The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. An updated version will be made available as soon as possible.

MICHAEL FOX: I don’t even know how to describe this feeling.

Like, they left the whole front facade, all along the wall here is just pot-marked with these holes that are left from the gunshots and the firings by the U.S. soldiers when they attacked this Churubusco fort almost 200 years ago. I mean, it’s incredible that they didn’t… Like, even with repairs and things, they left these spots, they left these holes in the wall. You know, as if they’re saying, we will not forget.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Those gunshot holes were made in 1847. During the Mexican American War. Churubusco fort was just Southeast of Mexico City. The United States would win that battle, occupy the capital and defeat Mexico by early the next year. Under the Treaty of Hidalgo, the U.S. seized more than half of Mexican territory. What is now the entire Western half of the United States… California, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, and more – it all used to be Mexico… until it was stolen by the United States and the invading U.S. army.

That was only one of numerous times the U.S. and other countries invaded and intervened in Mexican affairs.

And the United States is at it again.

President Donald Trump has been threatening to send in the U.S. military… The excuse…. Cartels, of course. In mid March, he had this to say about Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum…

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [CLIP]:  Well she should not have refused my help. I offered to get rid of the cartels in Mexico. For some reason she doesn’t wanna do that. I like her very much, but for some reason she doesn’t want to do that. The cartels are running Mexico and we can’t have that.

Sheinbaum’s response? 

PRESIDENT CLAUDIA SHEINBAUM [CLIP]:  Who is governing Mexico? Some people have been saying that others govern Mexico. In Mexico, the people govern and also… the women.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Trump is continuing his war with Iran. He is strangling Cuba and pushing for regime change, as I’ve looked at here, in depth, in recent episodes. 

And across the region, he’s amassing his right-wing allies into a military coalition.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [CLIP]:  We’re calling this military partnership the Americas Counter-Cartel Coalition… We’ll use missiles. If you want us to use a missile, they’re extremely accurate. Right into the living room. And that’s the end of that cartel person. But we’ll do whatever you need, if you want.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Increasingly, Trump has his sights set on Mexico — promising to send in U.S. troops in the name of fighting cartels and advancing a so-called drug war policy. Even though, over the last thirty years, that policy not only has failed to reduce the flow of drugs but also has increased violence time and time again… like we’ve seen in recent weeks…

NEWS REPORT [CLIP]:  Violence has erupted in Western Mexico after a powerful druglord was killed in a military operation by the Mexican government.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  A Mexican military operation with the support of U.S. intelligence.

The United States itself… is, in part, responsible for Mexico’s violence. The same violence Trump is now using to justify his push for intervention. 

CHRISTY THORNTON:  The drug war has long been a kind of very convenient instrument to use for the deployment of US power.

But Trump’s actions also harken back to an era of U.S. empire much, much older than that. 

More on all of that… in a minute.

[THEME MUSIC]

This is Under the Shadow — an investigative narrative podcast series that looks at the role of the United States abroad, in the past and the very present.

This podcast is a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA.

I’m your host, Michael Fox — longtime radio reporter, editor, journalist. The producer and host of the podcasts Brazil on Fire and Stories of Resistance. I’ve spent the better part of the last 20 years in Latin America.

I’ve seen firsthand the role of the US government abroad. And most often, sadly, it is not for the better: Invasions, coups, sanctions. Support for authoritarian regimes. Politically and economically, the United States has cast a long shadow over Latin America for the past 200 years. It still does.

This is Season 2 of Under the Shadow: Trump’s Attack.

Episode 9: Invasions & Interventions: How the United States Stole Mexico”?

A Brief History of U.S. Intervention in Mexico

So… I’ve spent the last few months in Mexico. This has been my vantage point as I’ve closely followed Trump’s onslaught on the region… everything I’ve been discussing in this season of the podcast. I’ve spoken with many people here about what’s happening. And I have visited some pretty incredible places that not only tell the story of Trump’s threats on the country today… but also shed light on the history of foreign intervention in Mexico. Reminders of a past marked by the bayonets of U.S. soldiers and invading armies from other countries, as well. 

I say all of that because today’s episode is gonna be a little different from what you’ve heard this season. I’m going to look at Trump’s threats today. But I really want to look at the backstory.I want to take you to some places first hand… like I did in the first season of Under the Shadow in Central America.

We’ll walk back in time and then up into the present to understand the long arc of U.S. aggression toward Mexico and how Trump today is embracing the most violent U.S. policies of the past, to push his agenda. 

