After the 2016 election there were widespread claims of some sort of foreign intervention in the election and after the Mueller Report was finished in 2019 it was proven that there was intervention in the election but it was still uncertain if President Trump had incited it. Now in 2020 there are even more accusations of election fraud and intervention, but why don’t we talk about our intervention in other countries’ elections more specifically Latin American elections.
There have been a multitude of cases where a democratically elected left-wing leader in Latin America has been replaced by a US-backed right-wing (usually authoritarian) leader in a Coup d’état. Why would America intervene in a democracy which we cherish to such a high degree and why is it only with left-wing leaders?
Shortly after World War II there were two different economic systems in place on opposite sides of the world. Capitalism and Socialism. Oxford languages defines capitalism as “an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state” and Socialism as “a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole”. Capitalism is also a right-wing economic system while Socialism is left-wing leading to America only intervening in leftist countries. America being a capitalist country tried everything it could during the Cold War to stop the spread of socialism beyond the USSR. This included fighting proxy wars where America backed capitalist regimes and the USSR backed socialist regimes, and planning/backing a capitalist revolution in a democratically elected socialist country.
One of the best examples of this is the 1976 Argentine coup d’état. During this coup d’état the United States Department of State sent Henry Kissinger to Argentina two months before the coup d’état telling the revolutionaries to “destroy their opponents quickly” before an outcry of human rights abuses started growing in the US. After the coup d’état was successful the authoritarian regime that replaced it where 30,000 people that opposed the new regime “disappeared” or were patently killed. Kissinger once again supported them saying “they would have the full support of the United States government in their war and associated actions.” This is one of many examples of the United States going into countries and support right wing regimes and coups in order to spread their message that socialism is the root of all evil and capitalism will lead everyone to be successful but they have never truly let socialism exist by brutally suppressing them not only in their own country but all around the world.
