> The US supported coups in Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1964), the Dominican Republic (1965), Chile (1973), and Uruguay (1973). Moreover, the US put some pressure

> The US supported coups in Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1964), the Dominican Republic (1965), Chile (1973), and Uruguay (1973). Moreover, the US put some pressure on the democratie government of Peru right before the 1948 coup, and Ameriean diplomats sympathized with military inter-ventions in Costa Rica (1948), Panama (1948), Colombia (1949), Ecuador (1963), Bolivia (1964), and Argentina (1976). In these seven instances, a case could be made that hegemonic demonstration was at work. Previous work has shown that US signals that it would accept coups were associated with their occurrence. 11 However, even taking such US signals into account - whieh often did not entail any agency on the ground -at most, the US favoured coups in 12 out of 27 democratic breakdowns. The waves of authoritarianism that rocked Latin America from 1948 to 1956 and from 1964 to 1976 were not a result of consistent US indifference toward democracy or support for authoritarianism; Washington opposed many coups. This article does not refute that the US supported multiple coups in the US. The claim is simply that, since the US supposedly also aided a similar number of democracies to the number of authoritarian regimes it backed, it is therefore unjustified to say "US only supports authoritarians". This is not nearly as strong of a claim as what you seem to be suggesting. Also, citing one single article on a complex matter such as this really doesn't prove anything. Anyone could cite plenty more articles with alternative takes.