Lester D. Langley - The Banana Wars: United States Intervention in the Caribbean, 1898-1934

I n October 1931 Smedley Butler, embittered over his failure to become the commandant of the Marine Corps, watched solemnly as his two-star flag was slowly lowered in a special ceremony at Quantico, Virginia. Two months earlier, Old Gimlet Eye had enraged his fellow Quaker Herbert Hoover by giving what was described as an antiwar speech to a convention of legionnaires:

I spent 33 years... being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short. I was a racketeer for capitalism.... I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1916. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City [Bank] boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.

A professional soldier since the turn of the century, Butler was now, at age fifty, caught up in the national debate over the collapse of capitalism and its pernicious influence in American expansion in the Caribbean. He harangued the Bonus Marchers in Washington and in early 1933 told a Brooklyn audience: I wouldnt want to see a boy of mine march out with a Wall Street collar about his neck. Commenting on his speech, The Nation, a persistent critic of American imperialism, declared: General Butler ... serves his country better in peace than in war.

Butlers last hurrah was taking place just as the American military expedition to Nicaragua was winding up its affairs. By 1932 the marines had made the guard into an organization that seemed capable of dealing with the Sandinista threat. When Sandinistas tried to embarrass the celebration of the opening of the Len-EI Sauce railroad by staging an attack on the train a few days before the ceremony, Chesty Puller and his guardsmen drove them off in Wild West fashion.

Stimson had declared that once the elections of 1932 were held the marines would leave Nicaragua. His original plan for complete withdrawal had been frustrated by the Sandinista attacks in the East in March-April 1931. Once again, as in 1928, American troops and guardsmen supervised a Nicaraguan presidential election; when it was over, Juan B. Sacasa, in whose name the constitutionalist flag of revolt had been raised in 1926, had been chosen president of the republic.

Nicaraguas peace and stability could be preserved, the Americans believed, by the national guard. And the key to understanding the role of the guard in the years following lay in the political ambitions of the man Sacasa named to head it, Anastasio Somoza Garca. Somoza was, it has often been argued, the personal choice of General Matthews, the retiring American commander of the Guardia nacional. The Americans had been favorably impressed with Somoza since 1927 when the English-speaking Nicaraguan had served as Stimsons interpreter. Somoza had played a vital role in the often delicate political relations between Moncada and the marines. Julian Smith recalled: Somoza was our liaison with Moncada.... [He] was always loyal to us. I never knew Somoza to put anything over on the Americans. And when the retiring Americans put into motion their plan for staffing the Guardia commandwhich anticipated a nonpartisan guard but called for appointment on a bipartisan basisMoncada, the outgoing president, had an opportunity to name his protg Somoza as Guardia commander. The incoming executive, Juan Sacasa, reluctantly approved the choice.