AMY GOODMAN: And that picture?

STEPHEN KINZER: The picture of Pinochet with Kissinger is wonderful. Shortly after the coup, about a year or two later, Secretary of State Kissinger arrived in Chile to address a meeting of the Organization of American States. In that speech, he had to make some pro forma references to human rights and the American interest in promoting human rights. But the day before he made the speech, he went to visit Pinochet privately. We now have the transcript of that meeting. And he essentially told Pinochet, “I'm going have to say some things about human rights tomorrow, but that doesn't apply to you. Don't take that seriously. We support you, and we're glad that you're here.” So, the public face of the U.S. policy toward Chile even then was very different from what we were directly telling Pinochet in private.

AMY GOODMAN: And speaking about Spanish-speaking countries, how about going back in time to Puerto Rico?

STEPHEN KINZER: Puerto Rico is another very interesting case, because Puerto Rico was a Spanish possession. But during 1898, the new liberal regime in Spain offered Puerto Rico a tremendous amount of autonomy, which the Puerto Ricans greatly embraced. They were not rebelling against Spanish colonial rule the way the Cubans were. And they were offered an amount of autonomy that was greater than the British gave to Canada. They actually had an election. They produced a Puerto Rican domestic government, which was going to be able to have large control over the direction of Puerto Rican policy within the framework of Spanish rule. They had very visionary leader, Luis Munoz Rivera, who was to be the new prime minister of Puerto Rico.

His government lasted only about a week, when the U.S. invaded on the way to Cuba, more or less. The Spanish-American War was not aimed at Puerto Rico. It was never intended to bring Puerto Rico into the U.S., but Puerto Rico was just grabbed because it happened to be there, it was available, it was lovely, it was on some sea routes that the U.S. wanted to control. So the U.S. stepped in and essentially crushed the self-governing home-rule government of Puerto Rico. It placed Puerto Rico under military rule.

And very quickly, the first thing that happened in Puerto Rico over the next few years was that the small coffee farms were taken over and transformed into large sugar plantations. Coffee in Latin America is sometimes called the poor man's crop, because you can grow it on just a very small plot, but you can't grow sugar that way. So, essentially large numbers of Puerto Ricans were dispossessed to make way for four big American sugar companies, and Puerto Rico went from being a self-governing rising very confident new nation in 1898 to the status of a colony, and a greatly impoverished one, in the decades that followed.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, what happened in these ensuing years, for people to understand?

STEPHEN KINZER: In Puerto Rico, I think you can argue that in the long run things could have gone a lot worse. This was one intervention where the U.S., after a long period of time, decided to take responsibility for developments in the country. And that was for a very particular reason. It had a lot to do with the rise of Fidel Castro in Cuba. Suddenly, the idea of the U.S. having a miserably poor colony in the Caribbean didn't look so good. It was a bad contrast to Cuba. So it wasn't until that period in the 1950s and 1960s that the U.S. began to try to develop Puerto Rico and pull it up from the underdevelopment into which we had cast it for the first half of the 20th century.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Stephen Kinzer. He is author of the book, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. Let's talk about Grenada and Panama. What happened, as we see Grenada, Panama, and then we move on to, well, today, Iraq?

STEPHEN KINZER: I place the American history regime change in three chronological groups. The first set of our overthrows of foreign governments came in the late 19th, early 20th century. That was the period when we could openly invade foreign countries. In the Cold War, we couldn’t do that anymore, because we were afraid there might be a counter-reaction from the Soviet Union. That's why we had to use the C.I.A. to overthrow governments covertly. But with the fading of the Soviet Union, we didn't have to do that anymore. We could go back to plan A, so to speak, which was invading governments.

Now, the Grenada situation started when a radical clique of ultra-militants within Grenada rose up and assassinated their own political leaders. A small group of a couple of hundred of American medical students were also on Grenada. Now, the U.S. could probably have evacuated those students quite easily. In fact, the new regime was eager to be rid of them, in order not to give a pretext to the United States.

But there was a larger global political context in which the Grenada operation happened. The United States was still recovering from the humiliation of the loss of Vietnam. And actually the very weekend before the Grenada invasion was launched was the weekend when the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon was blown up, with the loss of the lives of more than 200 Marines. The U.S. had been feeling very impotent in the world, and President Reagan had come to power with the promise that he would make America stand tall again. So the possibility of peacefully resolving the Grenada crisis, which is what some of the regional leaders wanted to do -- they wanted a blockade around Grenada, which has no natural resources, doesn’t even have water or gasoline or anything, so it would have been very susceptible to some kind of regional pressure. This did not appeal to the United States. Reagan and his aides immediately realized this as a chance for the U.S. to score a big military victory, something we hadn't had for many, many years.

Now, the whole population of Grenada can fit into the Rose Bowl. It’s a very, very small place. That's why, after the invasion, we had a spectacular opportunity at a very, very low price to transform Grenada into the garden spot of the Caribbean and show that something good could come after American interventions. The cost of that would have been so pitifully low -- it's 100,000 or 120,000 people -- but immediately, instead of doing that, we turned our back on Grenada, and we went on to the next project. But it did serve the purpose of the Reagan administration, which was to give America a victory, even though it was a victory over a pitifully small island, and to be able to show Marines doing something positive. That, I think, was the real reason we carried out that operation.

AMY GOODMAN: And Panama, the picture you have of President Bush, Sr., that is with Noriega, who’s now in a prison in the United States?

STEPHEN KINZER: We intervened and invaded Panama in order to overthrow General Noriega, but what I discovered upon working on my Panama chapter is that Noriega had been on the payroll of the C.I.A. for 30 years. He committed a number of sins. Part of it was his involvement in the drug trade, although the U.S. government and the C.I.A. had been completely aware of this for years. He was leading Panama out of the U.S. orbit. He was interfering with American plans to carry out the Contra war in Central America. You'll remember the Contadora process that was part of the peace process in Central America. Contadora is actually an island in Panama, so it was there that some of this peace process that undermined the Contra project took place.

In addition, Noriega could have been overthrown in a coup that Panamanians were carrying out just a few days before our invasion. And the Panamanian general who was carrying out this coup informed the U.S. -- he only asked the U.S. to block a couple of roads to prevent Noriega’s loyalists from coming into Panama. And that coup would have succeeded, but we didn't support it, and the American commander later explained why. He said that coup would have only overthrown Noriega. It would have left the very nationalist Panamanian defense force intact. We didn't only want to get rid of Noriega. We wanted to get rid of the entire military institution which had fallen away from American influence and become a reflection of some nationalist Panamanian aspirations. And that wasn’t a successful outcome of the Panamanian intervention.

AMY GOODMAN: We only have a minute left. But you end with, of course, Iraq today.

STEPHEN KINZER: When President Bush practiced the speech that day about two years ago, in which he announced the invasion of Iraq, he did it in a room in the White House called the Treaty Room. That was the very same room in which the Spanish document of surrender that gave the U.S. control over Cuba and Puerto Rico had been signed more than a hundred years earlier. And on the wall in that room is a picture of that episode, the signing of that treaty. That picture is dominated by the large figure of President William McKinley, so he was symbolically looking over Bush's shoulder when Bush was reading the speech announcing the invasion of Iraq. And no one would have understood better than President McKinley that Bush was not leading the U.S. into the regime change era. The U.S. had been in that era for more than a century.

AMY GOODMAN: Stephen Kinzer, author of Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq.

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