Backyard Empire: The United States in Latin America

How ITT Tried to Buy a Coup: Telephones, Electricity, and the Fall of Allende

Most of this series is about things dug out of the ground. This one is about the wires and the current — the telephone systems and power grids a modern country can't function without, owned by foreign corporations. International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT) owned the phone systems of Cuba, Chile, and beyond; the American & Foreign Power Company owned the electric utilities of Cuba and nine more Latin American countries. They charged high rates, paid little tax, and resisted local control — until governments began nationalizing them, starting with Castro's Cuba. Then the most notorious case: when Salvador Allende was elected in Chile in 1970 and moved to nationalize ITT's phone company, ITT — chairman Harold Geneen and board member John McCone, a former CIA director — offered money to the CIA (a reported $1 million) and pushed to wreck Chile's economy to stop him, a scandal exposed in leaked memos and 1973 Senate hearings. We keep the crucial caveat front and center: ITT was an eager instigator, not the puppet-master — the CIA ran its own operations (Episode 4) and rejected some ITT proposals. A study in how far a corporation tried to go to protect a monopoly. Narrated by AI voices from sourced, human-reviewed research.

How Capital Flight Replaced Private Armies: Maquiladoras and Fast Fashion

Strip the banana plantation of its bananas and the copper mine of its copper, and what's left is the system: a zone of foreign-owned production, walled off from the national economy, exempt from taxes, with a young disposable workforce and the law bent to keep them quiet. That system came back as the maquiladora. This episode of Backyard Empire — the series' modern capstone — follows the enclave economy into the present. Mexico's 1965 Border Industrialization Program and then NAFTA built tax-free export zones where U.S. and European apparel brands make clothes through local subcontractors; the factories primarily employ young women under long shifts and poverty wages; mandatory pregnancy testing was used to avoid maternity costs (documented by Human Rights Watch); and independent unions are suppressed through 'protection' and 'paper' unions. The model spread to Central America's Free Trade Zones (Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala) and on to Asia. The heart of it is the new way the system keeps order: La Forestal had a private police force, United Fruit could call the Marines — the maquiladora just threatens to leave. Demand more, and the factory reopens in a cheaper country. We keep the contested questions (exploitative vs. better-than-alternatives) open. Narrated by AI voices from sourced, human-reviewed research.

The Human Machine Behind C&H Sugar: Hawaiʻi's Plantation Labor System

The bag of 'C&H Pure Cane Sugar from Hawaiʻi' in an American kitchen was the end of a long, engineered chain. This episode of Backyard Empire — a companion to the Hawaiʻi overthrow episode — looks at the economic and human machinery of sugar. After Native Hawaiians were dispossessed of their land, a tiny haole elite came to control nearly half the islands and planted them in cane. Because the Native population had collapsed from disease and would not be made into plantation hands, the planters imported over 300,000 contract laborers from China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and Portugal — and housed them in separate camps and paid them different wages by ethnicity, on purpose, so they could not unite. For decades the early strikes broke along ethnic lines and were defeated. Meanwhile the Big Five integrated forward through the C&H cooperative, refining and marketing their sugar on the mainland at Crockett, California — itself a company town. We end where the system broke: the multi-ethnic workforce uniting under the ILWU after WWII. We keep the disputed figures contested and the workers' experience at the center. Narrated by AI voices from sourced, human-reviewed research.

How Sugar Barons Stole the Hawaiian Kingdom

Everywhere else in this series, the empire owned the economy. In Hawaiʻi, it took the country. This episode of Backyard Empire tells three linked stories. In January 1893, a committee of mostly American sugar businessmen — backed by the U.S. minister and Marines landed from the USS Boston — overthrew Queen Liliuokalani and ended a sovereign kingdom; five years later the U.S. annexed the islands by a joint resolution of Congress, over the objections of most Native Hawaiians. The families behind it ran Hawaiʻi for half a century as the 'Big Five' (Castle & Cooke, Alexander & Baldwin, C. Brewer, American Factors, Theo H. Davies) — controlling sugar, shipping, banking, and politics, and dividing a multi-ethnic plantation workforce by ethnicity. That held until 1946, when the workers struck together under the ILWU, shut nearly every plantation for 79 days, and broke the oligarchy. This is the series' limit case — an enclave that annexed a nation. We keep the Native Hawaiian perspective central, note the 1993 Apology Resolution, and keep the contested questions (overthrow vs revolution; legality of annexation-by-resolution) open. Narrated by AI voices from sourced, human-reviewed research.

How Corporate Monoculture Built Slave Empires in Sugar and Henequen

After the United States took the Caribbean stage in 1898, American capital turned whole societies into single-crop suppliers. This episode of Backyard Empire follows monoculture as a system of control. In Cuba, US sugar corporations like the Cuban-American Sugar Company bought out local planters, built mill-town enclaves, and left workers dependent on the tiempo muerto, the 'dead season' of hunger between harvests, while the Platt Amendment kept the door open for US intervention. In Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, absentee American sugar companies took the best coastal land. And in Mexico's Yucatan, the henequen 'green gold' boom — the fiber for the binder twine of the world's mechanical reapers — ran on a secret 1902 pact between International Harvester and the Molina export house, and on the debt peonage of Maya laborers and deported Yaqui prisoners, the system John Kenneth Turner exposed in Barbarous Mexico. The capital here is overwhelmingly American. We keep the disputed numbers contested and the human cost — bondage and hunger — at the center. Part one of a two-part set; the companion covers Hawaii. Narrated by AI voices from sourced, human-reviewed research.