War and Post-War in the Americas
1921 - 1922 Events will be ready eventually....
European War in the Americas, 1914-1917
By Jamie Bisher
The European war that erupted in August 1914 immediately assumed a global character. Not only did the Europeans’ far-flung colonies mobilize, but their communities of emigrants and expatriates in neutral countries were called to arms also. No corner of the earth escaped the martial clarion. Word of war quickly reached German settlements deep in Paraguay’s outback, Belizean logcutter camps, and merchants on Andean sales routes.
The belligerents were unprepared for the overseas intelligence and counterintelligence demands they faced in neutral countries. At the beginning of the war none of them had enough professional intelligence officers in the Americas. Thus, the first order of business for the belligerents’ intelligence services was to find reliable people and build organizations from scratch. Intelligence functions were often performed by agents hired by diplomatic and consular officials for specific activities. The geographic isolation of Central and South America from the Old World and the United States forced intelligence and counterintelligence chiefs to rely on local resources. The range and depth of these human resources depended largely on two factors in the recruiting locale: immigration and commerce.
Immigration brought pools of intelligent and hardworking people who could be molded into agents with proper cultivation of their patriotism, ambition or desperation. Approximately 70,000 foreigners lived in Mexico by 1910, and Spaniards were outnumbered by North Americans, who were concentrated on ranches and mines in Sonora, Chihuahua and Coahuila (James Creelman cited this statistic in his famous 1908 interview with Mexican President Porfirio Diaz for Pearson’s Magazine, in which the dictator helped ignite the 1910 revolution by insincerely stating that Mexico was ready for democracy). German fincas (plantations) produced half of the coffee grown in Guatemala and were the leading growers in Chiapas. German engineers, educators, merchants and military instructors occupied positions of prominence from one end of Latin America to the other. Syrian and Levantine merchants traded in every large Central American port, Japanese colonies had sprung up from Sonora to Callao, and Jamaican laborers had settled along the Caribbean shores of Costa Rica and Panama. Argentina stood apart from the other Latin American states in immigration. By 1914, nearly one-third of the country’s eight million inhabitants were foreign-born. Buenos Aires had swollen into the world’s tenth largest city, and city markets resounded with a cacophony of Old World languages—Castilian, Catalan, Galician, Euskera, Portuguese, French, German, Russian, Yiddish, several Italian dialects and others (half of Buenos Aires' 1914 population was born in Portugal, France, Germany or Russia). The metropolis had more in common with New York City than with most Latin American cities. Intelligence recruiters could find ample resources in Latin America.
Immigration brought pools of intelligent and hardworking people who could be molded into agents with proper cultivation of their patriotism, ambition or desperation. Approximately 70,000 foreigners lived in Mexico by 1910, and Spaniards were outnumbered by North Americans, who were concentrated on ranches and mines in Sonora, Chihuahua and Coahuila (James Creelman cited this statistic in his famous 1908 interview with Mexican President Porfirio Diaz for Pearson’s Magazine, in which the dictator helped ignite the 1910 revolution by insincerely stating that Mexico was ready for democracy). German fincas (plantations) produced half of the coffee grown in Guatemala and were the leading growers in Chiapas. German engineers, educators, merchants and military instructors occupied positions of prominence from one end of Latin America to the other. Syrian and Levantine merchants traded in every large Central American port, Japanese colonies had sprung up from Sonora to Callao, and Jamaican laborers had settled along the Caribbean shores of Costa Rica and Panama. Argentina stood apart from the other Latin American states in immigration. By 1914, nearly one-third of the country’s eight million inhabitants were foreign-born. Buenos Aires had swollen into the world’s tenth largest city, and city markets resounded with a cacophony of Old World languages—Castilian, Catalan, Galician, Euskera, Portuguese, French, German, Russian, Yiddish, several Italian dialects and others (half of Buenos Aires' 1914 population was born in Portugal, France, Germany or Russia). The metropolis had more in common with New York City than with most Latin American cities. Intelligence recruiters could find ample resources in Latin America.
Foreign commerce and investment influenced Latin American intelligence matters beyond the obvious economic and political benefits. Perhaps the increase in foreign trade, and subsequent introductions of new technology and investment during the last three decades of the nineteenth century contributed to the abatement of internecine warfare in Latin America. Foreign capital was initially invested in infrastructure—port facilities, roads, railroads, telegraph and telephone—that facilitated extraction of cheap raw materials and the establishment of outlets for imported manufactured goods, and enterprises that sought control over vital sectors of the local economy such as banks, commodity brokers, and freight forwarders. This growing communications infrastructure enabled state power to coordinate internal security on a national level, making it possible to tighten the grip on unruly regions where petty caudillos, banditry or anarchy reigned. The wealth generated by the new transportation and communications infrastructure through increased and more efficient trade also generated tax revenue that governments plowed into the military, police and bureaucracy, each of which spawned its own intelligence tendrils. Thus the wave of seeming tranquility that spread over most Latin American countries in the late nineteenth century owed more to technological and financial solutions than to any newfound political stability.
Foreign investment entangled commerce in secret diplomacy and intelligence. Foreign investments tended to cluster around critical infrastructure such as utilities—because of the technology transfer needed, or around huge agricultural enterprises such as bananas or sugar—because of the international distribution networks needed to make them profitable. Ordinary commercial decisions in these enterprises were elevated to politically charged decisions that could incite government or public wrath, so both expatriate managers and local politicians cultivated each other.
Foreign investment entangled commerce in secret diplomacy and intelligence. Foreign investments tended to cluster around critical infrastructure such as utilities—because of the technology transfer needed, or around huge agricultural enterprises such as bananas or sugar—because of the international distribution networks needed to make them profitable. Ordinary commercial decisions in these enterprises were elevated to politically charged decisions that could incite government or public wrath, so both expatriate managers and local politicians cultivated each other.
Electric and telephone utilities from Port-au-Prince to Punta Arenas were dominated by German firms, Mexican oil was held by British and US companies, shipping pitted German and British firms against US upstarts, Central American banana agribusiness was controlled by US firms, Argentine beef by Anglophile interests, Chilean nitrates and Mexican mining were free-for-alls, and so on… Usually foreign investors feared their merciless commercial competitors more than avaricious politicos or money-hungry rebels. When foreign-owned businesses did become embroiled in domestic politics, as was inevitable in Latin America, the distinction between commercial, diplomatic and intelligence issues and personnel blurred, and expatriate managers would find their enterprises drawn—sometimes wittingly, sometimes unwittingly—into the order of battle of competing domestic or foreign interests. Expatriate businessmen getting entangled in Latin American wars was nothing new. After Chilean forces overran Peru’s Tarapaca region during the War of the Pacific, a local English manager named Robert Harvey became an intelligence agent for the invaders, who repaid him with inside commercial knowledge that gave him an edge over competitors.
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World War I was destined to embroil every country’s foreign ministry and every foreign community. With good intelligence, foreign ministers could obfuscate and avoid committing themselves to the costly struggle. Most foreign communities however would be forced to choose between the sides and compromise their neutrality. The war’s drama in the Latin American theatre would be played out in the realms of intelligence and counterintelligence.
Copyright 2018, Jamie Bisher