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I feel like a lot of Americans don't realize or chose not to acknowledge that most of the violence in the South and Central Americas is directly caused by the U

I feel like a lot of Americans don't realize or chose not to acknowledge that most of the violence in the South and Central Americas is directly caused by the United States. The Bay of Pigs, the School of the Americas, the Iranian-Contras, the CIA supported coupe in Chile on September 11th, 1973, United Fruit Company, .. the list is as long as you want to make it. It's intentional. The lower Americas are pushed into this state by various corporate interests in the US which are large enough to dictate policy. I've written about this before: http://fightthefuture.org/article/america-and-the-mexican-drug-trade/ http://fightthefuture.org/article/america-and-the-mexican-dr...

mythrwy 9y ago
Naw, the struggle was already there. Yankee just backed a side. Which wasn't doesn't make it OK but you can't blame every problem in the world on the CIA. The CIA simply isn't that efficient.
- ataturk 9y ago
  Yeah, seriously. One could argue that Venezuela is actually worse off without US involvement!
cryptonector 9y ago
This isn't even remotely correct. It's just a... U.S.-centric way of thinking. Violence -- political violence -- was endemic in the 60s and 70s in Latin America, and that was not because of the U.S. The U.S. didn't get involved in, say, Chile, until 1973, and even then, while Nixon supported Pinochet at first, Kissinger did tell Pinochet to cool it. Carter did not support the Argentine "Proceso" either. You can say what you want about the School of the Americas, but the Argentines had a long long history of political violence going back to pre-WWI days. The U.S. had NOTHING to do with Perón, nor with the coup against him in 1955, nor with any of the succession of civilian governments and military coups that followed it, nor with the peronist violence. Political violence greatly cooled off in Chile, Brazil, and Argentina after the experience of the 70s. Not -mind you- because dirty war killed the violent (dirty war was awful and a failure) but because people just got tired of the violence. For example, in 1983 Argentina had free elections again after 7 years of dirty war, and they voted for the normal guy rather than for the radical leftist put up by the peronists. Then for each successive economic crisis (they're like clockwork down there) there was... no violence -- nothing remotely like the violence of the 60s and 70s. Now, I'm focusing on Argentina, and you might say they're unique, but I don't think so. The story is not the same throughout Latin America in terms of detail, but writ large it kinda is: the 60s and 70s were a violent time. In Central America the violence went on much longer, and in part that is because Cuba and the USSR stoked it. Now that the USSR is gone and Cuba/Venezuela on their heels, violence in Central America is down a lot -- especially in Colombia, where a clean war defeated the communist guerillas and the narcos. It would be much more interesting to study why political violence was so endemic in Latin America in the 60s and 70s, and later still in Central America. But as it's very popular to blindly blame it all on the U.S., I fear there's too little interest -- the narrative that "the evil U.S. what done it" must be too appealing, facile though it is.
- macawfish 9y ago
  How do you respond to Noam Chomsky? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKwJI9axblQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKwJI9axblQ
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    Chomsky pretty regularly exaggerates his positions regarding politics. For a long time he was defending the Venezuelan government. He has popular appeal in a lot of communities, but his expertise is linguistics not politics. No objective historian would say that the US is responsible for all or most of the violence in South America, nor that it has been innocent. The violence is not due to the US but rather is largely a result of the divide between the landholding elites and poor and the economic/social system the Spanish set up. To add to their examples, political violence was common in Mexico from 1900 onwards, and that was largely self-inflicted.
    - aylmao 9y ago
      Funny you bring up political violence in Mexico from 1900 onwards. Mexico had a revolution at the beginning of the century. It lasted 3 years at first, and then the US ambassador was involved in the murder of the President, which extended the violence for at least another 4 years. Mexico has a cartel problem now. It also happens to have in its northern neighbour the biggest consumer demand for drugs in the world. And said neighbour will rather export its problem and fund a war south of the border with billions of dollars, torture training and illicit arms smuggling [1], than address its public health issue. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mérida_Initiative#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mérida_Initiative#Criticism
