In his recent inauguration speech, Donald Trump took pages from America's grand foundational story: He invoked the doctrine of Manifest Destiny which, he said, will soon lead the United States to plant its flag on Mars; he praised the imperialist policies of former Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt in the Western Hemisphere; and he insisted, once again, that the United States must regain control of the Panama Canal to rectify the national grievance of having ceded it to Panamanian control by bilateral treaty in 1999, a decade after the last U.S. military invasion in Central America.
While Trump presents these characters as the pioneers, both today and yesterday, of a heroic “America” on the cusp of global progress, in their own time important voices in El Salvador had much to say about them and their agendas in our corner of the world: In real time, the very thing Trump admires in retrospect was —and still is— cause for anxiety, resentment and hostility.
The doctrine of Manifest Destiny stated that the United States had a mission to expand its dominance and spread democracy and capitalism across the continent. In the mid-nineteenth century, when this doctrine became fashionable, and in its name the United States had seized California from Mexico and William Walker invaded Nicaragua, the official publication of El Salvador reacted with indignation. La Gaceta pointed out that the northern country was engaged in “the criminal enterprise of usurping territories” in contrast with “the Spanish-American race” which “invades no one, disturbs no one in the possession of what is theirs”.
Later on, the Salvadoran population became very alarmed when McKinley took advantage of the Cuban independence movement to start a war with Spain in 1898, which allowed him to turn Cuba into a protectorate and to take possession of Puerto Rico. During the naval part of that war, it became clear that it was strategically expedient to build a passage between the oceans to easily move the navy from California to the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic ports. Military strategy dictated that the next great project had to be a canal, which also offered enormous commercial advantages. Thus Roosevelt embarked on the Panama Canal project with such enthusiasm that he did not mind dismembering the department of Panama from Colombia in 1903. From then on, the strategists of the Department of Defense decided that in order to protect the Canal it was necessary to control the entire Caribbean area.
The Salvadoran reaction was instantaneous. Vicente Acosta published the allusive poem “Las águilas del norte” (The Eagles of the North) in the magazine La Quincena, a couple of weeks after the dismemberment of Panama. It said:
The bizarre eagles are ready now
of the bugle to the hoarse vibrations
for the enormous hunt of nations
the baleful beak and the powerful talons.
In a few words, with the vivacity of a good TikTok video, the poet from Cuscatlán warned about the aggressiveness of the “eagle” and what this meant for the future: “the enormous hunt of nations”.
Another publication in La Quincena, this time by a Colombian living in El Salvador, Francisco Gamboa, criticized those who had promoted the U.S. action from his homeland. His poem “A propósito de Panamá” (On Panama) condemned “the corrupt traffickers / whose only moral is money”, clarifying that for them “selling or renting themselves out comes first”.
In 1914, Salvador Merlos, the important —and unjustly forgotten— Salvadoran anti-imperialist intellectual, had something to say about the presidents whom Trump so admires. Merlos wrote, “Never has the presidential chair of the United States been so frowned upon as when it was occupied by McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft.” The writer reserved most of his opprobrium for Theodore Roosevelt, who “mutilated heroic Colombia, usurping the rich department of Panama.”
From our country it was clearly seen that Manifest Destiny and the actions of McKinley and Roosevelt would have negative ramifications for the population, opening the door to interventionism (“the enormous hunt for nations”) and the rapacity of the oligarchs. So it was. During the first third of the 20th century, U.S. gunboats patrolled the waters of the area and the United States intervened with more or less intensity and permanence throughout the region. It made and unmade in Panama. U.S. marines marched through the streets of Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua. The very finances of these countries were administered by imperial representatives. The Platt Amendment to the Cuban constitution allowed direct U.S. interference in Cuban politics.
Acosta, Gamboa, and Merlos gave voice to a widespread sentiment that came to characterize the population of El Salvador. A U.S. diplomat said that our country was “the troublemaker of Central America.” When Manuel Enrique Araujo was president of El Salvador (1911-1913), he became a Latin American leader because he had the courage to confront President Taft of the United States, warning him of the serious consequences of an invasion of Nicaragua. The Dominican A. Freites Roques wrote shortly after the assassination of our martyred leader that he was an “illustrious Latin American” who “dignifiedly stood out in life against the abuses of imperialist policy.” Few people who walk along the Alameda Manuel Enrique Araujo in San Salvador, where Casa Presidencial is located, know why he was such an admired president.
Concern with U.S. expansionism was not limited to educated minorities. When the marines landed to occupy Nicaragua in 1912, thousands of residents of our capital city flocked to Bolívar Park to protest the imperialist action. During the same week there were similar demonstrations in cities and towns throughout the country. It was at that time that Prudencia Ayala and other women like her were introduced to political activism fighting against imperialism.
Opposition to U.S. interventionism in the region continued for years, even at the official level, but the might of the “eagle” and its gunboats and capitalists was unstoppable. Although El Salvador was never a protectorate and the traces of the empire were not so visible, in practice the differences with Nicaragua were much smaller than they seemed. As early as 1921, the U.S. representative wrote to his superiors that President Jorge Meléndez did not make any important decision without consulting him. Investors such as the miner H.P. Garthwaite and the railroader Minor Keith came and went freely from Casa Presidencial, shielded by the lack of official transparency as they cut deals very lucrative for them personally, and harmful for the country. After a 1922 loan, a tax auditor appointed by Wall Street banks and the State Department controlled 70 percent of El Salvador’s customs revenues. Ships of the Pacific fleet, such as the U.S.S. Denver or the U.S.S. Cleveland, visited Salvadoran ports whenever the empire's diplomats wanted their influence to be felt.
A dispatch from U.S. diplomat William Schuyler, dated 1921, is particularly illustrative. Observing the vulnerability of the Salvadoran government to external pressure due to its fiscal situation, he wrote to his superiors: “This is a great opportunity to control finances and thereby stability of this country, and should be seized.”
For those who still believe that it would have been desirable to be controlled by the United States, it is useful to remember that we were not far from such control. The experience benefited big Wall Street investors and their oligarchic allies without regard for the welfare of the majorities.
When Donald Trump speaks of Manifest Destiny, the Panama Canal, McKinley, and Roosevelt, he speaks of a reality that our ancestors in Central America lived firsthand. They did not like it.
Salvadoran historian Héctor Lindo Fuentes, professor emeritus at Fordham University, is the author of “El alborotador de Centroamérica: El Salvador frente al imperio” (2019, UCA Editores), an investigation of El Salvador's popular anti-imperialist struggles. He has written about the same topic in English for Cambridge University’s Journal of Latin American Studies.
