Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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economic blackmail in flagrant violation of the 1907 treaty”—and when
sugar prices collapsed after World War I, the Military Government
floated loans to finance its operations, which the Dominicans were
compelled to assume under the 1924 evacuation treaty. In the end,
about half of the meager public works program was ultimately paid, with
interest, by the Dominicans themselves. Far more significant was the US
takeover of the economy. The land laws promulgated by the Military
Government were designed “to permit U.S. sugar concerns to get legal
title to huge tracts of land. It was enforced with great zeal: Dominican
peasants were driven off their lands and Dominican villages burned for
the benefit of foreign—mostly American—sugar companies.” When US
troops finally withdrew in 1924, sugar companies owned nearly a
quarter of the agricultural area of the Dominican Republic, about 2% of
it owned by Dominicans, most of the rest by US companies. Americans
controlled property worth about $33.7 million, the Dominicans less than
$1.4 million. By 1925, exports in sugar and sugar derivatives reached
63% of total exports, profiting the foreign investor but not the local
economy. The tariff structure was designed to favor US goods,
eliminating protection for Dominican production so that “many local
crafts and industries were ruined.” “The only Dominican product favored
by the American-made tariff of 1919 was sugar—an American-owned
industry.” 164
During the counterinsurgency war, Calder continues, the Marines,
whose “behavior was often brutish by traditional Dominican standards,”
machine-gunned peasants, raped, tortured, destroyed houses,
imprisoned many people and sent many more to concentration camps
(providing a captive labor supply for the sugar plantations), bombed and
strafed “apparently as much to intimidate the populace with a show of
power as to harm the guerrillas,” and generally abused the “spigs” and
“niggers,” as they were regularly called, undertaking what the Military