  - cryptonector 9y ago
    Mostly by ignoring him.
    - coredog64 9y ago
      Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
gozur88 9y ago
Some of the violence? Sure. Most? Not even close.
- mschuster91 9y ago
  What fuels all that violence? Mostly drug related shit, and the US is by far the biggest market in the region for all kinds of drugs, not to mention the historic influence of e.g. the CIA in the drug smuggling. In exchange for drug money, US weapons end up in South America (what else is to be expected when one can buy AR-15s in Wal-Marts?!). So therefore it is legitimate to blame the US for most (or even all) violence in South America.
  - saint_fiasco 9y ago
    The US drug market makes things shittier on the margin, but it is not the main cause. If they stopped buying drugs the gangs would fight over the control of some other resource. For example, the town of Tancítaro became prosperous (and therefore valuable for organized crime) because they grow lots of avocados. The US doesn't fight a war against avocados.
    - jessaustin 9y ago
      The reason drug traffickers are billionaires is that they are drug traffickers. In the absence of that, they would have no money and no power.
      - chasd00 9y ago
        Do you think they'd just shrug their shoulders and go home and be poor?
        jessaustin 9y ago
        Some violent predatory thugs die. Some go to prison. Some get old and chill out. Some remain violent predatory thugs. They all run through cash pretty quick, though, so when American drug users start buying their drugs from normal nonviolent firms, the violent predatory thugs will be poor. Since they don't know any reputable trades, some problems with protection rackets etc. will remain for years. No one will be perverse enough to blame those echos of The Drug War on the fact that we finally decided to end it. What, did you think that narcos are somehow representative of Mexican national character? They most certainly are not.
f4rker 9y ago
Ah yes, the old "The USA is responsible for everything" line of reasoning.
corpMaverick 9y ago
Particularly damaging was the coup d'etat against Madero in February 1913 by US Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Lane_Wilson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Lane_Wilson It trigger one of the most violent revolutions of the 20th century, with great loses of life and economic infrastructure.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  This is a little misleading. Not in that Wilson was not responsible, but in that the violence was ongoing well before his actions: In response to this lack of action, Zapata promulgated the Plan de Ayala in November 1911, declaring himself in rebellion against Madero. He renewed guerrilla warfare in the state of Morelos. Madero sent the Federal Army to deal with the Zapata, unsuccessfully. Zapata remained true to the demands of the Plan de Ayala and in rebellion against every central government up until his assassination by an agent of President Venustiano Carranza in 1919. The brilliant northern revolutionary general Pascual Orozco, who had helped take Ciudad Juárez for the revolutionaries, had expected to become governor of Chihuahua, a powerful position. In 1911, although Orozco was "the man of the hour," Madero gave the governorship instead to Abraham González, a respectable revolutionary, with the explanation that Orozco had not reached the legal age to serve as governor, a tactic that was “a useful constitutional alibi for thwarting the ambitions of young, popular, revolutionary leaders."[67] Madero had put Orozco in charge of the large force of rurales in Chihuahua, but to a gifted revolutionary fighter who had helped bring about Díaz’s fall, Madero’s reward was insulting. After Madero refused to agree to social reforms calling for better working hours, pay, and conditions, Orozco organized his own army, the "Orozquistas", also called the Colorados ("Red Flaggers"). In early 1912 they rebelled against Madero, causing considerable dismay among U.S. businessmen and other foreign investors in the northern region. It was a signal to many that Madero’s government could not maintain the order that was the underpinning of modernization in the era of Porfirio Díaz. In April 1912, Madero dispatched Gen. Victoriano Huerta of the Federal Army to put down Orozco's revolt. As president, Madero had kept the federal army intact as an institution, using it to put down domestic rebellions against his regime. Huerta was a professional soldier and continued to serve in the Federal Army under the new commander-in-chief, but Huerta's loyalty lay with General Bernardo Reyes, rather than the civilian Madero. In 1912, under pressure from his cabinet, Madero had called on Huerta to suppress Orozco's rebellion. With Huerta's success against Orozco, he emerged as a powerful figure for conservative forces opposing the Madero regime.[68] During the Orozco revolt, the governor of Chihuahua mobilized the state militia to support the Federal Army, and Pancho Villa, a colonel in the militia, was called up at this time. In mid-April, at the head of 400 irregular troops, he joined the forces commanded by Huerta. Huerta, however, viewed Villa as an ambitious competitor. During a visit to Huerta's headquarters in June 1912, after an incident in which he refused to return a number of stolen horses, Villa was imprisoned on charges of insubordination and robbery and sentenced to death.[69] Raúl Madero, the President's brother, intervened to save Villa's life. Jailed in Mexico City, Villa fled to the United States, later to return and play a major role in the civil wars of 1913–1915. Notably, the men who conspired against him were previously his revolutionary supporters.
