From colonization to today.
Panama entered the 20th century as a newly independent republic, separating from Colombia in 1903 with United States support in a move tied directly to the construction of an interoceanic canal. The United States received rights to a ten-mile-wide Canal Zone bisecting the country, and the canal opened to shipping in 1914, transforming Panama into […]
For much of the 20th century, Nicaragua was governed by the Somoza family, whose hereditary dictatorship began in 1937 when Anastasio Somoza García took the presidency after helping organize the National Guard, a force originally formed under United States oversight. The Somozas ruled for more than four decades, amassing extensive landholdings and control over key […]
The Mexican Revolution of 1910 to 1920 ended the long rule of Porfirio Díaz and reshaped the country’s political and social order, producing the Constitution of 1917 with its provisions for land reform, labor rights, and secular education. Out of this upheaval emerged the National Revolutionary Party, founded in 1929 and later renamed the Institutional […]
Jamaica entered the twentieth century as a British Crown Colony with limited local political representation. Widespread labor unrest in 1938, driven by poor wages and living conditions on sugar estates and in the docks, spurred the formation of Jamaica’s two dominant political movements: Alexander Bustamante’s trade-union-based Jamaica Labour Party and Norman Manley’s People’s National Party. […]
In the first decades of the twentieth century, Honduras’s economy and politics became closely tied to U.S. banana companies, particularly the United Fruit Company and Standard Fruit, which built extensive plantations, railroads, and ports along the Caribbean coast. Their commercial dominance gave rise to the country’s reputation as an archetypal “banana republic,” with corporate interests […]
