Americans are strangely ignorant about all the horrible things the US has done in Latin America.
They don't teach it in schools, the press pretty much ignores it, but there is a long history of horrible anti-democratic acts. It's not a secret, you can read about it in Wikipedia. And it's not even really denied, although maybe the most hardened of right-wingers might still try to justify it under anti-communism.
The most widely know example is Allende in Chile, but it goes way beyond that. In fact, in the majority of Latin American countries, at some point since WW2, the US has either backed a right-wing coup to overthrow an elected government, or propped up a right-wing dictatorship against a popular left-leaning opposition movements.
And when these facts are fully appreciated, it really changes the whole Cold War "capitalists-good socialists-bad" worldview that is so embedded in the American psyche. Don't get me wrong, the USSR was extremely bad, and dictatorial communism was horrible. And, yeah, comparing Western and Eastern Europe, it's obvious that the West, under market-based social democracy, did much better than the East, under authoritarian communism.
But is that the correct comparison? What happens if you compare Latin America to Eastern Europe? In many ways, the comparison is more apt. Eastern Europe was the USSR's back yard, where they intervened violently, supported puppet dictatorships, and enforced the communist economic system. Latin America was the US's back yard, and we intervened violently, supported puppet dictatorships, and enforced a capitalist economic system. And neither Eastern Europe nor Latin America had good outcomes.
Why am I posting this random thought? It came up in a discussion I was having about the current situation in Venezuela. Because, yes, Maduro has abused human rights. And yet the coup that the US is trying to enact needs to be understood in the historical context. Which is why it's very disappointing than in the press coverage (even outside the right-wing media where it's all "socialism!!!!" ), you don't hear many voices pointing out that governments that the US has installed in Latin America, and there have been many, have almost universally been disastrous.
Someone on those talk shows and editorial pages needs to say "before we talk about supporting a coup in Venezuela, let's review what happened in Chile, Guatemala, Argentina, Nicaragua, Panama..." Because this is very far from the first time we've installed a right-wing government in Latin America. And in the other instances, the result was human rights abuses, as well as increases in poverty and inequality. And this would be true even if Trump didn't have his obvious love of dictatorships.
But there's no real pushback. Yeah, people point out that Venezuela's problems aren't the result of "socialism", but rather corruption, and that the accurate example of the kind of "socialism" promoted by people like AOC is Western Europe and Scandinavia. But there's more to it than that. The economic history of Latin America makes a very strong case against laissez-faire free-market fundamentalism.
= new reply since forum marked as read
