Write a commentIn his book, Beneath the United States, Lars Schoultz wrote, "A belief in Latin American inferiority is the essential core of United States policy toward Latin America because it determines the precise steps the United States takes to protect its interests in the region."
The senior John Adams wrote that "the people of South America are the most ignorant, the most bigoted, the most superstitious of all the Roman Catholics in Christendom."
His son, John Quincy Adams, told Henry Clay that Latin Americans "have not the first elements of good or free government... Civil dissension was infused into all their seminal principles. War and mutual destruction was in every member of their organization, moral, political, and physical."
From the second and sixth Presidents, to "a long line of U.S. proconsuls to Latin America," there was a belief in Washington that Hispanics were inferior. Joel Poinsett "referred to Mexicans as 'an ignorant and immoral race' and to the clergy as 'the very dregs of the people.... disgustingly debauched and ignorant.'" This superiority complex allowed President Monroe in 1823 to announce the Monroe Doctrine, the bedrock principle of U.S. foreign policy.
Former Secretary of State Robert Lansing wrote in 1914, "In its advocacy of the Monroe Doctrine the United States considers its own interests. The integrity of other American nations is an incident, not an end." A bedrock principle of self-interest combined with a belief in Latin American inferiority explains current U.S. imperialism in Latin America.
President Trump installed military radar and simulated an invasion (of Venezuela) in Trinidad and Tobago. The administration announced a "total closure" of airspace over and around Venezuela. The news outlet TeleSUR reported the CIA "increased clandestine operations, psychological warfare, and the infiltration of mercenaries into Venezuelan territory." This includes a U.S. aircraft carrier and a nuclear submarine off the coast of Venezuela. Current actions by the US government align with a long U.S. history of bloodshed in Latin America.
Last Tuesday marked the fiftieth year of the creation of Operation Condor. Francesca Lessa wrote, in 1975, "military intelligence officials from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay gathered in Santiago, Chile." They established "a secret network that would allow the officials to collaborate more efficiently in the harassment of political opponents living in exile across South America." The National Security Archive wrote that this secret network used "cross-border repression, [whose] teams went far beyond the frontiers of the member countries to launch assassination missions and other criminal operations."
As early as 1973, the Nixon administration informed Henry Kissinger that seven countries "have established Operation Condor to find and kill terrorists... in their own countries and in Europe." Washington approved of and supported Operation Condor. The Guardian wrote Operation Condor enabled "governments to send death squads on to each other's territory to kidnap, murder and torture enemies – real or suspected – among their emigrant and exile communities."
Washington has a long history of international terrorism in Latin America.
Kindly,
Anton Porcari
