1. Neocolonialism
Born in Blood and Fire, Chapter 6

2. Opera House, Manuas, Brazil
“When [companies] pulled out – because of a banana blight or new corporate strategy –
all that these multinational installations left behind was ex-banana choppers with no
job, no land, no education and a lot of missing fingers.” 189

3. “….’If one rubber baron bought a vast yacht, another would install a tame lion in
his villa, and a third would water his horse on champagne.’ And nothing was
more extravagant than the opera house, with its Italian marble, Bohemian glass,
gilded balconies, crystal chandeliers, Victorian murals, and a dome bathed in
the colors of the national flag.
Prefabricated in Europe and costing an estimated ten million dollars in
taxpayers’ money, the opera house was shipped in pieces more than a thousand
miles up the Amazon River, where laborers were deployed around the clock to
assemble it, working at night under Brazil’s first electric lightbulbs.
It didn’t matter that almost no one from Manaus had heard of Puccini or that
more than half the members of a visiting opera troupe eventually died of yellow
fever. This was the apotheosis of the rubber boom”.
The Lost City of Z

4. EXPORT BOOM
“The direct beneficiaries of this export
bonanza were the large
landowners, whose property values
soared with the approach of the
railroad tracks.” 183
“The arrival of the railroad benefitted
the owners of large Mexican estates by
raising property values. But it drove a
lot of peasants off the land, allowing
the landlords to extend their
holdings, make landless peasants their
employees, and multiply their profits.”
184
“Bananas were a neocolonial
nightmare for the palm-studded coasts
of the Caribbean.” 187

5. PORFIRIATO
• Positivism =
“order and progress”
A funny thing happened to the
liberals of Latin America during
their comeback of the 1860s and
1870s. Once in control, they forgot
about the political freedoms they
had demanded under the
conservative caudillos. Democracy
now took a distant second place, in
their thinking, to the material
Progress associated with export
growth. 193
[As a result of import/export tax
revenues funding armies and
police forces]… Now national
presidents commanded far more
David Alfaro Siqueiros, From the Dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz to the Revolution firepower than any regional
caudillo. 193
For the most part, the majority had little say in the matter [of authoritarian governance]. The political influence of the
rural majority was limited by income and literacy requirements for voting, and limited even more by the practice of
managed elections. The authoritarian governments of neocolonial Latin America made electoral management into an
art form. 194
Oligarchies and dictatorships provided stability, the virtue always most desired by foreign investors. 195

6. Rurales and Pan o Palo
As the value of Mexico’s import/export trade
expanded by roughly ten times during the Porfiriato,
Diaz used the new revenues to strengthen the
Mexican state.
He curbed regional caudillos by crushing them or
paying them off. He created public jobs for
middle-class townspeople by vastly enlarging the
bureaucracy. Diaz offered just two alternatives:
pan o palo, meaning roughly “carrot or stick.” For
example, he subsidized the press to keep it
friendly, then jailed journalists who spoke against
him. Mexico acquired a national rail system and
graceful, monument-lined avenues in its capital
city. But as Mexico approached the centennial of
Hidalgo’s 1810 uprising, the Mexico City police
had orders to hustle indigenous people away
from downtown, so that the foreign investors
would not get the “wrong impression” of Mexico.
195-6.

9. “In ideology and values, as in trade and finance,
neocolonialism meant the absorption of Latin
America into an international system dominated
by Britain and the United States. It is here, in
friction with powerful outsiders, that Latin
Americans began to feel the colonial in
neocolonialism.” 200

10. The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine made the US Marines a sort of hemispheric police
force to prevent European military intervention in Latin America. He believed incompetent Latin
American governments would occasionally need correction “by some civilized nation.” 206

11. REACTIONS
Augusto Cesar Sandino
“Come on you pack of drug fiends, come
on and murder us on our own land. I am
waiting for you on my feet at the head
of my patriotic soldiers, and I don't care
how many of you there are. You should
know that when this happens, the
destruction of your mighty power will
make the Capitol shake in
Washington, and your blood will redden
the white dome that crowns the famous
White House where you plot your
crimes.”

12. “Although neocolonial Latin America had grown
economically, it had developed much less.” BBF, 208