Richard Gott | guardian.co.uk, Friday September 12 2008 17:03 BST
On the 35th anniversary of the military overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile on September 11, 1973, which had the overt support of the United States, the presidents of Bolivia and Venezuela have asked the US ambassadors accredited to their countries to leave.
They both believe they are facing the possibility of an imminent coup d’etat in which they accuse the Americans of being involved. A third country, Paraguay, announced 10 days ago that it had detected a conspiracy involving military officers and opposition politicians. Latin America now faces its most serious crisis since the re-introduction of democratic practice at the end of the last century.
Brazil and Argentina have both denounced the violent activities of opposition groups in Bolivia that have led to the closure of the natural gas pipelines to their countries, while President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela has warned that a coup against Evo Morales of Bolivia would be seen as a “green light” for an armed insurgency in that country.
Giving details of a planned coup in his own country, in which retired military officers and opposition figures were involved, Chávez announced the expulsion of the US ambassador, Patrick Duddy, and the withdrawal of his own ambassador from Washington. Any aggression against Venezuela, Chávez said, would involve a halt in the supply of Venezuelan oil to the United States.
Chávez’s decision came one day after President Morales had thrown out the US ambassador in La Paz, Philip Goldberg, who has been frequently accused by the Bolivian government of plotting with the separatist politicians in the eastern province of Santa Cruz.
The situation in Bolivia is immediately more dramatic than in Venezuela, although both countries are facing important electoral battles at the end of the year.
Evo Morales, an indigenous politician from the Andes in the west of the country, has organised a referendum on a new constitution to which the rightwing (and white racist) politicians in the eastern lowlands are bitterly opposed. The atmosphere of violence has now broken into the open, with endless political demonstrations and several deaths, the seizure of provincial airports, and sabotage of the oil and gas installations on which the country’s economy depends. Morales has accused the regional governors of the five eastern regions of creating the conditions for a coup.
Chávez originally announced his decision to expel the US ambassador from Caracas as an act of solidarity with Morales – “so that Bolivia is not alone”. But it was soon clear that he had his own possible coup d’etat to deal with. A tape recording of phone conversations between retired military officers, some of whom were involved in the failed coup of April 2002, was broadcast on Venezuelan television on Wednesday night, revealing plans to seize the Miraflores presidential palace and to capture or shoot down the presidential plane.
The suggestion that there were plans to assassinate the president brought large crowds down from the shanty towns on Thursday night to demonstrate their solidarity with Chávez. Several of the alleged conspirators have been detained. Venezuela, like Bolivia, has an uncertain pre-election climate, since there will be regional and municipal elections in November that will be viewed as a judgment on the popularity of the president.
The possible coup in Paraguay appears less serious, since it only appeared to involve preliminary discussions between retired General Lino Oviedo, an old hand at failed coups, and a serving officer. Yet since the government of the left-wing former bishop, Fernando Lugo, has only been in power since August, tales of a possible coup have reverberated through the continent. Brazil declared pointedly that it would not tolerate a coup in Bolivia “or in any other Latin American country”.
The US is, of course, preoccupied with Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, but whichever presidential candidate takes over in January will also find Latin America at the top of his in-tray.
Peace and Justice Post 
Obama whitewashes foreign policy
June 19, 2009By Teo Ballve | The Advoacte, June 19, 2009
President Obama is trying to whitewash the history of U.S. foreign policy.
In two major speeches in the last month, he has spun a fairy tale.
At the National Archives on May 21, Obama claimed, “From Europe to the Pacific, we’ve been the nation that has shut down torture chambers and replaced tyranny with the rule of law.” And in Cairo, Egypt, just two weeks later, Obama said, “America is not the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire. … America does not presume to know what is best for everyone, just as we would not presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election.”
These assertions ring entirely hollow in Latin America, where the reverse is true: Washington propped up tyrannical leaders and bankrolled murderous armies. Under the iron fist of these U.S.-backed regimes, the region’s torture chambers rang with the cries of innocent victims.
As Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza ruthlessly ruled his country like a colonial coffee plantation, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt reportedly said of his ally: “Somoza may be a son of a b—-, but he’s our son of a b—-.”
Intervention sometimes came at the behest of influential U.S. companies, as in Guatemala. In 1950, President Jacobo Arbenz won a landslide election and moved ahead with a land reform program aimed at breaking up large landholdings.
The reforms sat uneasily with executives from the United Fruit Co. (today, Chiquita), which owned vast, feudal-like fruit plantations throughout the country. The company collaborated with the CIA and the State Department to orchestrate Arbenz’s overthrow in 1954. What followed were a succession of military governments and a crescendo of violent conflict that ultimately claimed more than 200,000 Guatemalan lives.
After the socialist Salvador Allende won the presidency of Chile in 1970, national security adviser Henry Kissinger declared, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.”
Three years later, Chile’s Gen. Augusto Pinochet overthrew Allende with the support of the U.S. government. Pinochet then helped band together his fellow South American dictators. They formed a coordinated campaign of state terrorism, called “Operation Condor,” against leftist sympathizers. The U.S. ambassador to Paraguay at the time suggested the campaign was receiving key intelligence support from the Pentagon.
A common tactic practiced by the military in these dirty wars was to throw drugged, yet alive and conscious, prisoners out of aircraft over the ocean. Not even pregnant women were spared from electric shocks to genitalia and waterboarding.
As Congress became concerned over the intensifying repression carried out by U.S. allies, Kissinger assured his nervous Argentine counterparts: “Look, our basic attitude is that we would like you to succeed. I have an old-fashioned view that friends ought to be supported.” Those “friends” killed 30,000 innocent people in Argentina alone.
In Central America, where civil wars broke out, the destruction was even greater. The CIA and the Pentagon worked with death squads in the name of U.S. national security. In El Salvador, where Washington spent $6 billion trying to defeat rebels, 75,000 lost their lives.
Today, Washington still disregards human rights abuses in its military alliances. Colombia’s army is drenched in scandal over its execution of 1,600 innocent civilians, who were later claimed as rebels killed in combat. The United Nations has called political murder at the hands of the army “widespread and systematic.” Nevertheless, Obama’s first foreign appropriations budget has slated $270 million in military aid to Colombia.
At the National Archives, Obama made a veiled criticism of the Bush administration’s policies.
“We went off course,” Obama said.
As U.S. involvement in Latin America shows, the truth is that the ship went off course a long time ago. Acknowledging this would be the first step toward steering it straight again.
Teo Ballve is a writer for Progressive Media Project, affiliated with The Progressive magazine.
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Tags:Colombia, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, Latin America, President Obama, Salvador Allende, U.S. foreign policy, United States
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