That’s where we are headed…. Here we go… 

[MUSIC]

I will begin today in the Mexico City neighborhood of Coyoacan. It’s artsy. Touristy. It’s where the former homes and present-day museums of both Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky are located. But about a 20 minute walk to the east, brings you to a big colonial adobe building. The grounds are encircled by an old worn two-story wall.

MICHAEL FOX:  And this, it used to be this convent a couple hundred years ago, and then it became what’s known as the Palacio Churubusco.

First off, it is the site of basically the last big battle of the St. Patrick’s Brigade, which was a brigade of Irish soldiers who were sent to fight against the Mexicans in the Mexican-American War in the 1850s, but they identified more with the Mexicans than with the United States, and so they switched sides. They defected, thousands of soldiers defected, and they started the St. Patrick’s Brigade, and they fought in defense of Mexico against U.S. invasion, against U.S. intervention. And of course, the United States would eventually win and take a huge swath of Mexico, you know, what is now California, Arizona, New Mexico. Nevada. 

But this location is interesting, because today, this is the museum, the National Museum of Interventions. It just gives you a sense of how many times other countries have intervened in Mexico.

Going back all the way to the Spanish and then the French, and then of course numerous times the United States. And this is a fascinating place because literally it is the spot where the St. Patrick’s Brigade, who defected from U.S. intervention, held their last stand. 

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  The main walkway, as you enter through the front gates and walk toward the entrance to the building is called the St. Patrick’s Brigade Plaza. There’s a little plaque on the wall for the fallen soldiers. Many were killed here in that battle on August 20, 1847, which would become known as the Battle of Churubusco. Most of the Irish soldiers who survived the battle were hung by the U.S. army for defecting.

I walk into the museum. Each room walks you up decade by decade. Taking you into the past of foreign intervention in Mexico. It’s actually pretty remarkable everything Mexico has had to put up with. 

MICHAEL FOX:  So you have 18, you have 1829, the Spanish intervention, then you have, uh, 1838, the French intervene, and that was just the first French intervention, of course, remember the French come back again, and then, of course, you have 1846 and, to 1848, which is the U.S. intervention, um, and that’s when the United States would take more than half of Mexico, right. 

I’ve just walked into this room, uh, on one side of the convent, there’s a massive map that actually shows the, um, the route that the U.S. soldiers took to work their way up to Mexico City, there’s this one corner, General Scott’s entrance into Mexico, it was a lithograph made in 1851, it just shows this, um, American flag flying in U.S., like, literally flying over government buildings, the big cathedral in the background, and the Zocalo and U.S. soldiers marching in the middle of Mexico City. There’s a, a little description here, the U.S. invasion of Mexico between 1846 and 1848 was the most serious conflict that had ever occurred between our country and our neighboring country, the United States.

The war between these two unequal countries, for Mexico, it resulted in just disaster. Just a few years after achieving its independence from Spain, and, and shortly after finally consolidating as a nation, it lost more than half of its territory.

Mexico, this is what it says here, actually, this is super interesting, Mexico had to confront an unjust and unequal war with a powerful country that was expanding, guided by the Monroe Doctrine, quote-unquote, America for the Americans.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Just 14 years after losing to the United States, the French would invade. 

MICHAEL FOX:  So almost every decade you have a new foreign country trying to intervene in Mexico. I mean, it’s just shocking, Of course, the French, this is happening at the same time as you have the U.S. Civil War. And so the French are thinking, well, let’s get a foothold in, in the Americas while the United States are busy, right?

In part, this happens because Benito Juarez, the former president, decides to not pay the debt for two years that Mexico apparently owed to France. This is a big sign on the wall that talks about the May 5th battle in Puebla, 1862. The French were defeated in this really important battle in Puebla, and then Napoleon III decided to send more troops to Mexico.

Between September and October 1862, 28,000 French soldiers arrived to Veracruz. And they attacked again, they again attacked Puebla. They basically laid siege to the city, and that battle lasted for two months.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  The French occupied Mexico for five and a half years, imposing their own Austrian emperor over the country — Maximilian the 1st.

MICHAEL FOX:  This whole place is just wild, because as you’re walking through these corridors and these old rooms of this former convent, and so in some places there’s these like religious images, and then, and then suddenly you’re, you’re learning about the U.S. intervention and the attack and the war that would steal more than half of Mexican territory, but it’s all within like the hallways and the rooms of this old convent, which of course is where the battle was held, like in these very same places where I’m walking, you had soldiers, including the St. Patrick’s Brigade, the St. Patrick Battalion soldiers, who were, you know, they were literally living inside of this fort, this former convent, and literally, you know, defending this against the U.S. invading soldiers. It’s just, it’s just crazy.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  And then you get to the Mexican Revolution. 

