Backyard Empire: The United States in Latin America
For two centuries the United States has treated the Western Hemisphere as its sphere of influence — and how, and why, is a messier and more revealing story than the textbook version. From the war with Mexico and the USS Maine to the Cold War interventions, the corporations that drew their own borders, and the invasions of Grenada and Panama — told from primary documents, declassified cables, and peer-reviewed scholarship. Narrated by AI voices from sourced, human-reviewed research. © 2026 Selway Solutions LLC · <a href="https://history.selwaysolutions.io/index.html#license">Educational & Institutional Use License</a> · <a href="mailto:nick@selwaysolutions.io">Contact</a>
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Episodes
How American Doctors Defeated Che Guevara
In the remote lowlands of 1960s Bolivia, American doctors raced to stop a lethal hemorrhagic fever the locals called "Black Typhus" — and a few years later, U.S.-trained Bolivian Rangers cornered and killed Che Guevara not far away.
How a Fruit Company Toppled a Government
For most of the twentieth century, one American company decided who governed, who worked, and who ate across much of Central America and the Caribbean.
Standard Oil's Secret Cartel With Nazi Germany
After the Supreme Court broke up the Standard Oil trust in 1911, the largest piece — Standard Oil of New Jersey — didn't shrink.
How Copper Sparked the Chilean Coup
Chile sits on the richest copper on earth, and for most of the twentieth century two American companies owned it.
The Mining Empire That Poisoned a Town for a Century
High in the Peruvian Andes, an American company spent the twentieth century turning a landscape and its people into inputs.
How the Tin Barons Bought Bolivia
For half a century, three mining families owned Bolivia's tin — and through the tin, owned Bolivia.
Blood and Marble: The Amazon Rubber Boom's Forgotten Genocide
At the turn of the twentieth century the modern world ran on rubber — and rubber grew wild in one place: the Amazon.
The Nickel Mine That Got Its Critics Killed
In the 1960s, foreign companies won the right to mine nickel on Q'eqchi' Maya land at Lake Izabal, Guatemala — a 40-year concession on terms so generous that a group of professors at the national university formed a commission just to read the contract.
The British Company That Owned an Argentine Forest — and Massacred Its Workers
For half a century, a forest in northern Argentina supplied the world with the chemical that turned hides into leather — and a single British company owned the forest, the towns, the railways, the police, and the money the workers were paid in.
How Corporate Monoculture Built Slave Empires in Sugar and Henequen
After the United States took the Caribbean stage in 1898, American capital turned whole societies into single-crop suppliers.
How Sugar Barons Stole the Hawaiian Kingdom
Everywhere else in this series, the empire owned the economy.
The Human Machine Behind C&H Sugar: Hawaiʻi's Plantation Labor System
The bag of 'C&H Pure Cane Sugar from Hawaiʻi' in an American kitchen was the end of a long, engineered chain.
How Capital Flight Replaced Private Armies: Maquiladoras and Fast Fashion
Strip the banana plantation of its bananas and the copper mine of its copper, and what's left is the system: a zone of foreign-owned production, walled off from the national economy, exempt from taxes, with a young disposable workforce and the law bent to keep them quiet.
How ITT Tried to Buy a Coup: Telephones, Electricity, and the Fall of Allende
Most of this series is about things dug out of the ground.