nitwit005 9y ago
The US has its faults, but it didn't invent crime, corruption or stupidity. And there is no corporate interest that wants mass killings and kidnappings.
- ohyes 9y ago
  Well, except the defense industry. The guys who sell you x-ray machines and bomb sniffing dogs and private security services. And the companies who build military tanks, planes, and ships. And the companies that build guns, body-armor and night vision goggles. And the ones that want you to be scared because scared people are easy to manipulate. Oh, that stuff represents a shit-ton of the federal budget? Weird. I guess it's just a really dangerous world, nothing to be done about it...
  - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
    The parts of the defense industry you listed are the parts that benefit most from arms races between well funded nation states and proxy wars. Basic hardware is cheap. Anyone can make it and that drives down price. The Mexican police can buy cheap guns and bullets from whoever they want. Stuff like radar systems and guided missiles are what makes it into the highlights list of the quarterly all hands.
    - ohyes 9y ago
      9/11 (an incident of mass murder) caused the US to invade Iraq and Afghanistan, surely that sold enough guided missiles, attack helicopters and radar systems to make the quarterlies for a few years. It also sold a ton of those bomb search machines and led to a couple of huge wings of the government (NSA and TSA). Cheney's Haliburton stock being a singular example of this type of violence being beneficial to certain corporate interests. People with power and money are much more cynical that we'd like to believe.
      - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
        >People with power and money are much more cynical that we'd like to believe. Than you'd like to believe. I have no illusions.
mmsimanga 9y ago
African here. Apart from the Bay of Pigs I don't know much about the events you mention. What I can tell you in Africa similar stories are shared. All coups are allegedly plotted and carried out with support from the CIA. I am not naive enough to believe that the CIA is innocent of everything but I often wonder why my fellow Africans betray us at the behest of the CIA. I get it often there is lots of money and power at stake but it saddens me to see some of the atrocities we commit against each other. There will always be a foreign power waiting to take advantage. It could be China next or Russia.
- adventured 9y ago
  The US is simultaneously blamed for everything bad that happens in the world politically, while receiving between zero and very little credit for anything good that has happened since WW2. If Russia annexes part of Ukraine and threatens to go further, it's the fault of the US. If Venezuela installs a Socialist military dictatorship with horrific economic ideas, it's the fault of the US (even though the US tried to stop Chavez). Meanwhile you don't see the US trying to topple Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Japan, France, etc. because of their quasi Socialist tendencies. The US hasn't tried to invade, topple or obliterate Canada because of it's far more Socialist-leaning beliefs. It's the irrational blame consequence of being the sole superpower during the post WW2 era. Here's the reality: the US isn't even remotely as powerful or influential in about 180 of the 195 nations as the propaganda would have you believe. The US plays very little role in the affairs of most nations. People take it to absurd extremes in trying to blame the US for anything and everything that happens, including: all poverty and crime in Latin America (but not the prosperity in Canada of course), any and all polical chaos in Africa (but not the improvements there in the last 50 years), anything in Eastern Europe that is bad (but not the dramatic increase in most standards of living there post cold war), et al. Typically if you dig into any claims about the US doing X Y Z, you'll find the story goes dramatically beyond any influence the US had on the situation. Iran's last 40-50 year history is a classic example of that intellectual fraud (usually the false claim is put forward that the US toppled a democratically elected government, which isn't true (it was never democratically elected for one thing), and is therefore responsible for every bad decision Iran has made about installing and keeping a 40 year theocracy).

