Yet Another American Crime in Latin America:

U.S. Officials Secretly Met With Venezuela Coup Plotters

September 10, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

It’s just been revealed that beginning last year, U.S. officials secretly met a number of times with Venezuelan military officers who were plotting a coup to overthrow the government of President Nicolás Maduro. Maduro’s is an oppressive, not a revolutionary or socialist, government, and this action by the U.S. is yet another crime and outrage against the people of Latin America.

According to the September 8 New York Times (“Trump Administration Discussed Coup Plans With Rebel Venezuelan Officers”), one of the military commanders the U.S. was meeting with has been accused of “torturing critics, jailing hundreds of political prisoners, wounding thousands of civilians, trafficking drugs” and other crimes. This IS exactly the kind of criminal the U.S. imperialists have worked with across Latin America—and the world—to further their interests for the last 100 plus years and counting. The Trump/Pence regime claims it’s trying to “bring positive change” to Venezuela. Apparently they consider criminals like this the right kind of men for the kind of change they have in mind.

The U.S. did not end up backing this particular reactionary plot with arms, funds, or equipment. Yet just meeting with these reactionaries could well have had the impact of encouraging them. And the U.S. rulers—starting with Bush and Obama and now escalating under Trump—have imposed harsh economic sanctions on Venezuela and continue to threaten it with military action.

One key reason the U.S. backed off, according to the Times report: fear that the effort “could backfire politically in Latin America” because of the widespread hatred of America’s “covert intervention across Latin America,” including in the Times’ words, “backing previous rebellions, coups and plots in countries like Cuba, Nicaragua, Brazil, and Chile, and for turning a blind eye to the abuses military regimes committed during the Cold War.”

And that’s not the half of it. The U.S. has carried out colonialist and imperialist aggression against its “southern neighbors” from its founding right up to the present day. Seriously look into this history. You’ll find America isn’t the “greatest country on Earth”—but it has committed the greatest crimes on Earth!

A few examples of American Crimes—in Latin America alone!

Case #57: The 1973 CIA Coup in Chile

THE CRIME: Beginning in the early morning hours of September 11, 1973, the Chilean military, with political guidance and secret backing from the U.S., carried out a military coup against the government of Chilean president Salvador Allende. With U.S. Navy ships offshore and U.S. spy planes overhead as backup, the Chilean Air Force and tanks and soldiers from the Chilean Army dropped bombs and launched artillery and small-arms fire in a furious, coordinated assault on La Moneda palace, the central government building in Chile’s capital, Santiago. Allende, a social democrat elected on a platform of social reform three years previously, was killed along with a small group of defenders.

The CIA had collected “arrest lists” and “key government installations which need to be taken over,” according to a 1975 U.S. Senate investigation. In the hours, days and weeks that followed the coup, tens of thousands of officials of Allende’s government and the Unidad Popular governing coalition, along with workers, union leaders, activists, students, progressive intellectuals, artists and people who just happened to be on the streets on the morning of September 11, were rounded up, then held in Santiago’s National and Chile stadiums and in military installations and facilities converted to concentration camps in locations around the country. They were subjected to brutal physical and psychological torture, or just outright murdered. Read more.

Case #83: The U.S.-Mexico War of 1846-1848

THE CRIME: In the spring of 1846, U.S. President James Polk sent General Zachary Taylor and several thousand U.S. troops into what had been—before slave-holding settlers from the U.S. declared it an independent “Republic of Texas” in 1836—Mexican territory between the Nueces and Rio Grande Rivers, near the Gulf of Mexico, with the goal of provoking a war. When Taylor’s troops arrived at the Mexican town of Matamoros on the Rio Grande and began menacing maneuvers, they were attacked by a force of Mexicans, just as Polk and his cabinet believed they would be. President Polk wasted no time in declaring Mexico guilty of aggression against the U.S. Read more.

Case #38: The U.S. Backs El Salvador’s Death Squad Government, 1980 to 1992

THE CRIME: Throughout the decade of the 1980s into the early 1990s the U.S. government backed, trained, and financed the reactionary government and military of the Central American country of El Salvador in its murderous counterinsurgency war that killed tens of thousands of workers, peasants, students, intellectuals, artists and others and forced hundreds of thousands to flee into exile.

El Salvador was dominated by U.S. imperialism in league with a few Salvadoran families who controlled the vast majority of the country’s land and wealth, while millions of peasants, workers and others lived in extreme poverty. They had no democratic rights and during the 1960s and 1970s their political protests were violently suppressed. In 1977, the Salvadoran military killed hundreds peacefully protesting voter fraud. The Salvadoran government unleashed paramilitary vigilante groups or “death squads” against its opponents, kidnapping and murdering leaders of labor unions, peasant organizations, political parties, and guerrilla groups, as well as priests and lay religious workers who sided with the poor. Read more.

Case #43: The U.S. Invasion of Panama, 1989-1990

THE CRIME: On December 20, 1989, the U.S. military invaded Panama with 27,684 troops and 300 aircraft, killing thousands of civilians and removing Manuel Noriega and his Panamanian Defense Force (PDF) from power. The invasion was given the name of “Operation Just Cause” by U.S. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney.

The Central American Human Rights Commission (CODEHUCA) reported, “The most devastated civilian neighborhoods—such as Chorrillos and San Miguelito—were extremely poor, densely populated areas. Half of the neighborhood of Chorrillos—which had a pre-invasion population of approximately 25,000—was literally destroyed by US troops and civilian residents were victims of direct attacks.” Read more.

Case #75: Obama, Clinton and the 2009 Military Coup in Honduras

THE CRIME: On June 28, 2009, the Honduran military carried out a coup d’etat against the elected president, Manuel Zelaya, a liberal-leaning populist. The coup had crucial backing from then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the U.S. State Department. The generals and politicians behind the coup brought to power a more openly fascistic and pro-U.S. regime that plunged the Honduran people even more deeply into the hell of U.S. domination, state-sponsored political assassinations and terrorism, and intensified violence, poverty, and oppression. These horrors remain in effect to this day, with U.S. backing. Read more.

 

For more, see the entire American Crime series at revcom.us.