For many Latin American states, expropriation has been a hammer in the toolbox of land or labor reform. For the United States, expropriation has been a thorn in the side of its companies’ profitable operations in the region—and, therefore, a threat to its interests.

This conflict has played out many times throughout the region. In 1938, the Mexican government expropriated the oil industry under Article 27, which specified the state owned all natural resources; the Roosevelt administration responded with a boycott of Mexican products. In 1952, Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz enacted Decree 900, which expropriated the land that the United Fruit Company (UFC) had laid fallow; the Eisenhower administration, with close ties to the UFC, overthrew the Árbenz government two years later. And in 1962, the Cuban government expropriated substantial U.S. landholdings, compensated at the declared tax value of the property. However, U.S. companies, who had artificially lowered prices to pay fewer taxes, cried foul that the Cuban government would not pay them the fair market price for their property. As a result, Congress passed the Hickenlooper Amendment to withhold U.S. aid from countries that expropriated U.S. property “without just compensation” the same year.

Read more

September 11, 2001 marked one of the worst ever terror attacks on American soil. Two hijacked planes crashed into and destroyed the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, one crashed into the Pentagon, and one crashed in rural Pennsylvania. Nearly 3,000 people were killed, 8,900 were injured, and thousands more were left traumatized after experiencing the attack.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks have also significantly affected U.S. foreign and domestic policy by increasing security and surveillance measures and fueling ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The attacks also led President George W. Bush to create the Department of Homeland Security in 2002, which remains active today working to protect United States civilians and combat domestic terrorism.

Career Foreign Service Officer Mary Ryan served as the Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs during the attacks on September 11, 2001. In Congressional testimony, she told how the terrorists who committed the attacks had received legitimate U.S. visas, and described how difficulties and limitations in background checking and interviewing made the visa adjudication process inaccurate. Ultimately, Ryan believed that it was important for other parts of the U.S. government to share its intelligence with consular offices to ensure that they issued visas responsibly and prevented future terrorists from entering the country. Without such coordination, consular officers would not have real-time information that could empower them to prevent potential terrorists from acquiring visas. Despite the lack of information, inter-agency cooperation, and similar circumstances for the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) borger agents who actually admitted the terrorists into the United States, Mary Ryan and other front-line consular officers received a lot of criticism and even blame for what happened.

Read more

They were doctors, professors, and, in some cases, even peasants. The one thing they all had in common, however, was the desire to flee communist Romania for America and being “just miserable” because of it. Thanks to the efforts of two people at the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest, “The Miserables” found a voice in the U.S. government.

Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu had little tolerance for dissent. So when thousands of desperate Romanians committed the “crime” of wanting to become American citizens, Ceaușescu cracked down. He had them fired from their jobs, revoked their benefits, and all but stripped them of their Romanian citizenship. Despite their pleas for help, the U.S. embassy declared that these asylum seekers did not qualify as refugees, since Ceaușescu’s assault on them was “not politically motivated.”

Virginia “Ginny” Young, the Consul General, personally took on their case. She lobbied the front office again and again over the years but they rejected her every time. Sometimes she was called “too emotionally attached;” at other times, she was rejected because a senior official’s reputation was at stake in preserving our relationship with President Ceaușescu. Finally, in 1989, she took the issue all the way up to the new U.S. ambassador, Allen “Punch” Green.

Read more

For women in the 1990s, Kenya was a difficult place to live. For those who came from wealthier families and could afford education, they sometimes had the resources to do great things, from simply living independently to even winning the Nobel Peace Prize as Wangari Mathai did in 2004. Unfortunately, however, poverty, lack of resources, and patriarchal laws and societal structures often prevented many women from becoming educated and achieving their full potential.

Women were expected to marry early to start a family, and families often couldn’t afford to send girls to school. Even for those who were educated, it was difficult to find jobs, and this contributed to violence, robbery, and other crime. In 1995, the Beijing Platform for Action and subsequent introduction of feminist thought into Kenya began to improve women’s conditions, but they still had a long way to go. More girls began going to school and women’s education improved, but there was still a huge disparity between the wealthy and poorer classes. Even today, women have few rights to property ownership in Kenya and are often even banned from inheriting their husbands’ assets because of their gender.

In this “moment” in U.S. diplomatic history, Joanne Grady Huskey discusses her experiences volunteering as the head of the American Women’s Association in Kenya from 1996 to 1999 while her husband, a Foreign Service officer, was posted there. From working with Kenyan women to build a hospital and then having it taken away by the government, to even meeting a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Huskey experienced many interesting and diverse things during her time working in Kenya related to poverty and the fight for women’s rights.

Read more

Following the 1990–1991 Gulf War, the United Nations wanted to prevent any further aggression, and feared that Iraq had developed nuclear weapons of mass destruction. The rest of the world could only imagine the level of mass destruction and carnage that would result if Iraq decided to use such weapons.

As a result, the United Nations developed a Special Commission (UNSCOM) to inspect Iraq’s arsenal of weapons and to ensure that Iraq complied with the regulations and guidelines pertaining to weapons of mass destruction. The international community largely considered Iraq to be responsible for the start of the Gulf War due to its invasion and occupation of Kuwait in 1990. As such, UNSCOM required Iraq to recognize Kuwait as an independent country and pay war reparations. It also gave the United Nations extensive insight into and supervision over Iraq’s military structures and production.

During the investigation, the Commission discovered that Iraq had indeed created weapons of mass destruction as early as the 1980s. While Iraq initially complied with the UNSCOM mandates, there was some minor conflict between UNSCOM investigators and the Iraqi military. At one point in 1991, the Iraqi military fired warning shots at the investigators to prevent them from searching vehicles that were believed to contain contraband weapons. Iraq subsequently admitted to developing nuclear weapons for defensive purposes only and complied with the UN’s rules by destroying a large part of its nuclear arsenal in the summer of 1991. Amid suspicions that the United States was using the Commision to spy on the Iraqi military and Saddam Hussein, rather than to actually fulfill its original goals, UNSCOM ended its special investigation in 1998, and was replaced by the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Committee (UNMOVIC). Iraq ultimately agreed unconditionally to the searches by UNMOVIC in 2002, and the investigation ended altogether in 2005.

Read more