mythrwy 9y ago

Naw, the struggle was already there. Yankee just backed a side. Which wasn't doesn't make it OK but you can't blame every problem in the world on the CIA. The CIA simply isn't that efficient.

ataturk 9y ago
Yeah, seriously. One could argue that Venezuela is actually worse off without US involvement!

cryptonector 9y ago

This isn't even remotely correct. It's just a... U.S.-centric way of thinking. Violence -- political violence -- was endemic in the 60s and 70s in Latin America, and that was not because of the U.S. The U.S. didn't get involved in, say, Chile, until 1973, and even then, while Nixon supported Pinochet at first, Kissinger did tell Pinochet to cool it. Carter did not support the Argentine "Proceso" either. You can say what you want about the School of the Americas, but the Argentines had a long long history of political violence going back to pre-WWI days. The U.S. had NOTHING to do with Perón, nor with the coup against him in 1955, nor with any of the succession of civilian governments and military coups that followed it, nor with the peronist violence. Political violence greatly cooled off in Chile, Brazil, and Argentina after the experience of the 70s. Not -mind you- because dirty war killed the violent (dirty war was awful and a failure) but because people just got tired of the violence. For example, in 1983 Argentina had free elections again after 7 years of dirty war, and they voted for the normal guy rather than for the radical leftist put up by the peronists. Then for each successive economic crisis (they're like clockwork down there) there was... no violence -- nothing remotely like the violence of the 60s and 70s. Now, I'm focusing on Argentina, and you might say they're unique, but I don't think so. The story is not the same throughout Latin America in terms of detail, but writ large it kinda is: the 60s and 70s were a violent time. In Central America the violence went on much longer, and in part that is because Cuba and the USSR stoked it. Now that the USSR is gone and Cuba/Venezuela on their heels, violence in Central America is down a lot -- especially in Colombia, where a clean war defeated the communist guerillas and the narcos. It would be much more interesting to study why political violence was so endemic in Latin America in the 60s and 70s, and later still in Central America. But as it's very popular to blindly blame it all on the U.S., I fear there's too little interest -- the narrative that "the evil U.S. what done it" must be too appealing, facile though it is.

macawfish 9y ago
How do you respond to Noam Chomsky? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKwJI9axblQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKwJI9axblQ
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  Chomsky pretty regularly exaggerates his positions regarding politics. For a long time he was defending the Venezuelan government. He has popular appeal in a lot of communities, but his expertise is linguistics not politics. No objective historian would say that the US is responsible for all or most of the violence in South America, nor that it has been innocent. The violence is not due to the US but rather is largely a result of the divide between the landholding elites and poor and the economic/social system the Spanish set up. To add to their examples, political violence was common in Mexico from 1900 onwards, and that was largely self-inflicted.
  - aylmao 9y ago
    Funny you bring up political violence in Mexico from 1900 onwards. Mexico had a revolution at the beginning of the century. It lasted 3 years at first, and then the US ambassador was involved in the murder of the President, which extended the violence for at least another 4 years. Mexico has a cartel problem now. It also happens to have in its northern neighbour the biggest consumer demand for drugs in the world. And said neighbour will rather export its problem and fund a war south of the border with billions of dollars, torture training and illicit arms smuggling [1], than address its public health issue. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mérida_Initiative#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mérida_Initiative#Criticism
- cryptonector 9y ago
  Mostly by ignoring him.
  - coredog64 9y ago
    Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

gozur88 9y ago

Some of the violence? Sure. Most? Not even close.

