Despite denials by the U.S. Department of State, there is evidence that the State Department, the CIA, and the military School of the Americas have a long history of regime changes throughout Latin America. A fear of Communism, loosely interpreted as any leftist government, detrimental to U. S. corporate interests formed U.S. policies in Latin America from the Truman administration through the George W. Bush administration.
James F. Byrnes, a southern conservative Democrat, was Secretary of State under President Truman. He believed that the USSR was violating the Yalta Agreement (the reorganization of Europe after WWII), and to counter it, the School of the Americas was founded in 1946. The school rapidly became known as The School of Assassins, training Latin American military officers in techniques of torture, killing, and terror.
In 1961, Dean Rusk, Secretary of State in the Kennedy administration and later to serve in the Johnson administration, made it the school' mandate to fight communist (leftist) governments throughout Latin America.
In1966 the last Peronist, popularly elected, leftist government in Argentina under President Arturo Ilia was overthrown by General Juan Carlos Goiania, with help from the United States. This led to years of torture, killings, and disappearances known as The Dirty Wars. General Goiania systematically removed people with Peronist connections and sympathies.
During the Nixon administration, with Henry Kissinger as Secretary of State, the United States supported the overthrow of President Carlos Allende's leftist government in Chile, the first duly elected democratic government in that nation's history. This coup was personally poignant for me. A former student of mine, Frank Truggie, was executed during the Allende revolution, apparently on orders from the U. S. State Department. The story is told in the 1982 Constantin Costa Gavras film, Missing .
(If you haven't seen it, please watch it on YouTube or on Netflix. It starred J ack Lemmon , Sissy Spacek, John Shea, and Charles Cioffi , and was based on Charles Horman 's story, an American journalist who disappeared in the aftermath of the US-backed Chilean coup of 1973 which deposed the democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende. The 1982 Cannes Film Festival awarded it the Palme d'Or )
With General Augusto Pinochet at the head of Chile, thousands of Allende supporters and sympathizers were tortured and killed with the blessing and financial backing of the United States government.
In 1978, the leftist Sandinistas government replaced the Somoza family dictatorship and the United States gave strong support to the groups of Somoza followers collectively known as the Contras. The Reagan administration during the 1980's supported the Contras in Nicaragua, in spite of Congressional edicts to the contrary. It is significant for future illegal acts that no one was ever found guilty of the illegal defiance of Congress. (I believe that Machiavelli would have seen this as ominous.)
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