The Guano Islands Act of 1856:
Though it authorized our nation’s earliest imperialistic land grab outside our continent, the 1856 Guano Islands Act is little known today. The act stated that the United States could claim any island that had seabird guano on it, so long as there were no other claims or inhabitants. Any guano mined had to be sold to American farmers as fertilizer at a reasonable price. Guano, or seabird excrement, was at the time the finest natural fertilizer, and farmers needed it to replenish the nutrients in their fields and increase their crop yield.
From the Monroe Doctrine and the 1856 Guano Islands Act, U.S. foreign policy advanced to mail delivery across Central America. In U.S. in Latin America: Postal Subsidies, Cholera, Regeneration I discuss the public health component of early U.S. military entanglement in Central America.
US military commitments after guano (earlier post) turned to subsidizing mail sent across Central America with postal subsidies. The demand for mail and Americans traveling to California created incentives for US steamship companies to connect via overland routes across Panama and Nicaragua. But those overland routes went through sovereign countries where distance and speed, as well as disease were key concerns. Competition between Panama and Columbia overland routes later led to military interventions.
We can make the case that William Walker and his early regenerators had good intentions.
His goal was “regeneration” for Nicaragua that would rid the overland route of malaria and cholera. Cholera had swept through New Orleans and other American cities, and tropical diseases had long been endemic across Central America. Critics of lockdowns in the US to slow pandemics are also critical of taking over foreign countries to improve their public health programs.
Recent US public health policy strongly promoting COVID vaccines across Central American populations. Whatever one believes about early COVID vaccines, there was little evidence for continued boosters among American health-care workers. How extensive are US public health programs, funding, and policy for Central and South American countries? Is this another chapter in U.S. regeneration projects for Central America? What was the COVID IFR in 2024 vs. potential risk of boosters, especially for the young and healthy? CDC claimed booster vaccine hesitancy is caused by misinformation, and works with social media companies to “protect” the public from “harmful” vaccine booster stories.
June 2024 data for vaccines doses per person across Central American countries is available from Statista here. It should be straightforward to review excess all-cause mortality across these same countries to see if there is a relationship between too-few and perhaps too-many booster shots. And, again, debaters need not take a position on early variants and early vaccines. Going forward, with current variants and boosters, should US policy continue promoting boosters to Central American governments and people? See, for example
CDC in Honduras supported the health ministry to expand access to COVID-19 vaccines and create a communications campaign to increase the number of people getting vaccinated. The Ministry of Health (MOH) in Honduras deployed teams of health care workers who went door to door to give residents a COVID-19 vaccine at home. … [Background] CDC has collaborated with public health institutions in the Central America Region since the 1960s.
And how about U.S. Banana policy for Central and South America? Bananas are big business in Central America, along with coffee and other agricultural products ( as well as pineapples, melons, beans, peas and okra.).
Ecuador, Brazil, and Columbia in South America are also major banana exporters.
U.S. banana companies have a long history of investing in banana production and transportation in Latin America and these firms have, from time to time, encouraged U.S. military interventions to protect their businesses and assets.
Banana policy critics claim that by paying a little more for bananas (say 29 cents instead of 19 cents at Trader Joe’s), we could improve living conditions for banana workers.
It would seem crazy to criticize Chiquita, Dole, or Del Monte for importing foreign “global” bananas from Guatemala, Ecuador, Costa Rica, and Honduras instead of growing “national” bananas in the U.S.. Banana trees grow better in tropical climates.
For more Central American banana discussion see this post on the Netflix production of One Hundred Years of Solitude:
The Netflix production will face the challenge of whether to stay true to the novel or to actual history, especially with the final “massacre” of banana workers at the behest of United Fruit. A Google search brings up first this quote from a 2014 article in The Nation:
The climax of One Hundred Years of Solitude is famously based on a true historical event that took place shortly after García Márquez’s birth: in 1928, in the Magdalena banana zone on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, not far from where the author was born, the Colombian military opened fire on striking United Fruit Company plantation workers, killing an unknown number.
The Nation claims this novel presaged a future of repression across Latin American by corporations and right-wing dictators: “García Márquez so uncannily anticipates in One Hundred Years. ‘There must have been three thousand of them,’ says the novel’s lone survivor of the banana massacre, referring to the murdered strikers. ‘There haven’t been any dead here,’ he’s told.”
So for future Netflix viewers as with past One Hundred Years of Solitude readers, is there a less magical past for banana workers in Central and South America? Was banana production a world of exploitation and repression for Latin Americans? Or was the banana business more a world of entrepreneurship and opportunity providing livelihoods for millions? ;;;
In Fiction as History: The Bananeras and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (Journal of Latin American Studies, May, 1998), a 1990 television interview with Gabriel García Márquez is discussed. A Colombian journalist asks about the “masacre de las bananeras” and Gabriel García Márquez replies that only a handful of people died during the strike. Nothing like the 3,000 in his novel.
So maybe the Netflix screenwriters will show a massacre as readers of One Hundred Years of Solitude experienced it, and then the scene will dissolve to the television interview with Gabriel García Márquez explaining that though few protesting workers were actually killed, his novel needed a much bigger massacre to be forgotten, in order to show the evils of foreign capital and the banana industry.
The long shadow of the past Past operations of United Fruit company, along with past US military interventions still “cast a shadow” notes this March 26, 2024 article on The World. Could Fairtrade bananas raise wages for banana workers without cutting the demand too much. That depends upon how elastic the demand for bananas is. If retail prices for bananas doubles, for example, consumers will buy fewer bananas, but how many fewer? Declines in bananas bought translates to declines in jobs for banana workers and transporters.
From U.S. foreign policies claiming guano islands, to public health and mail delivery regenerators, to banana industry and military interventions, we reach today’s debates over migration and wealth inequalities. Debaters should welcome international debate resolutions and the opportunity to understand what has caused the vast prosperity gap between the people born in Central and South America and their wealthy neighbors to the north.