mschuster91 9y ago
What fuels all that violence? Mostly drug related shit, and the US is by far the biggest market in the region for all kinds of drugs, not to mention the historic influence of e.g. the CIA in the drug smuggling. In exchange for drug money, US weapons end up in South America (what else is to be expected when one can buy AR-15s in Wal-Marts?!). So therefore it is legitimate to blame the US for most (or even all) violence in South America.
- saint_fiasco 9y ago
  The US drug market makes things shittier on the margin, but it is not the main cause. If they stopped buying drugs the gangs would fight over the control of some other resource. For example, the town of Tancítaro became prosperous (and therefore valuable for organized crime) because they grow lots of avocados. The US doesn't fight a war against avocados.
  - jessaustin 9y ago
    The reason drug traffickers are billionaires is that they are drug traffickers. In the absence of that, they would have no money and no power.
    - chasd00 9y ago
      Do you think they'd just shrug their shoulders and go home and be poor?
      - jessaustin 9y ago
        Some violent predatory thugs die. Some go to prison. Some get old and chill out. Some remain violent predatory thugs. They all run through cash pretty quick, though, so when American drug users start buying their drugs from normal nonviolent firms, the violent predatory thugs will be poor. Since they don't know any reputable trades, some problems with protection rackets etc. will remain for years. No one will be perverse enough to blame those echos of The Drug War on the fact that we finally decided to end it. What, did you think that narcos are somehow representative of Mexican national character? They most certainly are not.

f4rker 9y ago

Ah yes, the old "The USA is responsible for everything" line of reasoning.

corpMaverick 9y ago

Particularly damaging was the coup d'etat against Madero in February 1913 by US Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Lane_Wilson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Lane_Wilson It trigger one of the most violent revolutions of the 20th century, with great loses of life and economic infrastructure.

aaron-lebo 9y ago
This is a little misleading. Not in that Wilson was not responsible, but in that the violence was ongoing well before his actions: In response to this lack of action, Zapata promulgated the Plan de Ayala in November 1911, declaring himself in rebellion against Madero. He renewed guerrilla warfare in the state of Morelos. Madero sent the Federal Army to deal with the Zapata, unsuccessfully. Zapata remained true to the demands of the Plan de Ayala and in rebellion against every central government up until his assassination by an agent of President Venustiano Carranza in 1919. The brilliant northern revolutionary general Pascual Orozco, who had helped take Ciudad Juárez for the revolutionaries, had expected to become governor of Chihuahua, a powerful position. In 1911, although Orozco was "the man of the hour," Madero gave the governorship instead to Abraham González, a respectable revolutionary, with the explanation that Orozco had not reached the legal age to serve as governor, a tactic that was “a useful constitutional alibi for thwarting the ambitions of young, popular, revolutionary leaders."[67] Madero had put Orozco in charge of the large force of rurales in Chihuahua, but to a gifted revolutionary fighter who had helped bring about Díaz’s fall, Madero’s reward was insulting. After Madero refused to agree to social reforms calling for better working hours, pay, and conditions, Orozco organized his own army, the "Orozquistas", also called the Colorados ("Red Flaggers"). In early 1912 they rebelled against Madero, causing considerable dismay among U.S. businessmen and other foreign investors in the northern region. It was a signal to many that Madero’s government could not maintain the order that was the underpinning of modernization in the era of Porfirio Díaz. In April 1912, Madero dispatched Gen. Victoriano Huerta of the Federal Army to put down Orozco's revolt. As president, Madero had kept the federal army intact as an institution, using it to put down domestic rebellions against his regime. Huerta was a professional soldier and continued to serve in the Federal Army under the new commander-in-chief, but Huerta's loyalty lay with General Bernardo Reyes, rather than the civilian Madero. In 1912, under pressure from his cabinet, Madero had called on Huerta to suppress Orozco's rebellion. With Huerta's success against Orozco, he emerged as a powerful figure for conservative forces opposing the Madero regime.[68] During the Orozco revolt, the governor of Chihuahua mobilized the state militia to support the Federal Army, and Pancho Villa, a colonel in the militia, was called up at this time. In mid-April, at the head of 400 irregular troops, he joined the forces commanded by Huerta. Huerta, however, viewed Villa as an ambitious competitor. During a visit to Huerta's headquarters in June 1912, after an incident in which he refused to return a number of stolen horses, Villa was imprisoned on charges of insubordination and robbery and sentenced to death.[69] Raúl Madero, the President's brother, intervened to save Villa's life. Jailed in Mexico City, Villa fled to the United States, later to return and play a major role in the civil wars of 1913–1915. Notably, the men who conspired against him were previously his revolutionary supporters.