MICHAEL FOX:  This whole side of the building, so it talks about the revolution, Mexican revolution, 1910 to 1917.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Now… you might think that the Mexican Revolution was just an internal thing… well think again… April 21st, 1914. The U.S. blockades and occupies the Mexican port of Veracruz, in the Gulf of Mexico. 

MICHAEL FOX:  Wow, I totally forgot this history. Where in the middle of the Mexican Revolution, the United States invades with several boats in Veracruz and then bombs the city and occupies the city with marines to try and influence the outcome of the Mexican Revolution.

There are these pictures on the wall of U.S. troops basically occupying and taking over the train station in Veracruz. April of 1914. 

CHRISTY THORNTON:  So the United States blockades the port of Veracruz in 1914. It had actually done this you know, during the Mexican-American War in the 1840s as well, you know, Veracruz is not only a really important commercial port, but it is also a really important military port.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  That’s Christy Thornton. 

CHRISTY THORNTON:  I’m an associate professor of history at New York University. I specialize in Latin American history and particularly the history of Mexico.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  She also happens to be a longtime NACLista… former director, among other roles, and current Board member of the NACLA Report on the Americas, which co-produces this podcast. We’ll be hearing from her often in the episode.

CHRISTY THORNTON:  And so the United States sends gunboats to basically make it so that, the port there is blockaded. They put in place a kind of arms embargo on the Mexican revolutionary government that they only lift once they decide to sort of throw in their lot with the constitutionalists. And so, yeah, it is this kind of really key moment in the Mexican revolution where the United States actually goes and stations Navy ships. 

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  A couple hundred people die during the 7-month US occupation. And it’s a moment, Christy says, when the situation could have spun out of control and turned into a full-scale war. But it happened only months before the onset of World War 1 in Europe, which kept the United States from launching a full scale U.S. invasion of Mexico. 

In other words… World War I got in the way of larger U.S. plans to derail the Mexican Revolution.

MICHAEL FOX:  Wow. It’s just… It’s just never ending.

And a lot of this stuff you just don’t even realize. For a lot of people in the United States, they don’t even remember that most of the western United States was all part of Mexico.

This is just wild As soon as you leave the 1914 invasion, then you walk into the next room and then you learn about… How the United States sent in its own army, led by General John J. Pershing, initially with 5,000 people, but there were as many as 12,000 soldiers, to try and find Pancho Villa. This is in 1916.

They would never find him, but it was the very first time in U.S. military history that they used tanks, airplanes, like warplanes. And they never found Pancho Villa, but they took all these prisoners.

They said there’s a reward out for the arrest of Pancho Villa. $5,000. $5,000.

I didn’t know at all this history of the United States sending in its own troops into Mexico, 12,000 soldiers to try and take out Pancho Villa.

CHRISTY THORNTON:  So that moment of sort of sending in a military regiment led by a general onto Mexican soil, right? Is this real crisis of confidence for the relationship between the United States and Mexico.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  And they don’t get him. The U.S. with its thousands of troops can’t capture Pancho Villa.

CHRISTY THORNTON:  And eventually, you know, the United States is forced to kind of turn tail and go back and bring its troops back across the border without having achieved its objective. Now, eventually, he will be captured by his own, by Mexican forces, right? But the United States is not successful in that, but very much kind of plays its hand in saying when there is a kind of, when there is instability that might threaten our understanding of what the Mexican state should look like, we’re perfectly willing to send in troops in that way.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  I want to just pause here for a second. Because there’s a really important point I want to underscore about this story of Pancho Villa. 

The United States justified chasing Pancho Villa around northern Mexico, for months… with thousands of officers, due to his raid on the small U.S. border town of Columbus. Of course, the United States wanted to capture Pancho Villa, but it also wanted to show it had the strength and the gaul to act freely in its neighbor to the south. And it hoped to influence the outcome of the Mexico Revolution. 

This is the point. The United States acts. But it usually also has to find the justification to act and send in the military. And it does it time and time again. Up, even until today, like with Trump’s attacks on Iran or Venezuela. 

The United States invaded under the guise of grabbing president Nicolas Maduro for drug trafficking, even though that narrative was largely  dropped once they got Maduro to the United States. 

CHRISTY THORNTON:  And so the justifications throughout history, both in the, you know, Mexican American war during the Mexican revolution… there are always these kinds of justifications made to the American people for why the attack is necessary, right? Whether that is the incursion of Mexican people or Mexican troops across the border, you know, famously in the Mexican revolution case that Pancho Villa’s raid on Columbus, New Mexico. He comes across the border and then the United States sends troops after him. And a similar thing was the case in the 19th century.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  She’s referring to the start of the Mexican American War. The U.S. provoked Mexico, by entering into disputed territory, which Mexico considered its own…When Mexico responded, the U.S. said they had shed blood on U.S. land. The point is… The United States needs an excuse – even if it’s just that. An excuse to exert U.S. dominance. 

