With all the noise going on in the United States due to the Jan. 6 Committee hearings, which have shown how former President Donald Trump attempted to stay in power with the help of a coup, one wonders if all that is happening is bad karma.
No matter how much exceptionalism people in the United States attempt to show Trump as an aberration, he is USAmerica that came home to roost.
The US has bloodied its hands in so many coups around the world since the nineteenth century. It never apologized publicly for them never mind offering any compensation for the social damage and deep scars they caused to society.
On Tuesday, former national security adviser to Trump, John Bolton, surprised some by admitting that he had helped plan attempted coups in foreign countries.
As a Latin American, Bolton’s admission that he helped plan coups in countries like Venezuela unmasks the hypocrisy of the United States. Even if some US politicians praise the importance of democracy, Washington’s track record shows how much disdain it has for promoting democracy outside of its borders.
Another matter that the US has condoned is the spread of torture. Such an outlandish method was used by military dictatorships thanks to the CIA and School of the Americas, blamed for teaching and equipping de facto dictatorships in repression techniques and human rights violations committed by former students of different Latin American armies.
Even if France offered the military regime in Argentina its know-how on torture gained from the Algerian War (1954-62), the US was responsible for training security personnel in torture.
One of many terrible military dictatorships supported by the US was Rafael Leonídas Trujillo y Molina of the Dominican Republic, who ruled the country for thirty-two years (1930-61), was also a torturer.
Writes John Gerassi in “The Great fear in Latin America:” “Trujillo’s SIM (Military Intelligence Service) used slow-shocking electric chairs, or an electrified rod known as “The Cane,” especially effective on genitals, or nail extractors, or whips, or the Pulpo (octopus), a many armed electrical device screwed into the skull. Kilometer Nine [the jail] also featured a water tank with bloodsucking leeches.”
Gerassi continues quoting a Look senior editor who visited the country: “I still shudder about Snowball, a dwarf – now jailed – whose specialty was biting off men’s genitals.”
Strange world we live in, no? The US destroys and impoverishes Latin America by not allowing it to realize its own social, political, and economic potential, and then complains about why so many Latin Americas are desperately attempting to enter the US by any means.
Europe has the same issue highlighted by the cartoon below.