nitwit005 9y ago

The US has its faults, but it didn't invent crime, corruption or stupidity. And there is no corporate interest that wants mass killings and kidnappings.

ohyes 9y ago
Well, except the defense industry. The guys who sell you x-ray machines and bomb sniffing dogs and private security services. And the companies who build military tanks, planes, and ships. And the companies that build guns, body-armor and night vision goggles. And the ones that want you to be scared because scared people are easy to manipulate. Oh, that stuff represents a shit-ton of the federal budget? Weird. I guess it's just a really dangerous world, nothing to be done about it...
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  The parts of the defense industry you listed are the parts that benefit most from arms races between well funded nation states and proxy wars. Basic hardware is cheap. Anyone can make it and that drives down price. The Mexican police can buy cheap guns and bullets from whoever they want. Stuff like radar systems and guided missiles are what makes it into the highlights list of the quarterly all hands.
  - ohyes 9y ago
    9/11 (an incident of mass murder) caused the US to invade Iraq and Afghanistan, surely that sold enough guided missiles, attack helicopters and radar systems to make the quarterlies for a few years. It also sold a ton of those bomb search machines and led to a couple of huge wings of the government (NSA and TSA). Cheney's Haliburton stock being a singular example of this type of violence being beneficial to certain corporate interests. People with power and money are much more cynical that we'd like to believe.
    - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
      >People with power and money are much more cynical that we'd like to believe. Than you'd like to believe. I have no illusions.

mmsimanga 9y ago

African here. Apart from the Bay of Pigs I don't know much about the events you mention. What I can tell you in Africa similar stories are shared. All coups are allegedly plotted and carried out with support from the CIA. I am not naive enough to believe that the CIA is innocent of everything but I often wonder why my fellow Africans betray us at the behest of the CIA. I get it often there is lots of money and power at stake but it saddens me to see some of the atrocities we commit against each other. There will always be a foreign power waiting to take advantage. It could be China next or Russia.

adventured 9y ago
The US is simultaneously blamed for everything bad that happens in the world politically, while receiving between zero and very little credit for anything good that has happened since WW2. If Russia annexes part of Ukraine and threatens to go further, it's the fault of the US. If Venezuela installs a Socialist military dictatorship with horrific economic ideas, it's the fault of the US (even though the US tried to stop Chavez). Meanwhile you don't see the US trying to topple Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Japan, France, etc. because of their quasi Socialist tendencies. The US hasn't tried to invade, topple or obliterate Canada because of it's far more Socialist-leaning beliefs. It's the irrational blame consequence of being the sole superpower during the post WW2 era. Here's the reality: the US isn't even remotely as powerful or influential in about 180 of the 195 nations as the propaganda would have you believe. The US plays very little role in the affairs of most nations. People take it to absurd extremes in trying to blame the US for anything and everything that happens, including: all poverty and crime in Latin America (but not the prosperity in Canada of course), any and all polical chaos in Africa (but not the improvements there in the last 50 years), anything in Eastern Europe that is bad (but not the dramatic increase in most standards of living there post cold war), et al. Typically if you dig into any claims about the US doing X Y Z, you'll find the story goes dramatically beyond any influence the US had on the situation. Iran's last 40-50 year history is a classic example of that intellectual fraud (usually the false claim is put forward that the US toppled a democratically elected government, which isn't true (it was never democratically elected for one thing), and is therefore responsible for every bad decision Iran has made about installing and keeping a 40 year theocracy).