294 UNIT 2 COLONIAL MESOAMERICA
power in 1911, later maneuvering behind the scenes to have him replaced by the
wealthy creole Francisco Madero. Failing at this attempt, the United States landed the
marines in Veracruz in 1914 in an effort to bring down Victoriano de la Huerta, who
was being supported by its British competitors.
Political intervention by the United States in the first three decades of the twen-
tieth century was even more blatant in the case of the Central American countries.
The pattern was set early on in Panama, where in 1903, with the backing of President
Theodore Roosevelt, U.S. troops negotiated Panama’s political separation from
Colombia and concessions for U.S. ownership and construction of a canal connect-
ing the two oceans (the canal was completed in 1914). An even more egregious U.S.
intervention took place in Nicaragua, which was occupied by the U.S. marines be-
tween 1912 and 1933 (except for a short period between 1925 and 1927 when the
marines were withdrawn).
The U.S.-dominated capitalism of early-twentieth-century Mexico and Central
America brought dramatic economic growth to the region, but it failed to promote
the well-being of common people. Peasants by the hundreds of thousands were drawn
into wage labor, much of it required as debt cancellation and all of it miserably low-
paying. Most of these rural workers were people of color: mesoamerican Indians,
mestizos, and Blacks. They profoundly resented the economic exploitation to which
they were subjected and the racist discrimination heaped upon them by the foreign
and national capitalists. The United States, for its part, seemed to show no interest
in the plight of the Indians or other exploited peoples from whom its entrepreneurs
extracted exorbitant profits. Neither did it recognize that increasingly this rural sec-
tor—part peasant and part proletariat—was becoming a tinderbox waiting to burst
into flames.
Even the industrial workers, most of whom had emigrated from the rural zones
to occupy the manufacturing jobs in the burgeoning cities of the region, were sub-
jected to severe economic exploitation and racial discrimination. In Mexico many of
them labored in mining and textile manufacturing, and already by 1910 they made
up around 15 percent of the economically active population. Influenced by intel-
lectuals in the city, the workers began to be radicalized, and toward the end of the
Díaz period they engaged in dozens of (illegal) strikes.
In Central America the urban workers constituted a smaller percentage of eco-
nomic society, perhaps 10 percent of the labor force in the 1920s. But they were
sorely repressed by the Central American regimes, and by the 1920s began to form
radical unions and engage in wildcat strikes. They were soon joined by rural labor-
ers from the United Fruit Company’s banana plantations, who in the 1930s became
the premier radical sector of Central American society.
In retrospect, it seems clear that already in the early part of the twentieth cen-
tury, the societies of the region under powerful U.S. influence were developing con-
ditions that would lead to revolutionary actions more radical than the nativist
movements of the nineteenth century. “Revolution,” in contrast to “reform,” refers
to those violent actions by which socially dominated classes seek to break the bonds
that hold them down and in the process cast aside the ruling classes. If in reform, the