{"id":15491,"date":"2021-01-10T13:46:54","date_gmt":"2021-01-10T13:46:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/?p=15491"},"modified":"2021-02-21T11:11:56","modified_gmt":"2021-02-21T11:11:56","slug":"this-is-not-what-america-stands-for-except-uh-in-latin-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/2021\/01\/10\/this-is-not-what-america-stands-for-except-uh-in-latin-america\/","title":{"rendered":"“This Is Not What America Stands For” – Except, Uh, In Latin America"},"content":{"rendered":"

We are posting the following article by Nathaniel Flakin of Left Voices<\/cite> in the USA. This is response to all the nauseating hypocrisy coming from the Democrats and other neo-liberals about the USA’s great democratic traditions.<\/h2>\n
\"\"
Top Bolivian coup plotters trained in the School of the Americas* in Columbus Georgia<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The United States has long supported right-wing protests to subvert elections. This is so common that there\u2019s a joke about it: Why has there never been a military coup in the U.S.? Because there is no U.S. embassy there.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is not what America stands for.\u201d That\u2019s what Thom Thillis, a Republican senator from North Carolina,\u00a0wrote on Twitter<\/a>\u00a0while a right-wing mob was marauding through the Capitol. This sentiment was echoed throughout the liberal media and by members of both the Republican and Democratic Parties, who repeated the refrain that \u201cAmerica is better than this.\u201d The right-wing riot was clearly not a \u201cfascist coup attempt\u201d by any stretch. But the images coming out of the Capitol looked eerily similar to actions that the U.S. regime regularly supports in other countries, especially in Latin America.<\/p>\n

Racist fanatics forcing their way into a government building, with the tacit support of the police, in order to overturn the results of an election in which Black and Brown people played an important role \u2014 that may sound like an apt description of what happened in D.C. yesterday. But it is also what\u00a0happened in La Paz<\/a>\u00a0on November 9, 2019, when proto-fascists stormed Bolivia\u2019s presidential palace in order to stop the reelection of Evo Morales. Just like at the Capitol building, the police stood down and let the racists rampage.<\/p>\n

Those protesters installed a coup regime run by the racist religious fundamentalist Jeanine \u00c1\u00f1ez. Resistance by indigenous people and unions to the coup was repressed with brutal violence. Despite this, the coup government was\u00a0recognized by the U.S.<\/a>\u00a0just days later \u2014 and also by the UK,\u00a0the EU<\/a>, and right-wing governments in Latin America.<\/p>\n

Behind the scenes, the U.S. government \u2014 via both diplomatic and clandestine channels \u2014 had long supported right-wing forces in Bolivia\u2019s eastern provinces in their attempts to topple Morales center-left government. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had been\u00a0very open<\/a>\u00a0about his support for efforts by the U.S.-controlled Organization of American States to subvert the election results.<\/p>\n

This was no isolated incident. Half a year earlier, the U.S. State Department\u00a0recognized an \u201cinterim president\u201d in Venezuela<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 another thinly veiled coup attempt orchestrated in Washington. This was combined with extensive diplomatic and economic aggression. There was yet another U.S.-backed\u00a0coup attempt in mid-2020<\/a>, which stood out mostly for its dilettantism. Trump\u2019s National Security Advisor John Bolton, rather than pulling strings behind the scenes, was bragging about it on Twitter.<\/p>\n

But are such undemocratic actions merely a product of the Trump regime? Not at all. When Barack Obama was president and Hillary Clinton was his secretary of state, there were coups\u00a0in Honduras<\/a>\u00a0against Manuel Zelaya in 2009 and\u00a0in Paraguay<\/a>\u00a0against Fernando Lugo in 2012. In both these cases, the U.S. embassies were heavily involved, yet with more deniability thanBolton\u2019s public buffoonery<\/a>\u00a0toward Venezuela. In fact, we can say that while the Democratic administration had a more moderate tone toward Latin America, it was actually more effective in orchestrating right-wing coups.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0institutional coup against presidents Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff<\/a>\u00a0of the reformist Workers Party (PT) in Brazil, was also heavily supported by the U.S. State Department \u2014 and that policy stretched between both the Obama and the Trump administrations. That coup opened the way for a right-wing fanatic like Bolsonaro to take power.<\/p>\n

These are only examples from the last decade. U.S. interference in Latin America, installing bloody dictators in order to secure profits for U.S. corporations, has been going on for more than a century. In fact, it\u2019s so common that there\u2019s a joke about it: Why has there never been a military coup in the U.S.? Because there is no U.S. embassy there.<\/p>\n

Now, with just two weeks left in his presidential term, Trump is offering a small taste of these gangster methods in the heart of U.S. imperialism. This kind of violence to subvert democracy is exactly \u201cwhat America stands for.\u201d And that is why the Left needs to oppose U.S. imperialism in all its forms \u2014 in contrast to \u201cprogressive\u201d Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who often\u00a0legitimize U.S. aggression<\/a>. Internationalist opposition to the State Department, whether it is currently run by a Democrat or a Republican, is a necessary precondition to rip Trumpism out at the roots.<\/p>\n

8th January 2021<\/p>\n

*\u00a0School of the Americas Watch<\/a>
\n________
\nThis was first posted at:- \u201cThis Is Not What America Stands for\u201d \u2014 except, uh, in Latin America<\/a>
\n___________
\nalso see:-<\/p>\n

US Crisis and Reprocatic politics \u2013 Daniel Lazare<\/a><\/p>\n

2. Biden a Transition to Neo-Trumpist Politics<\/a><\/p>\n

a) Biden\u2019s Transition Team \u2013 Nothing \u2018Progressive\u2019 about millionaires and CEOs – M.K Kumar, Left Voice<\/p>\n

b) Pyrrhic victory over populism – Weekly Worker<\/p>\n

3. Neoliberalism\u2019s last stand – Left Voice<\/a><\/p>\n

4. The Weimarisation of US Politics- Daniel Lazare<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We are posting the following article by Nathaniel Flakin of Left Voices in the USA. This is response to all the nauseating hypocrisy coming from the Democrats and other neo-liberals about the USA’s great democratic traditions. The United States has long supported right-wing protests to subvert elections. This is so common that there\u2019s a joke…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1854,1845,1868,1869],"tags":[8633],"class_list":["post-15491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-left-crisis","category-us-imperialism","category-against-imperialism","category-latin-america-and-caribbean","tag-author-nathaniel-flakin"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"views":1697,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15491"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15491\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17703,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15491\/revisions\/17703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}