Soft-pedaling American intervention

Popular accounts of U.S. history and warfare largely neglect our military interventions in Latin America. Although over five dozen such interventions are well documented, the collective memory of more massive military deployments such as the Civil War, the World Wars, and the Vietnam war dominates common understandings of U.S. military history and U.S. relations with other peoples. Likewise, the historical memory of U.S. peace movements against military intervention is sparse, at best. Ask an average anti-intervention activist in the 1980s about the history of U.S. intervention and the opposition to it, and the most common response emphasized Vietnam and the 1960s. A popular slogan, which both made and missed the point, was "El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam." Yet popular resistance to U.S. military aggression in Latin America dates from the Mexican-American War, runs through turn-of-the-century anti-imperialist movement, on to the Left's opposition to dollar diplomacy in the 1920s. Today's solidarity movements with Mexico, Haiti, Cuba, and Central America have progenitors with much to teach.