And we’ve seen this over and over again.

The U.S. entered Cuba’s war of Independence against Spain, after the 1898 explosion of the USS Maine in the harbor of Havana. That brought the U.S. into war with Spain and ensured that Cuba would become a de facto U.S. protectorate once the U.S. achieved victory. Fast forward into the Cold War… and the violence in Vietnam, and across Central and South America. It was all done in the name of fighting communism, defending freedom… Then it was Iraq and weapons of mass destruction… 

GEORGE W. BUSH [CLIP]:  But we can’t let the world’s worst leaders blackmail, threaten, hold freedom loving nations hostage with the world’s worst weapons.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  The U.S. is using that one again… in Iran. 

And of course, over the last few decades, it’s been about getting the so-called drug trafficker, the bad guy, whether he used to be on our payroll like in the case of Panama’s Manuel Noriega in the late 80s, or whether he just isn’t willing to bow to the U.S. like the case of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro. 

CHRISTY THORNTON:  That idea of needing to make a kind of specific case about an imminent threat clearly reveals something about the way in which the United States still subscribes to, or at least until very recently, subscribe to the idea that this kind of war is illegitimate in some way, that offensive wars, wars of conquest are illegitimate.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  That’s what’s so incredible about the Monroe Doctrine and the concept of Manifest Destiny. It has enabled the United States to hide wars of conquest in a mask of supposed legitimacy, either in the name of defending stability and freedom, or today… America First. And it’s one size fits all. You can drag it out whenever you want. And use it at any occasion: Greenland. Canada. Venezuela. Cuba. Mexico. 

CHRISTY THORNTON:  So both in the eighteen late 1840s during the Mexican-American War, in the 1910s during the Mexican Revolution, right, you had particular justifications coming from US heads of state, from the U.S. president, from the State Department, etc. But then you had a kind of strong movement in both cases of strong interventionists, of people clamoring for just send in the troops or crush the rebellion, right, crush the sort of problematic Mexican tendency that’s going on at the time. And so that movement is also very strong.

This era of U.S. intervention in the 19th and 20th century might seem like ancient history. But we’re seeing that today, too. 

Senator Lindsey Graham.

SEN. LINDSAY GRAHAM [CLIP]:  Here’s what I tell president Trump. Keep it up for a few more weeks. Take Kharg island, where all of the resource they have to produce oil. Let this regime die on a vine.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  When we look at Trump’s world view and his push against the countries of the Western Hemisphere, Iran and elsewhere today, history reverberates into the present.

CHRISTY THORNTON:  I do think that there is a deeply 19th century understanding of power that operates somewhere in Trump’s kind of inner understanding, right? It’s as though history ends in say 1904 with Teddy Roosevelt and the big stick.” 

Christy says, Trump is essentially pushing aside all of the other more benign policies that the United States has developed over the last century for strengthening U.S. hegemony and power in the region..

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT [CLIP]:  We are strong. But less powerful nations know that they need not fear our strength. We seek no conquest. We stand for peace.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Like President Franklin Roosevelt’s “good neighbor policy” of the 1930s. He tried to improve friendly relations, promoting economic cooperation and promising to stop using U.S. military force. 

There was also John F. Kennedy’s muilt-billion dollar aid program Alliance for Progress, in the 1960s.

JOHN F KENNEDY [CLIP]:  Yet our basic goal remains the same, a peaceful world community of free and independent states, free to choose their own future and their own system, so long as it does not threaten the freedom of others. 

It essentially tried to offset the influence of the USSR in Latin America by fueling reforms, economic growth and improving U.S. relations. 

CHRISTY THORNTON:  Trump throws all of those 20th century lessons out, right? it’s not it’s not a coincidence that he’s always talking about McKinley and that era in which there were people who argued that the United States should be an empire to compete with the other European imperial powers. And so at that moment, 1898, when the United States intervenes in, you know, what we call the Spanish-American War, but which is a series of wars for independence in the Caribbean and places like Cuba and Puerto Rico, et cetera, um that sort of land grab at that moment taking over those territories and as well as territories in the Pacific, including Guam and the Philippines and you know, all of these other places. Trump throws out all of the learning that comes in that period and decides like soft power is useless. I think it’s really important to think about the Trump administration as a moment of dominance without hegemony.

They’re not trying to create a kind of consensual movement. hegemonic project in which the other countries of the world come along with us because they buy into our ideology. They’re trying to create a situation in which the United States is the most feared and most sort of unpredictable actor on the world stage. And Trump very much thinks that the kind of raw emphasis on power, on raw military power, is the thing that’s going to shape the world in the way that he wants.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  And he’s acting on it. 

Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren denounced Trump’s war on Iran on the floor of the Senate in early March. 

SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN [CLIP]:  He said he would be a president to stop wars, not start them. And Americans believed him. But now we face an ugly reality: In the modern era, no American president has ordered more military strikes against as many different countries as Donald Trump. None.

That’s true. As president, Trump has bombed 10 different countries…  Ten. That’s far more than any other previous president in the modern era. And that includes more than 600 air strikes on 7 countries just last year alone. 

CHRISTY THORNTON:  But I do think that underlying all of that is this kind of deeply 19th century imperial understanding of what it means to be powerful in the world.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  A return to the past. A return to the type of U.S. intervention on display in black and white pictures and faded maps, as I walk through the hallways of the Mexico’s Museum of Interventions. 

MICHAEL FOX:  Where you walk through this former convent and you see just the endless cycles of intervention whether it’s by Spain or attempts of intervention into Mexico or it’s by Spain or France or the United States or France or the United States again or the United States again. It’s just like one time after the other.

It’s crazy to be here.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  It’s crazy to actually touch the bullet holes from the invading U.S. soldiers that riddle the front wall of the former Churrubusco convent. 

MICHAEL FOX:  You can tell where they’ve kind of redone the wall itself, where they kind of rebuilt it, because you can kind of see inside where things were crumbling. But they left the spots, they left the holes where the gunshots by the U.S. soldiers riddled this building as the United States invaded, as the United States marched to Mexico City.

I don’t know. For me, it’s such a powerful testament. It’s so simple, but it’s so powerful. It reminds me of the holes in the wall of El Chorrillo, the neighborhood that I visited in Panama City, where gunshots from the U.S. invasion, the 1989 U.S. invasion, still can be seen in the walls of homes there as well. At least the homes that weren’t burnt down. It’s like a living testament to the continued U.S. invasion, the continued U.S. intervention.

A living testament to how Mexico and Venezuela and countries all up and down the Americas are still living underneath the shadow of the United States. It’s just wild. And here, you know, it’s not just a couple of holes. Like, I know this was a fortress, a former convent that was invaded, and the battle here lasted for a long time. But still, it’s like the whole front wall here is just pockmarked with the holes from the U.S. gunshots, the U.S. weapons. And like I’ve mentioned so much in this podcast again, you know, things like this are just buried just underneath the surface. It’s incredible to see this firsthand. It’s incredible to touch it. And like so many others, to dream that this will never happen again, even though today, more than ever, it is.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Drugs. That has been the boogie man across Latin America for decades. The excuse that has led to so much violence. The U.S. has funneled billions into allies in the region under the guise of fighting the drug traffickers. It has ripped apart countries. And the problem has only gotten worse. Decades of fighting, with nothing to show for it except tens of thousands of dead and disappeared.

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And that is where I’m going to take you next time. Out of the history and into the present day with Trump’s sights set on Mexico. That’s next time on Under the Shadow.

That is all for today. Thanks for listening. 

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Folks, I’ve placed some pictures of Mexico’s Museum of Interventions on my Patreon page. You can find those at Patreon.com/mfox. Or you can follow the link in the show notes. There you can also support my work, become a monthly sustainer, or sign up to stay abreast of the latest on this podcast and my other reporting across Latin America. This really helps me to continue to do this important work.

I did a special episode about the St. Patrick’s Brigade in my podcast Stories of Resistance. It’s pretty cool. Immersive, as usual. If you are interested, please check it out. The links in the show notes.

If you enjoyed today’s podcast, and you like this series, please do us a favor, go to your podcasting app and give us a like, a follow, a subscribe and leave us a comment or a review. It really helps to spread the word about the show.

I really want to thank Christy Thornton for sitting down with me for this episode. You can find more information about her  and her excellent work in the show notes.

As always… if you are looking for more information, news and reporting on Trump’s onslaught, both on communities within the United States and abroad… please check out The Real News and NACLA. Both of them are publishing daily indispensable reporting.

The theme music is by my band Monte Perdido. You can find us on Spotify or wherever you stream music. This closing music playing right now is off our 2024 album Ofrenda. I hope you check it out. 

Under the Shadow is a co-production of The Real News and NACLA.

This episode script was edited by Heather Gies.

Thanks for listening. See you next time.